Kingdom of the Grail (26 page)

In time, if the goddess was kind, he would.

She stormed his walls now, won him back with kisses. When she had him in her arms again, she said, “Don't go away from me.”

He looked as if he would speak, but thought better of it. He closed the embrace, sighed and was silent.

It was answer enough, if she would take it so.

CHAPTER 29

T
he joy that had brought the Franks out of Saragossa was seared and faded by long days of marching in the sun. The anger that had lain beneath it began to wear through. Mild quarrels sharpened to blows; small frustrations led to drawn steel.

They sacked Pamplona. They had won it as they came down from the mountains, taken and held it in the first bright fire of the crusade. Now, in the bitter ashes, they had no desire to keep it. They rode through its gates as conquerors. The people saw them pass in sullen silence.

What began it, no one knew. The king gave no signal. One moment they were marching through the narrow dusty streets toward the citadel. The next, they had scattered, whooping, striking, pillaging.

Charles made no move to stop them. His mood was as strange as theirs, his anger, if anything, deeper. He rode through to the citadel, broke down its gate which had been too hastily secured against him, and waited in its hall for his men to have their fill of looting and worse.

Roland's place was beside the king. But he had felt a shock in his body just before the men broke loose—as if something outside of him had plucked at his spirit. He had walls and wards against such things, and still he had come close to running wild; and these were plain mortal men. That power from without was playing them like a harp.

He could not find Sarissa. She had lain with him in the night, as she had every night since she came to him outside of Saragossa. In the morning, as every morning, she had been gone. He had not seen her riding in her wonted place near the rest of the women.

They were secure in the citadel, well shut away from the madness without. She was not with them. Nor did he see her near the king.

He asked no one's leave, and spoke to no one. He went out into the city.

The force that had loosed the army's anger was gone. Like a spear in the vitals, once it had struck, it need do no more. They themselves completed what it had begun.

The Franks rampaged through the streets, stormed into houses, broke down doors and walls. Everything that could be seized or carried, they took away. Men who opposed them, they stripped and beat senseless. Women suffered worse.

Roland's armor and the shimmer of his sword gave him passage. He beat men off from struggling, shrieking women; but none of them was ever Sarissa. None would be. His heart knew that. She was not in Pamplona. She was not anywhere that he could see, in his heart or with his eyes.

Still he hunted, if not for her, then for something that he could not set a name to. Charles had made it clear: none of his Companions was to hinder the sack.

But he had not forbidden Roland to fling aside a mob of men who had caught a young woman—a child—and thrown her down and wrenched her legs apart. The first had his trews down and his great red rod erect, thrusting at her, when Roland heaved him up and wielded him like a club, smiting down the lot of them.

They fled like the dogs they were. The child lay stark with terror. When Roland stooped over her, she shuddered to the bone. Her eyes were blank. There was no thought, no reason there.

His heart wept for her. He called such power as he had, gathered it in his hand, and poured it out over her small stiff body. He hoped that it brought her peace.

As he gathered to rise, he paused. The sack went on about him. He was an island in it, a small space of stillness.
Beyond it, men robbed and raped and looted. There was no sin here, no guilt, no awareness of good or evil. Only the raw desire.

It could touch him if he let it. He could run wilder than any of them. The temptation was potent, almost irresistible. It had a slither in it, a slide of serpent's scales.

He neither turned nor raised his head. The corners of his eyes, the tightening of his shoulders, caught the shadow in shadow, the inhuman thing that watched him.

He felt his lips curve in a smile. There was no mirth in it. It had an edge, like a sword. Calmly, steadily, he rose.

The way he chose passed near the shadow. He took great care to seem oblivious.

The force of the shadow's temptation was stronger, the closer he came to it. His smile widened of its own accord, baring his teeth. He drew his sword, his bright Durandal. He felt in his middle the serpent's laughter.

Just as he drew level with the shadow, he dropped his wards. He let the madness in, the wild lust for blood. He leaped, whirled, stamped. Durandal bit deep in the demon's heart.

He met those flat and lidless eyes. There was laughter in them still, but turned upon itself. And no fear. He had sent it to nothingness, not to damnation. For an instant he seemed to see . . . relief?

The creature's long pale hands clasped the blade. Its mouth opened as if to draw in air. Softly, suddenly, and without a sound, it collapsed upon itself. A pallid serpent coiled about the sword.

Durandal thrummed in Roland's hand. Its song was high and fierce and exultant. The serpent melted into air.

Roland stood in an empty street with his sword in his hand. Of the demon there was no sign, no scent, no track in the dust.

Roland laughed, sharp and short. Two of the three ancient servants were gone, and at his hand. Ganelon would have even less cause to love him now.

Durandal's victory song had quieted. It submitted to its sheath. Roland turned about slowly. The tide of the sack had washed away from him. He was alone. The child was gone, the dead and wounded taken away.

Down the empty street, from sunlight to shade and back
to sunlight again, came walking a small grey cat. No lady followed it, maddening or otherwise.

Tarik wove about Roland's ankles, purring raucously. Higher praise he had never given. He sprang lightly to Roland's shoulder, shifted and shimmered and gripped with a hawk's talons, riding that armored perch back to the citadel.

Pepin should have been attending his father. But he eluded the would-be nursemaids who came to take him in hand, gathered as many young rakehells as he could find, and went rampaging through the city. It was pure blood-red joy to sweep up one narrow twisting street and down another, driving shrieking infidels before him. His sword drank blood and tears. He plowed a Saracen furrow or two, or maybe three; he was not counting. He was simply living.

The tides of pillage washed him up on the steps of a church not far from the citadel. He had found a hoard of gold in a small mean house with a small mean man in it—a miser if he had ever seen one. The miser had not lived to mourn his lost gold. Pepin was wearing the best of it: a massive torque, armlets as heavy as the sword he had broken over the miser's turbaned head, and a belt of gold and great green stones. The rest he had cast into the street, laughing as men scrambled and fought over it.

Weighted with gold, dizzy with wine he had liberated from a tavern, with his twisted back aching as it always did, he sat on the steps and watched the city's fall. There were people inside the church, cowering and shrieking, and a priest's drone struggling to rise above the racket. He took little notice of them.

The knot of tension in his middle was gone. In the wrack and terror of the city's fall, amid the roil of anger and fear, hate and blood-red lust, Pepin had found the key that had eluded him for so long. This darkest face of war had shown him the core of his strength, the heart of his magic.

He had magic. After all, he had it. He amused himself as he sat there, striking sparks from the wood of the church door. With them he spelled a name in one of Ganelon's long-dead languages, then a name beneath it in another, and so a third. The door groaned. Such names were never meant to be written in a holy place. Pepin grinned and
tapped the door with a finger. It crumbled to dust. Its iron nails, and the bolts that had held it shut, fell clattering to the threshold.

Eyes rolled at him from within. A cloud of incense gagged him. It came to him that he should have chosen a mosque; that these were Christians. Yet had not the Christians of Spain turned against the Franks and all the crusade? They had earned whatever he did to them.

He gestured grandly. He meant but to dismiss them with princely hauteur, but the magic was still in his hands, crackling from his fingertips. It traced a pattern of fire in the air, gathered it together and flung it full in the midst of the huddled people.

The church went up like a torch. Pepin was flung wide, his face and hands seared by the fire, and all the breath struck out of him. He slid to the foot of a wall and lay there, sure in his belly that he was dead.

His breath came back too slowly, but it left no doubt that he was alive. Nothing lived in the church—nothing could live in that holocaust of fire.

He stared at his hands. They were the same as ever, broad white hands with strong fingers, the image of his father's. They grasped a sword reasonably well. They wielded a pen with more than ordinary skill—and that, his father had never been able to do, though he spoke now and again of learning to do it. But this, his father had not even dreamed of. To raise fire with a gesture. To kill.

What need of a sword, or even an army, if he could do this? Such power he had been given, that he had not even known he had—kings would fall at his feet. Emperors. Prelates and popes. The whole world would bow before him.

He sought the fire again. He went down to his center, but found only embers. His head reeled. It was a long while before he could stand, and longer before he could walk. If he had squandered it all, not even knowing—

It was coming back already, growing slowly, but he could have no doubt of it. He had spent it for the moment, that was all. It would grow again, as seed grew in his manly parts. Had not Ganelon told him that magic had a price? It took somewhat from the wielder: some part of his spirit, his body, his strength or his youth.

It was little enough to pay for such splendor. He pulled himself up, clinging to the wall. Once his knees had straightened, they held him not too badly. After a while he could walk.

The sack had gone on past him. He had no desire, just then, to go on with it. He turned instead and walked back to the citadel, a walk that lightened as his strength returned, until he was striding as proudly as a prince should.

He had learned in his lessons to find Ganelon with something other than eyes. That prickle in the skin led him up through the citadel, past guards who stared at him with envy—though not for his sorcery; he was still laden with looted gold.

Past the region of guards, deep in the citadel, he found the clerks' nest. Ganelon laired past even that, high up in a tower. The ascent to it was steep and dark, but Pepin had eyes for that now, and strength enough, though hardly more. The door at the top was unbarred, though he knew from times before that if anyone was not welcome, not heaven itself could gain him entrance. Especially not heaven itself.

He stopped in the door, to breathe and to take in what he saw there. Ganelon was standing in the room's center. Light fell on him, but no sun had ever cast it. A shape lay huddled at his feet. After a moment Pepin recognized one of Ganelon's not-quite-human servants.

In a voice so soft it was barely audible, but strong enough to shiver Pepin's bones, Ganelon said, “Tell me Timozel is not dead.”

The creature at Ganelon's feet—who must be Siglorel, the silent one—was true to himself: he returned no answer.

“And who slew him?” Ganelon asked, soft and oh, so gentle. “Whose sword smote him into nothingness? What folly was on him, O my servant? Had he run mad?”

Still, silence.

Ganelon swooped down and hauled the creature to his feet. Siglorel came up bonelessly, as a serpent might. His eyes had forgotten their human semblance. They were round and yellow, lidless and cold, and their pupils were slits in the otherworldly light. His voice was a long chill hiss, and his tongue was forked. “It was his time,” he said.

“That power was given me,” Ganelon said.

“All power is not yours,” said Siglorel.

Ganelon's fingers locked about the pale throat. “You are mine,” he said. “You belong to me. By the pact we made long ago, in that name which no mortal dare speak, I seal your power to mine.”

Siglorel could not blink. His stare was flat. His tongue flicked, tasting air.

“You will slay that one,” Ganelon said. “You will do it now, tonight. You will take his soul and bear it down below, and chain it for everlasting.”