Kingdom of the Grail (32 page)

And yet somewhere, Marric was certain, however deeply buried, was a mind and a spirit. Marric was a mender of things that were broken. That was what he was for. He would find the spirit trapped in that witless body. He would bring it out. And then the Lady would do with them both as she pleased; and that was as it should be.

CHAPTER 38

H
e woke slowly from his long winged dream. Little by little he learned to walk as a man, and not to stretch his arms as if they could grip the air and lift on the breast of it. He grew, if not resigned, then accustomed to skin without feathers, mouth without sharp tearing beak. He learned to eat as men ate, forsaking the hot sweetness of blood, the quiver of meat still faintly, pulsingly alive.

At first he lived in the damp dim room with its door that hissed and crackled with odd lightnings. But when he grew calmer and stopped fighting against this strangeness that had fallen over him, the brown man led him out into the wider world and let him taste the sunlight again. He never tried to run, though sometimes he did his best to fly. The earth bound him as always, and this unyielding flesh.

Speech did not come to him. That the sounds men made had meaning, he understood well enough; with the passage of nights and days, he learned enough to please the woman with the wild red hair, and even the brown man, who watched him nearly always and seldom left him. But there was no desire in him to speak as they spoke. He made no sound at all, even when he stumbled and fell and burned his hands in the fire. The woman made a great deal of noise then, and others who were there clamored like a flock of jackdaws, but he crouched silent, with tears of pain running down his cheeks.

The woman wept, too, after she had roundly beaten the man who, she seemed to think, had tripped him onto the hearth. But he needed no help to stumble; he was still unsteady on his feet, and inclined to forget that his wings were gone.

The pain went away soon enough. The brown man took it, and much of the burning and scarring, too. The rest healed without a mark. The woman made even more noise over that, as if it could matter whether he carried scars or no. She called him her poor beautiful idiot, and her lovely witling, and stroked him as she did her smug red cat. But she did not kiss the cat, or comb and plait its hair as often as she could catch it, or dress it in odd and sometimes uncomfortable garments from an inexhaustible store.

The woman had a name, a word that bound her spirit: Gemma. The brown man was Marric. The others too were possessed of names, some of which he troubled to remember, and some not.

He had no name. There was none in him when he went looking, and no one saw fit to give him one. He was the witling or the idiot or the mad one. Sometimes a stranger called him Yelloweyes, but that was not his name. He never answered to it.

Women were not made as he was made. They were determined to teach him the ways of it, catching him when the brown man was not looking, sliding hands up his tunic to clasp the dangling thing that hung between his legs. They had soft heavy breasts where he had none, and rounded bellies, and nothing below but thickets of curling hair.

One of them was teaching him a new thing one day, pressing his hand to her breast and slipping the other beneath her skirts, into a hot moist cleft that throbbed against his fingers. She moaned as he worked them into it, and arched her back. Her nipple was hard under his hand.

All at once she was gone, and Gemma was belaboring her about the head and shoulders with the wooden laundry-paddle. He stood blinking, baffled, with an ache between his legs, and the stiff rod thrusting beneath his tunic.

“Ah, lad,” said the brown man's voice behind him, dry as old leaves, “what I'd give for the women to be fighting over me.”

It was a battle royal. Gemma won it, returning battered
and bruised but grimly triumphant. She caught the witling by the hand and drew him unprotesting into the inn.

But when she tried to lead him to the corner where he spent his evenings, watching people in the inn and staying out of the way, he stiffened his knees and refused. Her breast was larger and softer than the other's, and her secret place was hotter and moister, and her lips were fierce on his. She taught him then what the stiff and aching rod was for. It slid home like—

Sword to scabbard.

Man to woman.

Soul to—

Memory tugged at him, slipping away when he tried to grasp it. This thing, this dance of flesh, he knew—he understood. It had its rhythms and its cadences. Now fast, now slow. Now deep and strong, now soft and purringly languid. When the release came, it nigh felled him. But he remembered. He saw—

Gemma's face, slack with pleasure, and the flame-bright cloud of her hair. Her strong freckled arms held him close. Her sturdy legs clasped about his middle. He kissed her lips and her cheeks and her forehead, licking the salt sweetness of sweat.

Tears were salt, too, but bitter. She did not shed many of those. She caught his face in her hands, stroking fingers through his beard. “My dear and lovely simpleton,” she said, both rough and sweet, “if you lay hand on another woman after this, I'll geld you with a blunt knife.”

She would not. But he had no words to say so. He kissed her instead, and would have done more, but she pushed him away. “Not now,” she said irritably. “Away with you, you randy thing, and earn your keep. We need wood for the fire. Find Kyllan, he'll show you how to cut it.”

Kyllan was her eldest son, the one who looked most like her, with his shock of fiery hair and his quick temper. But he was patient with the witling, and he understood without need of words. He taught the witling to wield the axe, and to cut and split the logs, and to carry them in and heap them just so, laid ready beside the hearth.

He would have cut wood all day and half the night, if there had been enough of it. It was like lying with a woman. The heft of the axe in his hands, the flex and surge
of muscles as he lifted it high and let it fall with force enough to cleave the heavy log, woke memories he had not known he had.

He was sorry when the last log was split and cut and set atop the pile. His arms wanted to lift the axe again, but Gemma had come out to take it away from him. She led him in to a bath and a combing and, tonight, the shaving of his beard. He was not sorry to lose that, but when she advanced on his upper lip, he stopped her. She shrugged, yielded, laid the razor away in its box.

Every night before this, he had slept in his corner by the hearth, curled in a heap of furs and tanned skins. This night she led him past that to her own shuttered box of a room. A bed nearly filled it, and the scent of her was rich in it. He reeled dizzily, tumbling with her into the soft featherbed. She laughed and wriggled and slid until he was secure inside her, and then he was laughing, too, but silently, with the pleasure of this thing that she had taught him.

She slept quickly, once she had her fill of him. He lay awake. He did not want to be a hawk any longer. He was not altogether content to be a man, either, but if it gave him woodcutting, and this, then he could bear it.

The woman rolled away from him, murmuring in her sleep. He let her go. His hand rose to his face, tracing the shape of the shaven chin, and tugging lightly at the mustaches. He wondered then what people saw when they looked at that face. Women seemed greatly pleased with it. Men were a good deal less so, but they did not recoil, either.

Gemma had a mirror, a disk of polished bronze. He had seen her peering into it, one morning when he wandered innocently in. That was before he knew what women were. She had chased him out with much noise but little force, and forbidden him to enter again unless she let him in. Which now she had done, and he was glad.

He found the mirror where it had been that morning, facedown on the chest by the bed. The slant of moonlight was bright enough for his eyes to see by. He held the mirror up between his palms, and stared at the face reflected darkly in it. A shift of his hands cast moon-silver across the bronze, brightening the image to an almost daylight sheen.

He did not look like the people here. His skin was whiter
than theirs, he had known that already, and none of them had hair so black. His face was sharper, his nose longer. One cheek was marked with thin parallel scars. His eyes were wide and yellow as the coins that Gemma took out sometimes to fondle and to marvel at. Gold was precious. Gold was richer than any other metal. His eyes were gold.

He turned the mirror facedown again and laid it on the chest, and sat in the patch of moonlight, staring into the dark with his eyes like golden coins. Gemma snored softly in the bed. His rod rose at the thought of her. He stroked it idly, for the pleasure of it, but his mind was not on it. Was this beauty, then, that he had? Did it matter?

To her it did, and the other women. To him . . . no. She mattered. The weight of the axe in his hands, and the strength of his arms as he swung it up. The pleasure mounting in his middle, bursting hot and wet—that mattered. But a face, what was that?

His lips felt odd. He was smiling. He was being absurd, and he knew it; and that made him smile the wider.

He lay with Gemma, breast to her smooth naked back, and cupped her big soft breasts in his hands, and buried his face in the exuberance of her hair. It smelled of ale and smoke and woman. She murmured but did not wake, nor did she pull away. He sighed—yes, content—and let sleep take him.

CHAPTER 39

W
itling or no, it seemed the stranger knew how to please a woman. Gemma had won him, and held him against all comers. He seemed content with that, though the women of the village were not even slightly pleased to have lost him.

Marric watched with wry detachment. The boy cleaned up well, particularly once Gemma stopped dressing him like a painted poppet and gave him clothes fit for hewing wood and drawing water. He might grace her bed, but she had determined that he would earn his keep in more seemly fashion. He proved a strong hand with the axe, and a capable one with the horses: the old slow gelding who carried Gemma and her sons about on errands too far or too pressing for simple feet, and Marric's brown pony that he kept at the inn, and the occasional patron's mount.

Then in the evenings he would sit in a corner of the common room by the fire, and though he never spoke, he seemed to listen to whatever people said. They took to talking to him, men and women alike, telling him their stories, sharing their secrets. His silence was like an open door. He seemed to understand: he never laughed or smiled, but his eyes would fix on their faces, and his expression shift subtly with the shifts of the story.

Marric had long since reached certain conclusions about this stranger. He took his time in confirming them. When
one day he caught the witling in the stable, he met steady golden eyes that had learned to smile, and lifted the unresisting hands. His thumb ran along ridged calluses, traced old scars. How strong those arms were, those shoulders and thighs, he knew already. He lifted a foot as if the boy had been a horse. As filthy as those soles were, barefoot in the stableyard, they were never as thickened or as hard as if he had spent his life afoot.

This was a horseman and a swordsman, marked with scars of battle—many battles, from the look of him. He suffered Marric's handling without resentment, though the smile had faded from his eyes. The black brows had drawn together in puzzlement.

Marric put on a smile, which was real enough, and patted him until the frown smoothed away. “Good lad,” he said then. The witling smiled a little, baffled still, but seeming comforted.

Marric wished that he could have said the same. It was no good omen to find a man of war here, where lord did not go to battle against lord, and no man raised hand against another. The young lords learned to fight because it was required of them, because they were guardians and defenders; but those who tested themselves in battle, did so far away among the kingdoms of the world. Never here, never in this realm, where the peace of the Grail had held for time out of mind.

Not long after that, Lord Huon's messenger rode into the village. He was one of the lord's heralds in fine though travelworn livery, with a squire to bear his arms, and in his hand as he rode, a spear with a blood-red pennon.

Everyone in the village who could walk or run or crawl had come to follow him. He halted before the inn, where the road was wide and clear, and people could gather to hear his proclamation. It was brief, and it struck hard. “War,” he said in his ringing voice. “War has come. Your lord bids you to the muster. Any man or woman who fails of obedience, let him pay the penalty.”

Marric stood apart from the tumult that rose in the wake of that, searching faces, weighing hearts. None of these children had ever been called to the muster, not in all their years. Nor had their elders, or any of mortal blood. Most of
them were grinning, dancing, laughing, as if war were a grand lark. A handful of idiot boys tumbled together in mock battle.

The herald called the muster that day, just after the sun passed noon, reckoning the count of each clan and kindred, and choosing the levy from among the young and the able and the eager. His eye was quick and his heart cold. He discarded the strong young woman with her baby at her breast, but chose her husband without a flicker of compunction. If a clan's offerings were too young or too old, he took the penalty in grain or hides or hoarded coin.

Of Gemma's household he chose Gemma and three of her five sons, discarding Madoc with his lame leg and Rhodri who was but twelve summers old. That should have been enough, but the swift cold eye had caught the figure that hovered behind them. The witling had come out with the rest of them; nor had anyone thought to chase him back into the stable where he belonged.

Marric, looking at him, knew a kind of wry relief. His tunic was ancient and filthy. His hair was snarled out of its plait. He must have been cleaning the hayloft: he was covered in dust and cobwebs, his feet spattered with mud and ordure, and a great smudge of soot across his face.

Marric caught Gemma's eye. She met his stare stonily. She must, thought Marric, have devoted a good hour to the disguise. He himself could hardly have done better.

But the herald was well schooled in the arts of doting women, and there was no disguising the breadth of those shoulders. He approached the witling, riding on his tall bay horse, and halted within reach.

Gemma had schooled the witling well. He did not lift those startling eyes. He stood with them lowered, and seemed to remember, rather too late, to hunch his shoulders and make himself smaller.

“That one,” said the herald to his squire. “He's young, his back is straight. Add him to the muster.”

“My lord,” said Gemma. Her voice was tight with the effort of keeping it civil. “That's but a poor idiot with barely wits to lace up his own tunic.”

The herald's brow rose. “Indeed?” he said. He lifted from his belt the rod of his office. Without warning he tossed it toward the witling.

The boy caught it in the air, swifter than the eye could see. He stood holding it, still with his eyes fixed on his feet.

“Give it back,” the herald said.

The boy's hand blurred. The herald was barely quick enough to catch the rod as it flew. “Wits enough,” he said, “to wield a spear in the lord's name. Reckon him with the rest; and see that he comes to the muster.”

Gemma looked ready to kill someone—whether the herald or the witling, Marric doubted that even she knew. But against the levy there was no recourse. The herald's squire completed the roll and tally of the village, rolled up the scroll, bound it, and laid it away in his saddlebag. Even as he straightened, the herald was on the road again, spear in hand, riding on with his burden of war.

“This is the great war,” said Kyllan in the inn that night. The long low room was crowded to bursting. Most of the men and women who had been called to the muster, and a good number of their kin, had come there well before the sun went down, drinking Gemma's good brown ale and eating every scrap that she could set out for them.

Kyllan was kept running with platters of bread and meat and mugs of ale, but he was an old hand in the ways of inns. He could carry on whole rounds of conversation as he worked, sometimes three or four at once. Tonight there was only one, and it held them all in the same irresistible grip.

“The great war,” said Long Meg. “Of course it's the great war. What else would bring war here at all?”

A murmur ran round the room, with the hint of a growl beneath. “So he's come back,” said Donal, whose clan farmed the lands to the east of the village. “He wasn't dead; he's risen again.”

“
We
knew he didn't die,” Kyllan said, filling mugs all round and setting a steaming bowl in front of Long Meg. As she dived into herbs and stewed mutton, Kyllan went on with the grand surety of a man too young to have remembered the last war that had rent the kingdom. “He was cast down, but he's had long years to restore himself. And now, as he swore when he fell, he's come back. This time we'll destroy him forever and aye.”

That met with a rousing cheer. When it had died down,
young Rhodri asked, “If there's a war, and the enemy's come back, does that mean the king is well again, to lead us against him? Or is there a new king?”

“There is no new king,” said his brother Madoc repressively.

But one of those whom Marric barely knew, a man from Careol coming through with a wagonload of wool for the weavers in Lord Huon's city, looked up from his mug of ale to say, “She's come back, they say—she who went away. She's brought back a great weapon. And, it's said, one who was foretold.”

“The new king?” Rhodri breathed.

The wool-merchant shrugged. “Who's to tell? The weapon needs a hand to wield it, after all. And if they've called the muster, they're thinking, surely, that they have strength to face what's coming.”

“Or it has come,” someone muttered in the shadows, “and they have no choice but to mount a defense.”

Marric heard that. No one else seemed to—except, perhaps, the witling in his corner. Marric saw the gleam of eyes there, flicking from face to face, fixing on any who spoke. They held long on the man in shadow. What the boy was thinking, if he thought anything at all, Marric could not tell.

He slipped through the close press of bodies, settling near the witling. The boy saw him: the yellow eyes brushed him with a swift hint of warmth. Marric smiled at it, though his thoughts were anything but light-hearted. The conversation had splintered into fragments, some speaking of the enemy, some of the old king, some of the new; and the rest chewed over such memories of the last war as their forebears had passed down. None of them spoke of the true face of war: blood, wounds, death. It was all glory and trumpets, grand marches and splendid battles, and of course a quick victory.

These innocents would die gladly for their king. Yet if he was dying, and if no successor had come, then victory would be neither swift nor certain. Whereas defeat . . .

Marric sighed. The omen that he had seen in the witling was all the stronger now, a shadow of fear that no light of sun or fire could dispel. A dying king, a kingdom long untested in war, and now a war that none of them could escape. If the champion had come, if there was hope, he
would have known it. But no word of such a thing had come to him here on the wood's edge, far away from princes or palaces.

The witling had a confidant again, one of the young women, great with child, whose lover had been chosen for the war. As Marric watched, she burst into tears. The witling gathered her in—looking not quite so witless now, holding her and letting her cry herself out. For an instant Marric thought he saw a glimmer of intelligence in those odd eyes. Then they were empty again, and he was rocking the young woman with mindless gentleness.