Kingdom of the Grail (37 page)

“With whomever the gods have given us.”

Roland scowled. But his temper had died to ashes. Parsifal had cooled it, and deliberately so. Roland could not fan the flames again. “Clever,” he said. “Clever and cruel.”

“I do what I must,” the Grail-king said.

“Don't we all?” Roland pulled himself to his feet.

“Kinsman,” Parsifal said, “for whatever cause, for whomever you please, come to us. Come quickly. If you choose then to refuse what's been laid on you . . . so be it. But come.”

“I come,” Roland said wearily. “It seems I have no choice in the matter.”

“Does any of us?”

“I don't know,” Roland said. “Oh, God, to be free and innocent again.”

“Were you ever either?”

“Long ago,” said Roland. “Long and long. Before—”

“Before Merlin.”

“Before I knew what magic was.” Roland raked his hair out of his face. Parsifal was looking somewhat frayed himself. He was thin about the edges, flickering like an image in clear water. “I will come,” Roland said to him. “I give you my word.”

CHAPTER 45

T
he Breton Count was dead. He had died in the slaughter of Roncesvalles. His body lay in the earth at the head of the pass, where the king had ordered a shrine to be raised and Masses sung for all those who had died.

He must have died in great pain. Pepin had seen the body when it was brought in, and it was terribly, unrecognizably hacked and mutilated. But there was no mistaking the armor, or the shards of the great aurochs' horn that had been found on its breast. Charles wept long and grievously over Roland, and over the rest of the Companions who were laid down beside him, all slain as he had been, recognizable only by their trappings.

They had not found the sword. Durandal was lost—looted, stolen, like the gold of Spain. Robbers had been stripping the body of armor when the Franks came on it. The thieves were dead, but Durandal was gone.

It was a grim march home to Francia. Men who had cursed the Breton witch in life were hailing him a hero now that he was dead. Already there were songs of him: his prowess in war, his magical sword, his great horn that had nigh brought down the mountains. It had brought the king back too late to save his rearguard.

Pepin was in an ill mood himself. He had been cheated of Roland's blood and kept far away from his death. There
was no joy in it, no satisfaction. Only a faceless thing on a bier, and a sour taste in his mouth.

Ganelon was closer to the king's counsels than ever. That his grand plan had failed, his gate of power broken and ten thousand men lost to him, seemed to trouble him little. Roland was dead, and that was well. The rest he could accomplish by other means than an ambush and a hellgate. They were neither as simple nor as easy, but they were certain enough.

Ganelon had made sure that Charles found Gascons among the enemy dead, and fanned the fire of rage against them. But Charles was strangely recalcitrant about leading his army to a new war in Gascony. “In the spring,” he said. “By the time we come to Francia, it will be the beginning of autumn. We'll disband the army, send them home to finish the harvest, give them a winter's rest. Come spring they'll be ready to fight again.”

Ganelon was as oddly acquiescent to this as to the ambush that had failed. He bowed to the king's will. He did not argue as Pepin would have, that the army was gathered now, ready now, and would be glad to take a swift revenge. He let the king march unhindered out of the mountains and into his own country.

Pepin was powerless to speak if Ganelon would not. The court seemed a paler, duller thing with the Companions gone from it. Charles made no move to gather a second dozen of paladins. The various lords' heirs were granted their new ranks and places, and Rheims had a new archbishop. But the king took none of them to his heart as he had their predecessors.

It was not the sweet victory Pepin had dreamed of. Nor was he initiated into a new and greater order of magic. He was still Ganelon's pupil, still writing letters and studying grimoires and practicing small spells and piddling workings. Ganelon did not need Pepin's eyes any longer, now Roland was dead and the sorceress had vanished.

She was not dead. Pepin looked for her in the silver basin, one day when Ganelon was out of his tent attending the king. He found her in the high castle where he had seen her before, standing on a tower, staring out across the empty peaks. She did not speak or move, though he
watched her as long as he dared. Nor could he read her expression at all.

On a night of stars but no moon, when the army had left the marches of Spain behind but before it dispersed to all its various nations, Pepin came late to his tent. He had been tasting the wines of Provence, fresh from the carts of the merchants who had been waiting for the army to descend from the hills.

There was no lamp lit in the tent, no servant waiting to undress him. Yet there was light, pale and strange, and Ganelon sitting in it.

Pepin stopped, reeling slightly, dizzy with wine. It was the wine that made him ask, “Do you need my eyes?”

“I need you,” said Ganelon.

“Now?”

Ganelon raised a brow slightly. Pepin's throat constricted in spite of itself. “The king will disperse the army when we reach Toulouse,” Ganelon said. “When he does that, you will ask his leave to go. Your soul is troubled, you will tell him. You have in mind a season of prayer and contemplation.”

Pepin stared.

Ganelon's expression did not change. “When he asks where you will go, tell him that you go with me, and that we will cloister ourselves among holy monks in an abbey near Toulouse. He should little care which, once he hears my name.”

“You'll see to that?”

Ganelon did not answer.

“And we really will do that? There are monks who follow your way?”

“There are monks in plenty, and priests, too,” said Ganelon, “and great princes of the Church.”

“Popes?”

“Even so,” said Ganelon.

At Toulouse the court and
palatium
continued on its round of the kingdom, but the army dispersed into the fields and forests of Francia. Pepin asked for and won his father's leave to go into retreat—more easily than he had expected, for the king was preoccupied. Word had come
from the east. The Saxons were rising again. The spring's campaign, Pepin could already see, would march east instead of westward into Gascony.

Charles had dismissed his son almost absently, intent on matters of greater consequence. Once Pepin would have resented that. Now he was too eager, and too curious, to discover what Ganelon had in mind.

They rode out of the walled city on a fair morning of autumn, Pepin and Ganelon and the silent Siglorel. Pepin was not permitted to bring a servant. He went in plain clothing, with only such baggage as his horse could carry. The sorcerer and his servant rode tall Spanish mules, and Siglorel led another laden with bundles, but none of them belonged to Pepin. Nor did Pepin receive an answer when he asked what was in them. He was to be condemned to silence, it seemed.

Very well, then he would be silent. His skin quivered, his heart beat with anticipation of great things. Strong things. Workings of great magic.

That night they sheltered in an abbey, but it was not the one of which Ganelon had spoken. The monks here were ordinary enough, their abbot respectful of the king's counselor but not visibly in awe of him. The place stank of holiness.

Pepin was not pleased to discover that they would be expected to dine with the monks and to attend all the offices, even into the night. Barley bread and sour ale were excessively penitential. Droning through endless psalms came close to torment.

Discipline,
he thought. Discipline was the first virtue of a mage. Ganelon had taught him that. He was not perfect in it, but he had learned a little. He set his teeth, ate the hard bread and drank the terrible ale and suffered through the offices. In the morning they would go. Then he would discover what great thing had brought Ganelon out of Toulouse.

In the morning they rose unholy early as the monks did. The skies had closed in with grey cold rain. The first storm of winter lashed the abbey's walls. Damp sank into the stones. Pepin braced himself for another day of monastic discipline. But after the monks had sung their office, as he prepared to retreat to the cell he had been given, the
demon Siglorel stopped him. The creature, silent as ever, beckoned him out of the cloister.

The horse and the mules were saddled and waiting, though the rain continued to fall. Ganelon was mounted, wrapped in cloak and hood. Pepin opened his mouth to demand of him why he chose this moment to go. Could he not wait for the sun to come back? But a gust of rain struck his face like a cold slap. He wrapped his own cloak more tightly and scrambled gracelessly into the gelding's saddle.

Ganelon seemed to be in no distress. Did he even feel the rain? Siglorel was a demon; Pepin doubted that anything of earth could touch him. Least of all now that Roland was dead.

Even in death Roland went on vexing Pepin. Pepin huddled into his cloak and wished himself in hell, where the fires at least might keep him warm.

He came to himself with a start. He must have slid into a doze, as improbable as that was. Mist had closed about them. He could just see the rump of Ganelon's mule ahead of him. He heard rather than saw Siglorel with the pack-mule behind him. Every sound seemed vast: the roaring of breath in his lungs, the hammering of his heart, the slip and clatter of hooves on stone.

The road had grown steep and very narrow. It had no feel of a road in Provence. Had they ridden back to the Spanish March, then? In so little a time?

For a sorcerer, all things were possible. Pepin sat up and gathered his scattered wits. His brown gelding plodded on as if sudden mountains and blinding mist were of no concern.

The mist brightened. Pepin narrowed his eyes against the growing light. All at once he emerged blinking into the sorcerer's garden.

His horse, with a horse's wisdom, lowered its head and began to graze in the blindingly green grass. The air was warm, so warm that Pepin began to shiver convulsively. He slid from the saddle, knees buckling, catching himself against the gelding's shoulder.

Ganelon paid no heed to him. The sorcerer and his demon servant had left their mules to graze as the gelding
was doing, and stood over the pool that filled the garden's center.

It was larger, Pepin thought as he gained back somewhat of his senses. He let fall his sodden cloak and hood. His clothes were damp, but drying already. It was almost too warm, and he was dressed for raw cold in furs and leather. He stripped off his tunic and straightened as much as his back would allow, luxuriating in the coolness of his linen undertunic and the warmth of the air—twin wonders, twin marvels after the abbey's discomforts.

He approached the pool, walking steadier now. The water was full of visions that spread outward in spokes like a wheel. The center was this garden, and three figures in it, standing by a pool, in which was reflected . . .

He stopped that before it spun him down into madness, drew his mind back sharply, raised his head and looked at the image from which the shadows came. More paths than ever led out of the garden. Each one, in sunlight or rain, bright day or night's shadow, showed much the same: the camp of an army, or an army marching. Some of them he recognized. His father had sent them home from Toulouse. Now they marched again, with white set faces and eyes lost in the shadows of their helmets.

And others he knew, too, by garb and nation: Gascons, Saracens, Christians of Spain. Still others were strangers, and many not human at all.

He had grown up in camps of war. He knew how to count men and companies. And this was a great army—greater even than his father had mustered against the infidels in Spain. There were thousands of them. Tens of thousands. All bound by the same great spell. All marching toward a single place.

Mountains reared against the sky. He knew those mountains, that sky. He had struggled through them twice, once going to and once coming from the Spanish war. And yet there was something strange, something new or different about them: the light on them, the height of them, the way they reached toward the sky.

They were not earthly mountains. They were rooted in earth, borne up against heaven, but the light that shone on them was not the light of the sun. The moon that waxed
and waned over them was higher, whiter, colder than the moon that he knew.

Ganelon's armies were swarming up those jagged slopes. The scope, the vastness of it, left him breathless. They were storming the walls of the world. He saw where gates had been: pillars of earth and stone, shards of light. Dark things poured over them to the lofty summits, and streamed down out of sight.

“How well you see,” Ganelon said.

Pepin started like a deer. The sorcerer stood beside him, who an instant before had been long strides away. Ganelon did not betray amusement, but his dark eyes glittered as he said, “You may still refuse to go.”

“Go?” Pepin asked stupidly. “Refuse? What do you need me for?”

“Your blood,” Ganelon answered. And as Pepin gaped at him: “Blood of kings, or of kings' firstborn sons, has great power. Did I not teach you this?”

“You'll . . . drink . . . my blood?”

Ganelon's lip curled. His teeth were white and sharp. They did not fit his pale wise face at all—they would have been more at home in the jaws of a wolf. “That would be wasteful,” he said, “when your soul is so simply won. No, fool; great magic, great sorcery can work through you, through what you are and what you hope to be.”