Kingdom of the Grail (9 page)

On his breast over his heart, warmth mounted to heat, and heat to the agony of fire. He reached to tear at the amulet, to cast it away, but his hands were caught, trapped in hers. He could not breathe: she had kissed the breath from him. He was drowning. He was—

Somehow, impossibly, he found strength to thrust her away. But she only wound the tighter, the harder he fought. She did not laugh as a woman might when she had a man in her clutches. The only sound she made was a hiss.

His sight was going dark. He was dying. He was calm, unafraid. She was killing him, crushing the breath from him, sapping his warmth, draining the life from his body. She did it deliberately, coldly, as a snake will take its prey.

No.

It was not even a word. It was pure will. Her arms held him fast, her legs wound about him, her body pinning him to earth.

But she could not hold a falcon. He was too small, too swift. The falcon saw no woman at all but a snake, a supple black-and-silver thing coiled tight round empty space. He soared up and up amid the branches of the trees. The sky was free above him.

He turned his back on it. He clapped wings to sides and plummeted, beak and talons wide. The full weight and force of him caught the serpent where it lay, just behind the flat wicked head.

It thrashed in agony, battering tree-boles, spraying water from the stream. He clung for his life, gnawing, clawing,
grinding down through scales and hide to the supple joinings of the spine. To rend, to tear, to break—to kill.

The serpent's throes flung him bruisingly against the ground. He beat with wings, struggling to catch air, to rise before the creature crushed him. It was heavy, so heavy, far too heavy to be an earthly serpent. The weight in it was magic: old and cold, black and deep.

He was light and fire. He was Merlin's child, the master's pupil. He was the champion of the sword. He rose up with all his strength, lifting the serpent with him, high and high. When he had reached the summit of heaven, he cast his burden down. He flung it headlong, crashing through branches, striking the earth with crushing force; he flung himself after it, dropping like a stone. He cared not at all if his own body was broken. Only that the enemy was destroyed.

It lay unmoving on the tumbled ground. Black blood seeped out of it. Its back was broken. Its eyes were flat, empty of life.

He tore at it with his sharp hooked beak. Its blood tasted of grave-spices and of old tombs. He gagged on it in revulsion so fierce that it shook him out of hawk-shape into bruised and naked humanity.

No woman lay there, nor serpent either, but a creature who was somewhat of both. Roland knew that long pale face, that colorless hair, that shaved circle of tonsure. Of the monk's robe he saw nothing. The naked body was hairless, sexless, not a woman's nor yet a man's. Faintly on its sides he caught the glimmer of scales.

With a deep shudder he recoiled. Ganelon's servant was dead. His—its neck was broken. But that alone had not killed it. On its smooth and nippleless chest was a raw red wound. It was as if a coal had burned through flesh and bone to the living heart.

The amulet was hot against Roland's skin—not hot enough to burn, not quite, but very close. He clasped it with a hand that could not stop trembling. Its song was as clear as he had ever heard it, a high sweet singing like the music that drove the spheres of heaven. White magic, high magic. It had protected him; saved him.

Even high magic could not save him from the truth. Ganelon knew, if not yet what Roland was, then certainly
that he was a danger. And he had killed one of Ganelon's servants. He would pay for that, and dearly.

He would have paid with his life if he had not killed first. He gathered his garments, his weapons, everything that could betray him. He blurred and scattered the human footprints that he had left, and laid a wolf's trail far into the wood. Then he buried the body, digging the grave deep beneath the roots of an oak. The tree shuddered at the presence of so ill a thing, but it was old and it was strong. It would render the flesh into earth and the bones into stone, and dissipate the darkness within them.

Ganelon would miss his servant soon, if he had not already. But Roland prayed that it would be long before he discovered what had become of the creature.

CHAPTER 8

T
he hour before sunset found Roland at the king's table, seated in a place of honor at Charles' right hand. He was scrubbed clean of black earth and serpent's blood, and dizzy with the simple pleasure of living and breathing and walking free under the sky. Even when he caught sight of Ganelon far down among the priests, his heart barely stopped. He was safe, for the moment. And when this feast was over, he would speak to Charles. He would warn the king.

He took his determination with him well into the night. The feast went late. Charles drank little, nor did he encourage his men to drink themselves into a fine Frankish stupor, but he was caught up in a disputation between a pair of priestly philosophers. Charles loved such contests, though his Companions tended to find them stupefying. Roland, who had no earthly interest in the precise order and ranking of the angels, nodded off where he sat.

When he woke with a start, it was deep night. Charles was gone—to bed, no doubt, and wisely, too. There were no few snoring bodies amid the remnants of the feast. Roland had drunk little, but he had eaten less. His head ached abominably; his stomach snarled at him.

There was still half a loaf of good white bread near his hand, and a bit of roast duck. He ate what he could, a few
grimly determined bites of each, and drank from the cup he had been mostly ignoring. The wine was well watered. It steadied him well enough.

As he sat sipping the last of it, gathering will to rise and seek his proper bed, a small sleek shape wove among the snoring bodies. His belly knotted, then eased as he saw what it was.

A grey cat leaped into his lap, curled there with the utter insouciance of its kind, and began to knead his thigh, purring raucously. Its claws were wickedly sharp.

He had seen this cat among the Saracen tents, the night he went there as bodyguard to the king. It was fey as all cats are, but still, he thought in the clarity of very late night, this one was more fey than most.

Its purring rose to a crescendo. He plucked it from his stinging knee, tucked it under his arm, and went out into the night.

It was almost dawn. He could smell the morning. The cat was quiet under his arm, purring still, tail flicking gently in rhythm with his stride. It had about it an air of considerable satisfaction.

Roland could refuse to let a cat rule him so, but he sensed no evil in it, though he searched wide and deep, and by every way he knew. This was no serpent come to slay him. But neither was it a simple mortal cat.

Its purring soothed him. The part of him that twitched to run to the king, wake him, warn him, subsided somewhat. His steps slowed. His senses opened as they had seldom done since he was a boy in the wood of Broceliande. The tent-city was beginning to wake. Men were yawning, stirring, rousing out of dreams. Monks and priests were up and praying, some in the slow roll of chanting, others in a shimmering silence.

The darkness was like a canker, small as yet but already deep. It had Pepin, held him fast. It stretched—yes: toward the queen and the child within her. It did not touch Charles. He was too well guarded.

Roland paused in an aisle of tents. If he slipped down this way, then turned to the right, he would come to Ganelon's tent. Durandal was close by his hand. One swift blow and he would end it.

Oh, surely, he thought with grim irony, it would be as
easy as that. Ganelon had lived for thousands of years. Others must have thought the same, and tried it, too; and he was alive and they, Roland could be sure, were long dead.

Ganelon did not seem to be guarding himself, or concealing what he was from one who could see. That was not innocence, not at all, nor carelessness either. Roland had used that same sleight in battle. It drew the enemy in, lulled him into complacence, and closed him in a deadly trap.

It was very hard to turn away from that path, even knowing that he would surely fail. Yet as the grey light grew about him, he took the opposite way. The cat slipped free of his arm, climbed to his shoulder, and draped itself about his neck. Its claws, he could not help but observe, were perilously close to his throat.

He was being ridden like a horse. Rather oddly, he did not mind. It was like the old days, when Merlin sent small servants, wise beasts or minor spirits of earth or air, to teach him this lesson or that. For an instant he wondered—

Merlin had no such power, not so far from Broceliande. This—spirit? Yes. This spirit in cat-shape was nothing of Merlin's doing. It was its own master, he suspected, or near enough; and it had something that it wished him to do.

It was purring again. The purr guided him through the waking morning. It led him past the king's tent and Roland's own nearby, then through those of the king's court to the closely guarded enclave in which dwelt the king's women, his children, and their servants.

Roland did not often go there. The women had their own kingdom. He, who had neither mother nor sister nor wife, had little occasion to enter into their world. Sometimes he went with Olivier to visit Olivier's sister Aude, who was a nun in the service of the king's sister, the Abbess Gisela, but he had never gone without an escort. It made him strangely shy.

The cat's claws had tightened. It wanted him to walk in among those tents. The voices there were higher, but not always softer. Somewhere nearby, a woman was cursing a servant's laziness in devastating detail.

It was quieter by the queen's tent: a murmur of voices, low and urgent; a child's cry, quickly cut off. The cat saw to
it that Roland stopped not far from the entrance, which was closed. There was no guard in front of it.

There was darkness here. It was not as deep as it was about Ganelon's tent, but it was distinct, with the same odd dryness to it, like the rustle of a serpent's scales.

The cat slipped from Roland's neck and leaped lightly to the ground. It vanished beneath the flap of the tent.

Roland could not follow. He knew what was inside, what it must be: the enemy reaching for the queen, perhaps to take the child she carried. But what could he do? He could not wield the sword here. He knew nothing of women's magic.

A woman slipped out of the tent nearly as gracefully as the cat had slipped in. She carried a water jar. There was a satchel slung over her shoulder, heavy for its size, but she bore it easily.

He gaped like a raw boy. He had not realized that she was tall. Her eyes were nearly level with his, her back straight, her steps light but firm. She could dance, he thought out of nowhere at all, as well as she could ride a horse. And . . . heal a queen?

Her face was troubled, those wonderful eyes downcast. It was not going well within.

He must have made a sound. She looked up, startled, and their eyes met. She was not as appalled this time as she had been before. She was not visibly delighted, either. “You have a message?” she asked him.

He blinked. From the king, she must have meant. He shook his head. As ridiculous as it sounded, he said, “The cat—”

“Tarik? Tarik brought you here?”

Indeed: the cat was weaving between them. Its purr was a low rumble. It sprang into Roland's arms and grinned a fanged cat-grin.

Sarissa glared at the creature. “Yes? And what can
he
do?”

“Nothing,” Roland said. “I shouldn't be here. I didn't mean—”

“Didn't you?” She was still glaring at the cat. “He cannot,” she said as if it had spoken.

The cat hissed. Its tail lashed.

“This is a women's thing,” Sarissa said.

“Indeed,” said Roland. He turned on his heel to escape, but the cat's claws sank into his arm, holding him fast.

“This creature thinks,” said Sarissa, tight and angry, “that you can be of some help here.”

“And why would it think that?”

“God knows,” she said. “What can you do for a woman whose child is sought after by something dark?”

“I know little of women,” Roland said. “But—”

He regretted that word as soon as he had uttered it. Her eyes fixed on him. “But?”

“But surely you can have a priest exorcise the evil.”

“We have had holy women raising walls of prayer about her,” said Sarissa. “This is stronger than they. Stronger than a priest, too.”

“Then what do you think a plain fighting man can do?”

“It's not what I think,” she said. “It's what Tarik thinks. He says that you are more than a soldier.”

“I do not want to be,” Roland said in a kind of despair.

The cat's claws sank deeper. It was, in its way, dragging him toward the tent, toward that nest of whispering women.

There were things that Merlin had taught him. Defenses against dark things. Walls of air. Their like had imprisoned the enchanter in the wood; but in lesser strength they could protect a man—or a woman—beset by ill magic.

For an instant Roland's hands remembered the not-quite-human softness of a demon's skin, and heard the hiss as the serpent-creature sucked the breath from him. He was as dizzy as he had been then, weak, swaying, heart pounding, gasping for air. Pain brought him back, sharp-clawed and merciless. He was not to escape this. Not unless he wanted to lose a portion of his hide.

He did consider it. But he was not so great a coward after all. Nor did he need to go into the tent for this. He had simply to know what the boundaries were, and sense where the queen was, with the child enfolded in her.

True magic was quiet, a thing of the spirit. It had no need for extravagant displays. He spoke the words softly, without drums or trumpets, magical gestures or sleights of the magician's art. He raised the walls as Merlin had taught him, secured them with bars of light, and bound them with
the chains of the earth. He delved deep in his strength for that, but there was enough. He even kept his feet after, bowed to Sarissa without falling over, and walked away. The cat, for a wonder, let him go.