The Grail War (17 page)
“Need I have steel at my throat?” he wondered. “It corrupts my speaking.”
“It had best sharpen it,” was the helpful rejoinder from the slightly less massive man beside the leader.
“Ask your questions, then,” Lohengrin returned, “make a London scholar of me … or tell me who you are.”
The dead man in the fire was hissing and bubbling now like a roast on a spit. Dark, stinking smoke was seeping into the room’s steamy air. Wista gagged, but he stayed perfectly still. He felt her erratic breathing against his chest.
“You may think of me as the devil’s dearest friend, for all it matters,” was the captain’s reply. “Who bade you to slay the Duke?”
“Myself prompted me,” Lohengrin instantly replied.
“And what reward did you hope for besides death?”
“Death?” He paused. “Reward?”
“Answer,” the knight said without emphasis.
Lohengrin knew that doom was grinning at his shoulder. He could almost hear the cold teeth clacking together.
“What about those two?” He indicated Frell and Wista. “Need they hear?”
“Want them to live?” the lieutenant asked.
“Why waste them?”
The leader leaned over the sudsy water close enough for a whisper to reach him.
Wista felt her trembling steadily. He held her. He noticed, peripherally, that she seemed strong-boned and firm-fleshed. He was starting to believe they had some chance to live.
“Easy,” he whispered near her ear, “easy, I pray you.”
ACROSS THE LEVEL dirt field, the woods and hills were going red and gold in streaks and blotches. The bright air was comfortable but cool. Parsival, in fur and velvet, sat on a bench chewing an apple and watching several pairs of young squires engage one another with wooden swords on foot under the eye of stolid Prang. The battlers wore full armor and shuffled, panted, and attacked with awkward ferocity. Unarmored Prang suddenly booted one in his steel backside and sent him flat on his face with a great clang.
“Never lean forward when you stroke!” he shouted at his victim.
Parsival looked up as Earl Bonjio laughed behind him, then sat down on the bench at his elbow. Parsival uneasily ate the fruit. He wasn’t certain of his feelings when he thought of her as this man’s wife. Custom, he reflected, fenced off the fields of life. And men were continually climbing over … Custom fences you into security and dullness, but, drag your feet or clutch the rails as you will, life sweeps you toward the unknown because, in spite of everything, the heart burns to live, to send you racing free over the mysterious earth in the very eye of death … He smiled, remembering many things.
Yes
,
until
you
crash
into
the
next
fence
after
that
, he thought.
“He’s very good,” Bonjio remarked. “I’m pleased you no recommended him. But he says he’s unwilling to stay and serve me when you leave.” He glanced shrewdly at Parsival. “Either he loves you in some unnatural fashion — ” he grinned with his sarcastic eyes — “or believes you have much to teach him.”
“Why not say, ‘Or both’?”
Bonjio chuckled. Out in the field Prang was demonstrating a step and cut. His grunts and the tearing air as the blade sliced and spun were plainly audible. He glanced over at Parsival when he finished.
“I appreciate your hospitality,” Parsival said and the words embarrassed him. He tossed away the apple core and one of the Earl’s hounds (which had been resting on crossed forepaws), levered himself to his feet, and crunched the tidbit in lean jaws. “Well … well, I’ll speak to Prang, if you wish.”
Bonjio was studying the form of the sparring squires.
“No,” he said. “I prefer to let a man follow his heart and inclinations.” For an instant Parsival thought the phrase had a special meaning for him. “But what are your plans?”
Parsival cleared his throat. Nearly every remark seemed a reproach or hinting. What a horrible way to have to live, he thought.
“Plans?” Parsival stayed neutral in response. He watched and waited.
“Where are you bound? What will you do …? Ah! Good, good, there!” He called out where one squire had struck another with the hardwood blade, dented the helmet, and dropped the fellow to his knees, as if to pray, stunned. “Well struck.” he added as an aside. “So, then?”
“Agreed … though he hesitated a little.”
“I didn’t notice. But I meant: What are your plans?”
“Yes …” Parsival stared at the grassy turf, as if to read an answer there. A flash of color caught his attention: a butterfly, trembling, lying flat in a hollow of hard, dark earth. It was nearly dead. Looking closer, he made out, with a slight shock, a swarm of black, glossy-gleaming ants intricately enmeshing and picking the fan-like spray of yellow and orange to pieces so that it seemed to dissolve, as though fallen from some pure, sparkling height into a glittering, dark, acid stream …”I really don’t know,” he said, knowing that he lied. He tried to remember if he’d told a lie before. He was certain he must have, but this one burned his tongue.
“You went into a monastery?” Bonjio asked.
“For a time … yes …
“Unlea mentioned it,” Bonjio said, watching the combat. “I wasn’t really surprised, from what I knew of you. How long since I’d seen you? Eight years?”
“Perhaps.”
“When did you take your vows?”
Does
he
seek
to
know
if
I’m
still
bound
to
chastity
?
“Five years ago … I think … I lost track of time.” Parsival concluded.
“Well,” Bonjio considered, “I last saw you near Jerusalem. You told me you were looking for your brother. I didn’t know there was such a one.”
“Yes. A half-brother. Part Moor. So my mother told me.”
He remembered: a collection of huts and tents in the blinding-white desert heat, sitting atop his horse, roasting in his armor among the sleepy mules and swaying camels and close-wrapped easterners, squinting at a garishly embroidered portrait on a silken sheet that the burnoused infidel was holding up. It was supposed to be his brother Afis, the prince who would never be sultan. He waved his sunburned hands at the flies that arced and darted into his open visor and buzzed maddeningly inside the metal pot and zipped viciously around his head. The other Christian knights with him were resting in palm shade across the road. The face meant nothing: lean and long with black hair, tilted eyes, and a thin moustache. It could have been anyone from the burning country … He’d promised his mother to embrace his brother once before he died and tell him certain things about his father … He’d glanced away from the embroidery and stared at the white road. The surface danced and swam in the midday brilliance, but he thought he saw a small animal there … looked closer … started: it was a hand that seemed to be reaching up from under the earth, clawed, distorted. “What’s that?” he asked the man in broken Arabic, and the fellow shrugged, said something incomprehensible, and redisplayed the fluttering square of cloth. Parsival ignored him and rode closer. The hand was stiff and still, though for a moment it had seemed to move in the heat mirages. It was a wrist and fingers. “Do they bury men here in the roadway,” he mused aloud and poked it with his sword tip. It fell over. A severed hand, but for a moment it had seemed a terror and a portent …
“What a vile place that was,” Bonjio was saying. “We were fools and dupes to ever be led there like sheep by mad priests. We roasted and bled in the desert while our women played us false at home. You were lucky, indeed, if kin or stranger stole not your lands, as well as your wife’s cunt.” He smiled with half his mouth. Parsival re-crossed his legs and shifted in his seat, not looking at anything. “Most returned home crippled and in begging rags … Well, why did you go east, Parsival?” He grinned. “To hunt the
Grail
apace?”
Parsival frowned.
“Trouble me not with the Grail, Earl Bonjio,” he said. “I’ve had sufficient questions and jokes for a thousand years were I to live them.”
“But why did you go?”
“Well,” he said, “to say truth: because it was far off.”
Bonjio nodded.
“An honest reply,” he declared.
“I was weary of … of things.”
“I came back with ten of my hundred that left with me and found a cousin in my house and bed.” His eyes went distant and cold. “He escaped me, but she did not.”
A pause. The squires were taking a break in the field.
“Your wife?” Parsival finally had to ask. And when Bonjio nodded, he said, “Unlea?” His heart was frozen and pounding at the same time.
“Who?” Bonjio smiled. “No, no, my friend. My
first
wife.” He suddenly seemed engrossed in Prang’s demonstrating shield-without-a-sword, taking the clanging blows of three opponents at once without seeming effort.
“I see,” Parsival murmured. He was thinking that he really wasn’t guilty at all and that was why he felt uneasy. What was between himself and Unlea was between them. It existed like heat in a flame and had nothing to do with anything else, person or custom … It was good and sweet and …
“I was sick with pain for a year afterward,” Bonjio said. “My heart was never in the blows I dealt her, God knows that …” He shut his dark eyes to remember. “I wept … I lay down on the cold stones beside her with my cheek in her blood and I wept …” His eyes opened. Parsival couldn’t tell if they were moist. “She was a woman … a
woman
… more than any since.
“ … But I had to do what I did. How could I not?”
Parsival shrugged.
Custom
struck
the
blows
, he thought,
not
this
man
…
“Yet all the while I killed her, Parsival, all the while, I tell you, I felt apart and watching myself …” — his eyes were closed again — “ … and, this is passing strange, and, all the while I felt so distant and yet so close to her and I kept thinking: ‘I don’t mean this, my sweet wife, I don’t mean this!’” He opened his eyes and just sat there for a time, lost within himself. “As if another struck,” he finally murmured.
Yes
, thought Parsival,
distance
.
And
another
did
strike
…
“At any moment I could have simply stopped,” Bonjio said. He sat and stared. Then he pulled himself out of it.
Parsival was looking for the butterfly. His eyes scanned and found just ants trickling away. Not even a speck of yellow remained to stain the earth with memory …
“Who’s this?” he heard Bonjio say in a different tone of voice.
Everyone was watching a mounted knight in dark green armor enter the field from the distant woods. He came on at a walk, a very even pace.
“Were you chaste, then?” Parsival wanted to know.
“Eh?” Bonjio was shading his eyes, trying to make out the rider’s shield device. “You jest?”
“No,” Parsival replied, frowning slightly, “I do not. Why should not your wife have slain
you?'
Bonjio was suddenly irritable.
“She was a woman,” he snapped with a different meaning from a few moments ago. “Or are you still the original fool?” He smiled in mitigation of his comment.
“That’s possible,” was the murmured reply. “But I’ve slept under all manner of skies since then.” He looked up at the rider, who was crossing the jousting field now. “Except, I heard a knight say once but that we wield a sword and they bear a sheath, men and women have more alike than otherwise.”
“Except that we’re different, we’re really the same, eh?” mocked the Earl.
“Who made man’s pride worth a murder?” Parsival was serious: he imagined Unlea being slain. For what? For need? For a dream? Custom … created by men ages ago stepping out into the world fresh and saying: I like this, so this is good. I hate that, so that is wicked. “In the name of
Christ
!"
The Earl crossed himself.
“I’m a good Christian," he said, irritated. “Enough of this!”
The mounted knight had stopped now among the training squires. Parsival was frowning, thinking:
It's
not
just
up
to
men
because
there
is
a
voice
in
all
things
…
I've
heard
it
…
And
that
voice
tells
you
if
you
listen
how
each
shadow
sorts
itself
,
how
each
blade
of
grass
finds
its
proper
space
…
Bonjio stood up and stepped forward to confront the newcomer.
Like something in the corner of the eye, he found himself always conscious of Unlea. Parsival knew that, like a miser with his coins, he could think of her with secret joy and vague insecurity. Even the edge of anxiety was welcome because it brought the image to life …
The green knight didn't raise his visor. The grille was wide so his voice was fairly clear, and familiar to Parsival, who tried to place it.
“Greetings, gentlemen," the knight was saying. His armor was glossy plate.
“I suppose you’re hungry and in need of sleep,” Bonjio said with formal disinterest.
“This covers all cases of mortals,” was the wry and brisk reply, and Parsival stood up. Could it be? Still living?
“But your particular case stands before me,” Bonjio returned. He obviously didn’t like the custom of having to feed any stray warrior who happened by.
Custom
is
what
you
happen
to
prefer
, Parsival reflected.
“Is this an inn, then?” the newcomer wanted to know.
Prang had come up to him.
“What manner of insult is that?” he asked.
“One well chosen,” the knight declared, “unless my wit has soured.” He seemed perfectly at ease. Parsival was almost certain now he knew him.