The Grail of Sir Thomas

Chapter 10

  The thief had been in too much of a hurry to hide his tracks. Oleg whipped his tired horse: he wanted to come upon Gorvel before dark. Thomas tried to exchange a few words with Chachar but she looked at him with eyes full of anger and resentment. She didn’t seem to be bothered much with the fate of civilization. Thomas came up with Oleg again and asked insistently, “Are culture and civilization not the same?”

  “No, they aren’t, Sir Thomas. They aren’t!”

  Thomas paused, rode silent for a while, frowned. When he spoke, his eyes were full of suffering. “When we climbed the walls of Jerusalem, shedding them with our blood… and the blood of our enemies, it was simple! And now? I’ve always thought civilization to be at the side of good. I thought of myself as a civilizer!”

  “Sir Thomas, civilization is an axe. With it, you can cut a tree down, cut some dry twigs to make a fire… or butcher a man. The higher civilization, the sharper axe you have.”

  “And culture?”

  “Culture is the invisible fingers that seize you by the arm when you brandish at a human. It is the moral law within you.”

  Night was falling fast, the shadows of trees were already black as coal. Oleg drove his horse to a thicket where, he supposed, a small spring was hiding. The trail of Gorvel’s horse was very fresh: they would have come up with him if not for the nightfall. However, Gorvel would also not ride at night. Many hamster burrows here, his horse would break its legs.

  Thomas unsaddled the horses, tethered them, tied bags of oat to their snouts. Oleg made a tiny fire, hiding it from a stranger’s sight thoroughly behind thick shrubs, brought some slices of bread and meat.

  Thomas asked awkwardly, “Sir wonderer… What about Christ? Does he support our Western civilization?”

  Oleg dropped his eyes, feeling embarrassed by the clear, honest eyes of the young knight. “Culture, Sir Thomas. He supports culture! Satan is much more civilized, don’t you think so? He knows more than Christ, can do more things. He makes wonders at every occasion. He’s free, brave, with a broad outlook, not bound by any rules: neither inward nor outward. A vigorous guy! As against him, Christ looks simple-minded and not very clever. Just a bungler! But he’s kind, eager to give his life for us, mean and ignorant! And he gives it – for them who are no fit to hold his candle! And then there’s a rum go; people get ashamed and start climbing up to the light and goodness. The sacrifice of Christ was not in vain! That’s what Satan, with all his great wits, fails to grasp. He still wonders why he, so daring and brilliant, is always defeated!”

  Silence fell for a long time. They supped, horses snorted in the dark behind. Then Chachar asked, in a soft voice, “And why is he always defeated? If he’s more daring and clever?”

  Oleg smirked faintly. Red lights played on his face. “It’s not enough to be clever. And daring. It’s never enough for man…”

  As they went to sleep, Chachar began to settle herself between the men. For a long time she complained of being cold, asked them to warm her from both sides, her nose, palms, and back. Thomas coughed in embarrassment. Oleg felt the knight’s thoughts were still far from the fire and the young woman fidgeting between them. “Civilization is not pure evil,” he comforted. “Your Lord, as far as I know your verities, has as much culture as he can, and some civilization as well. So it is possible.”

  Early in the morning, once the dawn painted the clouds red, Oleg woke Thomas and Chachar up mercilessly. At night, she had managed to wriggle, like a grass snake, into the knight’s iron embrace, but Thomas was accustomed to sleeping in his armor while in the field, so in the morning she struggled herself out, scratched and bruised. Poor Thomas was so upset by the loss of the cup that he didn’t even notice her trying to compensate for it, to make him a night of love.

  Chilled horses were bursting into trot, or even a gallop, but Oleg held them, as he watched the trail. They hardly rode a mile when they found a burnt spot, its ashes still warm. Thomas grunted in annoyance, hit his forehead with a fist.

  Oleg checked his bow, moved his shoulders to adjust the quiver on his back. Thomas looked askance with his blue eye, his iron hand began to tug the sheathed sword, tap on the battleaxe. Chachar tried to ride ahead. Both men shouted and hissed at her to stay put and keep behind. She got resentful, dropped behind and rode there, paying no attention to the men at all. To show her slender body once again, she would lean down from the saddle at a tilt and snatch flowers. Thomas and Oleg rode watchful, their eyes searching around. Over the distant shrubs, magpies were crying, flying in circles. The men exchanged glances, adjusted their swords.

  In a hundred steps ahead, four mounted men on warhorses rode out onto their road, alerted and gloomy. All of them looked very dangerous. Two were clad in heavy European armor, their necks protected with nettings of mail falling on their shoulders from beneath their helmets: good protection against sabers, but not Frankish swords, heavy as hammers, or Frankish axes, massive as forges.

  The other two men are definitely Saracens, lean and swarthy. Their fast Arabian horses, nervous and savage, gnaw at the bits and paw the ground, longing for the breakneck pace for which they were born and trained. The riders are clad in gleaming light armor of Damask steel, not common even for Arab nobles. Their bare sabers sparkle with blue: a distinct mark of blades made of the very best Damask steel. Their faces are haughty and still, but their posture and shoulders speak of readiness for a swift fight: so swift that it will be all over before the heavy European knights have time to spur their stout warhorses.

  “Oleg,” Thomas said softly. That seemed to be the first time he called the wonderer by name. “I think that’s a good start of a day.”

  “I don’t like my way blocked,” Oleg replied sadly.

  “A flimsy fence!” Thomas objected. “Just four planks in it!”

  “But sturdy ones.” He looked askance at Chachar. The woman stiffened, her palms pressed to her mouth, eyes wide open in fear and bewilderment. Just a moment ago she was picking flowers, she had already thought up a pretext for presenting them to the shy knight – and now these four thunderclouds, with flashing blades of lightning, emerged in her blue cloudless sky! What would happen to her if her protectors perished and their enemies survived?

  “I’ll fight the Franks,” Thomas said arrogantly, in a tone allowing no objection. He lowered his visor with a clang of steel, hiding his face that had became arrogant and angry. “And you distract the Saracens. Entertain them.”

  “You’re always taking the best part,” Oleg accused.

  “The next time you will have it,” Thomas promised.

  All the four enemies sent their horses ahead. The Saracens were motionless in their saddles, bare sabers gleaming in their hands. The armored warriors exchanged looks and smirked with malice. One bellowed out, “Try to die at once, Angle! And you, pilgrim, can go to your Pagan hell. Sure, we’d rather strip three skins of you… of you alive, sure! But we’ll have all our joy on the wench. Trembling as she looks forward to us, huh! Feels real men! I swear she’ll have all and more of it before her soul is out!”

  They reined up in ten steps against each other. The Arabian horses snorted and gnawed at the iron bits, while the heavy mounts of Franks could be mistaken for stone statues if not for the idle waving of their tails. Thomas saw the foes meant no fast attack, so he flung his lance away and drew out his sword in a single swift move. All the four enemies had curved sabers waving in their hands. Oleg had an old habit of calling that kind of weapon a Khazarian sword.

  Confused, Oleg slapped his pockets, searched his bosom on the left and on the right. Suddenly a happy smile lit his face, as if he’d caught a pernicious louse. Four enemies burst into mocking laughter. The Saracens laughed in a restrained way, feeling their full superiority, while the Franks swayed in their saddles. Thomas frowned with shame for the wonderer, moved a bit aside, as if to show he had nothing to do with him, but the laughter of enemies only grew louder and more wicked.

  Oleg pulled something ou
t of his bosom. His hand made a sudden swift move, Thomas saw a flash. Oleg flung his hand again, turned to the angry knight. “Looks like my enemies are done,” he said with perplexity. “Please lend one of yours.”

  The Saracens rocked in their saddles. The man with the knife handle in his mouth collapsed face first on the horse neck. Another jerked his hands up, gripped the hilt of Oleg’s knife stuck in his throat, in a finger above the mail collar. Blood ran out in two gushes, the air hissed in his stabbed throat. The Saracen reeled stronger again, fell down, his boot enmeshed in the stirrup. His horse recoiled in fright, burst away, dragging the corpse. Chachar, with her tender heart, galloped after it, feeling pity for the animal half-mad with fear.

  Two armored warriors watched it with disbelieving eyes. Before they could stop laughing, there were only two of them facing two strong, experienced, skillful fighters. Even the pilgrim was not the simpleton he looked…

  Thomas shared the blank look with them. “Fast you are… I recall you once ate a boar before we set to dinner!”

  “A brave heart wins two boars. May I take the left one?”

  “Only borrow!” Thomas warned, insulted.

  The warriors exchanged glances, drove forward without lesser confidence than before. The first was coming at Thomas, the second, with a saber in right hand and a round shield in left, rode up to Oleg slowly. He kept shifting his light shield. A throwing knife will bounce off like a stone. Anyway. Oleg had no more knives. He unsheathed his huge sword, spoke slowly, “You can leave undamaged.”

  Before the warriors could blink, Thomas yelled angrily, “Without a fight? It’s a shame on me, a Crusader!”

  He galloped at the enemies, giving them no time to recover. His huge sword glittered dangerously overhead, his armor shone in the bright sun, scattering the dazzle of sparkles around. He attacked the right warrior with thunder, wheeled round in his saddle to the left one whom he’d left to Oleg. Thomas’s violent blow crushed the shield, which the foe barely had time to raise, in two. His shield arm got numb, judging by his distorted face. Thomas put his own steel shield, large as a door, under the saber of the right enemy, turned swiftly to the left – and yelled with fury: his other enemy had a white swan feather jutting out of his left ear winsomely, while three palms of the arrow shaft topped with the bloody head stuck from his right ear.

  “You lent him to me!” Oleg reminded briskly.

  “I had a second thought!” Thomas roared. He saw a new arrow in Oleg’s hand, squealed in a strained voice, “No! Don’t you dare!”

  He clashed with the last live enemy. Both were heavy, rode mighty horses and fought in the same manner: stopped to take a breath, devoured each other with fierce eyes, lurched from their own mighty blows. The crushing, thundering sounds of their duel were heard within a mile around, as if mountains were broken by thunderclaps. The foe brandished his sharp saber much faster than Thomas could with his long sword, but Thomas’s armor proved its worth: the saber would only strike sparks out of it and get indented. Cursing, Thomas slashed with his dreadful sword, seldom cutting anything but the air.

  Chachar approached, stopped aside. She held the reins of the snorting Arabian horse. A different horse stood at a small distance, moved its ears nervously as it heard terrible clangs of metal on metal but did not run away. Oleg dismounted, pulled his throwing knives off, wiped them clean.

  Chachar’s face went white. She fidgeted in the saddle, begging Oleg with her eyes to help the valiant Thomas, who fought the nasty, shaggy robber desperately.

  “No,” Oleg replied to her mute pleading. “There’s a great difference in… in our world views. A Crusader puts the contest before the result! So he dresses the fight into rites, dances, postures, bowing and throwing a gauntlet, while a Saracen… or the likes of him, want only to win. By all means! They are ready to wallow in mud, play a mean trick, hit on the back or below the belt… If civilization prevails, this way will be common. No one will be surprised or upset if a man who is down is beaten before their eyes. Thomas has no idea he’s fighting for culture – but he is. He’d rather die than use ill practice! So I can’t interfere: it will be a great insult to him.”

  Chachar watched the dreadful fight tensely, trembling and shivering at the violent blows and clang of steel. “And you? Are you Saracen or European?”

  “I’m Rusich,” Oleg replied. “That means I am a bit of European, Saracen, Viking, Scyth, Cimmer, Arian, Nevr and many other nations, forgotten by everyone long ago. A Rusich is a very diverse man.”

  They heard a terrible crash of iron torn apart. The enemy reeled in his saddle, a broken fragment of saber in one hand, a shield strap clenched in another. Thomas slashed crosswise. The sliced body sank, flooding the saddle with blood. Head and arm with a bit of shoulder fell down on one side, some more pieces of body – on another. The horse snorted, shifted from leg to leg but stayed in place.

  Thomas turned to Oleg and Chachar, raised his visor with his blooded hand, still holding the reddened sword. His eyes searched their faces suspiciously for any hints of mockery or irony.

  “Why did you take that risk?” Chachar exclaimed indignantly. “He could kill you!”

  “That’s war,” Thomas replied with pride.

  “But the pilgrim got rid of three at no risk at all!”

  Thomas eyed Oleg from head to foot with displeasure. “He has no knightly ardor in him. No rapture in the fray!”

  “I have none of it,” Oleg agreed.

  They gathered their weapons, cleaned them, and loaded them on the remounts: four added to their number. When Thomas dismounted to dig the graves, Oleg kept him back. “Do you know whom to bury, whom to burn, whom to leave as they are? This mad land has all the faiths and religions mixed up.”

  Thomas scratched his wet forehead in a predicament. Chachar led a horse up to him. “Please mount,” she offered gently. “They’ll be found before vultures pilfer them.”

  “Found by whom?”

  “Their kin,” Oleg replied instead of Chachar, with heavy sarcasm in his voice. Honest Thomas wanted to wonder what kin the hirelings could have in this land, but then he saw their faces, scolded himself silently and mounted.

  The wonderer kept frowning as he watched the hoof prints. At times, his fingers touched the thread of wooden figures on the long lace. The steppe turned into a hilly plain: the open space of low grass was replaced by thick shady groves, dense thorny shrubs, deep gullies. Twice they crossed wide streams. The animals fled from their path in fear: hares, a herd of wild boars, a lone kulan.

  Oleg turned his horse often, dodged in loops, dismounted and palmed the ground. At last, Thomas asked with annoyance, “What’s the matter? Gorvel’s escaping! It’s time to get upon him while he thinks us stopped by his fence!”

  Oleg dusted his palms off, shook his head anxiously. “We’re not the only hunters in the forest.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Someone is following by stealth.”

  “Following Gorvel? Maybe they know he stole the family jewels!”

  “Following Gorvel… or us.”

  Thomas gasped, his eyes widened. “Who can be that?”

  “In Rus’ I’d have told you. But here… too crowded a place. Too many adventurers from all around the world.”

  They rode about a mile in silence till Thomas saw Oleg become alert. The bow appeared in his hands, he shifted the quiver from the saddle hook to his back, so that the feathered ends of arrows were over his shoulder. Looking at the sullen wonderer, Thomas unsheathed his sword, laid it down across his saddle and rode on, ready for any unexpected thing. Chachar kept behind them, scared, feeling the danger with her female intuition. Her small palm clenched the hilt of a big dagger bravely.

  Oleg reined up, said in a lifeless voice, “They were in wait. For us.”

  Thomas twisted his head round but failed to get what Oleg was talking about. Chachar galloped ahead. Soon she dashed aside abruptly with a shriek. Thomas seized the sword with right hand
, tugged the reins with the left one, rushed ahead with a battle cry, trampling shrubs and grass down.

  In twenty steps ahead, he saw the big black spot of a recent fire. The grass around was yellow, ruthlessly trampled. On the other side of the fire, three maimed bodies lay in puddles of clotted blood, their limbs bound tightly to stakes driven into the ground. In place of eyes, they had bloody hollows where flies buzzed angrily, fought, copulated, laid their eggs hastily. Only one had his eyes but they seemed unnaturally big. Thomas recoiled in terror: the dead man’s eyelids had been cut away deftly, trickles of blood clotted on his untouched cheeks.

  He looked back at the wonderer who gave a sullen nod to confirm Thomas’s frightful guess: the eyelids were cut away to make the tortured man unable to close his eyes, to force him to see the terrible torments of his comrades. Skin was ripped off their faces, greenish sinews and tight nodules bulged on the raw red flesh. The white of their teeth could be seen through the wounds on their cheeks. The three of them had their male parts chopped off and one had those parts in his mouth. Two men had their bellies slashed open and filled with earth and stones, bluish guts lying on the grass nearby.

  Suddenly Thomas seemed to hear a moan. He flinched, jumped up, glanced back at Oleg in fear. The wonderer nodded again. “The last is alive. They put out his eyes and teeth, transfixed his ears, cut sinews in his limbs… but spared his life.”

  “How can he live?” Thomas whispered in superstitious awe. “How can it… that… stay alive?”

  “Man is a great stayer, to his misfortune. Or his good fortune.”

  Thomas, still disbelieving, sheathed his sword and seized a misericord from his belt. Averting his eyes in pity and disgust, he stabbed the empty eye socket, scaring away the flies. The body twitched, uttered a scary rattle, as a blooded scrap of a tongue quivered in the mouth.

  Thomas was almost weeping, pallid, his hair on its ends. He hastened to stab the other two with the narrow blade. He didn’t find it in him to drive the misericord into untouched eyes, so he stabbed the temples. Each body gave a shiver before it was free of suffering.

  Oleg watched him intently. His eyes, green as fresh grass, went black as night. “Well, how is it? Is it easier to kill through a narrow slit of your visor? When you can’t see those you kill?”

  Half-oblivious, Thomas climbed into the saddle. He sounded hoarse with suffering. “I see it, sir wonderer… That’s why our Holy Church tries to prohibit the use of bows, especially crossbows, at war. Two edicts proclaimed the crossbow an instrument of the Devil. With a crossbow, you can kill without a single look in the enemy’s eyes!”

  “The crossbow is a thing of progress! The Church is right: if there is no way to prevent killing completely, then it should be made difficult at least. You have to see their eyes…” He fell silent, rose in his stirrups, cast a vigilant glance around.

  Thomas rode silent, suppressing the wish to look back at the maimed bodies. The wonderer cupped a hand to his forehead, strange sparkles in his shadowed green eyes. Thomas glanced slantwise at him, feeling his anxiety and strain. The wonderer was a far cry from that hermit, exhausted from fasts and self-torment, whom Thomas had once come upon and saved from mad dogs. And a farther cry from the meek slave he was in the stone pit. Meanwhile, little seemed to have changed about him: some stringy flesh gained, but still a man of few words. He seems to live in two worlds at once. His replies are sometimes out of place. Driven by the sense of friendship, he took the search of the cup stolen by Gorvel in hand, though it brought him personally nothing but trouble. Maybe a wonderer is a sort of knight errant in that far land of Rus’? A man bound to help the troubled?

  Oleg drove his horse silently to the far green hills. Thomas glanced back at the sprawled bodies. “We should have buried them… A requiem? I know few words in Latin… Laudetur Jesus Christos…”

  “Amen,” Oleg finished. “You keep forgetting that your Christian faith has not conquered all the world yet! Those might have been fire worshippers.”

  They felt a stinky wind from great wings overhead. Those were imperial eagles, a whole flight of them, floating in their wait for people to leave. Chachar was shivering with fright and ended up riding far ahead to wait for the men there.

  Thomas tied up the captured horses with a single rope, shifted the load among them once more. Scared Chachar was peering at every move within the bushes, listening to the sounds of the live steppes. The dismal cry of a jackal reached their ears from far away. It was answered by a dreary scream, full of depression and helpless malice, from the other end of the valley.

  Oleg listened, then grumbled, “Fools… Which spearmen?”

  “What are you talking about?” Thomas asked.

  “A fool asked whether the other one had seen two Franks who killed four spearmen. Another fool replied he hadn’t even seen their tracks.”

  Thomas glanced at the wonderer with badly concealed fear. “That’s the power of sanctity. Of the cave erudition, I mean! Once I’ve met a monk who could swear in twelve languages, and now… er… a man who knows the tongue of jackals!”

  “Which jackals? Those were robbers calling to each other.”

  The wonderer looked and sounded so dull that Thomas repeated in astonishment, “Rob… bers?”

  “Yes, just them. In search of us.”

  Chachar gazed at the men with hope, so Thomas squared his shoulders and tapped his sword hilt, proud and arrogant. “Let them find us.”