The Grail of Sir Thomas

Chapter 26

  Thomas bellowed, forcing the battle fury up in himself, stepped forward. The animal was driven up to him. Screaming, Thomas brought his sword down on the huge head covered with bony plates. Splinters flew about, like small silvery fish, the sword was all but wrenched out of his hands, as if he had struck with all his might on an anvil, his fingers were numb and aching. Thomas could barely keep the sword, so heavy it got at once, his mouth cold and dry, his heart stopped beating. In place of three thick horns on the beast’s snout, there now were only two – and a slantwise-cut stub in place of the third one. The monster uttered an insulted roar, darted on his enemy. Thomas was burnt with heat and fell down at once, as the beast shoved him with its side. Thomas rolled, his sword still in hand, jumped up studiedly and struck again, on the long green moss-covered tail that was sliding past him. The sword was cast away, its blow left a whitish stripe on the tail, and Thomas saw it was a different animal, while the one with cut-down front horn, roaring madly, broke into the lines of perplexed pilgrims.

  He heard a crash and a roar, caught glimpses of horrible paws, as the huge animal was rolling on the ground in a ball, crushing rocks and leaving a wide stripe of dead soil, trampled to the hardness of stone, behind. Terrified, Thomas could not believe his eyes; the monster and the wonderer grappled each other, both roared, wrestled, rolled on the ground… Thomas yelled, rushed to them with his sword raised, but a mountain bumped into his side, his armor crunched, and Thomas was blown away like a leaf torn off a tree.

  The earth trembled, as if mountains were collapsing. The mad roar was about to break his skull. Thomas managed to raise himself a bit, feeling as though all of his bones were… more than broken, reduced to hash, the largest fragment as big as his nail. With a moan, he leaned against his sword. A green log hit his legs at once. Falling flat, Thomas caught a glimpse of the animal, which had knocked him down with the very end of its tail. The beast roared with pain and fury, the wonderer took a grip of its jaws and was tearing them apart, as though to look into the red crater of its throat. Foaming blood, strangely white, gushed out. The animal gave a howl, waving its paws blindly. One of them caught the wonderer’s belt, the strong claws about to welt him. With a dirty curse, the wonderer left the jaws and gripped momentarily, with two hands, the animal’s thick paw. Before Thomas could say “mommy,” the paw gave a dry crunch, as though a thick pole broken, the terribly roaring beast collapsed on its side, started to beat the air convulsively with the other three paws. The wonderer jumped aside, picked up his sword.

  Thomas got up on all fours, had time to see another monstrous animal jumping on the wonderer before something pounced on Thomas’s back with a crunch, pressed him into the hard trampled ground. He lay half-stunned, waiting for terrible jaws to touch the back of his head, to come together once and bite his armor through, like a forest nut, and spit out the iron shell after having milled him, Thomas Malton, a noble Angle from the banks of the Don, with strong teeth…

  Suddenly the noise in his head subsided, but he heard a roar, dull thumps, and shouts instead. With effort, he turned in the pit, which his iron armor had made in his fall, to see the blue sky and, against the blue, the bustle of monstrous bodies and clawed paws.

  Then the wonderer cropped up into his eyesight. Oleg breathed heavily, his face wild, his eyes goggled still. Blood trickled down from his forehead, poured over his eyebrows. Irritated, the wonderer wiped it off with his blooded palm. “Are you alive, Sir Thomas?”

  Thomas tried to rise but fell prone; his arms were fragile as grass blades. Oleg supported him by his shoulder. “And… beasts?” Thomas asked in a husky voice.

  Oleg waved away. “All right. Fighting, what else?”

  Thomas sat up, shook his head, trying to regain his senses. He was sitting among broken and squashed twigs, limpid juice oozing from them, their leaves carpeting the ground. From the roadside, a crash and heavy rumble were coming, along with heavy strikes and mad shouts.

  “Lie down,” Oleg said. His breast rose frequently, the air rattling and howling in it, like a snowstorm in a chimney. He wiped the blood off his forehead again. His eyebrow was matted, his copper-red hair stuck up in a strange way. “Lie… They’ll cope on their own.”

  Thomas got up with effort, leaning on his sword, like an old man on a staff. He turned to the road. That last blow – with a tail, as far as he could recall – had flung him past the roadside. On the road, in puffing bitter dust, inconceivable things were going on; the last beasts had run down the slope, roaring and thundering, and pilgrims darted about, brandishing their staffs and chains. Three monsters, with their heads smashed and spines broken, lay at the roadside, their bony shields, impossibly thick, gaping with terrible cracks. Thomas was startled to see the head of the nearest monster flattened, as though between a hammer and anvil of unthinkable size, its hind paw torn out with a bit of meat. Huge white gristles were seen in the horrible wound, still oozing with blood, which made the ground hiss and swell in blisters.

  The last animal, a late one, thundered down the slope, came running into the old, grey-haired man, the one who had denied assistance to the travelers so coldly. Displeased, he stepped aside, socked the beast on the head with his staff. Thomas expected to see the immediate death of the old fool, but the colossal head, armored in thickest shell and resembling a granite boulder, cracked under the staff’s blow, broke into halves, like a rotten egg. Small splinters flew in all directions, blood gushed out in a thick gurgling mass. The animal’s broken mug hit the ground. The beast, unable to stop at once, turned overhead and remained on its back, its broad crest pressed down with a crunch.

  Along the road, in a hundred steps both on the left and on the right of it, pilgrims were hitting the beasts angrily with staffs, crutches, chains, and fetters. The air was full of terrible crunch and crash, death rattles and dreadful howls. Stupefied, Thomas saw that one pilgrim seized a monstrous creature by its thick tail, yanked it up into the air, whirled it overhead, as though to knock down other animals with it as a club – but there was a loud crackle, the green tail remained in his hands, while the beast flew over the road and collapsed, with bony thunder, onto the trampled shrubs. The suddenness of it made the pilgrim fall on his back, into a puddle of whitish blood and the entrails of another dead animal. The man was thin, yellow, his face gaunt, his skinny body covered with rags.

  Thomas jumped up in fear when a heavy hand fell with a clang on his shoulder. “They’re almost done with it. Let’s go to them.”

  “Aren’t they angry with us?” Thomas said, his voice unsteady. “We brought the beasts on them… Did you run here on purpose?”

  “I felt our Russian pilgrims going by,” Oleg replied evasively.

  The last animal was finished off by crutches; its shell cracked, as though beaten by iron logs, blood spurting out. One pilgrim threw away with disgust his crutch, with green moss and small bone splinters stuck to it. The crutch fell in front of Thomas, went into the stone-hard ground for the length of hand. Driven by natural gratitude, Thomas hurried to stoop for it, to pick up and clean it, as it was not disgraceful even for a king to render services to ecclesiastics, even those of other religions…

  His iron fingers slid off with a grinding sound. Thomas did not understand, gripped the crutch with both hands, hooking it from below, and jerked up – but it seemed to have grown into the earth. Thomas felt as though he were gripping the middle of the protruding root of a two-hundred-year-old oak tree. He saw friendly banter in Oleg’s tired face, bit his lip, frowned, took a firm stand and yanked the crutch up with all his might.

  He felt his legs breaking the hard crust of trampled earth, sinking into it, but that amazing crutch had only one of its ends raised a bit! Thomas went crimson, trying to hold it, but the crutch slipped off, he squelched onto the ground. Thomas could see, for sure it was neither his imagination nor illusion, that the earth was shaken with its fall and the crunch subsided as if it were mud, not well-trodden soil, as solid as stone.


  Oleg embraced Thomas, urged him to the battlefield. “Leave it, or you’ll bust a gut… No less than forty poods of iron in that staff. Their chains and fetters the same.”

  Thomas was astonished. “Why?”

  “To make them heavier,” Oleg explained shortly.

  Thomas turned his head, looked with mistrust, but the wonderer’s face was absolutely honest. “Why?” the knight asked again.

  “That’s a feat, as Ruses see it. Asceticism! It’s only hard to defeat a dragon till you try to defeat yourself. No beast is that brutal, strong, and cunning. A beast that always prevails, by ruse or by caress, by stubbornness or sweet words.”

  They came up to the wonderers who were seated tiredly on the huge bodies of dead monsters. Some pilgrims breathed heavily, scowled, one waved his blooded hand, others had a quiet talk with their heads close.

  The old man with the spade-like beard, his cloak even more torn, met Thomas and Oleg with his shrill senile voice. “Who is it, eh? Just two shrimps, but look – beasts from the very hell run after them! So big knobs indeed? Hares would do to hunt you down!”

  Thomas blushed, threw his hand on his sword hilt. Oleg seized his elbow, spoke back peacefully, “Who judges by clothing… My companion – he’s from the land of Angles, the former Tin Isles17 – had also thought you, in your rags, would not do the beasts!”

  “Tin Isles?” the pilgrim leader said, still annoyed. “Ah, the Land of Red Wolves? Where Taurus led the Old Believers to? I see, no way for them to know old ways there. And you didn’t tell him either?”

  “I’ve been chock-full with other matters,” Oleg replied.

  A hunched old man came up to them, dragging his swollen feet. The end of his dirty grey beard was tucked under his rope belt. He had a thick iron chain dangling on his neck, each link of it as large as a fist, its end dragged on the ground, leaving a wide track. With his fingers burnt on that plain-looking crutch, Thomas looked at the chain closely – and suddenly felt it had more iron in each of its links that his heavy armor in total! “Let’s stop for dinner?” the old man asked his leader in a hopeful voice.

  The old man with the spadish beard snapped back angrily. “Again? You had your meal yesterday! Enough to wait till supper tomorrow. The beast within should be tamed, its spine broken!”

  Thomas glanced around furtively. The wonderers sat in rows on the backs of dead animals, sad and ruffle-feathered like hungry crows in the rain. One walked among the monsters, prodded their jaws with his staff, examined their teeth. His belt had a gloomy glitter, broad and tight, made of metal with some strange writing carved in.

  The pilgrim leader followed the glance of the gleaming armored knight, his sharp eyes flickered with some emotion. “Well, we can have some rest. But don’t give in to temptation, don’t give up! The servants of Black God wait for you to… As the sun sets, we shall plod on. Less heat and flies on the way.”

  They made a fire far away from the road. The dead monsters were dragged into a huge pit and covered over with earth and stones. However, the pilgrims had cut a couple of animals first, with knives or their bare hands. Thomas turned away, he could not bear to see the dreadful entrails that had nothing in common with those of deer, boars, or even bears.

  The pilgrim leader saw to the liver being taken from the biggest animals. Soon after, strange fragrances started to drift over the green valley. Thomas sat humbly where Oleg had seated him, his nostrils sniffed the fresh-roast liver avidly, but his eyes recoiled in fright from the far road. He could see it as a twisting fair stripe with strange spots of dark, broken in one place and restored with great effort after, crawling out from pools of blood. From far away, a carriage was coming, attended by riders. What would they think as they see the road flooded with strange blood, all in dents and furrows that tell of a terrible battle? However, a light wind had already raised a cloud of grey dust to bury at least some part, if not all of it. By the time they have enough of their marvel and reach the nearest village, there will be no trace on the road at all and the words of astonished travelers will be taken as tales.

  When Oleg, after long talk with the leader of pilgrims, came back to Thomas, the knight whispered in amazement, “I don’t understand… They are heroes!”

  “They were,” Oleg dismissed.

  “What do you mean? They are! They scattered the beasts, slew, and crushed!’”

  Oleg cheered up and laughed. “Sir Thomas, one can live a life but remain a child. Heroes come out of childhood earlier than other people, as they in early age get everything other men can only dream of: glory, money, power, and princesses… Heroes have time to get fed up with that, to understand that’s not what really matters…”

  “And become wonderers?” Thomas asked with distrust.

  “They come out of heroes, anyway. In search of themselves. Many of them become wonderers to obtain Truth in their travels. They try to pick the easiest way: thinking the Truth has already been found somewhere and all they need is come and see it.”

  “And what is real?”

  “Truth is to be found in your own self. One man meets God on his way, another – while staying at home. Isn’t that true?”

  The pilgrim leader sliced the monster’s liver into big pieces, gave one to Thomas and one to Oleg. Thomas took it with both hands and thought, with a gloomy irony, that the old man with hungry eyes must be a real glutton. After eating such a slice, one can easily do without food not only till next evening, but for whole week! Next to him, Oleg crunched the roast liver loudly. As he gnawed deeper in it, blood oozed from the raw inner part. Oleg’s eyes were thoughtful as if he watched some very far thing beyond this world. He paid no heed at all to his bloody fingers.

  Thomas made himself eat it. Who else, in all the Crusader army, could boast having tasted the liver of Hell’s beast?

  On the other side of him, a gaunt ragged pilgrim was sitting, a thick hefty chain on his shoulders. He hadn’t taken it off even for dinner. By stealth, Thomas tried to move the end that lay on the ground but the chain seemed to be rooted in it, pressed into the soil at a finger depth.

  I don’t understand, he spoke sadly to himself, what strength do these strange men seek, which is more than strength? What power over power? What wonderful things are they going to achieve by denying… Goodness, a fool can see what they deny!

  He felt strange, as though he spent all his life walking past treasure visible to everyone except for him, a blind one. Would he also see it if he stripped off his armor, slipped into rags, denied the joys of life and walked bare-headed out in the rain and snow, as a beggar?

  He chewed mechanically, his eyes fixed on the emaciated ragged men, on their tatters, chains and fetters, their scabbed bare feet. “I don’t get it…” he whispered sadly. “Don’t get…”

  Oleg darkened, turned away. Will a worm of doubt infest even this beautiful, healthy, muscular body? Will the knight in his prime, to the terror of his family and friends, take his armor off, leave for a cave or join the wandering pilgrims?

  After all, it is the easiest way to seek Truth. To sever from the noisy base world, false and venal as it is, to cut yourself off with the wall of reclusion, to stay one on one with God. No birth without pain. Only pain and suffering can wake up the soul; it either aches or sleeps. However, ordinary reclusion is not the strongest pain. Mind the Great one!

  Having parted with the wonderers, they plodded to the nearest village and bought a horse for Thomas. They would have got one for Oleg too if not for the ill wind that brought the host’s wife to them. She started screaming, dug her nails in her husband’s face. All Oleg and Thomas could do was to save their purchased horse with a hasty retreat. Thomas gave a hint of offering twice that much for the second horse but Oleg dragged him out of the house. “This land is rich, one village close to another. We’ll buy a better one.”

  “I feel awkward, sir wonderer! I, a crusader knight, have a horse, and a priest…”

  Oleg gave a restrained smirk. At the beginning of t
he journey, the valiant knight was not conscience-stricken by the sight of the exhausted pilgrim dragging himself, covered with road dust and mud, by the side of his stallion in his luxurious cloth. The old god prescribed a noble knight to be high and a common man low, and Christ, the young god, consolidated and sanctified it! Man is eager to slip into the bad, but he can also come to humanity rather quickly. “Sir Thomas,” he said in a promising voice. “Up from that hill, I’ll be riding such a stallion that yours will seem a plow horse next to him!”

  Thomas shifted his jealous gaze to the horse he rode. He managed to buy a huge, mighty draft horse, which had evidently been brought there from the lands of the North. He paid thrice its price, but what is money when knightly honor is at stake? And that coin had come to them easily, according to the wonderer who claimed having either found it or taken it from a hare running by.

  As the wonderer walked, he often tip-fingered his charms. Thomas looked at them with dual feeling. The wooden things were impious, Pagan, but the Holy Virgin, in her unfathomable mercy, allowed their existence still. Nothing on earth is done without Her leave.

  “If we don’t buy there,” Thomas said decisively, “we’ll change!” On the way ahead, he could see five houses, a score of sheds, and the sweep of a well reaching for the sky. A goat for sale was unlikely to be found there, not to mention a horse, so he would have to dismount, getting his body troubled but soul relieved.

  Oleg glanced slantwise at the knight who rode like a tower bound with iron; unshakeable and indestructible. His blue eyes went dark and dim, as though his brave soul was wandering in doubt, so unusual to it. He seemed to be still among the wonderers, smelling unwashed bodies, hearing the clang of heavy chains, seeing horrible sores left by fetters that had worn the live flesh through to the bone. And he recalled his valiant friend, also a wonderer, explaining in a strange pitiful voice, with his eyes turned away, that only wonderers were humans, while others – pre-humans. Back then, Thomas had flared up with just indignation, righteous fury for the profane words, but now he returned to them silently, turning them this and that way.

  When they were eating the roast liver, Oleg asked venomously what is the difference between man and animals. Thomas blurted out that man can speak and animals can’t, so the difference is speech and mind. But Oleg said that animals also speak to each other, in howls, chirps, or squeaks. So man is also the cleverest of animals… and the most violent, as he even kills the likes of himself, but still only an animal. What is the difference indeed?

  May it be fetters? Thomas thought angrily. He cast curious furtive glances at the wonderer who walked on the right of his horse, raising road dust with each step. The wonderer got grey all over, his bronzed shoulders and jerkin of the same color, his face glistened with sweat.

  Surely, Thomas went on angrily, no animal will impose fetters or other heavy thing on himself. Neither will any man, common or noble. And what is man? According to the wonderer, that’s still an animal, a pre-human. But there are men who came from animals into humans. They are few, that’s why they seem strange and unfathomable to most people. But what is fathomable to everyone? The one who’s neither a fool nor a wise man, not too weak and not too strong, his heart neither too faint nor too brave… Strong men, wise men, heroes, prophets – they are all strange. They seem odd to ordinary people. Someone might have found strange even this quest of his; from a rich peaceful land, from his own castle on the Don into the strange world where death waited for him at every step, where he starved, suffered, had hard times, fell from tall towers, often slept, like a dog, on a bed of straw… And was it normal that he kept bearing the mortally dangerous cup, instead of leaving it and rushing to embrace his loved one?

  The wonderer walked deep in thought. Thomas, high in his saddle, was the first to notice a rider on the road far ahead. “Oho! I’m afraid we’ll have to fight!”

  The rider rushed towards them in heavy gallop. Thomas cheered up, leaving his reflections, so uncommon for a noble knight. The stranger’s horse looked like a rock of black basalt, while the rider looked like a smaller rock, but massive, heavy, menacingly huge all the same. Black crows were flying over him. Thomas felt cold between his shoulder blades as he grasped those were no crows but clods of earth hit off by the giant horseshoes.

  The stranger was impossibly broad in shoulders, thickset and stout, some ancient beastly might felt in him. He was clad in a coat of thick metal rings, his head in a glittering helmet, as large as a beer cauldron, the left side of his breast protected with an extremely broad shield the size of a shed door. Thomas expected to see a sword, but the man had a heavy spiked mace hanging on his right elbow instead. Across his saddle, in no knightly way at all, he had a thick spear with head of plain steel.

  The rider pulled up. The travelers stopped five steps from him. The stranger’s eyes measured Thomas in an open, impudent way. Thomas frowned, straightened up haughtily, his hand moved to lower his visor, but he retained from it; he knew that kind of jealous look. Brigands attack for plunder, but there is another sort of strange… yes, strange humans! In the young Britain, that sort is called errant knights. They wander along the roads of that land, still semi-wild, in search of the fight itself, persist in it till they find a stronger knight and even then try to get even with him. From bloody combat, they gain nothing but wounds and injuries. Thomas had been one of them, and remained one of them still but, whether influenced by Oleg or unsettled by the recent meeting with the forty wonderers, he spoke to the stranger first, and spoke peacefully. “Greetings to you, sir! May your road be short.”

  The rider gave him a gloomy once-over and did not stir, just bellowed in a deep voice that sounded like a roar of angry bear. “Short? Are you the one who will shorten it?”

  “I may try. Why not?”

  “Let’s see who is stronger,” the unknown warrior agreed. “I’ve met none of my equal yet, but you look a strong young oak. And I don’t recall you among champions. But work is first, and fun second. Where do you wend your way from?”

  Thomas noticed the rider glanced at Oleg with evident unfriendliness, while Oleg watched him with sympathy and some strange compassion.

  Before the knight could flare up to the stranger’s demanding question, Oleg replied in an even, placid tone. “From Jerusalem. Bowed to the Holy Sepulcher, which the crusaders won from the Saracen last year, bathed in Jordan, been to cypress groves. Now coming back home.”

  “Through Tsargrad?”

  “No other way available.”

  “How is it there?” the rider demanded menacingly.

  Thomas frowned, put down his visor with a thud. With a broad gesture, he slapped his thigh where his sword hilt was jutting up.

  “Unrest,” Oleg replied peacefully.

  “New nations attack?”

  “Barbarians? They too, but now an Idol is said to have appeared there. He and his have plundered some churches, threw icons out, covered their horses with chasubles…”

  The rider went crimson and scarily huge. His prominent eyes became bloodshot, he rasped in a fierce voice turning to a beastly roar. “How could you allow it?”

  Oleg moved his shoulder in vexation. Thomas felt pleased for his friend, as he saw Oleg watching the giant warrior with not a ghost of fear. “Has it been a long time,” Oleg spoke with displeasure, “since we Ruses plundered Tsargrad? And now we defend it?”

  “Our Christian shrines are there!” the rider bellowed.

  “Not mine,” Oleg said in a dry voice. His face darkened. “Not ours at all, you blockhead.”

  Thomas interfered, fearing that the rider may mistake the wonderer’s words for weakness or cowardice. “We don’t care a damn of your right-cephalous shrines! I’m left-cephalic, and my noble friend, though he walks on foot – a hero with his oddities – professes the old faith of his forefathers, or maybe his great-grandfathers…”

  “Shut up, your iron thing!” the stranger barked, without turning his big head to the gleaming knight. “And you
, wonderer! Aren’t you ashamed? I’ve met you once and heard more of you. Twice as strong as me, but wandering by roads, careless as a song bird that pecks dung! You lack boldness, and skill too. You should have taken the vile Idol by paw – or what he has instead? – and smashed him against the wall, for all the palace to shake, the domes to drop from churches! A wet spot you’d leave of him, and there’d be an end to it.”

  Thomas puffed in rage, his sword half-bared. He excited his horse with the bit, choosing a good position to strike.

  “Why should I bother with a scuffle within a foreign city?” Oleg replied in vexation. “Each month a new Idol appears there. With his supporters! They call their leader a prophet, and the leader of others – an Idol, and others do it the other way round, though I can barely tell them apart. Tsargrad is a rotten city. If her people don’t mind who rules them, why should we mind it?”

  The hero goggled his eyes, his breath got heavy. “How dare you… What do you say? Tsargrad is a holy city! There is the Patriarch of the Orthodox Church. That’s the place our Russian faith comes from!”

  Oleg’s face got darker again, he gnashed his teeth. He looked as though he had a stabbing, bitter heartache. At once, Thomas felt a savage hate for the stranger, drew his sword, turned his stallion and made him back up, to have a good running start.

  “Russian,” Oleg repeated in a flat voice. His cheek gave a twitch, he stood as pallid as a dead man. “Your Patriarch bows and scrapes before the Idol, the basileus, before any prince who holds him in fist. Those left, Catholic believers don’t bow, after all! They see faith as faith and power as power. Fool you are! A fool of short memory. But is it your fault?”

  The rider devoured him with fiery eyes. All but fuming with grey smoke, he puffed up, grabbed his mace, but made a great effort to restrain himself, only barked with fury. “Fool?! Don’t I remember that our holy Russian land has always kept the faith of Christ? Our forefathers prayed to Christ and Saint Nicholas! Filthy Pagan you are, Hell’s fire will burn you! Take off your rags, now! And your basts too!”

  Thomas bent forward in his saddle, cried at the top of his voice, “Sir wonderer! Make way! And you, churl, do fortify your spirit before I knock it out, to your foolish Orthodox Christ who’s not a patch on our Catholic one!”

  Oleg turned to him, as though stung, thrust his hands over head. “Sir Thomas! Sir Thomas! Tame your righteous fury. We’ll have a dispute on religion some other time, and now we have a matter to settle!”

  To the knight’s shock and indignation, Oleg stripped off quickly: took off the rags of his cloak, with burs and burdocks and frog spawn and green moss from the monsters’ backs stuck to them, then his pants, even his worn-out boots, which the nasty strongman had called basts.

  Confused, Thomas twiddled his sword in hand, his cheeks high-colored by bitter shame. He could not bear to see his friend humiliated, so he resolved to ignore his insistent request not to intrude. Come what may. If we die, we die together. Not life matters but honor. But, suddenly, the strongman got off his beast-like horse, threw his helmet down on the road, undid and hurled down his heavy belt, gripped the hem of the mail coat that reached his knees, pulled it over his head with effort, the entwined steel plates ringing.

  The horse under Thomas danced nervously. The knight’s jaw dropped as low as the sixth rivet on his armor. The strongman had stripped off all his armor, even his red high boots with silver tips on their turned-up toes!

  In silence, with not a glance at each other, Oleg and the strongman got into each other’s clothes. Thomas’s eyes popped out again; the strongman’s mail was a real fit on the wonderer, if not a bit tight in shoulders. The high boots and helmet were just the right size. Oleg twirled the giant mace like a splinter of wood, hung it easily by a strap on the saddle hook.

  The strongman struggled into the rags with open disgust, sighed. “How many versts from hence to Tsargrad?” he asked in a different voice.

  “Fifty and over,” Oleg replied and jumped on the black stallion. The horse moved its fiery eye, bared its teeth, laid its ears back in a predatory way. Oleg clapped on his broad forehead. “Hey, wolfish food, you won’t fall on the way?” he said comfortingly, then turned to the strongman. “Hail to you, hero. I believe you will overthrow the Idol… but is it what you should be doing? Is that the Idol you must overthrow?”

  “Thank you for your kind words,” the hero muttered. “I can’t fathom you, for the life of me! It was on your way! And I’m to do fifty versts and over, and ‘over’ can make a hundred.” He wheeled round and, wasting no more words, began his quick walk along the road to Constantinople. Thomas followed him with puzzled eyes.

  Long after, the knight drove his horse up to Oleg who was waiting impatiently. Armored, he looked so strange to Thomas’s eyes. “Sir wonderer, I feel a great mystery here!”

  “Great? There’s no mystery at all, Sir Thomas.” As Oleg rode side by side with Thomas, he towered over the knight all but for a head. Thomas’s stallion looked like a foal near the giant black beast snorting in fury, looking at his neighbor askance with bloodshot eye, about to bite him.

  “He said you are twice as strong…”

  “He is Ilya Muromets18, a great hero of the Russian land. Great not in strength, though his might has no equal even among heroes, but great in his sacrifice. He has no wife, no lover, no children, no parents – only Rus’! Since he came to Kiev, as a mature man already, he defends and protects only Rus’… as well as he can, surely. Rus’ is his love, his passion, his life.”

  “Hmmm… Is Kiev the Wild Field of yours?”

  “Why do you think so?”

  “He has the face of a man who slept in the open air for many years, with his saddle as his pillow. Not one used to sitting and talking at the festive table.”

  “You are right, Sir Thomas. Don’t be angry with Ilya. He spends his life on a frontier post, as befits a hero. Rus’ is big, though you still have trouble finding it between the vast kingdoms of Poland and Bohemia. Muromets catches enemies and offenders on their way. He’s burnt by summer sun, stung by winter frosts, lashed by autumn rains. Everyone who crosses the border unbidden is a foe to him!”

  Thomas bowed his head slowly, as though accepting the apologies for the rude man who simply could not behave in a different way. “I see. But all the same, I’d not endure such insults if I were you!”

  Oleg, still strange and unusual to Thomas in his armor, waved this aside with great negligence. “I don’t take insults, as I’ve told you. I felt ashamed to hide behind his back. I’m not twice that strong, though he thinks I am. Could I spend my life reading wise books in the silence of caves if not for him enduring frost, heat, and attacks of fierce enemies?”

  Thomas glanced back at the road. “Do you think he’ll pass for a wonderer?” he doubted. “Too burly. And less humble than nothing.”

  “He only needs to get into the palace!” Oleg took the mace off the saddle hook, twirled it, flung it up into the air deftly, not slowing the horse’s pace. The mace flew back with a din and terrible roar, its strap clapped loudly in the wind. Thomas alerted and hunched up, trying to do it without being noticed. This barbarian game was too dangerous. He glanced at Oleg slantwise with fright. The wonderer rode on, looking straight ahead. In a moment, his hand jerked forward – and the mace smacked right into his palm. He tossed it up easily, caught by the handle, and hung on the saddle hook again. His stallion stepped evenly, glanced a bit asquint at his rider absorbed in brooding.

  “Have you changed with Muromets to help him… or do you feel trouble ahead?” Thomas asked suddenly.

  “Both,” Oleg replied sadly. “Both of them, Sir Thomas.” Without a stop, he trotted past the houses plastered to the foot of the hill. They could see no livestock there save goats and hens.

  Thomas nodded at the hamlet. “Will we turn here?”

  Oleg clapped absent-mindedly on his stallion’s neck. “No, I’d rather go by shanks’ pony… by this one.”