Kingdom of the Grail Read online

  They all stared. Again Kyllan spoke for them. “You can talk.”

  “Yes,” said Roland.

  The bogle was crouched by the fire as he had been in the night, tending a pot that bubbled fragrantly. He handed Roland a cup that proved to be full of ale. Roland downed a good half of it. They stared at that, too.

  He stared back, which was not wise at all. He made their eyes drop. All but Gemma’s. She measured him as if he had been a stranger in her inn, weighed and balanced him and found him sadly wanting.

  He had expected pain. He had not expected it to be so sharp.

  He turned on his heel. Her hand caught him. Her grip was not particularly tight, but it held him rooted. “No,” she said. “You don’t run away. You stand and face us. You tell us your name, and you convince us that you haven’t been playing us for fools.”

  “I have not,” he said.

  “Easy to say,” she said.

  “By my heart’s blood,” he said, “I was exactly as you saw me.”

  “And now?”

  “I remember.” He must have betrayed something of what he felt, whether in voice or expression: she blinked twice, hard, and her face went stiff. “My name is Roland,” he said.

  “What kind of name is that?”

  “Frankish,” he answered.

  “You are no Frank,” she said.

  “My father was.”

  “But not your mother.”

  “No,” he said. “Not my mother.”

  “She let your father name you?”

  “She died when I was born.”

  “That is sad,” she said, as if she meant it. She was still holding his wrist. “Is that why you run? Because you never had a mother to teach you sense?”

  His lips twitched. “That is as good a reason as any other.”

  “There are no good reasons for running.”

  He might have contested her certainty, but his tongue had run on enough. He set his lips together and took refuge in silence.

  She let him go. “You’re still under my command,” she said. “Mind you remember it.”

  She left him there, stalking off down the line of tents, the thick coppery plait of her hair swinging to the small of her back. He shook himself. The others were stirring likewise, glancing at one another. Several bit back grins.

  Roland did not try to suppress his. Kyllan caught the contagion of it. In a moment they were all laughing like mad things.

  When the laughter had passed, he was still a stranger, but they had begun to warm to him. Donal tossed him a loaf fresh from the baking. Macul dipped an extra cup of stew and set it in his hand. Kyllan sat beside him as they all ate, and said, “Don’t mind her. She’ll calm down soon enough.”

  “It is a shock,” his brother Peredur said. “She doesn’t like surprises. And you—you’re so different. You look—”

  “Alive,” Donal said.

  “Awake,” said Cieran.

  “Arrogant,” Kyllan said, stopping them all short. “That’s what she doesn’t like, I’ll lay wagers on it. Are you a king’s son?”

  “No, nor a king either,” Roland said, too fiercely perhaps.

  “You’ve got a stiff neck on you for a peasant,” Long Meg opined, looking him up and down as she had not presumed to do since Gemma laid claim to him. Now, it seemed, he was fair quarry again.

  “He’s no peasant,” Kyllan said. “Farmers’ sons don’t walk like that or talk like that, or look like that, either.”

  “Unless the farmer’s wife caught a prince’s eye,” said Long Meg.

  “But he said—” said Peredur.

  No one was listening to Peredur, or paying much attention to Roland, either, though he was the subject of their conversation. He emptied the bowl that Marric handed him, eating without appetite but with grim awareness of the need. Some of the boys were playing past Gemma’s tent, hacking at one another with unblunted swords. It was a holy miracle that none of them had lopped off a hand or an ear.

  He set the bowl down and went to end the melee before it came to bloodshed. Neatly and deftly he plucked a Roman shortsword from one hand and what looked like a Saracen blade from another.

  These children stared as everybody else had, except for one young idiot who growled and tried to leap on him and wrest one of the swords from his hand. He caught the boy against him, holding him easily—dear saints, these babes knew nothing of fighting at all. The child snapped and cursed. He clipped the boy’s ear, just enough to quiet him.

  “If you would fight,” he said to the whole goggling pack of them, “you had best learn how.”

  “I suppose you know,” sneered a boy whose name, he seemed to recall, was Mabon.

  Roland’s lips stretched back from his teeth. It was not a smile. The boy blanched, though he held his sneer in place. “I know,” said Roland.

  “Prove it,” Mabon said, predictable as an antiphon in the Mass.

  Roland tossed him the longer blade. He caught it clumsily, and dropped it. When he bent down to pick it up, he found the point of the Roman sword at his throat. “And so you die,” said Roland.

  “That wasn’t fair,” Mabon said.

  “War is not,” said Roland. “War is about killing, and about winning. There is nothing fair in it, or just, or even right, most times.”

  “This war is just!” declared a young woman in the crowd.

  “I’m sure it is,” Roland said mildly. “It won’t keep the enemy from killing you, if he knows how to fight, and you don’t.”

  “We know how!” the girl said.

  He was still holding the boy who had attacked him. The child was motionless now. Roland set him aside, gentle but firm, and faced the girl with the bright fierce eyes. “Show me,” he said.

  She did not produce a sword; she snatched a spear from the ground near one of the tents. She held it not too awkwardly, as if it had been a quarterstaff. Someone had taught her that mode of fighting, Roland could see. It might serve her; but it made no allowance for the point of the spear. Or, indeed, for a sword in a skilled hand, that struck the spearhaft lightly aside and came to rest on her shoulder, not quite touching her neck. “Beheaded,” he said, “and quickly, too.”

  She blinked rapidly. Her cheeks had flushed scarlet.

  Roland lowered the shortsword. He half thought she might attack with the spear, but she stood motionless, fingers white on the haft, eyes fixed on his face. She hated him.

  He smiled, a true smile this time. “Yes, hate me,” he said. “Hate is useful. But only if you know how to use it.”

  “So teach us,” she said, haughty as any princess.

  He laughed. “If you so command, my lady.”

  That made her blush even more hotly, and drop those bold eyes, as if suddenly she did not know where to look.

  Roland spared her, he hoped, turning somewhat away from her, running his eyes over the baffled young faces. There were many more than he had thought when he first came. Not all of them were so very young, either. No few were older than he, but in war they were infants.

  “I can’t make great swordsmen of you,” he said after a moment, “or skilled warriors, either. That needs training from childhood. But I can teach you to fight, to defend yourselves and your comrades, and maybe to win a battle. If,” he added, “you ask it.”

  “We ask,” the girl said. Her chin was up. Her cheeks were as vivid as ever.

  “Tell me your name,” he said to her.

  “Cait,” she said, startled maybe, forgetting to be resistant.

  “Cait,” he said. “And I am Roland. While I teach you, I am commander. You are my second. Choose seconds of your own, and fetch a spear for everyone who needs teaching.”

  “No swords?” she asked.

  “No swords,” he said. “Although . . .” He frowned, considering choices. “Who hunts with arrows?”

  Nigh half of them admitted to that, among them the boy with the Saracen sword.

  “Good,” said Roland to all of them, but chiefly to t
he boy. “We have archers. And you are in command of them.”

  The boy’s eyes were wide. He knelt suddenly and laid the sword at Roland’s feet.

  Roland nodded and took it up. “Bows,” he said, “and arrows. Find them. Bring them here. And targets, too, if they’re to be had. Is there a field nearby, wide enough to shoot in?”

  “Outside the camp,” the boy said.

  “Then we’ll claim it,” said Roland. “Spearmen, too. Everybody.”

  They were quick to do his bidding—eager, as innocents could be. He felt very old, walking behind them, watching as their numbers grew. By the time they came to the field, most of that end of the camp had joined the march, bringing such weapons as they had. Word spread fast in armies.

  Whatever they lacked in skill, they made up for in goodwill. Roland had fared worse with raw levies in Francia, barely bearded boys called in from the fields, or Saxon peasants sullen and confused to be fighting for the king who had conquered them.

  He had never commanded women before. They were fiercer than the men, he discovered quickly, and less inclined to think of honor when there were lives to be defended. With spears they were quicker if not often as strong. With bows they matched or mastered the men.

  It could be a mildly competent army, with time and labor. Labor he had plenty of. Time was sorely lacking.

  He would do what he could, and do his best not to curse the lord who had called this muster without ever taking measures to see that his soldiers could fight. “What was he looking to do?” Roland asked of Kyllan and Cait, who happened to be standing by him while a ragged line of archers shot at hastily cobbled targets. “Magic you all into soldiers before the battle?”

  “That’s what they were talking about last night,” Kyllan said, “all the commanders. How to turn us into an army.”

  “This is how,” said Roland.

  “You know that,” Cait said. “You were a soldier somewhere. We don’t do that here. Except people who go away—and most of those don’t come back.”

  Roland shook his head. Peace, he thought, was every Christian’s prayer. But a peaceable kingdom was ripe prey for an army honed in war.

  He owed this kingdom nothing. Not one thing. But these people had taken him in, fed him, clothed him, been kind to him. For them he would do this. Not for the haughty woman in Carbonek, or her dying king. Not even for the Grail.

  CHAPTER 43

  Roland was aware as he drilled the troops—his troops, he could not help but think of them—that others came, watched, went away again. Some were commanders of the levies. Some stood higher: men or women on horseback.

  He did not acknowledge them. If they wanted to punish him for doing what they should have done from the moment the muster was called, then let them. But first he would see to it that these children learned how to stand in ranks, and a little, a very little, of how to fight.

  Marric had come, somewhere amid the ordering of ranks, and made himself useful among the archers. He had runners fetching arrows, and a fletcher or two settled in the shade, making and mending new ones. He was no stranger to war, that one.

  Sunset surprised them. Roland dismissed the by now somewhat less ragged ranks. Their steps dragged as they left, as much with reluctance as with exhaustion. He would not need to bid them sleep; not tonight. Their own bodies would see to it.

  Only Cait and Kyllan lingered, and Marric regarding Roland with a crooked smile. Kyllan was grinning, and trying not to yawn. “We’re good,” he said. “We’re going to be splendid.”

  “We’re going to be barely adequate,” said Cait. She did not sound cast down about it. “I could eat a whole ox.”

  “Save another one for me,” said Kyllan.

  They went off arm in arm. Roland watched them go.

  “You’re not a bad armsmaster,” a voice said behind him. “For an idiot.”

  He glanced over his shoulder at Gemma. Marric had wrapped himself in shadow, which a bogle could do if it chose. Gemma’s hair caught the fire of sunset. Night’s shadow was already in her eyes.

  “I suppose,” he said, “you’ve come to haul me off in chains.”

  Her lips twitched, then tightened. “We did discuss it.”

  “And?”

  “We realized that we need every man. And idiot.”

  He turned to face her. She did not flinch, but he saw how her eyes narrowed. “I don’t bite,” he said.

  “I don’t know you,” she said.

  That was pain, walled in brusque impatience. He touched her cheek. She ducked away. “Don’t,” she said.

  “Do you dislike me so much?”

  “I’m not for the likes of you.”

  “What is ‘the likes of me’?”

  She seized his hands, turned them up in the last of the light. The calluses there were older by far than the marks of pitchfork or broom. “Knight,” she said. “Lord and prince. Don’t shake that head at me! You couldn’t pretend to be a commoner if you tried.”

  “I did just that,” he said, “for longer than anyone will let me know.”

  “You were a very convincing idiot.”

  “Can’t I be a convincing soldier?”

  “You just appointed yourself armsmaster to the whole nether half of Lord Huon’s muster, and you ask me that? You can’t help yourself. Put you in an army, you take command of it. It’s in your blood.”

  There was a terrible truth in what she said. “I am still—mostly—human,” he said. “Part of me is still your beloved idiot.”

  “Not enough of you,” she said.

  “You are not being reasonable.”

  “I am being as reasonable as a woman can be. You can have my tent—my lord. I’ll bunk in with the boys.”

  “Gemma—”

  “Don’t argue. It won’t help.”

  “Gemma!”

  “My lord?”

  He growled in frustration. No man living had ever got the better of Gemma. Roland, it was too clear, was not about to be the first.

  Very well, he thought. So be it. If she wanted a lord, he would be a lord. “Don’t speak of this,” he said, “or of me, to Lord Huon.”

  “I won’t need to,” she said. “He’ll know soon what you did, if he doesn’t already. You weren’t circumspect.”

  Roland sighed. No, he had not been. Nor had he been thinking of anything but the need of the moment.

  She agreed: her glance was full of irony.

  He met it full on. “Gemma,” he said, “stand with me. Help me. Not for me—for the people. I’d like to bring them back alive if I can. I can only do that if they know how to fight.”

  “Do you honestly care what becomes of a pack of commoners?”

  “Yes!”

  “Well,” she said after a pause. “If that’s the truth, I’ll do what I can. But I won’t lie about you to Lord Huon.”

  “I’m not asking you to.”

  She snorted at that, but she did not argue with it. That was as much assent as he would get from her. It would have to do.

  Lord Huon’s messenger was waiting for him come morning, sitting by the fire outside the tent that had been Gemma’s, eating the bogle’s fresh barley bread. It was the same herald who had called the muster in Greenwood.

  He recognized Roland: his brow leaped upward as Roland came out of the tent. It leaped even higher when he met Roland’s eyes.

  Roland stared him down. The messenger looked as if he might have liked to ask a spate of questions, but he held his tongue. He rose somewhat stiffly, and thanked Marric courteously for the bread and ale. Marric responded with equal courtesy.

  The messenger did not bow to Roland or grant him respect. “My lord would speak with you,” he said.

  Roland inclined his head. When he spoke, it was not, at first, to the messenger. He said to Kyllan, who was hanging about, all ears and eyes, “Take charge of the exercises. Same as yesterday, till I come back.”

  Kyllan nodded happily and ran to gather the troops.

  Roland
turned then to the lord’s messenger. “Lead,” he said. “I’ll follow.”

  Clearly the man took a dim view of commoners who ordered him about as if they had been lords; but he was well trained. He led his charge up to the citadel.

  Lord Huon was hardly waiting on Roland’s pleasure. Roland was set in an anteroom to wait, while servants trotted back and forth, and men and women of greater note were let in upon their arrival. He was not offered food or drink.

  He considered anger, but that was hardly useful. Amusement served him much better. A brief hunt uncovered a kitchen, with a cook who was amenable to his best smile and his sweetest words. He won a plate of fine cakes, a jar of wine, and a wedge of good yellow cheese slipped into a new loaf. He brought his booty to the most comfortable corner, arranged a chair and a stool to his satisfaction, and settled at his ease, nibbling cakes, sipping wine, and savoring the cheese melted into the hot fresh bread.

  The servants glanced at him as they passed. After a while they began to smile. He smiled back. None would speak to him, of course; that would not have been proper. But they were as amused as he was.

  The anteroom had a window high in the wall. The sun climbed up to it, paused at its zenith, began its long descent toward the night.

  He finished the bread and cheese. The wine was half gone. There were still a fair number of cakes. He rose, stretched, prowled the room. There was little of interest in it, to the eyes of the body, but the magics that shaped and warded it were intricately wrought. He traced the lines and curves of them with interest, noting the ways in which they wove and interwove. One in particular tempted him to follow it, teasing it out of the rest, straightening it, weaving it in a new and clearer pattern.

  Just as he smoothed the edges of it into place, the inner door opened. It had been doing that all day, releasing clusters of men and women in fine clothes and haughty expressions. This one looked as if it had been dismissed unceremoniously: moving quickly, scowling, muttering, herded by a grand servant in livery of silver and green.

  They glared at Roland as they were hastened past. He smiled serenely back.

  The servant shut the outer door on the last of them and turned. He clung to his dignity, but his eyes were glinting. “You will come with me,” he said.