Kingdom of the Grail (33 page)

CHAPTER 40

P
eople kept talking to him. He did not know why, except that he never spoke, and they seemed compelled to fill the silence. At first their words made little sense, but as he went on, and they went on, he began to understand more of what they said. Their words built the world.

When the tall man came with his red pennon, Gemma dragged the witling away and made him filthy. He decided that he would never understand her, after she had labored so long and so vehemently to keep him clean. Then as she rolled him in the hayloft and smeared his feet with mud from the worst of the midden and slapped soot across his face, she commanded him with terrible urgency never, ever to let the tall man see his eyes. “Don't give him any cause at all to notice you,” she said, “or choose you. Do you understand?”

But she had not forbidden him to catch the stick that the man threw. The man chose him for that, whatever he was being chosen for. He drew himself tight inside, so that her anger would hurt less when it came.

To his astonishment, she only looked at him after the man had ridden away, then shook her head and sighed. When she spoke, she sounded tired. “Go get clean,” she said. “Then get to work.”

He did as she bade, as he always did. There was much to do in the stable and the yard. When it was done, the sun
had set. He went to his corner by the fire. She never asked him to run about with mugs and platters as her sons did, though sometimes she bade him turn the spit. His duty was to sit and be quiet, and let people talk to him.

They had a great deal to say tonight. Mostly it was those who had not been chosen, weeping for those who had. And sometimes it was the latter, telling him how frightened they were.

He did not remember what war was. That thought was clear behind his eyes. He should know. He did not remember. All he had was a darkness in his heart, and something that he could not name. It was not fear, nor was it elation. It was a little like both. Glory, he thought, and trumpets. And blood—red tides of blood.

For the first time it troubled him that he had no words to speak. He would have said—something. Of war, of killing. Of what they all were coming to.

He had been chosen to fight. So had Gemma, and Kyllan and Cieran and Peredur. And Long Meg and Gwydion the smith and Donal and Macun and . . .

All those names. And he had none. That troubled him, too. He had not been so troubled before. It was as if the word of war had waked him from a long deep sleep. He stumbled, confused; he had no words; but he was beginning, a little, to rouse from his stupor.

In the night after that long and grueling day, Gemma wanted him with fierce urgency. He would have been gladder simply to sleep, but she was determined to eat him alive. He pleased her as best he could, which seemed to be enough. Mercifully, once she had had her fill of him, she fell headlong into sleep.

He lay awake. Things were stirring inside him. They made him think of an egg in the nest readying to hatch: rocking, swaying, as the fledgling inside struggled to break free.

Did the fledgling try to stop itself? To stay within the egg? Did it yearn for the darkness and the dim quiet, and the awareness of nothing beyond its shell?

He had no more power to stop or even slow this than the fledgling did. He could only let it happen, and hope—or pray, if he knew how—that the world he entered into was one he could live in.

In three days they marched out of the village that was all he could remember. It seemed perfectly natural that Gemma led them. It also seemed natural to him to walk last. They marched in a column, with the mules in the middle, carrying the gear that the men and women could not carry. Everyone had a coat of boiled leather and a helmet of iron or, sometimes, age-darkened steel, and a pair of spears. Most had knives. One or two had swords, brought out from long keeping and worn proudly by children who had never lifted such a blade even in mock battle.

He had the spears, and a knife that Kyllan had slipped him when Gemma was not looking. Kyllan had a sword—another guest's leavings, it would appear, though that guest must have come and gone long before Gemma's grandfather was born. He did not know how he knew, but the sword was old, very old. It was short and thick and rather heavy, without grace or elegance. It looked like what it was: a tool for killing men.

Kyllan strutted with it, marching close behind his mother. The witling did not strut. He kept his head up, so that he would not shame Gemma or anyone else, but he was closer to the tears of those left behind than to the laughter and song of those who went to the war. They did not know, he thought. Truly they did not know.

When they had passed the last house of the village, with children and dogs running after, a stocky figure on a brown pony fell in beside him. Marric was dressed for riding, and laden saddlebags were slung across his pony's back. More to the point, he had a sword at his side. It was very like the one that Kyllan carried, short and broad-bladed. He did not strut because he had it. He looked as if he had worn it before, and drawn it and used it, and had hoped not to have to again.

The witling was not surprised. Marric had been remarkably silent in past days. Coming to decisions, the witling had thought. Choosing himself as the others had been chosen.

They were all glad to see him. No one tried to send him back. He was not someone who could be sent, the witling thought.

The witling was glad, too. Gladder than he had thought he
might be. The brown man had found him first, and had borne him company since. He would have been sorry to leave the brown man behind.

Marching was tedious. At least, as Gemma observed, it did not rain. The road wound on and on. Villages strung along it like beads on a string. Columns of the chosen had marched from those, too, so that the road bristled with spears. They were all going toward Lord Huon's city, which was called Caer Sidi.

As he marched, it seemed to the witling that he could see worlds beneath this world, like visions through clear water. The country through which he passed was mortal enough to the body's senses, woods and fields and villages, lakes and little rivers. The dark line of the wood slipped away and vanished behind. There was a sense of familiarity about these lands, as if he had walked in them, or lands like them, before.

Yet beneath them, sometimes, he saw other things. Sharp stones and windy heights. A stretch of wind-tossed sea. Mountains marching on the edges of the world, high and stark, crowned with snow.

They were both true. Both were part of this country, though he did not know how, nor precisely why he could see them. The others did not seem to, except maybe the brown man. Their eyes were mortal eyes. They saw what mortals could see.

Which meant that he . . .

That was not a thought he knew how to face, though he suspected the brown man could. When he was seeing in that other way, the creature on the pony was not a man at all. Nor was the pony exactly a pony, either.

The longer he went on, the more he found he could see. Most of the people on the march were human folk, and most of those in the villages, too. But some were other than human, though wearing human guise in the main; the rest walked on four feet or flew as birds. Those he saw with a constriction of the heart, and a yearning down to the bone. That yearning had become a tingle, an awareness that if he bent his will just so, he could spread wings and soar up among them.

Yet in that path was deadly danger. He had lost his self
once, nor gained it back except in fragments. If he ventured it again, nameless and scattered of wit as he was, he might never find his human form at all.

What he saw, he began to understand, was magic. It lay on this whole land like a glimmer of mist. It was in the ground they walked on, the air they breathed. It let them walk now on living earth, now in worlds shaped of magic, from mortal sun to one that shone for everlasting.

And all the while he learned to see with more than eyes, he marched in the company from the village of Greenwood, under Gemma's command. Rumors of the war ran with them. When they camped in fields or under the eves of woods, other companies camped beside them, and more of those, the nearer they came to Caer Sidi.

Of all the tales he heard, one thing seemed to be true: that the war was not in Lord Huon's city. It was far away on the edges of the kingdom, where they would go once all their companies had mustered into an army.

The name of Caer Sidi struck him strangely, as if it were a dark thing or sad; but the city was a wonder of white walls and gleaming towers, set on a promontory of stone above a deep swift river. The muster did not ascend to the city; the camp spread along the river's bank, a long swath of tents and fires that could look up to the city on its crag.

Some of the younger folk were audibly disgruntled. “Walls of silver,” they muttered. “Streets of gold. And will we ever see either of them?”

“We could go up,” Kyllan said.

“Not likely,” said Long Meg, who always saw the dark side of things. “They won't let us set our dirty feet on those golden pavements.”

“Why not?” Kyllan demanded. “We have as much right to walk there as any other. It's only that we can't
stay
there. There are too many of us.”

That was eminently reasonable—too reasonable for Long Meg, who stalked off to nurse her grievances in peace.

The witling thought of following her, for surely she needed someone to listen; but Gemma caught his arm. “We're going up,” she said. “They've summoned the commanders.”

He hung back, but her grip was too strong to resist. He
was not a commander. He was not even possessed of all his wits.

She wanted to keep him under her eye. That was it, of course. No one else was coming, though there were objections. It was odd that none of them spoke of him, not even with scowls or glances. He was part of Gemma, he supposed. They would expect him to go where she went.

Walls of silver and streets of gold. White walls and pale golden paving stones, and a green scent of gardens even in the city's heart. It was clean, that city, and full of light and singing, though laughter was muted now, overwhelmed by the rumble of war. He walked through it wide-eyed, flinching somewhat when walls closed in, but keeping his head up even when he wanted to crouch and hide.

Far more of these people wore masks of flesh over bright fires of magic. The city itself was shimmering with it. Magic bound the stones, held up the walls.

It was strongest of all in the center, high up in the white citadel. They passed beneath a gate warded by stone dragons, into a courtyard full of light. A bored personage met them there, mortal but weary as if with long ages of existence, and led them through a maze of passages.

The witling walked without fear. He had no memory of such places, but his body knew them. After a little while he saw in surprise that Gemma was drawn tight upon herself. Even the coppery brilliance of her hair had dimmed. Her hand gripped his still, but she was not doing it to give him her strength. She had none.

He tried a smile. It was stiff, but warmed with use. He brushed her hair lightly with his hand. For a moment she leaned into his touch; then she stiffened against him.

He did not press her. He had given her what he could. She stood straighter, walked more steadily. She looked more like herself again.

The hall to which they were taken was smaller than he had been expecting—and what would he know, to expect anything at all? It was a receiving-room, he thought. A place for lesser audiences. It was full of people like Gemma: nearly all of them mortal, sturdy and solid, people of earth and stone. Few of them had any splendor to boast
of. Their garments were plain, their weapons without pretension.

There was a deep and subtle rightness to this gathering. The land embodied itself in these commanders of the villages and towns. Gemma had eased in their company, falling in with people she knew, who knew her inn and her village. They even seemed to know her silent companion. He remembered one, and maybe two: a woman and a man who had spent a night in the inn, and stopped to talk to him in his corner by the fire. Their eyes on him were warm. None of them betrayed either mockery or astonishment that Gemma had brought her idiot to the great war. Indeed the man said, “We'll need every strong arm, I hear.”

He tried his new smile. People smiled back at him. That was delightful. Maybe he would try laughter; but not quite yet. And not here.