Kingdom of the Grail (53 page)

“Beloved,” she said, opening to him, taking him into herself.

But he drew back slightly. “Is it right? Should I love a wife so much?”

“You should do no other,” she said.

She was older than he by far, and famously wise. And he had always trusted her. She tightened her arms and closed her lips on his. He let her drown him in blessed delight.

CHAPTER 65

P
epin the prince lay in such comfort as he would accept, in a chamber of the king's tower. The guards on the door were mages. Wards sealed both door and window, though he would have needed wings to escape through the latter.

It was three days before Roland came to look on him. The sheer enormity of the war's aftermath had absorbed him completely. There would be a crowning before the people, and a great feast of victory at the moon's full. He had much to do to prepare, duties that preoccupied him from before dawn till long after sunset; and when he could escape from those, Sarissa was waiting, to consummate again the great marriage that had bound him to the Grail and the kingdom.

Pepin had tried twice to escape. His magery was not inconsiderable, and he had studied it well. But the mages of the Grail were stronger. After the second attempt, he lay on the bed in his chamber and would not move or eat or drink.

Roland entered the room alone. Half the royal guard would have come with him if he had allowed it, and the nine ladies of the Grail, and Marric and Tarik and Turpin, too. But he had held them all at bay, except Turpin, who insisted on waiting without.

Pepin lay on his side, drawn into a knot, back to the door. Roland sat in the chair beside the bed.

It was restful. Quiet. He could hear voices below, and the ringing of laughter: some of the king's own were playing at ball in the courtyard.

That pleased him beyond measure. They mourned their dead, none more than Kyllan, but their spirits were strong. They could laugh amid grief, and dance in the sun after their battle with darkness.

“Sooner or later,” Roland said after a while, “you will have to get up and eat. I don't think you're mad enough to will yourself to death.”

Pepin's back was obdurate. Had his breathing quickened?

“Your master is dead,” Roland said. “You knew that, I'm sure. Have you considered what it means for you? All his human slaves have repudiated him. All of them—every last one. Some few of them, who were in your father's army, profess to be your men. They're refusing to speak with us unless you're freed.”

“Good.”

Pepin did not unknot or turn, but his voice was clear and bitter.

“It doesn't matter,” Roland said. “They'll be sent away soon, with no memory of us; for all any of them will know, they were delayed on the road home, and wandered for a long while in the Spanish marches.”

“And what will you do with me?”

“What would you like us to do?” Roland asked him.

“Kill me.”

“I don't think so,” said Roland.

Pepin turned at last. Roland stiffened before the hatred in his eyes. It was absolute. It fed the darkness that had bred his magic. It blinded him to reason. “You would do well to kill me,” Pepin said. “The master may be dead, but I live. I've sworn to destroy you.”

“Why?” Roland asked him.

Pepin's mouth twisted. “What difference does it make? It's the truth.”

“I never knowingly did you harm,” Roland said.

“Of course you didn't,” said Pepin.

Roland hunted in that face for something, anything, that he could understand. There was nothing.

The slash of power caught him almost off guard. Almost. He had been prepared for it, but sooner than this. It struck him, but only slantwise. The second bolt, he flung back without conscious thought.

Pepin reeled back against the wall. His face was white. His eyes were staring.

“Don't ever do that again,” Roland said.

Pepin spat at him.

“He's dangerous,” Turpin said.

Roland had got no more sense out of Pepin than those bolts of darkness and a gobbet of spittle in the face. He left at last, unwillingly, but he gained nothing by staying.

Turpin was waiting, leaning against the wall, arms folded. The guard-mages had run in at the first blast of power; they stayed inside, standing over Pepin, weaving wards that he could not break.

Roland walked down with his friend from the tower. The game had ended in the courtyard; it was deserted except for a grey cat.

Tarik sprang into his favorite place on Roland's shoulder. His purring rasped in Roland's ear.

“Pepin is dangerous,” Turpin repeated as they started across the courtyard. “You can't keep him here unless you intend to keep him under guard for the rest of his life. If you send him back to his father, you can be sure he'll keep his promise to you.”

“What would you do with him?” Roland asked.

Turpin hunched his heavy shoulders. “I'd have him executed,” he said bluntly.

Roland stopped short. “He is our king's son!”

“
You
are a king,” Turpin shot back. “Kings do what they must. It's not always the pleasant thing—but for the good of the kingdom—”

“I will not kill Charles' son,” Roland said.

“Then someone has to,” said Turpin. “The old sorcerer raised him to be a viper in his father's nest. You can't let him go back there. If you keep him here, you keep him prisoner. There's no other choice.”

“There may be,” Roland said slowly. “It's even merciful. If—”

“If?”

“If it can be done.”

“You don't know—?”

“I think I know,” Roland said. “Damn the sorcerer to an even deeper hell than that he lies in, for bringing that boy here!”

Turpin crossed himself. “Amen,” he said.

While Roland turned Pepin's fate in his heart, speaking as yet to no one, even Sarissa, a delegation came to him from the Franks who had fought for him against Ganelon.

He had been in the chamber of the Grail, seeking counsel and gaining only the warmth of its light. There was greater solace, just then, in the king's garden, in the scent of earth and greenery. The apple trees were in bloom, intoxicating in their sweetness.

He sat on the grass beneath the oldest of the trees, a seed of which, the gardener had told him, had come from the garden of the Hesperides. A few golden apples still lingered on the boughs amid the cloud of white blossoms.

The Franks trod uneasily toward him, shying at shadows. They never had been at ease in the castle, though they did well enough in camp outside the walls.

Roland rose to greet them. They bowed as they insisted on doing, as low as if he had been the King of the Franks. He welcomed each by name, and warmly. “Here, sit,” he said. “I'll send for ale. Or would you prefer wine?”

“Neither, please, sire,” said Rothulf, the captain of infantry, speaking for them all. “We won't trouble you long.”

“You'll not be troubling me,” Roland said.

They smiled jerkily, glancing at one another, shuffling feet until he was moved to take mercy on them.

“Tell me,” he said.

It took a while, and visible gathering of courage, until Rothulf said, “Sire, we're thinking it's time we went home.”

That was blunt enough.

“It's spring in the world, we hear,” Rothulf said. “We have wives, children, kin. They'll have been mourning us for dead. And now with the planting, they'll be needing us.”

“And the spring muster,” Roland said.

“We think we may be excused from that,” said Rothulf, “if we've been fighting the winter long.”

“That's what you'll tell the king's men?”

Rothulf shrugged, a slow roll of the shoulders. “You let the enemy's men go, took their memory away and sent them home. We'll bow to that, if you're the one to do it. Though some of us would like to remember a dream, if you'll leave us that much.”

Roland searched all their faces. “You are agreed on this?”

They nodded.

“I never meant to keep you here,” he said. “There's the crowning and the festival; then you'd have been mustered out. But if you'd rather go sooner—”

“No,” Rothulf said. “No, sire, we want to stay for that. But we thought—”

He stopped in confusion. He was a ruddy man as so many of the Franks were; his face had flushed scarlet.

“You thought you were prisoners,” Roland said. He shook his head. “My fault. I should have spoken to you long ago. You are free men. Free to keep your memories, too, though I will ask you to take oath that the secret kingdom will remain secret. You're no more bound here than you ever were to the king's wars, once those wars were over.”

“No,” said one of the others—an older man than some, and smaller and darker. “That's our fault for not trusting you. When the enemy's men went out, ours started growling. We all forgot what we know of you.”

“We remember now,” Rothulf said. “Are you angry? That we want to go home?”

“And you say you know me,” said Roland.

That abashed them into speechlessness.

“Go,” he said. “Be comforted. You were the bulwark of this war. When you see your wives again, you may tell them: you defended the Lord's kingdom, and helped destroy a great evil.”

“Even if they don't believe us?” the Breton asked wryly. But before Roland could answer, he said, “No, no, we'll keep it in our hearts, and maybe tell it as a story to our grandchildren. How we fought a great war outside the world, and saw a king riding on a dragon's back.”

After they were gone, Roland sat for a long while.
Home,
he thought.

The sun shone through the apple-boughs. Petals drifted down like snow. Somewhere nearby, a bird was singing, achingly sweet. He had but to open the eyes of his heart to see the whole of this kingdom, cupped like a jewel in his hands.

He had not been thinking at all, only doing. Now it struck him what he had done; what he was, and was not.

He was dead in Francia. They had buried a stranger's body in his name, built him a shrine at the summit of Roncesvalles. There would be a new count in the Breton Marches, a new lord over the lands that had been his.

He could not go back. That door was closed.

But was it?

Home. For all his childhood, that had been Broceliande, the old forest of Brittany. For the years of his young manhood, it had been the court and
palatium
of the Franks, and the living presence of the king. When he thought of that, of Charles whom he had served, whom he had loved, his heart ached till he could not bear it.

He rose, turning slowly. All this beauty, this power, this magic, suddenly seemed strange; alien. They were not his. They had laid themselves on him, chosen him—but he had not chosen them.

Even Sarissa . . .

His heart clenched. She would never turn away from the Grail or from its kingdom. Her life and her spirit were given to it. Even for love of him, she would not turn her back on it.

Longinus the Roman had somewhat surprised Roland, in that he was the chancellor of the king's palace. He had not seemed the sort to be a clerk at all, and yet when Roland found him, he looked deeply content. He was reckoning long columns of figures on a frame of wires and beads, reading them off to a much more clerkly-seeming person with a roll of papyrus and a pen.

Roland sat to watch, perched on a stool. The beads rattled through their computations. Longinus acknowledged him with a glance and a lift of the brow. Roland nodded, settling to wait.

It was not so long a while. It calmed him, settled the roil in his middle. He slid into a half-dream.

In the dream he was a child again, not yet a man. He ran through the wood of Broceliande. It was spring: the new leaves were springing, the clearings carpeted with flowers. Sometimes he ran as a deer, a yearling fawn; sometimes he flew as a hawk. He was as free as living creature could be.

He shrank from fawn into boy, rolled and leaped and tumbled down a long grassy hill, and came up laughing.

There was a stranger at the foot of the hill. He had almost never met anyone else in the wood. People did not go there for ease or pleasure. Hunters and woodsmen learned quickly that the wood did not welcome them.