Part 6 (1/2)

”Please,” she whispered. ''Please.''

The sky was blue, the sea calm, the breeze from the east almost uncannily fresh. If Vaylle possessed sorcery, Cvinthil thought, then surely it was making a poor showing of it by not opposing in the slightest the progress of the men and weapons coming to attack it.

He wondered what Vorya would have thought of all this. In the s.p.a.ce of a little over three months, an army had been raised, trained, and provisioned-and now it was en route to battle. Cvinthil took no pride in the achievement, for it seemed to him to be no more than the proper response of any king of Gryylth. But he still hoped that the old man, were he still alive, would have nodded his white head gravely and uttered a soft well done.

Though Vaylle was the enemy, it was Vorya, perhaps, with whom Cvinthil actually competed. For ten years, the late king had guided his country through a mora.s.s of war. To be sure, he, like everyone else, had been wrong about the Corrinians, and there had been breaks and cracks in the honor of both sides that eventually led to the transformation of the First Wartroop and the slaughter of an entire generation of young men, but Vorya had maintained through it all, and even in his last days he had lost nothing of the stature of a king.

And have I myself done the right thing ?

Vaylle was appearing, rising up out of the water and taking on detail as the flotilla approached. With any luck at all, Gryylth's unexpected resolution and quick reprisal would catch that evil land off guard. But though most of the warriors and soldiers were looking ahead, Darham, silent and thoughtful even after a day and a half on the ocean, was staring back towards Gryylth. He seemed to be pondering, examining the distant fading land as though he hoped at this remove to pierce the veils of distance and semblance and so see, beneath the surface, something that would confirm or banish the suspicions that still gnawed at him.

Oh, we are but little kings, thought Cvinthil. Tarwach and Vorya were giants, Darham and I but children in comparison.

And what place had children in the business of war?

Cvinthil shrugged wearily. Child or not, he had to act, and he hoped that he acted rightly. Still, though, he wondered as he always wondered: What would Vorya have done? How would he have done it?

”Brother king,” said Darham with his farmer's courtesy.

Cvinthil looked up dully. Vorya would have done just this, in just this way. He made himself believe that. ”Aye?”

”Look behind.”

At first Cvinthil saw nothing save blue water, blue sky, and a smear of green haze that indicated the distant coastline. But in another moment he had detected the obscurity that was s.h.i.+mmering into existence, dimming the sunlight about Gryylth.

”Clouds?”

”There are no clouds,” said Darham. ”The sky is clear.”

Darkness grew in the distance. The wind died. The ocean turned gla.s.sy. Sails, deprived of the breeze, rattled uselessly, and the air turned leaden.

An attack from the Tree had numbed Vorya's arm, but the old king had dismissed the wound with disdain. Cvinthil's shoulder suddenly ached, and he wondered whether he could do the same. ”Vaylle?” he said uneasily.

”Attacking Gryylth and Corrin in our absence?” Darham pa.s.sed a hand over his beard. ”Why would they wait so long? If they meant to attack, they might have killed us all while we lay at the docks of Quay.”

Cvinthil shook his head. ”They might not have been ready. And, in any case, Vaylle seems to thrive on cruelty. But we will give them a fight.” Cupping his hands about his mouth, he shouted to the other boats. ”Put about!”

The darkness turned to gray, then black. Darham shook his head. ”A field half reaped is a field wasted. We are closer to Vaylle than to Gryylth, and if, as Helwych says, each attack weakens the Vayllen sorcerers, then they are now open for conquest.”

Cvinthil was incredulous. ”You would leave your people to die?”

There was a touch of amus.e.m.e.nt in Darham's blue eyes. ”A day and a half ago you were all but accusing me of being faint-hearted,” he said. ”Now you think me unfeeling.”

His voice fell flat in the sullen air, but then his words were swept away by a rising wind. A gale arose from the east, filling the sails to bursting; and though the steersmen fought with their oars and the pilots barked orders, their efforts were useless, for the wind drove the boats towards Vaylle like a child sweeping rushes with a broom.

Cvinthil lost his footing and would have toppled overboard but for Darham, who grabbed the Gryylthan and pulled him down below the level of the gunwale. ”Kings cannot command the winds,” he shouted over the storm. ”Best to let the sailors do their tasks without our meddling.”

The s.h.i.+p bucked and tossed like a frightened horse. The wind continued to rage, and the very substance of the sea and the s.h.i.+ps seemed to quiver in its blast. As though a curtain had fallen over it, Gryylth was now hidden in a shroud of darkness, and Cvinthil thought of Seena and his children, wondered what might be happening to them behind that veil. He wanted to scream, he wanted to weep, but he could not allow himself that luxury.

He held to Darham. What would Vorya have done? This very thing, he hoped. But Vorya, confronted with the loss of his homeland, would do something else, too. And so would his successor. ”I swear to you, brother Darham,” he said, though his words were all but blown away, ”Vaylle may well bring us to its sh.o.r.es for sport, but it will find its pleasure turned to pain when we arrive.”

Solomon's office was much as Alouzon remembered it: severe and cluttered both, the battered mahogany desk shoved into the corner beside the packed bookshelves, and the old man's reading gla.s.ses perched atop a stack of papers. But one wall opened out onto a dark seash.o.r.e, and that she did not remember. The water was gray, troubled, unlit by the overhead fluorescents; and breakers foamed up the s.h.i.+ngle and crept almost all the way to the inst.i.tutional linoleum that covered the floor. The sky was black, and no stars relieved its sable darkness.

Alouzon sat at the dead man's desk, leafing through old photo alb.u.ms and indices of Anglo-Saxon and Welsh names. The names-Sandde, Cynwyl, Morgan-told her little more than she already knew, for Gryylth was, after all, a study in recreation, an old scholar's frantic fantasies touched with history and then brought to life in a tangle of wish-fulfillment, repressed hope, and unadmitted fear.

The photos-some faded and yellow with age, some sharp and clear with the exacting precision of quality Polaroids and expensive SLRs-were of her own life and origins: her grandfather marching with the Wobblies at the Lawrence textile strike, her parents taking their daughter to picnics and political rallies, prom dresses and tuxedos, high school graduation . . .

. . . and then-blurry with half-tone reproduction, endless handling, and tears-there were the pictures of Kent State.

Alouzon leafed through them all slowly, noting as she did that the pages vanished after she turned them, the images they carried dissolving into mist. And when she was done, even the alb.u.m faded. She was left in an office lapped at by turbulent waters and filled with the sounds and smells of a dark, endless sea.

She waited. She was supposed to wait.

Finally, floating above the water with a steadiness that disdained the surging of the waves beneath it, came a shrouded, golden thing. It approached in a haze of light, pa.s.sed soundlessly up the sh.o.r.e and into the office. It hung before Alouzon Dragonmaster, a beating, pulsing glory that seemed not so much precious metal as living flesh and blood, and beneath its veil she sensed an upwelling of eternal waters, waters that invisibly, cascaded to the floor and inundated the universe.

Take what you need.

She understood and reached out her hands to the flow. She could not lift this cup yet: it was too early. But the Grail nurtured those in need, and Alouzon washed her face in what seemed to be pure life, the endless fatigue falling from her, the breaks and splits and fissures that had marred her existence beginning to fill and heal.

Face dripping with something that was like immortality, she gazed at the wondrous thing before her. ”Please,” she said softly. ”Can you help my friends?”

The glory wavered and then was gone. Alouzon understood: without doubt, the Grail would help her friends. It could, by its very nature, do nothing else. But by having to question it, Alouzon had shown her ignorance, and therefore her unworthiness to attain it as of yet.

When the questions are all done, then you will be ready.

”When they're done?” she murmured into the roar of the sea, ”or when they all just don't matter anymore?”

But out on the ocean, tossing on the waves, there was more movement. Bobbing and rocking, a boat with sere, torn sails floated to the sh.o.r.e and ground to a halt on the gravel. For a moment, it lay as though untenanted, but then a pale hand gripped the gunwale, and a withered head rose into view.

Slimy with decay, his long-dead fingers stiff with rigor mortis, his bloodless face pale with embalming fluids and seamed with the slippage of mortician's wax and make-up, Solomon Braithwaite crawled out of the boat and dragged himself up through the lap of waves. He made his way almost blindly, as though drawn by the Grail, but he stopped at Alouzon's feet and lay down beside her boots.

”I'm here,” he said.

Alouzon was shaking. ”Why?”

The corpse lifted a dripping, mottled head. ”I'm here to confess.”

Solomon's eyes were glazed with rot, and Alouzon tried not to meet them; but the plea that thrust itself out of their yellow ruin was such that she could not turn away. ”Confess?” she managed. ”Confess what?”

And then Solomon started. Bit by bit, the acc.u.mulated horrors and atrocities of his life pa.s.sed the lips of his corpse. His anger, his cruelty, his willingness to inflict both upon others dribbled out like a flow of impure blood, and the tale of Helen's forced abortions racked his decaying body as the stainless steel instruments ravaged her womb.

His hands fumbled and clutched at the linoleum as he supplied one d.a.m.ning detail after another, and his polished oxford shoes scuffed helplessly, doll-like. It was all, really, a kind of a war. A war upon the innocent. A war upon all the quiet, little people who had stayed at home while the battles raged through the falling snows of Korea. And overlaying it all, tinting it with the hues of blood and envy, was the frantic ambition of a soldier chained to a desk and a pile of reconnaissance photographs.

Alouzon listened, and she thought of Vaylle. How much of Solomon's feelings had she unconsciously shared? How much anger had been hidden by the wall of despair and guilt that she had erected in the days following the shootings at Kent State? And upon whom had she vented it?

Frightened by the correspondence, she recoiled from the decaying thing at her feet. ”Why . . . why do you have to tell me this?” she said.

Solomon fixed her once more with his rotting eyes. ”I want to be clean,” he said. ”I have to be clean. I turned away from the Grail. I'll never find it now. But I'm not clean, and so I can't rest.” His hands clutched at her boots and left a film of slime on their smooth brown leather.