Read Online The Grail War by Richard Monaco - Free Book Online Page B

dream!”
    The whore was trying to slip unobserved from the bloody bed, breathless with terror. Lohengrin, quite casually, with a vicious final twist, slammed the blade between her breasts, dropping her, with a vague, sighing outcry, to the sheets.
    “Please … I want to live …” she murmured.
    Lohengrin’s depthless eyes never left Broaditch’s face.
    “Remember,” he said and moved back into the shadows through the rear curtains and was gone.
    His escaped victim stood there a moment, then stooped forward to see to the girl, who had managed to crawl partway off the mattress, as if swimming face up where she now dangled, draining away onto the yellowish tiled floor.
     
    “It came to nothing in the end,” Parsival was saying to the young knight called (he'd learned) Sir Prang. “I killed a host of men, won back my lands from my relatives with little difficulty … had a son … then a daughter …” They went on through the dim trees. The leaves rustled softly around them. “I turned to the spirit. I touched the least hem of its garment … then lost my grip … I even went to war again, oh, to keep away from home, I admit this … and so it came to be that I killed more men …” The woods seemed to be thinning out. Parsival intended to make a point of discouraging Prang, but, at the same time, he was glad of an ear after so many solitary months.
    “I became a great fellow,” he continued, “as, no doubt, you’ve heard.” He smiled sarcastically to himself. “I stood high in the councils of Arthur after he regained his power and was never happy a day with it … And I came to my thirty-sixth year dulled by eating, sleeping, and fucking my fill. Why, I was so dulled that only the memory of the glory I’d touched as a boy had any life. So I joined the Irish monks, shattered my sword, and swore never to cease striving until I walked in that glory again …”
    He broke off as they moved across a narrow, moonlit field that sloped up before them. The castle was a dim outline on the crest.
    “Well,” he murmured, “I’ve come home again with more gray hairs and a dark heart.” He sighed.
    “Sir,” said Prang, “you have already mastered more than …”
    “No. I lost it. I lost the glory. Can’t you see that? Men who have never known it never miss it and so may endure their lives. But such as I lose both heaven and earth.” They climbed up the steepening, gleaming slope. Off to the left was the little village of huts. A single can-die seemed to shine down there. “You should understand this,” he said. There were no lights showing in the castle itself, he noted. What was it about a place where you spent childhood? A magic? An intensity that never fades …
    “I don’t know about all you say,” Prang demurred, “but I want to fight as you fight. I want to learn that.”
    “Why?” Parsival asked over his shoulder. It wasn't that late , he was thinking, for no light at all to be showing … Perhaps they’d all gone away, for some reason …
    The drawbridge was down, the gates open. They passed the first bodies there lying in the gleam and moon-shadows around the pitch-dark opening.
    “Ah,” said Prang quietly, “they went after your family, too.”
    Parsival knelt by the first man. The blank eyes gleamed in a bearded face.
    “I knew this man,” he murmured. “He served with me under Arthur.”
    “How long dead seems he?”
    Parsival stood up and headed through the doorway.
    “Not long,” he replied.
    Prang touched the hilt of his sword and followed.
    “Why do you say ‘they’?” Parsival wanted to know. He’d discovered he could not hear thoughts at will. When it happened, it happened.
    “Because more than one seeks your life. So much I feel free of oath to say.”
    The older man had stopped in the courtyard.
    “No,” he said, as if to a third party and startled Prang for a moment. “I won’t be drawn back into that.”
    “Eh?” Prang grunted. “What’s that,