The Grail of Sir Thomas

Oleg interrupted, raised both palms as a sign of defeat. “Let’s cook in your helmet then. Agree?”

“Sir wonderer…”

“Is it hole-ridden?”

“No. But it’s a knight’a helmet!”

“Then let’s pour the formic acid there,” Oleg resolved. “As the kettle is made for boiling fish soup in.”

Thomas twitched with protest. “That smell will cling to my helmet for lifetime! No, we’d rather use it for cooking. Lancelot once boiled fish in his helmet, Sir Gawain made porridge in it, and Percival…”

“And Arey, the god of war,” Oleg interrupted with delight, “once could not go to war because a dove had made a nest in his helmet and laid her eggs. Ares had to wait until her nestlings hatched and learnt to fly! No wars on earth for all that time…”

“Bloody bird!” Thomas swore with indignation. “To deprive noble knights of their feats? That’s disgusting.” He leaned back, going to lie down, elbowed a big orange stone aside. Suddenly his eyes opened wide, he hastened to roll the boulder close, lifted it with effort on his knees, whispered in a suddenly hoarse voice. “I swear on blood… of Christ that is the filthy lucre! Was Herodotus right even about such trifles? I’ll read all of it as soon as I’m back!”

Oleg kept indifferent silence. Thomas spat on the stone, rubbed it with gauntlet. The yellow glitter grew brighter. Excited, he squatted up, started to break the rock: it turned out to be made of dozens of smaller stones, more than a half of which were bars of heavy porous gold.

“Pick with your sword,” Oleg gave a sullen advise. “Ants have sticky saliva… a deadly grip!”

“Saliva?”

“Or sniffles. No, that’s rather saliva, I think. In their depth of earth, they stick small pebbles together while digging their tunnels, lest they have to carry each grain above separately. Though there are lazy ones who carry stones one by one or even run empty.”

He lay down, tucked his knees up and fell asleep at once, indifferent to anything that ants could drag out of the depth of earth. However, all the night long he kept hearing in his sleep some puffing sounds, heavy sighs, scuffing, dull pounding. The knight struck with his fists, elbows. Sometimes Oleg seemed to hear Thomas hitting with his head, even flinging himself on the sword hilt to break apart the blocks of gold stuck together.

All the night Oleg was escaping the thunder. He dreamed of a ferocious battle of gods: Pang shook the earth, Targitai set him in a plow, Peroun hurled thunderbolts. When at dawn he opened his eyes, shivering with cold, Thomas was still breaking huge stone blocks, like a slave in stone quarry. On his right, there was a hill of waste, tall enough for a horse to hide behind, on his left — a bright shining pile of gold nuggets, each no smaller than a fist. The pile of gold reached to the knight’s waist. Behind Thomas, there was a scatter of just broken stones, with big nuggets still covered with clots of earth.

Astonished, Oleg turned to the glittering rampart. Anxious, fussy ants were stopping up a breach wide enough to drag the Trojan horse into. One by one, they ran onto the top of the wall, dropped the porous blocks still smelling of underground into the gap.

Thomas glanced back vacantly, followed the wonderer’s eyes. Suddenly, he moaned, shook his fists in dismal. The new blocks used by ants to close the breach had twice that much gold nuggets in them! The first rays of sun fell on the top on the rampart, giving the gold its teasing glitter: it was so clean, washed, and bright!

“Ants dig deeply,” Oleg explained patiently. “Even small ones make their holes two or three sazhens[23] deep and these big ones can dig in three or four versts! All sorts of things can be found there, unavailable to man…”

Thomas watched the glaring rampart with grievous doggish eyes, his Adam’s apple twitched, as he gulped the saliva of hunger. That miracle was to stand in steppes up to the autumn, then ruined by winter snowstorms, razed to the ground. The spring would drown the heavy gold in muddy floods, the summer powder it with dust. No one will find the treasure then, unless by a random dig and until he gets too deep into the earth. “How often they come out?”

“Once they did it every summer,” Oleg replied after he thought for a while. “Old men say so… Then much less frequently. Now these ants are said to come above once in a century. They must have dug themselves too deep! There will come a time when they will get completely hidden from our world: sinister as you call it.”

Thomas ignored his attack. “Will all the gold stay there?” he cried in anxiety.

Oleg smiled sadly. “How can ants know what gold is? As they dig, they take up everything that blocks the way: sand, rocks, ore, gold, bones of unknown animals… Hey, aren’t you afraid anymore?”

Thomas glanced askew at the breach, waved his hand. “Dazzled by the glitter of gold.”

“At night?”

“That’s the sort of glitter to retain in full dark, sir wonderer! I saw how a noble knight killed another one, also a crusader, whom he was releasing the Holy Sepulcher with, for a single stone like these!”

Oleg got up, packed his things, checked arrows: someone had scattered them at night. There were many tracks of clawed paws around. He found his sword in two score steps, with holes made by spiky jaws on the baldric. Suddenly he went pale, clapped on his chest fussily, as though catching a grasshopper, turned his pockets inside out hastily, slapped his chest again. His eyes became glassy.

Chapter 34

Feeling something wrong, Thomas asked anxiously, “What? What’s happened?”

“I forgot to sprinkle charms… Ants took them!”

Thomas sighed with sympathy, made a helpless gesture. “You slept like a log. You’d hardly wake up if they took you… I caught a glimpse of some ant feeling you but I thought you were exchanging some news. As you know their language a bit! And I was busy… Don’t miss a woman — God will give a wench!”

“What wench?” Oleg asked in perplexity.

“You can make other charms. I can lend you my sword for it.”

“No, thanks.”

“Did you sanctify them in Jordan?”

“No, I didn’t.”

“What’s the matter then? The same wood makes icon and spade. I can fetch you the knottiest branch.”

Oleg glanced in the knight’s sympathetic face, shook his head. “Ready to leave your gold?.. I did not expect that. Thank you. Alas, I have no time to make new ones. If even I had, I’d have to get used to new charms. To learn from own mistakes… And now even the smallest mistake can cost our lives.”

He scooped the formic acid from the kettle, sprinkled his hair with it, rubbed it into arms and legs. Thomas goggled his eyes. “What?.. What you want, mad man?”

Oleg grinned sadly. “You guessed right. We’ll have to go into the burrow.”

Thomas jumped up, as though he sat on a poisonous snake. “To ants?!”

“It were no badgers who took them. Don’t worry, their holes are wide enough for me to get in.” He belted with the sword, clasped tightly.

Dumbfounded, Thomas watched him adjust the bow and quiver on his back, sprinkle them with formic acid. “Do you… mean it?” The knight was shaking with indignation.

“Certainly I do.”

Thomas spat, picked up his sword, spoke in rage. “Let no foe say I left my friend, even when he went mad… This heat can really melt any brain. Lead the way, sir wonderer!” He poured the rest of formic acid on himself, screwed up of the poignant smell, tossed the cattle away uncaringly.

“Why throwing the kettle away?” Oleg reproached. “What will you cook in?”

“Going to get out alive?” Thomas wondered. “What mad off-chancers live in Rus’!”

“The main thing is to save your soul. And the body may be eaten.”

“Body does not matter,” Thomas agreed. “A knight consists of honor, glory, valor, and fidelity to his Lady!”

Oleg started to climb up quickly, resting his feet on gold bars. Thomas groaned as he saw the wonderer