The Grail of Sir Thomas

menacing jaws apart, rushed on. Thomas, with his heart pounding in panics, grasped lately that ants were simply running on their own business. Should one knock Thomas and Oleg down, that meant nothing: they often bumped into each other as well, so the crash of bony armors was heard constantly.

“They let you in?” he cried to Oleg’s back.

“By smell,” Oleg answered without looking back. “And also by secret sign I gave them.”

Thomas felt his hair rising on ends. “How… you know?”

“I’ve spotted it,” Oleg blurted impatiently. “While you admired the beauty of this place!”

Thomas blushed with shame so bitterly that felt his ears prickling, as though in a frosty wind: he, a man of war, overlooked the watchword of sentinels, while a man of religion, though a profoundly false one, spotted all of it and interpreted correctly! There seem to be some good things about Paganism too. Not everything of it should be swept away, as cautious thinkers suggest. We may take some things from the past…

“We’re getting close,” Oleg said suddenly. “Take a hold of yourself, Sir Thomas.”

“A hold?” Thomas whispered in terror. “Are there more horrors ahead?”

They entered a cave that reeked of decay. Thomas held his nose, mended his pace, even left Oleg behind. There were white picked bones by the wall. Thomas caught a glimpse of them and turned away at once, quivering, his forehead almost hit against the wall that suddenly leapt out on him. He did not think the world ever had animals of such size!

When they came, by a broad passage, into the next cave, Thomas stiffened, unable to move. “Go along the wall,” Oleg advised comfortingly. “Pretend you are going to no church but tavern!”

In the dim light, strange and ghostly, as though cast by invisible moon, there was a slowly moving great dark mass of a two-headed hill, cracking and crunching heavily. As Thomas looked closer, he discerned pale legs, as long as tree trunks, with jaggy shins, then thick bony shells and combs. There was constant crash, as though a monstrous stone breaker was reducing huge blocks to road metal.

Oleg went along the wall carefully, avoiding the giant legs that scratched, twitched, tried to drag the headless bodies, many with their bellies torn out, their ovipositors pulled away. Most of the underground monsters were dead, but the half-dead ones demonstrated creepy vitality: still tried to crawl, climb, their hooked legs got hold of their neighbors.

“The monsters of underground?” Thomas asked in a thin voice that made him hate himself. “If these ones are here, I can imagine what things live in the very depth!”

“In the very depth… er… a giant turtle on which the earth stands. Or those are elephants? Or whales…”

“No, not that deep,” Thomas protested. “Why digging through? I don’t think even these ants of Herodotus could do it…”

“Do you think they could dig down to the hell then?”

Thomas got convulsed, as he imagined the tunnel they walked by leading them straight into the cave with hot blazing fires, huge pots of boiling tar heating over, poor sinners sitting in them and screaming terribly… He’d rather not get there as that would be a predicament. The knightly codex says to help the offended, but those are sinners. Even the Holy Virgin does nothing to protect them, and I can’t be holier than she is…

Keeping his head busy with godly thought and whispering prayers, he squeezed himself after the wonderer into a cave so large that the previous one looked a doghouse against it. All the colossal space was covered with giant corpses of strange underground monsters, whitish and hairless. Their skin looked disgustingly soft, but their heads were terrible: armored with bony shells fitted tightly, with only a narrow slit for eyes protected with a lowering thick plate, a huge mouth wide enough to swallow a horse…

Thomas wondered in fear why only the head was protected while the heart could be speared easily. It was seen through the translucent skin: huge, still pulsing feebly, vulnerable!

“Diggers of holes,” Oleg said suddenly, as though he read Thomas’s thoughts. “Head goes first and body’s dragged after, squeezing in the narrow passage. That’s why they are so soft, shapeless… And you are a brave knight! Even in this place you think own thoughts.”

“Sir wonderer,” Thomas began, flattered by the praise, “can those Secret Seven have a hand in the theft of your charms?”

Oleg walked silent for a long time. Finally, he shook his head. “Hardly they can. Ants do not obey them. All men, either secret or overt, are the same to ants. It appears to me that Secret Seven lost our track… We vanished too suddenly when picked by Agathyrsians!”

“And then Agathyrsians took us on the face of earth far away,” Thomas muttered. “If they search the place we vanished at, combing through hills and dales, hamlets and villages, we will leave unspotted: I for Britain, you for the Rus’ of Herodotus…”

“I hope so,” Oleg replied, but he did not sound confident.

A forceful push on thigh sent Thomas flying with thunder into a corner. Moaning, he got up, shook his fist after the ant running away. Once he rose, he was kicked down by another ant who carried a huge angular block in his jaws — or mandibles, as the wonderer kept calling them. Thomas followed the offender with eyes, howled of double vexation: the saliva-glued block was all but whole formed by sapphires. The smallest one is as large as a fist!

“Be patient,” a distant voice told him. “We’ll be there soon.”

“Do you know where charms are?”

“How can I?” Oleg sounded surprised. “We’ll have to rummage their storerooms!”

“Rummage…” Thomas moaned. “A needle in a haystack! You should have made your horses, dragons and other animals life-sized…”

He dragged along with his last strength, groaning, trying to keep in sight the broad back crossed with the long sword and the bow with quivers. The wonderer increased his pace, all but vanishing from sight, waited impatiently, then dashed along like mad again, extremely happy with his having no iron armor on. Once Thomas came up with him, saw the wonderer’s bare arms bleeding and covered with scratches and bruises: marks of his collisions with ants, so armor was no useless burden at all!

Thomas quickened his steps, bumped into Oleg. If he says, the knight thought nervously, we are walking in the mouth of a colossal animal — either sleeping or long dead or turned stone — I shan’t be surprised. I’ll only thank Our Lady for the beast sleeping as long as possible. And once he rouses, let him and ants kill each other in a struggle for power in the underground world and the last ant die of malice…

They came into a broad cave with walls of red quartz. Ants had only stuck the cracks in them with their saliva: just a glimmer of light, but their eyes got completely accustomed by that time — Thomas was the first to notice huge chests along the wall. He gasped, his sight ran along the row, counted forty of them, large and larger. Each chest had an ancient symbol on its lid and sides: a big svarga, carved either in wood or metal. Thomas had seen the likes of it in his native land, left by the first settlers on the coast rocks. They say those signs once had been everywhere but the first missionaries of Christianity were the ones to destroy them zealously: burn clothes with the image of svarga, shatter jugs with it, trim it away from walls and shutters. And those chests, judging by huge signs on the most prominent places, must have been left by ancient people! Old legends say they were extremely powerful…

Oleg jerked his head with irritation, passed along the whole row quickly. Thomas hobbled after him, moaning. “Sir wonderer!” he begged in a shaky voice near the last chest. “Just a look in!”

“Locked,” Oleg barked out without slowing his pace. “I don’t think ants could put charms there and lock!”

“We’ll find charms!” Thomas assured ardently. “But I’m so fascinated to see what the ancients put there! Just with half an eye!”

Oleg stopped near the last chest: the smallest one, it did not reach even to Thomas’s belt. The massive lid was so close that not a single hair could pass into the slit, and the thick cramps were joined reliably with a paunchy padlock. Thomas turned it in excitement, got sweated and, finally, begged in despair, “I know holy pilgrims are taught none of such things, but you are a Pagan pilgrim…”

Oleg took a grass blade out of his pocket, smoothed it carefully, tucked into the dark keyhole. There was a click, the cramp suddenly got longer, hung released in the hinges, while the heavy padlock fell down on Thomas’s