The Grail of Sir Thomas

“Sir Thomas!”

“Well, no rotten, I was carried too far about it… But I am a paladin of Crusade, noble Sir Malton…”

“In the excitement of hunting… er… A noble passion… But I said nothing of you having eaten it. Though both of us, dragon and I, saw you stealing the pike.”

“Stealing?”

“Everyone has his weaknesses, sir knight. Everyone is sinful, God forgive them. And the dragon… he will forget if not forgive.”

“Forget?”

“Dragons have memory like a sieve,” Oleg explained. The dragon’s roaring was all the softer, as though he tried to fathom the meaning of human words or the wonderer scratched him behind ears. “In the morning he can’t recall the day before. So he’ll forget you making off with his sheatfish.”

“I didn’t touch it!”

“Er… he, as well as I, saw you dragging away his pike. Probably he has seen even more of it. We Rodians consider it a sin to deceive even a beast, but you Christians have nothing in the way it’s supposed to be…”

He heard the wonderer settling by the distant fire, which crackled with coals in silence. Lately, Thomas recalled the wonderer, though immersed in his deep thoughts, could have seen the sheatfish getting into the river by itself. Oleg had even advised him, Thomas Malton, to save pikes for that ungrateful fool! But now the wonderer could hardly be reached by Thomas’s cries: he slept like a log, while the dragon breathed evenly at hand, as though a heavy tide coasting in: it only filled the cave not with fresh sea breeze but with a heavy smell of rotting meat stuck in dragon’s teeth. Thomas could see not a single star: the beast leaned his side on the cleft, blocking the way out even in his sleep.

Slowly, Thomas slid down the wall on the floor, trying not to ring his armor. The dragon’s snoring was even and mighty. Unwittingly, Thomas lapsed into a short and troubled dream, as he thought it to be.

Thomas woke of the bright sun shooting its fiery arrows straight in his eyes. He heard splashes, roaring, mighty slapping on water from outside his small cave.

Slowly, with apprehension, Thomas came to the entrance. The dragon was fishing excitedly in hundred steps from the cave, and the wonderer, naked to the waist, sat by the dead fire, which was only a black burnt circle in place of coals. He was doing a diligent needlework on the wolfskin jack lying on his laps.

“Sir wonderer,” Thomas called quietly from his cleft, “good morning!”

“Morning,” the wonderer answered vacantly. His eyebrows were knitted on the bridge of his nose. “How have you slept?”

“Thanks,” Thomas replied politely. He moved out a bit, measured the distance towards the excited fisher with his eyes. “How is our horse?”

“Skylark? He seems to be well. Fishing till dawn. They say it’s really the best time for fishing.”

“It is,” Thomas confirmed respectfully. “But what about the sheatfish?”

“There’s only one way to find out.”

Thomas came out of the cleft. “Sir wonderer,” he spoke with dignity, “in your godly thoughts, you have missed it were you who advised me to help poor animal save his fish! Well, for my kind deed… as my friend pilgrim of Rus’ would say, my lard was spread on my own skin!”

The wonderer lowered his needle, his eyebrows flew up to the middle of his forehead. “Really?.. I have some vague memories of that. It seems you truly haven’t stolen that sheatfish… Indeed, that would be too much even of a Christian. Though sheatfish did vanish… Well, well, let’s leave it. God sees everything, especially your Christian god spying on everyone, jealous of no leaf to fall without his will, not a single hair of one’s head…”

Thomas approached the fire, nodded at the humped back with reared comb. “Won’t he devour me?”

The wonderer thought for a while, scratched the back of his head with five, shrugged. “Off chance he won’t.”

Doomed, Thomas sat down near the wonderer. “Off chance,” “we must go,” “it will come right,” and also “kusim,” a mysterious spell with which the wonderer went right through it and won. Thomas tried to say that magic formula secretly himself, but it had no effect on him, the knight of West: one definitely needed to have a mysterious Russian soul, which is not to be measured against other men’s yardsticks, to say “off chance” and go on with a blind faith in own good luck…

The dragon darted suddenly along the bank, jumped up to a steep. Sitting in the hollow water, he started to claw out clots of yellow clay, with pebbles and grass, snatch them with huge jaws, swallow hastily, tear out new ones, trying to get those without stones, roots, and mud. “What is he doing?” Thomas whispered anxiously.

“Glutted with fish,” Oleg dismissed. Efficiently, he made a knot on the strand, bit a piece off, examined his work with satisfaction.

“But why clay?”

“He has a stomachache. One is helped from it by coals, another by clay… Let him have it. Today we’ll need to fly up to the evening.” He took the flint out of his bag. With a sigh, Thomas went for brushwood. He heard mighty smack on water and roar from the river again. The dog had some grass, as the wonderer said, but soon grew hungry for meat.

After a quick hearty breakfast, Oleg collected the slices of roast meat into a separate bag, then emptied the full kettle of thick viscous broth into the dragon’s mouth. The animal bellowed, turned his snout away, put his paw in jaws, trying to rack that filth away, choked, his eyes got five times bigger, about to burst. “Swallowed,” Oleg said with satisfaction. “Alright… He’ll sweat profusely but his illness be gone, like water off a duck’s back. Get on Skylark, Sir Thomas! Now he spreads his wings.”

* * *

The dragon dashed over clouds, like a stone shot of a catapult. Oleg and Thomas, tied firmly, were clinging to the comb, wrapping themselves in cloaks: the head wind was blowing off the last drops of warmth.

Thomas, despite his chattering teeth, would let his head down often and look below with a quiver. In the grey-green abyss, there were numberless mounted hosts moving and white spots of yurts among them, millions of those, and swarming about, as though it were billions of ants. “Polovtsians?” he asked.

“Pechenegs,” Oleg answered without looking there. “Their last attack on Rus’.”

“The last wife of priest, as one my friend wonderer says…”

“It’s really last. They got between the hammer and the anvil. Propped up by Polovtsians — new enemies to Rus’.”

“How will it?..”

“As it always was. Many of them came, and more to come. Off chance it comes right…”

Thomas glanced at the wonderer’s gaunt face with ardent sympathy. He undertook to an exorbitant feat: to find the Truth that will end all the unfairness in the world at once. Meanwhile, the triumphant faith of Christ came to his native land, and he turned a persecuted outcast!

“One good thing,” Oleg said with enthusiasm, “we won’t need to cross the lands of Polovtsians, Pechenegs, Berendeys! To tell the truth, I had my heart in heels about that. I don’t know whether we would pass…”

The dragon got flapping abruptly. Thomas was pressed on the slabs, his body filled with lid, even his heart struggled to keep pounding. Oleg sat still, like a stake driven in the flying beast’s back, fingered his charms, closed his eyes, froze up. His face looked dead, and the cold of fear in Thomas’s soul turned an icy block of despair, terror, and doom. The Secret Seven must be enraged. Put all business aside to search for us. They lost the trace when the two friends got underground, then found the wonderer for a moment, but the dragon was flying fast and they lost him again… But they will find and revenge the death of Baruk, the adept of black magic who sold his soul to Devil. Now they know exactly who killed that friend of theirs: the crusader, devoted knight of the Holy Virgin, and the wise wonderer, priest of old gods, some of whom, probably, the Savior did not precipitate into Hell as demons but elevated to angels by his throne!

Thomas managed to fall asleep, waking for a moment only for the dragon’s sharp ascend and only in the first hour. Afterwards he’d only puff in his sleep, fighting the strange heaviness, frown, and when the dragon spread his wings and soared Thomas would break into a happy smile, definitely dreaming of Krizhina and wedding rings.

The days are long in summer but even they end yielding to night. The sun started its way down to the horizon when Oleg stirred, took the dagger in hand. Thomas moved his shoulders. He felt deadly tiredness in every move of the wonderer.