of… the Holy Grail?”
Thomas kept his breath. He had said the last words almost in a whisper, but they sounded thunder to him. The wonderer shot a blade-sharp glance at him. “Is it… that one?” he asked abruptly.
“It is,” Thomas replied in surprise. “You… know it? You, Pagan?”
“When Christ, the god of yours, was crucified,” Oleg said, “one of his followers placed a cup, secretly, to collect his precious blood… Was it that way? Since that, you hold that cup sacred. You call it the Holy Grail.”
Thomas glanced around with caution. “You see,” he whispered, “even you Pagans were reached by the fame of Holy Grail. Many knights set out to find it: Sir Galahad, Sir Lancelot, Sir Gawain, Sir Percival… But we needed Crusade to free Jerusalem, the Holy City, from infidel Saracens, to free the Holy Sepulcher and the holy places where Christ had walked…”
“How did you get the cup?” the wonderer interrupted.
“In a fierce fight, sir wonderer. I wouldn’t say it came rushing to my hands.”
“There’s a legend,” the wonderer spoke harshly, his eyes fixed on Thomas, “that only a pure soul may take the cup! Other men, it says, will get ill and die in throes…”
Thomas looked down. His cheeks blushed bright crimson, the color spread over all his face and to his neck. Even his ears flashed so brightly that one could light torches from them. “Sir wonderer… I may die in throes, but first I’ll deliver the cup to my blessed Britain! Let God’s grace fall on the heads of Angles, the people who worship Christ… and for whom I’m ready to give my life!”
Their horses walked side by side, so their feet in the stirrups touched. The field workers followed them with anxious eyes. Both riders looked enormous on the deserted road, neither a tree nor a bush near it. Their horses are Frankish — huge, heavy, stout-legged, their steel horseshoes crush the ground with a crunch. The massive knight’s armor is glittering in the rays of sunset as though covered with thick blood. Another rider is a clod of darkness: hooded, still and gloomy in his black cloak, its flaps flying like a black raven’s wings.
The sun set. The air started to lose its heat, very slowly. Horses cheered up, feeling a rest soon. The clear blue sky was darkening imperceptibly until it was menacing lilac and the pale sickle of moon came out filled with ominous light.
Thomas breathed in the fresh, chilly air happily. The violet sky changed to black. Stars hung straight overhead: bright and big, the whole swarms of stars never seen in the northern sky.
“It is close,” Oleg told him. “That group of trees… It’s an orchard. A house is behind it. See it? Neither see I.”
“How do you know then?” Thomas wondered.
“I know it”, the wonderer said indifferently. “As you know good places to build a castle, a smithy, a watchtower, so I know such places for orchards and houses.”
The moon was flooding the world with ghostly pallid light, only the areas beneath trees remained black as coals. Horses walked on a trodden road but riders could barely hear the sound of hooves. Somewhere behind the trees, frogs were crying in strangely stern, metal voices. Thomas doubted whether it were frogs.
The roof of a small house was seen from a distance, surrounded closely by curly, well-groomed trees. The flat earthen roof was moonlit, while the rest of the house dark. Thomas and Oleg heard some risen male voices, drunken shouts, then a loud, insistent knock on the door.
They reined their horses into a slow pace. Trees hid them, allowing to approach on the dart throwing distance. They stopped on the edge of a broad moonlit lawn near the house. Before the porch, several motley- clothed men were laughing, passing among them a wicker basket with a narrow jug mouth sticking out from it. One of them hammered at the door with his fist and roared, “Open the door! Open it, you stupid woman! Or we break in!”
A faint female voice replied from inside. “What do you want? Go away!” She sounded scared, almost weeping,
“You’ll know what we want!” the man cried hoarsely. “Let us in!”
“I have a knife to protect myself!”
Thomas breathed faster, his face contorted scarily, dark in the faint moonlight. Oleg hemmed with sympathy, his eyes thoughtful. The knight was shaking with fury, his eyes popped out, his lips white and trembling. He seized his helmet and slapped it on. The visor shielded his face with a clink.
The man at the door roared with laughter. His friends cried cheerfully. One of them ran onto the porch, shouted in drunken boldness, “You can’t stab all of us! But you can… ha ha!.. sate all of us if you try your best!”
“I brought true men to amuse you!” the first man cried in a hollow voice. “Open it, silly!”
They heard a woman weeping inside. “She can’t kill all of you but we can!” Thomas cried, his voice constrained with fury.
The laughter stopped. In full silence, men turned to the trees. Their hands gripped daggers, axes and swords. The horses beneath Oleg and Thomas stood motionless, as well as the villains. Apparently, they had been the masters of night up to that day, no one dared to challenge them. “Hey,” one of them cried from the porch, “whoever you are! Stay where you stand, and you’ll be safe. Or go to hell, if you don’t want your bones dragged away by dogs!”
Thomas roared with a creepy laugher, like a mighty lion to a jackal sprawled in his paws. “My bones?
Two villains stirred at last, started to move closer to the darkness beneath trees. Oleg drew the bow string briskly and seized an arrow.
The villains came closer, their eyes made out the dim shapes of riders when Oleg put the arrow on. The bow string clicked, his fingertips gripped another arrow at once, he made a shot, seized the next arrow… The quiver was over his shoulder, so the wonderer could pull arrow out, put it on the bow and shot it with a single move, and he did it with such a lightning speed that Thomas had barely drove his horse into a heavy gallop when several arrows swished by him in a sequence. Someone near the house shouted in fury.
Thomas burst out of the shadow with roar, bent down to the horse’s neck, his lance pointed ahead. The two closest villains froze on the spot, advancing their daggers. Thomas pierced one through like a leaf, his bones crunched under the lance, another was trampled by his destrier. The night filled with terrible cries. Men were running away from the house, falling. In the ghostly moonlight Thomas saw glittering silver feathers in their necks, backs and breasts. The arrows went easily into the flesh of half-naked villains.
Thomas’s lance had been left behind, so he pulled out a sword, slashed the third villain slantwise, brandished at the next one but saw a white bloom opened at his chest, with a wooden stem. The villain fell to his knees, blood gushed out from his mouth. Thomas yelled, shook his sword at Oleg. The rest three were fleeing along the road, their coal-black shadows darting ahead of them like night birds. Thomas bellowed and drove his warhorse after them.
Oleg rode out of shadows slowly, an arrow on his bow string. He watched and listened, but there were only death rattles and moans in the night. Soon he heard the thud of hooves that amplified to thunder. A big ferocious knight burst out onto the lawn in all his magnificence, a huge sword slantwise in hand, big drops falling on the ground from the blade. He seemed to be just out of butchery, even his horse splashed with blood.
“You killed all!” Thomas barked at Oleg. “Could you have been a slower shooter?”
“As a child, I was taught to keep seven arrows in the air.”
“We are not in your Pagan Rus’! Here, in the Christian world, men can barely shoot at all.” He pulled up, made a circle around the law. The wounded men tried to crawl away, moaning, leaving dark traces of blood behind. Soon they got silent and motionless, with their fingers dug into the ground.
The door was opened with caution. A pale female face appeared in the slit, then her thin hand. Making sure of no villains on the porch, the woman came out silently: small, thin in waist, her eyes big and scared.
Thomas waved his metal hand at her. The sword, dark with blood, was still in it. The knight checked himself, wiped the blade hastily and sheathed it. Oleg took the bow string off, hid the bow in its case. The woman ran down briskly, her heels tapped on the porch as a squirrel’s paws. She bent over a wounded villain, turned him to his back.
Thomas touched the reins, his stallion moved closer to the woman, like a dark mountain, the ground trembling and thumping under his hooves. The woman jerked up her head, her face pale, her eyes wide with fear.
