Yury Nikitin - The Grail of Sir Thomas

Oleg flung the armory door open, glanced back at Thomas with reproach. The knight’s eyes glittered with joy. “Why kill him?” Oleg spoke sadly. “He’s no enemy.”

“And what you did?” Thomas wondered.

“Just stunned.”

“That’s why his brain splashed on walls!”

The armory was a big room with low ceiling, full of trunks, chests, sabers, daggers and other weapons. Along the walls, there were shields, pieces of armor, and flexible lines of riveted steel, all lying in heaps. Small mail rings shimmered like fish, dusty helmets stood in a row like overturned pots.

Thomas rushed into the far corner, rummaged there avidly, scattering the pieces. “That’s my armor!” he whispered.

His hands were trembling, his blue eyes in tears. He hurried to pull the heavy steel on, his fingers slid off. “Sir wonderer,” he begged in a whisper. “Don’t take it as impudence… Please help me with clasps on my back! The knight’s trouble is that sometimes he can’t array himself in!”

In a moment, a half-naked stonemason with an angry face was concealed within the gleaming steel. The armor was fitting but the slave collar did not want to go inside, Thomas pushed it in with a fist. His blue eyes looked at Oleg through a narrow slit, the rest of his body covered with iron.

Thomas stooped easily – pieces of his armor slid apart in particular places to allow it – seized his triangle shield, snatched the cross-handled sword from the wall. “Forgive me, sir wonderer. Though you are no highborn but not a servant either. I shouldn’t have asked you to clasp me as if you were a squire…”

“Stop it,” the wonderer winced. “You’d better hurry. Do you hear it?”

There was a noise in the yard: clamor, furious barking of dogs, then a desperate squeal. “Slaves picked the keys,” Oleg said. “It took them so much time… Now they’ll smash and plunder all around, break into the wine cellar… That will distract the guards.”

They hurried up the steep stairs, climbed on an open landing. It was dark below, the night ripped by torchlight, clang of steel, and shouts of men, but the sky was going lighter, stars fading. They felt a cool morning breeze.

They saw a watchtower on the left and the wall stretching along from it. In three or four steps, there was a lower wall fencing a corner off the yard. A guard in light armor was walking on the top of that wall, his cold hands under his arms, a sword and a knife on his belt. He cast uncaring glances below, where the torchlights rushed and men shouted.

Thomas cursed: the guard was unattainable on that side-by-side wall. The soldier raised his head and saw an armored knight and a half-naked man, lean but broad-shouldered, both with swords. His eyes popped out, his chest started rising, as he took in the air for a loud cry.

Thomas felt some hot thing rush past him. The next moment, he saw the wonderer pouncing upon the guard: he jumped legs first, and they crossed around the soldier’s neck with such strength that Thomas heard the crunch of broken bones. Both slid down the wall: the guard with his eyes popped and the half-naked man on his shoulders. At the last moment, the wonderer clutched at the wall edge. His legs came apart, the limp dead body slipped down.

Thomas could hardly believe his eyes: he had never seen such a fight practice. He heard a faint slap below, as if a sack of wet linen were thrown down on cobbles. The wonderer pulled himself up the wall, shook his fist at Thomas: “Damn you, knight! I don’t stop killing!”

“How’d you get back here?” Thomas cried anxiously.

“I’m not going to!” Oleg shouted back angrily. “I’m going to stables, to horses. And you want Baron? His chambers are just beneath you!” He rushed along the wall to the stairs that led down into the yard.

Thomas came to his senses, chose the shortest cut, although dodging and twisting, built in a way to help defend the castle. He ran by the inclined edge. Men in the yard below cried louder with joy, torchlights rushed faster. He heard a crack of wood, a clang of steel.

A guard, as lanky as a milestone, stood half-asleep beside an ornate door. He raised a gleaming spear. Thomas crushed him with a brisk strike of gauntleted fist, thrust the door with his shoulder. The wood cracked, the massive bar flew off its hinges with an ear-grating screech of iron, the folds flung open.

Thomas broke into the ornate room as an avalanche. It was a bedroom, as large as a hall, low-vaulted, lit by a huge fireplace that could burn a whole tree. A crooked old man was sitting beside the fire, throwing thick billets in it. In the middle of the room, there was a high bed covered with a bright canopy and curtained by silk.

Running across the bedroom, Thomas tore the bed curtains away, then stopped and turned, his sword and shield ready for battle. On the two puffy pillows of the luxurious bed, he saw two heads: one female, her golden hair lit the room when Thomas ripped the curtain away, and one male, black as a firebrand and big as a caldron.

Baron was asleep, his mighty arms stretched behind his head. He had a tiny forehead, overhanging brows, a short flattened nose with huge nostrils, and a heavy back-slanted jaw. Thomas felt something odd in his face but he had no time to think it over: Baron turned in his sleep, his nails scratched his strong chest with black bestial hair. The blanket slipped off, and the nightgown on the golden-haired woman opened wide. Thomas started back, blurred by the tender whiteness of her skin. He had time to see her alabaster breast, perfect in shape, crowned with a bright-red rose bud.

She woke up, her blue innocent eyes opened wide in astonishment, as well as her small coral mouth. Amazed, she looked into the eyes of the same blue that watched her through a narrow visor slit.

Thomas struggled to take his eyes off her. His fury, which had been boiling up for all the days of his shameful captivity, nearly leaked down all into some folds and cracks of his soul.

He grabbed Baron’s naked shoulder, squeezed it with gauntleted hand. “Get up! The Hell’s tired waiting.”

Chapter 4

Baron turned his head quickly, took in the room in a tenacious glance. Thomas swayed his sword ominously, throwing crimson lights into Baron’s eyes. On the wall behind Thomas, there hung a huge axe with fanciful hooks on butt. The old man raked billets in the burning fireplace. He was shaking, despite sitting near the fire. He paid no attention to Thomas, nor to his master.

Thomas caught Baron’s look and nodded: “Take it!”

Baron stood upright: dark, massive, covered with hair like a forest animal. Thomas noticed something odd again, his heart was wrung with alarm. Baron’s legs were too short, his arms huge and muscular, a strange head seated straight on his sloping shoulders… “And the rest?” Baron bellowed.

Thomas glanced around. Baron’s armor must be in another room. Send him for it – and he’ll bring a dozen of guards! “No,” Thomas said and lifted his sword.

Baron roared, tried to run away through the smashed door, but Thomas brandished his sword and nearly slashed the enemy’s side open. With a creepy howl, Baron snatched the axe from the wall, wheeled round abruptly to the armored knight.

He hold the axe with both hands at the knee level, his eyes fixed on the unexpected foe. Thomas suddenly felt weak: Baron’s eyes had no pupils, no irises, but they were not all white as a blind man’s – they were fiery red! Their blood-colored light was going brighter, blazing up as if the Hell’s fire, from which this monster had emerged, shone through his skull.

“You die!” Baron roared with a creepy move of his jaw: it was getting heavier before Thomas’s eyes, transforming, covering with a bony shell.