Yury Nikitin - The Grail of Sir Thomas

“Pagan,” Thomas muttered. “There’s only one God, the rest are demons. Our Lady in her unfathomable mercy has not knocked you off like a fly, as she hopes you to turn into the true faith. Do you know the way?”

“Of course I do,” the wonderer said with surprise. “That’s really simple!”

“Then I know why she saved your life up to now. Lead the way, you underground man.”

While they climbed out of the treasure cave through the low dark passage, moving on their fours in places, Thomas prayed the Holy Virgin. He felt the stone mountain pressing on his shoulders. Stones above cracked, shifted under that monstrous weight. In places, earth and small pebbles rained down.

At the very first opportunity. Thomas straightened his tired back up – and stopped in surprise. Ahead, there was a giant forest of strange translucent trees. Their trunks were three or four girths broad but only as tall as three or four man. They had swollen excruciations instead of branches and no leaves at all. Dark streams moved slowly within the trees, exfoliated, twisted into caudated rings.

Among the strange trees, there were slowly rambling ants, strange the same: slow, translucent, their inside seen through. Their small sharp jaws had a dim glitter. Ants used them to cut the trunks. A whitish layer of viscous sap came out from notches. An ant would fell down to the cut, drain all of it, and walk away slowly, his swollen belly dragged on the ground.

Unknown animals darted sometimes among the ghostly trees. So monstrous those creatures were that poor Thomas had his hair stand on ends of the insoluble question: could God have created such abomination himself? Devil definitely could do it but, as far as Thomas knew, the Almighty created all the world himself, no part left to Devil…

“Keep up,” Oleg said through gritted teeth. “You get stuck as though on the fair!”

“But monsters…”

“Domestic animals.”

“Domestic?”

“ Room animals if it please you. Room or cave… Even gods may have forgotten what ants bred these animals for. Ants may have forgotten that too. Either fun or work or hunt…”

Thomas squeezed himself against the wall to let disgusting animals pass, jumped up if one darted between his legs, and dashed between the legs of bigger ones himself: falling down on his belly with a thunder, his armor ringing, his eyes closed tight.

Thomas plunged after the wonderer into a dark tunnel, walked along, bending down in places and sinking to his fours in others. The passage was a steep rise, sometimes they had to climb up all but vertically. The air gradually turned warmer, less damp. Thomas got hot and sweaty. At last, he gasped with malice, “I feel going up! But are you sure there’s a way out? We meet no ants anymore!”

“Are we bound to return to the same place precisely?”

Thomas wanted to say that definitely they weren’t, the main thing was to get out, no matter whether it would be woods or hot desert or even the nomad camp of terrible bloodthirsty Pechenegs, but the wonderer’s voice seemed sneering. Thomas paused – and the pile of gold nuggets he had left in hundred steps from the entrance into the ants’ burrow flashed in his mind! “Well,” he forced out, “let us get out where we happen to get. May it just be in sun!”

“Then we’ll have to linger,” Oleg said thoughtfully. “It’s night there above.”

“Sir wonderer!”

“Let’s keep going,” Oleg replied, as he heard dangerous notes in the voice of exhausted knight. “Stars may also make a sun to someone.”

Oleg reached out his hand to help Thomas to climb: he had heavy armor on, no light shirt, but the knight dodged with indignation, only asked in a hoarse voice, “Is the entrance close?”

“Close,” Oleg comforted hastily. “That’s said by charms.”

“Thus saith the Teacher,” Thomas muttered under his breath.

“What?” Oleg asked with surprise.

“I often heard that from my tutor,” Thomas explained. “While learning quadrivium, as every knight is obliged to… Has Christ ever been to these ants?.. The Holy Book says nothing of that but he spent forty days alone in the desert where Satan tempted him. Now I know what the temptation was…”

The shining wall facing was left far behind, they groped their way in complete darkness. Should Thomas touch the walls with head or shoulders, as he did constantly, earth and small pebbles fell down. Once there came a shower of dirty water and soaked him all over.

“Damn them for not strengthening their walls!” Thomas swore. “They are ants ! Though the ones of Herodotus. Diligent, hard-working… Every good master would have done that long ago.”

“We are far beyond their anthill,” Oleg comforted.

“Why?”

“Thomas, you have the stamina of warhorse, but even so I’d have to drag you. And I value my back.”

“Is it a straighter way?”

“Half a mile.”

“And over?”

“Er… just a bit over.”

“Then two miles,” Thomas resolved. In the dark, he recoiled with such force that his armor clanged, the rock got shaking and a landslip thundered behind them. “Well,” he said reluctantly, “let’s go straight. As straight as a crow flies!”

The wonderer found his bearings in some way: he kept warning of pits and ledges with his voice. Sometimes he gripped Thomas in the dark, which made him scream in fright, dragged into a crack, as narrow as a mouse hole, that Thomas would have never found on his own but kept beating against walls for the rest of his lifetime, like a goat beats against manger.

“Is it close?” Thomas kept asking. The wonderer’s hands were holding him constantly then, and Thomas had no strength to push them away.

Once they saw a glimmer of light ahead, Thomas first thought it just seemed to him: he had spots of light floating before his eyes for a long time, but the wonderer dragged him on, urged, swore. Thomas climbed with his last strength, clutched at stones, pulled his heavy body up, rested his feet, groped blindly with his fingers spread wide apart.

He tumbled out on the surface, fell down on his back, his goggled eyes looking in the sky, so bright with stars and dented moon. The wonderer breathed hoarsely nearby. Thomas heard his choking voice. “I’d never believe… what pride brings to… Sir Thomas… you hero! Knights of Round Table not fit to hold a candle…”

“Sir wonderer!” Thomas whispered with protest, though he felt flattered.

There were shrubs on both sides and a crest blocking the sight ahead, but Thomas could see the bare top of a tall mountain. A silent shadow of a night bird, probably an owl, darted to that side. They heard a squeak in the dark, then silence again.

A grasshopper went chirring warily near Thomas. The knight looked there: the tiny green singer was seated on a grass blade in a foot from his face. The creature was fat, potbellied. He cast guarded looks at the giant monster but persisted in moving his jaggy leg on the edge of hard wing.

Thomas smiled, being moved by that. The grasshopper is definitely afraid: his big eyes goggled in fright, his feelers trembling with fear, but he chirrs his song, upholding his territory, his lands, his castle bravely against the intruding monster. Thomas moved away carefully. If he frights the bold warrior singer away, the latter will be deprived of his dominion. Other lands are all occupied and divided by others, so he, poor thing, will have to either hire or turn a knight errant. “What’s bad about being an errant knight?” Thomas said aloud and got surprised by own hoarse voice, as croaking as an old ill crow’s.

The wonderer stirred nearby, sat up heavily. His face was wet with sweat, stained with dirt. “You speak truth. The one who once made a trip around his house knows more than the one who stayed on his stove.”