Yury Nikitin - The Grail of Sir Thomas

“No ideas at all.”

“But how…”

“There’s one more enemy. The Head of Secret Seven!”

Thomas felt creepy all over, despite the hot air. “Isn’t it enough fighting?” he asked in a husky voice.

“We need to know: why all that fuss about an old copper cup?”

He went out of the cave briskly. There was a rumble behind, the ceiling collapsed. Through the doorway, Thomas could see huge falling stones. He hurried after the wonderer, felt a push of hot air on his back. He glanced over again: the ceiling was down, walls coming closer.

“We have no need of the cave,” Oleg blurted impatiently.

“None we have,” Thomas agreed, then asked cautiously, “And that… magician? Couldn’t he survive as you did?”

“No,” Oleg replied without looking back.

The ceiling in two steps behind Thomas subsided, a stream of dirty water gushed out. He mended his pace, ran after the wonderer on the dry. “You killed him?”

“I failed to do it. Too much killing! I granted his life to him.”

“How is he?”

“Enclosed in stone. About a verst deep in. Or deeper… I don’t remember.”

Thomas hurried, his dumbfounded eyes fixed on the hunched back that once was so broad. His sword was sheathed, he pressed the cup on his breast, as he had no bag anymore. “Won’t he get free? That would be bad…”

“Even the Secret Seven have no power to free him! He’s spread inside the stone, merged with it.”

“You are cruel as only a Pagan can be!” Thomas cried hoarsely. “He’d prefer death.”

“Death,” Oleg replied heavily, without looking back at him, “is for a long time, very long… And a live man has hope.” There was a thunder behind them again, sand and pebbles came down in torrents on their heads and shoulders.

“If he’s imprisoned for life… How long do magicians live?” Thomas cried on the go.

“Differently,” the wonderer snapped. “Fagim perished in over hundred thousand, and Trtsik died of old age in forty… You hold the cup firm! Don’t be distracted. We need to ruin all this bug-ridden place. No mercy to those who gorge on our blood. Do as you would be done by!”

They climbed downstairs, then the corridor turned twice, Thomas clasped the cup with care to his breast.

The corridor ended with a small ordinary door. Tar torches blazed on both sides of it, scattering sparkles. No guards, no bars. Thomas shrugged his shoulders with chill.

The wonderer pushed the door, it opened with no squeak. There was a middle-sized room with ascetic furniture. A monastic room , Thomas would say if not the presence of Satan he felt there. The candles burning in the wall niches spread a pleasant sweetish smell around. In the middle of the cave, there was a tall table where a broad-shouldered man in black clothes was sitting with his back to Oleg and Thomas, writing on a parchment with a white goose quill.

Chapter 41

The man did not turn but continued to write. “What detained you, the Wise?” he asked slowly.

“Trifles,” Oleg replied. He winced, fingers of his right hand were feeling a huge swollen bruise on his left elbow. “Have I kept you waiting too long, Slymak?”

“Never mind,” the man replied. “I had some things to finish before, anyway.” He put the quill aside, turned slowly. A deathly cold struck through Thomas, a breath out of grave. Slymak had white hair and tiny grey beard but radiated the power Thomas had sensed neither in himself nor in any other man before. The look of his sunken eyes was piercing. Thomas felt the evil wise man had known all of him at once, assessed his thoughts and desires, weighed his honor and knightly pride, looked through memories of the banks of Don and the beautiful Krizhina. Slymak did not look a strong man but Thomas had no doubt that a move of his eyebrow would shatter a stone wall.

“The idea of stealing the cup,” Oleg spoke slowly, “was yours?”

He spoke with strain, watching every move of the Head of Secret Seven, while Slymak settled back in his armchair easily, crossed his legs, smiled in a relaxed, free and easy way. Like a lord. “The Wise,” he said, savoring that word, “but have failed to guess… Haven’t you?”

“I have,” Oleg replied honestly.

“Now I can say it,” Slymak said uncaringly. Thomas caught himself at an anxious thought of himself and the wonderer as mice in a box together with a big cat. “Surely, the cup is nothing to us, people of reason. It means little even to Britain… though it could be some help to her.”

“Who is it important for?”

Slymak smiled condescendingly, fiddled with his beard. “For the new country, new nation… that could rise hundreds of years later!”

“Your calculations go that far?” Oleg said in a dull voice.

“That’s your school, the Wise. You were the one to lay the foundations of knowing, of exact science. Our calculations say the cup will be carried across the ocean where a huge continent lies… In a word, there will be a new nation that may grow too independent… er… owing to some circumstances of its birth. That nation could acquire unprecedented power! You know we need no foes. We need workers.”

“Is the cup bound to get to that new continent?” Oleg asked.

Slymak nodded at the stiffened Thomas who stood still, pressing the cup against his chest with both hands. “His descendants!.. Like father, like son. Adventurers, brigands, poets, hirelings, dreamers, prophets… All of them shall rush to the new lands and create the state of new… er… sort. All the states we know today are just hen coops and farmyards as against that one. You know we can’t allow it. No nation or kingdom can disobey us.”

“Have you heard of how Fagim died?” Oleg said softly. “He was the Head of Secret Seven.”

Slymak’s pale cheeks flashed with red. He leaned on the back of his armchair, chuckled. “Yes, you succeeded in uniting Slavs. Though only eastern tribes. But we made this victory of yours turn out to be a defeat! The son of Rurik, whom you’d led to Novgorod, tried to accept the Judaism of Khazars. His wife was baptized in the Orthodox Christian rite. Furious Svyatoslav, a grandson to Rurik, adhered to the true Russian faith only because he was indifferent to any gods. And his son, great-grandson to Rurik… ha ha… left his Russian name of Vladimir for the Greek one of Basil. With his help, we threw a net of steel on the savage beast called Rus’!”

Oleg went black, as though burnt by invisible fire. His teeth made a fierce grind in the cruel silence, he looked down.

“And Vladimir himself,” Slymak went on with malicious laughter, “the one baptized your Rus’, was but half a Rusich, which you fear to recall! Who was… ha ha… his mother? Malusha, a daughter of Gulcha who’s now one of Secret Seven! And you know well who was Malusha’s father. You know , don’t turn away!.. And you know why it was so easy for Malusha to enchant the furious Svyatoslav, the last Prince of Rus’. You know why his son Vladimir, who was considered a contemptible offspring of slave woman, killed his blood brothers… his half-brothers, of pure Rus blood. And why he became the Great Prince of all Rus’, took the daughter of Roman emperor for wife, forced the wild Rus’ to christen!”

Oleg was bending, as though under an avalanche of falling rocks. He turned ghastly pale, with black pits of eyes, his breath rattling. He looked aged at once, dead tired.

“The very name of your nation is all but extinct,” Slymak snapped fiercely. “In the most remote villages, where our power has not reached still, there are Ruses but all the rest are Russian slaves, Russian serfs, Russian servants… Later they shall be just Russians. You, as a sorcerer, must know well the difference between noun and adjective!.. Once I met Sardan, just after he had penetrated to Kievins. ‘What nation are you now?’ I asked. ‘Russian,’ he answered. I laughed and said, ‘And I am Greek…’ Ha ha! The top class of humor, you see?”