Yury Nikitin - The Grail of Sir Thomas

The Black Beard touched his badly-hurt head, stood up and left without saying a word. Even villains can’t object to such forcible arguments.

At night, Oleg and Thomas crawled on their bellies on the bare ground, peering at the rocks shimmering in the starlight. The silence was broken by rare howls of jackals. In the valley far below, a red fire could be seen. In times it disappeared, as a vigilant sentinel walked past.

Gorvel had a long talk with Roland, glancing back at Thomas and Oleg frequently. They seemed to have reached a consent at last, as they covered themselves with cloaks and lay down to sleep. Villains stood the first watch. Chachar sat with them for a while, staring in the dark with resent for Thomas for his paying her too little attention. However, she was almost the first to fall asleep.

Oleg fingered his charms. A wooden figure of hare was caught frequently. If he got the right meaning of that sign sent by his eternal, all-seeing and all-knowing soul, someone was going to run away, trying to save his skin.

The Black Beard, with his bandaged head, was lying at the other end of the cleft. Next to him, Oleg saw the heads of his survived villains. One of the marauders, a taciturn beastlike man, sat beside them, exchanging some quiet remarks with them.

Thomas and Oleg looked at each other. Thomas alerted, pulled his sheathed sword towards himself. “Is there a way out?” he whispered hopefully. “I must get out!”

“I see. The Holy Grail–”

“Krizhina waits for me! If I linger, brothers will make her marry!”

“Oh, that’s serious, I see. But we have to wait. For some host to pass by, for something else to happen… This land is no wild steppes for Hazars to invade without being seen! Someone somewhere is already blowing trumpets, saddling horses…”

“They’ll be late,” Thomas sighed. “We have to set hopes upon a miracle.”

Oleg heard a heavy sigh in the dark, as if one were carrying the whole cleft on his back. He smirked sadly. All the way, the knight had been telling with ardor about the miracles made by first Christians at the least occasion. And when nothing is left to us but belief in miracles, he lost his heart.

Far below, on the left side of their crevice, a stone tapped lightly on stone. As the man saw himself spotted, he dashed across the moonlit area and vanished in the shade, only his hard soles stamped hastily on the rocks.

Oleg glanced back at the sentinels. The Black Beard was in place, one of his villains with him, a sullen marauder sitting nearby and grinding his dagger, but another villain had disappeared. The Black Beard shook his fist angrily after the runaway.

Gorvel swore. “I’d rather expect it of their leader! That scum is going to those mountains. And Hazars are far. The bastard must have robbed us! And he’s leaving!”

“Will he leave?” Oleg asked with doubt. Thomas shifted his gaze between the wonderer and the red-bearded knight.

“I stake my arms and armor,” Gorvel said sharply, “on his successful leave. He walks light and far from Hazars. See their fire?”

Thomas looked at the far fire, far even from the foot of the hill. His face darkened.

“I bet my head to your armor, sir,” Oleg told Gorvel sadly. “Hazars have made fires there deliberately for us to see. In fact, two score of warriors lay in ambush among those rocks, in half a hundred steps from us, and listen, trying to guess what we do, what we are going to do, what we hope on. That’s a common tactics of Hazars! I’m surprised to find you, Sir Gorvel, a man of war, that easy to be dece–”

They heard a scream in hundred steps in the dark. A heavy body hit against the stone, pebbles clattered down the slope. A scream again: muffled, as if the man was silenced while uttering it. Dead silence fell, broken only by distant sounds of fast feet running away.

Thomas turned to Gorvel briskly, with his eyes shining like lynx’s and a wide smile from ear to ear. “You armor, Sir Gorvel!”

“Not now,” Oleg interfered hurriedly. “He’ll need it to fight.”

Gorvel fidgeted, as he forced himself to speak with great embarrassment and displeasure. “Sir Thomas, I’ve lost my armor. It belongs to sir wonderer. I, a knight, made a mistake. You and your friend know the ways of filthy barbarians better. That’s no surprise for me…”

Oleg saw Thomas’s face darkening in the faint moonlight and put his heavy hand on the knight’s shoulder to keep him from a furious lung. The cleft was dark. They heard marauders speaking in angry, irritated voices. “Keep a vigilant watch,” Oleg told them in a warning tone. “Over the rocks and bushes. Memorize their positions.”

A dark figure turned to him. When the man spoke, Oleg recognized the voice of Roland, the leader of marauders. “I know such tricks. They won’t steal up.”

“See to no one sleeping on the watch!”

Roland hemmed. His reply sounded a bitter irony. “Everyone heard of Hazars. A bit at least. Who can sleep when his hair stands on end?”

Oleg turned away from him. “Let no one try to get out alone!” Thomas added in a peremptory tone of a lordly knight.

Roland laughed. “If anyone nursed such idea, he trampled and grinded it by now!”

Oleg saw their faces, white in the dark. Woken up by the hushed voices, people looked at him with hope. He adjusted the bow and the quiver on his back, checked his knives. “I’ll go and have a close look at their camp.”

Thomas gasped. “But how you… get there? You’ve said we are surrounded. They sit behind every stone. A fly won’t pass!”

“There are no flies at night,” Oleg replied indifferently. “Only gnats… Sir Thomas, I’m not a steel-thundering knight, nor a villain. Slavs are taught as children to steal up to an animal! A child grasps a wild goose, an adult can jump on the back of the keenest deer… When coming back, I’ll give a whistle, so you won’t shoot me in case if you hear my steps.” He backed and vanished in the night. Thomas, Gorvel and all the rest listened tensely, watched the starry sky closely, but no star vanished behind a moving figure, no twig snapped, no pebble clicked.

A scatter of smooth stones looked like a herd of giant turtles frozen in the chill of the night. The sentinels kept counting the largest rocks. The Black Beard shot two arrows in a boulder that seemed suspicious to him and saw it sinking a bit, changing its shape slightly. When the moon came out again from behind a cloud, the boulder was not in place.

Oleg moved in the night, as silent as a bat. In times stopped, pressed against the ground, smelled unwashed bodies and horse sweat, listened to the creaks of belts and breath of men. Once he made out a full picture, to the smallest detail, he moved on, slipping past Hazars in their hide. There were not two scores of barbarians around their refuge, as Oleg had supposed, but twice that number, or even more. Karganlyk was so craving to get the Holy Grail that he’d sent half his tribe to guard, for no one to slip out, to crawl away, to dig into burrows.

As Oleg lay on the rocks, he listened to jackals roaming around the Hazar camp. A skilled hunter reads the voices of animals as easily as their tracks, so Oleg, still being far from the camp, knew that there were no more than hundred Hazars and twice that number of horses, three bonfires, six killed rams, and human flesh cooked on spits: Hazars, unlike Khazars, used to eat not only dead enemies but their own dead too.

He slipped down into the valley, started stealing up to the bonfires. He stopped dead at the strange sounds: mumbles and measured trample, as if several men were making a gloomy ritual dance. Oleg sneaked closer and saw, against the starry sky, a massive wooden cross, a white body on it. The poor man was crucified. The villain who tried to escape alone. Oleg recognized the dark stripes on his body at once: they were where Hazars had cut the man’s skin off to make their belts of it. The villain’s mouth was gagged tightly. They don’t want his voice to get hoarse before time. They would let him shriek as much as he wished in the morning, for Oleg and his small party to see and hear what awaited for them.