Yury Nikitin - The Grail of Sir Thomas

They spent all the forenoon either rolling or dragging stones to the wall. Rope ends were thrown down from above, Oleg and the black-bearded man called Shaggy tied the stones round, dawdling with knots to extend the moments of rest. Then boulders were lifted up with poignant slowness, their sharp edges scratched the stone wall, the crumbs of granite fell down.

After a brief lunchtime, when each slave was given a dried fish and a slice of bread, Oleg was told to drive the wooden wedges. Others were watering. The slab of stone underfoot was crackling and groaning when Oleg felt a strange strain in it. Next to him, two moaning slaves were rolling a broken-off boulder with long poles.

“Step aside,” Oleg warned them. “Or you may be injured.”

The slaves looked bewildered. The foreman gave him a sharp look, then suddenly barked at them, “Get away!” The slaves flew up, like birds flushed. The huge slab gave a crack. A boulder shot up as if hurled by catapult and ploughed the dry rocky ground two steps long. Oleg stood on the very edge of the larger slab. The foreman kept his eyes on the novice, his mouth twisted. “You know stone? Good… Two fools owe to you.”

The slab was broken like an overripe watermelon: its inside gleaming red with black grains, lined from top to bottom with straight grooves, water-swollen wedges stuck in them.

Oleg picked up his excessively heavy hammer. Slaves moved around like half-dead men, their eyes lackluster. His heart was wrung with guilt: he still had not found the Truth to rescue them.

There’s nothing truly great about the one who lifted himself from slavery to the emperor’s throne, as many did. Oleg used to know Upravda, a blue-eyed shepherd who left sheep herding in Carpathian Mountains for the throne in Constantinople. He translated his Slavic name, which meant rule, governance, and law, into Latin as Justinian to mean the same 6. The word justice , derived from it, spread in Latin and other tongues. He had done much, that fair-haired shepherd, though the throne was prepared and given to him by his uncle Justin, once also a shepherd in Carpathians. But even the most powerful emperor can’t find a way for happiness. For salvation, as the young Christian faith puts it.

By evening he was hardly able to drag his feet along. The hammer was dropping out of his hands, twice he escaped falling boulders only by miracle. Covered with stone crumbs, dripping with sweat, he could barely hear, through the buzz in his ears, the foreman shout for everyone to finish work and get out.

The exhausted workers rushed to the rope ladders dropped from above, where the guards’ swords rang and glittered with bare steel. Oleg lingered. His breath burst out in rattles, his legs quivered.

The foreman whipped him. “Move it!” he bellowed. “You must be in before dark!”

Someone helped Oleg up to his feet. The guards above struggled to keep their mad dogs who pawed the ground, reaching for slaves, and clanked their scary sharp teeth.

The foreman shoved Oleg into the barn, both collapsed on the dirty floor. Once the gate was slammed behind them, its folds started to shake. Oleg heard scratches, creepy howls. A thick paw, as large as a bear’s, tried to squeeze under the gate.

Oleg turned on his back. The foreman shook his head. “You endure. No wail… A stoic?”

Oleg shook his head slowly. “It’s just puny body suffering. I am free.”

The foreman pulled a mocking face. “But you’re set in this puny body, aren’t you? You can’t leave it. It’s your body if I get it right!”

“My soul is desolated. How can I put body first? Mark Aurelius was right, though an Emperor. He said man has nothing but his soul.”

“What if body dies? Of this work?”

“Here I’m fed better than I was… in my cave. I get less tired than I used to be in the work to master my body with spirit.”

The foreman nodded, with no further interest in the novice. For previous three years, he had met different people in the stone quarry: pious men, pilgrims, and stoics, men of many countries and religions. He had taught ascetics and hermits who would only wear hefty chains and mutter prayers to break stone. His primary concern was to reveal a man eager to riot or escape. That one was neither: he, a foreman for three years, could sense it from a mile away.

* * *

It was the second week of Oleg’s breaking stone and dragging heavy boulders. He gained some muscle, though he still looked gaunt and bony as against others. He was a welcome workmate: never shirking, ready to take the worst part of it, eager to help.

Once on his way back to the barn he heard a man swear and a lash whistle. A big man was crucified on an oaken cross, his clothes torn off and scattered about the yard. A Saracen in a huge green turban, naked to his waist, with sugar-white teeth bared in malice, was lashing the poor man with delight: spinning the lash over his head, hurling it down with a whistle, each slash meant to break the skin as deep as possible. The poor man’s back was lined with crimson wales. Bitter buzzy flies were dropping on it to lick his blood and ichor before a new lash.

The foreman nudged Oleg as he walked. “A nobleman,” he said with a frown. “They’d have the likes of us nailed, and he’s just bound! Held for ransom.”

“Who is he?” Oleg asked aloofly.

“A knight errant. Or maybe just a returnee from Holy Land. Not every knight lucky as our Baron! Many got their mouth watered and that’s all. Now would love to get home alive but scatter their bones on the way…”

They were the last to enter the barn. Guards prodded them with thick ends of spears and barred the door. Thomas Malton , Oleg recalled. An arrogant knight. A boy in the appearance of a man grown, his body in its prime, but his soul still a bud.

* * *

In his third week in the stone pit, Oleg saw a violently bashed man nearby: half-naked, his neck in the iron collar, his legs chained. It took Oleg some time to recognize him as Thomas and just a moment to forget it. He worked hard, but his thought was free to shrink deep into the soul, so he was searching the Real World desperately for the answers to the questions that tormented him while in the other world his mortal body, along with other two-legged animals, would drive wedges, raise a heavy hammer, drag boulders.

Suddenly he heard a hoarse voice nearby: “Wonderer? Er… Sir Oleg?”

He saw Thomas’s face: dripping with sweat, thinned, his southern tan gone. In the clatter of picks around, no one was looking in their side. “Yes, Sir Thomas, that’s me,” Oleg replied slowly. He was still in another world.

“I didn’t recognize you at once. This work does good for you! You got stronger, put some muscle on… Are you going to stay?”

“I can speak to gods anywhere,” Oleg said indifferently.

They heard a foreman’s warning shout. Cursing, Thomas brought his pick down on the rock, the stone fragments flew high. A cloud of dust raised and made everyone look alike. In the commotion Oleg lost the sight of Thomas, but in the evening the knight found him again. “I’ve changed with the man you worked with,” he whispered.

“We’re all men,” said Oleg indifferently. “All humans.”

For a while, Thomas crowbarred a granite boulder, thinking over an answer, then gave a guarded look around and whispered, “No men here but slaves! Does it befit you, a freeborn…”

“Slaves are men,” Oleg interrupted.

“Not men like us.”

“No one was made a slave by God. Only by people.”

Thomas shook his head angrily, his blue eyes blazed with fury. “Sir wonderer! You are too humble. I want to get out of here. I need help. A bit of help!”