The Black Grail

by Damien Broderick

Genres: Sci-fi Action & Adventure; Time Travel

Synopsis

A millennium from now, global warming has gone into retreat as the Sun's dynamics convulse. The great ice returns, driving humankind back to its primitive origins. Here, bands of brutal warriors wage war in the bitter cold. Xaraf Firebridge, powerful young son of a barbarian chieftain, enrages his sire by adopting the pacifistic doctrine of an outland mystic, Darkbloom. Before he can break his vow and slay his father, he is drawn into a temporal wormline and flung a further million years into the Earth of the Failing Sun.

Clever and determined, Xaraf wanders landscapes haunted by prospects of doom and overseen by a trio of godlike Powers. Since childhood he has dreamed of a beautiful young woman. His fate, he sees, is to rescue her from captivity--and perhaps save the whole world, now moved into the outer solar system and lit by a string of tiny orbiting suns.

He has yet to meet his true foe, the dragon whose history stands opposed to humankind's. But which will prove to be this world's mythic Galahad?

Release date: January 28, 2021

Publisher: Orion

Print pages: 400

Sample

Once Darkbloom asked me which animal I was.

“Animal?” I looked at him stupidly.

“Each of us has an inner creature,” he told me, with that infuriating blissful smile which made me want to beat his face. I was ten years old. “It walks with our legs when we fail to pay attention. It can be cowed, or tamed, or befriended. So again I ask you, Xaraf: Which animal are you?”

“I am not an animal,” I said angrily. I walked away from his meager fire and its stink of herbs and belly fat. The Sun had not gone down but ice winds were blowing from the glacier. I slapped my hands on my biceps. “You fool, old fool, ugly man, I am a warrior.”

“It certainly begins to look that way,” Darkbloom said with a sigh. “Have I wasted my time with you, boy? I should take myself off and sleep in a hole in the ground.”

The Sun was cold and terribly bright across the peaks, putting long shadows on the ground and making my eyes blur.

“How can a man be an animal?” I said stubbornly, staring back at him and blinking. “It is a contradiction.”

That made the shaman laugh. “Well, at least my instructions in logic have not failed to leave an impression.” He cuffed me on the shoulder. “I think perhaps you are a dumb, clumsy bear cub, Xaraf.” He got to his feet and went away into his squalid hut, leaving me to bite my lip and wonder how he had managed once again to insult and badger me and leave me feeling hungry for his company.

That wasn’t the end of his witless, profound paradoxes.

“Which garment are you, little warrior?” he asked me, much later, after he had shown me the bitter truth of the Open Hand.

“Garment?” I was speechless with indignation. A man is not his garb. A man is his station in the tribe.

“What food, Xaraf? Which drink, which tree, which weapon, which dream?” Nodding half-asleep by his rancid fire, he asked me these questions, a warrior he had disabled with his beautiful guile.

Which dream was I?

It was unfair of him, and unnecessary, to ask which dream I was. Most of the dreams in my head he had placed there himself, like the unhatched eggs of some bird, marooned in a lonely nest. He left it up to me to warm them into life.

A bird was not, though, the animal I chose to be when he tried his quiz on me again. I was something stronger and faster and leaner and hungrier and more cunning than any bird.

(The weapon, of course, was a battlesword, but I told him it was the Open Hand. He looked hard at me, reproachfully, no fool.)

Nor was this the dream, though it was one of his:

In a place brilliant and dazzling as the secret interior of a jewel, light flares up from torches wrought in copper green with verdigris.

At the polished room’s focus, cupped in the gaping jaws of a black stone skull, cushioned by gold and emerald pillows on a pallet sprung by ivory fillets, a man like a toad squats in the pouches of his own pallid flesh.

Two horrendous warriors glare forth at me from the deep pits of the skull’s eyes. Their skin is dull green, inhuman, scaled as a reptile’s. From their slit mouths ferocious tusks jut, gleaming with spittle. I regard them with dread, and at last oblige myself to return my gaze to the terrible creature they guard.

He is motionless. Against his bulging, crinkled flab is pressed a lovely woman whose features seem demented with disgust. Heavy with gems, his right hand grips her pale, uncovered thigh.

The worst of it, of course, is that I know her. She is the companion of my dreams.

The flames of the torches swoop and flutter in some impalpable wind. Nothing else moves. Trapped in the dream, every muscle of my paralyzed body straining to leap forward, I can only watch my lost love with a despair physical as an amputation.

When I first dreamed the beautiful child, the gold and bronze fire of her hair, her eyes green as the sky’s first momentary ignition before dawn and her wonderfully smooth flesh like a warmer, paler gold, I was hardly more than an infant, perhaps two or three years old.

Her image swam upward again and again from the muzzy pools of my sleep in all the years that followed. She was perfectly real, even if I did not know her name.

It seemed to me that we spoke, at first without understanding, inventing speech as we went; later with chattering fluency in a language I had never heard.

When I was six, we built forts and wells together from the clay and sand of our dreamscape. At eight, I climbed unknown trees to chase her into their frondy boughs, and her knees were as scabbed as my own. There was no ice in our secret world. I told no one about her, not even Darkbloom.

In those years when boys go together like raucous apes, in bands, despising girls and all they stand for, I kept my faith and rambled with her through long shivery winter nights, until at last even that failing faith was stolen by new urgencies in my tough stringy body. The swaggering of adolescence brought me scorn for dreams and soft things, along with mucky bubblings and oily pittings in my swarthy skin.

So I drove her out of my sleep with the advent of those first dark hairs at my chin and crotch, the ripening of my manhood.

I kicked her out and invited in the berry-breasted girlets of the clans and the timid bruised creatures from the towns whom I learned to coax or wrestle into the young men’s hut.

My brothers wasted their energies in boisterous taunts and rivalries: fights with those sharp bone knives that pared and pierced flesh and could lose you an eye if you weren’t quick; breakneck races along the grass-flattened tracks beside the winter valley rivers. … I relished these contests no less than my kindred did—but within reason. And reason told me there was more juice to be drawn from life than the sweaty and crack-voiced jostlings of bucks’ games.

So for a time she was lost to me, driven from my dreams, that lovely child who kept match with my growing until she and I were at the lip of adulthood. With her going I was diminished, coarsened, and left rudderless (though that metaphor would not have occurred to me in our mountain homeland) until my mentor Darkbloom fetched her back to me, in sleep, in that slipping moment of awakening, and in truth.

From the outset, so I gathered in late childhood, my father had deemed me a bastard, no true seed of his warrior lineage.

Probably he’d have had me put down at birth (or done it with his own blade, more likely, or snapped my neck with his large-knuckled hands) if it hadn’t been for the noisy oohs and ahhs from all his clucking wives as they peered into my swaddling clothes.

They, at least, found no difficulty in spying out, in my dark, squashed, and bawling face, those grubs of nose, mouth, and jaw which were destined at adolescence to burst forth into a quite comical parody of his own hawkish features.

It might be supposed that my father’s irritable qualms were perfectly understandable. Cuckoldry is not unknown when a man has as many wives as my father. Still, his suspicions about my legitimacy were odd, since the man he seemed to suspect most adamantly was a scrawny outland priest whom Father had gelded with his own hunting knife the day the fellow arrived at camp.

My mother could hardly warrant the truth of the matter convincingly (if you allow the absurd: that a docked shaman might somehow recover his maimed manly function), for she spent nearly every spare moment in Darkbloom’s grubby humpy at the outskirts of camp.

There, under the chilly pressing sky of winter, she lay in trance, drugged into grinning hallucination on his herbs.

The superstitious (and that was all of them, of course) kept their distance, dreading sorcery. They construed their own cowardice as sensible caution. Still, more than once some flush-cheeked nagger must have gone scuttling to the fire with news that the outland shaman lay stretched that very moment full-length upon my mother’s naked, unconscious body.

Only in the most attenuated, garbled form could this word have reached my father, or Darkbloom certainly would have forfeited life as well as balls.

Yet the reports were true enough, as I learned when I was far advanced in Darkbloom’s tutelage.

The shaman had indeed played his part in my mother’s condition. It was scarcely the part any jealous, ignorant husband of that squalid tribe might have envisaged.

In my mother’s womb, I clung like an aquatic lizard while his magic searched my unformed organs.

It beat through my mother’s swelling belly like drumbeats of light and pummeled me.

That magic muttered to my inner ear in tongues alien to my people.

It painted images within my skull.

Mysteriously, it strengthened my growing.

In simple truth, the magic of Darkbloom made me the godchild of a …

Of course I hesitate. Well, how better to express it?

… of a god.

Despite my father’s relish for butchery, I disgraced myself, as I say, by embracing an outland creed. At its core was a fervent faith in the Forceless Way, the Open Hand. To my father’s shocked and disbelieving shame, I had sworn an oath never to take a human life.

When in turn I broke that vow it was for no better cause than to please him, the father of my body. Some confused and lamentable sense insisted that after all I had betrayed the central truth of my kin and myself. Yet, in the event, hacking a man’s sneering head from its neck sickened and excited me nearly to the point of delirium.

It is a vile day to recall …

… the slap of leather on hide, my own bitter yells and taunts, thunder of baluchitherium hooves (those glorious giant Miocene animals, genetic restructs from the Black Time, that I shall never again ride), the dry haze of dust in eyes and throat—

The air pressed down. I felt it through the thick saliva in my throat, the blood raging in my muffled ears. All the eager world leaned on my shoulders, like a pantheon of godlets holding their breath.

Above the distant mountains, the whole great valley, vast banks of snow cloud towered. Above and through it all—clang and clash of our poor metal blades, stones flung from hooves spitting sparks, throats opened in rage and pain, blood spurting, my warriors pressing hard on the wheeling Rokhmun thieves—those ponderous heavens tipped into the valley’s bowl an offering of gentle flakes of white.

What I most wanted, in the midst of this wonderful carnage, was simply a share of the righteous conviction my men took as much for granted as the air they breathed, while their blades ripped into flesh, as their companions and foes lurched and tumbled from their mounts, eyes staring, mouths afroth.

In that whirling melee I hung back, paralyzed for all my yelling, my untainted sword in its scabbard banging at my back.

Right and duty. Courage and manliness. Truth. And the noisy snow-thickened pushing and striking and the Rokhmi dying two or three to every buck of mine. Yet my own fell too, fell in blood and filth.

A moment earlier the dust had gritted my nostrils. Now it churned to slippery mud as our enormous mounts lashed the snow. A mud-fouled animal broke through, pressed to my right hand. I heard the thieves’ battle cry bray in my ear, and spittle or snowflakes struck my face.

The icy wind came into me, then.

My blade was in my hand, freed, roaring.

I knew well enough how to use it. It was not my competence that was at issue.

Back jerked the jeering Rokhm. Our mounts were huge, slow. He slewed his beast about. My blade went into the animal’s neck.

Three times the height of a man, the baluchitherium rose in panic and pain. It bellowed, lashing without aim. It stumbled. The bandit went howling into mud among trampling limbs huge as boles.

In all that blurry white, blood streamed along my virgin blade.

I tasted my own sputum like blood. The pressure in my head was like the thick whining of a blow to the base of the nose, when there’s the tang of metal at the back of the tongue and a kind of stupidity enters the brain.

I was drifting away from it all. But the anger and confusion roared in my body, drove my heels into my beast’s sides.

The snow rushed, an obscuring blanket.

With no warning it was instantly evident that all the Rokhm were accounted for—all but the leader. Four of my warriors were missing: dead or mutilated. I stared around me, wrenching from side to side. The intruder realized how matters stood in that same moment and wheeled with hysterical speed, and was gone into the white fury.

Yes, four were lost and the rest battered and exhausted. I was the only one still with the strength for pursuit. My reserves had been husbanded at a cost I measured now in an access of shame.

“Go back,” I cried to them. My voice was lost in the rising wind. I tugged ferociously at my mount’s reins, put my mouth next to Yharugh’s ear. Flakes were melting in his filthy beard. He was afraid of me, but I did not like the sidelong look he gave me. “Take our victory to camp,” I said, slapping his armored shoulder. “Tell Golan that I shall fetch him a trophy.”

Yharugh said nothing. Not one of them spoke. I returned my bloody sword to its scabbard.

I spun away then from those soaked, tired warriors. It was cold and wet and the light was almost gone, but I hardly noticed.

Vengefully I rode after the man I desired, suddenly, with all my heart, to kill.

I remember perfectly, to this day, the jolt of the blow going into my arm, into my clumsily braced body, all the virtue and grace of balance, of physical poise which Darkbloom had labored to instill in me, lost in that foul instant, and the blood gouting in its bright, diminishing pulse.

The flurry of churned snow, its white slushed with mud and red.

I leaped from my high saddle, whooping, anything to keep my sanity, and scooped up the thing which had been the cage for a mind and was now a filthy mockery.

I grasped its greasy hair and swung it aloft. It weighed so little that it carried my arm up and over my shoulder, and emotions I did not wish to acknowledge roared in me. I grinned, laughed out loud. I shrieked with sick joy, brandishing my trophy though no one else was there to witness my triumph.

I looped the braided hair of it into my belt and spurred my monstrous lumbering baluchitherium toward my father’s snow-shrouded tent.

And became lost.

And fell into endless time.

I realize that what I am saying is difficult to understand, let alone give credence. Never fear. I shall explain this mad detour, in its turn.

Where I am now, people frown on murder. It makes me feel as if I’m wandering in a dream.

They don’t approve of killing other people for revenge, profit, or whim. They settle their scores by the methods I once imagined my old teacher had invented.

I never for a moment really believed those stories. Darkbloom told them to me when I was restless, chafing at my exercises. He gazed into his own emptiness and told me the stories he saw there. His brooding, wistful fantasies of a different world.

How was I to know his ridiculous tales were true?

Can they really live without honor and mayhem? I used to provoke poor Darkbloom with my scorn. Now I see he was correct, but I still don’t pretend to understand it.

They know rage and lust, like the men and women (and the mocking children, for that matter) of my own tribe, of my tribe’s enemies. How do they manage without killing?

They contain themselves.

Believe it or not, that’s the answer.

They hold their tongues. They back down. Conciliate. Smile. Offer gifts to those they despise. Somehow they deal with their most powerful impulses without losing themselves in a tempest of screaming, chanting, leaping, hacking ruin.

Often they seem merely pallid to me.

At other times, when I watch their cool restraint, I am awed by their courage.

Surely it takes bravery to trust individuals you have never met. These people don’t give it a second thought, as far as I can tell.

They place themselves in the hands of those whose names are a mystery to them.

Outside your own tent, who is reliable? How can you gauge the intentions of a man whose ways might well be as alien as the way of the reptile to the cat?

Or as sinister and dangerous as your own reflections in a lying pool.

A pool, or a mirror, shows you your own face, but reverses it. That is something Darkbloom showed me when I was very small. (The pool, I mean. We had no artifact as sophisticated as a mirror, there in the tribe.) To this day, I treasure that frightening, still knowledge.

There are criminals here, as everywhere. Are they slow to kill? It seems so. I don’t know what stays their hand. Is it merely the fear of consequences, if they are apprehended? Even dogs, even yapping curs, are richer in spirit than that.

Still, it must be admitted. The criminals are reluctant to murder their opponents.

And for the rest, those governed by custom and law—yes, certain exceptions are allowed.

The truly wicked are put down by the State, formally executed, though it’s rare.

Limited military actions are permitted, against a declared enemy.

So is self-defense on the part of the civil police.

There are lists written down in books. That is how they are. They like to refer to the records before they do anything irreversible.

So the spontaneity is taken out of killing. There’s no zest in the act. The deliberate infliction of death always provokes a lot of heart-searching and ethical debate.

Amazing. I feel as though I’ve come into the company of a nation of gentle lunatics.

Not that such tender-mindedness is in itself strange to me. As I say, Darkbloom had long since inserted such odd notions into my mind. I just never expected to see them put into practice on a larger scale.

What I find in this place is my own guilty eccentricity writ large. The man or god who trained and guided me in the brawling tents and huts of my people held similar beliefs in the sanctity of life. If anything, Darkbloom was even more obsessed about it than these people.

Maybe that was just in contrast to what he saw all around him. It must have driven him to distraction.

Now I see his philosophy acted out on every hand—empty hands, yes, weapon-free. How strange it is to recall the sick fascination and unbelieving shock I felt when first he alleged the wickedness of murder, the sinfulness of rapine, the injustice of my father’s tribe’s random bloody raids on the property and persons of our vile neighbors.

Once I had a dream with which I taxed Darkbloom, for it filled me with a curious disquiet.

“Can the images of sleep truly be read?”

“As your village shamans read the entrails of chickens and new lambs? Hardly.”

“No. As written runes are interpreted by those who can figure them.”

He ruffled up my hair, though I shrugged off his hand. “Tell me your dream, little Xaraf, and let us see what we can do with it.”

“I was coming down from a great height. It was at night, and firebugs flew about my face. I climbed down a strangely constructed palisade, like something the filthy townsfolk might use to keep our goats out of their crops, and the fences were made of wattling in small squares tied together into large panels. It was not meant for climbing, and I had trouble finding purchase for my feet, though I skimmed lightly as a bird, my shirt billowing up about my chest. In my hand I held a big branch, though it was more like a small tree covered in red blossoms, branching and spread out. They were bright as cherry blossoms. As I descended I had one of these trees, then two, then one again. I came to the end of the palisades and already the lower blossoms were faded. A tall young man was standing in the garden, a stranger, I think, though it seemed that I knew him. He used a rake to comb out thick tufts of hair from the branches of a tree similar to mine. I approached him and asked if trees of that kind could be transplanted into my garden. He hugged me in a brotherly fashion, but I struggled against him. He insisted that this was allowed, and promised to show me how the planting was done in another garden. It was his claim that though he was to receive some advantage, I would not suffer by it.”

I fell silent then, troubled.

“Did he show you the planting?” Darkbloom asked finally.

“I do not remember.”

He glanced at me. “Did a wetness wake you from this dream?”

I blinked, then saw what he meant. It made me laugh.

“No, old fool, it was not such a dream. He was not a girl.”

“Did not you and your cousin Yharugh once play such games?”

Now I became angry.

“You make everything filthy. It was not such a dream. I wished to kill him.” Then I blinked again, for I had forgotten that.

“Ah.” Nodding wisely, Darkbloom added another thin stick to his poor fire. “Who was this young man, then?”

In a very low voice I said, “I think he was my enemy, whom I wish with all my heart to kill.”

Darkbloom rose, drew his tattered cloak about him, stalked away shaking with rage into the night, and stared up, like a deeper shadow under the shadow of his hut, at the bright stars. When his voice came to me from that blackness it was remote, and crueler than I had ever heard it.

“Yes, Xaraf. That was your enemy. That was your brother. That was the stranger you will wish with all your heart to kill. Instead you must master him by another means. He will throw down his hot blossoms from heaven and scorch your garden, and you must not strike in return.” Suddenly, with not the slightest sound to betray his movement, he stood at my shoulder and his rotten-tooth stinking breath was chokingly in my nostrils. “Do you hear me, Xaraf? You must swear again, swear and swear upon the womb of your mother and the staff of your father that you will keep to the Open Hand.” His hand gripped my upper arm with a fierce, demented strength. “Swear that once more, Xaraf. Swear, I say!”

When I was thirteen or fourteen years old, I trembled with terrified delight to hear these extraordinary opinions.

I was enraptured by his moral sensitivity.

Of course I doubt I’d have listened all that long to him if he hadn’t shown me, in endless, painful, and exultant lessons, how to beat the tripes out of anyone who looked sideways at me.

The paradox of rational pacifism, yes.

To my father, of course, such ideas would not have been so much anathema as unthinkable. He was unable, literally, to frame the concept of nonviolence in his great bearish tempestuous head.

My defection was incomprehensible to him. It pointed to some tragedy, perhaps even some guilt in himself—or, more likely, the infestation of a demon, an unmanly weakness from my mother’s lineage. Certainly, as I have mentioned, she was strange enough in her behavior since before my birth.

Even so, at last I chose deliberately to enter into adulthood, in accordance with the cruel laws of my people, by slaying another human being.

On that same day I lost my way in time.

You could say I took a wrong turning, and tumbled a million years into the lovely and terrible evening of the world.

The severed head bounced at my knee, looped to my belt by its filthy braided hair. In the gray gloom of the storm it seemed to mock my guilt with its grin. Dark streaks and clots of blood stained my leggings, the stains frozen by rime.

I felt certain that I was about to die.

“No,” I muttered, gasping for breath in the freezing wind. “I will not die. No, I will not die.” To my surprise the words came louder, defiant, howling at last from my throat. Eyes slit and stinging, I tried uselessly to penetrate the gusting snow.

Turmoil. I screamed to the screaming wind, “Lords of Light and Death, give me your guidance!” No answer came; I had expected none. Somehow, though, the numbing cold and the ritual of invocation kindled a warm fire of imagination. I built around me a picture of the safe, despised city of childhood, the defended trading city Berb-Kisheh. On market days I had scampered there amid raucous throngs, through the bazaars and granaries. Bright fabrics were spread in the Sun; I breathed in the rich riot of tangs and tastes, kebabs turning over charcoal, lamb blackened but red and bursting with juice within, slices of onions and fat chunks of vegetables we never saw from season to season except on our visits to the city, and all the cries of peddlers and merchants shouting to outdo each other, mats and tables piled to overflowing in the warm protective bustle of the enclosing stone walls. …

Sleet whipped me. Cupped by the hard flaps of my hide helmet, my ears caught the dream-boom and hiss of an ocean I’d never known. The fury of the storm tore at my soaked, clinging clothing. Its clamminess disgusted and infuriated me.

Snow, blinding as sand, howled about the unprotected legs of my baluchitherium, picked like the beaks of carrion birds at his eyes. It hammered my own face, layered my cheeks with a crust of ice.

I hugged the saddle with stiff thighs, jolting as we blundered without vision. My fists clung to the reins but felt nothing.

In all this gray desolation only the jarring motion of my mount broke through the confusion which knotted my instincts, my senses.

It was not impossible that I had been blundering, in these hours of the storm, through great stupid circles.

“Keep moving, don’t stop,” I heard my mouth saying. My face pressed the baluchitherium’s huge neck, and my eyes were closed tight again. “You fool, you thrice-damned fool.” Wind ripped the words away. It was true, though. Only a fool would lose himself like this, not three hours’ ride from home. I shivered in a racking tremor. My father’s scorn. And the others, the scarred elders. I heard their derision. It made my belly cramp.

In the sightless pall, my numb hand fell from the rein and struck something icy, hairy, knobby. His head, my murdered foe. I let my fingers rest on his eyeballs, and laughed at the horror of it. Let them scoff. My party had routed the enemy. That was enough. There would be no scorn from the elders when I flung my trophy at their feet.

His eyeballs were frozen, like small round stones of ice.

I snatched my hand back, pounded it on the animal’s neck. He cried out, tossed his head. He was ready to lie down in the snow and sleep. I brushed clumsily at my own eyes. The darkness was night falling. How pitiful. How Darkbloom would relish the pointless loss of grace in this moment. So nothing now remained but the ride into the frozen dark until my animal collapsed under me. For my dirge I would hear the ignorant shrieking of the wind.

I nursed the fake warmths of memory: of gorges wild with life, the roaming bears and nests of snow geese; of Berb-Kisheh, the Green City in whose shadow I’d been born, and its smug townsfolk of whom my own nomadic people were so stubbornly contemptuous. The sweet scents of the Rezot-Azer valley seemed to brush my face, though I knew that my face was frozen, the spring breath of tulip and rose blowing in profusion, the meadows of clover far from the desert, where we love to rest. …

I slipped in my saddle, was falling forward, struck something hard with my forehead.

The baluchitherium floundered in a drift of snow, churning enormously to his own disadvantage. A crust of ice broke beneath one hoof as the other foreleg slid, twisting like a tree trunk broken by wind, across a shattered boulder. His head swung from side to side, and his mouth foamed as he shrilled.

All . . .