Grail Lore

“Long, long ago,” said Merlin, “in the dawn of the world, when Egypt was young, when Ur of the Chaldees was a raw new city and Babylon but a cluster of huts beside a muddy river, there was a sorcerer, a great master of magic. At first he was a master of the light, but as he grew older and more aware of his own mortality, he turned little by little toward the dark. Then at last, in terror of death, he turned his back altogether on the light, and made a great pact with the Prince of Darkness—no less than that one who is called the Son of the Morning.”

“Sathanas,” Roland breathed. “The Great Evil.”

Merlin nodded. “Yes. That one himself. The sorcerer gave his soul in return for his body’s life. He gained much else, too: beauty, wealth, power. Oh, he was beautiful, like a dark angel, and men fell on their faces before him.

“But evil is never content. It was a condition of his pact that he be no king himself, but rule through the power of a king. And so he did, from generation to generation. But men’s lives are short and their memories treacherous. For each king who died, he must find another, corrupt him, raise him up, rule through him, watch him grow old, then have it all to do again.

“He grew greatly weary of this endless round. For a long while he withdrew from the world, built himself a fortress with strong spells, and set himself to master all magic that there was in the world. Yet he found he could not do that, for the magic of the light was now closed to him. And that, in its time, drove him nigh mad.

“Then in his stronghold, amid his armies of demons and spirits of the dark, he heard a rumor, a whisper, a tale brought in scattered fragments from the world’s heart. The Messiah had come to Jerusalem, or so it was said. He had come, and lived as the most mortal of men, and died as a criminal, hung on a cross.

“And that, said the messengers who brought this word to the world’s end, was preposterous; and yet it seemed to be true. For the light is incalculable, and its ways are not mortal ways, and it does as it pleases to do, beyond reason or sense or logic.

“The sorcerer would have regarded this as a curiosity, a fine tale for a long night, except for the rumor that came with it. It was even more fragmentary than the word of the Messiah—who after all was but the incarnation of a minor deity in a very small province of the Roman Empire. And Rome, as every seer knew, was about to destroy that province utterly, and scatter its people to the winds of the world.

“Still, the rumor was this: that before the god’s son died, he had celebrated a feast of sacrifice. He had offered up a cup of his own blood, blood of a god, in token of the life that would be given thereafter. And that, as any mage knew, was the greatest of sacrifices, the divine sacrifice, that could redeem or destroy the world.

“Others before him had done this. Osiris, Tammuz, the Green King—their blood bound the chains of earth and heaven, and strengthened the light in its long battle against the dark. But none of them had left behind a relic, a remembrance, a vessel that had held his blood. That vessel was in the hands of a man of Jerusalem, or so it was said; it was kept hidden, perhaps in ignorance of its power.

“For power it had, beyond any instrument of magic that had been in this world. It belonged to the light, but it was not necessarily of the light. In the hands of a master of the dark, it would be a great weapon, and a mighty force for destruction.

“The sorcerer wanted it. He wanted it as he had wanted nothing in all the long ages of his life—even more strongly than he had wanted to live forever. He wanted this thing, the cup of a god’s blood. He wanted it, and he set out to take it.

“And he could not win it. It was taken out of Jerusalem in its fall, when the Temple burned and Roman armies trampled the holy places. It was spirited away, hidden from him, taken to the far edge of the world, even to the isle of Britain. And there he found it, but he could not win it. It was too well protected.

“He wielded every sleight and wile and power at his disposal. He put on the semblance of mortal man: first a priest of the Romans, then a Druid of the Britons. But this cup, this Grail as it was called in Britain, was kept from him, and hidden away where he could not find it.

“Then at last he conceived a plan. He found a woman, a meek vessel as he thought her. He summoned a demon, a prince of his master’s court, to lie with her and get a child on her. For he could not do this himself, much as he might wish to: that was another price of his deathlessness, to forsake all pleasure of woman’s body, and all hope of getting children. But the demon whom he summoned put on his face, his semblance of supernal beauty, and so seduced the woman.

“In the passing of time she bore a son, a child without a father, a strange inhuman creature whose every breath was magic.”

“You,” said Roland. “That was you.”

“Yes,” said Merlin. “I was that child, wrought by a sorcerer to seize the Grail. But he had underestimated my mother. She was a princess of Gwynedd, a redoubtable woman even in her youth, and she was a Druid and the daughter of Druids. She raised me as she saw fit, and that was in the light; and when my creator came to claim me, I was already corrupted. My mother had warned me what to expect, and advised me to betray as little of myself as possible. Therefore I seemed a biddable young thing, and dull, so that the sorcerer decided in the end to leave me where I was—but aware of his presence, and ready to do as he bade me, whenever he should have need of me.

“Which in time he did. He used me to make a king as he had done so often before: to raise up Uther as king over Britain, and to seduce him with the lady of Cornwall, and thus to beget Arthur. Arthur was to be his puppet, his kingly servant.

“But I was my mother’s son, and from the very beginning I was Arthur’s man. I loved him, both the child he was and the king I foresaw. I swore a great oath before the gods, that I would keep him in the light, and never surrender him to the darkness.

“So did I betray my maker twice over. I was not the meek slave he had wrought me to be, nor was my Arthur the puppet king that he was to have been. We had defied him, and worse, succeeded—and made him our bitter enemy.

“It was he who sent the vision of the Grail into Arthur’s warband, and so broke the fellowship in its obsession with the quest. And it was he who seduced Nimue and set her to betray me; but she woke to the truth too late, and knew what she had done. She could not free me, but she could protect Arthur, and did, as much as she might. His kingdom fell, but his soul was saved; and his son, who was to have been the sorcerer’s puppet, was slain by Arthur’s own hand.

“As for the Grail, which was the cause of it all, it was indeed almost betrayed into the sorcerer’s hands. He found it in its hiding place in the kingdom of Montsalvat, in a fortress called Carbonek, protected by nine enchantresses and by a brotherhood of holy warriors ruled by a Druid king. The sorcerer corrupted the king’s son, maimed and nigh destroyed him. But when the Grail was all but in his grasp, one of Arthur’s own warband came bearing the power of the light, and so saved the prince and the fortress and the Grail. The sorcerer was cast down by the might of the Grail. His beauty was rent from him, and much of his strength. The Grail was saved. The light had conquered.

“But it was too late for me,” Merlin said, “or for Nimue, whom I still loved. Poor child, she was racked with guilt. She swore to guard me, and bound our daughter to it, too. I would not have permitted that, but she was careful to do it where I could not prevent her.

“For she was convinced that as greatly diminished as our old enemy was, he was not dead; and he would look for me, to destroy me if he could, for I had betrayed him in everything that I did. I had raised Arthur in the light, I had won over Nimue—and yes, I had taught that young warrior, too, the one called Parsifal, so that he came to Montsalvat and redeemed its prince, and saved the Grail. He had a fair store of magic, did Parsifal. His forefathers had brought the Grail out of Jerusalem before its fall; and Nimue was his mother’s child, his own sister.”

“You taught him deliberately, then,” said Roland. “You knew what he would be.”

“Ah,” said Merlin, lifting his shoulder in a shrug. “I take no credit for that. The gods—or God, if you will—had rather more to do with it than I did. But he was a good pupil. Not as good as his sister, or for that matter as you are, but good enough in the end. He nearly failed, you know. When he came to Montsalvat, his foresight abandoned him. He was silent when he should have spoken, and shrank back when he should have been bold. But for that, the sorcerer would never have found the Grail’s hiding place at all.”

“But because he did,” Roland said, “he was destroyed. Wasn’t it a good thing, then, that Parsifal did seem to fail?”

“Some would call it blind luck,” Merlin said. “I call it the gods’ hand—and their humor, too, maybe.”

— Kingdom of the Grail, Prelude