anddeparted."
Mallory would have wiped his forehead if his forehead had beenaccessible and if his hands had not been encased in metal gloves.Fooling the warders was one thing, but passing himself off as SirGalahad to the man who was Sir Galahad's father would have been quiteanother. He had learned from the pages of his near-namesake's "Arthur"that Sir Launcelot had visited Carbonek before Sir Galahad had, butthe pages had not revealed whether the time-lapse had involvedminutes, hours, or years, and for that matter, Mallory wasn'taltogether certain whether the second visit they described had beenthe real Sir Galahad's, which meant failure, or a romanticized versionof his own, which meant success. His near-namesake was murky at best,and reading him you were never sure where anybody was, or when anygiven event was taking place.
The courtyard was empty, and after crossing it, Mallory dismounted,encephalopathed Easy Money to stay put, and climbed the series ofstone steps that led to the castle proper. Entering the buildingunchallenged, he found himself at the junction of three corridors. Themain one stretched straight ahead and debouched into a large hall. Theother two led off at right angles, one to the left and one to theright. Boisterous laughter emanated from the hall, and he could seeknights and other nobles sitting at a long banquet table. Scatteredamong them were gentlewomen in rich silks, and hovering behind themwere servants bearing large demijohns. He grinned. Just as he hadfigured--King Pelles was throwing a whingding.
Quickly, Mallory turned down the left-hand corridor and started alongit, counting his footsteps. Rushes rustled beneath his feet, and theflickering light of wall-torches gave him a series of grotesqueshadows. He saw no one: all the servants were in the banquet hall,pouring wine and mead. He laughed aloud.
Forty-eight paces sufficed to see him to the chamber door. It was aperfectly ordinary door. Opening it, he thought at first that the roombeyond was ordinary, too. Then he saw the burning candles arrangedalong the walls, and beneath them, standing in the center of thefloor, the table of silver. The table of the Sangraal....
There was no Sangraal on the table, however. There was no Sangraal inthe room, for that matter. There was a girl, though. She was huddledforlornly in a corner, and she was crying.
II
Mallory laid his spear aside, strode across the room, and raised thegirl to her feet. "The Sangraal," he said, forgetting in his agitationthe few odds and ends of Old English he had memorized. "Where is it!"
She raised startled eyes that were as round, and almost as large, asplums. Her face was round, too, and faintly childlike. Her hair wasdark-brown, and done up in a strange and indeterminate coiffeur thatwas as charming as it was disconcerting. Her ankle-length dress waswhite, and there was a bow on the bodice that matched theplum-blueness of her eyes. A few cosmetics, properly applied, wouldhave turned her into an attractive woman, and even without them, sherated a second look.
She stared at him for some time, then, "Surely ye be an advision,sir," she said. "I ... I know ye not."
Mallory swung his shield around so that she could see the red cross."Now do you know me?"
She gasped, and her eyes grew even rounder. "Sir ... Sir Galahad! Oh,fair knight, wherefore did ye not say?"
Mallory ignored the question. "The Sangraal," he repeated. "Where isit?"
Her tears had ceased temporarily; now they began again. "Oh, fairsir!" she cried, "ye see tofore you, a damosel at mischief, the whichwas given guardianship of the Holy Vessel at her own request, andbewrayed her trust, a damosel--"
"Never mind all that," Mallory said. "Where's the Sangraal?"
"I wot not, fair sir."
"But you must know if you were guarding it!"
"I wot not whither it was taken."
"But you must wot who took it."
"Wot I well, fair knight. Sir Launcelot, the which is thy father, bareit from the chamber."
Mallory was stunned. "But that's impossible! My fa--Sir Launcelotwouldn't steal the Sangraal!"
"Well I wot, fair sir; yet steal it he did. Came he unto the chamberand saith, I hight Sir Launcelot du Lake of the Table Round, whereat Idid see his armor to be none other; so then took he the Vesselcovered with the red samite and bare it with him from the chamber,whereat I--"
"How long ago?"
"But a little while afore eight of the clock. Sithen I have wept. Iknow now no good knight, nor no good man. And I know from thy holyshield and from they good name that thou art a good knight, and Ibeseech ye therefore to help me, for ye be a shining knight indeed,wherefore ye ought not to fail no damosel which is in distress, andshe besought you of help."
Mallory only half heard her. Sir Launcelot was too much with him. Itwas inconceivable that a knight of such noble principles would evenconsider touching the Sangraal, to say nothing of making off with it.Maybe, though, his principles hadn't been quite as noble as they hadbeen made out to be. He had been Queen Guinevere's paramour, hadn'the? He had lain with the fair Elaine, hadn't he? When you came rightdown to it, he could very well have been a scoundrel at heart allalong--a scoundrel whose true nature had been toned down by writerslike Malory and poets like Tennyson. All of which, while it stronglysuggested that he was capable of stealing the Sangraal, threw not theslightest light on his reason for having done so. Mallory was rightback where he had started from.
He turned to the girl. "You said something about needing my help. Whatdo you want me to do?"
Instantly, her tears stopped and she clasped her hands together andlooked at him with worshipful eyes. "Oh, fair sir, ye be most kindindeed! Well I wot from thy shining armor that ye--"
"Knock it off," Mallory said.
"Knock it off? I wot not what--"
"Never mind. Just tell me what you want me to do."
"Ye must bear me from the castle, fair sir, or the king learns I havebewrayed my trust and wreaks his wrath upon me. And then ye must helpme regain the Holy Cup and return it to this chamber."
"We'll worry about getting the Cup back after we're beyond the walls,"Mallory said, starting for the door. "Come on--they're all in thebanquet hall and as drunk as lords--they won't even see us go by."
She hung back. "But the warders, fair sir--they be not enchafed. AndKing Pelles, by my own wish, did forbid them to pass me."
Mallory stared at her. "By your own wish! Well of all the crazy--"Abruptly he dropped the subject. "All right then--how _do_ we get outof here?"
"There lieth beneath the fortress and the forest a parlous passagewherein dwells the fiend, the which I have much discomfit of. But withye aside me, fair knight, there is naught to fear."
Mallory had read enough Malory to be able to take sixth-century fiendsin his stride. "I'll have to take my horse along," he said. "Is thereroom for it to pass?"
"Yea, fair sir. The tale saith that aforetime many knights did rideout beneath the fortress and the forest and did smite the Saxons,Saracens, and Pagans, the which did compass the castle about, frombehind, whereupon the battle was won."
Mallory stepped outside the chamber, the girl just behind him, andencephalopathed the necessary directions. After a moment, Easy Moneycame trotting down the corridor to his side. The girl gasped, and, tohis astonishment, threw her arms around the rohorse's neck. "He is anoble steed indeed, fair sir," she said; "and worthy of a knightfitting to sit in the Siege Perilous." Presently she stepped back,frowning. "He ... he is most cold, fair sir."
"All horses of that breed are," Mallory explained. "Incidentally, hisname is 'Easy Money'."
"La! such a strange name."
"Not so strange." Mallory raised his visor, making a mental note tosee to it that any and all suits of armor he might buy in the futurewere air-conditioned. He got his spear. "Let's be on our way, shallwe?"
"Ye ... ye have blue eyes, fair sir."
"Never mind the color of my eyes--let's get out of here."
She seemed to make up her mind about something. "An ye will follow me,sir knight," she said, and started down the corridor.
* * * * *
/> A ramp, the entrance of which was camouflaged by a rotating section ofthe inner castle wall, gave access to the subterranean passage. Thepassage itself, in the flickering light of the torch that the girl hadbrought along, appeared at first to be nothing more than a naturalcave enlarged through the centuries by the stream that still floweddown its center. Presently, however, Mallory saw that in certainplaces the stone walls had been cut back in such a way that the spaceon either side of the stream never narrowed to a width of less thanfour feet. He saw other evidence of human handiwork too--dungeons.They were little more than shallow caves now, though, their