“Who is he?” Susannah whispered.
“I don’t know. Perhaps someone close to Jesus after the Last Supper?”
“I am Joseph of Arimathea,” the man screamed at them, his voice thin from age. “Jesus gave me the holy vessel after he’d drunk from it. He told me to collect his blood and pour it into the vessel. I buried him and I took the vessel.”
Then Joseph of Arimathea was no more. Flashes of other men, all biblical in their dress, passed in front of them, the vision quickly moving from one to another.
There were twelve of them.
Finally, there was utter stillness. Tibolt had no human form now. All features that had made him human were gone from his face, smoothed out as if he were now stone. His arms and legs froze against him, losing definition. He had the look of a pillar, frozen, lifeless. Then in the next instant, the pillar simply disappeared. There was nothing.
The Holy Grail still sat atop the rock. Suddenly, from behind it slithered a serpent, green and scaled, its head huge, its mouth open, hissing toward them. It slowly began to wind itself about the Grail, its thick body overlapping on itself as it circled once, then again and again. Finally its huge head was resting on top of the cup. The mouth opened. What came out was Tibolt’s voice.
“It spared you. I know now why it spared you. I know all now, but it makes no difference, for I am no more.”
The sky, which had just an instant before been glistening in the dawn sun, blackened. Thunder boomed. Lightning split the darkness, great streaks of it that sent the lake below foaming. Suddenly a crater of light appeared over the serpent—wide, fathomless. Then there was blackness again, as if it were midnight.
They could see nothing.
Susannah turned her face against Rohan’s chest. She felt the stiffness of him, the shock of what they had seen. There came a soft rumbling noise. The rumbling continued until the rocks began to shake. One ancient arch crumbled and fell over the cliff into the lake below. The massive rock upon which Tibolt had stood, upon which the hideous serpent had wound its body around the Holy Grail, was empty.
There was no serpent, no Holy Grail.
They jumped when the rock stood upright. The white became brighter, blinding them, then it seemed to spread, opening itself.
The rock disappeared into the blinding white.
The rumbling stopped abruptly.
There was nothing.
The sun appeared, the day continued its dawning. A sparrow sounded in the silence.
They walked as one to where the rock had stood. It looked as if nothing had happened here for more than a hundred years. Even the reliquary was gone.
Susannah cocked her head to one side and pointed. She leaned down and picked something up. She turned wordlessly to Rohan and held out her hand. In the center of her palm lay the tiny golden key.
“The key to the reliquary. It was left for us.”
“No, Susannah, the key was left for you,” Rohan said.
Phillip stared at that key, then at where the rock had stood. The broken glass beaker lay in shards on the ground.
Susannah was looking off into the distance, through the abbey ruins, over the water. She swallowed, clutching the golden key in her hand. “The Holy Grail had known only good until Tibolt took it.”
“All the forms Tibolt took,” Rohan said slowly, “they were the people who had held the Grail, who had held the Grail or drunk from it. The reason you weren’t harmed, Susannah, is because you are good. And that is what Tibolt saw so clearly at the end.”
Phillip shook himself. “I want to leave this place. There’s nothing more for us here.”
“You’re right,” Susannah said. “Both the good and the evil are gone.”
“That’s not quite true,” Rohan said, pulling his wife against him. “The three of us are here. We survived.”
He closed his hands over hers. He thought he felt the warmth of the tiny golden key she still clutched in her palm.
He knew in the deepest part of him that they would never speak of this again. He also knew that the tiny golden key would bind the three of them together for the rest of their lives.
“Let me deal with my little angel here first,” Susannah said, lifting a squealing Marianne into her arms. As for Marianne, after spending no more than fifteen minutes with her mother’s undivided attention, being rocked and praised and told an exciting story of nothing that actually happened, Marianne was ready to be set down and see to Rohan.