Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Read online

  “Aye. The prologue.”

  His shod steps echoed as they entered a large chamber; Parsival’s bare feet were virtually soundless on the cool flagging.

  “I mean to make it right,” he said, “if I can.”

  “If you can.”

  “With my wife, as well.” He sniffed out a chuckle. “Her ladyship.”

  Lego showed no reaction.

  “I see,” he responded neutrally.

  “I mean it.”

  “I said nothing.”

  “You said nothing. Yet you disapprove.”

  “What right have I to such a position, my Lord?”

  They stopped by the table that was still being set for breakfast with bowls of fruit, mugs of weak beer, trays of roasted eggs, toasted bread, strips of salt and smoked meat and fish plus trenchers of mash and wild honey.

  The servants seemed unshaken by their master’s odd garb, which left most of his legs bare. Castle folk were used to seeing one another in various states of undress. Some of the girls who’d heard talk about Parsival and Sir Gaf’s wife, traded looks.

  Parsival and Lego stood there and began eating. The semi-dressed knight was pondering a bowl of berries when his wife’s voice caught him and his stomach sort of winced.

  “Ah,” said she, “you break your fast ere your guests have stirred. You and your precious lackey.”

  “He’s a captain, not a lackey,” Parsival responded, not looking up, sighing, because what was the point? With women, facts were futile since she wanted him to feel something and the means to feeling didn’t matter. He knew that. “And you call them my guests?” He put a strawberry into his mouth, savoring the cool, almost over-ripe richness. “Well, has not Gaf had his host’s best?”

  Lego didn’t quite smile.

  “He likes your jibes,” she noted. “My husband was not once called fool, for small cause. He wants but cap and bells.”

  She crossed the chamber. She’d changed into a deep rose, silken robe. He didn’t look directly at her. He was hoping no storm winds would stir.

  I need to try… he thought. A new approach… or…

  He drank from a cup of thick, spiced buttermilk.

  “Maggots are guests too,” he couldn’t help but say, “feeding on what’s dead.”

  Lego imperfectly stifled a guffaw

  “Good fool,” Layla said. “Now sing a song for your food.”

  Parsival felt his captain tense beside him.

  “Were it your wife,” he commented, “you would, I imagine, kick her like a snapping cur.”

  Lego shrugged. Said nothing. Looked nowhere.

  “Kick me,” she sniffed, just standing there, hands lost in the deep, sunset-colored folds of silk. Daylight was fuzzy brightness at the huge, open main door.

  Parsival set down the cup and looked at the floor before his long, pale bare feet. “I have, myself, let the wine sour,” he pointed out. “Whom might I flog if my head aches from drinking it?”

  Here they come, he thought, glancing across the room where the visiting family was just coming to table: Sir Gaf, round, wheat-haired wife and dumpy, jowly, moist-faced mother. Gaf (Layla’s momentary lover) had a roll in his gait and ridiculous (Parsival thought) confidence. In a fight he’d soon be kissing the ground…

  Not that he was normally jealous. He didn’t feel his honor was bound up in Layla’s chastity. Sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, too. This knight was nothing if not even-handed. But Gaf’s obvious misapprehension of his strength and skill was annoying. He felt a warrior ought to be realistic. And, too, there were rules of courtly love, written and unwritten: some held that husband and wife could never be true lovers since love was the heart’s wild freedom and might not be tamed by law.

  The dark, short, stocky, slightly bowed knight swaggered up to the spread and nodded at Parsival with slight contempt. Lego bristled, at once.

  “Some as are haughty,” Lego said, to no one in particular, “is like the mouse that scratched the cat.”

  The blocky knight paid no heed but his mother, picking up a hard, green pear, reacted:

  “We start our day with proverbs from a peasant? And view the bare behind of our host.”

  “Ah, ha,” said the host’s wife. “he’s a very courtier, for style.”

  The son took notice. Scratched under his beard with a thick thumb. “Is it not an insult to have us break-fast with a low-born dog?”

  “Cats, mice, now dogs,” said his barelegged host, staring out the door into the day’s hot, rich brightness. “What about goats and cows? Is this a castle or a farmyard?” Looked back into the relative dimness of the room, more or less at the family, blinking at the purplish afterimage of the door. “A farmyard,” he said, judiciously and Lego guffawed, again.

  Layla didn’t like that.

  “My husband keeps low companions,” she announced, “to assure his own stature.”

  Chunky Sir Gaf rubbed and scratched his curly beard, again. His mother crunched into the hard pear, then poked a short finger into her mouth and worked a loose tooth. There were stools, but no one but she was sitting. She put down the fruit and tried a slice of pork.

  “Mayhap he is too deep in the habit and has become low, himself,” Gaf pronounced.

  Parsival touched Lego to check his response, saying:

  “Ah.” Took a bite of sweet, soft cheese. “Your wit soars like a clipped falcon. Or those wingless, trudging birds of legend.”

  “Clipped?” put in the lean, long-faced captain. “I’d say feathers of lead, my Lord.”

  “Silence, churl,” snarled Gaf, stepping over and snapping a backhand with his wide fist at the soldier’s face. Missed, as Lego slapped the corky arm aside.

  The furious knight snatched up a knife from the table and hooked at Lego’s lined, insubordinate face.

  “Hold,” said Parsival, effortlessly catching the thick wrist in mid-cut and tugging Gaf off-balance, driving his hand down so hard the blade broke off in the table, snapped tip quivering.

  Gaf then, foolishly, drove his fist at his host’s fineboned features; met air as Parsival leaned away, then countered with a terrific kick to the knee that popped something and dropped the knight on his side, cursing fluently. His mother was howling, meat filling her mouth.

  The wife looked away, embarrassed. Layla, incensed, flung a ripe peach at her husband and hit Lego in the chest.

  “You bastard!” she cried. “Go away like you always do!”

  “What did I wrong?”

  “Some say this is the last year of the world,” she said. “If I am so misfortunate as to meet you in eternity, husband, there will be time to tell you.”

  “You’ve hurt my boy,” the older woman almost howled, on her knees beside him, wiping pork fragments from her lips with the sleeve of her dress and holding him.

  “Ought I have let him kill me? Boy?”

  “There you stand,” Layla continued, “with your balls and dangler in the wind and your arse for all to see.”

  Parsival raised both hands over his head, in frustration which made things much worse as it raised his shirt several inches more. The wheathaired, bubble-shaped wife looked back, now; her mother-in-law shook her fist; Gaf clutched the table in an effort to rise; Layla rolled her eyes.

  “Are you now a pagan wrestler?” she wondered. “What a display.”

  Lohengrin was just coming through the sunbright door in his black tights and red and white, loose shirt. Out of the corner of his eye Parsival saw him and shook his head. Nudged Lego.

  “Retreat,” he said. “The enemy has the field.”

  Sir Gaf, partway up, lost his grip on the smooth tabletop and fell blockily back on his mother who gushed out wind from his weight in a kind of belch and outcry. The round wife finally got up to assist. She stole another look at Parsival whose arms were back at his sides. Layla just stood there. A woman servant came back with a mug of something and took the scene in as one who’d seen the play before.

  “Leav
e it and go,” Layla told her. “Bring back a sack to cover my husband. Or fool’s skins.”

  “Trust me,” the bearded knight hissed, “I shall slice out your liver and roast it, you damned cuckold!”

  “Enjoying breakfast?” wondered Lohengrin, sauntering up, grinning.

  “Don’t involve yourself,” said his mother. Then to Gaf: “And you, have a care what you utter.”

  “Sounds like a quarrel in a stew,” put in Lohengrin. He loved acrimony and, especially, to see his father under fire.

  With help, Sir Gaf got up with his stout mother, but his leg buckled, again. His eyes bulged with anger. He leaned, heavily, on the table full of food.

  “Stench and cuckold!” he went on. “Coward!”

  Parsival, moving away towards the hall and stairs, started to raise his hands, again, then checked himself, grinning. Glanced back at Layla and shrugged.

  “My Lord,” said Lego, “he hath called three times now. Should not his meat be served?”

  “He has enough to digest,” his lord replied. The woman had come back holding a bright yellow robe. He shook his head at her. “Not my color,” he told her. “Anyway, I’ll leave as I came.”

  “Just so you leave,” snapped Layla.

  “Cuckold,” repeated Gaf.

  “Mind your mouth, oaf,” Layla recommended. She suddenly had no notion of why she’d let him in her bed. A silly, self-righteous, selfish man.

  I have no judgment, she thought. I let asses mount me…

  “We must fly this den of murderers,” mother Gaf said. Lohengrin was delighted at the break in monotony.

  “Father,” he called over to the retreating knight. “Why do you creep from the fray?’

  “I’ll fray you like a worn sleeve, my son,” he snapped.

  “Ha,” reacted his son.

  Parsival spun and went for the boy with his open hand drawn back. The boy didn’t flinch, still enjoying himself.

  “Now strike down your son,” Layla said, heading over. She always got between them, sooner or later.

  “Accept my challenge, you stinking bastard,” blustered Gaf, leaning heavily on his mother and the table. “Meet me on the field of honor or be known a coward, hereafter!”

  Parsival shrugged and, on impulse, raised his arms over his head, exposing again what ought to have been private. The mother covered her eyes. Gaf’s bovine wife stared, as if to recall something. Layla sneered. Lohengrin laughed, actually taking his father’s part, for a change. Lego, in disgust, went to the door and out into the morning’s dazzle.

  Not an hour since, Parsival was thinking, I was breathing bliss that makes air coarse and hearing the musical sighs of angels past the dull ear’s utmost capacity… And now I am back with my family…

  With a movement so swift and economical that it seemed a blurring swallow’s flight, he glided three steps to his son and, even as the boy tried to duck back (finally afraid he’d pushed his father too far) caught his two shoulders in that incredible grip and lifted him, effortlessly, off his feet.

  Layla was still coming to intervene, slippers skidding on the smooth white tiles – then she stopped, surprised, because her husband suddenly, fiercely, kissed his son’s lips and then released him.

  “You are all ridiculous,” he informed them. “So am I. But I love you, Lohengrin, despite what you choose to believe. And your mother, too.”

  And then he padded, barefoot, across the hall in silence until Sir Gaf cried out:

  “On the field of honor, coward! On the field!”

  Parsival went up to his second-floor chamber. He was weary to the bone. His stomach and nerves shuddered with exhaustion. His eyes were sore. His thoughts dragged through the molasses of his mind.

  He went straight to the big bed and threw himself down on his back. Covered his loins and legs with the silk sheets. The feel was cool and soothing. Sunlight creased in through the slit windows.

  Without energy to move much, he tugged some more sheet over his face, rolling partly on his side. He lay for awhile and slowly felt the tension melt from his limbs.

  “My son,” he muttered, adjusting the material so his nose was clear. Yawned and rubbed his face. “My wife …”

  Noises in the castle yard kept him from dozing off completely. He’d drift for a moment, then snap back to his headache and sore joints.

  Dozed and was instantly in a field of golden flowers that seemed dense and, somehow, heavy with color, set on either side by massed, rich, deep green trees in a perfectly straight line to the horizon and he understood, dream-like, this was what he’d always wanted: follow the straight line to the end, into an epiphany of summerich light because his life had been nothing but twists and turns…

  He blinked himself back. The sheet had shifted from his face. The light at the windows hurt. His left eye throbbed. He tried to relax his forehead by gently rubbing it. Covered his eyes again and heard himself start to snore… was running straight and gently upslope between the flanking walls of trees, through the ankle-deep and knee- high flowers as if his body were dissolving into light… running behind a nude woman who moved just ahead of him in blurred perfection like a roll of wind forming shapes in the golden blossoms… and he needed to touch her and end the reaching… closer, she seemed to have been formed from the flowers, a living hush flowing… reached and ran and reached as if he might be wafted into her glowing substance… reached… “…and if you do, I’ll crown you with this jug, you bastard!” a reedy woman’s voice was scolding, outside. A man muttered something back and might have spat. They were close under his second-floor window.

  In a lull he went under again and this time he was in a tunnel, smoothly carved that almost melted into black, unreflecting stone. Pitch dark, yet he could see. Sensed he was down deep and that mountain masses of rock lay above him. The tunnel twisted and bent back on itself like (he dream-thought) the intestines of some stone behemoth… then a dead end where a niche had been hewed into the black wall, a ledge with something like a vase or jar there, a shadowy blurring in a gout of darkness.

  Sensed menace and power all around and that the container held the heart and soul of the darkness which pulsed and spread its lightless beams out into the eternal stone night, beat steady and yet measureless… sensed a watcher watching as he reached for what he now dream-perceived as a fat cup with holes to grip; he gripped and realized he held a living black skull because the mouth bit down and held him fast…

  He woke in soundless screaming and just lay there, sweating in the twisted covers…

  Always dreams come back, he said to himself.

  The man outside snarled something at the woman. Parsival dozed again. Came back. The woman was saying:

  “… the world ends, ya old fool… ”

  He dozed. Shuddered awake, to hear: “… this is the last year …”

  The man (probably the husband) said:

  “You’re as mad as that priest who says such…”

  Heard that much rebuttal but was out again when the woman said:

  “The Antichrist is everywhere. Water will turn to blood …” Asleep, Parsival was seeing rivers, lakes and seas all staining red with naked corpses bloating in the waves.

  “… we must flee to the Holy places… the Great Whore is already among us,” she went on, reedy, penetrating.

  The knight was awake again, panting. Felt numbed, as if drugged.

  “What?” the husband’s voice cut through the murmur of outside sounds, “is ya damned mother come again to stay?”

  Parsival’s laughter finally fully woke him. He stared straight up at the low, vaulted ceiling. The quarreling voices faded as the couple moved off.

  Outside there was suddenly noise and banging and shouts. Horses and armored men, he realized. Because of the dreams he kept his aching eyes opened and listened:

  “What?” a voice cried.

  “Where is your lord?” another, deep, irritable, demanded.

  “In heaven with his holy host,” said the first
he now knew was Lego’s.

  “Mind your mouth,” the irritable voice advised.

  What is this? Parsival wearily wondered.

  “It seems more like you must mind, my Lord knight,” Lego responded. “you are, after all, within our walls here.”

  “Think you churl,” was the retort of a new voice, cool and logical, “that your walls will long stand one brick on another if Arthur the King willed it otherwise? Call your lord.”

  By now Parsival had dragged himself to the embrasure and tilted his head far enough out to look down into the dusty yard where the high sun now beat hot and steady.

  He blinked, saw Lego in his leathers, leaning on a staff, saw the open gate, and the castle people gathering, the soldiers alert: the three armed, mounted knights reined up at the main steps about fifty feet to his right. One was drinking from a pot of water held up by one of the castle grooms. They sat with their helmets on their laps.

  Parsival leaned out far enough and called down: “Here I am without my choir of angels.”

  They all looked up.

  “Parsival?” The rough voice said. It belonged to a balding, bearded, middle-aged knight who seemed familiar.

  “For the most part,” he called down. “What do you want of me?”

  “All of you, save your jibes,” the logically-voiced knight said. He was long-limbed, hair dull red, nose long with an uptilt. The blunt sunlight flashed on his mailed hands as he gestured with near delicacy. “For body and soul, as we know, are you not vassal of your master?”

  Parsival took that in. The sun was hot and felt good on his face.

  He shut his eyes to soothe them.

  Vows, he thought, are cheaply broken though dearly sold.

  He said:

  “I’m hoping to sleep. Unhorse. Lay aside your gear and troubles. Rest. Eat and drink. Later we can parse body and soul.” Parse. He liked that.

  Back to bed, he thought. Considered going out and napping on the hillside under the lime trees. Nothing felt better than a doze in the sun and cool shadow.

  “Do you object to my point?” The long knight, the leader, wanted to know.

  Parsival was annoyed. He’d had his fill of trouble, when you counted the plates.