Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Page 6

  He’d lived like a bandit after that, almost never letting himself think about the part of the past that hurt the most; so that only sometimes, while dropping, as drunk as possible, into the feverish dreams that usually waited at the end of his consciousness, sometimes he’d see the woman he could never know again… there was no way to control it as real memories would seep into the nightmares; remembering her was the worst. The name he never let himself say: Shinqua, exotic and passing beautiful, goldendark skin, eyes like shadowed, distant places, a velvet touch, a heat and natural perfume that stopped his breath and heart…

  After being challenged by a young knight, thirsty for reputation, in an inn, he’d gotten the notion that the Grail Parsival had been so obsessed with might be the miracle for him.

  At that time he didn’t yet have the famous wooden hand to replace the flesh one he’d lost along with half his face. He’d learned to fight shieldless, one-armed, one-eyed, depending more and more on craft and speed. He’d knocked the lad down without much trouble in the muddy yard near the horses. The peasants and one other knight who’d been sleeping in a chair by the fire came out to watch. It was a cool, autumn twilight. Stars were showing.

  Gawain, wearing his monk-like cowl and a mail shirt, had one foot on the fallen knight’s sword arm and his blade at his throat. The boy groaned: the flat side of the blade had banged his head, leaving a massive, bleeding lump that probably wouldn’t prove fatal.

  The average-sized, balding, but still young knight who was watching from under the timbered, dirt-floored overhang, squinted into the grayish dimness at where Gawain’s hood had pulled back on the good side of his face.

  “I know you,” he said.

  Not turning, Gawain said: “I know you, too, Erec.”

  “When you never returned, it was said you went in quest of the Cup of God, as have so many.”

  Gawain stepped back from the semi-conscious boy. Sheathed his sword. Started for his horse.

  “Farewell, Erec,” he said, not looking back.

  “So it’s true, then?” The other knight followed him across the dimming yard as three or four of the peasants were carrying the loser out of the mud and back into the inn.

  “True? You don’t want to see what’s true, Erec.”

  “Where are you going?”

  Gawain stood by the horse, his hand on the saddle, brooding, remote.

  “Back to the Kingdom of Nothing,” he said. And it was then that the idea of finding the Grail occurred to him. Better than nothing, he’d joked to himself. Meanwhile, he stood there because he really wanted to ask and was hoping his fellow knight would bring it up first. So he waited.

  “You were injured,” Erec said, looking at Gawain’s left arm where no hand showed at the bottom of the loose sleeve. “Do you mean to return?”

  “What is there for me? I belong to Nothing.” The other man got it, and said:

  “She ran away to find you. Her husband brought her back. She has given birth to a male child.” A pause. “Will you return?”

  “A child,” Gawain murmured. His life had run out and away, in a moment, like spilled water, with a single swordcut from a dying adversary. What was the world where children played, to him, now? Or the world where she mattered? Or anything mattered? No more than water spilled and gone forever mattered. “What belongs to nothing must to nothing go.”

  He flung himself upon the horse and sat there. The only meaningful light now as the firebright in the inn windows. Everything else was drained and vague.

  “The black woman spoke of you,” said Erec.

  “My Lady, you meant,” Gawain said, sharply. “For she is my Lady.”

  “So please you.”

  “What does the child look like?”

  “Like any other.”

  “Not striped dark and light? Or a sullen mixture?”

  “Like any other.”

  “There’s some lesson there.” He squeezed his good eye shut and open. “Tell her, I charge you …”

  “Yes, Gawain?”

  The eye wept and, he knew, with a sick despair, that the torn blind socket on the left side wept too, in sightless grief.

  “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.” Spurred the horse onto the road and was lost in the night. Sir Erec watched him go, glint faintly once or twice as his mail caught the last flicks of firelight, as if he were riding out of the world like a phantom into the land of death…

  PARSIVAL

  Now it was dark. The sky seemed encrusted with the stars. There was no moon yet. Lego was saddlesore and baffled. “My Lord,” he asked as they were moving beside a stream, palely phosphorescent, hinted in the forest darkness. Lego could smell the water, mud and wet green.

  “Yes, Captain?”

  “We must have passed the castle in the dark.”

  “I meant to. I mean to go on alone, Lego.”

  “Nay, my Lord. I have my duty to your person.”

  Parsival was a blurred shape moving just ahead of him. The air was warm and comfortable. He redressed himself from a saddlebag. He was wearing a sleeveless leather vest over a buttonless linen shirt. He’d put on Saxon-style sandals that tied around the calves plus breeks that amounted to shorts. A short, thick-bladed dagger was strapped to his belt.

  “I release you,” Parsival said over his shoulder. They moved up by a deep curve in the stream where the trees closed massively in overhead. “In the morning you return.”

  “But where will you go?” Lego asked, as, after dismounting, they watered and tethered the horses.

  “To the king, Captain. But I expect to get lost along the way.”

  Later, lying on the soft grassy earth beside Lego, listening to the man’s gentle snores, Parsival reviewed the day. He sighed and stared up into the dark blots of the branches overhead, where here and there a piece of sky showed with a little star spark. He remembered the intensity, the urgency of the morning when he was about to die. He tried to recreate that moment. He couldn’t. He tried to somehow reach himself up into the darkness, into the vast night sky that rolled in perfect silence over him. But nothing happened. He sighed again.

  “It’s wanting a thing,” he murmured, “that drives it off.”

  He shut his eyes and let blankness come. He needed blankness. The earth was soft and the blanket he’d spread beneath himself was a real comfort…

  He opened his eyes and the world was now a ghostly, dull grey dawn. He glanced over and saw Lego was sleeping, curled on his side.

  Ah, he thought, rest easy, good fellow… I will journey alone, again…

  He moved quietly and unhitched his horse. He’d strapped the armor to the flanks before turning in so the mule could be left with Lego. He led the horse in near silence along the dew-wet grasses into the misty obscurity of pre-dawn.

  I’ll stop to wash and piss and chew some loaf after the sun is fairly risen…

  It was still grey an hour later (he was mounted now) because the wooly fog had rolled up from the sumpy area he was just skirting.

  He was aiming at where he knew the sun would be rising, though it was still invisible. The fields rolled smoothly here and only now and then did the thin line of trees (long trunks, a cluster of branches high in the vagueness) loom up, mysteriously.

  It’s foolish, of course, but I’ve got to go a little mad or there’s no hope for me at all… since I can no longer even pretend to fall in love…

  His horse paused at a crease of streamlet that gleamed dull grey in the mistlight. He frowned and then smiled, suddenly remembered his mother.

  Another lifetime ago.

  She gave me advice, he thought, and I really should have heeded her: “Cross not streams at dark fords …” Smiled. We’ll start with that again… because she’d never said how big the stream had to be, just dark.

  He urged the charger forward but didn’t cross the thread of water; instead followed it as it looped down country in easy, wide curves. Trees, sparse at first, gradually thickened in around the water. After awhi
le, the horse had to work to pick a steady way.

  Perhaps a mile further on, the trickle simply folded into a cluster of golden flowers and was gone into the earth. The mist was burning off, now. The fist clear sunrays lanced into his eyes. He blinked and squinted. In the dazzle he thought he saw a woman in a bright gown standing in the clearing, a sky-colored tent behind her.

  A moment later he realized the field was empty. It was an impression rather than a hallucination. The effect was like an image.

  “Spirits?” he asked aloud. “A vision?”

  The woman had seemed stunningly beautiful: tall, hair a dark rush, long exquisite limbs. A trick of the eyes, he concluded – except he knew it meant something. Like a dream, or a memory, or a vision…are they trying to come together?…will the world become a blur of dream, madness and solid earth?

  LEGO

  Lego sat up suddenly. He’d been dreaming something violent. The pictures faded quickly. Smoke and smudge and swords, darkness lit by tortured flames… something in black and glowing armor, with red eyes like coals. Terrific unsounds that burst his ears.

  He realized at once that his lord had left him behind. He’d expected it. Parsival was moody, even melancholic these past few months. Troubled in mind, he reflected, but does he think my oath so light that I will kiss the wind and depart?

  He yawned and stretched and scratched. Who could blame his master? What a family life he’d had. Lego shook his head. My own life, he thought, is far from perfect, yes. But my Lord has been chewed like a rabbit in a nest of weasels…

  He thought about a number of things standing there, taking in the situation, letting himself fully wake up.

  I need a woman again, he thought. The last one had been a peasant girl he’d seen working in a field as he rode by, marching his men-at-arms on the way to battle. How long had it been? Over a year, he decided.

  They’d camped near the village and he’d slipped away at dusk. He’d found her eating a bowl of salted peas and pork, resting barefoot, against a haymow as the shadows went darker and depthless, the sunset draining away like water into a dry field. It was a rich moment. He’d felt strangely, intensely alive. Maybe it was the prospect of a battle the next day. He’d felt that strange fear and anticipation a young man feels (though he was nearly forty at the time) realizing, without putting it into words, that the power of women is in the power of refusal because the only thing men really want from them couldn’t be raped into possession. So they had to give it willingly and could withhold it in a moment. Any of them had the power. Otherwise all you had was the body and a sheep would do as well.

  They hadn’t had to say much. He’d squatted on his hams close to her and nodded. Probably he’d smiled. She’d nodded back, sucking the grease from her hands. He’d liked that. She was dark-haired, full-lipped with smoldering eyes. He’d been hit at once.

  She’d offered him a rib bone and he’d chewed, thoughtfully, watching her eyes watch him. “Well, your lordship,” she’d said at one point.

  “I am not a lord, girl.”

  “You be not a miller be you?” She’d said smiling. Her teeth weren’t bad, he noticed, pleased. She’d licked her lips with a red, pointed tongue. “Or a reeve?”

  He’d chuckled and had shaken his head, liking her. The tension of anticipation had been strong but not unpleasant. Not the way it would have been were he actually a young man.

  Age has the advantage, he later reflected, of permitting a man to enjoy certain of his discomforts; like an old cheese, where the mold becomes satisfaction.

  “It’s an honest trade,” he’d said. “Miller, at least.”

  “Aye. There be no end of honest ways to go hungry.”

  “Well,” he’d said, “you’ve eaten.”

  “This week.” She’d stood up and cocked her head toward the hut. “There’s nobody about. Come on then.”

  He stood there in the misty morning, blinked and remembered that, for some reason: the rankness, muddy, sour hay smells, spicy smoke… the crush of straw under them, her strong yet sweet sweat, powerful calves rocking, locking down his legs, the hot shock between them.

  He blinked and blocked away the memory, now.

  “No good thinking that way,” he told himself. Not when alone, with no woman in sight.

  By the time he’d mounted he knew he would simply follow Parsival. After all, he was a vassal. What child had not been told the tale? How the seneschal and his wife, who, when their lord’s castle fell and he was killed, and as the victor was about to slay the infant son of that lord, he being a male, the vassal and his wife cried out that it was their child dressed in the noble robes to fool the enemy, and so they were forced to stand by while the baron discovered their own child who was the same age, and cut his head off on the spot. They’d saved their liege’s boy. That was the point. Lego knew perfectly well he could not have done such a thing, but that was the ideal. He was far from ideal, he realized, and wasn’t sorry.

  He smiled at the thought. He believed the tale overdone but it rang true enough in spirit: you are supposed to be loyal to the death. It didn’t matter if the lord was insane or cruel or foolish; you were supposed to be loyal.

  PARSIVAL

  Parsival had dismounted and was poking around the glade, as if to find something tangible where there had only been an effect of light. The sun was hot now.

  Bees were stirring among the lean, blue, thistly looking wild flowers.

  “This feels familiar,” he murmured. He was thinking it had to be a place from his childhood. He looked around, trying to recover an image. Nothing came to him.

  What am I looking for? he thought, A ghost of which mistake? Because they had all been errors except among the errors, false starts and hopeless endings, as, among thorns, exquisite flowers have blossomed, so there had been other things, moments rich in life and joy… other things…

  He remembered. There had been a tent. There could have been no trace of the tent, even a week later much less decades. But he remembered now, how he’d wandered into a lady’s tent (wearing a fool’s ratty hides that his mother had covered him with in the forlorn hope of keeping the world from wanting him) and how he’d kissed and fumbled in his almost supernatural teenage ignorance… kissed and fumbled her into total ruin in the end, by accident.

  Ah, but what is pain? he asked himself. Only the mind which holds on to shadows…

  He hadn’t thought of that woman or that business in years and years and now, suddenly, the memory was a vivid stun and he saw her, her lovely, pale breasts naked on the sleeping silks and furs where she lay waking into fear, startled by the strange beautiful young boy crouched over her.

  “What was it?” he murmured. “What was the name?”

  Jeschute, he remembered. That was it. It all came back to him: her husband, the mad duke black bearded, vicious, unforgiving, after tormenting his wife, finally falling to Parsival’s lance; and later, to his own insensate, self-consuming fury: actually chained to his horse because his back was broken, charging Parsival on a narrow trail, missing and wedging himself between two trees, raging, demented, helpless and doomed as the (then) young knight rode away… What was it, fifteen years ago? He never found out what had actually happened to her back in those torn, firefilled, bloodsplattered, tormented days. Days when he’d lost every trace (or so he believed) of his youth. He frowned now, troubled, thinking about it. He was drawn by a strange retrograde current that was sucking him back into past shadows… Why? Why now after all that time?

  What happened to her? he wondered. How many causes had he set in motion to effects he knew nothing about. It would be good to find out… Yet it was absurd, he knew, though it followed from everything else, because absurdity was the soil in which his garden grew.

  Perhaps I’m going to find out what became of everything I touched and so I’ll owe nothing to God or to man when I’m done – I’ll have forgiven myself, been purged of consequences…He recognized that this was already an obsession. He was caught
because it wasn’t just walking over the same paths (if indeed they were) of his youth, it was living it again.

  “This time,” he said, “If a damned door opens I won’t let it shut. I’ll jam my head in and let it be crushed.” He kicked the earth. He stared at the grass.

  It was here, he thought. I know it now… There, in the misty morning of the last day of his childhood.

  There…

  If that woman be alive then I must right the wrong I did her, he thought, calmly, like a man about to undertake an all consuming feat.

  There’s my repentance. There’s my expiation…

  He understood it was a vow he was making. And like anyone making a vow, he felt instantly better, as if something were already accomplished. He found it important to speak aloud now: “I’ll find her, and save her.” As if he believed it. As if she might need saving. It didn’t matter. It was his impulse and could guide his life through what might otherwise be a pathless trek. Because if he meant to drop his past purposes he certainly needed new ones.

  LEGO

  At the same time, a mile or two away, Lego was riding and brooding. He followed the river and hoped for the best. The sun went higher and higher and the heat burned towards afternoon like an open furnace door.

  He rode steadily, squinting across the general dazzle. He picked up Parsival’s tracks without much trouble and he sat with one leg across leaning on the horses neck, watching the steady flow of matted grass and dusty earth rhythmically marked by the puckered broken circles of unevenly printed horse hooves at once alike and yet as various as snowflakes… it was hypnotic…

  So at first he didn’t realize the fact that there were too many prints, suddenly, and it hit him just as he looked up and saw three riders cresting a grassy rill perhaps a mile ahead. He squinted at them across the lush valley. His stomach clenched at once. He spurred the big roan forward.