Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Read online

  Would I were going to the sea shore to rest in the sun and row a skiff, he thought, yet, instead, I ride on the road of troubles…

  LOHENGRIN

  Lohengrin had left that morning. He’d made up his mind to get away while his father was absent. He’d planned it for weeks. The young squire, Henry called Hal (whose family had sent him for training, as was the custom) had agreed to go with him. Lohengrin liked the fellow just enough. He thought young Henry of Aud stiff and stuffy, even somewhat foolish; he assumed he was brave enough.

  Because of the season, Lohengrin strapped his light armor to his horse and rode in leather shorts Firetail; Hal wore fighting leathers, long pants and tunic. Both carried swords and daggers.

  “Why wait and suffer what they tell us.” He’d reasoned with the lad who was, in fact, a year his senior, at fifteen. “We’ll strike out for ourselves. Win our knightly spurs in the old style.”

  Lohengrin liked the idea of the old style. He liked stories about more lawless times than theirs. He liked the idea of knights banding together against the world and winning riches and honor and various unclear glories. Mainly he liked the idea of being free to come and go as he pleased and fight whom he chose. He’d been well-educated for a youth of his class; Hal not so much.

  His eyes were dark, intense, magnetic, persuasive. His tongue was precocious and convincing and so the two of them had slipped away just before dawn and by mid-day found themselves miles down the valley on the main south road, roughly paralleling the direction taken by Parsival and Lego, and indeed, Arthur’s emissaries.

  The sun seemed to impact the dust flat on the hoof-chewed surface.

  Lohengrin was sweaty. He hated hot weather. Both of them rode with their armor and fighting gear strapped to the horses’ withers.

  He opened his loose, linen shirt to the navel. His dark, surprisingly thick chest hair showed, matted and wet.

  “Now I have misgivings,” said young squire Henry.

  “What?” wondered Lohengrin. “Are you a girl-heart?”

  “Nay, as you might know. But will they not send after us and bring us back in shame?”

  Lohengrin spat past the horse’s shoulder. He smiled faintly without humor. “Hah,” he uttered. “You will not find me a light burden to carry in any direction. There is no dishonor in what we do.” He wiped his eyes. “I think my flesh will melt to the bone. And sweat to me nothing.”

  Henry took this in. He stared across the lush, rolling fields, serious, uneasy. His face was roundish, with wide slightly protuberant eyes. He didn’t look like he battered his brain with violent thinking; the few ideas he had, however, were nailed down to stay.

  “How will we eat?” he wondered. “After a day or two our supplies will be gone, I think.”

  Lohengrin smiled with real amusement this time. He shook his head in disgust. He realized why he liked having Henry with him: because Lohengrin loved to mock and stir things up. Even if he liked you well enough, he still enjoyed pricking the needle in.

  “You eat beyond what is human,” he commented. “Maybe your grandfather was a horse.”

  Henry’s brown, small eyes looked seriously at his companion. He had no sense of irony or sarcasm. Many of Lohengrin’s sayings, consequently, were lost on him.

  “I am well proud of my blood,” he said stolidly, “and the deeds of my forbearers.”

  Lohengrin almost laughed. He looked sidelong at his companion with a provoking air. “I am proud of Lohengrin,” he said. “Let the rest be fucked in their ears and asses.”

  Henry said nothing more. He looked contemplative and uncomfortable. Lohengrin always made him uncomfortable. He was about to ask himself if indeed he had not made an error in joining him. “Surely,” he said at length, “we will come to a village before long.”

  Lohengrin looked uninterested.

  “Do you long so for the company of villains?” he asked Henry. “No,” responded his companion, “but base folk make some excellent dishes.”

  He nodded thoughtfully. He remembered things. “Some nobles think only the dainties from Italy are worth swallowing.” Lohengrin seemed incredulous.

  “You concern yourself with such things,” he wondered. “Naturally, I think the foods of our country are greatly underrated. Did you ever have flatfish and thistleweed stewed with clams such as the peasants eat at my manor?”

  Lohengrin chuckled. “I’ll drink salt water and chew dry oak leaves,” he said, “in trade for one of their choicer wenches.”

  “What’s that? You’d mate yourself with a serf sow?” Lohengrin shook his head. Henry was hopeless.

  “What have you fucked above a sheep or two?” he wondered. Henry was offended.

  “Do you think me unnatural, Lohengrin?”

  “A wench with a bath is a clean hole,” Lohengrin said, “but a sheep dripping Arabian perfume is still a foul beast.”

  Henry was agitated. His eyes flashed.

  “Why do you link me to such Godless practice?”

  Lohengrin guffawed. He was really enjoying himself now. He shifted around in the saddle to better look at his victim.

  “Haven’t I seen you rightwise linked?” he snorted. “Linked to a sheep’s arse?”

  The strong, stocky Saxon youth stood up in his stirrups. “Cease!” he cried, baited, furious.

  Lohengrin couldn’t control it. He was shaking with laughter. “What a sight,” he said. “Fear not, I’ll not reveal your vices to your lady.”

  Henry sat back down, looked uneasy. “I have no lady,” he said, nervously.

  “Ah, have you not?” Lohengrin cocked his head to the side. “Come now, Hal.”

  Hal was sullen. “I have not.”

  They were just entering a thick, dark wood of mainly saplings massed together. The thin trees made a soft-looking grey wall.

  “I know her well,” Lohengrin said. He did. His aunt’s daughter. A slightly thick-waisted, but pretty-because-young flaxen-haired girl, a year his senior. “I had her kiss me stick,” he said, breaking up.

  Henry’s eyes flashed. He’d had just enough.

  “You lie,” he cried. “she never —” then cut himself off, realizing, finally, he was merely being provoked.

  Lohengrin squinted ahead across thickly bright green, overrich, almost spoiled-looking fields and rolling foothills. He felt confident. Life would be his. He stretched and cracked his finger joints. He felt good.

  “You want serf’s pasty bread?” he asked, rhetorically. “I —”

  “I mean to make war, like any other lord. I have an idea of booty.” He looked quite cold, his eyes suddenly dark and still. Henry didn’t say anything watching him, uneasily. “We’ll raid and we’ll rule,” Lohengrin assured him. “I’ve made my plans.” Which was true. He’d sketched them out during long, dull afternoons in the castle yard, in his chamber, or riding in the neighborhood. They were crossed between the just possible and youthful daydreaming.

  “Plans?” asked Henry.

  Lohengrin came back from the cool distance of his inner vision. “We’re heading to the seacoast,” he informed Hal. “I’ve thought it through. We’ll gather foreign and masterless men about us.”

  Hal blinked. “Gather men? What men would follow two boys?”

  Lohengrin didn’t quite smile. But he was amused. He felt the cold spring of strength rising within him, in his belly and head, and almost ecstatic power and confidence.

  “You’ll see who follows,” he said, quietly, “and who dies.” Because he felt, in fact, that no one was better. No one who sat in large castles with small armies at their disposal, yes, not even the king himself, would have any more claim to glory, or power than Lohengrin of Wales. He saw his future. He would have women for sport, hounds past counting, an army to rip and smash whatever stood between him and… but the thought was really only a feeling and the precise final goals were still vague outlines of battles and big fortresses and triumphant processions…

  “You’ll see well who follows,” he rep
eated. Because he’d kept his real purpose, the one that was clear to him, private; although now he was content to tell Henry, now that they were on the road. “I mean to win where my great father lost,” he said. “Then we’ll see.”

  Henry nodded. Frowned. “Win what, Lohengrin?”

  The dark-complexioned young fighter stared straight ahead, not looking at anything.

  “When I was small he’d tell me the things he told no other,” he said.

  Hal nodded again. Shrugged. “Fathers share their wisdom with their —”

  “Bah!” Lohengrin cut him short. “My father had no wisdom I ever noticed. Better to take the advice of a chirping bird.”

  Hal shrugged again. “Well then,” he said, “what is your import?”

  “He told me many times, the story of how he tripped over the Grail Castle.”

  Hal looked as thoughtful as he ever did. “But you always say —”

  “I always say my father was stupid. But he almost found something that might, like Arthur’s Excalibur, give a man power in this world. I mean to succeed in taking hold of this Grail that all men desire.”

  Now Hal was amused.

  “Ho, ho,” he emitted. “And you a boy will succeed where the great Knights of the Round Table all have failed?”

  “We’ll see who’s great, Henry. I have a map.”

  “A map? Let me see –”

  “Hal, you are precious,” Lohengrin cut him off yet again.

  PARSIVAL

  Parsival remounted and rode across the glade into the harsh looking woods beyond: The trees were very old and gnarled here, and bent thick, branches twisted close to the ground so that he had to work around them and stoop constantly. “Even if I had a destination,” he muttered, finishing as a thought: I’d be lost in an hour…

  The heat was oppressive as the sun mounted into bronze, blazing noon and broke through the leafed interstices in burning spears and boiled a hot steaminess from the damp earth. He was glad he’d stripped off his armor and the leather vest. He just wore a loose, linen shirt, and his bare legs were comfortable.

  He kept slapping at insects, sweaty and miserable. Enough was enough. He contemplated turning back. And then he heard the steady whoosh of running water and he aimed towards the river, well downstream at this point.

  The trees arched away here so he decided to follow the curves for awhile. The river was wide and not too deep.

  “What vile heat,” he told the day.

  He halted the horse and dismounted. Leaned down and dipped his face and hand in the coolness. Nothing ever felt better.

  He blinked and stared. Sunscatter created bright greenish, golden fannings of light. He remembered, as a boy, staring and imagining that strange fairy-like beings lived there among the fluid fronds and mysterious rocks and shadows.

  A flash of silver as a fish winked suddenly into a lance of sun and hung there. He was tempted to draw his sword and impale it because it was so elusive, so momentary – like, he thought, all the bright things that eluded human grasp.

  He leaned back from the water and cocked his head. He heard voices: a shout and a high pitched cry.

  “What’s this?” he wondered, aloud.

  “You pig!” a woman cried out. “Curse you!”

  He stood up and headed for the sound: downstream, close. He went around a sharp bend. A man was raging in wordless fury. A woman had just fallen half into the water on hands and knees. Her clothes were ripped. He saw bright blood spots on the white pebbles.

  By the cut of the man’s stained, ripped clothing and the quality of it, Parsival took him at once for a well off townsman.

  What a world, he thought.

  He rushed forward the last few steps and got between them. He had a feeling the man was about to deliver a blow on the light haired woman’s head. He kicked the fellow in the side sending him into the shallow water flat on his back.

  “You bastard,” the man cried, in a somewhat high pitched, raspy voice.

  Though the woman was obviously low born too, Parsival instantly helped her to her feet, as if she’d been a lady. That was his way. She stood there blinking, startled, breathing hard. One eye was bruised and her lips were cut, fine nose intact. Well, peasants are always fighting. But these both, he had already noted, seemed more refined that the usual run.

  She’s a beauty, Parsival thought.

  Meanwhile, the now dripping wet man scrambled to his feet, clutching a big smooth stone in each hand, eyes slits of fury, thin chin beard plastered to his cheeks.

  “I will break your head, you bastard!” he raged.

  Parsival glanced at him and raised an eyebrow, speaking to the woman:

  “Is this your husband, who so abuses you?”

  She looked weary, haunted, but furious. Her eyes were dark blue, face freckled and pale, hair a reddish brown. She wiped her lips with the edge of her hand and smeared the blood. She cast a fierce look at the man who edged closer, cocking his arm as if to throw one of the stones, obviously worried by the virtually unarmed man’s total indifference.

  “The priests joined us indeed,” she said. “At the very door of the church.”

  “Mayhap I ought not to judge this knave too harshly,” Parsival reflected, “since two and a hundred times have I longed to serve my own wife thus.”

  She paid scant attention to his ruminations. “Loan me your dagger, fellow,” she said, “and I’ll sever the bond.”

  He noticed she was well spoken. Not unheard of in a peasant but really rare.

  The man finally kicked his courage free and whirled the stone at Parsival’s head. The knight nodded just to make it whiz past his ear, not really looking away from the woman.

  “Repeat that folly,” he told the fellow without turning to him, “I’ll send you on a dark journey.”

  “You pig!” she said to her husband. “You dog’s stool …”

  “You whore!” he interrupted. “How curse me when you dipped your head over that pardoner’s prong! While I —”

  Parsival was both bored and amused. He accepted the contradiction without analysis. “I might as well have stayed at home,” he declared, “to hear such discourse.”

  “Ah, did I indeed?” she wondered, standing, wide-legged to face him. “At least he had a bone and not a boiled sausage!”

  Parsival raised an eyebrow and nodded. “That’s plain talk,” he commented.

  “Yer a slut!” the man declared, raising the second rock. “Yer twice a slut.”

  Parsival wagged a finger at him. “Mind,” he warned. He noticed the fellow’s eyes were reddened: maybe drink or recent weeping. No doubt he had cause for either or both, Parsival thought.

  “He is a man,” she told him, as if they were alone at home bickering among the turnips, Parsival thought. “Not —”

  “Boiled sausage,” Parsival put in. He shook his head, grinning. “For Godsake, no more of this. Have I just come to another room in my own castle?”

  “Ya great ass,” the man addressed him, “ya fancy yer indoors?” Shook his head still holding the second stone at his side. “He’s a fool.”

  Parsival sat on a fat rock, under a sweeping willow tree. The shade was pleasant and the smell of the water was cool and refreshing. His horse had finally come up and was waiting, nuzzling the surface of the stream.

  “There’s no sense in fighting,” he told them. They both just looked at him now. The woman plastered back strands of her wet, disheveled hair.

  Really very pretty, he noted again where her traveling dress was torn and hitched up, the long graceful sweep of pale leg held his eye.

  More than pretty…

  “Are you a disguised priest,” she wondered, “come to make peace between us?”

  “There’ll never be any peace, you bitch,” said the man.

  “Eat dung, Hubert,” she recommended.

  Hubert’s mood suddenly changed. He dropped the stone and went and sat on the bank. “Go with him to his castle, Katin,” he suggested to her
. “He looks a right lord.”

  She studied the horse, saddle, clothes, light armor. “It’s a knight’s gear,” she pointed out.

  Parsival realized he should just go, he was watching himself begin the process of acting silly because it was a female, and he’d soon be inventing, he realized, reasons to linger. “Where are you bound?”

  “Where indeed?” she replied. “Ask the donkey there.” Hubert the donkey didn’t look up. He spat towards the water.

  “Women,” he said dully, “take out the heart of a man.”

  “Ha, ha,” Katin said. “What might you know of men, Hubert?

  Or hearts, for all else?”

  Parsival tried again. He really did want to leave. He felt a strange obligation to do something. This was life as he knew it.

  “What has brought you here?” he tried asking.

  She was now kneeling, washing her face in the stream, cupping the water to her hurt mouth. “I rode a mule named misery,” she said.

  “Be not so harsh,” Parsival suggested. “You seem not provisioned for a long journey. Is your village close?”

  “We have no village nor no course,” Hubert declared, bitterly. “So that leaves us no distance to go.”

  “Ah,” said the knight, “here’s logic at least, but what drove you here?”

  “Troubles,” the woman said, standing up and facing Parsival. She was bold-eyed, strong, with a slim, very good body. He almost knew how she’d feel naked in his arms: strong, nervous hands; the smooth wiry back and shoulders; the pressure of hip and thigh…

  He blinked the thought away; rather, tried to blink the thought away. Didn’t quite meet her dark, knowing eyes. She understood. She was almost sure already, watching him from under her eyebrows now as if she actually could read his thoughts. It rarely took women long, he knew. He tried to stay cool and remote with the usual success. He avoided looking down at her legs. That was a start.

  “I came form the land of dullards and cruel, useless men,” she said.

  Ever I am drawn, he thought, to the same slim beauties with needle tongues… He blinked. Still, she’s well spoken for a peasant wench… “Well,” he offered, “we may all journey together for a time, towards better places.”