Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Page 8

  The man, Hubert, didn’t quite look up, sitting with his arms on his knees brooding, sullen. “Do so, by all means,” he said, sourly. “She’ll lie flat in the field for you at the point of your lance, the slut.”

  Parsival didn’t get it at once because he was only half-listening. He was wondering if he should bother at all with this. Twice, now, is a short space of time, the world had dissolved: first the blade to his throat, then in the monastery… as when you lay sick and feverish…

  “But I don’t battle women,” he protested. “Even were she armored capape, bearing sword and buckler. Anyway, I gave up my lance.”

  “Were a woman hid in armor,” she said, thoughtfully, “how would you know if you battled her?”

  “Bah,” muttered the man, “you’ll thrust into her, never fear.”

  “Oaf,” she sneered, not looking at him.

  “Come now,” Parsival said, “I am not that sort of fellow.”

  He felt faintly like an ass, saying that: under certain conditions he was exactly that sort. “Anyway, you’re in luck because I’ll journey with you for a time.” He smiled. “But you must give me your oaths to make the peace between you.”

  “Ha, ha,” said the man, scornfully, “we’re in luck, as you are, yourself, if you meant to travel with us and hear every oath ever framed.”

  LEGO

  Now, Lego came over a knoll into denser forest. The tracks were still plain and overlaid his lord’s. Were these the knights sent by the king? He had to assume they meant harm. It was prudent and natural.

  Each time he passed through a deep tree shadow the coolness was a shock. The hot, thick, wet air; and then the coolness. He urged the horse on into a canter. When all this was over, he decided, he’d ride to the village of Arsra and see his 17 year old daughter. She’d married a man of law, a pardoner. He was thin, dour, with a sallow complexion. He did his duty but no more, not by a hair. Lego didn’t exactly delight in his company, but he enjoyed her wit and the way she looked at life. He missed her. He nodded to himself, thinking that, watching the roots and leaves and sun and shadow flick and flow past.

  LOHENGRIN

  Lohengrin and Henry “Hal” were not too far ahead of Lego but angling away, following the twists of another valley trail that intersected the course of a sluggish creek branching off from the main river. Lohengrin vaguely remembered this was a shortcut to the seacoast. The mountains were to the right, tops craggy and dark above the trees.

  The black-haired young fighter squinted his still, jet eyes into a sudden break in a nearly solid wall of forest. “What’s this?” he wondered.

  Hal blinked; followed his companion’s gaze. “A tent,” he observed.

  They reined up. Lohengrin looked calculating.

  “Not just a tent,” he commented. “This may be opportunity.”

  “Nevermind that,” Hal said. “I mean not to plunder like a base-born robber.”

  “Suppose there’s roasted chicken to be had by plunder? Good game pie?”

  He loved the fact the savory images gave the appetite driven young man pause.

  “There’s no right in such things.” He shook his big head, solemnly. “We will ask for food but do no dishonorable thing.”

  “I am fortunate to be in such chivalrous company,” the wry, swarthy young man said. “You give me as much pleasure as a stone in my shoe.”

  “I was taught a knight’s armor is like a mirror. If it be stained or blemished in any part then the picture it shows is false.”

  “I am glad you are not pompous.”

  “I mean what I say.”

  “And I say what I mean.” He chucked his horse to a walk, heading for the large, cylindrical, red and black tent. “We’ll be lovers yet. There are women here, my ponderously moral friend.”

  “Can you tell?”

  “Smell the perfume? I ken roses where none are growing. Wait here and I’ll say a greeting.”

  Hal sat his horse, crossing a leg over to ease his back and hind end.

  “So you do none harm,” he said at Lohengrin’s back, “who merits it not.”

  “I’ll come back with bacon and cheese. Content yourself with such thoughts.” He was looking around carefully, alert for trouble. No horses. No smell of horsedung, either. Just green earth, a faint scent of rotten grass and the odor of distilled roses. He twisted around to say: “I’ll share equally, always. The women for me; the victuals for you.”

  “Still your talk, Lohengrin.”

  “Have you never fucked aught but a sheep?” Lohengrin asked as he passed under the trees into the clearing. “I wonder not at your love of mutton.”

  The little glade was a sunny hush, walled in by dense thornbushes, heavy with the dark red flowers, purple, swollen, ripe; dripping petals. Though he really didn’t react, he was vaguely conscious that the place was strangely over-rich for the border of the Northern highlands. Even the leaves seemed too large and palely, almost biliously green. Here was the source of the faintly rotten smell.

  He halted the horse in front of the silverblue, silken tent that shifted delicately in its guys. The stillness was strange – dream-like. He decided he might be a little giddy from the sun.

  He was a moment from turning back except the fabric’s sheen wavered and parted and a woman who might have seemed (to a more poetic eye) a very exhalation of bright afternoon’s sweetness stood there, just inside, the perfume (hinted soured roses) faintly stung his eyes.

  Her gown was the rich ripe color of the heavy, winedark blossoms and shimmered like dim gleams on twilight water. Her face was pale, oval, exquisite as carved cameo. The lower half was covered by a soft, silken mask. Things she’d seen showed in her eyes; things he was too young to perceive as contradictions. He was hit. Stunned. He understood no better than a tomcat comprehends the pull of the moon and the scented ferality that burns and fills him.

  The effect was raw and total and drew him so that he was already dismounting, walking at her before he really realized he’d moved.

  Here’s an opportunity… how silly Hal can be…

  “Er,” he croaked.

  What’s wrong with my voice…

  She just stood there, not coming out past the parted flap. Her face showed nothing. He stopped himself from touching her.

  “Are you unattended?” he asked. Imagined he felt a tingling from her that crackled like clean, brushed hair.

  “For the nonce,” she replied. Her voice was dark silk, too. He felt soft inside and silly.

  “For the nonce,” he pointlessly repeated.

  He wondered if this were love. Most songs and poems were equally about violence and love. He had never felt the things they described.

  “Young warrior,” she asked, “are you unattended?” He liked that.

  “I have my best friend with me.”

  “The shy fellow in the road?”

  “No,” he said, “my sword.”

  She wasn’t quite disdainful. His giddiness gave the impression the world was slightly tipped towards her so that it was partly gravity bringing them together.

  He kept imagining her nude: pure, pale, cleanly scented. It was like hunger because it was taste he wanted. An urge to kneel and somehow feed on her flesh. This was something new.

  As if she read his thoughts instead of merely knowing them, she faintly smiled and gestured. He went inside; bit his lip. Couldn’t focus on anything but the knee-weakening hunger.

  “I …” he began.

  “Come, boy” she told him. Her robe had parted, calves and bare feet visible.

  He hadn’t been this tense when he’d lain with his first woman. Thirty-odd old, husband dead in battle, a friend of his aunt’s. They’d met during a feast at home while his father was typically away, about two years ago. He’d been surprised how well it went once he got past the first few moments. Undressed, they’d embraced in a dim upper story storage chamber on bolts of satin and linen, raising a fine dust when they moved that hung and held the dimming, deepen
ing bloodred beams that came in almost flat across the sill of the tiny window a vague streak in the shadows.

  At first he’d tensed, chilled as if the energy pressing through his loins withdrew from the suddenly heavy, awkward flesh. Felt nothing there… nothing. Then her hand (at first seeming knobby, rough, harsh) as he lay athwart her, those fingers, somehow kneading the energy back out until he arced and ached to press himself into her.

  Or that same year, finding himself with the fifteen year-old daughter of a physician by an abandoned outbuilding where he’d agreed to meet her after, in church, she’d passed him a pale scrap of parchment inked with symbols that made no sense to him. He was always pressured to go and sit, recalcitrant and bored, hoping the priest would trip on the altar steps, again, and spill the wine…

  His unwittingly cool lack of response had finally driven her to boldly invite him to what he didn’t yet know was a liaison. He’d really only cared about fighting. Even falconry bored him. He enjoyed pig-sticking more than stag-hunting because he liked being in on the kill himself and not, as he put it, watching a pack of dogs do his work for him. “Why not,” he’d told a knight, “fight a joust by having a gang of soldiers drag your opponent from the saddle ere you come to grips with him.” He enjoyed the last moments when the quarry was out of resources and room, trapped and fell to the hunter’s will.

  Lohengrin studied people trying to understand things they seemed to feel that meant nothing to him. Eventually he was as a sharp as a Borgia in reading the human motives and weakness he generally didn’t share. He tended to judge love by his parent’s example. So he’d gone to his liaison not quite sure why. He’d gradually exasperated the comely miss with the redgold “Viking” hair until she finally led him by the hand to the adjoining garden on that unseasonably warm, pre-spring afternoon, sitting in the yellow-brown grasses where a few scattered, pale-blue flowerlets specked the earth. The sky was leaden and when she finally sat on his lap and put his hand where it mattered he understood and was instantly straining at her like a bar of iron. It started to rain (as if on cue) and they went inside into a musty, disused room which still held a strange, faintly sour scent from when they’d used to hang and bleed game on the hooks set into the masonry wall. It didn’t bother him. Why would it.

  “Ugh,” she said, wrinkling her nose.

  Lohengrin knew what to do with the same precocity he brought to fighting. Unlike his sire whose strange, fluid skill always left the impression that his victories simply revealed the ineptitude of his opponents, Lohengrin practiced with total intensity to beat his enemies at their best, meet their strength and bend it back on them.

  He worked his way into and under her garments, wildly excited by the first smooth, amazing touch of bare flesh, running his hands up and down, not so much in awe and excitement as basking in possession as if he were molding her into a form for his pleasure; not that he actually conceived these things but that the inner map of his being demanded it.

  So he opened and spread her, made love with suppressed fury as if he’d mounted to joust, rocking himself down into her until the girl, through spurts of passion and pain (back getting battered and scraped raw as he rode her across the floor into the wall) cried out – he didn’t notice she was resisting and, at the end, pressed her shoulders flat and bowed himself into and arc of victory, spending her soft sweetness and seat and fear as if ejaculation were a coup de gras…

  He blinked the memory away, so to speak. He followed the woman inside the tent into a warm, rich, thick musk of spice and scent so intense that for a moment he felt his nostrils might close. It was somewhat difficult to breathe.

  Took another step, blinking as the dimness tilted and, in the velvety red blurring he was stunned by a pale golden flash: she was instantly nude, magnificent, eyes remote in mists of strange, sweetened wickedness that no man might ever call her back from; coppery hair like dreamflame, spilling and folding over her shoulders.

  “Kneel, boy,” he thought she said and he never knew if he’d obeyed or had simply toppled forward in vertigo onto the perfumed, almost foamy masses of cushions and silks. A part of him was enraptured; a part was furious. “Pay homage,” she commanded.

  She stood over him where he crouched on all fours in the uneven softnesses, furred pillows crackling with spice-stuffing. He cricked his neck looking up her incredibly long leg and then her toes were lightly brushing his lips. It was strange: the tips and undersides were perfectly smooth (he thought of polished alabaster except they were warm and soft) and he couldn’t help but move his lips back and forth as if her foot was formed of sugary stuff, not mere flesh.

  What is this madness? He tried to think. He found himself eagerly licking, lapping as if expecting honey, then sucking as a baby sucks the rich syrup from the charged breast.

  His body was excited, heart thumping hard.

  “Good boy,” she said from her remoteness far above him. “You will serve me well.”

  “Yes,” he heard himself agreeing. “Yes.”

  She was far, far above him, a goddess towering into the smoky, rose-red, perfumed atmosphere. Time had gone somewhere else… dreaming had leaked into waking and dimly inhaled the crush of odors and tasted the sleek sweetness cramming his mouth.

  He moved and she moved, at different points… his mouth traveled and tastes sharply changed. He licked and sucked whatever presented itself… lost track… lost himself, spent and stifled by the mass of musks… tried to wake up until he realized he wasn’t asleep… intended to get up soon…

  At some point he began working very hard, straining, holding his breath until he forced his eyes open. It seemed someone had poured jelly over them. He blinked but all he could do was shift the blurrings around.

  And there she was: golden-pale, tall nude, towering above him, endless legs curving up into the reddish dimness.

  “Up on thy knees, young knight,” she commanded. “Training continues.”

  He twisted around and was looking right at it, eye-to-eye, so to say. Her fingers gripped his head like tongs and brought his face where she wanted.

  He intended to struggle. What she wanted suddenly nauseated him. He had no say. She planted his face there and again he was amazed by the sweetness and silky textures. Thought of the most succulent peach he’d ever tasted. Then she moved away.

  Nothing but this could be important. He slipped back into the strange torpor. Had to reach that perfect goal. Rolled with great effort… half-knelt, half-fell his way over to her. She was on her back, legs effortlessly wide. Crept toward her as if she had a gate there that went somewhere and he had a destination…

  “Drink deep,” she admonished, “from this holy cup.”

  He did. It was sweet. He was as lost to time as a suckling babe. He sensed (somewhere in himself) this might be wrong. But who could be sure? Wrong in war was the loser. Who was the loser in love? The one fucked or fucking?

  PARSIVAL

  Midday. The sun was a whitehot hammer on their skulls. Parsival, Hubert and the wife were following a twisting road; the trees didn’t overhang very often. Parsival rode with the woman sidesaddle in front while her husband stalked along through the yellowish dust. The untilled countryside tilted wildly there, rising and falling in short, sharp swells.

  Her scent was strong, musky but pleasant, the knight decided: flowers and sweat. Her hair right under his chin, smelled like hot, dry wheat. He liked that.

  I’ll never reform, he thought. He went back to his interview with the abbot, the blurry conversation in the burial chamber (or whatever it was) where the holy man had been perched on the side of what seemed a stone coffin. Never…

  The couple had begun wrangling, again. He hated it. Really sickened him.

  “Too hot for that,” he told them, wiping the fresh sweat from his forehead. “Christ’s feet!”

  “Hubert were born cross,” she said.

  A pun? Parsival wondered.

  “Oh, hear how the whore uses me,” cried Hubert.

&
nbsp; “We travel but a short time on this earth,” Parsival intoned. “We ought to enjoy one another’s good points.”

  “Had he any,” she said, “I’d revel in them.”

  Parsival shook his head, chuckling. He kept staring ahead, unfocused, across the brilliant afternoon as they tipped up and then swayed down roll after roll of road.

  “Have you ever tried to pull up the roots of your disputes?” he asked them, thinking of himself and how he never had.

  The askew-looking man tilted his head around and just missed being struck dumb by wonder. His wife gazed up at the blue, blazing heavens as if to draw strength from above.

  “The roots,” she said. “That’s good.”

  “I’m serious,” the knight told her. “I’ve been pondering many things.” He shifted to the side a little to ease the growing numbness in his left leg. His body’s memory of a forgotten wound. “I war at home more than ever in the field. What folly! We repeat ourselves until we’re dull as dead men.” He bit his lower lip, narrowing his eyes. He wished, just for a moment, he could feel that vast, clear otherness again that would have filled out his words with a power beyond mere sense. “Dull and dead… and so we die long before our time and our world shrinks to a small and bitter knot.”

  She twisted around to see his face. She wasn’t mocking him, saying: “You be an odd figure of a knight. Mayhap you should make poems.”

  He nodded.

  “That would surpass what I’ve done,” he agreed. “Nay, but I want peace… peace at home, first, um …” He gestured, inclusively.

  She got it.

  “My name is Katin,” she told him. “Peace at home, Katin.”

  “Ha, ha,” put in Hubert. “Then slay your wife.”

  “Slay yourself, you wormy cheese,” she sneered and recommended.

  “I’m getting seasick on this horse,” Parsival said.

  The valley was narrowing now, steep bluish hills closer. She sat quietly, thoughtful. Hubert spat in the dirt and marched along, up and down the sickening rills and ruts.