Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (23 page)

PARSIVAL

“I know where we are,” he told Lego.

They were on a gentle hill, shaped something like a woman’s breast, overlooking a long, subtly sunken sweep of clear green, lightdappled fields, crisscrossed by many twisting streams, touched, here and there, by blinding spots of sun reflection.

There were crops and distant, grazing animals. On the horizon, as if the summer haze were solidifying, was a sudden steep hill topped by the vague outline of a huge castle.

Parsival pointed, standing with his legs wide apart. “That’s it,” he said.

Lego was just freeing his horse to graze. “Camelot?” he asked.

“I think.”

“Think?”

The knight shrugged. The horses now both were nuzzling the lush, rich lowland grasses. Yellow flowers speckled the slopes. The sun was just past noon.

Lego sat down and rubbed his big, hard sun-chapped hands gently over the rich earth. He sighed.

Parsival folded his arms, brooding into the distance like a depressed archangel.

“It’s been some time,” he said. “And I hate this place.” Lego looked up.

“This place looks like heaven on earth,” he commented. “You hate it, my Lord?”

Parsival shrugged again.

“When I was a boy,” he expounded, “I had hope. By the time I left Camelot, my youth was in a coffin and the hole was already dug.”

Lego plucked a buttercup and held it next to his palm. The gold reflected faintly on his skin. He remembered, when he was a boy that it meant something.

Somebody loves me… or do I love them…

“You make me sad, my Lord.”

Parsival looked down at him. “You have a gentle nature, captain,” he said. “You’re above all those pigs in armor. You recall an excellent fellow who served my mother. I’ve never seen him since.”

He pictured the blocky, solid almost uniquely literate retainer: big, gruff, bearded, loyal… Lego was much like him… much…

“Last time I came here,” he told Lego, “I killed my first man and took his armor and horse.” Shook his head, still brooding. “My life proceeded from there, unfortunately.”

My first man… yet there must be knights who were killed the first time they fought… I may have slaughtered a dozen such… who knows?… here’s an odd career: train a lad his whole youth to ride and war, and then his first day he dies…

Lego lay back, palms down flat at his sides, staring up into the bright blue. The ugliness, death, pits, darkness and poisoned corpses of the past week momentarily dissolved away like fog in sunlight…

“This is such a beautiful place,” he said, softly gruff.

A big grasshopper rasped over him, little wings fanning, glinting like metal. Up high, a hawk circled, riding the easy air.

Lego closed his eyes and kept his hands flat on the earth.

After resting they went on across the late afternoon fields. The castle hill was dimming as dense, low rainclouds gathered ahead of them. There wouldn’t be much wind, Parsival decided.

By the time they’d come to the base of the hill, it was a dull gray twilight. Fog rolled down the slope at them like ocean breakers under a warm, light drizzle.

“If this fucked mist thickens up,” declared Lego, “we won’t be able to see the horses’ damned heads, sire.”

Parsival was looking straight ahead. It was steep here. They’d already lost the trail which would have led to the main road and castle gate. They’d come to a farmer’s wall of field stones, just too high to jump going uphill. They were forced to follow it and went left, for no special reason. The billows thickened, as Lego had feared.

“Christ,” he said, “you could cut this smoke like cheese.”

Parsival nodded. Lego was just a blur to him, maybe five feet behind.

“I can still see my mount’s damned head,” he joked. “Though, in some ways, I’d prefer to have never met this noble steed at all.” The peasants had given them two second-rate horses, insisting these were their best. This one had a habit of suddenly trembling and then loosing low, long farts, apropos of nothing. Lego’s would puff whether at a walk or fast canter, as if it had galloped a mile. Neither rider was anxious to overstrain either animal.

“This is some witch’s spell, I think,” Lego added. “This is not natural fog.”

“You think they know I’m coming back, captain?” Parsival smiled. “Better they kept me away the first time.”

It was strange, he considered, how being suddenly closed-in like this made grown men as uneasy as children.

“How will we find this castle?” Lego said.

“Well, captain Lego, seeing as how it covers the entire hilltop, need we do aught but climb on? It’s too big to miss.”

They climbed on after passing through where the wall had fallen away. The trees were sparse here: now and then a couple would seem to suddenly condense out of the still thickening fog.

By the time they’d reached the crest and the hill leveled off, it was night and with only the bright, rising full moon for vague, diffused light, Lego’s fears were now justified. The ground was almost completely flat so they could no longer guide themselves by the tilt.

The wind had died away. The two horses were almost touching flanks and still the men seemed more blur than substance to one another.

“This fog seems unnatural enough,” said Lego. Parsival grunted.

“It can’t be far,” he murmured. “How far, my Lord?”

The knight chucked his mount along at a very low walk. “No more than a few hundred yards from the walls.”

“It might as well be miles,” Lego said.

“Hush!” Parsival commanded in a whisper. “Hark!” A pause. The mist barely stirred.

“What?” wondered Lego, softly.

“A sound I know too well. The crick of an armor joint.”

“You are keen, sir.” A muffled voice startled them, almost directionless and close in the fog, blurred by what both men knew was a closed visor. They turned around several times but there was only the dark gray wall everywhere.

“How did you find us?” Lego wanted to know. The voice was amused.

“But who could not have heard your great voices and cloddish steeds?”

“What is your pleasure?” Parsival asked. “We have come to find the king.”

Now, a few feet away a knight and charger shaped itself from the cloudy air. Parsival was startled, no stunned: the horse and rider wore red armor.

What? He thought. What?

It was the same as the armor he’d won and worn all those years ago, the first time he’d come to Camelot. Impossible, because he’d left that gear hanging in the great hall of his castle. He knew at once it was identical. Impossible…

“I dream again?” he asked.

“You’ll find no king, Knight,” the newcomer announced, “save you pass me.”

“That’s simple,” he responded. “We’ll go on, then. How far past you is the king?”

“You’ll go nowhere unless you knock me down, Sir Coward.”

“Listen to that,” said Lego. “Harken, great knight in red, we are already in nowhere and thus need no permission to proceed. Though, to knock you down seems sport enough.”

The challenger drew an extra long, massive, two-handed sword that Parsival instantly dismissed as too clumsy to bother with. He felt the kindest thing would be to simply slice off the arrogant fellow’s thumbs with a double cut and leave him to his regrets.

“What do you want of us?” Parsival inquired.

The laugh, inside the heart-shaped visor, was oddly high-pitched. “I will spare you,” was the reply, “but you must enter my service for one task.”

Parsival let his steed work a little closer. The armor made him uneasy. It was so much the same as his. Perhaps someone had stolen it for sale?

I’ll just disarm this fool, he thought, and bang him one on the skull to remember me by…

“Where did you get that armor?” he asked.

“Fight,” said the other. “No more talk.”

And instantly struck at Parsival from the shoulder with a clean, hard cut. The unarmored knight leaned away and drew the scimitar. The oversized sword missed; but Parsival blundered – something few had ever seen. He forgot the blade he cut back with was a relatively delicate, slicing tool whose quality was unknown. After all, he hadn’t taken it from a famous or wealthy knight or solid man-at-arms: just a barbarian knave. So he blundered, making the natural move to strike down on the opponent’s awkward sword from above with all his power and knock his hand loose from the grip or even shatter the blade. He’d done it enough times in the past.

Instead, he bent the springy scimitar into a useless U. He instantly trotted his mount into the moon-tinted fog mass to gain a tactical moment and vanished. Even as he took a short circle back to come at the knight from behind, he realized he was instantly utterly alone in the faintly luminescent, damp clouds.

I’ll drag him to the ground and disarm him, he thought.

Tossed the useless weapon away. Charged, shouting, “Lego!” for bearings.

His horse glanced off a small tree that seemed to jump out at them as if the mist itself had struck a blow. The fog was in his face like a wall now.

“Lego!” Nothing. No echo, no reply.

I doubt I went above ten yards, he reasoned. How lost can I be?

Very lost, it turned out. Stopped and listened. “Legg-oo!”

His voice seemed lost, dull, stoppered. No response. Then a whoosh behind him, and as he tried to turn, an immense blow struck him across the shoulders. He knew it was the flat of a blade: the Red Knight’s blade.

Impossible, his mind said, even as he was sailing from the saddle and aware too that he could have just as easily been hit with the edge and sliced in half. How?

The pain was dull and deep and would have left a lesser man down for half a day. It took him a few moments before he got his feet back under him. He knew all the opponent need do was dismount and cut his head off or ride him down and stab him to death.

Impossible, he thought again.

“Very well,” he said, wincing and recovering his breath. “Come ahead.” Because he was alone again. Even his horse had drifted away. Calling it would be futile since he barely knew the animal. So he stood there, walled away in the blurred silence.

“Show yourself, back-striking coward!” he tried. He moved carefully to the side until he found a tree and pressed his back to it. Dull silence flowed back over his flat cry.

Then:

“Here am I, Sir Disarmed and defeated,” said the Red Knight’s slightly reedy and high-pitched voice. The mist seemed to fold into form and the dismounted knight stepped close to him, holding the outsized sword over one shoulder again.

“Do you find me by sense of smell,” Parsival wondered, “as would a dog?” He waited, wanting the other to do anything, raise the sword so he could throw him and (furious now) jam the thick blade into his visor’s eyeslits and pin the annoying fellow to the earth clean through his face.

The Red Knight responded with highpitched laughter.

“I spared you, oaf,” was the reply. “Now thou owes me service.”

“I owe you death,” Parsival said. “You are no knight but a warlock.”

More laughter. “I swear, before God and the Devil, I am no warlock.”

Parsival, like a tight wound spring, sprang from the tree across the perhaps three feet faster than a panther could have, incredibly strong hands clawed to rip the armor from the other’s throat and strangle. He hadn’t been so consumed by raw rage since he’d gone wild in his first battle and killed an unarmed boy.

But his attack was another blunder because he gripped only mist and went flat on his face again, except this time, there was a steel foot on his spine and a swordpoint pressed into the back of his neck hard enough to draw blood.

“Yield,” the muffled, high-pitched voice demanded.

“Ah-ha,” the knight said into the sweet, wet earth-smelling grass, “yet you’re no warlock.”

“That’s still true. Yield!” He exhaled a snarl.

“Be damned, wizard!”

“Impossible. I’ll not offer you life again.”

“I must find the king,” he said into the ground. “There is a threat to all Britain. This is no game or jest, you unnatural fool!”

That caused amusement again; though the blade didn’t shift. “Called fool by the prince of fools,” the victor said.

“So you know me?”

“I know you have no choice. Arthur is gone, none knows where.”

Parsival sighed. No surprise. He’d been prone to that in recent years. “Very well,” he murmured.

The sword went away. He started to get up. “Am I to do penance here, wizard?”

Now there was creaking and clashing above and behind him which he instantly realized was armor coming off. “What now?” he wondered. “Do we wrestle?”

“You put on this gear, Sir Parsival. You then follow the map I leave with you. You will find the king.”

He started to roll over. The moment the visor came off he knew it had been a woman’s voice, fairly deep. Rich and strong – and he’d heard it before.