Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (27 page)

GAWAIN

John’s followers now consisted of a pilgrim line stretching back nearly a mile. Like an army on the march – which was how he obviously looked at it. A nice idea, except when Gawain looked at it he saw a straggling line of mismatched, mixed and miserable underclass that might have been scattered by a pack of boys with play swords.

Since the golden-masked, red-haired woman had joined them, their numbers had swelled at every village. The death had spread all along the coast and survivors were desperate. The woman proved to be a good speaker and helped persuade the terrorized and scattered people to follow them. The mask covered her features below the eyes which showed pale as water.

Gawain didn’t like her; but was impressed by the way she’d simply stand up straight without speaking for a long time, glaring over their heads. Then she’d simply say, in her vibrant, penetrating contralto:

“If you would survive the world’s end, follow us!”

And many did. The whole business was madness, he decided.

They’d just entered a town that fronted on the Channel. John and his new cohort rode side-by-side ahead. The sun was behind them and their long shadows wavered over abandoned and burnt-out huts and unburied, stinking bodies human and animal.

Gawain’s face ached as it often did. He decided it was the sea dampness. He kicked his horse ahead and then drew up beside them. Studied the woman again: she sat stiffly, as if resisting everything around her, including the motion of the animal. The mask was finely wrought thin gold and looked old and foreign. He wondered how mad she was, on the scale of those around her.

Lunatics, he thought, spring full-formed from the earth these days…

“How,” he said, in lieu of grunting, “do you intend to ship all these happy pilgrims off to the great nowhere?”

“Knight,” the woman responded, her cool, imperious monotone vibrating the metal, “whose face is never revealed to us, perhaps because of a deep oath such as mine?”

He snorted. “You don’t want to see it,” he told her.

“That’s sure,” said John. “Providence has marked him and set him seeking salvation.”

“A leper?” she wondered, staring into the shadows of his cowl with her strange, bleached-pale eyes.

Almost like blind eyes, he thought.

“Nay,” said John, “a dreadful wound he ought not have survived. Yet he did and now serves a sacred cause.”

Gawain snorted.

“Hah,” he said. “And I thought my head was but cut in half by some son-of-a-bitch.”

“Well,” she said, “we will find our way north.”

“Mayhap,” he asked her, “you have no nose or some wart the size of an egg sits on your cheek?”

“You will see all when we come to the Kingdom of Morgana,” she told him.

“What? Ought that not be Witchdom?” wondered Gawain, looking back at the endless, straggling line. “I thought we were bound for Avalon?” He was amused. “One imaginary place, I suppose, matches another.”

“It is all one, yes,” she responded in humorless monotone. “Our destination is not imaginary. Those who come there will be saved from darkness by darkness as fire puts out fire. Preserved from death by death.”

Gawain, in his cowl, smiled with the half-lips he had.

“I’ve preserved many, in my time, with that method. Ha. The more mad the enterprise,” he said, “the greater the certainty. Well, I’ll make you a promise.” And he meant it. “Should you two either err, I’ll preserve you well.”

John was bouncing up and down in his seat, like, the knight thought, a child with an aching bladder.

“Blessed and saved!” he yelped. “Just so, just so!”

“Lord Death has our lady at his right hand,” she pronounced.

“Mean you the Blessed Virgin?” Gawain asked.

“Our lady is no virgin,” she responded, toneless. “She has been to the dark place under the earth and returned carrying his chill blessing.”

Gawain almost drew his sword and paid his promise in advance. Instead, having learned to adjust his impulses through much suffering, he merely urged his mount forward a few paces so he need not look at them.

“Why are you in this company?” she called after him, in that level, resonant voice with the metallic ring.

He didn’t look back.

“I want the magic chamberpot too,” he said, straight ahead, “So I can make love again. And take pleasure in meat and drink and all the world’s wonders. Unlike you two dancing geese, I know my cause is hopeless.”

“Why do you follow it then?” she wanted to know.

“Dull woman,” he reacted, “when there are no roads left to follow, I ride on anyway. Be fucked. Aye, be doubled fucked the pair of fools you are and thank your providence I do not slay you merely out of good taste.”

Now there were three shadows, the knight’s longest, bending out past the last hut to where small waves broke on a gray and stony beach. In the dying twilight several ships were visible in the shallow cove.

“Behold,” John cried behind him, “there!”

“The miracle of the boats,” Gawain muttered. “Pray you have sailors among you.”

“You are filled with doubt,” the woman observed.

“And you are filled with shit,” Gawain snapped back.

“Soon we embark,” John said, turned and rode back along the line to encourage the followers. “See, see,” he exclaimed, “the way is open! Soon we sail!”

LOHENGRIN

By late afternoon the sun was behind them as they followed a well-worn road towards the sea. He was blurry from being continuously in the saddle for over twenty-four hours. She’d leaned into him and dozed, off and on, the whole way.

He really wasn’t sure why he didn’t just dump her off and take some other direction. What had been done to him? He brooded in his blurriness and became increasingly convinced that the witch (as he had it) who’d briefly enslaved him when he first set out with Hal (where was Hal?) was somehow responsible for weakening his approach to women, and impeding seduction. Unless it was the work of the steel-strong girl at the gate to the underground stronghold where he’d swum in a pit of shattered bones.

And were bitten by Death’s best companion… if any of this happened at all…

He noted, as they swayed along at a walk, signs of a large group ahead of them: leaving a litter of chewed bones, rags, excrement along with hoof-cut and foot-flattened earth.

“They can’t be far ahead,” he said.

She sighed awake. “You see them?” she murmured. Shifted away from him as far their riding double permitted, maybe reflexively fearing the intimacy.

“I smell them,” he said.

He came more alert as they were partway through a bend where the trees grew suddenly close to the road. He noted what he took for a glint of metal back in the underbrush. Nice spot for an ambush.

He urged the horse into a trot. Then a canter. “Hold fast,” he told her.

But it was too late. Several tiny men (in rusty middle-eastern armor cut from the same pattern as the ones who’d nearly slain his father two weeks before), no bows or horses showing, blocked him as one (very skillfully) leaped to catch the reins.

Clearly, he peripherally thought, they were tracking the marchers.

He shoved her down into the horse’s neck and drew his sword. While not as good as Parsival, he was very good. Youth driven by icy fury and joy in smashing.

He struck with a curse and his trademark accuracy, and left with a pair of wrists dangling from the reins.

“Fucked little shits!” he snarled.

Galloped through swiping and missing the others who ripped slashes at his horse’s legs and missed themselves. They shouted things he couldn’t understand as they crashed along, raising a spray of dark dust that fell heavily in their wake.

He kept on fast until sunset and they were again in an almost treeless, flat area. Their shadow stretched far in front. He slowed the horse to a walk again. Drew up to study a man by the side of the road; under a net of flies he lay on his back, head broken. A peasant probably clubbed to death by another. His shoes had been pulled off and his traveling sack lay ripped and empty.

“Know him?” he asked.

“No. Why would I?” Lohengrin shrugged.

Part of your expedition,” he explained. “Christ, I’m weary.” Yawned and stretched, urging the horse ahead again. “How were you going to catch up with them without a horse?”

“Someone was supposed to come back to meet me,” she murmured, uncomfortably.

“Someone?”

“Yes.”

“Good that you found me. You would have been slain or worse on the road.”

“I would have waited at the edge of the village. He would have come.”

“We haven’t met someone riding to find you.”

She stiffened and said nothing more. He kept blinking one eye after the other. They hurt and his face felt wooden.

“Mayhap someone is dead,” he suggested. She didn’t react. “Mayhap he’s taking the long way round.” Nothing. “Mayhap he’s got his nose in some quim.”

“Mayhap you’ve said enough for now,” she suggested. Her voice was dull and she yawned. “You made your stupid point.”

He was just staring now out where the point of their conjoined shadows wavered and bent across the earth.

As the night was seeping down through the last, lost blur of twilight they came to a tiny bridge over a narrow streamlet.

They stopped to water the horse and themselves. While the horse grazed and drank, they both stretched out on the cool, mossy bank, side-by-side. He wanted to keep his eyes open. This was a fight he couldn’t win. They felt like twin knots. The faint splashing of the shallow water was soothing.

“We dare not sleep,” he said. “They’ll be following.” She had just snorted a snore. Shook awake.

“You need rest,” she said, sympathetically.

“I’ll sleep when we catch up,” he said, drifting a little. “There may be a horde of the little snakes behind us.”

“They seem soldiers of the Antichrist,” she said.

He was aware that she was lying close to him and that something had changed in her attitude. He was too leaden to make much of it.

“Antichrist,” he muttered, “I’ll smite them with a cross, in that case.” Snorted. Has she met them before to know them again? He asked himself, mockingly.

He was flickering in and out of what weren’t quite dreams: just faces too close to make out… then there was the red-haired witch who’d enslaved him in her tent – except this time she was holding a silvery, spiky crown in both hands, raised as if to be set on someone’s head.

He shook awake as the girl was saying: “I think I trust you now.”

“What?”

“I no longer fear your touch,” she said, quietly. He had an impression she’d shifted closer.

Now, he thought from the leaden space he lay in, that I cannot lift a hand…

“Yes… good …” he whispered, flicking out again and there was the naked witch or whatever planting a soft, perfect foot over his face. Shook awake.

“Don’t let me sleep,” he said, struggling onto his elbows, shaking his head.

She knelt up beside him. Her robe-like dress was parted and she put his hand inside, touching her elastic, warm softness, the flicking surprise of her nipples. She sighed and he automatically reached his other hand to pull her down beside him.

Ah, he thought.

“No,” he said. “We can’t linger here.” She pressed close to him.

“You never gave your name,” she said into his ear. Her warm, musky, pleasant breath wakened him.

“Nor you yours,” he returned. “Jane,” she told him.

“Lohengrin,” he said, groping, heedless now, at her skirts, tugging them up so his hands could roam, licensed, over the thighs and secrets he’d been imagining the whole ride.

She lifted herself and mounted him, stripping away at his codpiece and belt until she found what she sought and gripped it firm.

“Oh,” she hissed between her teeth. “How I like this… how I like this …”

“Ahhh,” he let out, “fit it within you… fit it within you …”

PARSIVAL

The cliffs gradually folded themselves down to almost sea level as the miles passed. And then, at early evening of the next day, as if (Lego felt) his lord commanded these adventures, they saw fire and heard cries and sounds of combat on the beach maybe half-a-mile ahead. And there were the unmistakable sails and low-profiled dragon ships drawn up to the beach, melting in and out of the smoky mists as the sea wind shifted.

“Well, my Lord,” Lego said, “we found them. Pray it’s no mistake. What follows now?”

Parsival was running ideas through his head rapidly. So far none felt solid.

“We keep riding,” he said, picking up the pace along the sketchy, sandy trail that obviously ran to the burning village ahead.

The knight, when no plan occurred to him, in generally just went into situations and improvised. In that sense he’d never grown up. The fact that he usually succeeded must have meant something, but he wasn’t sure what, himself.

“There may be lots of Norse there,” Lego pointed out. “We only need one ship.”

Lego took that in. “Who will sail it, lord?”

“The Vikings, of course.”

“I n’ere heard of hiring such devils like London Town watermen.”

“We’ll win their hearts to our cause.”

The wind shifted and the smoke from the burning huts blew blindingly in their faces. The horses cantered over scattered bodies now but they heard no more fighting or shouts. As the twilight went black the firelight showed groups of men carrying booty and wounded back to the longships.

They reined up by the nearest on the smooth, firm, wet sand just above the low breakers. Two bare-headed bare-chested Vikings and one in a horned helmet were raping a woman on the beach while several others were dragging pigs and cattle up a steep gangplank into the ship, blurring away, then fading back as the smoke and fog swirled.

Parsival and Lego both detested violence against women, unlike so many others in a time where chivalry was more a hope than a practice. The big knight in the red armor of his youth dismounted and fell on the three rapists, wielding his still-sheathed sword with furious contempt. Only the helmeted character who’d been holding one of the woman’s legs (she was not particularly attractive, he noted, rather fat) managed to actually stand up and loose his war ax from its shoulder sling before Parsival (the other two were already down flat with cracked heads) simply jabbed the scabbard point into the Norseman’s throat and sent him stumbling off, gagging and gasping into the sea. The smoke obscured it from the others.

Lego was beside him.

“Winning their hearts, my Lord?” he asked.

We’ll try this, Parsival thought. “Bring your horse,” he said, stepping back and taking the reins in one hand and heading for the gangplank. “We’re going to hire them.”

“Hire? Have we gold?”

“Better than that,” he explained, as seven or eight fighters came to close in around them. “I have the map.”

“I doubt they want that map,” Lego said, releasing his mount and standing ready.

Parsival didn’t draw his sword. He stood up on the gangplank as the men closed in around them with blades and axes. The fog and smoke puffed and filled keeping them at best semi-visible for no more than a couple of dozen feet.

“Who speaks our tongue?” he demanded one hand on hip, obviously relaxed.

“Your language is what the dead speak,” a short, very wide redheaded warrior replied, moving closer, war ax ready. He had a slight accent and could almost have been a Briton by the sound of him.

Parsival sighed. “Yes, yes,” he said, “I’ve been dead ten times this year, to hear others tell it. Hold back your wolves a moment. I have something to profit you.”

“Ha, ha. We have just taken the booty of your village. We have profit enough.”

“This is not my village. And I speak not of lank cows and pigs, but of treasure ten longships could not bear away.”

Lego nodded.

“He speaks true,” he said.

That’s no lie, he thought, how can you bear away nothing?

The Viking cocked his head, pondering. “So you say,” he said, at length.

“So I say,” quoth Parsival, “so I say.”