Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (35 page)

PARSIVAL

Pieces of the vision kept flashing as they moved inland at chilly dawn. There was no visible sunrise, but after an hour or so, the mist thinned somewhat and their range of visibility increased. The landscape was bleak, sharp-edged, pale grayish with patches of ice and snow. The cold was deep and damp with a steady wind from the sea hustling them inland.

“Viking heaven,” commented Lego.

His lord was pondering one of the remembered images. “Up ahead,” he announced, “there’s little killers.”

“My Lord?”

Parsival shrugged and gestured, vaguely.

“Visions,” he explained. “Better in these situations to trust moonshine than common sense.”

MORGANA ET AL

The tide had done something or else (as Mimujin believed) the witch had put a spell on the very sea so that a narrow, serpentine promontory had emerged before them, vanishing ahead as if melted by the sea-mist.

Modred was less ill, now, sitting straighter in the saddle. The mask on the lower half of his face made his voice tinny and dulled.

“Ah, Aunt,” he said, “this is like unto the deed of the great magician ‘Mose’ in scripture.”

“All forward,” she commanded, in her own mask-voice. “You will claim your father’s weapon since he cannot hide from me now. The Red Knight will be drawn to him and this little fang to the Red Knight.” Gestured to the little killer.

Which was why she hadn’t slain Parsival outside Camelot. She’d set him to attract King Arthur. She’d need Mimujin because (she believed) on the island that some called Avalon, her powers would be ordinary and leave her vulnerable to any of these enemies including the barbarian. She’d never intended to set foot on that soil. She meant to populate it with slaves and vassals under her son while then rest of Britain fell to her. Only Merlinus ever guessed her full ambition.

“And brother’s weapon, too,” said her eldest crony, amused.

Morgana didn’t mind. Nodded, aiming her horse along the narrow, twisting way, massive waves dividing and crashing past on either side. The sea-spray stung.

“We are all brothers and sisters,” she declared. “One way or another.”

“Witch,” Mimujin called out, keeping close to her where two horses could barely stay abreast, “Whatever doom coming, I strike you at the last. Death nothing to me.”

Turned her half-masked face to him, voice metallic and wind-wrung. “Nor are brains,” she told him, very amused and a little annoyed. “And with a face like yours why live, in any case? Your nose alone… when you blow it, does snot pop out your misshapen ears?”

“Ha, ha,” he responded. “When I cut throat I blow nose in you hair.”

“Witty retort,” she said. She was thinking about Arthur, her brother and whatever.

You struck the flat of the great blade on a rock in your pique and it snapped like your failed prick when you heard of Guinevere’s horizontal dance with fly-wit Lancelot and needed a new helm cut around your cuckold horns… you look a stag, now, repenting you slew neither whore nor knight you broke thy steel prick and flew to the lost land to have it made whole again… your flesh one would take ten Merlins to recreate…

“We’ll have it,” she said. “The true power.”

“Mean you the Grail, mother, that all men seek in vain?”

“No,” she explained. “Not that. We don’t want that. That’s best left forever lost.”

SHINQUA

When she woke up under the tree in the mist-diffused, cool morning glow she was stretched-out on the rich softness of the pine needles. The tall, well-spaced trees blurred into grayish smoke. There was a faint pittering of rain in the great hush… then a birdcall, up high… a lyric trill… somewhere… brief…

The cart stood empty on the road, the mule unhitched, looped loosely to a tree trunk, nuzzling the weeds.

He is gone, she thought, not caring much. That one was much scared of his woman… with reason…

She felt relieved. At least he’d left the cart for her. And the foodsack, before padding off, noiseless on the pine-matted ground.

She relieved herself by a tree and rinsed her mouth from the waterskin and washed her face. She untangled her tight-curled hair and retied it in a high knot and thought about Gawain… her child… which way to go…

When I come to a stream I will wash my body, she thought. She hated feeling grubby and took particular care of herself. The hygiene was barbarous compared to her culture: she missed those baths, oils, soaps, perfumes… all of it. What will he think when he sees me again? Mayhap he’s found another spare black woman in this pale country who’s stolen his heart…

She softly laughed. The last other black face she’d seen had been at a tournament in London Town where her lord’s son had fought. She’d seen her father, the Moorish Knight called Iron Heart, fight when she was very little. The watchers cheered as the men, with round shields and pointed helmets, dashed their swift, slim horses around each other. Close to where she stood clutching her mother’s robe the horsemen came together on the sandy soil and she saw the tip of a spear crease her father’s cheek, saw the blood and his wide, bright smile as he struck viciously back. She felt chill fear but didn’t turn away. She never forgot that moment: the flash of his teeth, blood running like tears from under his eye, the glitter of brilliant, dry sunlight on the steel…

At the London Town tourney she’d chatted with a dark Saracen warrior and his saffron-skinned woman who were guests of some high-and-mighty. They’d asked her if she missed her people and she’d answered that it was all in what was familiar and, in any case, her memories were scars. The woman asked if she were content with her blocky, pink-skinned husband (who was not even a knight) or was there a true and noble lover somewhere? The woman loved romantic tales, it turned out. Why not? Shinqua had said nothing much but images from her childhood came back in fragments: pitching through blazing heat, white desert, high on a camel’s back, the straw-musk reek of its hair, a man’s iron-hard, leathery hands holding her virtually in his lap… his smell (still cloying in her memory) pungent and thick, oil and sweat, high-pitched laugh like a shout as he groped under her white robes plucking, stroking, scraping over her tender nine-year-old body… memories like scars… somebody saying “Now you are married, girl.” Riding into the blue and white fire of the day in the terrifying embrace and shout-laughter of the man (husband) whose face she’d never dared look straight at, riding her out of the white-walled, blindingly bright town in the land known for exquisite women… riding, tilting along as people danced and called out stylized felicitations… Scars…

Not long after, she was taken by the Christian knights and ended somewhere in the unstable territories west of Turkey and was held in a great castle. She was about twelve. They baptized her at once. She became the prize of a knight with a partly slashed-off nose and squinty, runny eyes. His face was so reddened by bad skin and drink she feared to look at him. He brought her to his home in Brittany where she met a touring troupe of English jugglers and actors: the leader saw profit; she saw escape, so went away hidden in a trick coffin with a false bottom they used for miracle plays. It was a great attraction to have a jet-black, beautiful infidel girl, with a long, narrow nose, on stage.

She toured Britain for two years and took only one lover, a young man-at arms who brought her home with him. He was killed in a combat concerning a point of what wasn’t yet called heraldry, a matter (incomprehensible not only to her) about a raven on a crest. She saw him carried from the field, thigh shattered; later he died.

Eventually she’d married the armorer because she was already a Christian so none could oppose it. This was her life. It had been bad but might have been worse. She was a black Ruth among the alien corn and that was alright, too.

In fact, she’d been about to leave her girlchild in the hands of her in-laws and go on a holy pilgrimage (it had to be allowed) when the tedium of castle life was broken forever by the coming of Gawain.

This world, she thought, now, among the misty pines, is either dull or painful…

“I’ll go on, anyway,” she murmured. “Find Camelot. Find him.”

Even a hopeless dream, she’d concluded, years before, is better than no dream at all.

PARSIVAL

It was true. The mist had thinned and there were grayish-green fields before them. Except the crisscrossing ravines hadn’t been in the dream. It was a kind of maze of shallow and some deeper cuts.

As they went on straight they’d scramble down and stump up the other side of each one. This had to be one of those tests (he thought) as he tried to explain to Lego, where his actions cast exaggerated shadows.

“Christ Jesus,” said Captain Lego, as they marched through this up-and-down landscape. “What a fine view, now.”

They could see about 100 feet, for a change. Parsival had a feeling the intercuts were going to get deeper and closer together as they went along. It stood to unreason.

“Ho,” uttered Gralgrim, “where is them as inhabit heaven here?”

“Hoo,” responded Lego. “Where, indeed?”

Parsival was carefully scanning the periphery where the mist thickened. “Don’t doubt they’re here,” he suggested. Loosened his sword unconsciously, as they went down a steeper cut which bent out of sight, right and left, all wet earth and rock croppings. It was deeper than Parsival was tall and as they went up the far side he advised: “Spread apart, somewhat.”

“Eh?” grunted Gralgrim.

“So they don’t hit us the first time.”

“Who?” asked the Viking.

“More dreams, lord?” wondered Lego.

“My nose,” said the tall knight, shaking his head.

“I smell nothing much,” said the Berserker.

They came up the far side of a steeper, trench-like cut. The next was fairly close ahead, as he’d expected. There was movement in the mist.

“Duck down,” said Parsival as several little pointy helmets popped up as one and fired arrows almost point-blank.

As he and Lego fell flat, one zipped through the Viking’s bushy hair. The knight realized he knew only one way to fight, being just stupid enough. He sighed and followed the other’s mad, instant charge. Heard Lego grunt to his feet behind him.

The three were suddenly too-close as the little, eastern-looking fellows were re-nocking for a second shot so their next volley was weak, half-drawn and ragged. One had stuck about a quarter of an inch in the Berserker’s massive forehead, flopping as (hissing in rage) he plunged among them, chopping and flailing viciously, smashing bows, flesh and bone with a gnarled broken tree limb he’d picked up. Scimitars flashed, but too late as Parsival and Lego arrived and the survivors fled down the trench-like watercourse. One with a broken leg was trying to crawl away but Gralgrim cracked his head with a terrific downstroke.

The Berserker stood there, seemingly unaware of the arrow sticking in his skull. The knight plucked it out and a bright crease of blood ran down his snub nose and lost itself in the matted beard.

“Hoo,” he commented, weighing his improvised club. Rubbed the wound as if it were a bee sting.

“Your good luck you were but struck in the head,” said Lego, smiling. “And now you think this is your heaven?’

“Closer to the mark,” agreed the Viking. “But where be the wenches?”

“Move on,” said the knight and they went on down and up the other side, again and again as the number of intercut creases became more true ravines and they had to use hands and feet both to get up the steepening sides.

They were soon all panting. The mist stayed the same fifty to one hundred feet around them. No more little men popped up. It seemed more of a gesture than a real attempt to stop them.

They paused and stared ahead at the deceptively even ground surface. Parsival’s image showed the heart-shaped island with the point straight ahead. But the terrain was becoming impossible. Reminded him of something long ago… a place in his youth where he was forced to twist into the grain of that country despite his best efforts to go on straight.

“We should go straight to the heart,” he murmured.

“Heart a what?” wondered the Viking.

Parse peered in the now almost windless fog-curtains and shrugged. “Heart of the same nothing I’ve come to know and relish,” he said.

GAWAIN AND THE LADY IN THE MASK

It was as if something had been poured (something viscous and chill) that somehow set the fog in the shape of a ragged, many-turreted black fortress carved into the side of a cliff face; the same place Lohengrin apparently stumbled into during that great storm.

The ground cover thinned to the west where the landscape rolled green under bright blue sky. At the horizon spurs of dense forest showed dark, rich and clear. Was as if they’d come to the edge of a breaking sea of light.

The knight shook his head. His fancy suggested the shroud had, somehow, flowed from that forbidding structure, her goal.

Something is going to fix me there, he thought.

“No more amazements,” he said. “Let us part where I have but half-known you as I have but half-seen you, being, myself, a half thing.”

She shook her head.

“Are you half-witted, as well?” she asked. “Maybe half your brain was cut away. You are at freedom’s gate.”

“My luck is too weak,” he replied, moving off, slowly, melting by degrees into the surrounding mists, “else my head entire would have been taken off. I have no ambitions. What point? What could any offer me? Riches? Power? Gross pleasures? I’ve had all. In the end I will die and have no face.”

She stopped her mount and watched him as he rode out of the fog she still sat in. She was starting to fade behind the mist as he spoke back to her.

“You don’t know what you’re giving up, Sir Gawain,” she told him.

“Nay, I know well. And I go to try once more to… what? Not live for… I but half-live. I go as a ghost come back to look one last time on what I loved and left. That’s better said. Not to be just a simple, bloodstained villain riding, dick first, through all my lingering, dying days like all the bloodstained fools who went before me.” The mist was closing, melting his dimensions as he slowly eased away. “Down the path of shadows to the last, wearing my yesterdays like a shroud, without leaving more than half a glory to my half a name. Farewell, witch who believes in something. In the end, all paths meet in darkness. Or in the windy raving of a village fool telling my story with violent emptiness.” Blurring away now. “I go to view who I most loved in life. For I am, as I say, a ghost now.” He felt remorse, longing, and (strangely) even hope. He didn’t understand the hope. There was nothing to attach it to. But it lived in him, still, like a lost seed in bitter, winter soil. “I go to look my last.”

The ground-clouds filled in behind him so when he looked back again she was a shape, a shadow… gone behind a dimming wash while he blinked in brightness…

He was a shape, a shadow… gone.

She nodded, strangely moved. Unusual: a knight whose soul had bled within him.

“I’ll show you what’s under my mask,” she called into the abstract fog.

“Better to have half-known you, my lady,” his muffled voice returned from the blankness.

“Farewell then, ghostly knight,” she said. “Thou wilt return to the cold smoke. I doubt thou wilt find the solid world, again.”