Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (40 page)

PARSIVAL

He leaned close to the listless king.

“My Lord,” he said, “I swore to do no more murder for you. On my oath, no more killing save in defense.”

“I ask no more. You denied my knights who came to you. Yet it was not killing they were to ask you for. And I am not the same Arthur you knew as you are not the same boy who came to me for the same red gear you wear still.”

“Aye, Lord. We change with time.”

“Yes and no. We are not the same because we are here in this place where time is as with a sleeper, where moments can seem days or a lifetime.”

“We are asleep? I suspected something since that odd monk …”

“This is no dream to wake from in your bed. This is a place neither of us may stay in. We will go back and I will be the unhappy king, again.”

The heat of the low-ceilinged chamber made the knight want to get outside but he stayed on one knee, listening.

“My, ah whatever-she-is-to-me-through-copulation’s-conscience-smothering-blindness, she, Morgana, has poisoned the world with needless murder, plague and ill magic. She has opened gates that were well sealed. She has awakened Clinschor’s father in his ice cold hole and wants to bring him forth to darken and chill God’s light and sweet green earth.”

“So I must fight this fight.” He was groggy from the stifling air; yawned. “But it’s not what it seems.”

“Most true. It is not. You will battle and chop down and slay flesh and blood in a world of pain and loss, effort, hope, despair…”

“Yes, yes, Sire.” His eyes kept shutting almost as they had in the strange monastery.

“And in another place they will mean other things. The shadows of our acts in life matter more than the lumps who cast them. So I will give you a map.”

Another map, Parsival may have said or just thought, eyes shut, now.

“There is a tunnel back to the world. There is a chamber where the knights and their horses sleep and you will find the rest of Excalibur’s blade.” The gaunt king held out a scrap of pale parchment.

“Yes, my King …”

The stifling heat was too much and the Red Knight sagged to his side with a dull clunk and snored, slightly. His last waking thoughts may not have been his own:

Excalibur… Grail… words? Just a sword and a cup… or something?

Things that stop the mind far short of truth and prove the mind a lie…

Gralgrim hadn’t gotten up. He knee-walked over to Parsival and shook him.

“I’m here to homage King Bush,” he declared, laughing.

Parsival stirred and got up. Staggering a little in the close air he went quickly down the corridor and back outside, breathing deeply. There he held the map before his face.

A map is a dream, too, he thought. Or, at least, a wish to believe something is really known about something…

Behind them, still kneeling, the Viking had pulled a branch to him as if it were a hand and kissed it.

“I pledge to serve you,” he cried, “an all yer leafs and berries.”

GAWAIN

“Look,” he said, softly this time, hand clenched to pull back the hood and show her his face. She held him, half-dragged along as the horse restlessly shifted and snorted.

“What care I?” she insisted. “I had heard your face was hurt. What care I?”

“Yet am I monster and man.”

“Many are. You are my love. Even were you become a monkey-man all foul hair and stink.”

Then she reached up and tore his concealment away. He wrenched his face aside so that only the fine profile showed in the gentle, fog-diffused moonlight.

What? Her mind asked. He still looks like some pale god… “You are like some angel in the Holy Book,” she told him. “Angel?”

“Then ever keep that single half to me, my love,” she whispered. “And I’ll put out this eye –” She held the dagger to her face. “— with this hand and see you only from one side, forever.” He knew she meant it.

“Ahhh,” he groaned.

“Then cover yourself, I care not, fool.”

“Ah.”

“Better to be half myself with you than live out this dull bitterness alone.”

He threw himself from the saddle and crushed her to him, to his mail and plate and she gasped with pain and pleasure.

“Shinqua,” he whispered.

“I need but part of thee, my Lord,” she told him. “Which still you keep from me.”

Easy to say, he thought, in night and fog… yet…

“Yet daylight will come,” he murmured.

“Give me the part I burn for now,” she said into his ear so that he sank within himself and his heart pounded. “Strip off this shell.” Her fingers skillfully worked at the armor’s lacing. “Or slay me here, if you be not white of heart as well as flesh. I’ll not part from you alive this night.”

Then they just stood there, silent, breathing hard; the horse still too. Head twisted to the left, his eye stared across the flowing water into softened forms and shadows, into the misty night melting into morning, the high leaves now taking substantial form…

He could go neither forward nor back and she knew that, too. He disarmed and let her help him lay aside his armor. She kissed his good cheek again and again and his good hand. They finished undressing and lay down together on the soft, warmish knoll. Her rich body astonished him as it formed out from the brightening vapors that concealed them both.

“Let me hold you, now,” she said. “I know not what’s to come …”

“Mayhap little or much. Let me hold you, my lover. And if you must leave me, then slay me.”

MORGANA

“Aunt, See there!” cried Modred, pointing. There was a high arch cut into the side of the passageway and their torchlight flickered into what must have been a vast room or natural grotto.

Mimujin had gone ahead, not looking back. Morgana and her son climbed a few steps into the opening. “Look,” he whispered, excited, pointing at a welter of bright glintings, a slaughter!” The horses resisted, trying to pull back.

Because (at the outskirts of the wavering flamelight) armored men lay in part of what must have been a large circle extending around the chamber. They were laid out, side-by-side.

“Hush!” she hissed at him. “Leave this place!”

Seized his horse’s bridle as she backed them both out. “Aunt Morgana?”

“We’ll come here later. Let them sleep.” They went on through the rock corridor. “They are not dead?” he wondered.

“Death meets in sleep,” she said.

They came out of the passageway into a perfectly flat field that could have been used for a tourney. Mimujin was waiting, sitting his pony.

The mist was fading here and they could see for nearly a hundred yards all around.

“They will have to come this way,” she said. The little man glared at her, twisted around in the saddle. Snorted through his split nose. His eyes were slits of fury. “Go my little hunting beast,” she said. “Find your quarry. You smell them, I think. Bring back the broken sword that Parsival, your beloved, will have found.”

“I find beloved, witch,” he said, twisting his pony’s neck as he held it side-stepping violently. “Then I bring you something back. Yes.”

“Call first your brothers whom I sent before you,” she added.

“Brothers here?”

“Call them. I doubt those two will have slain them all. Go!”

He started the shaggy, quick mount across the gray-green field.

Maybe I bring the brothers back to you, here where you are too weak to do your own business…

“Wait here,” he called back.

“Good hunting,” she said.

One of the women was close to her.

“I feel weak,” she said. “Almost as when I bleed of the month.”

“It is this land,” Morgana told her. “Well let them come who comes. They will pursue and we flee until we’ve caught them.” Smiled.

And the sword we could not have found here ourselves as we are near blind in this place… if the little assassin fails it is no matter as the knight will follow…

She sat there watching across the pale fields into a blurred distance where all edges went to mist, and considered how in days to come when all magic weakened, this island would reverse and the powers gather here and fade elsewhere on the earth… unless she succeeded completely, this time, and woke and freed the sleeper in the fortress…

Wondered when the ships of the pilgrims would arrive here led by the demented priest and her sister sorceress. The idea was to populate this isle with serfs for her son to rule and breed legions so this would be the great place as the world beyond went dull and dark. Part of the Great Plan.

“Do we fight when they come?” he asked.

“The point of war, child,” she explained, “is not to seem brave but to win and live.”

PARSIVAL

He held up the map before Lego and Gralgrim in his mail-gloved left hand. “We follow this and soon we’ll have both halves of the sword,” he told them.

“You need to find both halves of yer wits, mad knight,” responded the Viking.

“It seems a blank piece of bark, lord,” said Lego, looking closely at the thin, silvery stuff that must have been peeled from a smooth, grayish tree like a birch.

“It’s perfectly clear,” he said. Here is this dream so deep I wonder I can ever wake again… here where that king I never really trusted has a majesty and meaning as if he were no man but a fable in seeming flesh…

Gralgrim pinched the edge of the bark and made to study it. “Ar hoo,” he emitted, “what could be plainer.”

Parsival was already turning and heading back through the jagged heaps of broken stone. The other two followed at a little distance, Lego trying to keep a pace or two ahead of the Berserker.

Or I’m awake, the knight went on, internally, and magic and amazement overlap the substantial earth and leave us in two worlds at once so all is now new or all is nothing but vapor…

MIMUJIN

The pony seemed to know so he let it canter. The mist closed in and drew back as he went. The small hooves thumped softly on the moist ground. The gently rolling field ended at a wall of shattered rock, black, volcanic-looking. He rode parallel, sensing his moment might be close. Loosened his bow.

Soon we see, he said to himself.

PARSIVAL

As they followed a twisting path with the dark rock on both sides making a kind of canyon, a gust of mist (it had, generally pulled back hundreds of feet) spilled over and down the broken slope on one side like an airy waterfall. At the edge of Parsival’s sight it seemed to shape itself into the archway of a small chapel where (in blurry stained glass gleaming) a couple seemed to taking vows before the vague outline of a priest. When he looked directly there was just mist. It made him think of his marriage to Layla, so many years past…

“I wish I’d bolted,” he said, loud enough for Lego to hear.

“My Lord?”

“From that wedding.” Pointed, unconsciously, at where the mist was spilling shapelessly onto the ground. “What unhappiness might have been averted.”

“Which wedding?”

“Mine.”

“You cannot be sure,” Lego considered, “what good it may have brought and may yet bring.”

Gralgrim came nearer, not wanting to miss any new madness. He thought the entertainment almost as good as a meal. “Hoo,” he voiced. “Be these fairy-folk dancing afore ya, now?”

And Parsival saw a huge knight in black and silver steel with a demonic faceplate, mounted on a massive charger. He resembled one of Clinschor’s mutes from twenty years before.

“This monster is for me alone,” he told them. “Stay back.”

This may wake me up, he thought. In the middle distance was a placidly grazing moose as far as Lego and the other observers could discern. Gralgrim licked his chapped lips, contemplating fresh meat. He knew these animals wouldn’t flee one hunter.

The Black Knight had a spear-tipped lance couched. The Red had shield and sword but no mount. The rider waited as Parsival came closer. Now, in the mists behind, more warriors were visible, waiting.

If this is real it will be worth a tale, he thought.

Suddenly the near one charged. Parsival relaxed, waiting to respond. His opponent thundered at him, lance tip flashing the weak light. “Here we are,” he murmured. Like the first time when he won this armor.

A yard away he ducked across the enemy’s path and suddenly the lance was on the wrong side of the horse. No time to recover. The Red Knight tossed aside his shield and dove, point-first, at a space in the part-plate armor exposed under the armpit.

The mute emitted an agonized grunting bellow and went over and down with the impact of Parsival’s weight.

The other two watched the famous knight criss-cross and stab the huge animal under the right shoulder after the beast had flipped a furious antler at him. Gralgrim was delighted and moved forward to help in the kill.

Parsival was rolled aside by the impact, leaving the blade jammed in the creature’s ribs.

“Good strike,” Mimujin muttered.

Parsival stood up, stunned, and gestured to the onlooking herd while his victim thrashed around, dying, pinkish foam at his lips. Some of the moose were moving off into the receding mist.

“Your champion has fallen!” he called to them.

Lego raised a warning fist. “Speak no word,” he warned. “Not one.”

Except Gralgrim was looking elsewhere. “What’s this?” he exclaimed.

Because Mimujin, moustaches flopping, oiled hair shining, bow in hand, pony loping, had just come around the bend where the wall of rock ended not far ahead. He was close to Parsival who was still watching the herd withdraw as Lego yelled a warning. Mimujin yelled an ululating warcry which was also a signal in case any of his people really were near.

They are on foot, he thought, and soon die!

The knight turned in time to take an arrow through his lifted faceplate. Even his amazing reflexes failed to do better than take the missile on an angle so it creased across his eyebrows and wedged in the helmet, blinding him with blood and the shaft, too, before he snapped it away so the next one (shot at closer range) hit and just pierced his backplate, stopped by the chainmail layer. It hurt.

He couldn’t wipe the blood from his eyes through the visor with his steel-gloved fingers and assumed the companions of the Black Knight were upon him.

I die here, mind words flashed.

Except the Berserker, brandishing his tree limb club in instant frenzy, bull-charged, roaring with happy anger, amazing Lego with his stocky speed. He went straight at the mounted man who’d halted his pony with his knees, taking dead aim, point-blank, at the blinded knight.