Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (6 page)

The monk was across the room by the entrance. “You lay down,” said the monk.

Parsival blinked. His sight was clearer. He could see the round, thin-featured face quite well. The floor was firm. He heard a fly buzz near his ear and flicked his hand at it.

“I thought I’d come here and be told something,” he murmured, climbing out of the tub-like artifact.

“Told what?”

“I don’t know.” He felt sober. Dull and sober. “I don’t really know why I came here.” Rubbed his face. “I just had a dream.”

“Well, sleepers do dream,” the monk said, without emphasis. “Are you now awake?”

The tall knight went over beside the little man. At the doorway he stood at the too-steep ramp. He had an impression that if he slipped he’d slide to the bottom like a child on a slicked board.

“I suppose I’m just running away again,” he murmured.

“Go back the way you came,” the monk said, as if giving casual directions.

“Back home?”

“No. The way you first went. Go back that way. It won’t be the same.”

Parsival wondered if the Abbott meant he wouldn’t be the way he was when he first left his mother or if the road would now veer differently. Or both. Or neither. He reached for the man’s arm as he asked the question except the fellow had moved, slightly and silently, like a shadow. In the dimness he seemed to float back across the room to the coffin.

Parsival felt too weary to follow or even go on talking. He turned towards the stairs. He didn’t want to look back and find the mystic had disappeared or shifted shape or something…

Hours later Parsival and Lego were working their way back down, facing the sunset. The horizon hills cut a wedge into the speck of hot sungold that burned into the gathering clouds.

“Aim always at the sun,” he remembered and smiled. Lego noticed it.

“Something, my Lord?”

“My wife’s father once gave me advice. An age ago when first I met her. I took it.”

Lego grinned. He considered the matter. “Always a mistake,” he said.

“Nay. It led me in circles. Her father told me to ride always into the sun and so I went east at dawn and west by dusk.” He chuckled and shook his head. “My error was finally riding straight. I came home and fell into misery.”

“It is easy to find the lumps in the bedding,” Lego said, “but a man must make the best of his life. It passes like piss in a stream.”

Parsival was looking at the sun. It was so perfect, he felt, beyond thinking. The way the colors toned and blended, melted the clouds into a twilight mystery of light and dark.

“Bad cheese, my Captain,” he said, “is still bad. There’s no way to keep it on your stomach.”

I’m going to do it again, he thought. I’ll get to aim at the sun again… He noticed something: a puff of dust down where the trail flattened into the valley itself. He read it at once.

“Ah,” he said, “here comes the other side of chivalry.” Lego frowned leaning up toward his horses neck.

“I was taught,” he said, “to heed the proverbs of the serfs but otherwise to keep my distance from them.”

“And to be courteous to all.” Parsival added, grinning. “To trust no one. To break open heads. To defend the helpless. To war for the good to the gates of the Holy City itself.”

“The proverbs never failed.”

“Here’s one,” Parsival responded, watching the horses coming toward them out of the hoof dust. “trust not Greeks bearing gifts.”

Lego pondered this. A Greek merchant had sold him a saddle once at a very good price. He supposed that could be like a gift.

“Why not?” he wondered. Parsival shrugged. Considered. “Know you not the tale,” he replied, “of the knight Ulys who hid in a horse?”

“Nay.”

“A horse of wood. I heard it of a minstrel at court. Sir Ulys and his men hid in the horse which was left at the gate. When his enemies dragged it into their castle out they leaped and slew the lord and most of his men.”

“Out from a wooden horse?”

“So runs the tale.”

“It was hollow as a cask?”

“I imagine.”

Lego turned over the idea. A few points occurred to him. “How long were they within the horse?” he asked at length. “I know not.”

“Were it overlong, they’d have to void piss and shit within.” Parsival smiled and agreed. He was watching the riders come. “Tellers of tales,” he commented, “often leave a few pegs out of the bridge.”

“What a stink that would be,” Lego posited, watching the riders. “Are these Greeks coming here?”

“No. Knights of Arthur’s table. They intend to practice chivalry on me, I think.”

“How do you mean?”

“They’ll tell me if I say no to the king — which I have every right to do — great sorrow will be my fortune.”

“Well, we all have had the lesson: be courteous to all, but fear everyone.”

The riders were close enough to them now to see the glint of arms and armor. Between the heatshimmers and the dust the men seemed to be forming their substance out of some vague, intermediate stuff.

“I have a proverb,” Parsival said. “If they press me too closely: Be not the lamb who bites the wolf.”

Lego nodded and chuckled. He appreciated that. “They’ll shortly be nipped, my liege.”

“Nay.” he said. “Not nipped.”

Because he knew what he was going to do. It was suddenly clear. Mad, but clear. He smiled at himself.

It was mad. He watched them coming and considered it. He felt a rush of laughter bubbling up within him instead of cold rage. He shook his head and kept grinning as the three knights reined the bulky chargers up in a jingle, clip-clop and clitter of arms.

Parsival and Lego had already stopped. Captain Lego watched as his master dismounted, stood there and began stripping off his clothes and tossing them into the bushes until he stood in what amounted to a loin cloth.

The mounted men opened their visors. The leader removed his helmet and set it over his saddlehorn. Lego saw that, indeed, these were the emissaries sent by the king. The lean, sour-faced, red-haired leader looked puzzled but determined.

“Parsival,” he said, “what does this nonsense mean?”

“It means I am mad,” the famous knight returned, “or a fool.”

He kept on his sock-like buskins. He fell on his knees in the dust. “Are you angels of God?” he demanded.

The leader raised both eyebrows. He didn’t like this much. He glanced at the other men.

“Were we such,” he replied, “we would call you to heaven instead of to his majesty.”

“A shrewd answer,” said Lego.

“I don’t recall the rest,” Parsival said, standing up again. “What say you?” the knight wondered.

“You’re made of shiny stuff,” Parsival told them, half smiling. “You must be angels after all.”

“Enough of this,” said the wider knight. “Will you come to your lord or no?”

“What makes a man a knight?” Parsival asked. Deadpan. He heard Lego guffaw up behind him.

“Honor.” said the leader. “Have you forgotten, perhaps?”

“Who makes a man a knight?”

“The king to who —” started the second man then caught himself in fury. He didn’t enjoy being baited. Who would?

“If you be not a knight within yourself, none can cause it from without,” overrode the leader of the three. “Do you mean to mock us Parsival?” Parsival shook his head. He wasn’t quite smiling. He looked past them now at the sundazzle on the fields where the dust of their passage was still puffing out steadily and thinning away.

“Nay,” he answered him. “I mock nothing. I will start afresh. I want the king to make me a knight again, from without. Perhaps it will take away the curse of the first time.”

“Curse?” The second, the wide one said. “The pride of heaven, a curse?”

Lego chuckled, looked down and couldn’t believe what he was witnessing. “That’s good,” he said. “The pride of heaven is good.”

Parsival remounted. He kicked his horse lightly and rode past them without looking back. Lego followed. The knights watched them go, dustgouts spurting under the hoof impacts.

“We will follow at a distance,” the leader said. “I think he’s mad,” said the second man.

The third, short and wide with a bull-like face, had another view:

“It’s his cunning and craft. No more. He means to deceive us.”

“What matter?” said the leader, thoughtfully stroking his long nose with his forefinger, squinting. “He’s no man to provoke. We’ll follow at our leisure.”

GAWAIN

He watched the backs of the mismatched men at arms and bandits marching behind John of Bligh, who was now riding a dull gray, one-eyed, one-eared horse that he’d decided perfectly represented the half-blind, half-deaf Christian churchmen of the world. He’d announced this, greatly to Gawain’s amusement and the men’s incomprehension.

They were several days march away from Parsival’s castle (where they’d left him standing naked, holding the spear with their comrade sprawled at his feet) but still way up in the rugged Welsh highlands, following the road to the sea and the only settlement resembling a city north of England itself. It was perpetually misty here. The last two days it had drizzled steadily and was chilly as autumn. The men were unhappy and getting hungry. They’d been promised loot and fresh converts – which meant women.

Here the fog was rising and thickening as if the earth were coldly smoldering. Looking from the rear, John on the gray horse was no more than a bulging and thickening of the mist itself and the men seemed to be following him into increasing insubstantiality.

Disgusted with them and himself, Gawain was half inclined to just turn back the way they’d come. There was no way to ride very far from the road here on that jagged mountain ridge so you only had two choices of direction. He decided to wait until they reached the lowlands. He knew his hope was probably vain. He’d always been a realist – until that terrible wound had cut him off from life and love, not so many years ago. It had taken months for his face to heal as much as it ever could, and before he left to ride off into brooding fury and isolation, he’d curse those who’d saved him.

He’d lived like a bandit after that, almost never letting himself think about the part of the past that hurt the most; so that only sometimes, while dropping, as drunk as possible, into the feverish dreams that usually waited at the end of his consciousness, sometimes he’d see the woman he could never know again… there was no way to control it as real memories would seep into the nightmares; remembering her was the worst. The name he never let himself say: Shinqua, exotic and passing beautiful, goldendark skin, eyes like shadowed, distant places, a velvet touch, a heat and natural perfume that stopped his breath and heart…

After being challenged by a young knight, thirsty for reputation, in an inn, he’d gotten the notion that the Grail Parsival had been so obsessed with might be the miracle for him.

At that time he didn’t yet have the famous wooden hand to replace the flesh one he’d lost along with half his face. He’d learned to fight shieldless, one-armed, one-eyed, depending more and more on craft and speed. He’d knocked the lad down without much trouble in the muddy yard near the horses. The peasants and one other knight who’d been sleeping in a chair by the fire came out to watch. It was a cool, autumn twilight. Stars were showing.

Gawain, wearing his monk-like cowl and a mail shirt, had one foot on the fallen knight’s sword arm and his blade at his throat. The boy groaned: the flat side of the blade had banged his head, leaving a massive, bleeding lump that probably wouldn’t prove fatal.

The average-sized, balding, but still young knight who was watching from under the timbered, dirt-floored overhang, squinted into the grayish dimness at where Gawain’s hood had pulled back on the good side of his face.

“I know you,” he said.

Not turning, Gawain said: “I know you, too, Erec.”

“When you never returned, it was said you went in quest of the Cup of God, as have so many.”

Gawain stepped back from the semi-conscious boy. Sheathed his sword. Started for his horse.

“Farewell, Erec,” he said, not looking back.

“So it’s true, then?” The other knight followed him across the dimming yard as three or four of the peasants were carrying the loser out of the mud and back into the inn.

“True? You don’t want to see what’s true, Erec.”

“Where are you going?”

Gawain stood by the horse, his hand on the saddle, brooding, remote.

“Back to the Kingdom of Nothing,” he said. And it was then that the idea of finding the Grail occurred to him. Better than nothing, he’d joked to himself. Meanwhile, he stood there because he really wanted to ask and was hoping his fellow knight would bring it up first. So he waited.

“You were injured,” Erec said, looking at Gawain’s left arm where no hand showed at the bottom of the loose sleeve. “Do you mean to return?”

“What is there for me? I belong to Nothing.” The other man got it, and said:

“She ran away to find you. Her husband brought her back. She has given birth to a male child.” A pause. “Will you return?”

“A child,” Gawain murmured. His life had run out and away, in a moment, like spilled water, with a single swordcut from a dying adversary. What was the world where children played, to him, now? Or the world where she mattered? Or anything mattered? No more than water spilled and gone forever mattered. “What belongs to nothing must to nothing go.”

He flung himself upon the horse and sat there. The only meaningful light now as the firebright in the inn windows. Everything else was drained and vague.

“The black woman spoke of you,” said Erec.

“My Lady, you meant,” Gawain said, sharply. “For she is my Lady.”

“So please you.”

“What does the child look like?”

“Like any other.”

“Not striped dark and light? Or a sullen mixture?”

“Like any other.”

“There’s some lesson there.” He squeezed his good eye shut and open. “Tell her, I charge you …”

“Yes, Gawain?”

The eye wept and, he knew, with a sick despair, that the torn blind socket on the left side wept too, in sightless grief.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.” Spurred the horse onto the road and was lost in the night. Sir Erec watched him go, glint faintly once or twice as his mail caught the last flicks of firelight, as if he were riding out of the world like a phantom into the land of death…