Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (14 page)

Lego recognized his lord, stood up in his stirrups and drew his sword, cantering fast in pursuit. A bowman took a running shot at him and missed. Then he was in the thick trees and bush, cutting left and right to find a way, slowed like Parsival so that he couldn’t really gain much on the men. He rode down a straggler and had the satisfaction of seeing him bang off a tree trunk and spin down flat.

Sweating, kicking, yawing hard, he came out of the trees onto the sudden slope in time to see Parsival and the woman go skidding and scrambling down. Lego shouted, as if that would help. It was not so steep where he was and he managed to halt his rank-sweating charger sidewise, horse and rider tilting, trying to inch back up on the best angle possible.

He dismounted, sword in one hand, and leaned into the reins as the big hooves scrambled in the powdery soil. It was hard going and he was panting by the time they struggled back to the more level tree line.

Half-a-dozen bowmen were waiting: small, dour, dark. He sighed, dropping his swordtip and leaning against the heaving flanks of the almost spent, blowing animal and took his own deep breaths that might prove to be his last at any moment…

LOHENGRIN

Lohengrin and Henry had come to a miserable village. The thatch and log roofs were broken and the few cows and horses scattered in the fields were bony and torpid-looking, not moving far or often. The heat was heavy, steamy. The place felt like a bog, Lohengrin decided. Even the grass and breeze seemed somehow exhausted, barely stirring. For a moment he had an impression the whole was embedded in foggy crystal.

He was still groggy from whatever had happened to him in the tent. The sun rang his head like a dull bell. He understood he wasn’t himself. He had no focus, he was neither annoyed nor impatient; he just wanted to be quiet and not have to deal with anything for a while.

Hal kept commenting on this and that but Lohengrin hardly paid attention. He was vaguely anxious because he kept worrying that he was, somehow, going to be drawn back into that state or spell.

Because the path kept tilting like a slow swell in the sea, the sky and trees stayed blurred and he felt the heat was making his stomach churn. He needed to rest. His companion’s voice blurred into the hot drowse of afternoon. The hot breeze rattled the thick leaves and the birds, insects, a soft rushing of water — all became a soothing, hypnotic hum…

So that he blinked several times when the young peasant said something to them from the side of the road. The fellow was actually squatting on his heels on the low wall of a stone bridge that crossed the winding river – the same one they’d all been independently following.

The peasant’s feet were bare, reddened and bony, giving Lohengrin a fleeting impression of lizard-like toes and a long V of a face with tiny eyes lost in a network of creases. He wore baggy, sack-like, dun-colored clothing. Both long-fingered hands cupped his chin, pointy elbows on knees.

Lohengrin reined up. Rocked slightly in the saddle.

“Churl,” he addressed the fellow whose head was patched with unseemly bald spots set off by tiny curls of red hair glinting like dull, uneven flames.

“Where do you wander, knightlings?” the fellow asked in a high voice that wasn’t quite as disrespectful as his choice of words.

“To glory,” Lohengrin said, hand on hip, sarcastic.

Out of the droning, soft rush of afternoon, he didn’t quite catch Hal’s comment.

“Well then,” the disturbingly misshaped fellow said, raising both fire-tipped eyebrows to reversed V points, “stay on the path that dips steady. You’ll find such glory as will content you.”

Lohengrin cocked his head. He was debating where to kick this apparition to best pitch him from his perch.

“Are you a prophet, ugly one?” he asked. He felt vaguely dizzy again, suddenly.

“Eh?” Henry said. “And you but bend your stare on nothingness and speak to birds?”

Lohengrin swayed and blinked and rubbed his face. There was a bird on the bridge wall: a frowsy-looking crow with one toeless foot hopped unevenly, flicking its quick, dark bead of an eye at the two horsemen. Its feathers had a coppery tint in the flat, hot sunlight.

Lohengrin grunted. I was poisoned, he told himself. It will wear off…

He looked straight ahead now, past the arched, nodding horsehead at the twisted, shadowlost road that rose and dipped in an almost choppy effect that made for hard and somewhat giddy going.

The trees had closed in here and the way was getting gloomy and often overgrown. There couldn’t have been much traffic out there. Henry was complaining (his companion felt) as regularly as the drip from a water-clock.

Lohengrin was trying not to really notice anything or think too much. He wanted to avoid talking to anymore birds.

“We’re lost for certain,” Hal was saying. “Night will find us nowhere.”

Lohengrin looked around. The trees virtually walled off both sides of the road. The heat stayed oppressive even in the shade. There were bare and broken limbs everywhere. Only high up did thick, dark green overarch and block the sun — which, to judge by the thin, stray beams that worked through the cover to the forest floor, was certainly angling down to sunset.

Lohengrin felt more alert now, as if he’d dozed off just enough back there. Nothing weird had happened for a couple of hours at least. Maybe it was all over.

“You’re worried about supper,” he said.

“Yes.”

“How did I divine this?” Lohengrin grinned. “But what’s this now?” The road (if you could call it so) rose and twisted up a rocky slope. The air was thick with no breeze at all and a smell of earth and faint rot. The way forked here.

They halted horses. The stream had veered off someplace behind them. The left direction seemed less rocky and cluttered. Lohengrin thought the trees seemed like they might open out a little past the first visible bend.

“Let’s try it this way,” he decided. Booted his mount lightly in the new direction. Sure enough, it was immediately smoother, wider, and seemed to gradually descend.

“How do we know we won’t get lost?” Henry wondered. He followed a horse length behind.

Lohengrin peered ahead as they rounded the bend and lost sight of what was behind them. He smiled. There were paving blocks here, wildly overgrown on the edges but set (by whatever pioneering Roman engineers centuries before) so close together that only sparse weeds forced their saw-edged-harsh-green-hardiness up between the cracks and joints.

The trees fell back and they found themselves heading for the sunset, the sun a fat, reddening ball settling into the end of a long, straight valley.

“A bird told me,” Lohengrin answered, at length.

This new, solid road ran almost straight down and across open fields where the dusk seemed to wash in and pool like a soundless tide.

“There have to be folk down there in such a place as this,” Henry thought. He was thinking about coarse peasant loaf and hung sheep milk cheese and ale. “It stands up to reason,” he concluded.

LAYLA

By sundown they caught up with his family and retainers, camped with some hide-covered wagons and half-a-dozen horses.

Layla had given up arguing and berating him, for the moment. Her back was sore from banging into his armor for hours. She was more frustrated than nervous. She blamed her husband, naturally, but only to a point; after all, this idiot had been poured from the same mold of selfish, jackass men. She saw the campfire about the same time she smelled the roasted meat.

“Well,” she asked her ex-lover, “and what will your mother think of this?”

“My mother,” he said. “Ha, ha. That’s good.”

“Did her husband keep two wives?”

“My father? Ha, ha.”

“Flawless dolt,” she said, “Will you tell her you’re so mad with love for me that you stole me away?”

She longed to smack his bearded face but that was impractical at the moment. They were among the tents now. She thought what a charming outing this was going to be.

“Mad for love?” he wondered. “I want your husband to come fetch you. He has insulted me and thinks himself safe. He thinks.”

“Something you spare yourself as much as possible, Gaf,” she said. “Listen, how will Parsival divine that you’ve made away with me? He will consider I’ve run off for spite, if ever he comes home to learn I’m gone.”

A man stood up from the fire and moved towards them. He held a spear like a staff, leaning a little. His outline was just a blot against the warm flamelight as the sun went deeper red, becoming just color now and even that starting to drain away as if the horizon clouds actually sucked up the light

“I left word,” her captor assured her. “He’ll learn. He’ll learn. He’ll be brought to heel like the hound he is.”

She twisted her head to look back into his bearded, shadowed face, the eyes unwinking glints. “I cannot believe I let you have your way with me,” she sighed. Shook her head.

“You liked it well enough,” he grunted.

“Do I like an itch because it feels pleasant to scratch it?” she asked.

“You itch? Did a bug bite you?”

“You were but the tree stump the dog rubs his hind against.”

“I begin to understand your husband,” he snorted.

“Good,” she responded. “Then why not be like him and leave me at once?”

He reined up by the fire, his man-at-arms holding the horse while he half-lifted Layla down, dropping her so that she hit the earth hard enough to stumble. His wife was there.

“Good even my Lord,” the soldier said.

“Have any passed this way?” Sir Gaf demanded.

“None, Lord, save a mendicant monk and a charcoal burner.”

Sir Gaf dismounted, heavily, favoring the leg he’d hurt in his breakfast brawl with Parsival. It reminded him. He glowered and spit with spite.

“You never bucked me off,” Gaf said, defensive and clearly insecure. Gestured at his wife. “Or either of you him.” Meaning Parsival.

Layla liked that.

“Never bucked is right,” she said, “We hardly felt the riders.”

His wife giggled at this racy pass though her face stayed expressionless.

“Feed yourself and be still,” said Gaf.

He handed her a seared rib. She took it but didn’t bite yet.

“Your husband means to draw mine by using me as bait,” Layla told her. “That’s like setting out a pot of honey to catch a toad.”

Layla bit the rib. Wrinkled her whole face this time.

Gaf stood there. He was now spilling beer from a jug directly into his throat, head backtilted. He paused long enough to say:

“I’ll clip him close when next we meet.”

“If you don’t free me,” Layla said, “I’ll clip you while you sleep.” She turned to the wife who seemed unmoved. “You astound me,” she told her.

“I?” asked the woman.

“You live with this man and yet… have you never tried to slay him?” Layla queried.

The lady shook her roundish head.

“I do not grasp your import,” she said. Her husband was now ignoring both of them, absorbed in his beer.

Layla’s face seemed to keep changing expressions in the uneven firelight.

“Ha,” she said. “I bring nothing from across the seas but I’ll import some advice from the Italians: Better a short life than a slow death.”

PARSIVAL

He and the woman had rolled to a stop together on one of the circular ledges about one third of the way to the bottom of the spiral pit which must have been the entrance to a mine, he concluded.

“Have you killed most of them yet?” she wanted to know as he helped her up and out.

He sighed. Whenever he’d brag at all… “There are a few left,” he admitted.

The soldiers were riding around the spiraling roadway rather than attempting to cut across and be spilled like Parsival had been. It would take them time to circle down.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Come on,” he said, taking her arm, helping her climb to the next level.

“You want to reach them sooner,” she wondered. “I do,” he replied.

He was timing it, so by the time they scrambled up three levels all but one horseman in the posse of seven had passed them. Now they’d have to come back uphill which would allow their quarry to run lower and evade. The rest, were on foot and, of course, were scrambling down the sides from level to level.

“I’m good at this business,” he told her. “I’ve tricked them.”

“Yet we still seem surrounded.”

The last rider had just come up, reining back and raising his scimitar, shouting incomprehensible words that clearly meant, “Stop!”

“I’m not bragging,” the knight assured her.

He stepped close and gripped the man’s calf just above the pointed boot, forcing him to slash straight down wildly whilst he yelled in agony as the terrible grip closed. Parsival leaned under the stroke, took the sword and tossed the little man down to the next level.

“There,” he said. “Come.”

Mounted her behind him on the armorless pony these Mongol-like fighters favored.

Headed up the spiral towards the next clump of opponents, foot-soldiers who came running, leaping and skidding from several directions. He brushed them aside: banging, kicking, cutting. No bowmen yet. Kept climbing.

As he came over the rim he saw Lego coming out of the trees. Reacted to his loyalty once again. The next thing he noticed were the arrows zipping and hissing out of the woods at them.

Lego got his shield up fast. A couple sparked and skidded off the steel. Then he saw his lord actually deflect two or three shafts with the edge of his open hand. He realized the woman had been hit. Then he was trapped.

They wheeled their horses and crashed back along the forest trail to the main road. They reached it at the same time as the three knights from Arthur’s court who’d been following at a distance. Their visors were open.

“That’s enough,” commanded the lean, red-haired, long-nosed leader. “You have defied your king long enough.”

Parsival shifted the slumped woman around to the front of his saddle. She groaned. He’d been afraid she was dead. He was trying to get a look at her wound, which was the reason it was Lego who saw the sideblow swung by the burley, big-jawed knight. Lego lunged nearly out of the saddle in a hopeless effort to block the stroke that laid the flat of the blade alongside his lord’s bare skull. Even so, Parsival’s reactions were so quick he actually rolled a little with the blow as a tremendous, red/black blotting soundlessly burst in his head and seemed to push him face forward onto the rutted road.

“Ahh,” he whispered, rolling to his knees, holding both sides of his head as if to keep it intact.

The little fighters had already swarmed out of the woods and surrounded everybody. The split-nosed leader came panting up, on foot, yelling both his language and crippled English:

“You stand still! You caught! You stand still!”

The three knights didn’t: they charged instantly, in unison, swords ready, shields up. Parsival was tempted to follow them, except his legs weren’t part of him yet. The woman lay sprawled in the dust.

They reared to a sudden stop as a wedge of mounted “infidels” rose up to block them. Parsival’s head felt like a broken bell.

“Well, lord,” Lego said. “Gone but a day and I find you with a woman.”

Parsival went on his hands and knees to her and carefully ripped the fabric away from the arrow wound. A strand of blondish-brown hair unwound down his forehead and he shook his head to keep it out of his eye.

He saw the arrowhead had penetrated her ribcage and the pain and shock had knocked her out. He realized it wasn’t deep enough to cut her lungs, but there would be no way to push it through: he’d have to pull it straight back the way it had come.

Lego was watching the three knights circling their horses, looking for a weak point; there were too many warriors now. He was waiting a chance to strike down the one who’d hit his lord.

Parsival took a careful grip on the shaft, deciding to take advantage of her unconsciousness. He braced his left hand on her breastbone, held his breath and pulled with a steady wrench.

Praise our lady, he thought, because the head was small, narrow and oval with no reverse edges to stick between the bones. So it popped free, followed by a gout of blood. She groaned and thrashed for a moment.

“Get the medicine bag from your horse,” he told Lego. He’d pack the wound with a field poultice before binding it. He knew that more wounded survived who were treated by fellow soldiers than those who fell into the care of professional surgeons.

At the rim of his attention, he saw the foreign warriors had shut them in; but if they’d meant to kill they’d have already done it.

Lego came back with the bag. He was looking at the newcomers his lord hadn’t seen yet. Parsival found what he wanted and started dressing the wound, aware of the clash and jangle of horses and metal looming over them. He assumed it was Arthur’s men. The sun was low and right in his eyes where he faced southwest on the road so it was all shadow and dazzle and he didn’t understand what Lego was talking about when he said:

“These are strange knights.”

“Aye… and days, my friend.” Parsival squinted and shielded his eyes, looking up not at Lego, but into the silvery facemask that was now close to him. The rider leaned down.

What? he thought. What?

Because it was a skull face with blood-red fangs; the distorted, furious grimace of a demon in deep black armor, darker than the shadows themselves. And he was shocked because he knew them, twenty years ago, while escaping from the madness, plague, fire and famine of those days, returning home he’d been tracked by twelve of these black armored killers, the last (he’d believed) of the dark army whose lord and leader Clinschor, the eunuch, devil, wizard and fiend, had unleashed on Britain in an effort to conquer the land and possess the Holy Grail.

Parsival, weak and weary, far north and near his home, had been caught up with on a white pebbled dry-wash that served as road in the Welsh highlands. His memory was true: the steep banks, violet highland flowers on the rocky, scrubby hills; the black knights: with their carnival facemasks charging him again and again and again. Him: striking, blocking, twisting, ducking, blacking out, the world spinning gray, bright and dark… finally the earth slapping him flat on his back and it was over, and when he returned to consciousness he found he was the only one left alive or unbroken…

He’d been a boy then. The boy who’d found the unfindable Grail Castle, by seeming chance, and then left, and lost the way back forever… a fierce, hopeful, dreaming boy with a fighting talent that seemed to possess rather than obey him. A skill that was poetry and pain. A violence cursed with elegance.

He remembered in a bright link how he’d lain there in the white pebbly wash among the dead and dying Black Knights – sleeping, half-waking, shivering with fever from his wounds, the mist-paled Northern sun seeming to appear then flick away into moonless night. Eventually, he’d wakened and healed.

Those killers had followed him for literally hundreds of miles. They’d been sent by the tyrant Clinschor to take the Grail from him. This mistaken belief had become his life’s chief curse. The Grail, he’d said, was like a tin can tied to a cat’s tail that drew all the dogs to him.

Absorbed in the memories, he touched his head where the flat of the sword had just hit. Winced. There was blood and a bump. When he stood up to face the Black Knight who was regarding him from horseback, reeled and staggered forward, groping to hold himself up on his horse that suddenly wasn’t there… falling… bracing himself to hit the ground that wasn’t there either… nothing under him but nothing… darkness…