Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (4 page)

“Accept my challenge, you stinking bastard,” blustered Gaf, leaning heavily on his mother and the table. “Meet me on the field of honor or be known a coward, hereafter!”

Parsival shrugged and, on impulse, raised his arms over his head, exposing again what ought to have been private. The mother covered her eyes. Gaf’s bovine wife stared, as if to recall something. Layla sneered. Lohengrin laughed, actually taking his father’s part, for a change. Lego, in disgust, went to the door and out into the morning’s dazzle.

Not an hour since, Parsival was thinking, I was breathing bliss that makes air coarse and hearing the musical sighs of angels past the dull ear’s utmost capacity… And now I am back with my family…

With a movement so swift and economical that it seemed a blurring swallow’s flight, he glided three steps to his son and, even as the boy tried to duck back (finally afraid he’d pushed his father too far) caught his two shoulders in that incredible grip and lifted him, effortlessly, off his feet.

Layla was still coming to intervene, slippers skidding on the smooth white tiles – then she stopped, surprised, because her husband suddenly, fiercely, kissed his son’s lips and then released him.

“You are all ridiculous,” he informed them. “So am I. But I love you, Lohengrin, despite what you choose to believe. And your mother, too.”

And then he padded, barefoot, across the hall in silence until Sir Gaf cried out:

“On the field of honor, coward! On the field!”

Parsival went up to his second-floor chamber. He was weary to the bone. His stomach and nerves shuddered with exhaustion. His eyes were sore. His thoughts dragged through the molasses of his mind.

He went straight to the big bed and threw himself down on his back. Covered his loins and legs with the silk sheets. The feel was cool and soothing. Sunlight creased in through the slit windows.

Without energy to move much, he tugged some more sheet over his face, rolling partly on his side. He lay for awhile and slowly felt the tension melt from his limbs.

“My son,” he muttered, adjusting the material so his nose was clear. Yawned and rubbed his face. “My wife …”

Noises in the castle yard kept him from dozing off completely. He’d drift for a moment, then snap back to his headache and sore joints.

Dozed and was instantly in a field of golden flowers that seemed dense and, somehow, heavy with color, set on either side by massed, rich, deep green trees in a perfectly straight line to the horizon and he understood, dream-like, this was what he’d always wanted: follow the straight line to the end, into an epiphany of summerich light because his life had been nothing but twists and turns…

He blinked himself back. The sheet had shifted from his face. The light at the windows hurt. His left eye throbbed. He tried to relax his forehead by gently rubbing it. Covered his eyes again and heard himself start to snore… was running straight and gently upslope between the flanking walls of trees, through the ankle-deep and knee- high flowers as if his body were dissolving into light… running behind a nude woman who moved just ahead of him in blurred perfection like a roll of wind forming shapes in the golden blossoms… and he needed to touch her and end the reaching… closer, she seemed to have been formed from the flowers, a living hush flowing… reached and ran and reached as if he might be wafted into her glowing substance… reached… “…and if you do, I’ll crown you with this jug, you bastard!” a reedy woman’s voice was scolding, outside. A man muttered something back and might have spat. They were close under his second-floor window.

In a lull he went under again and this time he was in a tunnel, smoothly carved that almost melted into black, unreflecting stone. Pitch dark, yet he could see. Sensed he was down deep and that mountain masses of rock lay above him. The tunnel twisted and bent back on itself like (he dream-thought) the intestines of some stone behemoth… then a dead end where a niche had been hewed into the black wall, a ledge with something like a vase or jar there, a shadowy blurring in a gout of darkness.

Sensed menace and power all around and that the container held the heart and soul of the darkness which pulsed and spread its lightless beams out into the eternal stone night, beat steady and yet measureless… sensed a watcher watching as he reached for what he now dream-perceived as a fat cup with holes to grip; he gripped and realized he held a living black skull because the mouth bit down and held him fast…

He woke in soundless screaming and just lay there, sweating in the twisted covers…

Always dreams come back, he said to himself.

The man outside snarled something at the woman. Parsival dozed again. Came back. The woman was saying:

“… the world ends, ya old fool… ”

He dozed. Shuddered awake, to hear: “… this is the last year …”

The man (probably the husband) said:

“You’re as mad as that priest who says such…”

Heard that much rebuttal but was out again when the woman said:

“The Antichrist is everywhere. Water will turn to blood …” Asleep, Parsival was seeing rivers, lakes and seas all staining red with naked corpses bloating in the waves.

“… we must flee to the Holy places… the Great Whore is already among us,” she went on, reedy, penetrating.

The knight was awake again, panting. Felt numbed, as if drugged.

“What?” the husband’s voice cut through the murmur of outside sounds, “is ya damned mother come again to stay?”

Parsival’s laughter finally fully woke him. He stared straight up at the low, vaulted ceiling. The quarreling voices faded as the couple moved off.

Outside there was suddenly noise and banging and shouts. Horses and armored men, he realized. Because of the dreams he kept his aching eyes opened and listened:

“What?” a voice cried.

“Where is your lord?” another, deep, irritable, demanded.

“In heaven with his holy host,” said the first he now knew was Lego’s.

“Mind your mouth,” the irritable voice advised.

What is this? Parsival wearily wondered.

“It seems more like you must mind, my Lord knight,” Lego responded. “you are, after all, within our walls here.”

“Think you churl,” was the retort of a new voice, cool and logical, “that your walls will long stand one brick on another if Arthur the King willed it otherwise? Call your lord.”

By now Parsival had dragged himself to the embrasure and tilted his head far enough out to look down into the dusty yard where the high sun now beat hot and steady.

He blinked, saw Lego in his leathers, leaning on a staff, saw the open gate, and the castle people gathering, the soldiers alert: the three armed, mounted knights reined up at the main steps about fifty feet to his right. One was drinking from a pot of water held up by one of the castle grooms. They sat with their helmets on their laps.

Parsival leaned out far enough and called down: “Here I am without my choir of angels.”

They all looked up.

“Parsival?” The rough voice said. It belonged to a balding, bearded, middle-aged knight who seemed familiar.

“For the most part,” he called down. “What do you want of me?”

“All of you, save your jibes,” the logically-voiced knight said. He was long-limbed, hair dull red, nose long with an uptilt. The blunt sunlight flashed on his mailed hands as he gestured with near delicacy. “For body and soul, as we know, are you not vassal of your master?”

Parsival took that in. The sun was hot and felt good on his face.

He shut his eyes to soothe them.

Vows, he thought, are cheaply broken though dearly sold.

He said:

“I’m hoping to sleep. Unhorse. Lay aside your gear and troubles. Rest. Eat and drink. Later we can parse body and soul.” Parse. He liked that.

Back to bed, he thought. Considered going out and napping on the hillside under the lime trees. Nothing felt better than a doze in the sun and cool shadow.

“Do you object to my point?” The long knight, the leader, wanted to know.

Parsival was annoyed. He’d had his fill of trouble, when you counted the plates.

“Rest and we’ll speak later,” he called down. “Else you may object to my point.” He meant his sword. They got it. He smiled, because he was, after all, their host. “Give me your message,” he said, “from my sovereign liege. Then wait upon yourselves.”

“We expected a more gracious —” one began to say. Parsival cut him off.

“Enough of this babble,” he snarled, “my head aches with it.”

“King Arthur calls you to service,” the red-haired, long faced leader snarled back.

“Ah ha. For my singing?”

“Will you say nay to him?” the burly one wanted to know.

“I agree to attend upon the king and sing holy chants. My fighting is off-pitch these days.” Out of the mode, he thought.

He pushed back from the deepest windowslit and let himself sink back into the bed.

The next thing Layla will find me here and my torments will mount… I need no summons to spill blood. Yet I’ll go to him and speak it to his face… He yawned and rubbed his eyes. I’ll strike only who first strikes me… if I cannot run away… Shut his eyes and tried again to concentrate on what had happened that morning.

“First I was fucking that lady and she made sounds like a pig which is what I’ve come to,” he whispered aloud.

My life is a barnyard…

He lost focus. Sleep lapped at his thoughts and there was a flutter of darkness, a lapse of sound and time… and then he tensely jerked awake again.

“Christ,” he whispered, “fucking and then set upon by Gawain and those witless …” Sighed, feeling sorry for Gawain. Sighed again, feeling sorry for everybody.

When I sleep all is real, he thought, when I wake all is real… what would happen if they came together?

He brought himself back again to the point where he’d expected to die and tried to recapture the… what? The floating up? The widening? The blast of light? Tried to bring it back. Held his breath. Imagined his soul was soaring among the angels…was that dreaming? Was it both?

He was still just lying there with a headache. Tried to calm himself deeply, asked God to bring that lost moment back. Prayed with all the humble sincerity and simplicity he could muster. Waited… fell asleep again… shook awake with a worse headache.

He sighed.

“Everything slips away,” he told heaven or just the vaulted ceiling. The way his childhood had slipped away. Which he really always missed the most. Maybe he’d lost the Grail, maybe he hadn’t; but he knew he’d lost his childhood and that had been the most real of all places, in his memory it was all one seamless summer, dappled fields awash with pure dazzle and the scent of rich, ripe sweetness… endless time… energy and interest without bottom… as if he’d wandered in and out of time like a wounded angel.

He shut his eyes.

I don’t want to be young again, he thought. I just want to find those days again and walk in them now…

Opened his eyes. Sunbeams slanted across the fine dust in the air giving the light golden substance. He imagined the fanning brilliance was a bridge and that he could make himself small and weightless and ascend that span of light and follow it to mysterious golden realms. A daydream. But it hurt. Because he remembered lying there thirty years before watching the dustmotes. He believed there were small, misty, effortless beings who fed on sunlight. He used to imagine their world where clouds were solid as earth.

By Saint Stephen’s nether eye, he thought, I cannot rest… He blinked and the chamber was just dull stone and sunlight again. No magic kingdoms of air…

He heard a footstep outside the room.

“Who’s that?” he demanded, afraid it was his wife. A neutral female voice responded:

“Marga, my Lord.”

He pictured her: young, slim, freckled, nervous.

“Marga,” he said, “go and fetch my man Captain Lego. Tell him to ready two good horses. Tell him to cinch and bit himself for a long journey.”

“Yes, my Lord.”

He had the idea and instantly approved it: get away without having to deal with Arthur’s emissaries or his family.

He was out of bed and getting ready in one movement. He splashed water on his face, took a drink from a mug of honey wine he kept in the niche by his bed. It had to be nearly noon now, he decided.

He could reach the broken hills by sunset this time of year. An easy ride. Just himself and Lego. Men without women. No apples to bite; no sweet fruit of doom.

“Now where are you off to, you bastard?” Layla inquired from the doorway. She wasn’t shouting anymore he noted, just simmering ferocity. If he didn’t stir her, he hoped she wouldn’t boil over.

“I must heed my liege lord’s summons,” he lied.

“Ha, ha,” she said in that tone that was not encouraging. “Why do I doubt you?”

He paused, halfway to the doorway, watchful. “I will return as soon as I —”

“Spare me the list of foods I never eat. Return when you will or never. You are no husband to me.”

He brushed past her now, heading into the corridor. The air was cool there. He didn’t want to leave on a bad note. He tried again: