The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (19 page)

XXXI

The sun was beating noon into the hardening earth under the scorched weeds and bleached, spindly underbrush.

They stopped to rest by a long, thin curve of what was recently a stream that fed the river, now mud and scattered pockets of watery silt. The peasants, men-at-arms and others were arranging themselves in spidery scraps of shade.

Gawain had removed his helmet and had wrapped his bandagelike, vaguely oriental headdress over his mutilated skull. He sat near Parsival and Unlea, who were standing side by side not directly looking at one another.

“I always have news for you, Parse,” Gawain said from the shadow of his strange turban.

“Which this time?”

“You know I spy things out.”

Parsival nodded. He was thinking about being alone with Unlea. Noted a broken wall running along the opposite rise parallel with the vanished brook.

“Yes.” He waited.

“I think your family …”

“Family?” Thought of the knight in the dark who said he was Lohengrin. But that seemed absurd …

“Wife and daughter.”

“Yes?”

“One, I think, is living.”

Parsival remembered the chopped bodies, chopped faces, his wife’s necklace as he tossed the grave dirt over them …

Unlea was staring at him. The sun beat like a hammer on an anvil.

“Which one?” he finally asked. Gawain’s good eye was bright under the hood shadow.

“I know not. I met a raider, a Norseman. Lost from his fellows, he were.” He shrugged. “It came to blows … a matter of a horse.”

“Where’s the steed?” Parsival smiled.

Gawain shrugged again.

“Fate is uneven,” he said. “But we drank together at first and said a few things, tightlipped though these barbarians be.”

“He spoke of
my
family?”

“Not in so many words …” Gawain raised an expressive hand. “But you know my ways.” Shrugged.

“You ever tell me things to change my life.”

“Why believe this?” Unlea put in.

Gawain leaned back, the shreds of shade flicking over him.

“It may be true,” he answered her. “He were drunk at the time he spoke. The facts were blurry. He said the
woman
was with his chief. But mother or daughter, I know not.”

“Or much else for certain, sir,” she said.

“Like many things,” he said, “it may be true or false.”

“I think it false,” she said.

“Which may be true,” Gawain was amused to respond.

They went up to the wall together and sat on the shade side. Parsival was quiet for a time, reflecting on Gawain s information. He’d looked for his son, found a murderous shadow in the night who called himself Lohengrin. Now his wife or daughter might still live.

They reclined in silence, hands almost touching on the hot, brittle ground. The twisted, burned trees squeaked slightly as they creaked in the light winds.

“So,” she said, at length, nothing showing in her voice, “you’ll have to look for them, too.”

He stared and she watched him stare.

“Too?” he answered, abstracted.

“What about your son?”

He shrugged with his mouth.

“Hm,” he responded.

That’s passing fine. I can go home.”

He touched her hand, which she neither gave nor withheld. It felt cool and smooth.

“What?” he wondered.

“I’ve a fine future before me.”

He touched her cheek next. She looked weary. There was discoloration under her eyes. He remembered how she hated to travel … Her nose was sunchapped.

“Unlea,” he began.

“Did you come back for me?” She didn’t look at him now.

He hesitated and knew she knew it. It was so hot. Heat waves shook along the stones just above his heat. His whole body was sweating.

“I came back,” he said. “But I need your help now … in this business … I can’t turn my back and forget …”

Her hands rested at her sides. Kept her profile to him. Her hands were soft, pale, not even tense …

Later, the sun slanting down the far side of afternoon, in roughly single file, they were crossing into what already was being called the “ashlands.” Miles on unending miles of forest country destroyed during Clinschor’s war for the Grail. An immense chunk of the country had been charred to dust, even their unhurried footsteps raising a fine, black, choking dust. Some, like Unlea, had tied light scarves across their faces.

Parsival and Gawain were at the rear.

“The problem,” Gawain was telling his friend, “is coming clear.”

“How much water is left then?”

“A half-cask and some skins.”

The ashes whispered underfoot and billowed a little whenever a hot breeze stirred.

These are the worst
, thought Parsival, looking at the almost limbless trees that stood oddly stripped into isolation where there had been a dense mass of forest.
They
poke
up
like
poles
in
hell
…

“You’re sure,” Parsival asked, “this is the best way?”

“The shortest track to the coast, which is our best hope.” As Gawain walked, the charpowder gradually dulled his armor. “There’ll be food and water there if anywhere. The ocean trade … and, mayhap, word of your son or whoever.”

Parsival grunted. After a few more steps:

“I don’t know what to do,” he confided.

“About what? In the main, we have few choices. When in the sea, sink or swim.”

The sun was at their backs now, pushing shadows gradually out before them. Parsival’s reached nearly to Unlea. He thought the sunheat was like bearing a weight.

“No,” he said.

“The woman,” Gawain didn’t actually ask.

They moved uphill and deeper into the black desolation. Following what might have been a riverbed or a wide road, fairly straight, ankle deep in ash. There was a structure ahead, dark, massive stones, a broken turret and high wall. Gutted.

Nothing
but
rock,
Parsival reflected,
not
even
steel
could
have
kept
shape
in
those
fires
… He remembered the unbelievable wall of heat and fury, howling, hissing, booming, melting armor like wax, bursting flesh …

“Smoke?” Gawain was surprised. “Here? What’s left to burn?”

A crease of faint vapor rose behind the soot-stained walls into the fiercely blue sky.

“Hm,” muttered Parsival.

“Where there’s smoke there’s folk, the peasants say.”

“Where there’s folk,” Parsival amended, “there’s murder and misery, more times than not.”

There was no gate, just the open archway into the castle yard. Unlea and the surviving peasants waited outside as Parsival and Gawain went in.

Nothing stirred. The castle was squarish, not large. The terrific heat had cracked the foundations. Several sections had crumbled, opening into vacant dimness. Here and there were shapeless spatters of metal. Gawain suddenly stopped.

“A well,” he said.

They peered into blackness driven straight down into the earth. Water smell, no doubt about it.

“Here’s fortune,” Parsival remarked, looking around for the fire now. Studied what he believed must have been a formal garden beside the inner wall. What looked like statuary, standing or fallen, grouped where the walks and prospects must have been. The smoke rose from there.

Except what he’d taken for statues were young men and women, lying, sitting and standing so perfectly still it seemed a spell must have held them. Gawain, who was not in the least traditionally religious, crossed himself as they came closer.

Stopped by a young girl, slender, hair long, stringy, oil-twisted, quite naked and covered with soot except for startling clean streaks around her mouth and hands. Her eyes were shut, hands held over her head, long fingers hooked as if to grip the hot, substanceless air.

“Well,” Gawain wondered, “does she breathe?”

She was pretty, Parsival noted, under it all, but hollowcheeked as if she ate shadows. The lids suddenly snapped open and large, blue eyes glowed at them without seeming to focus.

“Girl,” Gawain asked, “how long have you stood thus? What ails you?” When she didn’t respond he poked her side with a blunt forefinger.

Parsival was looking the rest over: a nude boy with clean flesh showing too, where he’d obviously cupped the water to drink, was sitting on a stone staring at the blackened wall, head nodding continually as if in perpetual agreement with something unheard. Another male lay on his stomach, undulating slowly as if (the gray-blond knight thought) miming a failing snake, grinding himself into the black dust. A girl lay on her back, just her hands moving, clenching and unclenching in the ashes that had practically covered her so that she seemed to be growing or slowly dragging herself out of the lightless ground.

“Can none of you weird creatures speak?” Gawain demanded. Then drew his sword and aimed the point at the buttocks of the undulant boy. “We’ll probe for truth,” he announced.

“Nay,” said the other knight, “they’re all mad. Leave them.”

And then, without looking at them, the first, standing, blueeyed girl was speaking, staring over the stony wasteland before her.

“Ah,” she said, without a peasant’s accent, they noted, “men of shadow.”

“What?” asked Gawain. Sheathed his blade with almost regret. “Say on, girl.”

“Girl?” she wondered.

“What else?” Gawain cocked his incomplete head, artificial hand resting on mailed hip. “She’s bent for sure.” Turned to go. “Let’s take some water and proceed apace. This country is a nightmare.” He headed for the well whose blackened stones poked out of the ashy swells of ground.

“Where are your people?” Parsival was searching for a point of contact. Her strange madness kept pricking his fear. Gawain had lifted a bucket on the end of the pole.

“Shadows,” she intoned, rocking slightly back and forth. Then she screamed with sudden violence, blackened hands over her face. She screamed into them. Gawain glanced up, pouring water into a leather bag. “Thirst!” she screamed. “Thirst!”

And Parsival turned thinking a demon from hell’s heart had risen before him: a round face, all massed black beard and a preposterous beak of a nose that looked as if the whole head had run into it. Short, covered with soot, genitals a black obscurity. Unlike the others, he moved with purpose. He was chewing something (clearly he’d made the fire, Parsival concluded) and holding a gourd in his hand. Gawain was just taking a long pull of water and then strapping the waterbag across his shoulders.

“Let’s be off,” he called over. “Leave them to their writhings.”

“Horror of shadows,” she was moaning, fingers over her face.

The gnomelike man (the only adult Parsival had seen) gave her a long swig from the gourd, which she lapped down, greedy, trembling. Sighed and shut her eyes, weaving as if to music.

“What does this mean?” the tall knight asked the beard and nose. The fellow silently held out the gourd. “Can you speak?”

“Do you not thirst?” he wondered.

“I’m content for now. Who are you people?”

“Parse, come on,” called Gawain from under his load.

The nose-faced gnome kept the drink up to Parsival’s lips.

“This is the water of life,” he said. He seemed a man made of charcoal.

“Parse!”

The girl rocked and rocked, hands on knees, clean mouth smiling now.

“I came for the children,” the burnt-looking man explained, offering the water still. “This is haven for the lost folk. Freedom for those in chains.”

“What? To grovel in filth and burned dust, raving?”

Gawain shouted this time:

“Cannot you part yourself from these delightful companions?” he wanted to know.

“A moment,” Parsival called back.

“The world is burned away,” the nose and beard informed him, sloshing the liquid slightly. “Here it is ever springtime and all wounds are healed.” the undulating boy had reached the base of the blackened tower and was wriggling his head into it again and again like some blind worm … the girl on her back had reached behind her head and was gripping a massive chunk of wallbrick, caressing it with long, bizarrely tender strokes … “Drink, shadow-knight. Join the peace of the children.”

“I fear I’m tasked with the strife of the adults,” he told the strange being.

“Mmmmmm,” sighed the girl, rocking in rapture. “Mmmmm …”

The gnome aimed his face of bristly darkness at him, letting the drink drop back to his side.