The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (24 page)

XXXV

Sounds of battle, clash, screams, raging curses, indescribable tenseness everywhere, unmistakable, and this time he got his haunches under him and brushed Alienor aside. The wagon was stopped now. Moved to the door through the stiff bursts of pain and heaved against it, then stood up, giddy but intent, and kicked once … again … on the third it gave and the twilight (bright to him for an instant) showed the swirling fighting and then a bareheaded, link-armored knight appeared, panting, several horn-helmed Vikings leaping and cutting in at him like a wolf pack, and then the knight rolled up into the doorway as a wave of robed, shrieking fanatics broke between them, and the fighting swept away for the moment …

Broaditch looked at Lohengrin’s aquiline, brooding face, bush of black, curly hair, eyes like onyx stone, and knew him instantly. For some reason he wasn’t surprised: remembered that face leaning out from the canopy in the whore’s bed long ago … the old nobleman lying there, blood bubbling from his stabbed chest, the woman trying to slide away, Lohengrin’s cold black eyes holding Broaditch as the steel-wrapped arm almost absently flicked the dagger into her and the cold voice hissed at him where he stood between the rows of tentlike beds, saying he’d die if he spoke … and then the next memory, the battle on the narrow ledge above the Grail Castle in the incredible storm that seemed to tear the earth apart, dissolving it into wild clouds that broke in lightning-rent surf over the peak, rain a near-solid mass, the beak-nosed face glaring in icy fury out of the opened helmet as Broaditch spun the improvised sling, flinging the dull, heavy ball (he’d found in the Grail Castle) in a last, desperate try, the hurricane wind veering it as the knight twisted away. It seemed to follow him and then (because the lightning was suddenly intolerable) explode in brilliance as the wind took Broaditch over the cliffside and hung him on the air in impossible suspension …

All this in one recall and he was already saying:

“In a stew how can you tell fat from lean?”

And Lohengrin crouched and watched outside and inside at the same time, sword half raised.

“What?” he asked, stared hard. “Know you me?”

“More to the point, sir, is the reverse the case?”

“They say I’m Lohengrin.”

“What say you?” put in Alienor.

He watched the blurry, continuing fight.

“My memory is torn,” he said, “and I’m no longer sorry of it.”

“Do you serve these … foul …” Broaditch had trouble getting it out. “…
things
?”

“No,” said the young man. “I serve no one. I want to lose myself.”

Broaditch nodded, painfully shifting his thick legs out the door.

“There’s an ambition to commend, sir,” he remarked. Studied the dark gleaming eyes that seemed less cold than he’d remembered. Clapped his steel shoulder with a big hand. “Let me get a spear and we’ll lose ourselves together.” In the last wash of day the battlers raised a terrific cloud of black dust.

Some cover, Broaditch noted, as he helped his family down. They all moved around past the halted mules: ears and tails jerking, eyes white, the driver hanging upside down from the traces.

“You knew me too?” Lohengrin asked.

“Lightly, Sir Knight.”

Tikla was whimpering. Rubbing her face.

“Stuff in my eye,” she said.

“Well,” Lohengrin insisted, “tell me nothing. Do you hear? Nothing!”

“So please you.”

And then the knight rushed past, as Broaditch was picking up an abandoned spear, and met two charging robes, zipping their daggerlike blades, springing from a long roll of ashcloud.

“You are not brothers,” snarled one.

As Lohengrin raised his blade and Broaditch came charging up, a flurry of Norsemen turned the confrontation into chaos. The little group moved on, Lohengrin and Broaditch covering the family. To Torky it was forever a dark memory of choking ash, rock-edges against his ankles, the big bulks of his father and the warrior, cries and clashings in the dark, strange voices, strange warcries … huddling in closer to his mother and sister, struggling on into seeming nothingness … invisible action and then brightness just ahead, flames suddenly high and fierce, and for a moment he thought of sunrise, and the big fires at home when the farmers burned autumn leaves, the smell in the cool air that always excited him, sent him running to the blazes … walking home at dusk on the suddenly mysterious, rutted road, moving with prickles of fear as he passed shadowy bushclumps … then smelling the cooking food and hearing his mother’s voice across the cool, violet fields …

The Vikings had closed in all around. John, his best men, plus a mass of hundreds of sparsely armed women, boys and girls were bunched together in the steep-walled defile around Clinschor’s wagon. A wedge of horn-helmed figures were hacking their way through the packed defense when John stood up in the stirrups and yelled:

“Save the father! Save the father!”

And the cry spread rapidly over the din of battle. The brothers and sisters stirred out of a kind of lethargic panic and began moving, chanting it now, louder and louder, led by the younger, the weaponless, chanting it with swelling purpose as if it were a tangible mace to smite with:

“Save father … Save father … Save father …”

Pushing, packed, into the terrible blades, axes, spears, clubs, the front rows screaming, falling, flopping in pieces, vomiting blood, tangling in their entrails, brains spattering sticky and strange, the dead unable to fall so that all the bodies advanced in a rolling, horrid, groping wave pressing the horned warriors back as by a lavalike, inching, irresistible wall of bloody meat and bone as the twilight was sucked away to utter night and only the screams and curses and butcher shop sounds rose over the weakening, now shrill cry:

“… Save … father … Save father … Save …”

The sounds revealed where the believers were still being ground and minced … and then several open supply carts puffed into flame as fabric, wood, tallow, oils went up under Truemen torches, the blazes holding the flank as John and his inner guard fled into the twisting valley while the almost motionless pile of chopped dead secured the rear, the gushing blood turning the ash to sticky muck …

Leena had been marching among the younger sisters and brothers. They’d tied a black robe around her shoulders. Her pale blond hair was gritty with soot and lay flat along her forehead. She kept looking upwards where the day glimmered and died.

She was enduring all this now because the luminous sky was a sign to her, a hint of what waited at the end, when she would finally sight the little castle across the golden wheat fields where the pure air was rich, beating energy. So the other pictures were blinked away and she concentrated on the light that the very fading made more intense and precious. Blinked away even last night because it hadn’t really touched her, just another strangeness that didn’t matter: all of them nude, praying, and John stroking his bent, hard member with both hands and gasping out fragments about Jesus and whores and shame …

And when the horned heads appeared (she knew they were devils and this hell’s gateway) she was unsurprised and kept her sight on the thinning light as the dark and choking hellsmoke rose among the expected screams; raised her eyes because she knew there was nothing else, nothing more she needed to take in ever again, just the light she knew she’d still see after the choking, dry, hot dark closed altogether everywhere. Barely felt it when the cry went up and the mass of them packed together and began heaving into the demon’s weapons, the bodies slamming together, bones cracking and popping around her, the vast weight and pressure closing, small children shrieking and vanishing underneath the mass, some carried along, feet not actually touching the ground, barely feeling the crunch of her own body because she was now able to shut her eyes and still see it, the brightness of it, actually stepping now, walking on the yielding greenness beyond the rippled fields among blazing flowers where trees soothed in the liquidity of breeze and light; actually there in that luminous land where nothing had edges, where each moment enfolded you with a tender, endless kindness and you yourself melted and flowed into the kindness, closeness, and she and the day were one thing and the kindness bore her up as she lightly ran forward like waterflow, destinationless, floating within and without straight into an unbounded softness where she had no thoughts, memories, just followed one pattern of color and music after another, each new, totally absorbing, color, music, scent, softness … each step an infinity of wonder while somewhere forever away swords and axes ripped and there was screaming lost under the least whisper of tune and breath and chaotic blood and blackness lost under the least flickering of ecstatic light … and her racked bone and flesh finally fell away from her, freed her at last from all it could not escape …

Clinschor kept his eye pressed to the opening and watched the battle in the dusk and soot, recognized the creatures of weak softness, strange butterfly-like, bright and flimsy, begging for gentleness, creatures who’d been conjured by the enemy wizards.
Cowards
all
, he reflected with livid hate. Safe in their remote mountain lairs they sent forth their foul minions …

He sneered a smile and decided he’d soon put a stop to this: felt his power stir as he leaned back on the uneven stool (the wagon had just halted) and locked his hands in mystical position and began his first invocation …

Outside, strung on the rope with the others like fish suspended from a skiff, former lord general, Baron Howtlande, of Clinschor’s disintegrated forces, rolled his eyes, sick with fear and fury.

Sleep
, he thought,
has
more
reason
than
waking
…

Because by some inconceivable thrust of incomprehensibility there he was roped to that lunatic’s cart about to be slain as part of some profitless horror where there was nothing to gain save more dead — nothing rare, not even food, nothing but blood and buckets of ash and he didn’t know he was moaning under his breath … for nothing … and it struck him like (he didn’t think) St. Paul on the road only this was a dark, not bright, flash when he understood there was nothing to win or preserve but breath and the few days you lived, tasted, touched, nothing to dream about or perish for, nothing to keep but choking ashes as death rose slowly over everything like a tide of mud … so he raged and wept now, heaving against the rope, shaking the others, sawing them back and forth, straining as the fanatics flung themselves on the Norsemen as onto a steel and bitter wall and then some slash or parry had cut the cord and he tumbled with the flopping rest into a gully, onto brittle, crackling branches of char as the fighting lost itself in lightless clouds and he was actually praying because there was nothing else now, nothing but breath, coughing and prayer …

John was shouting in the thickness and confusion:

“Drive the mares along!”

The wagon driver, over the muffled din of slaughter, now heard what John was aware of: a booming thunder (that no one believed yet was human), rhythmic, a bellowing blowing, shaking the wooden sides of the vehicle as though, John felt, some leviathanic creature were trapped inside, and suddenly he was afraid he’d made a terrible error about that madman and flipped his finger across his chest in a cross-sketch. The booming pounded at the sides like vast, soft fists and the driver stared back once, twice, then leaped over and fled into the thickened darkness as John waited in puzzled shock. The mule team strained on undriven as if to flee the sound they bore behind like a tinpot on a hound’s tail, delicate hooves flicking knee-deep, slipping and tugging, the noise pounding harder and harder, faster and faster.

“The fire lord speaks,” someone called out.

“Father,” another shouted, “release him against our enemies!”

For a moment John almost believed it as the terrific chantbooms seemed to strike inside his belly and chest, somehow match and supersede the heartbeat as if, he sensed, the sound alone could take him over, rule and disport his limbs, drive on his thoughts … He shook his head in sudden fear, then he and the others fled, riding and running ahead on the twisting, narrowing way, seeming chased by the muffled, tremendous echoing that had no more words in it (save what imagination might impose) than breaking thunder or knotted wind … fleeing on, drowning out the horror and tumult of slaughter at their backs …

XXXVI

Perhaps an hour later, Broaditch wasn’t even furious anymore. It went past that. He felt tight clenched around himself like a fist over a stone. They weren’t going to break him because it had gone too far, too many escapes and recaptures and miseries … no more … too many years of wandering and wars … deaths, lost homes, friends, hopes … it was absurd, they were absurd, futile, simplebrained and even roped in a row (to the second cart), in senseless thrall again, cut away from wife and family again, he felt safe because he’d become stone. There were men strung in front and back of him as they stumbled and waded into the twisting, descending ravine.

John, riding, held a torch. The shadows ate at his long head. Other flames showed here and there. They seemed to be looking for something besides escape and Broaditch didn’t care a fractional damn what it might be.

At some point they stopped and all three flopped down. The man behind kept panting and coughing. Black-robed Truemen flitted here and there in the flamelight. Broaditch’s wounds were stiffening but the bleeding had stopped. He gritted his teeth and looked at nothing. He sensed that all his troubles and absurdities would simply fall away from him like water spilling around a boulder. He’d outlast them. Suddenly he murmured as if alone:

“We were away. Safe,” he said, straight into the night. Reset his jaw. It was a curse or inscrutable purpose again because he’d had to talk at a perfect time for silence. “I said to him, I know not why, even as we moved low and crouched among the trees …”

The man still panted on one side, the other, equally invisible, rested motionless.

“Said what, brother?” the silent one suddenly said.

“Am I your relation and know it not?” wondered Broaditch.

“We’re the family of doomed bastards,” was the reply which the other found excellent.

“Aye,” he said back. “How came you here?”

“I used to …” He suddenly tensed. “I … I … lived … I …” Paused. Then: “But what said you, brother? Nay, a tale may take my mind from its pains.”

“But make mine fresh,” Broaditch replied. “It’s not even a tale. Just madness.” His voice was hard. “Or a poor joke of fate, which may be one thing, in the end.”

“You remind me of him I knew.”

“Who?”

“What died this recent … died …” Voice trembled. “All died … all … all … He were called Flatface for his face were like unto a Lenten cake … we used to farm the land together … but the land died too and so we planted dead and grew hell’s crop … poor Flatface, he dove deep for his meanings, now he’s deep …”

“He dove deep, did he? Well, I sink for mine … Hear how the fire flared up and showed us, Alienor … my babies … ah … ah … but if we’d moved on apace …” His tone was flat, hard.

“Up,” someone said out of the night as the rope suddenly heaved at them, yawing their wrists around. “Up and on.”

The other wagon banged and strained a bend or two back. The booming thunder voice had stopped by the time it (driverless) caught up with them. Above the ravine walls a few hazy, swollen-looking stars showed.

“Go on,” Broaditch was continuing, talking at the invisible shape of the man roped ahead of him. The other still panted behind and said nothing. “I said. “Go on,” to Lohengrin but he wouldn’t move. The fire showed us …”

“Why not move?”

“He had to ask questions.”

They lurched and swayed around a bend. The ash was shallower here. The fire had not come that far.

Because Broaditch didn’t know why he’d had to say it after so long a silence. Yet, he mused, over and over, that was his special flaw, the error he had to commit in the wild red flaring light of the blazing carts and goods, Lohengrin dark against it, his family crouching behind him, saying an hour ago:

“I struck you. On the mountaintop. In the storm.” Wishing he’d chewed his tongue raw instead except, perhaps, he’d sensed the young man had needed to know this and that it was the beginning of a kindness …

“I remember,” he’d said, excited. “You were the peasant … you threw the stone. I was trying to slay you.”

The ash and smoke boiled around them, the red flaring on the dead-black earth. Alienor was dragging at his arm, children muffled close to her. She said nothing, just pulled. Lohengrin was blocking the way forward but this time he went at him, actually pushing the armed knight on, saying:

“We cannot speak here, for Christ’s sweet sake, lad!”

But it was too late and robe flapping, lithe figures seemed to spring up from the lifeless ground everywhere at once and the last thing he saw, in the tortured glare, was Lohengrin hit in the head by a red-spinning flash that merely (falling himself a moment later he understood) was a tossed ax this time and then he was on his face, choking again, darkness lapping over his consciousness …

The rope whipsawed his bound wrists as they rocked around another turn. His feet kept slipping.

“Fly,” he’d screamed into the ashes. “Alienor, fly! Fly!” Screamed until his choked throat failed him and the darkness all ran together …

Alienor stood still, a hand on each child’s shoulder, the black trees around her, the flamelight, a wisp of color on their faces, was swallowed to nothing everywhere else. She’d hesitated as the shadowy men pounced into her shouting husband (she saw the others, the horned ones, battling through the fires and heard the agony behind them) and she was just whirling when someone gripped her by a wad of clothing and yanked all three of them (because her grip on the children was locked) as the little girl cried out in pure and terrible hurt.

“Father! Father! Father!”

Torky struggled to free himself as she writhed in the violent grip and her mind flashed that this was death, the dance of death,
he
had them as the night closed in and a voice whispered, repeated at her ear with breathless pain:

“I’ll get you away … I’ll do this …” She recognized Pleeka’s strained tones. “The times have done it … the times have made them mad … I won’t let them feed …”

And now they were running into the blind night because of the children … the children … feeling the staggers in his gait even as he fiercely yanked and balanced, hurled her along past the limbless, lifeless dim trees, her mouth raw with thirst and dust and each breath and foot impact shocking, flashing pain …

They were climbing the steep side of the valley that had become a ravine, blundering, snapping through small trees and fallen branches, charred brittle; scraping their hands on edges of rock, moving part up and part parallel.

She was half-carrying Tikla again. Pleeka stayed in front. She heard him scrambling on, almost continually muttering. She caught few of the words …
just
live
, she told herself when she told herself anything …
just
live
…

They
passed
through
my
body
into
all
this
so
I’ll
keep
them
as
long
as
I
may
…
I
did
it
before
…
I
did
it
before
…

Because she was dreaming now (though she hadn’t realized it) of the water …

We’ve
used
up the
gift
, she thought in fear,
she’ll
not
save
us
again
…
She
of water,
she
of all benediction, because to Alienor it had a face and form, an almost face of wet light all clothed somehow like summer and spring, and clutching her frail daughter, the male at her other side, uncomplaining (as if she willed it so because she was half-helpless, beyond her limit, driving herself up into darkness) behind the mechanically muttering ex-believer. Alienor could almost see the image almost above her, neither beckoning nor rejecting, almost luminous, almost palpable …

“Onward,” she told her children.

“Thirsty, mama,” said Tikla.

“Soon,” she answered, firming her voice for their sakes. “Just onward now. Soon …”

Not far behind in the same darkness the Vikings descended into the stony, burnt-out cut. Few of them had been killed or wounded. Tungrim was on foot now.

“It’s serious,” he told Layla as they went side by side near the head of the column. He’d ordered all the animals slaughtered for food except for her mount.

Several men with torches were out in front, casting strange, horn-headed shadows among the dark stones and pole-like trees.

“Hmn,” she replied.

“Were lost,” he told her.

She rested her long hands on the mule’s ridged back and didn’t think about there being no wine left. The animal was gaunt and chewed its lips together with thirst.

The mountainsides had become actual cliffs here. Their feet ground over smooth pebbles. There was little soot suddenly. Obviously this had been a riverbed.

Layla looked dully at the fat man who called himself baron. He’d clearly been grosser but hard living had loosened his flesh into great pouches. She didn’t like his stony little eyes. He was smiling, of course, holding a torch and gesturing intensely.

“Gentlemen,” he was saying, waving something in the torchlight, holding it up to Tungrim’s face. “Here’s solid proof enough.”

“Keep still your hand then, slayer of Skalwere,” the prince said. Plucked it from the other: a bone, freshly chewed with scraps of gristle. It had obviously been cooked. “This but proves some go before us.” Squinted at the fragment in the shaky glow.

“At least they have meat, my lord,” Howtlande pointed out as the captains silently watched him, expressionless. “That’s worth following after these days.”

“The seas, fat one,” redbeard baldhead put in, “are full of fish and not such land-garbage.”

“Well come back to the sea in time,” Tungrim told them, flicking the bit of flesh and bone away as they went on, crunching over the streambed, the sound almost as though water flowed there …

“Do you believe this fat cheese and his tales?” the lanky captain added. He walked ahead with his torch flashing over the pale wash of pebbles and ever-narrowing walls.

“Which tales?”

“About treasures of the great wizard.”

“They’re sooth,” Howtlande insisted, “sooth.”

“We should have slain you,” redbeard added to the discussion. The flames gleamed on his smooth skull.

“Peace, Thorere,” Tungrim quietly commanded. “This fellow smote our enemy.”

“This load of gull droppings?” the lanky captain snorted.

“I never lie,” Howtlande lied, with firm dignity. Prince Tungrim raised his eyebrows. “I knew the wizard. I heard him telling countless times about this place, this hidden fortress he’d made in the earth. This be where all his treasures are kept secure.” He was trying to distinguish their expressions in the fugitive orange glow. “I heard him say the secret of his magic is there.”

“What might that be?” Tungrim responded laconically.

Layla felt chilly though the night was warm. Crossed her arms over her chest. Each sway of the mule irritated her.

At
least
let’s
camp
and
sleep
, she thought.
Thank
God
for
sleep
.
There’s
little
to
say
for
waking
…

“The Grail,” Howtlande was saying, “The Holy Grail of power itself.”

“Eh?” Tungrim was baffled and faintly disgusted with the conversation. “The what?”

She was already twisting around in the saddle, almost shouting:

“Grail? Grail?” she said. “Kill him! You hear me, Tungrim? Slay this gross fool!”

Their faces were shadowhollowed as the torches rocked and the flames bent and puffed. The four stared at her with eyes blotted out, gleamless.

“I’m a Norseman,” Tungrim began, tediously, “and Norsemen are bound by their honor to —”

“It’s a curse!” she raged, arms refolding over her slightly shivering body. “A fucked curse!”

“Lady, I —” Howtlande began but was cut short by the Prince.

“I want no accursed magic,” he bellowed. “I’ll have no such —”

“Fool!” she said, shivering so that her voice shook. “I had my life spoiled by that nonsense … that Grail …” She spat out the word. “Slay the fat fool for his own sake … It’s a disease that eats your husband’s mind and leaves you loveless with tormented children and —”

“Woman!” he said. “Woman!”

“Clinschor,” Howtlande insisted, “swears it’s real.”

“Oh, yes,” she went on, cold with fury too. “No doubt. They all believe it … all of them … Slay them all, I say!” She twisted around to stare into the blankness before her. Saw him, Parsival, the long, bright hair flamed with rose-red from the sunrise, mounted on a blur of horse, red armor (helmet in his lap) like quickening coals … remembered only her feelings, wordless … remembered begging him to stay and he said something and something … the red fire in his hair, the clear, blue remoteness in his eyes, and she’d felt death was like that: seed … growing … filling out … drifting into goneness … gone … she’d shouted something about how they’d lied to him to get him lost following the Grail … and he went and the old, old tears of that long, lost morning had really been wept because she’d been walled off from her love dreaming … the wall never came down again …