The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (6 page)

XI

The pain in the amnesiac knight’s head was so intense (as if beyond mere feeling) he found he could stare right through it. He blinked at the morning light. The pain leaped a little each time the world shook and then he looked around, saw the trees passing slowly and unevenly through the hazy heat … saw soldiers … women … boys and girls … blinked at the long, rabbitlike mule ears for a moment before realizing he was bouncing behind them atop a cart loaded with raw and scorched potatoes. A pair of cows were snubbed close to the rear and lowed from time to time. He smelled their rich, sourish warm breath.

He tried to sit up and the pain was white iron claws in his skull.

“Aiii,” he sighed and held his head with one hand.

“Good morrow,” a bluff, smooth voice was saying.

He turned his eyes that way. The speaker was mounted, keeping pace with the toiling cart, the rising sun behind him so that he was a bulky, blinding silhouette.

“Good morrow,” the voice repeated, “knight in the cart.” A chuckle. “Better such disgrace, I think, than be left behind, don’t you agree?”

“Ahhh,” the hurt knight sighed.

“I thought you were dead.”

“Why … Why …” He was still trying to see the man clearly, but the sun was almost directly behind him and the beams stabbed into his sight. He twisted his face away.

“The next village is in view,” the voice (he couldn’t know) of Finlot called back to Howtlande who, mounted on his mule, looked away from the knight on the potatoes. Howtlande rattled a crudely sketched map of the territory.

“Excellent,” was his response. “Unless they have famous lords like this one among them I expect little trouble.” He smiled with oily satisfaction, sucking on a scrap of cold pork fat, tongue lashing at the greased edge of his moustache. He leaned out of the sun over the sides of the halting wagon and fixed the injured fellow with his dark, active eyes that coldly belied the netted, perpetual humor wrinkles surrounding them. “Well, are you with us, lord general?”

Holding his head with both hands, the knight struggled up to a semi-sitting position on the food heap that shifted under him. His neck was stiff, back out of joint. The unrelenting pain clawed at his head. He sighed and leaned against the wicker side that sagged a little and creaked with each slow jounce of the wheels …

“Ahhhh,” he murmured.

“He ought to been dead,” was Finlot’s opinion. “I lain a five-pound hammer over his noggin. His helmet’s all flat.” He sort of sniggered. “He ain’t bled a lot, considering.”

“Well, well,” Howtlande declared, “you were not treating with an ordinary knight. This is a great and legendary fellow.”

“Oh?” Finlot wasn’t too sure. “All them what I hits on the noggin is fair ordinary.”

“Which great one, do you say?” a new voice behind the pain and sunbrightness pushed in: the dour warrior with a red silk surcoat.

Howtlande leaned back up into the brightness, holding his mule’s neck. Sucked thoughtfully at the ball of fat in his stubby hand. He looked suddenly sly.

“The lord general,” he said.

“Which lord general?” the dour, nameless knight persisted. “And of what?”

“Do you know him not, sir which-and-who?” Howtlande narrowed his already squinty eyes. When the dour knight said no more he went on: “Well, if you will not say who you are yourself expect no floods of information.” Grinned, the fat shining on his lips which he ineffectively wiped with the leather sleeve end that hung raggedly below his steel wristlets.

The knight in the cart was staring, holding his hand up against the sunglare.

“You,” he said at the bulky figure featureless with the hot sky behind.

“Yes, general?” Howtlande was feeling expansive.

“You know who I am?”

“Would that not take much knowing, sir?” was the reply. “Had you a wife it might tax even she to know you altogether. Or your mother, say, I —”

“By Odin’s dangling fuck-maker,” a new voice interjected with disgust, and the knight didn’t bother to turn his eyes because there was pain enough in looking straight ahead. “He’s like a great wind that blows and rages to shake a straw!”

“Well put, Skalwere,” Finlot called out. “If we could fight as fierce as he speaks long and to no point, why none could hold us for a heartbeat.” Guffaws here and there.

Howtlande sneered.

“And if all your brains were gathered in a pile,” he told them, “an ant would step over it unseeing.”

“Do you know who I am?” the wincing knight demanded. Adjusted himself on the potatoes. He realized there was no hope of (or point in) getting to his feet. The pain even seemed to be ebbing slightly. “What is my name?”

“Know you it not yourself?” the fat man wondered, scratching his hawk nosetip. He was finished sucking the lard. Cocked his round head. The nose was the second warning (after the eyes) that nature had placed on that jolly mask.

“Would he then ask?” Skalwere called over. “Though
you
might, in his place.”

“What be he lord general of?” Finlot wondered. “That village of mud and cowflops?” Guffaws here and there in the marching line.

“Say, if you can,” the knight insisted, holding his lumpy, bloodcaked skull, gingerly.

“Why scatter your advantages?” Howtlande asked no one, licking the last sweet traces from his shiny lips. “The blow took your memory, it would appear, sir. So your name now would be little use. Surely it’s a blessing to have a light mind. I’ll not be the one to weigh it heavier.” He spurred the mule, whose sharp hooves plip-plopped more rapidly than the actual forward motion justified.

The mysterious subject of conversation finally shut his eyes. Sighed under his breath with each rut and stone the warped wheels battered into and over. He decided to wait until the pain eased, then he’d follow up. Here was a key to his past … but right now he’d rest … yes … that was it … rest …
Ah
… it hurt …
Ah
…

The pain and dreams jarred in and out as the day flashed on and off. He saw the dark-eyed, beautiful woman again and this time with a man … flash of burning sun prying at his eyelids, into his raw skull … the man and woman under cool trees by a glittering stream. He was tall, blond, in red, silky robes and the woman crooked a basket of thickly-gleaming red berries under her long arm. The green spring light was cool and sweet. This couple was so tall, godlike, somehow … his head was ripped into again as if by sawblades that ground over the bared bones … Then the peace and coolness, the purling swish of water, the birds, breezes high up in the pinetops … voices … her voice, saying words he didn’t really follow … divine, mysterious utterances …

“So,” she was saying, “I spent a lifetime getting away from there and now you want to go back.”

“What harm in a visit?” he wondered.

“They love you little enough, great husband.”

“Your father’s ill.”

“Not enough by half.” She didn’t look at him. “I don’t want to go back there.”

… he knew these were memories … then the light stabbed and pounded at him but he sank under it again into the cool, easy lushness of that shady afternoon somewhere in his lost past. The tall, blond man was drinking from a wineskin. Stained lips and chin with what seemed a dribble of blood which he didn’t wipe away. A little girl, ash-blond, about three, naked, was kneeling at the stream’s rocky edge, piling smooth, dark, round stones in a heap, careful and grave. Threads of reflected sunlight flicked over her intent face as the awkward, stubby childfingers sorted and plucked and added to the stack.

“You hate your own father so?” he asked.

“You know all this,” she said. The sun glowed in the basket of berries but missed the woman’s face. She seemed to be watching the waterflow. “You were different for a time,” she told him.

“For God’s name, Layla,” he said, setting the wineskin aside.

“In God’s name,” she corrected.

“I am different,” he insisted. “I’m changed.”

“Mayhap so … but still you are weary of me, my husband.”

“Nay.”

“Yes.”

“I am not.” He was so tall he seemed (in the viewer’s angle) to be leaning back into the green-gold blur of forest light. His robe was fascinating: the shimmers of silk flashed when he moved, like water. The voice was deep and strange. There was a strange taste … he wanted the deep voice to stop … just stop sounds …

“I didn’t want the other child,” she said next. The voice was a calm softness. “You truly want to go away. Why not admit it?” She was staring at him finally, eyes wide and bright dark. “God … God …” She was crying and he tasted a tense dryness … was it him she didn’t want? … who? … what? … “You tried, Parsival. You tried. I grant you that … you tried to be a man and decent to us. I grant you that.”

“So I failed you?”

…
don’t
say
things
anymore
, his mind pushed in.
It
tastes
…

“You tried.” She turned now, walking away, hands gripped together. “I grant all that …” Sobbing, tearing at him with sobbing and the fear and the taste …

…
wait
, he thought,
don’t
…

And he was running, the shadow and golden light flickering past, passing the tall, red blur of blond giant and the little girl who never looked up from piling the wet stones, rapt, squatting … tree boles, branches, leaves flashing past, hearing his voice raw and filling everything, mind beating over and over, running, beating, tasting it:

…
wait
for
me
…
for
me
…
wait
for
me
…

Hearing the resonant male bass high behind him:

“Sweet Jesus … Layla! Sweet God, make your peace with me! I beg you! I beg you!”

And then the light that was pain slashed his flayed consciousness and the cart leaped and banged, lumpy potatoes shifting and spilling around him …

XII

The legs and arms flopped stiffly through the spaces in the wagon sides as two sturdy, dusty men heaved it across a network of hard clay ruts to the edge of the ditchful of bodies. Behind them was an empty village of huts. Smoke from a single fire rose into the mild, windless morning.

The bulkier of the pair was looking down the hard scar of road to where a few sagging logs crossed what was once a stream, but now was stones and caked mud.

“Where’d this one come from then?” he asked his companion, who was wearing his hood up. They both were already sweating. The first was bareheaded, balding and missing the tip of his nose.

“Arr, what’s this?” the other responded, letting the traces drop, clattering, to the harsh earth.

“Another customer.” the first pointed to where a ragged, bony man lay flat on his face by the bridge, legs and arms starfished from the swellings.

“What fine work we got, eh, Flatface?”

The bald man shrugged.

“Well, we gets the pickings, at least that,” he reflected, harsh, squinting, lumbering over as puffy, rainless clouds inched across the sky. The edge of one caught the sun and briefly dimmed the fierce light. He bent above the pale, ravaged man, flipping through his rags expertly and finding nothing, rolled him over and stared with disgust into the long, bony face with filthy, outsized moustaches plastered to the hollow cheeks by dust and grease. “Some bloody pickings,” he said, “this one be.” Pondered the black blotchings on the abdomen. Gripped the emaciated wreck by one knifelike ankle and dragged him to the burial pit. The head bounced over the rough ground.

“What spreads the death, Flatface?” the hooded one asked, conversationally. “Some say flies … others the wind itself.”

Flatface grunted. Rolled the body into the heap. Then they backed the cart around and dumped the rest.

“Not so many no more, eh, Flatface?”

“Who be left but us to get it now?”

When the corpses hit, clouds of flies rose grating and seething.

“I know not why we still live,” the hooded one said.

“Some it won’t touch.” Shrugged. “Ask God or the Devil. I wit not which be in charge of plague.”

They were pulling the empty cart back. It rattled lightly over the stony earth.

“It’s a strange thing, Flatface, a strange thing. Me old woman, she went right off …” Snapped a finger. “Like that … the old Gaf too … That was back when we used to bury’m.”

“I think they poisons the fucked earth, Vordit, that’s what I think.”

“It’s been unnatural dry.” Vordit peered around and crossed himself. “No doubt a that.”

“I think the dead poisons the earth.” Flatface reiterated his declaration. Jerked his head in a nod.

His associate was squinting down the pale thread of main road that ran across the low-rolling valley fields and vanished in the haze.

“So,” he said. “Ah.”

“Eh?”

“Is that wind work? I think not. Oh, I think not.”

Flatface turned and stared himself at an almost motionless streak of dust that floated in the horizon haze.

“Must be more of’m coming north,” he said. “The road lies there.”

“Let’m come, and go too.”

The light briefly dimmed again as they jounced the cart past the first houses, sagging, tilted, forlorn with gaped, empty doorways and overgrown, sunbleached yards.

“Well,” Vordit said, “there’s room enough for all in the pit.” He glanced distractedly at the slowly passing, empty shells that seemed to still hold (somehow suspended in their mist and shadow) the harsh intensities of all the lives there, all hopeless rages and tender moments … A crow arced overhead, a dark, rough fluttering, and folded itself down on a tattered thatch eave. The bird eye was a sudden, dim bead.

Flatface was looking behind again. The dust was closer Whoever they were, they were not dawdling. Now he could see there was a second cloud somewhat behind the first.

“So,” Vordit was saying, “what troubles me still is why they worked so hard? If it all comes to the same. Eh?” There was a kind of furious amazement in his tone. “Folk was clearing them worthless fields when the plague took them. What use was it all? They should’ve run off … what use?” Shook his head and sniffed violently, part blew his nose, then sniffed again.

“Go ask them, why don’t you?” suggested Flatface, walking now, looking backwards as he pushed at the traces.

It was nearing sunset before the first bandits actually reached the wasted collection of broken huts and houses. Howtlande gestured with drawn sword at Flatface and Vordit, who were sitting on the cart, munching hard bread. There was no one else in sight or hearing.

“Fan out and search around,” Howtlande told Skalwere and Finlot. “See what’s to be seen.”

“Why would I do that?” Skalwere questioned, sarcastic. “I’d walk around with shut eyes save that you just opened them with your fat wisdom.” He was already slipping up into the shadows, short, wiry, dangerous, quick and quiet. He was wishing he could go home again. More than ever … If only he’d slain Tungrim, the son, too, and not just the others … He’d imagined himself raising a force of disgruntled Britons and Welshmen and renegade Norse and going back home on better terms than he’d left … except these men were not much of a match for half their weight of Vikings.

Howtlande smiled his best smile and advanced the pale mule a little closer to the two peasants, whose flesh glowed through the grime as if they were made of embers as the last sunbeams leveled into them.

“Hail, goodfellows,” he said, “we’re travelers on a long route with more coming behind. Be there room in your fine town here?”

“If it be not empty,” Skalwere called down from the hut shadows, “your talking will soon clear it out.”

Flatface just watched as his partner said:

“There be room to spare here, traveler.”

“Another tragically wasted place,” Howtlande sighed. He wondered if anything useful would be left. How could he expect to build his forces in this land of the dead and missing? “How many are left, goodfellows?”

Vordit shrugged and bit into his bread as if he had eternity to swallow and digest.

“Can you count?” he finally asked back.

“Just you both?”

“No,” Vordit allowed.

“Well, how many then, fellow?”

The other raiders were poking around the deserted huts behind Skalwere and Finlot. The sour knight stood silently near the mule.

“Should I name those already in the grave?” Vordit wondered.

“Were we to wait on that tally,” the dour knight said, “we needs must stay past our own deaths.”

“So this town is empty?” Howtlande said, exasperated. “You low-born sons-of-bitches weary me. Is it empty or nay, thick brains?”

“Not so long as we be in it,” Vordit pointed out.

“Enough of this nonsense.” Howtlande was losing his temper as Finlot and Skalwere returned.

“No one about,” Finlot declared, a trace breathless. “No food … no folk … empty huts, fires cold on the hearth …”

The second group of raiders (with the women and the cart) could be heard now in the darkening stillness. The wood creaked and strained, shockingly loud. Everything seemed to be sinking, receding as the last red glow was sucked away into the faintly luminescent hollowness of night.

“All fled on,” Flatface said. “We stayed.”

“Why?” asked the knight. “You prefer the peace and quiet?”

“No,” said Vordit.

Howtlande was frustrated and impatient.

“Answer questions as put, you dogs,” he suggested.

“You sound like a nobleman,” Flatface thought aloud.

“All of us are most noble,” the knight said. His armor was a vagueness like a lost gleam on dark water.

“We stayed,” said Vordit, “to care for the dead ones.”

Finlot was squatting, leaning on his braced spearbutt. Skalwere had his back to the conversation, apparently staring into the last deepening smear of blood-colored light.

Contempt ate silently at him. Except for that knight who rarely spoke the rest were cowards and carrion who in his homeland would live best by begging or mending nets. Men needed an iron code. The code was becoming clearer and its importance paramount. These people had nothing to bind them but the whims of their feelings. He’d kept the code and would keep it, they’d remember his example, because by now his single slip was blurred over by reasonings and circumstance and time. He never really looked at it anymore, one small blurring in a long, clear lifetime …

“Why bury them?” Finlot wondered.

“Someone had to,” Flatface felt.

“But that’s daft, you foolish bastard.”

“Well,” Howtlande offered, grinning faintly, humped up, a massive blot against the sunset, “there’s that which sticks to the fingers, eh?”

“Don’t put nothing on me mother,” Flatface said. “I were no bastid, you bastid!”

“Well,” Finlot allowed, “still it be daft.”

“Then why?” asked the knight. “Duty?”

“What?” wondered Flatface. “Daft? We just stayed. Why not?”

Skalwere kept turned away.

Duty
, he thought.
Duty
…
What
do
these
ragged
swine
know
about
that?

Howtlande was watching the oncoming cart and pale mule rise out of the vast, tidally advancing night. The brighter stars were softly wet-looking. No moon yet.

“Say what you fucked and bloody please,” Vordit suggested. “If I was you I’d press on me way. The death ain’t gone from noplace till there’s none left to die.” the last red tint had just faded from their faces.

“I’d not have stayed,” Finlot said, reflectively, “as wise as you make out to be.”

Skalwere finally turned around.

“Why don’t you talk for another hour or two?” he said. “The moon has yet to rise.”

“Get these gravediggers into line with the rest,” Howtlande suddenly seemed to break out of a reverie. “We’ll have plenty of work for them ere long.” Then to the mule, kicking it lightly: “Stir your bones, you baggy-assed son-of-a-bitch!”

Finlot ushered the two along with cocked spear. A slight breeze came up and swished the still trees.

“Somebody had to stay,” Vordit muttered. “Otherwise what’s the sense?”

“What sense?” Finlot wanted to hear.

“We lived here,” the other replied, sullen, downlooking.

“Oh, aye,” commented Finlot, “that makes all clear, like a map to a blind man.”

“We lived here,” the other repeated.

“Why do you take us off?” Flatface asked, watching the gleaming spear point.

“Why, we’re forming a great host, and we’ll need good buryers.”

* * *

Back in the ditch the flies quarreled and grated. The bodies shifted here and there as their internal halations dictated Some bizarrely erupted into long-latent flatluence; a stiffening arm cocked itself at the dark sky as if with purpose, with only the other dead to witness the unseen salute …

The ragged man on top of the heap suddenly breathed hard and heavy, chest creaking and popping … gurgled … clenched and unclenched his long, wide, soft hands, volitionlessly plucking at, clutching the twisted, flopped corpses …

He discovered he was staring at a perfectly round blur of whiteness that floated in a vast dark, and he thought he might be underwater, held enchanted by a spell at the bottom of the sea. Stared at the magical light he knew was holding him in thrall … began gathering the scattered shreds of his will power to fight the imprisoning whiteness … gathering …

Ye
cannot
hold
me
…
Ye
cannot
hold
me
…
I
will
it!
I
…

His body was a soft smear of flesh strung over frozen bones. There was a memory of pain beyond imagination. He vaguely believed the fevers had melted him to this, that the only life in him pulsed like a heatless ember behind his sight, had retreated back and back from the flashes of wild pain …

Stared and fought the great whiteness, eyes tracking it across what he didn’t know was the sky, never shifting, never releasing the pressure that held the speck of life back from what was lulling away his unfelt body. He felt no peace and sensed no restful darkness or sweet fields, only the struggle, the unending pressure to live, to master the round glow, and knew he’d won when it was chewed to nothing, bottom to top, fraction by fraction by what he didn’t know was the western horizon … then it was gone and he was freed … freed …

Victory
, his mind exulted.
Victory
…

Tried to move now … speak … strained … croaked a sound … was blotted out …