The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (7 page)

XIII

“Another cursed and empty place,” Alienor said, holding Tikla close to her skirts. Sourceless, subtle first dawnlight shadowlessly lifted the broken huts from the void night. Tikla was leaning into her, yawning. Torky was poking around the abandoned place with his bulky father. Long-faced Pleeka was pacing nervously, looking, apparently, at nothing.

No
dead
here
, Broaditch mused.

“Father,” said the boy, “did the sickness slay them?”

“Then the dead buried themselves,” he pointed out. “As scripture says.”

The hills rose before them, a featureless wall.

“Did God say that?” Torky asked.

Broaditch shrugged, flexing his powerful hands.

“Jesus Christ,” he said. “Which were told is all the same.”

“God and Jesus are the same?”

“Well, son, as water in the sea and water in a bucket are the same.” Shrugged. “But I think, unless I grow a pair of Christ eyes myself, I’ll never see if such be sooth or costless words. Meanwhile, we’ll have to trust the priests. That has its defects, however, if you’ve known many priests.” He nudged something with his toe. An empty, cracked pot. “It
may
be true. It may all be true …” He started walking past the last shadowy hut. He stared into the imperceptibly dissolving night. Thought something had moved across the field by the road.

“So they’re the same?” Torky persisted, matching his strides to his father’s.

“That’s no problem for words, son.” Was sure of it now: a gangling figure swayed towards them as if drawing vaguely glimmering form from the substanceless air itself. “Well, someone lives here, mayhap.”

He glanced back to be certain Alienor was all right. She was still outlined (as the stars faded above the old hills) grayish in a shapeless sack dress. Pleeka was behind her. He turned back to the strange, jerky-stepping man who reeled to a halt just ahead. Broaditch saw the dead-white flesh streaked with dark, eyes that seemed to palely drain the light into themselves; overlarge, pale hands on broomstick wrists, gesturing before him, and then the voice, hoarse but tremendous, ringing, the force of it overwhelming its own raw, painful rasp, saying, singsong:

“Devils fall back from thy master!”

Torky, startled, went back a few steps behind his father’s solid, shielding shape.

“What?” Broaditch wanted to know.

Alienor was watching. She’d heard the voice, muffled, flattened by dull earth and musty air and it had startled her: familiar … something from the deep, disturbing past … She moved a little closer, Tikla swaying reluctantly against her, rocking her head back and forth over her mother’s hip. Pleeka paced and muttered inaudibly behind her, lost in his reveries.

“Ideals,” he whispered. “Ideals …”

“Devils be bound to my will alone,” the bizarre stranger insisted.

“What a greeting,” Broaditch allowed. Watched the ragged man totter, still twitching his outsized hands and long, thick fingers at them in what he finally realized must be magical passes. “Fellow, you seem to have but few steps left in you. You’d do well to husband your strength for walking along.”

The wide, empty, bright eyes glared as the body (as if to confirm Broaditch’s prophecy) suddenly sagged and was gone, leaving the big man surprised there’d been no rattle and clatter when all those bones hit the ground.

Broaditch bent over him. Torky watched. Alienor sat her daughter on a stone and came over.

“What new trouble have we now?” she wondered. “I’ve grown tired of my easy life.”

“A very thin man,” her husband said. Stooped and lifted one of the arms and let it limply flop back. Wrinkled his nose. “From the smell he’s been dead a week and moving on from spite only.”

“What said he?”

“Nothing with sense in it, woman.” Broaditch straightened up. “We’ll attempt food and drink on him.”

“What little we have, you mean. The water jug’s low and where’s the next well, I wonder? All the streams been dry so far.”

“Well, since four days’ hike anyway.” Wiped his hands together. “It’s always the poor has got to make loans.”

She didn’t react. Glanced back over her shoulder.

“How far do we follow the
crusader
?” she asked.

Broaditch shrugged, rummaging in the foodsack as the sweet, dampish air filled imperceptibly with light and the trees and huts and the hills shaped themselves from the draining night.

“It doesn’t matter yet,” he answered, bent over the sprawl of bones in question.

“Give him not enough to kill him or it’s a double waste.” She sniffed and looked around again at the emerging village. “He had a loon’s voice.”

Broaditch held the waterskin to the raw slash of blackened mouth. Heard the breath catching and wheezing. The dribble of water sparkled and vanished into the shadowy gaping that chewed the air now and sputtered slightly.

“Well,” Broaditch murmured, “here’s a face that shows some wear.”

“We have to decide,” Alienor was saying, watching Pleeka pace. Tikla had slumped on the grass with her back on the rock. Torky remained standing close to his father, watching, intent, absorbed, as if about to utter some grave profundity. She asked herself why they had to remember. If there were just some potion that would blot away all ill and leave only the sweet. She smiled.

There
would
be
,
in
that
case
, she thought,
more
hollow
in
life
than
hill
…

“Who is he, papa?” Torky wanted to know.

“He neglected to say.”

“A hermit?” the boy drew back a little again. “He stinks bad.”

“That may well be holiness, son,” Broaditch said as the man’s eyes popped open without a flutter and he resumed his coldly flaming, vacant stare. His lips shook and then smiled for an instant.

I
have
them
in
thrall
, he was thinking.
Fortune
is
turning
my
way
…

His look went sly. There was light enough for shadows now. A warm, dry breeze stirred the trees and the sunseared, yellow-brownish field grasses. The east was a pale, flame-colored melting wash.

“Good morrow, fellow,” Broaditch said, watching the sly eyes that reminded him of pond water on a rainy day.

Alienor didn’t speak. Went back to stand near her slumbering daughter. Pleeka was still now and stared over at the newcomer. Broaditch gave him another drink. Watched the dry, chapped lips work and smack. Up close the eyes were sunk in, bloodshot, and Broaditch thought if he wept he’d weep blood like those pictures of Christ in churches …

“Are you a holy man?” Torky wanted to learn.

I have them … I have them … am I not back from the dark lands? … have I not learned much there? … I begin again here
,
on
this
morn
… He tried to really smile. Great chunks of memory slammed home in his burning brain along with flows of strangeness and pictures he didn’t bother about yet.
All
is
not
lost
…

“Look,” he whispered, then said rich and loud as Broaditch and Torky moved closer as if called. “Look at the marks on me … the marks!”

The morning showed them plainly: the fingerprints of the plague on face and chest, pocked, black …

“I passed through darkness,” he told them, eyes tracking nothing. “You pitiful devils …” Tried to laugh this time. Pleeka came nearer, staring at the long, mad, concentrated, bony face as (with an effort, but suddenly, as if a well of energy flooded the sagged body) he sat up in triumph, not actually looking at anything; standing as if he rose to oversee the brightening fields and ruined huts, calm and remote, big, pale hands folded over his loins. The scraggly, filthy face seemed contemplative, the dark mouth parted.

“I’m hungry,” it said, ringing, filling through its hoarseness like a flood of stones down a hillside, crashing, clashing, clacking. “I’m hungry.”

Broaditch, on one knee, paused reaching into the foodsack, as if he’d mistakenly looked for the wrong food, as if they actually had something else to offer this unsettling stranger.

XIV

Parsival was halfway across the ceramic blue, wide, shallow river, striding and hopping from stone to stone, watching the foamy swirls twist and bubble away around the willow-overhung bend — a few hundred yards, in fact, from the wooden bridge where the villagers had abortively battled the amnesiac knight …

He felt as though a spell had lifted, that darkness had passed from his mind …

All
of
that’s
gone
, he was thinking.
Sword
,
shield
and
stupid
life
chasing
Christ
-
knows
-
what
-
and
-
never
-
tells
…

Because it was not abstract for him now. He intended to find his son so he could finally just say it:
I’m
sorry
,
forgive
me
… and after that what they did wouldn’t matter … perhaps he’d go home again, see crops planted … open all the doors … find a wife? … let age come in its time with grace and ease …

He noticed how low the water level was. Dried, pebbly banks cracking and crumbling …

And then there were too many reflections: shadows that laid the water open to the bottom (where weeds unwound and infinitesimal minnows glinted like steel chips), superimposing heads and shoulders like a thick palisade, and he was already stopped in midstep, taking in the row of them, the high sun’s shadows blotting out all the eyes above wild beards that (he saw without noticing) puffed and stirred as they breathed, and he didn’t have to count to know there were over a dozen before even bothering about the long staves and bent clubs and dull, ragged-looking blades.

Ah
, he was thinking,
a
forest
of
hermits
…

Except he felt the gazes he couldn’t see through the shadow hollows and hairshag, felt the malice that went even beyond religion …

He was halted on a round, slick stone that rocked a little at each slight shift of his weight. Raised both eyebrows. Hoped none of them carried bow and arrows.

“Good day, sirs,” he said, glancing covertly behind himself by lowering his head.

“An unbeliever,” one of the beards stated, clipped, flat harsh. He couldn’t tell which had actually spoken.

“In what, pray?” Parsival was curious. So it was religion after all. These men were amazingly gaunt. Part of his sight was aware of the undulant weeds, abstractly thinking:
They show the movement … until something shows the movement you can’t tell anything’s passing
… Watching the men, who hadn’t stirred yet.
Too
many
to
argue
swordless
… Still he didn’t regret throwing his blade away because now he was even with everyone and equally threatened. That was important. A weapon always set him somehow smug, detached, isolated, masked his ordinary heart behind extraordinary skill.

He found himself strangely distracted by the waterflow, the fish flickers, the light bouncing, scattered by the long willow shimmers overhead. He became absorbed in the richness of the moment, aware too that he feared dying because something was stirring within him, something like speech trying for a voice that the water and light and fragrant earth and fear too could shape, and he wondered if he were brave enough yet to simply flee. Frowned as the shortest, gauntest one was talking, stepping down the steep, dried-up bank to the sand-laced shoreline. The green and gold light winked over him. Their dark, greasy-looking robes had been folded around their waists, bare chests tanned and burned unevenly. Some were barefoot, this one missing random long toes, eyes like polished pebbles.

“Unbeliever,” the leader was saying. “You look fat-fed.” His light beard seemed stained with blood about where his mouth should be.

“So?” Parsival returned unregretfully.
What
absurdity!
“You are all on a holy fast, then?”

The man looked back at his fellow’s beards.

“A fast?” he mocked. “To be sure, unbeliever.”

“Are you children of Mahomet?” Parsival tried.

The man was amused now. The others were inching down the bank and spreading out silently. He squatted down and played with the stones near his mutilated feet.

“Mahomet,” he laughed, holding his pale, gritty-looking stare perfectly still. “Hear me, fellow, we are the Truemen. The children of the father.”

“Truemen? So you never lie?” Parsival relaxed his legs to back up to the flatter rock he remembered was one long step behind him.

“We are the inheritors,” the wiry, crouched man replied. “We are the father’s flail.”

Why
is
it
, Parsival asked himself,
when
men
mean
to
do
truly
ghastly
acts
religion
is
their
first
armor?

“Inheritors,” he remarked, “you were all named in some will?” He part-leaped back and came down firmly on one foot. He was pleased he hadn’t missed and looked a fool, up to his knees in sand and water.

“Where are you going back to?” the chief inheritor asked, standing up like a steel coil, walking, then wading, step by step. “Like you not our company?”

The others were pretty well spread out along the opposite shore now and were entering the water too. He saw their point: the ones at the extreme ends would move fastest and close him in the center, bag him, he thought.

Well
,
they’ve
done
this
business
before
.

“Inheritor,” he said, “or whatever you decide you are, pass me in peace. I’ve had a hundred times my fill of stupid battling.”

“Nay,” the man said, “not quite, eh, lads?” He smiled as he looked at his men. The end ones were already across and running into the trees, starting to close a wide, loose circle with Parsival in the middle. “But you’ll have it soon.”

“As you see, I’m unarmed.”

“Well, there’s a pity.” the man and the two or three nearest him were closing quickly. He was cut off.

I’m
always
wandering
,
it’s
my
curse
,
I
have
to
get
someplace
and
stay
…

“You have to force me into it, don’t you?” he said. “Someone always has to do me that service.”

“Take him!” the violent, wiry man cried. The line had closed behind him. They came on splashing into the stream.

Parsival stooped and clawed free two handfuls of smooth, cool stones from the stream-bottom and without a break in motion charged the two nearest (the leader and a fatnecked bull of a man), whipped the missiles away
left
(hit a bald skull and rebounded twenty-five feet in the air),
right
(hit a runty, one-eyed man between the legs who hopped straight up and howled). Then the massive-necked one (the blur of his moving registered, metallic reek of body and breath, wirelike hairs on the smooth, sweaty chest, deep grunts) was chopping his ax down as Parsival (already ducking without having to pay attention) spun so fast he already stood behind the man, who tilted off-balance, trying to check his committed swing and needed only a light kick to send him over on his bushy face. This became a dance with Parsival loose, free, floating … Next, he spun close to the leader (broken teeth, snarling mouth, furious glare), inside the vicious jabbed blade, picked him up under the arms and tossed him into the next coming, a pointy-faced redbeard leaping from stone to stone with poised mace. Without glancing back Parsival ran, feet rebounding from the shore, then bank, slashed through the brush and willows (that flickered his shape a moment before shimmering back into loose dangling), howls and curses fading behind … the strident cry of the leader.

“A hunting! A hunting! Call the brothers! Call the sons of the holy father!”

Some other:

“Then the feast! The feast! Arrrr!”

Almost lost now as the landscape shook slightly, zipping past:

“First the praying, brother! The praying …”

He followed a vague scribble of trail, effortless and swift … up and lightly over a fallen tree, swinging and dancing through the crisscross of sidewise branches … racing on … sun flickflashing … racing partly in sheer exuberance, barely panting after half a fast mile but beginning to feel his legs thicken with pumped blood and his stride splay and wobble a bit.

The
Truemen
, he was thinking,
the
brothers
… what dunglumps … I flee to where I can when I can as far as I may … this is the art of living in this world …