Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II (21 page)

LOHENGRIN

The crippled one was just ahead, swimming, kicking like a frog. After the plunge down the shaft, Veers and I hit the black water like turds into cess. I kept hold of the spear. We paddled forward. Veers cursed me whenever he found extra breath. We came up to the cripple fairly soon. His armored friends had obviously gone to the bottom. My father must have stripped fast, assuming he had made it.

The cripple was snuffling the water, I swear. Impossible yet he was, like a hound in a field. I could see him in the greenish dimness sniffing a scent on the damned water! I lay flat and quiet on the surface with the spear pointed like a lodestone. It seemed as reasonable as sniffing the water. We would through a maze of half walls and tunnels and arches. The point of my spear seemed to agree with the sniffer. A wondrous fact.

We came to shore where my father was battling what I took for a giant. The three of us crawled out together as he fled into a tunnel, leaving the giant knight (which I soon learned was a strange machine) flailing the air with a very big sword.

The cripple cocked his head towards Veers and myself. His glittering stare flicked wildly around. I thought he was having a fit.

“Who are you?” he snarled.

I held the spear up. The tip seemed to glow slightly.

“Poor pilgrims,” I replied.

“Bah,” he said. “I know you now. Spawn of that damned bastard. I know you.”

“How do we escape this dreadful pit? Well would I have done to have stayed above and plied my rightful trade.”

The little man’s insane eyes glittered and wandered.

“We have to pass this guard,” he said.

“There’s a fair start,” muttered Veers. “My idiot boy, for once, had more sense than his father.”

“Use the spear,” the runt hissed.

“This flimsy thing?” I held it up. But the tip was definitely glowing. I moved towards the iron thing. The blade waited for me. “Touch it,” he insisted. He reached for the shaft. “I’ll do it then. “

“No, you won’t. What do I need you for?”

“You’re in the bed,” he laughed. “Enjoy the company.”

“You ask much.”

“For Jesus’s sake,” said Veers, “do
something
!”

I flicked the weapon out like a snake tongue. Ticked the metal arm before it could slice me. It flashed blue fire and paused in mid-stroke. We went past fast, into the tunnel.

JESCHUTE

Down the road I went as if knowing where … I passed through a village … watched some young girls playing a game I remembered, hopping on one foot along lines drawn in the dust. I paused to watch for awhile, thinking back to long lost sweet days … playing … the odor of dinners cooking, so long ago …

Someone gave me bread and cold peas in fat. I talked to a peasant. Then his wife … later a ride in a cart that creaked along into the sunset. Not much was said that I can recall.

Night, sleeping in a hayfield … waking wet with dew among blue flowers. Lovely flowers. I hadn’t seen such things in so long. The next day I was walking again. I believed I knew where I was. Only later did I awaken to realize I’d been utterly lost …

HOWTLANDE

They all went down the hole. They all were mad. The well had been enough for me. I just waited, with one eye on the little killers and the bearded stinkers, the other on the girl.

If there was a treasure down below, trust Gobble to dredge it up. He was bred to such work …

PARSIVAL

The woods and wall were flat as a painted scene. That was bad. I was supposed to be conscious. It didn’t bother Morgana. She was waiting for the magic moment. When looked back they were coming across. I counted three.

“Make speed,” she said.

“Where?”

“To my heart’s desire.”

“Come on.”

I went towards the flat-looking woods. No reason. There was no glimmer of direction left in my brain. I just wanted to get out. I bounced off the flat forest because the tight space between two trees happened to be solid.

Because it was a wall. Painted, carved stone. All of it. A remarkable, if senseless, accomplishment. Smooth as glass. No hope of climbing it. The wall and trees were of a piece.

“Good God,” I said, rubbing my palm over the cool smoothness.

“Can’t you see a gate?” she said behind me.

“No.”

It was all faded.

“Try,” she said, nervous now.

“We better try the river.”

“It goes underground,” she informed me. Nice to know. “The current is too swift to go upstream and we cannot go back.”

I turned. She was more than right. The twin bridges had broken. I could now see the water force where a shattered piece jutted up on shore. The water sprayed wildly where the piece cut the surface. But how had it broken?

The three were coming up the gentle rise. I recognized Lohengrin. Holding the spear still. What stubbornness. Lean Veers was there and my favorite gimp-stride brought up the rear.

“Make haste,” she whispered close to my ear. “Don’t try to think. Act.” Her breath seemed to set my head spinning, but not in the ordinary way.

“Wait for the family,” I said.

LOHENGRIN

“Hello, Father,” I said, smiling. I was tired. Chael was eating my nerves. Gobble was amusing enough, so long as you never turned your back. Now, my sire. I was too tired to care. I just wanted to get out of this nonsensical playground or find the gold, if there was any, which I doubted. I’ve heard knights say they’d rather starve as nobles than be the richest merchants on earth. Personally I’d rather be the richest knight.

The witch showed nothing much. Looked hard at Gobble. He sidled and rolled his bulgy eyes and showed his tiny teeth.

“Where are the rest of them?” asked my father. I yawned. I wanted to drop right there and sleep. The swimming had taken everything out of me.

I shrugged. “It all closed up behind us,” I said. It had. “Stone gates and things closed behind us.” “Kill him,” Morgana said to my father. “Whom?” he asked.

“Me, eh?” snarled the little, twisted one.

“Or else he’ll destroy us,” she insisted.

“By himself?” I put in.

“She’ll destroy you!” Gobble shrilled. “She betrays for pleasure alone. Trust her as you’d trust a viper in your breechclout. “

“The thing is to get out of here,” my father said, sensibly. “Or do you still expect some wonder to manifest itself?” he asked Morgan.

“We’re near,” she said. “Very near now.” Sneered. “And that stunted creature knows it too.” The stunted creature chuckled unpleasantly and peered at the wall that looked like trees.

“So this is the final barrier,” he reflected. “And we have the key this time.”

“You see,” she said, as if it proved something.

“But where’s the gate?” he asked. “Where’s the gate?”

And, believe this or don’t, the spear moved, twisted in my hand and aimed itself at a point on the wall perhaps fifteen paces to our right. It bent my arm out with a strange, prickly, slippery force, which my muscles couldn’t cope with. I was nervous for the first time since we’d come there. I admit it. That slippery force worried me.

Morgana took advantage of the moment and snatched the weapon from my grasp. I wouldn’t have believed she could move so fast. A catlike blur and the thing was gone, and in a way I felt relieved. I didn’t like that slippery force.

“The key!” she exulted.

I instinctively tried to snatch it back, but it was like trying to grip an icicle. It slipped free, and she was running, pointing or pointed by the spear, following where it had aimed itself. She poked one of the carved trees. I saw a bright green spark and sputter.

PARSIVAL

A greenish light flashed where the point hit the remarkable wall. Morgana fairly danced with excitement, like a child. “Follow me,” she cried, because the stone trees were opening where she’d struck: a perfect gate.

Gobble did a few quick front rolls and snapped to his feet (like the treacherous tumbler he was) and hobbled rapidly at her heels.

The rest of us followed, my son on one side of me, Veers on the other.

“Are you coming home?” I asked him.

“Unlikely,” he said.

“You never surprise me,” I told him as we passed through the gate. “Don’t you want to help your mother?”

LOHENGRIN

My mother. Fine, coming from him. When did he ever care a shaving of brass for her?

We went through the hole in the wall. I followed now just to see if I could recover the spear. It had to be valuable, if only for the finding of strange places and opening walls. This resembled children’s stories that my mother had told me. I thought idly at the same time how I’d like to have that smug bitch Morgana kneeling at my feet to give sugar kisses to my shaft.

“Help her with what?” I asked, staring at the new scene, watching the suddenly (and startlingly) ghostly shape of Morg and the twisted nastiness heading down a slant of barren, stony ground that crunched underfoot, suddenly in a dank gust of fog. Where had it come from? The weather was dry enough on the other side of the wall. I glanced back through the thickening mists and saw the gate resealing itself.

PARSIVAL

Looking back, I saw, as the gate slammed shut again, a pale thread of daylight poke softly into the massed fog that pressed down as if dense, motionless clouds hung over our heads.

The thread snapped, and I felt (I cannot tell why) that I’d missed it again and that the last true light in all the gray world had gone out.

LOHENGRIN

I kept them in blurred sight. My father was just ahead of me now. Veers behind. He’d stopped cursing and muttering. We were cutting and twisting left and right through dense masses of flowers taller than any of us. I brushed some with my hand: dry, brittle. Leaves and petals fell in showers.

The harsh ground slanted ever downwards, though not so steep as a hillside. I felt we were curving into a hollow like a cup. I knew Morgan was following that spear through this dim and lifeless garden. As if autumn had struck only here. My father said something lost in the crackling swoosh as we cut across a brittle thornbush. The thorns snapped like straws. “What?” I asked him.

PARSIVAL

“Your mother.” I told him. moving deeper into what might have been the ruined ghost of the flower garden we’d fought in last time, though I didn’t recall this precise slant of ground.

“What?”

“The witch says she’s in danger, Lohengrin.” I wasn’t sure it was true, however.

We stooped through an arbor of dead, pale, pulpy-looking saplings that crackled and fell before us as if we were bulls. It was easy to follow the two ahead of us, since they left a wake of shattered woods.

LOHENGRIN

“What danger?” I wanted to know. Who was he story-telling to?

There were constant, wrenching twists and turns now. We veered through dead rosebushes, walls of sunflowers, and a thousand obscure thistles. There were so many hard, narrow ruts in the earth my ankles ached.

PARSIVAL

And then we came to a perfectly circular open space, paved with stone. Morgana and Gobble stopped at the rim. The fog literally billowed up from the ground there, from the center.

Usually fog descends. It was cold and heavy, so there had to be some pressure below forcing it up. I could see the hole now. Like a well. Not the same well, obviously, that I’d pitched Gobble and the fat one into.

My son went past me. I could see he meant to get back the spear. What really troubled him? My flesh and blood and bone. I’d held his little body and slapped his bare buttocks. Helped feed and dress him. And I understood nothing. His dark eyes were walled off from my comprehension, and I had no map for the mazes of his heart and mind.

He went past me there, more remote than any stranger.

“Is this the great secret? Fog pouring from a hole in the ground?” It spread a glistening false dew on the lifeless plants and dried-up trees. I spoke to no one. I vaguely recalled that my mental map, now evaporated, could not have led here, because it showed a path deep down, and we were outside. “I’m glad I struggled through water and fire and general hardship to reach this place.”

Gobble was creeping low, trying to work his way behind Morgana. My son was heading straight for her. I assumed she was aware of both approaches. And I wondered again what had happened in bed at Modred’s castle. Not that it really mattered. At the same time, I was contemplating dropping Gobble down the hole to see how long it took him to surface this time.

Veers walked to the edge and peered down into the smoking fog.

“I don’t see nothing much,” he said.

Morgana looked at me. She appeared pleased.

“Come forward, Sir Parsival of the Grail,” she invited, smiling. “We shall free the power together.” She held up the spear.

“There’s nothing down there, I take my oath,” hazarded Veers.

“Give it back,” said Lohengrin, “Or pay me my price.”

He caught her attention as Gobble bobbed behind her on the rim of the pit. I came closer. Amazing how much soupy mist was pouring out. The world was nothing but grayness, our phantom outlines, and sketchy hints of dead bushes and trees.

“Lohengrin,” I said, gritting my teeth, “it doesn’t belong to you.” The simplest things often seemed to escape him utterly.

He turned, furious, to argue with me. As always. I could have said the words for him. Except things happened: she, still smiling at me, lunged for my heart. As pretty and perfectly level a thrust as I’d ever seen. I should have died.

Veers turned and was already trying to leap in (why, I never found out, some instinct, some fatal decency, the spark in all men that flames against their wills at times) while my son still had his head twisted around to glare at me. Gobble saved me. He was already in mid-grab when she struck, so he got a hand on the shaft. It only poked my bare chest.

She and the cripple pirouetted along the rim (a low curb ringed the smoking hole) her voice raging over his hisses as he strained to wrench the weapon away. I suppose he wanted his chance to stick me. “Fool. You fool! …” she shrilled. “… his heart … his heart had to be pierced … fool …” She was quick and graceful. He was smooth and slyly strong. He tripped her, and she had to let go or go over the edge. As she fell, she kicked him, and he went down. He rolled, of course. I moved in. Lohengrin too. He still wanted the spear. I just wanted to kick Gobble into the hole. I don’t know what Veers wanted, but he was closer and got there first.

Hanging over the rim, Morgana was still yelling at him:

“Idiot! Idiot! His blood would have freed the power!” Just her head showed between her gripping fingers, body dangling down into the mist-spewing abyss. “We need blood to spill into the pit.”

“We?” he sneered, bouncing on his skinny haunches like a monkey, eyes tracking faster than usual. “This power is my master’s” He rolled out from under Lohengrin’s attempt to pounce. Bounced off my calves as I tried to kick him. Veers dove and missed. Gobble giggled. This was his sport. Morgana was dragging herself out of the pit.

“Blood,” she cried, “damn you!”

“You’re very sweet,” I said, trying to anticipate the cripple’s moves. On the ground he was slippery, deadly, and elusive.

“Damned eel,” snarled Veers. We were all bouncing off one another, stumbling after him for motives known and obscure.

“Dip the tip in his blood and it will command the Grail force,” Morgana was still instructing. She must have had more cards to play that would undo Gobble’s hold on things.

Lohengrin and I hemmed him close: two sides with the pit behind him. Veers filled in the middle. “Got you now,” he said. “We’ll land you proper, me fine fish.”

But no. Gobble did a front roll straight into his legs. Veers struck with a dagger and ended with the spear jammed through his body. Senseless. Like all of it.

“No! No!” shrieked Morgana, already running, crashing out of sight into the billowing mists, crashing through the undergrowth, gone (except for the sound) as if she’d melted. Still yelling, muffled and mysterious and frantic and bitter, as if from death’s far shore: “The wrong blood! Idiot! The wrong blood!”

Veers cried out and grunted in shock. He toppled into the pit. Gobble failed to jerk the spear loose. Gone, just like that. And me not having bled a drop.