Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (10 page)

PARSIVAL

Midday. The sun was a whitehot hammer on their skulls. Parsival, Hubert and the wife were following a twisting road; the trees didn’t overhang very often. Parsival rode with the woman sidesaddle in front while her husband stalked along through the yellowish dust. The untilled countryside tilted wildly there, rising and falling in short, sharp swells.

Her scent was strong, musky but pleasant, the knight decided: flowers and sweat. Her hair right under his chin, smelled like hot, dry wheat. He liked that.

I’ll never reform, he thought. He went back to his interview with the abbot, the blurry conversation in the burial chamber (or whatever it was) where the holy man had been perched on the side of what seemed a stone coffin. Never…

The couple had begun wrangling, again. He hated it. Really sickened him.

“Too hot for that,” he told them, wiping the fresh sweat from his forehead. “Christ’s feet!”

“Hubert were born cross,” she said.

A pun? Parsival wondered.

“Oh, hear how the whore uses me,” cried Hubert.

“We travel but a short time on this earth,” Parsival intoned. “We ought to enjoy one another’s good points.”

“Had he any,” she said, “I’d revel in them.”

Parsival shook his head, chuckling. He kept staring ahead, unfocused, across the brilliant afternoon as they tipped up and then swayed down roll after roll of road.

“Have you ever tried to pull up the roots of your disputes?” he asked them, thinking of himself and how he never had.

The askew-looking man tilted his head around and just missed being struck dumb by wonder. His wife gazed up at the blue, blazing heavens as if to draw strength from above.

“The roots,” she said. “That’s good.”

“I’m serious,” the knight told her. “I’ve been pondering many things.” He shifted to the side a little to ease the growing numbness in his left leg. His body’s memory of a forgotten wound. “I war at home more than ever in the field. What folly! We repeat ourselves until we’re dull as dead men.” He bit his lower lip, narrowing his eyes. He wished, just for a moment, he could feel that vast, clear otherness again that would have filled out his words with a power beyond mere sense. “Dull and dead… and so we die long before our time and our world shrinks to a small and bitter knot.”

She twisted around to see his face. She wasn’t mocking him, saying: “You be an odd figure of a knight. Mayhap you should make poems.”

He nodded.

“That would surpass what I’ve done,” he agreed. “Nay, but I want peace… peace at home, first, um …” He gestured, inclusively.

She got it.

“My name is Katin,” she told him. “Peace at home, Katin.”

“Ha, ha,” put in Hubert. “Then slay your wife.”

“Slay yourself, you wormy cheese,” she sneered and recommended.

“I’m getting seasick on this horse,” Parsival said.

The valley was narrowing now, steep bluish hills closer. She sat quietly, thoughtful. Hubert spat in the dirt and marched along, up and down the sickening rills and ruts.

“Be you truly a knight?” Katin asked, looking straight part the mount’s neck.

“Not so truly as once I was,” he replied, shrugging. “There’s everything wrong with it.”

“You’re the first to say so,” she said.

“Yet it’s but the fool in the armor,” he reflected, “so it’s the same as all other work I suppose.”

Hubert was weary and irritable. He glanced over.

“Why do I doubt you?” he wondered. “Do you really believe this fellow?” he asked her. “I take him for a fraud. Where is your knight’s stuff?”

Parsival was amused.

“It weighed me down,” he answered. “Aye, as you fled from battle?” Parsival nodded. He liked that idea. “I suppose I am fleeing from battle.”

“What is your famous name, then? Some fine knight. Bah.” Hubert spat into the dust and watched the spittle roll into little balls. “Fly shit.”

“You guessed right,” Parsival said.

“He seems a knight to me,” Katin put in.

“Oh, aye, to you he would. And he can do great deeds and then come back and stick it in you.”

She tossed her head.

“Pay him no heed,” she said, “he be low and dark as the Devil’s shit.”

“Which famous one be you?” queried Hubert. “The great Lancelot or the mighty Parsival?”

“The mighty Parsival,” the knight declared, grinning. “And Lancelot the squat? I fought them both. Parsival is easy.”

That was too many for Hubert and he shook with chuckles, dropping to one knee.

“Oh yes,” he got out. “To be sure… and you still alive and unbroken …”

“It’s a living death, fellow.”

They were passing a crumbled hove near the road, the first sign of habitation in some time. The roof had fallen in and birds perched on the crossbeams.

Parsival squinted through the sagging doorframe into the inner dimness. Leaks of light hinted at lost shapes of long-lost life…

Everything seems strange but familiar, he thought. Like first love… They’d gone on. The forest had closed in almost completely there and the road was fairly level, though twisted and seemed to be succumbing to the undergrowth in places.

Everything seemed to remind him of long ago. Everything was like the sights of childhood, suddenly fresh and charged with gathering promise; promise without a cause or purpose…

He pulled himself back from his reverie and decided to try a new tack. Not that he had to try anything; he could have booted Hubert in the hind end and chased him. But he knew women enough to think she might have left with him; wasn’t his style, anyway.

“Look you, Herbert,” he began.

“Hubert,” corrected the man.

“Pardon me, I …”

“There it is,” the man interrupted. “What is?”

“A knight begging me pardon.”

“It’s just words, you ass,” she said. “Some lords are like that. It’s the training.”

“Look,” the knight went on, “it doesn’t much matter what I am. Let us pass on our way in peace.” He nodded, satisfied with his point. “You, Hubert, what is your trade?”

The man had stooped, picking a few from a red scatter of wild berries he’d spotted by the road; straightened, kept walking a little behind them, now, nibbling, staining his fingers and lips.

“Don’t offer none such,” she commented.

“There’s scarce enough to plug the bung of a bug,” he returned. “That’s his true trade,” she said, “pluggin’ bungs.”

“Oh, hear her. You had yours plugged aplenty.” He chortled. “Well sir It-Don’t-Matter-What-You-Be, I’m a bailiff, or was, more properly.”

“More properly,” Katin muttered.

A bailiff was the highest rank of peasant, a man privileged to take meals and sleep in the lord’s manor house, steward of his lord’s affairs and property when the master was absent. Years might pass without a noble paying a visit if he happened to hold many villages, which was common enough, so long as his profits were collected and passed on to him. So Parsival assumed, at once, that this fellow had probably tithed himself a little too well and drew unpleasant attention.

Still studying the brush for more berries, Hubert had drifted behind to the edge of earshot.

“Well then,” Parsival said, “I can imagine what befell.”

“The reeve was a thief,” she told him. The reeve, among other things, collected and tallied for the bailiff.

“I believe that to be common,” Parsival said, judiciously. Actually, his knowledge of manor affairs was sketchy, like most fighting knights. His seneschal did most of his business and he held only a single fife, in any case. His wife had much to say on that subject since he’d rejected holdings in the south offered by the king for his war service. Parsival didn’t want to feel beholden because he always meant to quit fighting. After lust, this was his favorite inner conflict and self-indulgence.

“My ass of a husband had to bear the blame,” she said. “So we were cast out.” She seemed amused but with a bottom note of hysteria. “Vagabonds …” Bitterness, too. “Who could have foreseen this day?”

Parsival took this in. The road twisted sharply back and forth. The trees were massively old, densely green with humped, gnarly roots.

“He was fortunate not to have gone into the dungeon.” She sniffed.

“The reeve went under the castle, as the saying is. God curse him. Now we wander the cold world like Tom O’ the hedges.”

“Your husband knew not of his crimes?” She laughed. Her hair flicked across his chin and cheek. “He is the bird who let the snake warm her eggs.” she said.

Parsival was considering the case when something caught his attention: a glint of metal among the branches. He squinted, leaned closer. From a middle branch a rust-rotted chain hung straight down, suspending nothing but an iron collar. Convicts were often hanged that way after a slow death elsewhere. He sucked his lips, feeling it somehow meant something.

He vaguely hoped her husband would sort of somehow fade away, because she was leaning back into him. His nose was full of the scent of her sun-heated hair and the rich, soothing smells of the hot earth. She was slender but he had a feeling that her body would be a surprise. He kept trying to picture her naked… would have liked to run his hands under her clothes and feel the sleeks that always took his breath away.

He sighed and rolled his eyes. Tried to concentrate on the weaving road and cool silence under the trees.

“Nothing new,” he said.

The road was suddenly paved with wide stone blocks. He realized that was as far as the old builders got. He was used to coming on Roman handiwork left over from the centuries-ago occupation.

We all only get so far, he thought, on any road we build or follow… Snorted at himself, his strangely reflexive, didactic mind. Should I have been a priest? The idea was troubling.

The hooves clunked dully on the stone.

“Bound to be a village ahead,” he said needlessly.

“Or a castle town,” she added.

Because the road showed use; the grasses were crushed down between the blocks and worn to dirt in places.

So he was busy studying the surface as they rounded yet another sharp bend, still following the course of the now, unseen, river. He was startled to see the horseman sitting his motionless mount as if he’d been waiting for them.

The red armor surprised him. The branches parted there and the hot hard sunbeams sprayed around the figure. Parsival blinked and squinted, automatically easing the woman down from the saddle in case of a fight.

“Wait,” he told her, glancing around for her husband who hadn’t turned the bend yet. He edged his mount closer to the knight whose visor was down.

I am on the road of ghosts, he thought, remembering the day he met the Red Knight, Sir Roht, whom he eventually killed for his armor. He was young then, younger than Lohengrin.

He eased the horse a step or two closer, into a splinter of sunlight. The armor wasn’t really red, just totally covered in rust.

“Have you never heard of grease?” he couldn’t help asking.

The visor was closed, flat and dented. It looked like it couldn’t fit over the man’s nose.

“You come,” the metal-muffled voice commanded. Parsival thought about that.

“I come?” He lightly touched his chest where the pale linen shirt fell loosely open.

There was an overgrown, mossy wall just in the underbrush. Perfect cover for an ambush. He wondered if they’d all have rusty armor and would the joints stick when they struck blows?

New idiots, he thought. Always new idiots… He estimated the distance to the wall. Scoop her up and ride.

“Come closer,” he murmured to her. “Nonchalant.”

“How?”

“Slowly.”

“She die,” the armored man declared. Parsival couldn’t place the accent. “No doubt, but when?” he asked.

“You come or she die.” Gestured with his rusty head. “Follow, unbeliever.”

The woman was close to the horse’s flank. “Unbeliever” made him hesitate. He’d seen bowmen from the Holy Land. The range was hopelessly close were there any behind that wall.

“Mount up behind me woman,” he instructed. “Nonchalant.”

As she did, a row of heads popped up behind the wall and he saw the short, deadly bows. Not Muslim but nomad. He’d seen those too.

“We come,” he said, soothingly.

“What does this mean?” she wondered. Glanced back, looking for Hubert.

“We’re making new friends on the road.” He felt her fear.

“Will we be slain?” she asked. “Will I be raped?”

“The infidels I knew hated women,” he said. “You may be safe as long as there’s a loose goat.”

Unless they were nomads. But how did they get to Britain?

They came over the wall and out of the bushes. There had to be twenty or more, dressed in rag-tag fighting gear. Parsival had the feeling they’d looted a long-deserted castle or a mass grave on some battlefield to judge from the condition of the gear. He supposed they were in disguise. He wondered how many blind beggars they’d deceived so far. The men were mostly dark with oily-looking hair and beards.