Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (12 page)

Her husband cut her off with a casual backhand which staggered her and left the fine nose dripping a thread of blood. Gawain had what he wanted.

“She’s a perfect little beauty,” the innkeeper said, “all fresh and untouched.”

He must have gestured in some way because the other men were on their feet, both holding a long stave. “Worth her weight …”

“You pig!” she cut him off.

He just ignored her this time.

“As I’m sayin’, yer honor,” he went on, but this time Gawain who’d noted the two armed peasants with cold relish, spoke over him.

“Nay,” he said, “as you seem worth your weight in shit, I want you. I long to probe your south-most hole with my stiff dangler.”

The innkeeper’s face went flushed and wild.

“Unnatural knight,” he cried, “begone from among us.”

His cronies had moved in on either side of the table, rather smoothly, he noted.

“To lose your company would be like losing a bad tooth,” he told them. “Don’t send me away.”

“Go from here and find your own kind,” said his host. His wife now got Gawain’s point.

“Be still, ya fool,” she advised, “lest this fellow kill us all.”

“Not all,” the knight assured her, standing up as her husband drew a chopping knife from behind his back and, simultaneously, both his fellows swung their staves. They’d done this before, Gawain realized, as he instantly countered, cutting one stick in half and stepping back away from the other as the woman screamed and the innkeeper surprised him hurling the heavy, semi-square blade with terrific speed and force, point-blank.

There was no way to avoid it. A death blow slicing into his cowl that his reflex twist barely moved to the left of his nose. The fellow had a special talent for murder, it appeared. But that inch to the left sent the blade into the space where his face didn’t finish.

They were all stunned when the cowl was ripped back and away and they saw bare skull and teeth. The woman gagged and fled, thinking her husband had cut his face in half. The others froze in shock and terror long enough for the knight to chop down the two of them and then go for the red-faced man who bolted for the back room.

Gawain was incensed.

“Wait up, whoremaster,” he pleaded, charging after him, leaving the other two in a welter of blood and pain.

The pimp didn’t wait; so sore afraid he actually ran through the side wall (loose fitting planking) into the alleyway, squatly ploughing through mounds of refuse knocking man and animal aside until he finally fell flat, exhausted, safe behind a maze of twists.

Except Gawain stopped two steps outside. The stink alone, he later said, had been enough discouragement.

“So much,” he muttered, “for the pleasures of Eros.”

He went back in and found the ale cask. Dipped a fresh jack and drank deep. Began eating some cold meat. One of the wounded men had crawled away somewhere; the other had been hit in the head and wasn’t going anywhere.

He didn’t realize the woman was still in the room, crouched behind an overturned table, watching him. She stood up.

“Well,” he said, “what’s this, woman?” He instinctively turned his good side to her.

“I’m used to ya now,” she told him. “I’ve seen worse hurts and them as was born looking like a trod worm.”

“You relieve my mind,” he remarked, mocking. “Did ya kill’m?”

“The world’s fastest fat man? Nay. He rolled from my sight like a kicked ball.” Drank some more, keeping his head turned, after trying to readjust the slashed hood.

“I’ll mend it if you like,” she offered, coming closer.

“That pandering, fat nastiness just had me nearer death than any knight in twenty years.” Studied her, from an angle. “Mend what? My torn heart?”

“I see yer too much alone, sir knight.”

“Fine,” he snorted. “How much for mending?”

She touched his face in profile to her. Her hands were cool, stonehard but smooth. She gently stroked his cheek. He felt it melting him.

“Just yer word on a thing is me price. You tell the word here that if he does any hurt to me or the children you’ll return.”

“Sorry I didn’t slay him,” he said, nodding. “He was too quick.” Still amazed. “He nearly had me.”

She was close against him now and her hands went here and there. So he didn’t bother to reflect on how he might have been better off if he hadn’t ducked aside; for once, he was satisfied to be alive.

“Come up the ladder,” she breathed into his ear, “to the sleepin’ loft.”

His knees went a little soft; throat felt choked. “Yes,” he managed to agree.

LAYLA

She shut her eyes and reopened them very slowly. She knew it and she knew she knew it.

Stood in the sharp shadow of the thatched hut, the sun a whitish-yellow dazzle in the dusty yard, the bright green furrowed fields of early wheat rolling up the rounded slope towards where the castle sat. Men and women were out in the fields in gray, red, brown, some men stripped to the waist, most wearing turban-like hats or hoods.

The old woman came out into the hard-shadowed doorway. Her eyes were lost in squinted lines, dress a shapeless grayness. She was holding a heavy clay pot in both hands.

“You need not show me,” Layla said. “I knew in my heart.”

“Aye,” said the crone. “The seed did sprout, lady.”

Layla was staring across the sharp, wooded hills to the empty sky beyond, shimmering in heat haze, the powdery blueness of midsummer. She sighed, not knowing how she really felt.

“No,” she murmured, unconsciously touching her belly, feeling a strange, annoying tenderness for her husband. It welled out like water through a clenched fist. Hating it, she remembered the first time she’d touched him when he was a strange, clear-eyed, too innocent teenager sitting in an oaken tub in her family castle. He’d stopped there, she thought years later, like Paris tripping over Helen, playing, she’d thought, at knight in borrowed armor. The herb-strewn water steamed around him while she and her sister (to show their father’s courtois) scrubbed him with perfumed soap and she’d learned her own deep weakness and need when she gripped him under the water and shocked them both into one… for a seamless moment and a broken lifetime…

What nonsense… She sighed, standing here in the golden, mellow August light, staring, she imagined, like a snared bird in a fowler’s trap. I have birthed two and lost another and by God I’ll lose this one too since my soul’s already on the list of the damned so what’s one more stain of darkness?

Just the memory of him in the tub, her desperate wanting, as if she were dying of thirst and he a full skin of water. Except it wasn’t he, she understood, because I got my wish and felt only worse… She’d touched between his legs, startled them both and in his perfect eyes she saw his need waken. They were so blue… like broken jewels…

Over the years the soaring promise had fluttered, spun and finally hit the bitter ground like a stricken angel. In that fateful bath she’d gripped his innocence and never forgave him for being the mirror of a magic he never actually possessed…

“My lady?” asked the old woman, cocking her head to one side. “Bring me a ladle of water, will you?” Layla asked, staring.

Both gone, she thought, meaning son and husband. No more men… Pictured her last mistake, Sir Gaf, the Greek, and reprised his wet kisses and itchy beard; his insistent but short-lived member. They all have to tell you how the other man is a weakling yet the wrong word at the wrong moment and their fine club becomes a willow wand…

The crone came back out of the cool interior holding a wooden bowl of water. Layla took it and absently drank. It was warmish and satisfying, tasting of earth and stone.

“No more men,” she told the hag. “May God damn them!”

“Hah. The fox had a full belly ere you feared for the goose.”

Layla handed back the cup and left the yard. Mounted her palfrey by the sagging gate, and sitting astraddle, man-wise, let the horse amble up the hill. She didn’t actually look when a horseman clattered from behind the last hut in the village and reined up close to her.

She’d just been watching a big ram with dirty, yellowish fur and one gimped leg, clumping and skidding awkwardly across a walled-in muddy field in hot pursuit of a long-legged lamb who kept just ahead with gangly effortlessness.

She grimaced, recognizing Gaf. “Still around?” she asked.

She was wondering if she could keep her daughter from all the twists and hurts of growing up; all the phantom joys and hollow nights that attended love…

“I have come back,” the knight said. He wore mail armor but no helm. His beard was trimmed to a close-cropped point. Maybe, she decided, he thought it made him seem French.

“I can see that,” she said. Urged her mare ahead, glancing back at the enclosure where the ram seemed to have finally cornered the lamb. The hill beyond which reached up to the square castle silhouette, was just being slowly covered by a cloud shadow. The sun still beat hard and steady where they were. “Why?” she wanted to know. “You ought to make haste back to your sweet bride and mother.”

She was mildly annoyed to note that he was keeping pace with her. She felt sweaty and grouchy with no desire to deal with him.

“Spare me your barbs, Layla,” he told her. “I’ll not leave you with that fool and coward.”

“Which one,” she wondered, deadpan, “particularly?”

“Indeed, which one.”

“Do not mistake him,” she warned, wiping her brow and eyes with a handkerchief.

Why doesn’t he go away?

“I will have you to keep, Layla,” he said. He seemed, she decided, more tense than usual.

“Why?” she asked, quite seriously.

“Life, in other wise, holds little joy for me.”

She didn’t quite laugh. She wasn’t amused, for one thing; and for another, she’d been brought up to take romantic declarations seriously since so many knights were willing to be maimed and die for the sake of such notions. But she was closer to laughter than awe, at this point.

She squinted at his face in the dazzling sunlight.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, “ride with this token —” She held out the damp handkerchief. “— and return with a dragon’s head and I am yours for eternity.”

What, she thought, are we children still to follow nonsense like a spellbound moth the shifting and inconstant flame that drops him scorched to oblivion in the end… not likely, Sir Gaf… She was furious now. Thought about the new child one of them had left within her.

“Do not mock me,” he said. She smiled without humor.

“So you’ve cropped your beard to come and win my heart,” she said. “Bring me back the head of a pig, or failing a pig, the head of your wife, and I’ll …”

He went red in the face and leaned over to slap her but she leaned away.

“Evil-tongued slut,” he snarled, exasperated. He shout-whispered: “Heed me! Mistake not my resolve.”

She was a long way from the safety of the castle. She knew she should have dissembled until she could slip away. The idea of appeasing this selfish, pompous bastard (as she now thought him) disgusted her. The memory of his distracted caresses, perfunctory kisses had little appeal. She was amazed at how she’d once been eager for those contacts.

And then I have to lie on my belly and him above and it’s no more use than a glove without a hand in it..

She had to get away. Fast…

LOHENGRIN

He felt dulled, drowsy, enervated… He could barely open his eyes and what he then saw was all bent into blurs.

He felt he didn’t belong there, that he ought to get out but time and the past seemed to be melting away…

He kept considering crawling across the silk and velvet floor to the tent opening – except he wasn’t sure which way was right. To his blurred sight the interior seemed a seamless dimness.

“What has this witch done to me?” he murmured. The air was suffocatingly close, hot and densely perfumed. After what seemed ages of stagnant time he managed to roll over onto his back. “Have I been here for days?” He tried to recall when he’d eaten last. He couldn’t tell if he were hungry or thirsty.

He never believed in witchcraft… He feared he’d be spellstruck forever, prisoned in fairy twilight like a fly in amber. He’d heard tales of supernatural races that hid behind screens of deceptive magicks and might madden and obsess humans.

He closed his eyes again (or thought he did) and seemed to dream that he was lying enchanted in the tent and he told himself he was dreaming and then reopened his eyes (or thought he did) and was still nude lying in a strange, gray world of slow-flowing mists where shapes stirred almost into forms but never quite revealed themselves… and there was one, a shadow that might have been cast by some remote, gigantic statue (he sensed that much) that yet lived and had a message for him which made him feel that he would, somehow, be made into something as powerful, massive, enduring as stone and that his life would be monumental…

And next he blinked and was looking down across his belly at the top of her head where it was wedged between his legs and felt that her mouth was drawing all the strength out of him, like a pool draining away, being drunk away. It had to be a dream: neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

She seemed to drain him until blackness flowed in and filled the almost empty pool of himself and then he was gone…

And then his eyes popped open again and a bright glare burned into them and a voice nagged and he winced.

“Rouse yourself from this pitiful torpor,” the voice was saying. “I have waited an hour or more for you. My guts are hollow. I was in a way to chase a rabbit with my sword when I bethought myself: yonder lies a tent and there must be victuals within.” Big Henry was looking around the silk and satin interior. “No doubt you have eaten and forgot to call your companion.”

Lohengrin just looked at him from under his black, thick eyebrows, his eyes like dull, burnt coals. He wondered who this clumsy-looking, pout-lipped oaf was.

Where is she? he wondered to himself. Do I sleep or wake?…

He suddenly sat up. The light from the parted flap was blinding. He held his temples under the matted, curly black bush of hair. Henry was still saying things. Lohengrin remembered who he was now.

I feel better… As if a spell had lifted. He stood up. Swayed slightly but that was all. A few blackish dizzy spots holed his vision but that was all. One, as it was fading and his sight cleared, gave a fleeting impression of a graceful female body topped by a skullface… and then there was just the sting of factual sunlight.

“Where is she?” he wondered.

“What?” Henry was still poking around the tent. “The woman.”

Henry liked that.

“Ahha. So this is what reduced you to ruins.”

Lohengrin grimaced, wryly, looking down at his naked body. He found his garments here and there and began putting them on.

“How long were you outside?” he wondered.

“Some little time. I saw a woman come out. And then I came in.”

Lohengrin looked at him while sitting there, tugging on his metal-studded, pointed, low boots. “She was a beauty, eh?” he said. Henry shrugged.

“She had red hair,” he said. “She went into the woods. I didn’t see her face.”

Lohengrin was staring again, as if rapt.

“It seemed a long time …” he murmured.

“It seemed forever to me,” said his companion. “When you’re waiting to sup, the sun stands still in the sky.” He was poking around now, lifting cushions and what not. Wrinkled his nose. “It reeks in here like a Sunday mass between the scented smoke and the old women stinking of flower-water. And you say you found no food?”

Lohengrin stood up to strap on his sword belt.

“I have to say I did not look, Henry.” He headed outside into the green and blue brightness. “Mayhap I fell into a sick dream when I went within. The close air …”

It seemed possible now, out in the blunt daylight. Anyway, that was better than being mad. He finished dressing in the hot sun. The tent was empty. There was no witch, no woman even. The whole business meant nothing and didn’t bear thinking about.

He squinted up into the trees, not looking back, even when his starving companion came out of the tent.

“We go forward,” he said, as if to Henry, “on the road to destiny.” He liked saying that. He’d heard a tale-teller tell it.

“The only road I seek,” said Henry, “is the road to roast meat.” As he braced and swung his leg up over his horse’s back, and Henry mounted beside him, Lohengrin thought:

It was no dream… it was not a dream at all…