Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (19 page)

PARSIVAL

The cart suddenly stopped. The driver, whom they could not see, got down silently and walked away. They could hear his padding, animal-like footfalls.

“Do we wait here for the cook and butcher?” Lego wondered, twisting around, staring into the pitch darkness back up the tunnel.

“We’re leaving before the feast,” Parsival told him. “I know what I have to do now.”

“Yes?”

“Go far away and never come back.”

My life is very stupid, he thought. My life makes completely no sense…

He was disgusted, discouraged, bored and empty. He was also much stronger than he appeared. He was stronger than anyone suspected. His power came into him like water; flowed into his arms, wrists, hands, fingertips.

The tight, waxy cords that had been binding him stretched, then gave. He sucked air into his lungs like a bellows. Grunted, strained until his eyes swam with flashing lights of dissolution. Blood welled from his wrists. He kicked his legs, puffed… then the bonds burst with a crack.

He raised his agonized hands in front of him, gasping. Lego was amazed.

“We’re leaving this… charming… pit,” Parsival said with broken breath. He freed his legs and then Lego. They went on up into the driver’s seat. Lego took the reins and turned the cart around in the tunnel. Their eyes had adjusted and they could dimly make out the smooth floor and walls.

“My Lord, why did they just leave us here?” He thought for a moment, listening carefully for anything. “Unless it were to fetch the greens for soup.”

The knight wasn’t really paying attention. “Soup?”

He chucked the team back up the slope the way they’d just come. “Sir Parsival and Captain Lego soup,” was the response.

“Soup,” Parsival repeated. Grinned, grim and alert. He felt something. Clenched and unclenched his hands. He had no weapons. Not this time, he vowed. Not again.

The cart creaked up the smooth stones, hooves scraping and clicking. Parsival rubbed his sore wrists where the ropes had cut into him.

“They’ll meet us at the gate,” he said. “I’m used to that.”

Next the lustrous starfield was partly blotted and they could hear the grate and scrape of feet and rattle and creak of wheels.

“I might have known,” said Lego, “there must be a hundred of them ahead.”

“We’ll have to delve deeper into this rat warren,” he decided.

They got out of the wagon and started back down into the deeper darkness. As they went quickly, they discovered feeble torches set well apart casting wan flutters of light and showing only patches of shadowy stone.

He kept swinging his arms. The numbness was just a tingling now. “I feel like a sheep,” Lego said, “being driven from the pen to the knife.”

Parsival was sure they couldn’t have planned this. They could not have expected him to break his bonds. They were probably supposed to be picked up by these coming behind.

Except there wasn’t a turning or a break. The tunnel stayed wide, straight and downtilted. The sounds behind them kept pace at about a fast walk.

And then they hit a wall of smell. Both men winced. “Corruption,” Lego gagged. “Is this the bottom of a toilet hole?”

“Save your breath for vomiting,” Parsival suggested.

He pressed his sleeve across his nose. Excrement, he verified, was only part of the stink; the rest was decaying dead.

There was a sudden turn and then there was so much torchlight it seemed blinding for a moment.

Enough darkness makes a candle like the sun, Parsival thought.

The first impression suggested pictures in churches depicting the horrors of Hell; heaps of dead and dying; demons with weapons overseeing; lost souls tottering in flame and poisonous shadows.

He dragged Lego down behind a pile of broken timbers just to the side of the tunnel.

A good spot to wait and watch.

As their eyes adjusted, they could tell what was going on in the big pit-like chamber – which was as bad as Parsival’s first impression.

“These people,” Lego muttered, “what are they?”

Each thing they do, Parsival thought, is worse than the last…

At the bottom of a kind of bowl hollowed out from the living stone maybe three hundred feet across filled with heaps of obviously dead bodies and tottering, clearly starved or ill men and women loading carts with corpses.

They’re all dying, the knight said to himself.

The little killers goaded them on. Looking more closely, they could see that even the not-yet-dead were being lifted into the wagons. The stink was palpable as miasmic fog.

The group that had been behind them arrived: the empty wagons and a dozen or so soldiers. “I want to squash these little turds,” Lego ruminated. Gagged again and spat.

Parsival noted how the torchlight fluttered and smoked constantly which meant this was no cul-de-sac. He squinted, trying to focus past the hellish flapping of flamelight and shadow.

Then he saw a fully-loaded wagon being driven into an opening on the other side that was an obvious continuation of the tunnel they’d descended.

“As I said, Captain Lego, we are getting out of here.” Lego rubbed his nose and eyes.

“How? By dying?”

“More or less,” the knight agreed. Lego got it at once.

“My Lord,” he hissed, “those people have plague.” Parsival nodded.

“When I was a boy,” he told him, “I stacked heaps of them.” He shrugged.

“There’s been no outbreak in twenty years. Where do these come from?”

And then the question was answered because another wagon came in with men, women and children bound as the two of them had been. The cart was tilted up and they were dumped into the heaps of dead and dying.

“That was to be our fate,” Parsival said. And then it hit him: he was nothing special to them. Just fodder for a grotesque and stupid death. He realized he’d assumed he was somehow the center of some complex plot to use him to find the Grail or something…

They were just going to kill me like a chicken for supper… “I don’t get in a cart full of poisonous dead,” Lego insisted. “That’s not the plan, exactly.”

“Eh?”

The tall knight gripped his arm and the captain winced.

“They sold me too cheap,” Parsival said. “I want to dissolve into perfect love.” He shut his eyes, flashing back to the moment again, the blunt blaze of total light that had, for a moment, in the perfect peace of morning under the walls of his castle, dissolved him into (he believed) mere, luminous air. “But I’ll have to postpone it.” He felt something, not fury, but rather a sense of power and justice like a wave heaving up somewhere deep within himself. He felt it lift him. He felt indestructible. “Follow me,” he said.

They charged around the woodpile. They’d each, automatically, snatched up a club. Parsival’s was about five feet long and thick as a young tree. He was going forward, exploding with the wild joy of combat he hadn’t felt since he fought the tyrant magician Clinschor’s black-armored knights some twenty years before.

“My Lord,” cried Lego, “there must be twenty of them!”

“Feel no pity,” Parsival snarled.

I’ve no woman on my lap, this time, he thought.

The small scimitar-wielding fighters turned and watched the two ragged, filthy wildmen charging them brandishing poles. No wonder they paused and wondered – which was a mistake because Parsival was very, very fast on foot (from a childhood spent chasing game in the woods) and closed on the first five or so guards with nearly the speed of a horse.

They slashed and stabbed at him. The impression Lego had (lagging some twenty yards behind) was that they stumbled and staggered trying to cut down a blurry shadow and then began falling as if struck by a thunderbolt.

He’d never seen his lord at full fury before. His attack was like the beating of supernatural wings whose invisible winds sent his opponents flying and falling. As he drew closer he could hear flesh burst and bones shatter.

As he reached that spot, his lord had already ploughed into the next group of soldiers who were, noticeably, less quick to engage him. The knight was working his way around the rim of the bowl and obviously meant to fight them all.

Just then two new infidels came up from behind to attack him and he had all he could do to beat them back.

Meanwhile Parsival had smashed another half dozen down like stuffed dummies on a training field. Lego ran after him, jumping over the fallen, some writhing and groaning, others flat and still.

He stooped and armed himself with a scimitar and tossed the stick aside. Parsival, he noted, was using his long club like a yeoman’s staff, holding it in the center and swirling it in all directions whenever he closed on a new group of opponents.

Lego really had no one to fight as he followed in his lord’s wake. They’d reached the far side of the rim where the arch opened into the other tunnel where the loaded carts had been exiting.

Then one soldier who hadn’t been really hurt suddenly popped up and tried to slice him down the back. He pulled aside and cut back, taking a chunk out of the man’s side, which was enough to put him back down again.

He came up to Parsival who was now alone in the archway standing by a wagon whose driver he’d just laid out.

Others were coming from the far side of the hollow full of horror. In the blurry confusion Lego had the impression the warriors in their spiked helmets were condensing out of fire and shadow.

“Come on,” Parsival ordered.

Lego shook his head to clear it, and followed, breathing hard, feet sore and getting numb from pounding over the stone flooring.

“Yes,” he gasped.

They mounted the wagon and headed into another downslope, steeper than before. They could hear the hoof clacks on the cart ahead of them.

We’re at the bottom of the toilet hole, Parsival said to himself.

Then they were suddenly outside in the middle of the night. No moon, just brilliant masses of stars and (Parsival recognized) the pale, greenish, flickering planet Saturn nearly straight overhead.

They were on a road that leveled off and twisted into the bulging shadows of dense forest.

“Let us follow the wagons,” the knight said. “Do we care?”

“Didn’t you ever wonder,” Parsival said, smiling grimly, breathing steadily and slow from his exertions, “where the dead go?”

MIMUJIN

Back up in the plague chamber, chaos swirled like a wind as Mimujin came crashing in on his panting pony, skidding to a halt, taking in the terrible scene: captives fleeing, some being cut down by what remained of the guard; dead and wounded scattered around the central pit full of plague bodies and sufferers.

He was so angry he was weeping. “Fools!” he cried.

At first he assumed Parsival was slain and that he would have to answer to the witch. Then, as he slowly rode around the stinking pit (she had showed them this cave complex, in the first place) he realized the truth. He felt sick, now, and a little afraid.

This dog must be dropped by arrows alone, he thought. Father of my people, am I? he mocked himself. Headed into the downward tunnel, without hesitation. He knew he’d have to slay that pale demon himself. Nothing less would answer. So many of his men fallen. There was no excuse and he made none. Witch or no witch, he thought. We will succeed or perish without this terrible white devil… he’ll serve us only destruction… and could not this be that pale, plotting red-haired bitch jackal’s purpose too?…

His virtually pathological distrust of other people was now red and raw. Only blood could soothe his icy fury now: his own or another’s made little difference, just so there would be blood.

A warrior holding a shattered arm, sweating in silent pain, stood by the tunnel entrance. Mimujin paused by him:

“The white dog went this way?” he asked.

“Yes, lord Mimujin,” the man responded, eyes rolling back in agony. Others had come. One or two unhurt men who’d reached the fray too late.

“See what was done,” one man moaned, beating his chest. “So many slain.”

They saw their chief was weeping and were amazed. His eyes were terrifying.

“Bring me a coal of fire,” he commanded, as more men arrived, retaking the captives. He looked around the smoky, bloody chamber.

“No more of this. No more do we work for the treacherous witch!” he commanded. “Tell Tarkas and Arunijen, my dearest captain, no more playing with the dead. Move through this cursed land and slay and burn until we find the witch and her map. Make their deaths terrible until we are shown the way to the Great king or all die here!”

The men around him shrieked approval, clashed their weapons.

One came up holding a coal in a blackened tongs. “Here is the fire, my Lord”

“Blow on it,” the leader said. “Tell them I bear the guilt alone. Tell them I go to slay the filth who did this.” He jerked up his left hand, some of the men already yelling: “No, my Lord! No!” and sliced off most of the pinky with his blade. Blood spattered. He took the tongs and jammed the coal into the wound. He snarled and sweated and didn’t move. The men began to chant his name. He pointed at the captives. “Eat their hearts and pray for victory. I apologize to the people.”

And then, half-fainting from the pain, he rode into the tunnel where Lego and Parsival had escaped.