Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (24 page)

“Not a warlock,” he said. “A witch.”

He now sat facing her: she was tall, magnificently beautiful and nude to her toes. This put him completely off-stride, yet again. He felt he was being played with. She stood at the border of the fog beside the heap of armor. As the silvery clouds shifted she seemed to continually blur and focus.

“I am kin to Ambrosius,” she said, “but stronger than he.”

“Merlinus?” he wondered. “Kin? Does he yet live?”

She seemed amused. His impression was that her face was not even cold, not even hostile, nor arrogant; just remote as if she were looking through him and all the mists and shadows at things invisible. He felt incidental, somehow.

“If you call his lingering presence in this world life,” she said, “then he lives. And should you find Sweet Arthur, you may find him too.”

“I know you,” he half-asked.

“Yes,” she said. “And I know your silly son, too. Follow the map and you’ll all come together, in the end. You’ll have to sail.” She smiled, faintly. “The Norse have been raiding again knowing the country to be weakened. Have a care.”

“After this I fear only women.”

“After this?” She chuckled. “It’s clearer now.”

He stood up. His back throbbed. He wasn’t angry. The past had come back again… but hadn’t he been trying to reprise his life?

Her face had such intense, concentrated energy it was almost repulsive in its stunning beauty; when the mist shifted and softened her outlines, she looked like any artist’s vision of an angelic goddess rising from the earth like a sweet vapor.

“Put on the gear,” she commanded, stepping back and, in effect, softly fading away.

“Are you his sister?” he suddenly asked. “You’re Morgana?” Morgan-la-Fay. The legendary witch. But, whoever she was, she was gone.

“Lego!” he yelled again, looking at the armor as if expecting it to melt away too.

Incredible, he said to himself. I’m supposed to put this on again after twenty years… The last time I won this gear… Now I lose and am given it… Somewhere this may make sense…

He shook his head and sighed. Moved his back muscles, testing: the pain was slowly stiffening into soreness. A good sign.

“Lego!”

MORGANA

Naked, long-stemmed Morgana walked straight back to the castle gate and entered through the portcullis beside the drawbridge.

There was no mist inside, just hazy, dull bright sky above the massive, high walls. The central keep stood thick and massively tall. The former center of Arthur’s power was virtually deserted. The inner fields where knights once jousted daily; where thousands of footsoldiers lived in barracks; where peasants held feasts and market. Now there was just flat, weedy turf.

There were no armed men; few men of any kind. As she reached the entrance to the great hall she was joined by several red-robed young women. No one spoke. There was a ritualistic feeling. No one offered her any clothing or took any particular notice.

Inside, lit by high slit embrasures and a massive chandelier, was the round table. All the seats were there. Dust was everywhere; cobwebs sprung from chains to table legs.

Morgana, nude and lithe, ran forward like a dancer and sprung, effortlessly, up onto the immense table and went to the center, stood there with upraised arms, as if in supplication. She was smiling, content. “O my angels,” she said, “we have cast our bread upon the waters and will see what floats back to us.”

MIMUJIN

He saw Lego and Parsival blur away into the massed fog that was concentrated around the castle. He was about half a mile behind. His hand throbbed and he could feel the missing finger. His fury throbbed with it in painful time and dark harmony.

His plan was to charge, in an open place, knowing he could outmaneuver their relatively clumsy mounts and close circles until he placed an arrow in unarmored Parsival; staying too distant to attack.

He was remembering, years ago, before his people had been trapped on the march, the terrible day of disaster, pinned against a swift river with rock walls all around. No room to ride, only to die as masses of European knights ground into the great host and chewed the army to pieces and drove the baggage train, the women and children, into the icy rapids. He relived the terror and pain. Remembered hurling himself, on foot, against a huge, mounted knight, bent on his own death as he killed. He’d been hit in the face (as he stabbed the horse between the armor joints), splitting his nose and knocking him unconscious until nightfall, lying alone among the heaped dead, listening to the sighing, sobbing, groaning dying, mind flowing in and out of darkness in the steady water roar.

So he went quietly into the deepening fog. He followed their track in the damp, long grass. Mimujin was a master tracker. He followed up to where they’d encountered Morgana. At first he didn’t recognize her voice. Hung back in the fog-shroud he now believed was too dense to be natural. Curbed his bloodlust, listened and learned. There would be no way to use the bow here, in any case. Close enough to hear, he still could not see them.

“I owe you death,” Parsival was just saying. “You are no knight, but a warlock.”

Morgana laughed again.

“I swear, before God and the Devil, I am no warlock”

The witch, Mimujin realized. Wanted to kill her too. Counted success unlikely. There was still the possibility she was really an ally of the Great King. A dilemma – he hated dilemmas.

Then motion, conflict, shouts; Parsival and the witch were suddenly out of hearing. He’d now have to circle to pick up the track.

The other man (Lego) was shouting, muffled by the fog. No other sounds. Then a horse thump-thumping to his left, another, a crash of metal in front of him… more shouts and then silence again. As if (he didn’t think) the place was haunted by troubled and warring spirits.

He eased his pony slowly ahead towards where he thought he’d last heard them. The trees thinned out which meant he was near the open area around the castle walls. There was still no visibility or sound other than the almost noiseless, unshod hooves of his mount.

He decided his best chance was to wait at the gate, reasoning that if she killed the stinking unbeliever, fine, then he’d see her when she came in; if the pig still lived, they might come together. He’d settle it, either way.

So he waited just where the gate was faintly visible; sat stone still, thin long moustaches drooping and dripping condensations; waited while the chopped-off pinky throbbed ghostly pain as if it were still on his hand…

A little while later she came back, tall and nude, this time, striding through the gate, a foggy blur.

Did they mate? He wondered. Is the dog dead or resting satisfied? Bah, I should have shot her now…

He was torn for a moment: which way? Then followed her. A few questions, then see who lived or died…

Book II: The Cult of the Map

LAYLA

“The hour is struck!?” the round “monk” had declared, sounding like a question and a croak and driven her back out through the entrance tunnel. She’d had enough to eat and drink and the sweet ale had put her into a general numbness; in fact, the whole thing almost made sense for awhile. She’d slept.

We’re off to join the blessed, she’d thought, crawling back through and up the narrow hole, smelling damp earth and cut roots. All 47 of them… or however many… She knew the Bible named a number. Some number. Probably more than 47.

As she clambered up into the early morning light it was as if no time had passed: the new day was the same as yesterday. Pale rose and gray. The round one popped out behind her.

Except this time there were about two dozen pilgrims, the men all wearing the same loincloth sort of outfit their round leader (it turned out) wore. The women and girls favored white, rough-cut linen robes. Most of the men were freshly cut and scarred as well on torso and legs by what were clearly whips.

“More mad flagellants,” she muttered.

With her luck, she felt, they’d be the same fanatics she’d escaped from at Sir Gaf’s camp. And this was a motley enough collection to qualify: a caravan of carts, ploughhorses, donkeys, and a broken down lot of peasants, about to set off to whatever feverish destination, following a cloud of rhetoric by day and a pillar of nonsense by night.

She sighed, watching an amazingly tall, stooped, scarecrow-skinny man with a chin like a doorstop, bring out, with a flourish, a ragged piece of parchment almost big enough (she thought) to wear as a robe which turned out to be a map. The leader immediately squatted down on his massive, ball-shaped hams and spread it out on the spiny grass.

She went closer.

This must be the famous map, she thought. Sighed. I’ll have to escape again…

Or maybe it didn’t matter. Maybe one place really was as good as another. Except her daughter was still at home. Her son – she winced and shook her head – he was nothing like his father, or her… or anybody else she knew.

Lohengrin… Lohengrin… you were born a stranger…

She stood over the head monk, or whatever-he-was. The sun was just over the horizon, eating up the morning grayness.

“I suppose I’m a prisoner,” she said.

The round man didn’t look up, absorbed in tracing a stubby finger across the huge parchment that seemed to have been drawn in brown ink or maybe dried blood.

“Sir?” she urged.

He twisted around to look up at her, small eyes lost in their squints and cheekfolds. “You are a prisoner,” he told her, “of truth?” She rolled her eyes and nodded.

It occurred to her, since this adventure was so patently ridiculous, she might very well cross her husband’s path before the end. At this point, she wasn’t even sure how she felt about that…

There was a pleasant-looking, blemished, slightly plump girl riding beside her on the back seat of the unevenly-balanced wagon. She kept making conversation. The girl turned out to be an armorer’s daughter – which put her in about the highest class under the nobility. Good weapon makers were given land and gold by grateful and competitive lords.

“How fortunate we are,” she said to Layla. Layla didn’t quite look at her.

“Don’t tell me,” she reacted, “the fat priest will bring us to salvation.”

“Yes, yes. He has the Holy Spirit.”

Layla was thinking how she’d slip away at dusk or after dark and just follow the road back. Something…

“I thought he just had the map,” she said.

“Yes,” said the enthusiast. “Yes.”

Layla sighed.

“You don’t think there’s something peculiar in following someone Christ-knows-where, just because he has some map?” She sighed. “Why does all he says sound like questions?”

“Ask and it shall be given you. Seek and –”

“Enough, silly girl!”

The girl looked hurt. “Have you no faith?” she wondered.

“In my wits, girl. In my wits.” She studied the banner again; but it still hung limp and told her nothing. “Look you, what will happen if we get wherever-it-is? Will we lie in rosy bowers and suck honey? Will youth never end? Will each of us gaze sweetly upon the other, forever? Will women bleed no more by the moon and lay small eggs at birth instead of laboring in agony? Will death be banished with old age and vile disease?” She pressed her hands over her eyes and shook her head. “You stupid, sad, sorry little goose.

If the armorer’s daughter had an answer, she chose to let it pass. She looked away. She looked up. She looked down. Said no word.

Meanwhile the leader on his sagging donkey fired off a peroration, the gist of which was that they were slightly ahead of the following doom and darkness that would crash behind them like a wave as they fled to a land that evil could not touch nor poison stain…

GAWAIN

Gawain was perpetually amazed by the way the runt-like John managed to gather people around him with raving speeches and strange promises. Here they were, hardly two weeks after they’d left Parsival standing naked in front of his castle, and he’d already added several hundred followers to their band with a couple dozen outright whores and camp-followers thrown in, during what John liked to later call his “triumph at Firth Town.”

They’d just taken a high noon break. John stood up on a rock beside the dark, dusty road that hooked and curved almost due east towards the water, and shouted out a flow of new promises to those who cared to listen.

Gawain had just dismounted and sat with his back to an oak tree, helmetless, his cowl parted just on the intact side of his face where he ate and drank. He often did his best to ignore his terrible injury. Usually he drank from about mid-afternoon. The drawback was he became mean about vespers, homicidal by eight at night, and passed out by ten, or so.

He sucked sour wine from a Spanish leather flask by tilting it up and squeezing the acrid, black-red stuff into his throat. The best part was feeling the deep warmth seem to spread from his belly through his whole body.

The more of these characters he gathers round, he thought, the slower we move… after a time we’ll just become a great town and stop altogether…

He carefully didn’t ask himself why he stayed with them. Wasn’t drunk enough to get serious, yet. Rested his head on the thick bark, lowered his lids and let his eye unfocus so that the raw and reeking armed mob milling in front of him on and off the roadway, eating, drinking, going to the bushes for relief and even (sometimes) sex; the little raging lunatic on the rock, all ran, fused and doubled together in a bright, shifting, misty blur. Felt it was a distinct improvement.

Began to reflexively ponder the Parsival problem again. At first he’d considered just staying near his castle, wait for him to go somewhere and track him. But as John had pointed out, unless he had the Grail on him or was going to it (which they couldn’t know), what would be the gain? He squirted another arc of wine into himself.

There are more things wrong with that notion, he thought, than lice in a serf’s crotch… Suppose he never came out at all? Suppose he went nowhere that ever mattered? Suppose…

“Bah,” he muttered. Worked his eye again and watched the blurs stir in a chaos of brightness and shadow. Listened to the steady sputter of voices and shriller cries of the blur above them on the rock, telling the general jumble of overlapping shapes that he, John of Bligh, the chief blur, had deciphered the secret message scrawled by the Last Apostle of Jesus Christ, Joseph of Arimathea, on the wall of the chapel at Glastonbury where (it was said) the Cup of the Christ had been secreted.

He John, scholar and blur, visionary, rebel, etc. etc. had teased out the true meaning of the message. Only he. Gawain was sick of the story. He’d considered cutting off the runt-priest’s head, a few times, in a rare spirit of public service. But, on the other hand, the little bastard might be right by accident and, in any case, the knight was on his own. He was, by choice, no one’s man anymore; but, not being rich or landed, that meant he had to find his own food and gold – well, pence, anyway. Which really meant, at that time, he was as much a bandit as any other out-of-service knight. He had renounced his claim on his family estate in favor of his younger brother when he went to serve Arthur, over two decades ago.

What none of them knew was that he was in love. Had been for a long, long time. Had spent the best days of his life in the close (if stolen) embraces of his lover, the wife of a Captain-at-Arms. She was not noble (in this land) but very exotic-looking – a converted infidel brought back as whore and servant by a knight who’d been later killed in a pointless quarrel over falcons. Her name was Shinqua.

The color of dark honey, she was full-lipped, supple and graceful. Her mother had trained her to advance herself in a world of selfish, lustful and indifferent men. Her father had been a famous Muslim knight. She was shrewd enough to understand it was better to marry a lesser man and tarry with his betters for gifts and favors. And she’d done that, very well, until she met Gawain. He’d been content with hopeless, poetic love affairs with noblewomen with a few snatched and half-satisfying encounters with the low-born. He was selfish, cynical and (though he never said so) disappointed with himself.

He’d been sent by Arthur to serve the lord of that manor to maintain good relations with a valued vassal. Plus it took care of the knight’s upkeep and kept the king informed. He’d taken to this policy with a number of his Round Table stalwarts.

Shinqua had stunned and changed him instantly. Her frank, knowing, steel-under-silk presence; the promise in her look and least movement took him like drugged wine. He put himself where they’d have to meet, talked to her in passing, hinted, teased, or tried to be serious on subjects and petty local events he cared nothing about. Once, when they’d been laughing together over some silly business or other, he’d impulsively taken her by the shoulders and aimed a kiss at her lips; she’d given her cheek instead and effortlessly stepped out of his arms. At that point he despaired of success and began analyzing her and talking to himself whenever he was alone and paid little attention to anyone, in general.

He hadn’t tried to approach her at the feast. Once, casually, he’d smiled and she’d nodded. They hadn’t danced or spoken. Naturally, he’d agonized over whether to join a dance she was in, strike up a conversation… and thus was generally miserable, pretty drunk, wandering around the two or so acres of carnival…

Intending to relieve himself he’d wandered behind an empty tent at the edge of the woods. The music, fires and revelers were a good way off. The full moon filled rich gleaming around its shadows. Reaching for himself he froze as she came around into the light as if exhaled by the warm, sweet night. Face-to-face, alone, and he felt even worse. He was stunned too, because she looked better than he’d remembered or imagined: the big, deep eyes, uptilted face, remote, somehow untouchable yet yielding expression plus she was wearing a long, loose robe suited to the sleeping chamber, slightly (and it affected his breathing) parted. He was flushed and tense, instantly. Was she there to meet a lover? Just leaving one?

“Ah,” he got out. “And what brings you back here?” She stood now, not too close to him.

“What brings you, my Lord?”

He was glad he hadn’t already undone the front of his silky trousers and removed his codpiece to urinate. And then again, he wished he had earlier, because the internal pressure from bowls of wine was building and stung now.

She seems annoyed… perhaps because I discovered her here…

The only music left came from a drummer and one shawm – a kind of reedy oboe that sounded like bagpipes, almost two acres away with the peasants.

“Just walking,” he lamely replied. “A lonely man under the moon.”

He looked up at the full, bright disk, as if that confirmed something.

“Lonely?” she wondered.

“Well, yes, in truth.”

He felt like his mouth was full of sand. He wanted to kneel, part the robe, and kiss her legs… and on from there…

“Yet you came never near me?”

“Near you?”

“So I just said, my Lord Gawain.”

“Well …”

“Yet not two weeks ago you took me in your arms.”

“Well, but you seemed …”

“I seemed?”

“Well… yes… not …”

He imagined the sand was dribbling out between his lips. Somehow she was closer and the scent of her was like a blow numbing his nose and overriding the burning pain and pressure in his suddenly stonehard penis.

“How seem I now?”

The uptilted face was under him and the robe was wide enough apart for all that mattered to be bared to his eyes and the feral moon.

“My God,” came out of him. “Oh, my God, Shinqua… Shinqua …” And he seized her, as if grasping smoke, and felt instead hot, sleek, soft, exquisite flesh… and went down with her, into the silver light and shadow and almost tender grasses, and far, far away, wishing he’d relieved himself because later he’d be in agony… and then even that was lost, flattened like the grasses by the weight and force of love and wildness that took him and moved him like the ragdoll on a puppet master’s stick…

He remembered. Half-smiled with his half a mouth at the memory of himself once they’d finally finished, wet with one another, mostly naked, shaking with slow, sighing gasps and painful breaths, drunk with one another – except, once he’d come, the pressure pain from his bladder was like a hot spike driven down the diminishing length of his organ and, against her startled and vaguely protesting arms, he’d rolled to his feet and plunged, stifflegged and doubled, around the curve of tent away from her, whispershouting back:

“A moment, my love… a moment.”

From then on they’d met constantly and their affair became notorious. Gawain’s present lord (a rich, strong Baron) embarrassed by the complaints from her husband and unwilling to lose his services in the event he attacked the deadly knight and was killed or maimed, demanded Gawain leave off the affair or leave his service. Meanwhile, the Baron asked him to deliver a fee owed to Arthur, which round-trip would take a month or so. Let the embers cool a little, was the idea.

By then, he’d been with her enough to consider a vacation no great matter, after his initial angry refusal. He agreed to go. She didn’t like it. It turned out she was pregnant. His argument that her marriage protected her got nowhere. All sound advice about preserving herself and being realistic, not running off with a poor, landless, famously amorous knight, was like mist in the wind of her feelings. Her husband’s rage and even pain hit her with the force of a puff of smoke. His threats meant nothing since she knew he couldn’t hurt her. And he wanted the baby which could have been his.

Gawain left secretly. The Baron kept her locked in the castle after her lover left. She got wild and refused to eat, saying she’d starve the unborn child unless she were freed. The Baron gave in to his Captain’s pleading and released her after a week or so, which, he declared, was far too soon. But the husband could not bear to see that beautiful, silky face rent with misery; the eyes savage with pain; long, tight-curled waves of black hair in filthy knots. She was a beauty that none but nobles normally would have come near, much less possessed; and he’d possessed her. And adored her. Every exotic inch.

Naturally, she’d almost immediately followed after Gawain. He’d expected that too and followed, with the idea that at least he could protect her, from a slight distance. The furious Baron, having lost his best fighter, his best Captain, and a vassal woman with child, cursed love and swore an oath that became famous in the land: “If any dare bring such a beauty again into my domain, I’ll have her nose cut off and ears slit like a sow!” And he meant it.

Gawain remembered the last time he’d actually seen her. Opened his eye, as if to drive the image away. Looked at the unblurred panorama of grubby fighters, sluts, and malnourished peasants with the Moses, John, perched on his low rock, holding forth as if the wind itself blew the words endlessly from his mouth.

Shut the lid again and risked the pain of the past.

Shinqua had taken her own horse, a slim, short, quick mare, and ridden towards Camelot. Gawain, halfway there, decided to go back to see if she were alright. It was then that he finally completely faced the fact that he loved her, hopelessly, intolerably. Except, the shattered remnants of the defeated invader, Clinschor the Magician’s troops, in broken, insane bands were still both fleeing and infesting the countryside. South of them, where the war had expressed its full force, dark smoke still was visible on the mountain horizon from the countless burning villages.

He was passing through a defile where the sharp rocks and massed brush made a wall on each side and the daylight was dimmed when he ran into half-a-dozen of Clinschor’s black knights coming the other way. He knew he should have reversed and outridden them. They were terrific fighters, in general and happy, it seemed, to die. Good as he was, there was no sense in taking on a group of them. And they always attacked; showed no mercy. Their only function was to destroy. Whether the cause was won or lost, they tried to kill everything that moved. Some believed they were empty suits of armor full of demonic flame and fell machinery.

But he had a sudden (and unfounded) fear that they’d come from destroying the manor and might have hurt her. He knew it was absurd, but he charged, wielding mace and chain so as to hit the horses too and stop them. He was known for his craft: they could just come at him two at a time and the first was just a shoulder ahead of the second in line, so he swung out to the right as far as the narrow space permitted and drew a sword stroke, checking his horse and leaning away so it just missed him. Like Parsival, Gawain often fought without a shield, depending on his timing and speed. Unlike these fighters, he wore light mail rather than heavy plate. Like Parsival he tended to go for the opponent’s hands, wrists, or knees rather than reaching in for head and body blows. They said Gawain had made an army of cripples in his time.

It worked again because he caught the black knight’s elbow with his counter stroke and heard him bellow. This let Gawain easily wedge his mount between the wall of rock and the injured man, shove sideways and tilt him over into the second knight, creating a jam so that none of them could quite reach him. His weapon had a flexible chain joined to a long, thick handle. Using the beautiful strategy that had made him famous (unlike Parsival who rarely made any plans going into a fight) he was now able to reach over the wounded man and strike the others, which he did, while the animals scraped and neighed and struggled to get free. Gawain hit very hard and very fast and knocked down all but two in a minute or so.