Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (26 page)

MIMUJIN

He entered the center of the castle, close behind Morgana, and was pleased there was no fog inside the huge, practically deserted open area. He saw her just going in the main entrance to the keep, flanked by her attendant women.

If only he could have come on Parsival in this flat space, he considered. He’d have cut around the heavy horses and filled them with arrows. He had no intention of going inside, either. He’d wait, again. He knew how to wait and hate. Kept his bow across his lap with an arrow nocked. Watched the doorway.

At one point, three men robed more or less like priests came out and went by, barely glancing at him. The sun was burning through the hazy sky, now, and felt good on his face. A little later a fat man whose vast belly wobbled him forward, also in vestment-like garb, came puffing across the field, brushing his hand at the tiny flies that were everywhere. He peered at the little barbarian on his pony, shading his eyes with one fat hand, then went up the steps into the keep.

She’ll be soon out now, Mimujin thought.

LAYLA

That night they made camp in an open field. No food was cooked. No fire lit. Hard bread and harder cheese was passed around along with water jugs. They sat in a big circle several rows deep on stony ground broken up by clumps of thistles and spiky weeds. The sky was cloudy but rainless. Tiny, unseen, annoying bugs kept flicking into and around her ears. Candlelanterns had been set around the inside of the circle and, in the center, on a sharp edged rock, the round leader perched uncomfortably.

The plump girl was there again. Layla had a feeling she was supposed to keep an eye on her.

“No tents?” Layla commented. The girl was chipper.

“We want no comforts for this journey.”

“God help us if it rains.”

“I have a blanket to share with you, sister.”

“Sister. Are we nuns now or merely relatives?”

“We are in the family of the saved, praise His name,” the girl said, eagerly.

“What great fortune is ours.”

“Yes.” She leaned close. “Our shepherd has so spoken.”

“What fortunate sheep we are.”

Layla had another bite of bread because it was softer than a stone; something she couldn’t say about the cheese.

“Yes,” agreed the armorer’s daughter. “He is one with His Father.”

That got Layla’s full attention.

“You speak of the round fellow squatting like a frog on the rock before us?”

The girl was uneasy again. Layla did that to people.

“The same,” she replied, trying for soft patience.

“Meseems his father must be joints of mutton, pies of beef, sides of bacon, bread and jugs of mead.”

“What?”

“I believe him to be one with all those and more, to judge by his wholly, round body.”

The girl seized on an error - her own, incapable of Layla’s pun: “Yes, you see he is holy,” she said, pleased.

The dialogue was cut short by a troop of girls and women, all completely nude, stepping into the inner circle of candlelight and forming another circle around the round shepherd. They knelt and sat on their heels.

Sweet Mary, she thought, what is this?

“Ah,” said the girl beside her, “a teaching!” She was excited. Layla finished counting them: a dozen, even.

“Which way do I run?” she muttered.

“Hearken,” enjoined the girl. “A true teaching.” He spoke from his inner roundness:

“The Holiness has moved within me this hour,” he more or less intoned. For the first time, Layla was sure he’d been a priest or something close. In fact, though she didn’t know it, he’d been a monk. A very thin monk, then, who’d discovered “divers prophecies unknown to Mother Church,” in his words. He devoted nearly all his time to deciphering these texts, pricked in old script by savants in the Holy Land itself. The authors had believed (as he came to) that these were the secret words of John the Baptist preserved by Christ’s disciples. The ideas he absorbed and expressed eventually caused him to be expelled for heresy. He wandered around for a long time, preaching a new vision that, he explained, had been shown him by God direct and thus freed him from the limitations of the Church. As people followed him, he would remain alone in deep contemplation, eating the gifts of food he was brought, always demanding pots and pots of honey, insisting the angels supped with him and could consume only pure sweetness. Whatever the truth, he grew rounder and rounder and said it was the spirit filling him.

Much of this had been explained to Layla by the plump girl during the ride. She told it as if it were scripture.

“Why are they all naked?” she wanted to know.

“To show they are chosen and innocent,” was her interlocutor’s response.

Layla’s appetite kept gnawing at her and she tried the cheese again. Nearly cracked a tooth.

“Who,” she semi-quoted, “if his child asks for cheese would give him a stone?”

“What?” the girl responded distracted. “More cheese?”

Now the rotund visionary stood up on the angled rock, barefoot in his traditional loincloth.

“The first child born in the New World,” he declared, “must be of Holy conception.”

Is he now the Holy Ghost? she thought.

There was a murmur of assent around the assemblage. The plump girl seemed especially stirred. She rocked back and forth on her ample behind.

Layla noted the question-like inflection had gone. Maybe she considered, the sacred prospect before him had overridden it like Moses’ speech impediment when God spoke through him.

He sees his burning bush, she thought with a sneer.

“Only the holiness,” the bulbous prophet exclaimed, “only the holy will exist in the New World! No man unfilled by the Father’s spirit may know a woman, for his offspring shall be demons, subjects and soldiers of the Antichrist!” He paused.

Then: “In these times, the latter days of the earth, all children born outside the Holy Spirit, must be destroyed, instantly. The mothers bearing such must perish as well, for they have had the fiend’s spirit quick within them and are now subject to his evil!”

The crowd sighed with what seemed awe and anger.

They’re all infected by this, she thought.

“And he’s the only one full of whatever he’s full of,” said Layla.

“Yes, yes,” the girl agreed eagerly.

“Yes, yes?” repeated Layla.

“His sons will mate with his daughters,” she explained further, “and the world will be saved. We will all bear Holy children.”

“He plans to fuck all of you?” Layla said.

“Even you will be blessed, once you are purified.”

“What joy awaits me.”

“Yes, oh, yes.”

He hopped heavily down from the rock and began walking around the circle of nude women. Layla felt ill already seeing what was about to happen.

“Oh, Christ, now?” she said.

“Nay,” said her interlocutor, “you are not yet cleansed. You may not enter the circle.”

“What?!” sputtered Layla. “As if I’d be fucked by that ball of shit!”

She turned her back when he selected a girl.

Someday I’ll be out of madness, she thought. Someday I’ll simply be dead…

Then she remembered (not that she’d actually forgotten) she was pregnant. The idea was chilling. She looked into the annoying girl’s face, profile to her and reversed.

“What do they expect to do with children born from now on?” she asked.

“Are your ears stopped?” the voice suddenly abstractly angry. “They are not babies so born but demons from Hell.”

“Of course, that suits reason,” Layla said, wondering whether to run then or later.

“Look, look,” the girl said, pointing one hand and (to Layla’s disgust) thrusting the other under the ragged, sack skirt between her legs. “See how the Holy One mounts her!”

I think I’ll run now, she decided.

Stood up and started walking through the circle. She didn’t get far, which surprised her. Two men jumped up. They were both pale and skinny; one with a swollen jaw who kept spitting, wincing in pain.

“Ya go noplace,” he snarled. Spat.

“Aye,” said the other, “ya turn yer back on God’s word?”

Layla sighed, almost too weary to think anymore. “I need to piss,” she said.

“Well,” said swollen face, “ya wait.” Spat. “Until God’s business be done.”

“God’s business,” she said. “Still, I need to piss.”

“Piss on yerself, then,” said the first, laughing. “G’back and sit.”

She went back to her place, noting that her plump companion was not the only one touching him or herself. Obviously, the sin of Onan had been forgiven here.

She realized the round messenger of God was on his second Holy Vessel. She just shut her eyes and sat there this time.

I’ll sleep and escape tomorrow… in any case, I’ll begin then and be gone before these lunatics waken…

She sat there and stared between her feet, listening. The ball of spirit was now grunting as he beat himself into his new vessel, where she rested on hands and knees before him.

If this be vespers what goes on at Matins? she wondered.

MIMUJIN

The little killer had nearly given up waiting and was about to simply ride his horse up the stairs and into the main hall of the castle when Morgana and her ladies-in-waiting emerged. The witch came right to him, the others looked on. Stood looking up slightly at him on the low-backed pony.

“My little demon,” she said. “Why dost thou tarry here? More business with me?”

More business, aye, he said to himself. It will come…

“Why you set them loose, eh?”

“To do a useful thing.”

“Well they do quick,” he said, cold and furious. “Or no do at all.” She liked that. Went to his real point.

“Why don’t you kill me now?” she asked, amused. “You want to so much.”

“Urrr.”

“You long to do it like a lover longs for his love.”

“You say.” Her entourage came closer.

“I say do not kill them. Follow only - for the time.”

PARSIVAL

“Well,” said Lego, dismounting and standing at the edge of a sheer cliff on a gritty little trail that ran north and south along the edge, “here’s the sea.”

There it was, hundreds of feet below, rolling greyly out of fog – masses under a tin-colored sky so low it was like a ceiling where they stood.

“Lifts your spirits, does it?” Parsival said, leaning back in the saddle.

“What does your magical map say now?” The knight pointed north.

“That way,” he said.

“How far, my Lord?”

Parsival shrugged. “Until we find some Norsemen.”

They sat at the cliff edge, eating and drinking while the winds sucked and puffed at them. The summer air was almost cool there. “What bleakness,” said Lego. Nothing on the sea, nothing on the land, all grayness gathering, folding and unfolding. “How far away, do you think, is the closest Viking?”

Parsival shrugged, crushing hard cheese into a bread chunk to make a kind of crude compote. “What’s good about adventures like this,” he told his man, “is that they unfold themselves. All you need do is stay alive and keep on going.”

LOHENGRIN

He’d stopped so they both could go to the bushes for relief. Since there were no bushes nearby, they went to either end of the horse. Then the horse moved which caused mild embarrassment since he was now consumed by desire for her and kept resisting the urge to embrace and drag her to the earth.

She was still squatting in the vague, silvery light and he was fumbling his codpiece closed. He was torn now by thinking he should open it again and hope for the best.

“Why do you stare?” she demanded. “Have you never seen a woman pee?”

“Not one so fair,” he said. He felt thick-tongued and dull as stone.

“What?” she wondered. “You woo me whilst I make water?”

“Shit,” he said.

“My God, you are mad!”

“Nay, I but cursed.”

She adjusted her skirts and stood up. He moved closer, an impulse that he instantly regretted. She drew back half-a-step. “What will you now?” she asked.

“The world may end, as you say,” he told her. “Why not take some pleasure first?” That was better, he felt. “Here, in the night” he gestured, “under the sweet sky.” Even better.

“And, should the world end not, I grow a big belly. I think nay.” He eased a little closer. She didn’t move this time.

“That need not result,” he explained.

“But generally does.”

“There are ways to —”

“Stop, young knight, if knight you be. Even if I desired you, which I do not, I would not submit to your randy heat a minute after we meet like a whore in a stew.”

At least she was discussing it. Like catching a bird, you had to move soft and slow, he decided, so much as to seem, often, motionless. He’d had very little experience in subtle seduction; his natural quickness guided him.

“I spoke in haste,” he told her.

“And may repent at leisure.”

He bowed. “Because you are passing fair,” he said. She walked around him.

“Let us go on,” she suggested. “You may trouble me some other time.”

“I have your word on that?”

She shrugged and remounted. “How can I stop you?” she wondered.

“With your displeasure,” he found himself saying. The odd thing was he sort of meant it. He was now troubling himself, he realized.

She sat there and stared down at him. The moonshadows merely hinted at her face and gleamed softly in his jet eyes where he looked up at her with the appearance of a strange near-reverence. He hadn’t seen her clearly since they’d met and hadn’t thought of it; as if he delighted (also unlike him) in hints and pale, uncertain meltings of form.

“Mayhap you are a knight in fact,” she murmured. “I would not have thought you so courtois.”

“Nor I,” he said, still staring up at the mystery of her face.

It was suddenly important that she trust him. He felt good speaking with her. He felt good looking at her. He felt good being near her. He wanted to be near her continually. He wanted to trap her under him with his body so there would be nothing else on earth to distract her from him. Then he believed he understood:

It was that witch… it was that damned witch who has set a spell on me…that damned witch…