Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (28 page)

MIMUJIN

Morgana didn’t quite look at him, still smiling. One of the assisting women handed her a black metal staff which the little nomad assumed was dangerous. He checked the impulse to let fly a quick arrow. Soothed his pony’s neck with one hand.

“You follow both of them,” she said, in his language. “Maybe so,” he answered.

She carelessly pointed the staff at him. He frowned, expecting anything.

“Do not kill them, yet,” she said again. “Wait. Watch. Gather fighters at Channel sea.”

Sneered. “Mimujin not as you, witch,” he declared, “in many places at once.”

“You are not.”

“Follow, how gather people same time?” She smiled and spoke English:

“I’ll cut you in two parts and send each on its own errand.” The ladies-in-waiting were amused.

“Yuh, yuh,” responded Mimujin in his English. “Mimujin laugh.”

One of the women went over to him. His mind ran, idly, to rape. Briefly pictured riding off together and taking his pleasure before killing her. Wondered if Witch Morgana could read his thoughts. In any case, she clearly knew them.

“Alyal will ride with you,” she explained. To a second assistant: “Bring her a swift horse.” This girl left, half-running, across the courtyard. “Entrust her with the token you wear around your neck and she will direct your people to the sea while you pursue those you hate.”

The little man grunted. His fellows would do what they pleased with her. She was pale, sleek, reddish blond. He imagined her pubic hair. Wanted to see that.

“I go, then,” he said, in English.

“You go then,” she agreed. “Follow so far as you can, then wait for me.”

He shrugged. How could she make him wait? When would he know to wait?

“I go,” he said.

“You go,” she repeated.

MORGANA

She tapped the staff, watching the little warrior ride out through the castle gate ahead of her handmaiden.

Alyal will not fail me, she thought.

“Leave me,” she commanded, and went back inside.

On the second floor the high embrasures were flooded with daylight. Camelot was like a cathedral, in places, lined with narrow windows facing south.

She went to the King’s bedchamber. Paused at the massive bronze and oak door, stared as if reading a message on the planks where nothing but wear and time was written.

He still fears my brother will return while I am so afraid he will not. I seek him everywhere… Sweet Arthur, maybe he’s found the path to the mystery and now stands with Excalibur in one hand and the Grail in the other…

She pushed the door open and went into a shock of dimness: the windows were clogged with hangings. Scented candles burned everywhere, cloying, somehow humid. The huge, draped bed where the king had lain with the tragic Guinevere was now occupied by a pale, languorous, naked teenaged boy. His straw-colored hair was oiled and he wore a flower behind one ear. His eyes were restless, nervous. The bed was silken, perfumed and lush.

The time is coming, she thought, my sweet child and sacrifice… She looked at his genitalia: pale, small, dusted with light hair.

“How are you, my son?”

“Aunt, is my uncle coming?”

“Nay, Modred. You need not fear. Even were the King here, he could do you no hurt.”

“What of his knights?”

“His knights,” she said, smiling, raising the staff, “least of all, my son.”

“Nor Merlinus Magnus, neither. I have taken their measure. You will be king. Your child will rule the earth.”

“Mine?”

“Your child.”

“Am I to be married?”

“No. Yet you will be well wived.”

“Still, Uncle Arthur is a fearful man.”

“As was your father.”

The boy sat up, unselfconscious. Frowned. “Who was he?”

“A man much like the King,” she told him, “whose bed you lie in.”

“Is this Arthur’s bed?” Modred was startled. “Will he slay me if he finds me here?”

She soothed him with a kiss and touch.

“Hush, my sweet boy,” she murmured, “you have as much to fear from your own father as King Arthur.”

“Is he against me, too?”

“Fathers love their sons above all else.”

“Will I see him?”

“Mayhap. You are special. Royal and more than royal.” My nephew and son, she said to herself. I have set the last one I feared to where, if Arthur lives, he will join him… set the vicious barbarian on the trail… all birds in one net save the enfeebled Merlin and one other…

“All goes well, dear Modred,” she murmured, staring into the mist of the future.

And last of all, she went on to herself, the self-devouring Clinschor… I feel his stunted fury under the world where he kisses death on the lips and strains to claw his way back to the bright earth…

“So I need not fear?” her nude boy asked, sunk in the sweet, perfumed silks and pillows.

“This world must be heated, hammered and subtly drawn into a pleasing shape,” she said distantly, not really talking to him. “Else why live in it?”

His little barbarians will find him for me… their true father… with Excalibur in hand I’ll make a vassal of him, too…

GAWAIN

Late morning and Gawain was standing near the pier watching the army of broken-down fighters, peasants and serfs filing into the first ship. The air was soupy, misty and heavy with wet salt. The overcast was smooth and solid.

They were emptying wagonloads of supplies they’d accumulated on the long march from the West Coast. They’d recruited most of the survivors in this town who were nearly all seamen.

The idea was, once all the ships were full, they’d sail up the coast following the map North.

He was less convinced than ever. But what were his options? Stay in a doomed country, fighting to feed himself… wander back to spend a little more time as a bodyguard to a female innkeeper who was sweet to him; but for how long?

Still, it was his best option, because of the sweetness, and he might have taken it… except for Shinqua. She and a spiky fate had turned the once casually brutal knight into an embittered romantic, and a desperate dreamer.

There’s no chance there’s a Grail at the end of that red-haired whore’s map, he thought, or that I’ll be healed… without her it doesn’t matter anyway… since I’ll never have her again, I might as well die trying… call it entertainment…

He touched the hurt side of his face with the good hand, as if to check if it were still the same. He always did that. Felt the bone through the cowl.

How did I live? He wondered. Wished he hadn’t but wasn’t sure he meant it, because something in him never entirely despaired. Were God truly God, then mayhap it fits some purpose beyond my ken…

That was another thing: until the injury he thought no more about God than grammar.

As he strolled away from the waterfront, wrapped in his cowled robe, he indulged his favorite fantasy (the old Gawain drank, ate, fought, fucked and rarely even dreamt while asleep) which had him finding the Cup of Christ and baptizing himself with Holy Water and the Blood of the Lord so that the power of He who had raised the dead restored the flesh and bone of his ruined head and, then, riding like the wind to Shinqua and repossessing her. She wouldn’t have changed; it would be as if no time passed.

Tapped his wooden hand against his leg where the long chainmail, dress-like coat hung to his knees. Grunted to himself to break the spell of his own unwonted imagination.

Went back past where most of the followers had encamped. The area stank of sweat, bad meat, dead dogs, and the excremental stench the westerly breeze eased down from the shallow latrine pits they’d dug just beyond the last hut.

Following the road up onto the rise just beyond the village, he stopped and looked back: the ships in the bay were shadows in the mist; the one at the pier was a flat outline; the huts were soft-looking and even the ragged people were blurred into a smooth gentility.

Hoof beats were approaching on the flinty road surface. A single rider on a heavy horse, he noted.

Could be a knight, he thought, listening for tell-tale sounds of metal. He watched the big, heavy billows of gray softly flow across the strip of road. Sure enough, a gray armored figure on a lightly armored horse seemed to float up larger and larger into semi-solidity.

Automatically, Gawain loosed his sword in its scabbard. Then, as the curtain of fog drew thin, he saw an extra pair of arms and for a moment imagined a monster or demon approached as four-armed knights were rare, he assumed. Smiled, realizing they were riding double.

Fifty more feet and the bulky, solid riders reined up. He studied the helmetless, bushy-haired young man (looked familiar to him) who tilted his face down to speak:

“Are you one of the world’s saviors?” he asked. Jane slipped down from the saddle and stretched. “I know your face, young knight,” Gawain said.

“I don’t see yours,” Lohengrin responded from the saddle.

The girl Jane, was stretching her legs and looking over the village at the ships.

“You don’t want to,” Gawain told him.

“He’s one of the leaders,” she said. “They call him Gawain.” Lohengrin nodded.

“You know my father,” he said, getting down easily and touching the pommel of his sword. “You saw him recently. We may have to fight.”

Gawain grunted.

“You don’t want to fight me either,” he said. “Who is your father?”

“Sir Fool. Remember him?”

“Ah. I did see him. Is he well?”

The darkly fierce-faced son shrugged. “I know not and care less,” he said.

“There is bad blood between you and your father?” Jane asked.

“From his appearance,” mused Gawain, “there appears little blood between them.” She looked a question. “Which might explain some things,” Gawain considered.

“Is this Paradise, have we arrived?” Lohengrin wanted to know. “Are we now preserved from the end of the world?”

Gawain laughed. He liked this boy. Reminded him of himself past: precociously cynical, ready to kill at a blink.

“Did you two fuck on the way?” he asked. The girl’s expression told him. “That’s Paradise enough.”

“Is there anything to what she’s told me?” Lohengrin asked.

“About love?” Gawain wondered.

Scoffs. “No. About the great seer who will save us all.”

Gawain laughed. “That’s good, boy. The great seer is good.” He tapped his wooden hand against his mailed side again. “There’s a map a dry sort of woman brought to us and is supposed to show the way to God’s Chalice and some puissant greatness or other. A fair script for the Miracle Players.”

There’s new work for me, he thought. I’m ready for the traveling stage… I can reveal the two faces of Man to applauding morons….

“By sailing the sea?” Lohengrin was a little uneasy about that. He had no special love of water. He could just make out the blurry activities at the long wharf as the mists ebbed and filled.

Gawain shrugged.

“You may be my good luck charm, boy,” the older man said. “Son of the Grail-finder himself.”

Jane squeezed Lohengrin’s arm.

“I have to pee,” she said. “I’ll rejoin you.”

“Nay,” he said, “I’ll go with you.”

LOHENGRIN

He walked the horse more or less into the village near the undergrowth where they’d dug the latrines. Gawain ambled behind at a little distance.

Partway there was a smell of roasting meat. Smoke mixed with the fog. “That’s what we need,” he told her. Then a voice:

“Lohengrin, ay!”

Out of the smoke and fog, holding a leg of some meat or other, chewing, came Hal.

Lohengrin was happy to see him. Laughed. “Good Christ,” he said. “You’re eating.”

“I found my way here,” he said. “I met these pilgrims on the road. I thought you might be dead.” Took a bite and chewed words. “None I met knew the way home.”

“You joined these characters?”

“They seem to know their purpose,” Hal replied, offering the meat vaguely to Jane and Lohengrin. “Are you hungry?” He smiled at the girl.

“My name is Jane,” she informed him.

“I am Hal,” he said, awkwardly holding the meatbone extended.

“Hal the Hungry,” Lohengrin laughed. “Let’s go sit and have at it.” He watched him watching the girl. He kept offering the food which she finally took as they walked toward the fire. “Thank you, sir,” she said.

Lohengrin was amused. “Do you know how hard that was for him?”

“What?” she wondered.

“To give up food.” To Hal: “You must be love-struck.”

The solid, blond young Saxon blushed and muttered, uncomfortably:

“Nonsense, nonsense,” he said. “Be still, Lohengrin.”

The fire made a kind of tent out of the mist. They sat down on the sandy soil. Gawain watched from a few feet away, enjoying the exchange.

“He’s shy,” Lohengrin said, fishing a piece of roast meat from the flames with a charred stick. “But be not fooled: he’s a mad lover.”

“Be you still, I say,” Hal snapped.

Lohengrin was partly facing Gawain who was leaning on a tree, looking at Jane and thinking about Shinqua. Here I stand, he thought, in an ordinary place with ordinary people… these are not the days of the Bible in the Holy Land where prophets rubbed against saints in the marketplace… no miracles save that I refuse to murder myself despite all sensible encouragement… and here in a poisoned land these three children sit filled with heat and hope and the same desperate need that aches in me… they may drink from that sweet cup… while I cannot… and surely never will, despite the stupid hopes that bubble up in me…

Lohengrin saw him clench his fist and slam it into his thigh hard enough (it seemed) to break the bone through the chainmail. “Angry at your leg, Sir Gawain?” he called over.

“Ha, ha,” the knight said. “Think you so?”

The younger man stood up, chewing the meat on the stick, and stepped over to Gawain and said to him:

“I know you’re a man of sense.”

“You know this?”

Lohengrin shrugged and took another bite, bushy eyebrows rocking up and down slightly as he chewed and spoke through his food. Wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“Compared to these others I’ve been meeting, I have high hopes for you.”

The older man was amused.

“You have, just now, arrived in the land of the truly senseless,” he said. “Prepare thyself for wonders of undreamt idiocy.”

Lohengrin liked the idea, the same way he enjoyed acrimony. He was trying to get wider impressions.

“What have you seen yourself,” he asked, “of the spreading doom they talk about? I’ve been only in the North.”

Gawain cocked his eye at the young man who was trying to see what he looked like in the shadow of his hood. He couldn’t see much, just a hint of a disturbing, too sudden ending of the left side of his face.

“They say,” he said, “the South is very bad.” Gawain thought about it. “There were no armies in the field. The sun shone. Rain fell. Yet plague spreads and rivers fill with foulness. I’ve seen this… crops withering… stinking pits forming in clean fields …”

“All unnatural?”

Gawain shrugged. “Mayhap,” he replied. “At least no natural cause I can detect.”

“We were nearly taken in an ambush, some miles back.”

“Were there many?”

“I had a feeling there were more.”

“Soldiers? Brigands? Norse?”

“Looked like nasty little men from the Holy Land.”

Gawain grunted. “We’d better set a watch,” he said. “What know you of the Holy Land, boy?”

“Pictures in my father’s books. He reads like a monk when home. A rare event.”

“You ought respect him more,” said Gawain.

“You may do it for me, so please you.” Frowned. “Yet I understand him a little better. He wants to flee everything and when he cannot he reads himself away.”

“I understand I am as mad and silly as he ever was. You should respect him. I care little enough for the Church but some sayings are sound. Honor thy father and mother.”

Lohengrin sucked for marrow in the bone.

“Now both of them?” he responded. “One is burden.” Flipped the bone into the mist.

The young man took this in. Then glanced over at where Jane and Hal were in close conversation. Hal, he noted, held a chunk of bread in his hand and yet neglected to eat it.

Wonderful, he thought. A new appetite grows within him… one he’ll never satisfy…

“Meseems,” said Gawain, “your lady is beset. Her castle is besieged.”

Lohengrin shrugged. He absolutely didn’t care. Was amused. He believed he’d never really care about such things. He liked the pleasure, would burn for that, yes, but for the rest… there was no rest…

He studied others to judge their soft and hard places… even to seem more like them. A kind of actor. He loved his skill above all and next wanted to have his way when he wished. “She defends but weakly,” he commented. Like my unhappy mother…

Gawain studied him even more closely. “Nay, she is yours. I was like you, lad,” he said. “I cared but for profit… pleasure… and victories – had no more romance in me than a Moor’s monkey.”

“And now?” Gawain shrugged.

“Look at them,” he said, indicating the couple by the fire. “He longs for her.”

Lohengrin shrugged. “Save I entertain myself by dropping trees across his path,” he said, “he’ll soon find satisfaction, I think.” Narrowed his eyes. “I care not a fart for fame. Profit to me is strength to bid others act as I ask. Above all else I love victory.”

The older man put his good right hand on the younger’s shoulder. Turned him face-to-face.

“Feel you this living hand?” he asked.

“I must.” Lohengrin shrugged again. “As you grip me with it.”

“Life longs for life. And he longs for her. Do you see?”

The young man was uncomfortable. Was Gawain cracked? “I suppose so. He longs for her, as you say.”

Up came the wooden hand. The hard, spiky, flexless fingers digging into the bare flesh just below his neck.

“Which touch do you prefer, son of Parsival?”

Lohengrin took both wrists in his hands as if to consider the question: felt the big bone and the yield of flesh and sinew; the smooth, round, hard wood.

“What is your sense, Sir?” he asked.

“I long as he longs. If you never know this, you will never taste life. Do what you will.”

“I must long? Should I force myself?”

He kept his grip on the two forearms. The long, thick fingers closed tighter around his shoulder blade and he winced.

“Be not like my wooden hand, boy,” the knight almost snarled.

“I see,” Lohengrin said, resisting the vise-like pain.

Gawain snorted, furious. “You see no better than the eye in my ass,” he said. He jerked his hands away.

“What do —”

But Gawain cut him off:

“I am forever sliced away from all I long for, boy. Like an old man cut off by age alone from a love that seizes him too late and can never be.” He raised his wooden hand to his face and hooked the carved fingers under the cowl. “A hopeless longing. Out of season. Pointless.” His breath hissed in and out. “Be not like my wooden hand.”

“Yes,” said Lohengrin, wincing under the grip. “I see.”

Gawain released him and at the same moment pulled back the cowl and showed his face.

“No,” he said. “Now you see.”

He did. He blinked both eyes a couple of times and then Gawain covered his face again. Lohengrin knew better than to even comment on the ruined features.

“Gawain, I cannot make myself feel what I do not.” He was annoyed with himself for trying to explain or apologize.

“No, you cannot,” the famous knight said. “But it will come to you too late.”

The young man kept seeing the afterimage of that sliced head: the exposed teeth, the halved left eye, the chipped jaw, the missing ear and planed temple; the almost beautiful right side.

“So,” Lohengrin said, “you long to be healed.”

Gawain shook his head. “I cannot be healed.”

Lohengrin looked back at Hal and Jane by the fire. Jane was looking over at him and Gawain; really at him. Hal was watching her, trying to keep her attention, jealous of her focus – only Gawain read it.

“What then?” Lohengrin wondered. Gawain was already walking away from them, heading back towards the village. “What do you long for, Sir Gawain?”

The famous knight made no reply. Walked into the dense sea mist. Melted away.

In this place, he considered, a few steps away all are ghosts… like the Greek knight who went to the land of the dead to question shadows and got mist for reply…

The young man just stood there, staring at the couple by the fire. Jane was smiling at him and saying something. Hal looked alert and uncomfortable and was still not eating.

What is it they feel? he asked himself, probing, thinking about Gawain too. He reviewed things he had felt: helplessly aching with need, as when the woman in the tent had him in thrall; walking around with an uncontrollable erection under his codpiece, looking for a peasant girl or maybe just a shady bush to relieve himself behind; thinking about a woman he really wished he could fuck… That must be longing… Unless they meant the Chivalry and pure love people talked about, the worship of women. Some women.

He tried to imagine what that love was about: he loved his mother, he decided, because she was nice to him; his father frustrated and infuriated him so he certainly didn’t love him and, anyway, he wasn’t a woman.

Frowning and annoyed, he went back to the fire and sat down next to Jane, facing his friend.

“What’s wrong?” she asked.

He shook his head. Looked at Hal. “Do you long for her?” he wanted to know.

The stocky Saxon went bright red under his faded, wheat-colored hair. “Lohengrin, you great ass!”

“I mean,” the hook-nosed youth explained, “is there something you want more than fucking her?”

“What? What?”

Jane just sat there, misreading his meaning. “Is there some feeling you —”

He was cut off as Hal dove across the fire, flailing his ham-sized fists as Lohengrin jerked back, taking a glancing blow that rocked the landscape and rolled him sidewise into Jane who was trying to embrace and protect him, crying out:

“Oh, my love, my love, you need not be jealous!” Holding him now so that Hal couldn’t strike again. They were all tangled together.

Lohengrin looked up past her shoulder, feeling his cheek swell, dark eyes amused, saying:

“You long for blood, which I can understand.”

Began laughing as Hal now struggled (in embarrassed outrage) to extricate himself from the unintended embrace they now all shared. Lohengrin gripped him by the upper arms, keeping him pressed against the girl who was trying to push free. Hal thrashing from side to side, the three of them rolling over and over away from the fire across the gritty, weedy sand while Lohengrin, trying to stay on top and pin Hal, laughing and saying, gasping:

“I long… for you both… I have you… love is… triumphant …”

“Diseased madman!” cried Hal. “Unnatural …”

Lohengrin lost his position and went over again, saying laughing, as Hal finally broke free:

“Your wish is granted… why do you flee?” And Jane:

“Are you hurt, my love? Are you hurt?”

He just lay there now, on his back, Jane in his arms, watching Hal melting away into the mists, not-quite-running. She looked at the lump on his face and kissed it, gently.

“Now,” he said, “I have experienced love-longing. At least, I’ve borne witness to it.”

And she, tenderly caressing his bruise: “My poor love. Oh, my poor love.”