Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (3 page)

“Let the fallen lie,” came the answer. “We are not cut-throats.”

“Lohengrin,” he said to the boy, “if I could tell you …”

“If you could tell me,” his son said back. He noted what seemed tears in his father’s eyes. This was odd. “What?”

Parsival had dismounted and stooped beside the wounded man who looked up at him with gratitude and a wry smile that Parsival instantly liked.

“Arr,” he grunted. “Chivalry. I have lived to see it.”

“May you live to see more.”

“Something often talked about.” He winced and caught his breath. Parsival looked around. The soldiers had all re-gathered now at a little distance.

“An enemy is usually an accident,” said Parsival.

The fallen man shut his eyes and sighed from his wounds. “I ask a boon, chivalrous knight,” he whispered.

“Which?”

“Leave me a leather of water.”

“I’ll do better than that.” Parsival cocked his head, thoughtfully studying the man. “Friends should not be an accident.”

In the following years they had become fairly close. Lego had become Captain Lego and a loyal vassal. Although he was from the lower nobility (a younger son and so not heir to anything but his brother’s whims) and entitled to knighthood he refused to be knighted. He was like a modern Sergeant Major who rejected not only the responsibility but the very look of being an officer. Also, though not technically a peasant, his mother was not highborn.

“What have you from me, my boy,” he asked Lohengrin, “beyond power and rage?”

“A broken wit, father? A lying nature? A cruel indifference altogether?”

“You had better hope your lance will match your tongue,” Parsival said, “or else you will talk yourself into death before you have twice shaved.”

His son yawned and rubbed his eyes, looking up at where the far wall cut across the pink and blue sky. He was enjoying the clean morning air. His father’s reddened eyes disgusted him; and why was he half naked? He refused to deign to bring it up. He’d been out drinking and had made a fool of himself, obviously.

“I want to be knighted,” he said, seriously. “I mean to start shaving this morning.”

Lego guffawed.

“Ah,” he said, “How can you hurt those little hairs?”

“Are you then prepared to serve and study arms at your uncle’s?” Parsival wanted to know.

Lohengrin was still studying the sky. He was thinking about breakfast and hunting later. The peasants and serfs had been complaining about boars in the fields.

“I want to be knighted as you were,” he said. His eyes said something else. He was thinking it was time for him to leave that place and go and do the secret thing he’d planned since he was nine years old. The thing he never mentioned. He was sure it was now time… Then they’d see something. Then his father would see something.

Parsival shook his head and tossed his spear into a muddy rut, in disgust. The shaft quivered and rippled the puddle.

They now went into the castle together, into the cool dimness, the daybright still shimmering with each eyeblink for a few steps.

“You think you are part of a tragic tale, Lego?” he asked wryly. “Not yet, my Lord.”

“Not yet.”

“The… what-do-they-call?” Lego frowned his eyebrows. “Before the play …”

“Aye. The prologue.”

His shod steps echoed as they entered a large chamber; Parsival’s bare feet were virtually soundless on the cool flagging.

“I mean to make it right,” he said, “if I can.”

“If you can.”

“With my wife, as well.” He sniffed out a chuckle. “Her ladyship.”

Lego showed no reaction.

“I see,” he responded neutrally.

“I mean it.”

“I said nothing.”

“You said nothing. Yet you disapprove.”

“What right have I to such a position, my Lord?”

They stopped by the table that was still being set for breakfast with bowls of fruit, mugs of weak beer, trays of roasted eggs, toasted bread, strips of salt and smoked meat and fish plus trenchers of mash and wild honey.

The servants seemed unshaken by their master’s odd garb, which left most of his legs bare. Castle folk were used to seeing one another in various states of undress. Some of the girls who’d heard talk about Parsival and Sir Gaf’s wife, traded looks.

Parsival and Lego stood there and began eating. The semi-dressed knight was pondering a bowl of berries when his wife’s voice caught him and his stomach sort of winced.

“Ah,” said she, “you break your fast ere your guests have stirred. You and your precious lackey.”

“He’s a captain, not a lackey,” Parsival responded, not looking up, sighing, because what was the point? With women, facts were futile since she wanted him to feel something and the means to feeling didn’t matter. He knew that. “And you call them my guests?” He put a strawberry into his mouth, savoring the cool, almost over-ripe richness. “Well, has not Gaf had his host’s best?”

Lego didn’t quite smile.

“He likes your jibes,” she noted. “My husband was not once called fool, for small cause. He wants but cap and bells.”

She crossed the chamber. She’d changed into a deep rose, silken robe. He didn’t look directly at her. He was hoping no storm winds would stir.

I need to try… he thought. A new approach… or…

He drank from a cup of thick, spiced buttermilk.

“Maggots are guests too,” he couldn’t help but say, “feeding on what’s dead.”

Lego imperfectly stifled a guffaw

“Good fool,” Layla said. “Now sing a song for your food.”

Parsival felt his captain tense beside him.

“Were it your wife,” he commented, “you would, I imagine, kick her like a snapping cur.”

Lego shrugged. Said nothing. Looked nowhere.

“Kick me,” she sniffed, just standing there, hands lost in the deep, sunset-colored folds of silk. Daylight was fuzzy brightness at the huge, open main door.

Parsival set down the cup and looked at the floor before his long, pale bare feet. “I have, myself, let the wine sour,” he pointed out. “Whom might I flog if my head aches from drinking it?”

Here they come, he thought, glancing across the room where the visiting family was just coming to table: Sir Gaf, round, wheat-haired wife and dumpy, jowly, moist-faced mother. Gaf (Layla’s momentary lover) had a roll in his gait and ridiculous (Parsival thought) confidence. In a fight he’d soon be kissing the ground…

Not that he was normally jealous. He didn’t feel his honor was bound up in Layla’s chastity. Sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, too. This knight was nothing if not even-handed. But Gaf’s obvious misapprehension of his strength and skill was annoying. He felt a warrior ought to be realistic. And, too, there were rules of courtly love, written and unwritten: some held that husband and wife could never be true lovers since love was the heart’s wild freedom and might not be tamed by law.

The dark, short, stocky, slightly bowed knight swaggered up to the spread and nodded at Parsival with slight contempt. Lego bristled, at once.

“Some as are haughty,” Lego said, to no one in particular, “is like the mouse that scratched the cat.”

The blocky knight paid no heed but his mother, picking up a hard, green pear, reacted:

“We start our day with proverbs from a peasant? And view the bare behind of our host.”

“Ah, ha,” said the host’s wife. “he’s a very courtier, for style.”

The son took notice. Scratched under his beard with a thick thumb. “Is it not an insult to have us break-fast with a low-born dog?”

“Cats, mice, now dogs,” said his barelegged host, staring out the door into the day’s hot, rich brightness. “What about goats and cows? Is this a castle or a farmyard?” Looked back into the relative dimness of the room, more or less at the family, blinking at the purplish afterimage of the door. “A farmyard,” he said, judiciously and Lego guffawed, again.

Layla didn’t like that.

“My husband keeps low companions,” she announced, “to assure his own stature.”

Chunky Sir Gaf rubbed and scratched his curly beard, again. His mother crunched into the hard pear, then poked a short finger into her mouth and worked a loose tooth. There were stools, but no one but she was sitting. She put down the fruit and tried a slice of pork.

“Mayhap he is too deep in the habit and has become low, himself,” Gaf pronounced.

Parsival touched Lego to check his response, saying:

“Ah.” Took a bite of sweet, soft cheese. “Your wit soars like a clipped falcon. Or those wingless, trudging birds of legend.”

“Clipped?” put in the lean, long-faced captain. “I’d say feathers of lead, my Lord.”

“Silence, churl,” snarled Gaf, stepping over and snapping a backhand with his wide fist at the soldier’s face. Missed, as Lego slapped the corky arm aside.

The furious knight snatched up a knife from the table and hooked at Lego’s lined, insubordinate face.

“Hold,” said Parsival, effortlessly catching the thick wrist in mid-cut and tugging Gaf off-balance, driving his hand down so hard the blade broke off in the table, snapped tip quivering.

Gaf then, foolishly, drove his fist at his host’s fineboned features; met air as Parsival leaned away, then countered with a terrific kick to the knee that popped something and dropped the knight on his side, cursing fluently. His mother was howling, meat filling her mouth.

The wife looked away, embarrassed. Layla, incensed, flung a ripe peach at her husband and hit Lego in the chest.

“You bastard!” she cried. “Go away like you always do!”

“What did I wrong?”

“Some say this is the last year of the world,” she said. “If I am so misfortunate as to meet you in eternity, husband, there will be time to tell you.”

“You’ve hurt my boy,” the older woman almost howled, on her knees beside him, wiping pork fragments from her lips with the sleeve of her dress and holding him.

“Ought I have let him kill me? Boy?”

“There you stand,” Layla continued, “with your balls and dangler in the wind and your arse for all to see.”

Parsival raised both hands over his head, in frustration which made things much worse as it raised his shirt several inches more. The wheathaired, bubble-shaped wife looked back, now; her mother-in-law shook her fist; Gaf clutched the table in an effort to rise; Layla rolled her eyes.

“Are you now a pagan wrestler?” she wondered. “What a display.”

Lohengrin was just coming through the sunbright door in his black tights and red and white, loose shirt. Out of the corner of his eye Parsival saw him and shook his head. Nudged Lego.

“Retreat,” he said. “The enemy has the field.”

Sir Gaf, partway up, lost his grip on the smooth tabletop and fell blockily back on his mother who gushed out wind from his weight in a kind of belch and outcry. The round wife finally got up to assist. She stole another look at Parsival whose arms were back at his sides. Layla just stood there. A woman servant came back with a mug of something and took the scene in as one who’d seen the play before.

“Leave it and go,” Layla told her. “Bring back a sack to cover my husband. Or fool’s skins.”

“Trust me,” the bearded knight hissed, “I shall slice out your liver and roast it, you damned cuckold!”

“Enjoying breakfast?” wondered Lohengrin, sauntering up, grinning.

“Don’t involve yourself,” said his mother. Then to Gaf: “And you, have a care what you utter.”

“Sounds like a quarrel in a stew,” put in Lohengrin. He loved acrimony and, especially, to see his father under fire.

With help, Sir Gaf got up with his stout mother, but his leg buckled, again. His eyes bulged with anger. He leaned, heavily, on the table full of food.

“Stench and cuckold!” he went on. “Coward!”

Parsival, moving away towards the hall and stairs, started to raise his hands, again, then checked himself, grinning. Glanced back at Layla and shrugged.

“My Lord,” said Lego, “he hath called three times now. Should not his meat be served?”

“He has enough to digest,” his lord replied. The woman had come back holding a bright yellow robe. He shook his head at her. “Not my color,” he told her. “Anyway, I’ll leave as I came.”

“Just so you leave,” snapped Layla.

“Cuckold,” repeated Gaf.

“Mind your mouth, oaf,” Layla recommended. She suddenly had no notion of why she’d let him in her bed. A silly, self-righteous, selfish man.

I have no judgment, she thought. I let asses mount me…

“We must fly this den of murderers,” mother Gaf said. Lohengrin was delighted at the break in monotony.

“Father,” he called over to the retreating knight. “Why do you creep from the fray?’

“I’ll fray you like a worn sleeve, my son,” he snapped.

“Ha,” reacted his son.

Parsival spun and went for the boy with his open hand drawn back. The boy didn’t flinch, still enjoying himself.

“Now strike down your son,” Layla said, heading over. She always got between them, sooner or later.