Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (42 page)

PARSIVAL

The tunnel was wider and steadily descended. Neither of them liked that.

“This wasn’t on the map,” Parsival said.

“What matter?” asked Arthur, riding abreast of him.

They were moving at a walk, now. The ringing hooves and clashing of armor diminished.

“This may be a trap,” suggested Lego. “It has to be,” Parsival said.

They probed on through the dimness, down and down…

“I don’t understand what’s happened to us,” Lego murmured.

“Maybe this tale will be told ages hence,” his master returned, obliquely.

“What care I for that?” responded Lego. “I think of home and no more sinking boats and mad killers, plague, witchcraft and poisoning of wells.”

“I warned you, at the first, to go straight back and follow me not.”

“I grant you did.”

It was starting to smell dank and foul as an open sewer, rank decay, sweet and nauseating. Parsival sensed, by the echoes, that they were in a large, cavern-like space. There were sounds of dripping water.

“Hold,” he said. Because there were rumbling and grinding noises as if massive stone were breaking loose and vastly shifting, as if the mountain above them (that they didn’t know they were under) was moving.

He suspected all of this was like an afterglow from the vision where something long past and something in the future enfolded together… where what you might dream or say might have the same force as what you did…

We’re like fish, he thought, as the rocks screamed and cracked around them, seeing the sky of heaven only through the water… Or, now and then, in a brief leap into a breathless world of brilliant light and freedom where no fish could long live…

So he wasn’t quite surprised when the huge, cavern-like space was suddenly glaring green and he saw Modred up on a kind of balcony looking down as a twelve foot tall and massive knight in armor came out through and opening just formed by the crashing stones.

The hundred with Arthur charged at once. The giant (eyes twin pits) flailed a mace and three or four, horses and all, flew aside, shattered in a scream of metal and thunk of burst flesh. One actually slammed against the far wall like a crumpled piece of tin.

The machine of doom was wading through the mounted men whose swords and maces chipped, bounced, scraped and sparked futilely. It was making for the king who was looking up at his half-son.

“Where is your stinking mother, boy?” he yelled. “Know you not, Father?” jeered Modred.

The stone warrior was no quicker than a man, Parsival noted. So it could be dodged. He, Arthur, and Lego backed their horses away.

“The way back into the tunnel is surely sealed,” he said, judging the distance to the ledge where Modred stood. “The thing seeks you, your Majesty.”

Two more knights had just been slammed and shattered; a horse decapitated as the grinding, clumping fighting machine crashed closer, body worked in filigreed stone armor. One hand reached for the king.

He and Parsival spurred past and headed for the ledged wall. The thing slammed through more knights and followed. About half were down by the time it reached them again.

“Let it come close,” said Parsival over the clash and din, “and give me your half of Excalibur.”

Arthur hesitated then obliged and the Red Knight stuck it under his sword belt. Now (as he expected) the giant went for him.

A voice spoke through the stone or in the stone.

“You belong to the king of ice and death.” Arthur’s remaining men kept crowding in but the thing didn’t move.

“Stay back,” Arthur shouted. “Avoid combat!”

“Resist not,” the hollow, flat voice commanded.

Parsival (nimble as any in a steel suit) lunged up and stood in his saddle as the stone hand clawed to crush him.

Except he ran up the arm to the huge shoulders and put one mailed foot on the head jumped up to the ledge beside Modred.

We each have half, he thought.

Modred struck at once and, at the same time, the stone knight (almost at their level) slammed a blow at Parsival. Most would have fallen to one stroke or the other. When backed to the wall, when there was no hope, he always seemed to move as if he’d rehearsed with his enemy; so in that narrow space he danced forward into the Modred’s cut so that the giant’s mace just scraped his back armor, twisting so the boy’s sword just scraped his left side and then he kicked him between the legs so hard with his mailed foot that the iron codpiece crumpled.

Modred screamed and doubled up. Parsival stooped under the following mace-blow (that actually shattered the rock ledge) and took the second scabbard (which had showed where the piece was) from the fallen boy (now puking and gasping) and moved along the ledge. The mace followed, spraying rock chips so hard they pinged and dented his red armor. He thrust the hilt he had into the scabbard with the other half of Excalibur. He had no idea what might happen. He wasn’t thinking, just flowing with the pounding at his heels.

And then he was outside the walls of his castle again, nude, the spear to his throat watching the bird soar above the treetops, catching the first sunbeams and seeming to ride the light and Parsival felt the strange power and beauty and vastness… he felt the strange energy as the blade fused itself in the sheath and he drew a whole sword, Arthur, down below, shouting:

“Give it to me!”

“Nay, Sire,” Parsival called back, “you must not destroy this thing, I think.”

Because he was sure it was like the other time when his own armor attacked him outside Camelot.

Now it’s my turn, he said to himself. What came out of stone can penetrate again…

As the mace swept down, he simply jumped onto the massive shoulders, feet skidding, as he was tossed off the back he timed and struck a blow with Excalibur. The blade flamed, sparked and took the head cleanly off. It hit with a crash and rolled about thirty feet under the knights’ horses where they were keeping their distance. As he suspected the thing was hollow. The head was empty.

He crashed onto his back, then rolled to his feet. As he expected, it raised the mace again.

“Useless,” he said. “I will kill you, my lady witch. You have no protection, now.”

Because he realized if she’d had her own powers down here why would she bother with this stone giant armor that was obviously mechanical?

He rested the bladetip at the center of the carven breastplate and saw the downblow freeze. The response seemed a voice in his mind, something deep, dark from the stone foundations of the earth itself. An echo, potent and terrible that was not just Morgana herself; You cannot escape. The world will close down upon you.

He was about to thrust when Arthur eased his mount beside him, facing the unmoving, headless seeming statue. He clamped his hand over Parsival’s.

“This is my steel, sir,” he said. Lego was close.

“Why does it hold its stroke?” he wondered, as Arthur took Excalibur.

“Because she’s alone in it, now,” the Red Knight answered. “Your sister, My Lord.”

I hope none of this is happening, he thought, except in the dreaming or whatever it is… except believing in the dreaming makes you careless of the waking…

“I’ll not slay her, yet,” said the king, striking hard but holding the blow so that the stone sheath fell away like an eggshell and, as if she’d just hatched, Morgana stood there, red-haired, graceful, nude and contemplative.

Really so beautiful, Parsival thought. “Dogs,” she said, “now darkness falls!”

“Stupid sister,” said Arthur.

“Dull king,” she responded. “Sagging prong. The true ruler of all creatures awaits you. All maps lead to him.”

Her son had crawled to the edge of the ledge, face pale and squinty.

“Aunt,” he gasped, “help me.”

She leaped the twelve feet, caught the ledge and pulled herself effortlessly up. She was far enough from the isle to have some strength again.

The chamber was rumbling as rock shifted. Parsival was aware of a flickering effect which he sensed was the dreaming and waking worlds overlapping, trying to either fuse or pull apart and seeming to spin around him like a whirlwind.

“He is hungry!” she yelled, furious, seething. “Go to dinner in the dark.”

The spinning blurred around them and the Red Knight sensed it was another chance for him to act, to change, to understand… as when he saw the Grail, he was supposed to do something with the power revealed here…

What, what? His mind asked. Help me, sweet heaven… help…

Maybe that was it, too: he’d never really asked before. Not understanding how small and helpless he actually was like the king who attacked the sea with his sword and was knocked flat and tumbled for his pains…

And the floor opened and the walls and roof crashed down and he perceived the pit was, actually, a vast mouth with a tongue of fire, rimmed with fangs.

He fell without a real sense of motion… floating… down… into Hell’s mouth…

GAWAIN

The moon seemed to lift the dawn behind it. Now growing he understood it was now slightly less than full. Every moment it was slightly more then, full, it would almost imperceptibly begin to be less. Because they lay there, legs overlapping, side-by-side, on the crushed grass as the water flowed with low, sopping sounds and faint, faint tinkles…

His good half was to her, arm under her head. He lay there hating time.

“The sun will soon rise,” he murmured.

“No,” she said.

“Ah, no?”

“Never. It will never rise again for us.”

“Never.”

“We will live only under the stars. I will sleep by day and wake for you all night.”

“Yet it must rise.”

“No,” she declared. “It will not.”

LOHENGRIN AND LAYLA

They rode in the coolish, fogless air. The countryside steepened and sharpened as they moved into the northern foothills not so far from home.

At least, Layla thought, I am not with child… at least there are no guests waiting and my husband has gone off again… these are compensations and it seems my son has learned something about finding and keeping… and what have I learned?

“Try not to be bitter, son,” she advised, out of her reverie. They were climbing, steadily; had drifted to the rear. He was munching a greenish apple. Tiny bright flowerlets almost glittered along the trail where the sun fanned through the thin trees.

“Bitter,” said Lohengrin. “I’ll try.”

And fail, he thought. Stared. He wasn’t remembering Jane. He was deeply tired the way the young are tired but are just a simple, dreamless sleep away from beginning again as if the world still had no real weight – or they simply hadn’t yet noticed…

What have I learned? She asked herself, again.

Because, in the end, there was a memory that had no weight either and was about half true: there was (forever) the young man on the silvery-soft grass in the lost moonlight and tender shadows of more than half her life ago when she’d hesitated a few fearful steps away, thinking how beautiful and pale he was, lying there in the delicate night… and she knew (without knowing she knew) that once she went and touched him it would forever open the door her whole life would go through…

And not knowing she’d moved, was suddenly kneeling over him, fingers light on his bare chest, speaking as if she’d rehearsed the words in some time or place long past as this moment cast a shadow of itself, forever, saying:

“My name, though you have not asked, is Layla.”

PARSIVAL

In a way he was still standing on the hill under the wall of his castle, naked, hands bound behind, death at his throat and the flash of the bird lifting above the world… above everything… voices of the bandits around him, the mad priest and Gawain with helm shut as if it mattered… one runtish brigand pointing to Parsival’s groin, saying:

“See how it’s all shrinked up like an old hag’s neck!” Another laughing.

“Ain’t much a one to start off, meseems,”

…still staring there and here too as if nothing had changed or ever would so the pit that was just a mouth opened to nowhere and faded away… and there was the stone room in the monastery and the great carven stone coffin, the round-faced monk with his pointy, razor sharp features. Parsival was there too in his red, discolored, rent armor that the salt-sea had stained with spots of corrosion; alone, sword at his side.

“Did I ever leave this place?” was his question, being now well used to impossibilities. He was treating everything like a troubled sleep.

“Yes.”

“Yes?”

“You’ve been in the world wizards’ love,” said the monk, looking at the doorway as if expecting guests. “Two things can be true at once. You have not been living in one world at a time.”

“Magic? I have been bewitched?” The monk shrugged.

“Words, Sir Knight,” he said. “What is, is. Time to go home. You have gone everywhere and done nothing… or have you gone nowhere and done everything?”