Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (43 page)

JOHN

There was a seaweed-covered, mussel-clotted rock that sat high above the dark and stinking strand. There was a big turtle working its slow, glopping way parallel to the water. A handful of former pilgrims of the map were standing and sitting in the general area, watching the fog disperse and the steel-gray sea gradually expanding to the horizon, blurring away into the eternal vagueness…

John stood there on his bare, splayed feet clutching the rock like some giant five-toed bird, ragged black tunic still wet, flapping heavily in the sea breeze. He was saying things, mouth open as if swallowing the wind except his voice was too worn away to be audible.

Two boys were tossing shells and pebbles at the laboring turtle. Now and then they glanced off the shell with a dull click and the creature would pull its head in and wait. The boys were delighted and were working up to killing it, as boys will.

So John’s mouth moved, the wind blew, the waves sagged into the beach and crumpled there like all that went before. The turtle crawled and paused and paused and crawled into its fate.

John gestured with one skinny hand. His rags flapped; mouth opened and closed. His eyes were bright, avid, full of the power of his vision…

SIR NOBODY

Lego’s mind was still ringing, overwhelmed by the shock, crash, bang, and confusion as the masses of stone fell around him. The earth cracked open and he fell (or seemed to fall) down towards the foundations of the earth – except it was about fifteen feet and he rolled, battered, but not much hurt and saw daylight just above him spraying in around the shattered rocks.

“My Lord,” he cried out. “Where are you?”

Everything behind him was sealed-off so there was only one way to go. He crawled (no space to stand) over and around the broken stones that pressed so close he felt he was being bent and softened and twisted, doubling and turning so that by the time he actually wriggled and crept on his belly into the actual daylight he almost believed some random beam of the mad magic back there had converted him into a snake.

“Half in…half out,” he muttered, straining. “Christ… urrrnnn…”

Like being born or passing a hard turd…

At the end his head was out, shoulders stuck. The warmish breeze and sea air was refreshing and seemed strange.

Sweat in his eyes blurred and doubled the shock of brightness as he finally dragged and kicked himself free. The cliff face had crumbled well up from the beach and exposed the tunnel Morgana hadn’t known about.

Struggling a few steps higher to softer ground he lay on his back panting, looking up into the greenish-blue, pure late afternoon northern sky. The sun angled warmth into him, almost sparkling on the long, mixed grasses of pale, yellowish greens. The thing, he decided, was to forget as much as possible as fast as he could. He felt as if from the time they met the Vikings and set sail, he might as well have been asleep. He hoped he could get home without meeting his master whom he assumed was alive somewhere. He remembered Layla once saying (maybe more than once) that her husband was under a spell to never die until he took full responsibility for something… anything. So he was, she’d concluded, effectively immortal.

Lego never understood her until now as he reflected back on his recent adventures.

“He talked to trees and found swords and whatnot in bushes,” he muttered, thoughtfully. “We went underground with cannibals and plague bodies… Almost everybody died, in the end.”

I admit, he thought, he warned me….

“Witches and monks and madmen,” he went on, still trying to take it all in. “King Arthur!” Shook his head. “As that Viking would say, ‘hoo.’”

Holy Mary. He thought. What madness… and me a knight or half-knight… Sir Nobody… there’s some sense in the name an let me stay so…

He looked at the sun making sharp waves of light as the tall wild grasses stirred in the shifting, comfortable breeze. He didn’t want to stay there and he didn’t want to get up; either way he might be found by Parsival and drawn into new and unpleasant adventures that resolved into a kind of nauseating and misty confusion…

I’ll stay with my married daughter for awhile… there’s a notion… I’ll live in a cave… I’ll…

MORGANA

It was like walking through heavy rain without getting wet, Modred thought, as they made their way through the crashing rocks that seemed like blurs of softness, his hand in Morgana’s soft yet steel strong grip.

And then there was greenish-blue sky, pale grasses and a warmish breeze. They went up a little hill with a view of the crystal-blue sea crashing into the rocky coast. Walked higher on to the cliffs.

Almost directly below they saw the King and Parsival walking side-by-side on the actual beach under the sharply pitched rock wall. The red armor was like a blot of blood.

“Aunt,” said the boy, “I want to kill him. I want to …”

“We just didn’t,” she pointed out. “Be quiet.” A tic winked under her left eye.

“But I want to kill him.”

“Another day,” she said, tense and cold with clenched fury.

“But –”

“Another day you will eat his heart.” Shook off his hand. “Now be still, weak boy.”

“We eat hearts?”

“Aye. But we roast them first.”

PARSIVAL

The King was looking up the cliffs at the back-tilted figures (obscured by the misty haze from the breaking surf) he couldn’t tell were Morgana and her unhappy son. The knight was facing out to sea where waves like fractured blue-green light cut, humped and sliced into the rocky shore, shattering into spray.

Parsival wasn’t remembering anything. He wasn’t planning anything. He didn’t want to know anything.

“Did you notice how we got out?” Arthur asked.

Parsival liked looking at the waves and the small, white birds that kept circling and suddenly swooping down, darting their long, sharp beaks into the water until one finally came up with a speared fish, a silver glitter that, as he squinted could have been anything from a coin, a jewel to a trick or defect in the eyes.

As he watched the bird soar up with its prize in its beak, into the haze-softened sunlight creasing over the cliff tops, he knew what it meant and refused to think about that either. It was appetite and illusion or something as simple and empty as a curl of wind or water…

“I’m not sure we were anywhere, my liege,” Parsival said, at length. “We didn’t get out of anything.”

“What sense does that make?”

“None, Lord.”

“I sent men to find you,” the king said. They still faced opposite ways.

“They found me.”

“Did you kill them? I hope you did not.”

“I retired from violence.” He squinted but had lost the bird in the bright haze. “I’ve hardly killed anyone since then.”

“Will you come back to Camelot?”

“I’ll go that far with you, my liege. Then …” Shrugged. “I’ve made vows… well, we’ll see …”

“Yes, Sir Parsival. I have made vows myself. But, I, more than another, must stand by the roll of the cast dice which are still bouncing.”

He turned at the clinking and scraping sounds to see the Red Knight stripping off his armor and the under padding clothes until he stood on the pebbly sand, bare-legged in his tunic and leather sock-like shoes.

The king watched him scale the plate and mail into the grinding surf where it was tossed, rolled, stuck, unstuck and turned in the foamy undertow.

“Another gesture, Parsival?” asked the king.

“Yes,” said the knight, grunting. “Let the sea eat this stinking metal that I might never put it on again.” He stared at the birds watching them circle and dive for the quick, silver flickers, spearing into the heaving roils of water. He considered how, to the fish, these soft, weightless, fragile riders of the lucent, substanceless air were deadly as thunderbolts dropping from the unseen void above to stab them through in their own hushed element. “What invisible creatures hunt, poise and drop on us?” he reflected, aloud.

Arthur got it, following his gaze and train of thought. “The Grail stained your mind, Knight,” he said, “so shadows and dreams joust with you.”

“The Grail,” said Parsival, staring away into the hazy horizon. His inflection told the king little. “I still say nothing really happened and we went nowhere.”

Arthur shrugged, glanced back up at the two figures on the cliffs he imagined were fishermen. He drew Excalibur and let it catch the blurry light.

“And how was this recovered?” he wondered. “Made whole again?”

Parsival shrugged. “Maybe it wasn’t,” he said. “Maybe you never lost it or shattered it. The Grail blurs my mind, blurs my life, My Liege. Maybe we’re both dreaming, this moment.” Shrugged again. “Maybe we’re not.”

“Time blurs mine,” said the king, sheathing the blade. “Walk with me, in any case, until we find horses. Then we’ll ride.”

Parsival nodded.

“Yes, your Majesty,” he said.

“I won’t ask you about the Grail.”

“Nothing happened,” the tall, lean, mainly blond, sometime hero said, inhaling the rich, cool salt air, watching one of the birds (perhaps the same one) dip, drop and come up with a flash of glitter in its beak, circling up away from the others, riding a coil of thermal air until it was lost in the bright haze and glare, again; a detail-less flickering… blot… lost… “Nothing happened at all.”

I’m going home, he said to himself. One way or another… sooner or later…

Arthur was looking up at the two figures on the cliff edge. Squinted, because something was moving, a speck, a blur dropping fast, faster… a stone the size of a head was almost on them by the time he reacted, yelling to Parsival and ducking aside.

It was a pretty good throw. The knight glanced up, not having to move, and tracked it to where it cracked, shattering, where the king had been standing. Rock chips zinged around, two or three clipping Parsival hard enough to sting.

“There it is,” he said. “As ever.” The two on top were gone.

“That had to be my sister and her twisted child,” Arthur said. “They escaped, too.”

“Escaped what?”

Parsival was looking out to sea again as if it meant something. Falling rocks left him unmoved, at this point; he was more concerned with the way the waves rode up on themselves as they broke. Never the same twice but always the same. He understood that, too, without thinking about it.

The king was looking at him. “You don’t have to come with me,” he said. “Go where you please. I believe I was enchanted though I don’t believe in magic”

“No?”

“I believe when it is far off. As I believe in the miracles of our Lord. But were I not enchanted then I would be mad to think what happened, happened.”

“You are politic, my liege.”

“I believe in stones being dropped on me by supposed witches.” Glanced up.

The waves were more astonishing the more Parsival studied them. “Credo,” he said, “in falling rocks.” Nodded and stared. “I believe waves are never the same but have everything in common. I begin and end with that.”

“You don’t have to come with me,” the king sighed. “I release you. But we were enchanted, you agree?”

“You are right or you’re not. I’m mad or I’m not. What use are opinions?”

The birds had circled away along the rocky shore. Parsival could see pieces of the dull red armor scraping, turning and shifting as the angle of the breaking surf moved slowly and resistlessly south.

There goes my life, he thought. Farewell…

He stretched and sighed. Tried to see what hurt the worst. Hard to tell.

“We were enchanted,” the king repeated.

“I am going home,” the knight said at length. “I’ll kill no more men save those who ask about the Grail. I’ll watch the serfs till the fields. I’ll watch the birds nest. The pigs shit and eat. The grasses grow.” He turned from the sea and looked at Arthur. “Let us go, your Majesty. You back to the great work of state and me to my family and respect for manure.”

“Great work,” said the king, glancing up again to see if, maybe, another rock was dropping at his head. “Great work of greed and mayhem. Of course I don’t believe you, Sir Parsival.”

“You are mistaken, my King,” the knight said, starting to walk with him along the beach, looking for an easy way to climb the cliffs. “I truly love cow manure and all manner of horseshit.”

EPILOGUE

The king and the knight walked through the late morning into the soft afternoon together; maybe seven miles. Without knowing it they passed Lego who was resting with his back on a rock overlooking the rutted coast road. He didn’t move, watching them pass. Shook his head, no, as if he’d been asked something.

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The Final Quest
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