The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (38 page)

“How can you be sure this way leads out of here?” Lohengrin asked his father, who could just follow the sense despite the overwhelming resonances.

“It’s all simple,” he replied, “if you don’t trouble yourself.”

“Like being born, you mean,” his son returned, amused.

“That trouble comes later, my lord,” Broaditch added from up ahead. “The first part is like resting in a haymow.”

He was still supporting Layla’s arm, though she was steadily sobering. Parsival brought up the rear with Unlea holding on, limping, in a daze.

“Do you want to look for him?” Parsival called ahead to his wife.

She half turned and watched him in the weak torchflutter. His eyes were bright, she noted.

“Look for a man?” She was amused. “Ha. They always find
me
, try what I might.”

What
must
I
do
next?
he asked into the brilliance that washed through the cloudy stones.
What?
Because he knew that simply to contemplate this unending glory wasn’t yet possible. There was too much unresolved … there was Layla and Lohengrin and the past weight of all his days …
What?

“Well,” said his son, wryly, “is that what comes of not troubling?”

The passage ended. The last
fut
…
fut
… of the last torch showed a circular room like the inside of a well with no opening, not even a windowslit.

Broaditch tapped the blocks with the end of his short spear. Raised both eyebrows. Looked at Parsival, still bemused to be here. Remembered setting out to find him and ask about the Holy Grail.

Great
God
I
was
a
silly
man
,
I
think
…

“Well, my lord,” he said, “last time I found myself in such a situation, I batted with the hardest thing I possessed and knocked a hole through.” He shrugged. “I might have saved myself the trouble.”

Lohengrin smiled, black eyes intense.

“The hardest thing you possessed,” he repeated. “Well, how’s your skull tonight?”

“How know you it’s night, sir?” Broaditch wondered, innocently.

Parsival was rapt, losing touch with them again. The light was overwhelming, streaming, fanning, changing, singing, immersing their words and forms, thinning them, melting them … He watched. They were all shadowy, fragile husks that fell into death, dried, hollow … vanished in the restless cloudy substance until living light stirred the crumbled, time-chewed shells and filled, firmed and puffed them into shape again … He stood still, trying to hold this illimitable perception perfect, motionless, unruffled, hushed as a windless pond …

Unlea was shaking his arm.

“The torch is going out!” she said, and to the rest: the water poisoned him …”

“Fear not,” mocked Layla. “That’s Parsival the hero. He’ll save us.”

“If we go back we’ll walk in darkness and be lost forever,” Unlea said.

“The hero,” his wife repeated. “Darkness becomes you, lady,” she added.

Parsival realized he really didn’t want to get outside. He didn’t want to move at all. Wanted to stay like a parched man at a fountain, nothing else real but drinking deep and deeper …

Lohengrin looked up from under his black hooked brows in the last shudders of flame.

“He wasn’t there when Leena died,” Layla said. “Neither of you were … you bastards …”

The light dimmed as if he’d blinked against sunlight and Parsival shook his head.

“I came later,” he said. “I buried her …” He remembered the raw, chopped faces above the ripped and spattered gowns, colorless shadows in the chill moonlight. “In the yard …”

“My poor girl …” She gritted her teeth. “Did you know about his children?” she shot at Unlea who paid little attention.

“Well,” said Broaditch, “this room will serve as a fine tomb for us.”

Parsival watched their heartbeats, each sending a pulsing shimmer into the general glowing like water-ripples expanding, overlapping … each movement left a stain of light in light … each movement dying into the next … these wispy bodies would soon fail and fall but each life could no more cease than a fish could drown swimming. He would have just stayed there if he’d been alone. It was as good as anywhere else. But he felt their fear and a shimmer that was within and without and was and wasn’t just his mind spoke:

Let it go this time knowing it. You cannot lose forever. You have passed through the door and now go back and do what is hardest, Grail Child.

And then the rapt touch died into a shock of total blackness and he was already walking (the torch was out) asking himself:

What
do
I
do
about
the
two
women?
Because he was back.
This is the most difficult of births, Lord, to enter the world knowing what awaits.
Crossed in the dark and reached the wall with his hands.
No
more
magic
.
No
more
dreaming
…

As if he’d always known this place his right hand found a handle. He tensed his massive back and pulled the arched door open. Stepped out into the fuzzy, blinding noon sunlight, his senses stunned into shatteringly vibrant life, hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting air, touching warmth, day, earth, sky … grass and blue sparkle. He took his first steps, as if entering a temple, into the hush and wonder of the day, drinking in his first breath there …

Alienor watched the storm front rolling, boiling on like dark surf, over the sunbright, green-blue skies. Lightnings flashed and flicked. The rain seemed to take breath, hold … then rush down. The children stood there with heads tilted back, the water spinging in, spatting on their sooty faces, the blackness starting to run off. Alienor opened her hood and spread it to catch the rainfall. It was cool and sweet. Bubbled in her knotted hair.

Gawain was on his knees, naked on the earth, crouched over the stippled water that had overflowed from the well. The lightning had passed over and the downpour was steady.

There was a pale, nude girl across the puddle from him, near the shattered castle wall. She stared into the water, smiling. Their reflections, alive with little impact-ripples, were pale, and both kept dipping up the coolness and drinking. Neither knew it as water, just sheen and glow, a flowing of soft, subtle tones, not reflection but a window, and the dipping hands cupped light and form and they drank lush air washed from lost springtimes where unweeping children played in unending mornings. His face floated near hers, each rainping a perfect moment of color, their pale features watersmooth …

Gawain remembered Gawain like something lost in mist. Drank again from his palm and felt the colors beat with his heart and gush with his gleaming blood and waterflesh.

His face and body were finally unmarked by time or strife. He dimly recalled another world of pain, confusion, darkness and terrible sorrows back in the mists that were Gawain the knight. Looked at his clean eyes, smooth cheeks, graceful arch of neck … deep, deep, rich eyes where fields of newness swam in flowering color.

And her face overlapping, her body overlapping him in the rippling watertight … everything going paler, silvering into twilight … moon-color unfolding in her tresses as wavewinds unstrung her hair where stars were caught … and he leaned from the bank and let himself into the buoyant reflections … falling into her and himself … drinking become breathing … touching, feeling, thinking all drinking … he was whole now drinking … whole … the incredible water filling all of him and the her that was him too … drowning (though he didn’t know it) in her and in himself …

EPILOGUE

The rain was steady, washing the mucky soot into rivulets, creasing the blackened earth; running into gullies; gradually filling the streams as the world began to clean itself: puddles rising, cuts of waterflow foaming around rocks, some high ground already showing raw and clear, a rich muddy tang covering the bitter, ashy smell.

Parsival and Broaditch backtracked through the blasted woodlands. They were trudging up a moderate slope, water sloshing over their leatherbound feet. Their capes were tied closed and saturated. (Lohengrin had stayed with the women at the deserted fortress.) They planned to search for Alienor and the children, following the ravine at a distance and then circling back beside it. Broaditch felt it was as bad a plan as any other.

“Well,” he said, conversational, “I hope you found the Holy Grail. You come in sore need of it, I think, sir.”

Parsival was watching the softened rain tones blending in the mist. The rich, cool, wet air was a delight.

“Oh, so?” he responded.

“Aye. With two such ladies. How will you distract them?”

Parsival smiled.

“From what, Broaditch?”

“From yourself, sir. As wondered the chicken when the fox come up the yard.”

“You don’t fancy they’ll rest content together?” He looked warmly at the big peasant. Thought him a fine fellow.

“I think nature’s at war with it, Sir Parsival.”

The tall knight rubbed the back of his neck, thoughtfully.

Glanced at Broaditch’s ruddy features, grayed temples and beard.

“I remember you,” he told him, “when you and that other … what was his name, the skinny one …”

“Waleis.”

“Yes. When you gave me those fool’s clothes. My mother thought they’d laugh me home again.” A few more steps. The mist smoked around their feet. “I wish they had …” Sighed. “You’ve changed but little, I think, Broaditch.”

“It’s only fine helmets as show the banging,” he suggested.

Parsival smiled with pleasure.

There’s
so
many
to
learn
from
in
this
world
, he thought.
Who
needs
magic? Each
turn
in
the
road
,
each
new
face
is
a
wonder
…
There’s
your
magic
… And it didn’t matter whether it had been the water or not that had changed him this time. He didn’t care at all. Layla and Unlea … Broaditch was right, except, he decided, it wasn’t nature but brute custom made the troubles. They were really all so much the same that to fight was to fight with yourself, seek Strangers as you will. All wars began in custom.

“Hold,” he said at the top of the muddy crest. Stared through the thin, charred trees at shattered, blackened walls Headed over, the big peasant a few strides behind.

He instantly understood, even before he totally registered the pale, naked body sprawled in the shallow pool around the well that stood there like a tower over a moat. The legs and arms were outspread as if trying to grip all the grayish-white and dark water where the wall and the sky showed … face down, the chopped short arm making a final, sardonic point, Parsival imagined, might have pleased the once tormented knight.

The long-haired, very thin girl had a hollow, haunted face. Her eyes were wild, wide, absorbed, tracking past them again and again as Broaditch came up on the soggy, flowing muck and stopped. Her eyes moved as if following invisible butterflies …

“You won’t believe it,” he said to Parsival, “but I know this place. I passed it the first month I set out to follow you from home … long ago …”

“Ah,” murmured the knight. He’d just realized he felt the light now without seeing it, without having to see it. It was there, a warmth within … all around, in mysterious flow squeezing each beat into his heart, each pull of rich breath …

“Aye,” confirmed the powerful peasant, folding his solid arms across his thick chest, looking from the girl to the floating man. “I did. I keep passing over the same ground for all that I wander far.” Reflected. Watched the pale body slowly turning in the greenish-gray water. “Do you know these?” the surface churned pale in the rain.

“One of them,” Parsival said softly.

Ah
Gawain
, he thought.
Ah
…

The well continued to slowly flood. The downpour was muted and steady.

Broaditch remembered the place from that summer’s day, misted (like the mist that ghosted here around the dark stones) through the twenty-odd years between, when the dead lay around the burned and shattered walls, dried, swollen in a field of goldenrod ashimmer with bees, the twisted forms awash in glowing lushness …

“I was looking for you,” he repeated. “Your mother had just died.”

The girl’s gaze kept following nothing, over and over and back again … shifting … circling …

Broaditch kept following the lost image that seemed to drift over the wet, dark gray landscape. Recalled riding in from the road (that had been absorbed back into the markless earth), his mule’s withers deep in the golden flood, the bees’ drone a soothing murmur almost like riverflow … saw himself glancing back to where Alienor and Waleis (skinny, awkward, gripy, long dead, dreaming Waleis) waited on the now nonexistent road that led to vanished days and adventures … stood there, remembered, and hardly knew he wept or why.

The hollow-faced girl followed whatever it was across the tin-flat sky, then down the arc and across the dark horizon. The rain pulsed steadily through her tangled hair.

“Well,” said Parsival, “you found me.”

“I no longer was looking, my lord.”

Parsival waded knee-deep. His reflection was dim and cloudy. The water was warmish. He reached for Gawain … then checked himself. The rain whooshed quietly all around.

“No,” he whispered, “you’ve drunk deep at last, old friend. I’ll not trouble you now.” Who did you visit in an empty house? “Farewell.” There was nothing to it. He felt the spot of warmth in him that would never cool. You came and went and only fading, cloudy pictures stayed. “The tale is told at last,” he said, motionless in the dim water as the day dimmed imperceptibly into mistgrays. “At last.” As the girl furiously didn’t watch him; and Broaditch wrapped himself in his own mantle of memory.

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The Final Quest
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