She was on her back, relaxed, soft and thoughtful looking.
“Come over here, Sir Parsival,” she offered.
She touched his wrist with one rounded bare foot. Kneaded his flesh lightly with her toes.
“It’s dawn,” he said, gesturing with his head at the wall before them where faint, grayish slits of daylight showed.
“The birds are still quiet,” she noted.
“But is your husband?”
Her foot went away.
“I’ve grown fond of him,” she said, “in these last years. He’s a decent man … He understands me.”
“It shocks my senses,” he said, “when I think how easy it is to put off one life and put on another …”He turned to face her, still squatting. “I was afraid last night, when I came here with you. Did you know that?”
“Yes,” she replied. “And I wonder at your frankness. Few men would speak so.”
“What profit to lie?” he wondered. “Why, there have been times when I’ve been incapable with a woman.”
“That,” she said, smiling with rich content, “is like a rich man talking of his days of poverty, Parse.”
“Parse?”
“No one called you that?”
“Perhaps. But it never sounded so fair.”
“Does it displease you?”
“No.”
A pause.
“What were you afraid of, Parse?”
“Last night?”
“Yes.”
He cleared his throat and held back a yawn that sent sleepless shivers down his back.
“A week of days ago,” he said, “I sat in the bleak hills alone. This world was distant as a dream in a dream … I sat there immersed in things … things beyond the world’s borders …”
“Yes?” She was interested.
“Even now I feel only half here, as when I was young …” He yawned again. He wanted to sleep, to float. The world drew at him softly.
“Oh.” She was a little saddened.
“And I was afraid I’d surrendered again.”
“Ah. Perhaps you have.”
He moved to his knees beside her. He watched her smooth face, her eyes, as if some answer to something unasked might float up and reveal itself in those violet-green gleaming depths.
“I’m still afraid,” he said.
With a yielding strength, she gripped her surprisingly long arms around his thigh and rested her cheek near his knee.
“That you’ve lost God?” she softly wondered. “That we’re sinning?”
He shook his head.
“No,” he replied. “Not so simple, lady, not so simple … The sins I’ve witnessed and committed in this world would leave this a pale wrong, indeed, in their harsh light”
“Then what?" she wanted to know, pressing softly but insistently at him.
“That I’ve started another adventure,” he finally answered, smiling, serious, but inescapably wry, too. “I want no more of them.” He touched her face as if amazed at the sweet, firm warmth and life of the flesh. “They leave me ever with empty hands.” He raised her face to his and kissed, his tongue lingering in the hot, silky, fluttering unfolding of her mouth. “And,” he now whispered, “more lost than ever …” — he kissed — “ … without an ending.”
“But,” she told him, serious and direct, “there is always an ending.”
He frowned. The idea, the fact, pained him. It seemed, unreasonably, a surprise. It was as though underneath all he’d seen, done, felt, and hardened himself to, there was a timeless hopefulness in reserve, a belief in joy unsullied and permanent, as simply, he reflected, as anything his famous childhood had showed …
“No,” he murmured, almost too softly for her to hear, “let me only begin and begin forever, my love."
“Ah,” she sighed, suddenly clinging closer, drawing herself up to press against his full length. “There’s such magic in you … you’re like a dream yourself … What am I to do? Tell me, love and do it I shall! Only tell me …
He kissed and stroked over her, inhaled her spicy sweetness of ripened flesh. Staring into her spring-forest-colored eyes, he could only say, “I want to be with you. That’s what I want. I want to learn everything within you.”
He released himself now, as if all the years frozen in him were finally melting, and he knew only now how cold he’d been, how utterly cold and lost and remote … As all else thawed and ran, he found one thing suddenly, burningly firm, and letting the day dissolve away, he pressed into the resistless wetness of her, and although there was motion, there was no time: the outer world beyond their bodies shifted in its tides and currents without effect and the sounds came through without meaning and they rocked together as if to fuse seamless and forever, fragments of words and images flashing by … His body snapped into her faster and faster, deeper, fiercer, as if something were within reach, as if in this tender violence there was bliss and space, both struggled in a frenzy to free within themselves … He heard the loft rock and creak with the strain, the rhythmic rustle of the hay, the sop-sop-sop of their loins, his breath, heartbeat, smelled the sweat, juice, and uncanny fragrance on her breath … raised himself higher and hurled himself into her with images of golden fields and white, rich blossoms raining through his mind unbidden … the waves of a shimmering sea swelling and peaking … delicate, translucent, shining beings in a prismatic world embraced and praised and sang wordless and wept gold with joy … a flower like the sun unfolding … a tender animal, all warm fur and flowing, forest eyes, quivering in his grip …
“Ah,” he gasped, “I'm you … I’m you … I give all … I give all … I give … give … ah! … ah! … ah! …”
“No!” she cried, fluttering fingers clawing into his pulsing buttocks. “No … no … no …” Rolling her head distracted, throwing up her legs to lock behind his neck so that each stroke of him pounded against her innermost recesses, so she cried in pain now, too: “Harder … no, no! Oh, harder …! Heaven and earth … harder … kill me with it … kill me … kill me … kill meeeee …! ”
Because it was there and for a moment neither knew where the other began and ended and there was no telling mind from flesh from soul. All one fabric stitched through them. And he thought (though never remembered) or said: I am we are this joy only this only this only this only this …
Lohengrin rode out of the swampy woods into the cool sunset. The master of the hunt followed a few minutes behind with his lord’s body. The retainers were waiting. Lohengrin noticed his squire had finally arrived. He wondered if he’d accomplished his purpose. He couldn’t ask him just yet.
“A terrible mischance,” he said to them all, his face set, eyes cold and steady, not quite looking at any one of the half a dozen present. No one said anything. A chill, damp wind blew across the over-lush rot of the field. Autumn was coming in on the season’s tide. “My lord Duke, His Grace, is perished.” The men just looked at him. “He fell bravely, gentlemen, saving me from the pig. I owe him a debt of life.” Silence. The cool gray shadowless twilight filled the woods around them like rising water. “I slew the brute killer, of course.” He let his horse drift a little closer to the vassals. Two lower barons sat at seeming ease, eyes slightly restless in bearded faces. “The Duke’s last words — unfortunately heard only by myself and the good God …” — he crossed himself — “ … were that I take hold of his affairs and act as uncle and regent to his unformed son.”
He idly wondered if they could hear his heart. Would they let this pass for now? He was basically demanding neutrality. He smiled slightly, unconsciously, thinking how one might as well risk a kingdom as a castle … Why a king but treats the world as any man might treat his family … The same stick can strike a thousand backs.
He didn’t realize (as he noticed, relaxing slightly, that they weren’t going to resist him just now) his smile had decided them. His mouth had curved and parted unselfconscious, as a shark with no thought to terrify: it was his utter cold amusement at the
fact that life and death hung on this moment, and that flash of slightly too long teeth had been enough for men who still believed their lives and families and politics led somewhere to something beyond the void and trackless blackness those eyes stared into and the bleak, bitter depths that mouth smiled from … They weren’t prepared to defy him face to face.
“Fortune’s wheel,” he was saying, not smiling now, spurring his horse lightly past, the bloody spear resting across his lap, gesturing for his squire to follow, “astounds us all.”
He felt warm, comfortable, a little light-headed. A bold stroke. So far successful. It was a good game and would stave off those melancholy hours when he was done with combat, sex, chess, eating, and sleeping, those hours of staring into the blackness that was always there gnawing at the heart of the brightest day like flecks of sore and poison …
As they moved along the dimming path toward the castle, he tilted back to speak with the younger man.
“Well, Wista?” he demanded.
“I learned nothing, sir,” Wista replied, seeming vaguely curt.
“No trace of that great fellow, your sovereign hero and saint?”
“I know nothing of that. But there was no word of your father, sir.”
“So he no longer fasts and prays his days away in the sweet eye of God?”
“I know not. He may, for all I know, seek God in some other place.”
Lohengrin turned to face ahead into the dusk. A few stars already showed above the very tall, very massive battlements.
“My father,” he muttered, smiling, “and God.”
Later in the morning Parsival lay there watching thin fingers of sunlight grope slanting through the boards and probe the musty shadows of the barn. Unlea was dozing, tucked close beside him on the matted hay.
Now what was he going to do? The same question again. Always the same … The world outside without this woman in his life seemed bleak and relentless. And dead gray … He was suddenly afraid she might not care as deeply as he did. His stomach tensed with the thought, which was instantly almost unbearable. Why, was this the same Parsival, he wondered hopelessly, who’d put aside the frail vanity of ambition and strife and tried to feel the pulse of the steady, infinite heart, who’d seen human goals and achievements become a child’s snow-carved figure at the start of thaw …? Was this himself (who’d heard the eternal whisper once) in a near panic because a woman might have whims …? Why, his inner eye had learned to poke through the shadows that seemed mortal substance and … his powers … He frowned, said no to himself, then tried, concentrated on her, tried to hear and see her mind as he’d been taught … Nothing … He strained … nothing at all … He realized he probably had lost everything already. And he was ashamed of himself for the impulse. Of course I’m losing them, he thought. I’ve dropped to earth again … no wonder monks flee from women … He smiled. And here she was, alive and close. He felt a peace and hope suddenly like an image from the sweet stream of endless dreams, of the infant sleeping at the full and tender breast …
He had to be with her now. Impossible as that was, he had to be with her. He blinked and sat up straight and eased his cricked back. He glanced into his lap at his limp organ, shiny with dried juices in its nest of dark, gold-tinted hair.
Look at you, he thought. Dead flesh … What passes through you, what fire to raise you up again? He shook his head. Your time comes and passes quickly … Well, I’m bound to her and you are the key to the fetters and to her gate, through which I must pass …
And he thought that, perhaps for the first time, it was not merely the animal who wielded it …
“Awaken, my love,” he said, and then, relishing the sound with tender embarrassment: “Unlea.” He touched her lightly. “It’s full day without.”
She stirred.
“Ah,” she murmured, “you let me sleep long … in the eye of death.”
“Bonjio,” he said quietly.
She looked up at him.
“I’m not really afraid,” she said, “as you see.”
He nodded.
“What will you do?” he wondered. What will I do, he thought.
She shrugged.
“You must say,” she told him.
He hesitated, tried to meditate. He kept asking his soul to ask What’s right …? What’s best …? Nothing. His years, his talks, his readings, his lives before (because his life had been so cut into sections) had provided nothing for this day and need. What’s right? What’s right? What’s right!?
He kept staring at her now, as if the answer lay in the sweet curves of her face and those subtly changing eyes, whose briefest attention seemed precious in the fugitive gleam of a sunbeam … What did he want from her? he kept asking himself. After all, she was just another woman: flesh, blood, thoughts, and the food passing through came out as shit, not nectar … She hoped and feared and had ugly places in her secret thoughts like everyone else … would shrivel and die with the years and mark her passing with a set of crumbly bones … But these thoughts were reason without substance. And they were blown away by each hushed moment in the fullness of unstirred time, the glory and wonder of finding out what she saw, knew, and had known before, the world marvelously reflected through her, the new life of her flesh to his stunned, strong hands … He felt the calm of her nearness with the hinting fear that she could go at any time … saw with his naked heart that no one could love without willingly, rapturously embracing death …
“So I must say,” he repeated.
He remembered in a flash with sight, sound, smell, and something deeper, remembered the actual, tangible presence of the movement from childhood: a spring morning, fresh, drying, cool dew, sun and shadow startling, yellow flowers blinding on the hill, where the clouds and air and green lushness seemed a single flow and extension of his own rippling pulse, and only the stiff, darkened part of him walked on the tilted ground at all, and he could have cried out with each breath and heartbeat as he heard his mother singing, turned (as if the day simply flowed and engendered a new image in the gleaming air) and was blinded by her gown and the burning dandelions and buttercups at her feet, for a moment within the unimaginable soul of the day and so within her, too, felt her being like a floating cloud and needed no names … needed nothing … Suddenly, without seeming break, the song became her, saying, “Good morrow, son.”
“Yes, mother.”
“What will you do today?”
He was mildly surprised. He felt drawn by the stream where it curved, shocking crystal blue, into the deep green, overhanging old woods. Every day he had been following it a certain distance, looking, learning, as the sunlight or gray tints shifted imperceptibly, and finally his mother’s voice would reach him and call him back out of that calm suspension and he’d discover he was hungry again … There was so much to see and smell and touch … never the same, each day wrote its own story of shape and shadow, insect flickerings, animal tracks, and glimpses … But today a thought kept troubling him.
“Mother?” he asked.
“Yes, Parse?”
She lightly stroked his fine, ash-blond hair.
“Mother, is there something …”
“Yes?”
“ … something I ought to do today?”
She shook her head, keeping her fingers tenderly on him.
“No,” she told him. “You have to say, my boy. When you say for yourself without fear, then you’ll speak from love and will do no hurt to anything. I cannot teach you goodness, Parsival.” She shook her head again and briefly shut her eyes. “Oh, and what the world waits to teach … oh, my son, what the world waits to teach you …”
He listened to those sweet sounds that didn’t really satisfy his questions. Then he went lightly down the resilient hill slope with the sweet-scented, sun-vibrant breeze in his face …
He remembered all this now in that single flash.
“So I must say again,” he said again, lifting her to a sitting position. “Am I still too poisoned by time t
o find a true tongue in my mouth?”
She was smiling, relaxed, dreamy.
“You are magical,” she said. “You’re my gift from the lands beyond sleep.” She kissed him with her over-soft, bruised, wet lips. “You …! How can I tell you what you are?”
“What will you tell your husband?”
She blinked. He was fascinated by the color and changing tints in her eyes.
“Ah, love,” she said, “I had better be practical.”
He smiled, helping her up and into her chemise and robe. He dusted off the hay as best he could. He picked it from her hair.
“Try only the possible, my love,” he remarked, “as a wise man once said.”
“Who was, no doubt, a priest of ice who never loved a whit.”
She kissed him again, lingeringly, as they stood there. He was a little wobbly.
“This is new to me,” he said.
“Love? At your age, sir?” She looked up into his face and stroked her long hands over his shoulders.
“I have learned a few things,” he told her, helping her down the tilted, splintery stairs to the musty floor of the barn. The cows lowed; chickens bawked and shifted. Outside the bell for morning mass was sounding. “In barns, particularly,” he concluded.
“The priest stirs,” she remarked as they came to the door, which stood ajar. Parsival squinted into the brightness: an old man was toiling across the muddy yard, a load of firewood tied to his shoulders. Farther off a bony man was kicking a stiff-legged, motionless mule. Two tiny red and blue birds suddenly landed in a bright swirl and nervously pecked the earth … then whirred away in a blink …”The serfs will be coming here shortly, I should think. I confess I am not expert in rustic ways.” She smiled to reassure him. “But I take walks some mornings dressed as I am. There’s less danger than you think — unless we make love again.” She smiled and watched him.
“Again?” He enjoyed the notion. “So I might meet my death either from love or your husband?”
“You? With your magic and strength?” She looked up into his face and nestled close into him. He held her cheeks in his hands and kissed and kissed and kissed … and she rubbed herself against him, as if drugged … He felt need like a hunger and thirst now just for her spicy taste and firm touch and the pulsing stir of his body, a hunger and thirst, he knew, that could never be assuaged … though it might cease someday …
The Grail War Page 11
