Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II

by Richard Monaco

  LOHENGRIN

  My father. Name hundreds of people I wanted not to meet just then and he and the pope would top the list. What fate!

  I was broiling hot, bone-jarred to a mushy weariness. I mechanically kicked the horse along. I’d made the mistake of loafing in a village inn yard, drinking and eating, and then talking with a round, dark soft-bodied serving girl. She had small, pretty toes and fingers, and I was in the mood to admire them. The moon was high, my urges low. Oh, she had a too shrill laugh and a broken front tooth, but such a sweetly compact body. She’d been only mildly impressed (which showed good sense) by my knightly estate, but I was just showing her a little brass trinket that could have been gold (unless seen by sunlight) and the perky, dark face was turned up to mine, her sweet and sourish scent filling my nostrils. The blood and tingle was half filling my sausage loaf …

  I was just thinking about how some knights would have stunned and gagged her, then had their way. For all the pleasure in that you might as well stuff the stern of a sheep. No, I needed a willing partner in pleasure. Willing for whatever reasons. I was close to my goal, feeling good about everything in general, sitting there by the haystack when those four horsemen came clattering into the yard. I crouched around behind the hay in the moonshadow. Heard the voices. Excused myself and headed for the stables as (I think) three of the men crashed into the sleepy inn. One reached the stable as I was climbing in the side window. He sat outside, cautious. I armed quietly and then charged out full tilt.

  He didn’t miss by much, but he missed. Oh, I may not have been the killer my father was, but I had a neat swing. I stabbed and hit some part of the moongleaming rider. Sparks. Jarred my wrist. Had no time to follow up. Veered off the road into the near fields because the others (and torches and voices) were spilling out various doors and windows. No time for a nice duel.

  I’d been riding hard ever since. One mistake like that is as good as ten. By mid-morning all the animals were winded and we’d lain on two small hills a quarter mile apart, in shade, staring at one another across the summer pounding sun-fury, and waited for the blown mounts to get up for the next segment of the chase.

  Thank God or the Devil, I care not, for that cornfield. Certainly the devil, for my great father popping in like an armored scarecrow. On days when I missed him he never turned up.

  I nearly overturned, scrambling down into a dried-up streambed with steep sides. Dense green prickly bush with tiny purple flowers lined the walls. Hard, smooth, damp stone grated and clacked under the horses’ hooves,

  I was satisfied. Even if they followed close they’d have to come up on me one at a time here.

  I was aiming to reach the coast as soon as possible. The village I wanted was north of London and maybe a day’s ride. I had directions and instructions. I hadn’t stolen the spear on speculation. No. I’d been outside one fine, warm, moonlit night. On the hillslope near the castle walls. Practicing fast draw and cut. The air was rich and refreshing. I’d worked up a sweat, stripped to leather shorts. Barefoot. The moon was risen.

  I was poised on the crest where the hill fell off steeply. I could see into the valley where the serfs used to live. Two or three families lingered on. I could see the faint stutter of candle flames among deserted huts.

  I worked through a series of terrific thrusts, hoping to get a good night’s sleep from tiredness. I had too much energy and too little to do. When I lay in bed, sometimes it was like a river flooding through me, floating me above the safe, soft dark of sleep.

  I thought something moved close behind me in a wall of hedges. I crouched around, sword at ready.

  God, but I would have loved a little trouble just then. A robber or assassin. A good excuse to fight. My energy seethed for it.

  Next I imagined a ghost or fairy spirit: a phosphorescent shimmer, a long, oval, lovely, female face. A voice speaking as if the rich night itself murmured words.

  Straightening up, I took a half-step ahead. Tried to focus in the veiled moonlight.

  “What’s this?” I asked.

  “Lohengrin?” was the muted reply.

  “Hmm,” I agreed. I felt half in a dream. Didn’t move closer. Really didn’t want her to be real. Not yet. I needed something strange just then. All in all, I got what I bargained for.

  “I serve the lady Morgana,” she informed me. I let that go. I’d only heard the name.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “She knew your father.”

  “A poor recommendation.”

  “Their relationship was unsatisfactory.”

  More to my liking.

  “Say on,” I invited.

  “We sought you out.”

  “We?”

  “I am not alone.”

  I stepped closer and she receded slightly into the man-high hedge. Seemed to melt into shadows. “What is this about? What do you want with me?” I smiled. “Are you a wizard’s seeming?” Not that I believed it.

  “There’s a task for you. And a reward.”

  “Reward. Always sweeten my cup, lady.”

  She won me over. There was more to it — but that will come out later. Now, in the present, I had the stolen prize. My neighbor’s silly, useless spear. My key to some lock on the door of the future, I was sure.

  So I followed the gully for maybe two miles, grinding over stones that threatened to cripple the horse. I finally came out where it emptied (when there was a trickle in it) into a fair sized river.

  I’d lost them. Now just follow the current to the coast. I was on my way to whatever it was. My reward …

  LAYLA

  I’ll tell it honestly, I was always sinful. I love it. Love touching a man’s secrets with my fingers, to feel the power of it stiffen and pulse to my touch. I like to feel wicked and hot and open to his touchings. Other things too … many other things.

  I might have been faithful had I a faithful husband. Sinning with one man is like sinning with another, I imagine. But I’ll never be able to prove that.

  So that night my lover was coming. Sir Chinket. I’d already dismissed the guard. When I saw him, I’d go down and open the back gate. I remember my husband told me it had always been left unlocked when he was a boy. Those were easier times in the world. I think he said he used to sneak out there after supper on warm nights and dream adventures — as if he weren’t going to have enough of those later.

  Obviously, I still loved him. Or loved what had been. Loved the clear-eyed, intent, curious boy who’d stopped for no particular reason at my uncle’s castle when I was sixteen.

  I went downstairs and pushed open the little gate that was like a plug in the wall. It squeaked and creaked. I stood in the warm draught from outside. The air was scented with the ripening woods and fields.

  I saw his outline. He’d dismounted and was stooping to enter. Chinket. May boils infect his manly sack. I heard the faint ping and schluss of chainmail. That surprised me. Why wear armor tonight? Although, I once made love to a steel-suited man. Even sitting on top (the circumstances were complicated) I was bruised and pinched.

  “My lady,” said false Chinket (I didn’t know that yet, of course) too quickly, stooping out beside me and then the entrance was blocked by others: steel ringing, murmuring voices, crunching steel shoes. I saw the wet-looking gleam of blades.

  “What does this —” I began. Perhaps I should have fled, but I was stunned!

  “Forgive me, my lady,” the false creature said. “I must serve my master’s will.” Stunned. Expecting love. Then I was angry. They tell me I have a mouth made for anger.

  “You foul, dishonest, son-of-a —”

  I stopped to stare past Chinket’s armored shoulder at my next uninvited guest (a number of men-at-arms had come through into the yard): an outline that seemed a misshapen beast lumped against the faint glow of sky lingering behind the hillcrest.

  Meanwhile, half a dozen more troops went past me. I squinted at the lump. It could barely fit into the opening. It kept twisting and banging the sid
es. The others paid no attention.

  The lump scraped through sidewise. I fell back another step. It resolved into a toad-like man squatting on a litter of poles carried by four soldiers. He was armored and chained to the structure so that at first I took him for a prisoner. His faceplate was closed but a matted, bushy beard poked through the grille.

  He shouted muffled orders. The troops and knights scurried and clanked through the dimness.

  “Hold her,” he commanded.

  “Yes, my lord,” someone responded.

  Chinket. I refocused on him. My eyes hurt with hating him.

  “You,” I said. That was all I could manage.

  “These matters are past my power, lady,” he told me. I spat in his face.

  “What do you intend?” I asked. There was a big, hard hand on my arm. I heard clashes of steel, yells and rages spreading as more men poured in the gate. Undone by love. Or, more properly, lust. Yes. But who would trouble to take this miserable, second-rate stronghold? Were they foolish enough to imagine my noted husband was at home? What next?

  The staring men wafted the toad-like leader closer to me. Proximity didn’t enhance him. His eyes had a glassy look where the light penetrated the visor slits above the mad beard that seemed as if it would strangle him in the mask: it bunched underneath and curled through every slit like cypress branches twisted by contorted winds. His voice was husky, whispery, as if constrained by a violence too extreme to be really expressed.

  Well, I was angry too. The supper wine was hot in my blood.

  “Who might you be?” I wanted to know. “The pope?” They carried him as if he were. He didn’t say anything. We all listened to him breathe for a few moments. Then he came out with it:

  “He left me broken and disgraced,” he whispered. I sensed what was coming. Wind hissed through his constricted throat. “Left me for dead, dear lady. Yet here I am! Here I am!”

  There was no arguing with that. “I see and regret that fact,” I told him. “What do you want with —”

  “Now he’ll suffer as I suffered. Ah.” One of the men supporting the litterpoles buckled slightly, shifting the weight, and the bulky toad hissed with fury and smacked the man’s head with the back of his mesh gauntlet. “What I say, I say,” he said. That was hard to dispute.

  “Who are you, knight?” I demanded. “Why don’t you go away? There’s nothing for you here.” I looked sidelong at charming Sir Chinket. He’d moved out of spitting range, it seemed.

  The toad was answering me:

  “I am your bane, lady. I am vengeance. Certain as the grinding millstone.” He quietly hissed for awhile. I just stood there and tried to clear my head and take this all in. “I am vengeance,” he repeated, and I was beginning to believe him …

  PARSIVAL

  If my son had come this far south, I could be positive he’d be aiming for London. Young Sir Discontent.

  Whatever my shortcomings as a parent, I had tried my best. I was about to try again. I had to bring him back to the hearthfires. Peace and a fresh start. Too late, yes, but it was always too late.

  I headed towards where I knew the channel had to be. He’d be bound to take the coast road, sooner or later.

  I kept a fair pace. Brooding, but pleased that I hadn’t had to kill anybody back there. I took that for a hopeful sign. A fresh start.

  The day held clear and hot. My appetite came back to bother me. No hope of eggs. I chewed hard biscuit and cheese. Crossed the thin woodlands that lay between the fields and the coastal cliffs. I was nearing the high road.

  By sunset the weedy, flat stones were under the horse’s uneven hoofbeats. Roman work. I passed various characters, but no knights: a priest, a pardoner on muleback, a procession of goats; a fat woman driving an oxcart … No one had any eggs …

  A small boy bounced up from behind a wall of brush and pinged a pebble off my armored back. I twisted around in the saddle, annoyed. He tossed a second stone. I lost its arc in the gathering dimness, then heard it puff past my ear. Close. Ill-raised children, I thought. Perhaps my son had passed this way, giving lessons.

  A skinny peasant boy in sacking stopped my horse and looked at him. The sunset was a darkening red wall behind him. His features were swallowed in shadow. His hair was pale.

  “You,” I called over. “What insolence is this?” I really didn’t mean it but I needed practice. Some knights I’d known might have slain the lad for sport and moral training.

  He made a sound like broken wind with his mouth.

  “Have I offended you?” I asked.

  He just stood there with the dying day behind him, slim, young, angry.

  “What have they done to sour you so?” I tried. When I was his age I thought everything was soft and summery and everlasting.

  He said nothing. I knew he’d leave if I tried to approach him.

  “Have you no tongue?”

  He didn’t say. I don’t know why I didn’t simply go on. I tried to imagine what his life was like, what sorrows and struggles had brought him to this moment — or was he merely perverse?

  I wanted to talk to him. A strange, small thing, yet suddenly very important. There was an unseen wall between us. “Don’t fly from me,” I told him. “I won’t harm you.” I turned my horse and eased back through the deepening shadows in which he was now a depthless shape melting edgelessly into the landscape. Behind a wall. Just standing there seemed to mean something. Voicelessly. “Please.”

  The animal shied. I adjusted. When I looked down again there was nothing but dark. In a blink. The crestedge was traced with blood — deep crimson. Crickets were frantic in the hot, windless evening.

  “Are you still there?” I asked. Anything, even another stone would have been welcome. I thought about it. About what we all owed the young. The promise, the hope that had glowed in my childhood.

  I felt a strange sadness. A boy had sprung up from the earth to mock me. This was like all my life: encounters in dimness, gestures, incomplete contact, violence, and emptiness … “Talk to me,” I said into the vehement and inarticulately falling night …

  I was still thinking about him, hours later, moving through a wall of seafog. The road here curved with the indentations of the beach. No lights showed anywhere around me. I was hungry, wet and ready for sleep. But where? Under a tree? On clammy sand?

  The hooves clacked dully on damp stones. My ass-bones ached and my left leg kept tingling. An old problem of mine on long rides.

  A few stars showed straight overhead, looking soft and swollen. If Lohengrin had come this way, he couldn’t be too far ahead. He’d probably taken shelter — assuming he’d lost his pursuit. Couldn’t he have seen that earlier? What happened to his neighbor? Did I just leave him there and follow?

  I rode on into the thickening mist. Cattails rose here on both sides of the road higher than the horse’s head. It was awhile before I realized I’d lost the main highway. The road became pebble and grinding sand.

  I cursed. Good work, man of experience. There must have been a paved section torn up on a curve. Now, which way was really back? Lost again. Visibility was about ten feet. I could smell the water and hear the soft purring of the waves above the background insect outcry.

  “What a misery,” I muttered. And then heard a creak and bump. Wood. A boat, most likely. Then a voice humming a dreary tune.

  I nudged the tired beast ahead at a walk. It snorted. A hard sound to miss. The singing stopped.

  Then the fog opened like a drawn curtain and there was the blurred outline of a tubby-looking sailboat and a lean, long man poised with a line in his hands. Further along the steeply curving shoreline there was a glow in the fog that had to be a large fire on the beach. The marshes croak roared with the rhythms of frog and bug. Unseen midges buzzed around my face.

  The sailor just waited. Didn’t seem nervous.

  “Hail, iron fellow,” he said. “Looking to joust with the fish tonight, are you?” He was amused. And brave. Or a fool, perhaps.

>   “Vex me not with fish,” I replied. And got to the point. “I need shelter until morning.”

  “You picked a poor spot for it.”

  I reigned up beside the dark wood of the hull. The horse shied a little as small waves broke over its fetlocks. The salty air was thick, clammy.

  “I didn’t pick it,” I said. Gestured down the coastline towards the shifting orange smudge that had to be flames. “Any inn or cottage near at hand?”

  “Missed the road, did you?” He was bald. Shirtless and shoeless in quarter leather pants. His head looked rockhard and his sinews like wound metal when he tossed the rope in his hand into the broadbeam, shallow-draughted craft. It ground slightly on the pebbly sand.

  “You’re a sharp thinker,” I told him, “to figure that out all alone.” I was almost out of patience with everything in life.

  “It picks up again about half a mile on.” He pointed into mists that showed the blurry firetints. I estimated the blaze was about a hundred yards down the beach. I supposed I could sleep there, if it came to that.

  “I’m weary. I’ll pay for lodging.” No harm in an offer.

  “Will you?” he asked. I tried to see his expression but all I made out was a too long nose and a pointed chin. Looked like a fellow with a sense of humor and possible flickers of intelligence. That would be refreshing. Assuming I actually had brains myself. “A great knight and lord who pays his way. You know, sir knight, we keep pigs at home who reckon sums, tell prayers, and know of mice that know the hour of day or night. “

  “What wonders,” I smirked.

  “So I think myself. But less than a lord who pays.”

  “I get the point.”

  He tilted his long, grave, hard-looking head at me like a listening dog. “I have a cottage,” he informed me, “not far down the beach.”

  “By the fire?”

  “Past on. That’s young Asa — Tom’s — son. Fisherman.” Clucked his tongue. “That’s his fire.” “To keep off the chill?” It was hot and muggy enough to make a rock sweat. “Ha,” was my answer, “to find the shore, you mean. His boat sits deep. This here —” He rapped the side of the sailboat, “— Sweet Megeen, passes over the very stones that would split Asa — Tom’s — son’s double-masted hulk.” The thought seemed to please him. People are always tallying their little advantages. “Yet, Asa’s craft could bear both you and your horse here. Even your great sacks of money.”