Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II

by Richard Monaco

  “Hah!” hissed the priest. “Heresy! The gnostic and heathen lies the Mother Church has stamped out. The false views of the Devil in hell!” He was very excited now. “Put a tongue in the anus and who can say what you’ll have to hear?”

  “If I’ve lived before, lady —” I said. I’d heard fragments of this doctrine myself and wondered about it. Merlinus had hinted things. “If I’ve lived and come back to do no better than this, then God help the world, were I king of it.”

  She chuckled. “Well said,” she agreed, “yet the wheel of fate spins, and we must all walk as best we can. I am leading you all to greatness, if you find footing to follow me.”

  “I knew I recognized this road,” I said.

  She was too serious now to understand me. “You remember this tunnel?” she asked. She actually had a map of the place. She unrolled the parchment at the first intersection of corridors. The priest was muttering still. Modred was thoughtful. To the limits, I’m sure, of a snake’s powers of reason.

  “We must descend,” she announced.

  And then I did recognize something: the corridor veered down (part of the labyrinthine interior) and looked like the spot where I’d fought the biting little cripple, Gobble, (my heel would hurt in wet weather from his teeth for many years) the fat foreigner, and the sweet girl I’d had to murder during that absurd charade. That had all ended at the well, which obviously had a bottom, and nothing had, in fact, ended at all. The madness had merely been reincarnated (so perhaps she was right about that too) …

  She led on, holding a torch near her map. I found that almost amusing, though I doubted she’d understand why. Fanatics seem to laugh in all the wrong places. Fanatics plague my life.

  “What do we look for?” Modred asked.

  “The gate to hell,” said the runt.

  We were descending a circular stairwell. The only light was from our torches. The troops strung out behind us seemed to be keeping good order. We’d kept about fifty men, I estimated.

  “Better than that, Father,” she said.

  “The Devil himself?” bitingly asked the prelate, eyes a small hard glitter in his narrow face.

  Morgana was enjoying herself, I think. We came to a chamber where the walls went up beyond the flickers of our torchlight so high you couldn’t have proved there was a ceiling. Words (that might have been Greek for all I knew) were graven into the dark stone. Strange. The blocks were larger than any I’d ever seen in a castle and certainly I didn’t remember seeing these things the last time — if I had really been here.

  As we went on, I noticed that the walls gradually began to slant together, so that before long we were funneled into single file behind the witchwoman. My misty memories from about twenty years ago of what was supposed to have been the Grail were nothing like this. I’d been received into an open hall with a roaring fireplace, pages, fine ladies and knights in silk and samite, a feast with music … I’d swilled wine and fallen asleep, stuffed with pastry and sweetmeats. Now it was all underground ways and twisting passages, all mysterious sneaking and stalking and all for the same nothing, in any case.

  Why had I come here, I asked myself. The answer was a shrug. Maybe I’d find Lohengrin, though I doubted it. Maybe there was something to Morgana’s claims … And then there were my wife and daughters to consider.

  “This looks promising,” I said to her.

  “Patience. “

  “Soon,” I said, “the Grail will come bounding to me like a loyal dog.”

  “Perhaps,” she said.

  Modred was behind me.

  “This is senseless,” he said. “We’re getting nowhere.”

  “Patience,” I said. “Permit the lady her quiet madness.”

  She didn’t deign to turn back but said:

  “You know better than that. Both of you.”

  LOHENGRIN

  I was amazed that Chael actually knew the way to anywhere. But she found a castle. A huge deserted place a few days ride northeast, past swamps and deserted country.

  We stood and stared at the gate for awhile. It was open. I didn’t really like that. Neither did Veers, who showed some sense when squeezed.

  “This is it?” I asked her.

  “Yes. “

  “Now what?” wondered Beef, furtively picking the rim of one large nostril. “Be still,” his father said automatically. “I suppose we go in,” I said. “Then what, Chael?” She shrugged. She managed to make the gesture faintly irritating. “I don’t know more than how to come this far,” she told me.

  I held up the spear, idly hoping some occult guidance would flash from it. Now, and I must tell true, as I stared at the dull metal head something gleamed in my mind, neither a proper picture nor a voice. Nothing really, and yet, I felt touched by something strange — a purpose. I felt oddly exhilarated. I took a deep breath and strode forward. As if I knew where I was going.

  Inside, just past the door, I saw a slight movement ahead. A dull gleam of armor just past an archway. That seemed promising.

  “Follow me,” I told my motleys. “There’s nothing better in the bottle.”

  We did. Down and around and over and under. It was easy to stay back behind their torch flares. Their armor (there were quite a few) made enough noise to cover us. Around, under, and down … They seemed to know the way.

  We came to a narrowing passageway that was unsettling. The walls came in, making a slow V. After awhile we were all walking sidewise, crabbing our way along.

  Beef murmured. I didn’t listen. His father periodically hissed him to silence. I led — except that I was following.

  THE WOMAN - JESCHUTE

  The water was memory, cold and inexorable. Suddenly, I was drowning in memory, after so many dry years of emptiness. The dark rocks cut the water around my frailness and feeble struggles. All of it was coming together at once, memory tossing me, turning me, spinning me, sucking me down, filling my lungs and choking away all breath … All the years I’d been keeping back behind the madness, all the fears flooding me at last, all I’d held away so as to survive in that stinking, dismal, dreary underground, abused by those pale, cruel, reeking semi-people, offal eaters, cannibals … All the safe, distant, calm madness that let me live now swamped and spilled away by the shattering surf and slashing rocks, seeing (in glimpses) the terrible little cripple above, braced on the tilting, wet steepness … then smoking foam and massed wetness flung me away into death and the shock of clear remembering …

  Even my name came back to me. Jeschute. I recalled my husband hitting me with his balled fist (so long ago) spinning me from the mule he’d forced me to ride in tatters while he followed at a distance, waiting for imaginary and imagined lovers to come to my rescue. Since there were none, none ever came.

  I suddenly wanted to live again, now that I was dancing with death. I kicked and fought, crawling in the foam to gasp surface air. I struggled in hopelessness and terror while the years spilled over me: the blond knight in red steel, the beautiful idiot boy who’d come into my tent and left footprints in the soft earth. My husband had gone mad from the sight of those marks left in strange innocence by that harmless, deadly child. Because all the forgotten years made no space at all in my thoughts, it seemed that no time had passed since the knight in the blood-colored armor spilled my husband in the gold rustle of autumn leaves and left him twisted, bitter, and broken, as well as mad … And when I rode for help across those bright, crisp, fall-smelling woods, the leaves rattling and swooshing under my skinny mount’s hooves, I ran straight into those terrible men, the underground devils, who took me into the place where all memories died in smoke and flame and dreadful darkness … But that wasn’t right. … There was a gap after that, with other smokelike wraiths of consciousness, nuns, a convent … something … I lost the images …

  And then the rock lifted me from the massive heaving of the sea, the waves fell back, and I was clinging there, just high enough to resist the next breaker, and the next, until I crept and crawled
and worked my way up to the soft earth again, filled with remembering and a need to return to somewhere. Because I’d believed he was dead. I lay there, fitting the pictures together in thin sunlight, staring inland across a lawnlike field at a low, pale stone wall that fit along the slope of a gentle, yellow-green hill. I was getting my breath back … remembered how I’d believed he was dead; remembered riding to the convent and hiding there until they caught me… All in the blurs and mists … Later, somebody said he wasn’t dead, just ruined … That, too … and now, getting my breath back. Staring at the boy sitting on the wall, blond, like the other one from beyond the mists that I couldn’t yet tell were from long ago … just sitting there. I stood up, reeled, rubbed my temples, and wandered forward, thinking vaguely I’d talk to him, ask him about what had happened to my husband, thinking it was the same boy, Parsival, the fool. …

  A road ran past the wall where he sat, kicking his heels against the stone, poking the air with a flexible stick. His clothes were rough hide. A peasant. His hair was long, greasy, and knotted. He looked pretty until I came close. His nose was bent to one side and his jaw was too heavy.

  “Is there a village close at hand?” I asked. He flicked the stick. It cut the air. His eyes were blue, so pale they seemed hollow.

  A fool’s clothes, I thought. That was from the mists too: the pretty face coming into my tent from the windless, golden summer afternoon (I think it was afternoon) and waking me, leaning over the bed of fur and sheers, touching my body with (I realized gradually) no real intent at all, the way he might have poked at a kitten or frayed the petals of a flower.

  This not-quite-pretty boy was humming, kicking his heels and snapping the stick at nothing with tremendous concentration, heeding me no more than if I were a wisp of fuzz on the breeze or flicker of light and shade. I wondered if he saw or heard.

  “Alas,” I said. I looked down the road to where it bent away under a cluster of dusty-looking trees. I was still soaked, but the sun was drying me comfortably. Which way to walk? North, I thought.

  The mad boy suddenly slid down from the wall and waded into the dusty road. Stopped. Cocked his head as if listening sagely. Nodded. Considered. Took a few steps at an angle … listened again … tilted to the opposite side. Shuffled backwards in a yellowish cloud. Then seemed to stare up at the hazy sky, then veered in a new direction, looking up, walking into the wall, rebounding, then climbing over, bending low now, peering at the ground as if following a definite track like hunters I’ve seen or dogs on a scent, and I got the impression, as he went up the slope, that he actually sniffed the earth …

  I turned away and went down the road. I hoped I’d find kind or at least indifferent people before long who would point me on the road to what had been home (before the mists that I didn’t know fused decades together) …

  PARSIVAL

  I always sense an enemy with my belly, but Morgana reacted first. We’d squeezed down and were scraping sidewise through the ‘funnel’. Crouching on hands and knees (I had visions of a dead end or a final mousehole) when she said:

  “They’re waiting ahead.”

  I was panting and cramped. My back and legs ached from stooping. Modred was breathing heavily behind me. Everyone’s armor scraped unpleasantly.

  “Who’s waiting?” I wondered. “The mousepeople?”

  “I creep no further,” Modred announced. The good priest was farther back, muttering something. “Be ready,” she advised. A rush of cool air and we were out of that miserable passage and crawled head-to-butt out into a large open space. I felt cool, outside air.

  There was light overhead. Shifting, uncertain. I craned my neck and creaked upright. Several hundred feet above lightning flashed across the night sky. The walls swirled and leaned away in an inverted cone. We stood in the relatively small space at the bottom. The swirled walls resulted from a winding ramp that spiraled to the top. The sudden, soft flashes (thunder was a distant rattle) showed statuary lining the ramps. Odd. Never seen the like.

  I squinted to make out the shapes. I think I feared they’d move at first until I realized the unsteady light glinted on polished stone. Beasts and men, fabulous beasts. They seemed frozen — marching, flapping, creeping, and leaping up the spiral ramp. I made out a ram, a snake, a bull …

  I’d been watching the wrong sights, because the lowest row, just seeming to begin the ascent (a line of giant fish and a winged dragon), moved: a row of tiny figures came out of the shadows. They charged, waving small swords and axes. I knew them only too well.

  Morgana was ready. I expected her to fling another impotent spell at them, but she simply drew and slashed. The others joined her as they struggled out of the rathole we’d traversed.

  Long, fat lightning bolts beat the air above. The shadows were violent, flip-flapping. Thunder shattered the sky.

  “Those little bastards,” I said, “are infesting the world.”

  I moved beside her as they swarmed around us. I felt angry and relaxed, ideal for fighting. I swung the golden sword and then things happened. Things I could with pleasure have missed.

  A dozen or more gigantic bolts crashed to the rim and, not spinning, leapt to the center of the space above us and formed a single pillar of blinding brilliance that instantly (yet in strange slow motion) reached for my blade, which was frozen overhead (my entire body was locked motionless). My senses sped faster than thought itself, yet perceived clearly. The flash went down my arm into my body and seemed to fill my head with sudden, flickering brightness.

  I perceived (as if from very high up above myself) with seeing that burned through the stone and earth surrounding us, the mass of world that I grasped as more than mere earth but rather a vast, concentrated weight of human pain, greed, and fear, and all forms of confusion and misery, dense with ages of ignorance. Later I supposed these ideas were madness, triggered by the electrical shock. It was not like the vague memories from all those years ago, the feeling or vision that had only happened once, the total comfort and resistless, inexplicable peace, that had come at that moment years ago when my throat was about to be cut. It was in front of my castle (with my wife watching from the wall) and I suddenly realized how I’d wasted my life and, for an eternal instant, I’d floated in bliss… But this vision was not like that … This was wild and painful. This was power, not love. I seemed to see through the world’s dark bulk. Saw far and near as in dreaming. I heard the cries and felt the longings of all the world at once.

  I saw my wife and daughters at home, felt her grief and their fear … I saw other things there, dark things … darkness creeping and spreading like smoke and stained water over the green land, swirling and bubbling up from the depths. I saw my way home, too.

  I saw the thing that even that wild, superhuman sight could not directly focus on, saw it lying under the massed world, pressed down by the darkness like a wounded heart, far under our feet, and I saw the way through the maze to reach it, the maze we’d walked into here, the labyrinth below, and felt called there to try and touch the wounded brilliance of the Grail glory …

  So I was like the rest of the silly seekers, in the end. A fact is a fact.

  And then I was back in the chamber surrounded, but with the lightning’s light still in my head. And I was faster (or so I thought) by a fraction than before. I was racing, floating, focused. I felt indestructible. The sword was a straw in my grip. I drew the second. One in each hand I laid about with smooth, quick strokes, amazed myself with the precision as the little gnashing nasties sparked and puffed air in pain, flip-flopped and flew across the stones.

  My brain held the bright imprint of the track through the undermaze. Either there was substance in the vision or my mind was burned. I had to follow. Had to see which it was. Find and face that sweet blaze that hung at the end of the illuminated route like a blurblot of afterglow …

  I ran now, fast and lightfooted, up the spiralling ramp. I heard Gobble’s voice behind me, and Morgana shouting:

  “Truce, damn you!
Damn you all! Put up your arms!”

  Gobble screeched:

  “We have you now, bitch! We have you now!”

  “You have nothing, shrunken worm,” I heard her yell. “I led him through the place of change, and he changed.”

  The fighting swirled around them. I glanced back at the glints and sparks and crashes of battle as I went up. The armored little ants were at my back.

  “There he goes.” That meant me. The fat one’s voice this time. We all were here. I went up intent and calm as a sleepwalker, following my inner map …

  Changed, I thought, that’s a feeble statement of the case…

  My map led me three quarters of the way up the swirling ramp past all the statuary beasts and odd mythological creatures to a doorway. The right doorway, I was sure. There were plenty of wrong ones: about every twenty paces. Doorless holes in the outward slanting walls of the cone.

  They were following, but I was light and swift in my fine chainmail. By the fading storm flashes, I glimpsed the cripple listing rapidly in my wake and losing ground to Morgana. He seemed to hold his own with the fat man. Good for him.

  LOHEGRIN

  Following paid off — depending on how you looked at it. With Beef puffing and vowing retreat at every step and his father cursing him with casual contempt, Chael licking her pale lips, looking worried, we wound into the entrails of that forsaken castle, hot on the scent of the great something. And I had the spear, so by the mad standards then prevailing, I stood very well.

  We had to squeeze through a ridiculous passage where we actually lost Beef. His father cursed in vain because the lad would creep no farther. He said he’d just wait. I doubted that.