“You fool,” was Veer’s parting snarl. I was going to miss him; I liked spending time with a father and son.
About when I was going to try backing up myself, I heard fighting and yelling ahead. By the time we popped out of that hole, we were late for the fun. There were bodies here and there and a few, at the end of their race, sighing final moans.
Good work had been done there.
The trail was bloody and easy to follow even by torchlight. We followed. Chael shuddered. “Come on,” I encouraged. “To where?” hissed the seaman, sensibly. “To victory,” I said. I was caught up in it. My pulse ran quick. I was a knight, after all. By blood and the strange dreams of knights. Would all these men be fighting and dying for nothing? I thought not. I was eighteen years old.
I half dragged Chael up a ramp that sloped past rows of peculiar statues that I didn’t pause to admire. Past a dying, tiny man in black metal clutching a beautiful stone woman. I heard his hard breath and the tinkle of his blood in the hollow of his suit. A perfect-sized opponent, by God. Very encouraging. Send me lots of tiny men.
LAYLA
I held my poor hurt daughter while the room spun; I felt her sobs shake me, the two of us sprawled on the stained sheets where virginity had just been brutally slain. I was sick and half sober from it. I twisted to see the bastard killer of my child’s privacy… To be so rudely pried open, like a gate battered down, or even taken by stealth and deception, as in my own case, and then a strange enemy in your peaceful hold … I twisted and saw his profile, blurred but sharp enough where he was creeping across the slowly spinning floor, crawling for the door, in shame, like the serpent in the garden. I cried out in outrage thinking how I too had dreamed of love and promise and had been led to pain and dullness, how I’d followed and found and taken the promised man into myself and been led down twisted ways and come to this, to this … My baby pressed her face into my body and shook with weeping.
“You,” I cried at foul Chinket, “you … you …” My thoughts were red and burned away words. “You …” I kept saying as I tried to climb from the bed and follow him save that my daughter tangled me, her hot tears soaking my bosom …
PARSIVAL
Moving so fast and fluidly, I thought at times that I was floating on the rushing air. I headed into the side passage and was so relaxed that when I hit the slide, which I’d foreseen in the luminous, gradually fading map in my mind that I sensed could not be memorized in the normal way so that once it faded I’d have no clues left, and shot down into darkness, I simply dropped like a lead lump. I heard a scream of dismay up above. I hit a shock of cold, shattering water, then I came to an utterly black surface (though the stones gleaned greenish, here and there) and could only follow the envisioned maplight. I heard other splashes behind me and yells of terror. I was working my way around stone pillars and short walls, while a strong current dragged me along, relaxed as a madman, watching the slow fading of the glowing directions in my head …
More splashes and shouts … but I felt I’d lost them all by now. How could they find their path through that watery labyrinth? I knew where to turn, kick, back water, struggle forward like a somnambulistic fish.
Then my knees hit a shallow ridge of sand. I stood up. The roof was high, smoothly arched and faintly luminous. Greenish like the light of subtle decay.
I waded along there, the dark water pushing my legs gently…
LOHENGRIN
Almost at the top of the spiral, there was a jam-up by one of the holes that lined the way. Some dwarves, some normals. This had to be the key rathole. Veers was beside me. I tried affability:
“Greetings, friends,” I said. Heads turned. It was too dim there to bother smiling. They looked a fair pack of thwarted hounds. I had the lady Chael by the hand. She was trembling as always. I knew she wanted to go back. Her body told me as much.
No one tried to prevent our stooping into the little tunnel. A few yards in, it opened into a small dome. The fat knight stood there, holding a torch. I knew him from the fight on Morgana’s island. He was staring down a slope, like a child’s slide.
“Well,” I said to fatso, “where’s your twisted friend?”
He gazed glumly down the slide.
“I fear all are lost, young knight,” he told me, “as is so often the case when men strive to follow their dreams.”
Veers was now peering down as well. There wasn’t a thing to see. “All are lost?” I wondered. “Who are all?”
“Those who went before fell down this dread pitfall to certain doom. This place is a curse of treachery and death. I regret coming here. Only the spur of need and high plans could have led —”
“That proves little,” I said, thinking a little. An uncommon habit, I was to find, as time went on. “Why should anyone have designed such a thing here?” It wasn’t like a true pitfall. You had to want to jump down.
“For sport or profit, I suppose,” the fat knight returned. “What other motives save maybe love drive men to —”
“Why are you here?” I asked. “What were you looking for?” I glanced at the armored mites who waited silently around the entrance.
“Not to pilgrimage to my untimely death, young sir,” he replied, studying me in the shifting torchglare. “And I advise you now to take counsel with me, for perhaps we two can rescue some profit from this odd expedition by forming a joint enterprise. Yes?” He nodded. He liked the idea. I could see he was an enterprising man.
I pointed the spear at him.
“I don’t need ballast,” I explained. “And I have partners enough.”
“Well, sir, well,” he said.
“They all went below?”
“Your sire. And others of my company and the witch.”
“The witch. That’s right.”
Chael brightened. Blinked, big-eyed.
“She’s fallen down that hole?” she wanted to know.
The fat one nodded, sagely.
“I fear so, young lady. I fear so. A fearful slide it looks and only screams came back when I leaned close my ear, so —”
“She’s fallen,” Chael breathed, looking very pert.
“Don’t grieve so,” I suggested. Of course my father was down there too. But I had no doubts about him. A fortuneteller told me, thinking I’d be pleased, that my father would live to a ripe age and then some. “By the way,” I asked the big sack, “how did you pass that narrow way below?”
“What way?”
“The tiny passageway leading into the hall down there.” Because it simply wouldn’t have been possible.
“We came the top way down.” I’d decided I wanted company. There was no sense going back, and I had no illusions about the likes of Morgana tossing herself away or spilling down into darkness without calculation. I was just losing time up here.
I kicked Veers solidly and he went down the slide headforemost: a long slither like someone swallowing a snake. He cursed and was gone.
I grinned and went more carefully. I sat and eased myself, foot by foot, but that quickly failed, and I was gone. The fat man protested and I heard Chael cry out, but whether because she’d miss me or simply at the prospect of being alone I couldn’t say. Nor would I have wanted to say as I zipped down into that black pit.
PARSIVAL
Whenever I shut my eyes now, the map was fainter, but I saw flickers of lightning in strange echo. I waded to solid shore. Stone. I faced three tunnels. The map seemed to show dimly the middle one as being brighter. Perhaps that was the way. Perhaps I wasn’t half mad from electric shock.
At the narrow entrance I paused, facing an armored figure whose helmet nearly touched the roof. His sword was poised at face level, and I thought the facemask was in the shape of a goat’s head. That might have reminded me of something, but it didn’t. Was this supposed to be the devil himself here in the belly of the world? Probably not.
“Are you mortal?” I asked. No movement or sound. I stepped closer. An empty suit, it seemed. I lightly touched i
t with my swordtip. Clink.
Then it moved, creaking, grinding, strange greenish light flashing in the eyesockets. It was not mortal, obviously. At best an amazing machine. At worse …
I parried the thrust and hit back with the golden sword (the other I left sheathed) and discovered the figure was solid iron. I might as well have chopped at the walls. My forearm ached from the useless blow.
“Well, well, well,” I said. The unliving thing all but filled the passageway.
It cut sidewise with a shriek of steel. It was better than that pathetic ‘guardian’ everyone had overcome in the castle gardens — if indeed this was the same place. Its blow clipped my knee and I staggered into the wall in terrible pain. The bone ground when I moved.
I went back. It lurched forward. I wondered if it could leave the tunnel itself. I had to pass it before the map went out altogether.
“A setback, Parsival,” Morgan said behind me.
“Christ. You followed.” I kept just out of range of that sixfoot blade. The green fire glowed and seemed to sputter within the goathead.
“I have resources,” she allowed.
“It’s time to dredge them up,” I suggested, still backing up.
“You know the way now,” she said. “As I predicted. It came back to you.”
I grunted. The metal monster stirred, a chopping stroke nicked my blade, which unfortunately wasn’t spewing flame and fury just then. It was almost out of the tunnel.
The sound it made in motion was almost worse than the blows. I was limping, my knee on fire. The map was darkening because, I realized with horror, it was the substance of memory itself, so nothing would remain once it glimmered to nothing.
“You’d better do something,” she suggested. Easy to coach from the seats at a list.
“I’ll feed you to it,” I said to her, then snarled at the unliving thing: “You blind lump!” To her, over my shoulder: “If it comes all the way out, we’ll get around it. “
“So it won’t,” she said, and I agreed. I glanced behind her and sure enough there were dim figures struggling along the sandbar, coming from the river. I must have left a scent in the water.
I noted that the eyes were hollow in the goatmask, filled with the sputtering fire. I sheathed my useless blade and drew the other sword. I had an idea. Badly needed one. I reversed the blade and tossed it like a javelin (the way I’d once long ago won my red armor with a speartoss) into the eyeslit. I knew there was no head inside. A perfect shot. The green flared up, but nothing else resulted.
“That was well struck,” she remarked. “Go back then,” I suggested. My knee joint burned and scraped with pain.
The figure was motionless again. Then I had another idea. I stretched out my sword and barely clipped the tip of the other blade. The metal monster ground and screeched forward, took another step at me. Stopped. I touched it again. Same result.
I led it out this way almost to the water’s edge, then ducked around the deadly sidecuts. Morgana skipped in ahead of me. The figure was crashing back towards the tunnel opening. I glimpsed twisted Gobble and his pards struggling up the stone beach. By the time I was inside, the iron guard filled the doorway again, ahead of them. I grinned. Their problem now.
She and I went rapidly down a straight, narrow path.
“I’m hard to beat, just now,” I commented. “The stars must have taken a night off.”
“You think yourself ill-fated, Parsival?”
“Hah,” I grunted, squinting into the hazy, greenish light, wondering what next. “I was born with great Jupiter kissing Venus. But Saturn dressed me in lead armor.”
Suddenly the passageway spiraled, horizontally, in a violent series of ropy twists, like a coiled snake. There was even the carved semblance of the inside of a serpent’s mouth as we entered this section. The floor was suddenly smooth and treacherous as ice. The illumination faded like the map in my mind.
Impossible to walk on without sliding back. The walls were also slick and no help.
“Now what?” I wondered.
I glanced back. No one disturbed the stillness or the blurred glow. “Solve the problem,” she recommended. “This castle is a joke. Like a mad house built for carnival.”
The dying glimmers of the map showed a few more curves and angles, then nothing clear at all.
Even barefoot, for traction, balancing together, we were unable to get around the first turn. We skidded down together and lay panting. My knee throbbed.
“This is nonsense,” I complained.
“No,” she said. “We’re close. You know we’re close.”
“What got me this far has faded.”
Whatever it was that had buoyed me with electric energy had leaked away. I was more myself again. Everything was back to being an effort.
“Take my hand,” she said. “We have to run full speed.”
“Let’s take a nap instead.”
“We’re almost there.”
“Where?”
“Come on. Are you never serious?”
“I’m never not.”
With better traction now, we ran. Our bare feet slapped on the smoothness. We fled into the belly of the snake. We hung on the continuous turning. so delicately. a cough would have plunged us all the way back. The bones in my knee joints ground together.
At the top we tumbled together out the back end of the snake. Shocked. we rolled into a soft. grassy fold of ground. We learned it was daytime outside because pale sunbeams found their way down an open shaft to gleam on this tiny perfectly tended garden. I was amazed by the violet and mellow gold colors hundreds of feet down sheer brick walls. Like being at the bottom of a well.
“Another garden.” I said. “I’d like to know who tends it.”
“Is that important?”
True. It wasn’t. But someone must have been staging all these things. Morgana’s idea was that these were magical machines. Fine. but it was still staged, whether animated by dark spells or subtle gears.
Because now it was a lion crossing the lingering beams of mellow gold sunlight filtering down. A lion chained before the exit. His mane was full and dark, and the big muscles knotted around his forelegs.
“This is absurd.” I said. I drew the golden sword after putting my leather and mail foot gear back on. We walked towards the awesome creature. It watched us approach. No figment. Tail flicked. Ears laid back. Lots of teeth and snuffling breath. “Vanish illusion,” I tried.
I thought I heard voices behind us again. Maybe the guardian had run out of green fire.
“Must I slay this poor beast?” I asked no one special.
I tried circling around it to the door where the chain was pinned. A huge paw nearly took my face off. The following roar hurt like a maceblow. Frustrating. This senseless wandering was worth no creature’s life. I wasn’t about to kill over it.
The slender sorceress dodged past me and stepped close to the deadly creature before I could react. I believed she meant to force my hand. I tried leaping in to chop the massive head except the beast was already down on its belly like a house cat and she was humming to it, stroking the great mane.
I was impressed. The beast rumbled a bass purr. She smiled at me, those hot, dull, blue eyes amused and pleased. “The cats are my family,” she said. “Now I’ve done you a —”
“Service. Which reminds me.” I sheathed my blade. “Did you?”
“Go on,” she commanded. “Hurry.”
I went, still saying:
“But did you do me a service back at the castle?” She heard, but didn’t respond. I was already under the archway into an open place.
I squinted at the outside. High walls in the distance. Massed pine trees growing up to the walls and a wide river to cross. I stood on a shore of bricks. Two thin bridges arched over. The water reflected the soft afternoon sky. A misty sky with sun just behind a cottony wall of clouds.
The last vestiges of the visionary map showed that the right bridge was the way. Morgana was now be
side me.
“Well?” she wondered.
I shrugged.
“I think so,” I replied. “It’s fading.”
“Hurry then.”
“To what?”
I heard the lion roar. Someone yelled back around the bend that led from the beast’s garden to this strange shore. “We’ve come this far,” she said. “It’s fading,” I repeated. I was delighted. I just wanted to get out of here. Finally having come out of that strange darkness in the castle mazes, it all seemed ten times more nonsense than before.
“There’s still no way but forward,” she said.
So we went over the narrow span. I realized the river was fast, but it was hard to tell because there were no rocks and shallows to ripple it.
“This whole business,” I announced about midway, “is really nonsensical. It’s a game. I’ve been through things like that at fairs and carnivals. Traps and tunnels.”
“No,” she told me, “you have not.”
“Who made this place?”
“Ancient folk. This was a holy path. You passed through as we have done or you perished.”
“No less absurd.”
“Say what you like, youth,” she chided, in the manner of old man Merlin himself. Youth. “The power has found you, else you could not have passed the tests.”
I looked back at where the others had appeared in time to see which bridge we took. “Not what I’d call an exclusive guild,” I suggested. “Everyone seems to be getting good grades today.”
She sounded serious. “You have opened the way,” she said.
We arrived on a lovely field of silvery green grass. All the hues had an evanescent quality in the indirect sunglow. A silvery, elusive hint.
“To where?” I asked.
“Not where you think. You are not where you imagine you are.” We strolled up a gradual slope towards the wall of almost blueblack trees.
“Just show me the way out.”
“We’re in the land of the Grail. What they call the Grail, youth.”
“You don’t say, Old One. What do you call it?”
Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II Page 19
