Morgan fled. I was baffled. The spear was lost. What was she running from? My father was chasing the cripple around the rim. The stunted bastard hissed and spat like a cat. My father yelled that he had shoes on this time, whatever that meant. The fog was so thick, I lost sight of both before they were halfway around the hole.
And then I knew (unless the general madness had simply and finally spread to me too) why she’d run. Something came up from the pit. A deeper chill puffed out and tortured the rising mists as if giant wings beat below.
I nearly screamed like a girl. Shivered with more than cold. A shadowy something moved, seemed to reach a long (too long) arm from the pit (arm or maybe a spider’s hooked leg) and groped the air … or maybe nothing but my fear filled the empty smoke with shape …
I didn’t scream, but I followed the witch. And I was sure it was crashing along on my heels as I bolted through the undergrowth, the streaming fog blinding me. I finally jerked to a stop, panting, trying to point my sword in all directions. Something moved … a shadow. “Father,” I yelled. “Father!” I don’t know why. “Father, watch out!”
PARSIVAL
I charged around after that vicious creature. This time I’d end him. I had the golden sword drawn. He had his curved eastern blade ready as he scuttled on his back, but he wanted no part of me that day. My knee still hurt and my poor heel remembered his nasty, biting teeth.
He skittered sidewise, around the low curbing. I tried to pin him to the inside, taking half steps laterally left and right. The golden blade was glowing hot. Then something seemed to rise from the well, looming behind Gobble. For an instant my brain tried to believe it was Veers.
The looming seemed to reach for me. I felt a chill grip in my chest, I felt confusion and a dread, dreary loneliness. No one cared. No one could care. All was barren and meaningless. Nothing but blankness stretching away into eternity. I wanted to end myself, my pitiful little senseless self. I had an urge to cast myself into the pit. End … sleep away the emptiness …
Gobble squealed and flailed his sword at the billowing, icy, terrible, empty doom and then scuttled right past me. I didn’t even care enough to swing at him.
I backed away, fighting the urge to perish under the gaze of that void. Shadows filled with fog spilled over me. I fought the urge, though nothing mattered, all hope and joy were long since swallowed by the doom …
I managed to run and felt better with increasing distance.
“Lohengrin,” I cried, “where are you?” I circled around and away from the pit in a spiral to avoid the shadowy formless feeling that seemed to suck at my vital heat and tug me into hollow darkness.
Thrashed through the flimsy underbrush, shouldered over a tall, rotted pine tree … I didn’t have to look back, I felt the terror coming out of the well, spilling its nothingness, milling along the barren earth seeking me, seeking all warm and small living things to drain.
“Father,” I thought I heard, muffled, to my left. I cut a new arc through the gray blindness, waist-deep in rattling reds. Kept climbing…
LOHENGRIN
Whatever it was, it was coming. I heard my father yell, but it was hard to gauge distance and place. He didn’t need me. When did he ever need me?
I ran, tripped, weaved, dodged thickets, trampled the raspy dryness, ankles aching from the stony, rutted ground. There had to be an end to the mist. That made sense. I ran. Find sunshine, I kept telling myself. Find sunshine …
PARSIVAL
I followed the closest crashing sounds up the harsh slope. I wondered if I were running towards the wall. Hoped not. The cold grayness kept pace with me, tingled at my back. I didn’t look over my shoulder. The ground leveled off. No wall yet. The dead vegetation ended, the fog thinning slightly, bare ground now. A tree here and there, green with life. Behind it looked like massed smoke, almost solid, rolling slowly, gray to almost black in spots. Something in there, I kept feeling, hinting its unnatural shape.
I ran. Something ahead … a woman’s outline in the fading fog. Morgana, I assumed. Up a short, steep slope and then a spine of ridge, and then nothing under my feet. I hit dirt flat on my face. Cursed. When I stood up I realized it was a road. It was clear in one direction, so I went that way. Sunset over the hills, over the dense pine trees that closed in the road.
Looking back, I saw that the fog had already walled off the road. There was no sign of the woman, if I’d seen right. All in all, I thought, scornfully, it had been a wonderful, priceless, peerless experience.
I decided to wait at the outskirts of that peculiar fogbank. I sat with my back to a massive tree. The sweet pine tang soothed me. Brought back a sweet feeling of Christmas. It had been a long time between Christmases.
I realized I was hungry and weary … Somewhere along into twilight (the fog simply hung across the road, unmoving) I dozed fitfully. My dreams were nothing worth sharing.
When my eyes opened, it was bright gray and I thought morning and the mist was surrounding me, the shadowy something, shapeless, near, reaching for me with numbing hands or claws.
I was frozen, trying to yell or move. I couldn’t … then suddenly could. And when I did, it was dead dark with phantasmal moonlight outlining the road and showing the strange blankness cutting across trees and road like ghostly carved stone rather than vapor. Bad dreams … bad dreams …
“Parsival,” a wheezy voice was saying from the shadows around me, “if I am not in error.”
JESCHUTE
Days and nights ran together. It seemed always to be raining. People were mostly nice. I was often fed and sheltered as I wandered through the country. My head cleared sometimes and I wondered where to go and what to do.
Somehow I kept moving. My thoughts would clear for a time and then I’d drop back into a waking kind of doze. People took me for a holy pilgrim, I think. I was, after all, barefoot, in rags, and out of my senses …
And then (I don’t know when) someone kept saying a name at me out of the rain and mist and long past, as I was stumbling along a line of soggy huts, somewhere in a steep, coarse, rocky countryside.
I stopped in the rutted roadway and stared at a small knight in armor, helmetless, rain beading on his face and oiled hair. He had loaves of wet bread under his arm and linked sausage strung around his neck like a necklace. His face was round and red. I supposed the name he spoke was mine.
“Jeschute,” he said wondering, rocking his head like a bird. “Is it you in truth?”
Because he’d loved me once, it turned out. Long ago. I never knew it. And because of it he saw through the years and weariness and madness in my face and perceived the look he once treasured. It is strange to have been loved by someone you never loved in return.
“Perhaps,” I said to him. “Perhaps.”
LAYLA
The bastards … the bastards … I thought I’d find ways to hurt them except … except … my daughter stopped weeping and bleeding and slept most of the time now and I cradled her head as when she was a babe so sweet and new and pure of eye… I located another skin of wine and told someone (or maybe no one) how I’d be revenged …
HOWTLANDE
Waiting became senseless. I retraced the way we entered, leaving the dark hole where they’d slid into mystery and no doubt (or so I believed then) doom.
I took the nice, nervous girl with me and the rest of the little men back up the rest of the winding ramp to the castle roof, then down the outer stair and ladder we’d propped up to the dank, foggy ground again. I circled until I found the high road again. I was toying with the idea of finding King Arthur and asking for work. I had no illusions about finding Clinschor again …
LOHENGRIN
I fled fast. I suppose I might have circled around that gigantic castle that was mad as nightmares inside and looked for Chael, but I didn’t. I found nothing but trees and rocks. Followed the natural slope of the land and crossed a road twice before I realized it. A rutted, overgrown way. By then it was nearly night.
Walking clear of the fog, I stepped off the road figuring to wait on morning. I felt strong and confident again. Nothing mysterious or otherwise had followed me. Somewhere there would be opportunities. Contemplating the possibilities, I heard muffled voices ahead in the trees. Perhaps, I reasoned, that would be an opportunity.
PARSIVAL
A large figure stood over me, outlined like a flat cut-out against the faintly luminous, moonstained road. My hand was on my sword. I blinked and squinted and felt the fog closing in. “Parsival, let us make fresh amends. I would wager the balance has rocked to a stop between us.” That could have been only one windbag on earth. I yawned, perhaps only from weariness.
“Howtlande,” I said.
“Yes. The very same. Baron Howtlande at your service.”
“Yes would have been enough.” I sighed. “I have seen no wells near at hand.” I must have seemed regretful. He shifted uneasily. “Now, now,” he said, “I stand before you intent and ready to —”
A slight figure I first took for Morgana had come closer. “Have you seen Sir Lohengrin?” she wanted to find out.
“I lost him at the pit of profound nothing much.” I stood up. I sensed others in the shadows. We were probably surrounded by dwarves again. I was used to it. “Where’s my precious clubfoot?”
“I know not where Gobble lurks,” the fat man said. “Nor the whereabouts of your esteemed son.”
“Esteemed,” I said. “My son is what is hidden by a horse’s tail, in general.”
“There’s a terror on the road,” she said. “I feel it.”
“Indeed,” the Baron (I wondered where he got his title) agreed, “I felt something strange … yes … a grim sense of —”
“Tell your little killers to come out,” I said. “I won’t crack their skulls just yet.”
“Ah,” said Howtlande, “you’re a man to be respected, as I’ve always said. A man of keen perception and nice judgment. Yet they are none of mine, properly speaking, I —”
“Yes,” I said. “Yes.”
The wall of fog was very close. What’s more, an elongated arm of it seemed to reach along the road towards us. The girl turned and stifled a cry. Someone came running out of the edge of that ominous and somehow purposeful cold smoke.
We all headed for the road. I expected the mites to pounce, but they simply filtered out of the trees and joined the rest of us in time to greet puffing and pale Lohengrin. He’d dropped his icy pose, for once.
“Lord Jesus,” he said, breathless, “I was touched … touched! …”
“By what?” I asked. He backed past us, staring at the mass of fog. He shook his head. “Something touched me … cold … cold…” He shivered slightly.
The girl tugged at him, but he didn’t appear to notice. The shadow was coming in long streamers of mist that suggested soft, sentient hands. It seemed to move, just when you weren’t quite watching.
“It sucks at your soul,” I said, thoughtfully.
The fat man was sweating in the cool air. He kept licking his lips. “We best make some sensible plan,” he said, staring as if half moonstruck.
“Plans?” my son said. He was already moving, the girl following as if attached by an invisible line, so that it seemed almost as if he were trying to flee from her and not the inexplicable horror we all were moving from a moment later.
And every time I glanced back down the twisting, climbing, falling road, the uncanny fog blurred closer, following faster than the breeze. We were able to keep just ahead without really running. Howtlande puffed and sweated. “What are men like ourselves,” he wanted to know, “what are we if not helpless …” Puff. “… without good steeds under us? …” Puff. “I’m sick with walking and fretting on foot, pursued …” Puff. “Pursued by all manner of madness…”
My son and the tandem lady kept the pace ahead of us. The little men had taken to the woods, I think. The fog came on, flowing through the forest on either side like a phantastic tide, as well as following the rutted way.
JESCHUTE
Sometimes I remembered things very clearly, riding with the man who said he’d loved me long ago. He said he didn’t love me anymore, but that my husband did, and that loving me had made him mad. This fellow was loyal to my husband and still served him, as best he could, in his madness. This knight had an idea that the sight of me might restore Orilus to his senses. But what it might do to mine wasn’t at issue.
Because I didn’t like thinking about my husband. The memories were disturbing. Whatever it had been at first, in the end it was nightmare. His pale, cold, furious face, unable to forgive a sin never actually committed, was like ice in my memory.
I remembered fragments as we rode: seeing him lying shattered in the bright gusts of gold and red leaves by the black earth of a hoof-chewed trail in thin, cool autumn light, as if he’d been blown to his destruction by the wind within him, the bitter gales of pride and fury … And the blond, silly knight in armor red as blood, telling me something long lost before he drifted off across the windy fields …
“Orilus,” I muttered, “sweet Mary … Orilus …”
HOWTLANDE
Don’t look back, I kept telling myself as we fled along that foul road. The hellish, clammy doom-fog seeped around us as we climbed through steep, rocky hills. It was impossible, of course. Bah, I hate wizardry. It’s an emptiness that can destroy a man better than a keen ax. And how can you tell it from madness? A question for Church thinkers.
I cannot tell how far we ran. Time was swallowed into edgeless twilight that must have been daytime. No inns, no villages, no castles… The road twisted and rippled like a trodden worm. The trees and brush were supernaturally dense, walling us into a gradually narrowing track. Eventually there was nothing but a lumpy path overgrown from disuse. Sawgrass whipped our legs.
LOHENGRIN
The mist boiled around us. My feet hurt. The girl was gasping and I was half dragging her now. I heard my father and the fat knight puffing and clinking along behind.
Suddenly there was no more path. Side by side, my father and I chopped the small growth with that chill deadliness at our backs. There was no choice but to run for it. I’d rather face a solid opponent. I was very, very tired and that made it harder to deal with.
PARSIVAL
Who’d ever heard of a road just ending in nowhere, I kept asking myself as I struggled along beside Lohengrin, hacking brush and dodging trees.
And then we were trapped. The woods ended abruptly and the moon gleamed on a huge embankment topped by a high Roman wall. That meant a good highway on the other side. I was pretty sure I knew where we were. Amazing to have tome so far on foot. The road that ran along the wall branched a few miles farther on and went directly past our home.
We ran for the embankment. The darkness in the mists billowed, seemed to stride at us on spidery limbs: tall, dark wrong-jointed limbs reaching and scuttling. The guardian. The drinker of souls.
“Aii,” cried the fat man, scrambling at the packed dirt. “We’re doomed!”
“Climb, shitlump,” I suggested. I paused to watch them scramble. My son was actually helping the girl. I was moved. There was hope for the world yet.
I turned to face the horror. That was the least I could do. We weren’t all going to make it. The streaming cords of mist beat like breakers into the massive wall. The walking darkness was among us.
With an impotent feeling (something I was getting used to) I brandished the golden blade. No sparks sputtered. No lightning flailed the smoky air.
I thought my bounding heart would burst from my chest. My nerves screamed. My body wanted to turn and fling itself against the mass of earth and stone where the others were clambering towards the top. Another instant and it would have. But a limb of night flicked out and touched my forehead. I felt the shadows (like ink in water) flow into my brain.
I fought. I screamed NO with all my soul. Eternity seemed to drift past soundlessly while I strained. No earth, no sky, only formless empty blan
k blackness. I fought to fill it with color and brightness and I wielded pictures, memories, hopes, dreams of sweet days … instinctively, I fought with all the brightness in me …
I waved the sword and slashed at I know not what, and, still fighting, lost everything …
LOHENGRIN
I don’t know how I gained the top of that wet, slippery wall with the damned girl clinging to me like a babe to its dam. But I made it. And so did the fat man. Armor and all. Well, it was light mail.
I peered back down and caught my breath. Chael sobbed and trembled. Fat panted. My father was lost in the surf of mist. I decided he must have run parallel before he climbed. I assumed he was ahead or behind us on the road. I couldn’t see ten feet either way. Well, I’d keep on north. And hope Father went south.
LAYLA
Hopeless … hopeless … hopeless … “Your husband is coming,” the crippled madman was saying to me. He dangled in his litter, one twisted leg swinging free as they carried him through the cool drizzle to the parapet’s edge.
The hills were saturated with ground fog. The day was dull, overcast. Two men held my arms because my legs rippled a little like willow wands. I saw better with one eye shut. That was secret and funny. I may have giggled. I think someone slapped me, far away. Dull … The madman kept talking, but I was busy trying to catch the light rain in my upturned mouth. Something tasted like salt and metal. Blood, not rain. I wanted to sleep again, because there was a dream I liked. I tried to recall it. The effort or the failure made me sad. I told them all about it.
Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II Page 21
