“Father?” she repeated.
“Not far, child.” Frowned and murmured. “No more than eternity away.”
“Your father,” Alienor put in, “has come to riddling like a mystic hermit since we found him.”
“It was this hermit, woman, did the finding.”
“Oh?”
“Aye. Right enough. And were not easy as finding shit in a cowbarn.”
“A sweet comparison.”
“Well, just, anyway.”
“Oh? And were we not where we were when you come upon us you’d not have found us.”
He frowned and smiled and shook his head as if struck.
“Woman,” he said, “there’s no denying that, I think.”
“So, were it not for where we chose to be you’d have missed us.” He couldn’t tell how amused she actually was. She always could sound a little fierce.
“No question,” he murmured, peering around.
“So,” she said, with a twinkle of triumph, “without our help you’d not have done the thing at all.” She smiled then.
“I found nothing quite the same,” he said, and she glanced at him, faintly unsure of his full meaning.
“Do you mean to forever hold that little business up to me?” She was almost coy.
“Little business.” He brushed the grayed hair back from his sweaty forehead. “A springtime bud in winter, more like.”
“What? Winter? You say I’m come to that? Hah. Oaf.” She cracked her knuckle into the side of his head. “Oaf. So you make a hag of me already?”
“Well, well, autumn then, woman.” He was grinning now, faintly. “In any case, finally you admit it in full.” He wasn’t sure himself how much it actually mattered to him. But not knowing bothered him, suspecting bothered him.
“Ah, do I indeed, Broaditch?”
“I’m hungry,” said Torky.
“We’ll eat soon,” she assured him.
“That long-faced chap, that Lampic,” Broaditch was saying, “he showed his thoughts in his eyes.” Spat and pursed his lips. “His squinty eyes,” he amended.
“And what do thoughts come to?”
“The turnip comes from the seed.”
She chuckled, reaching down into the foodsack now, tilting it over her shoulder.
“Broaditch. At our time of life? You act like a young swain jealous of his first love’s every look.”
“Well, well …”
“I might profit from this mood had we time and place at hand.”
He stopped again. The weedy grasses here reached nearly to Torky’s face. His sister was over her head.
“Sit down, everybody,” Broaditch said. “We wait and see what we see.”
“What’s in your mind?” Alienor asked. He shrugged. She frowned. “There’s nothing to be done about those folk. No sense to think on it.”
He nervously thumped the spearshaft into the soft earth.
“I hate these things,” he said.
“I know,” she said.
“Mama,” Tikla asked, sitting crosslegged, braiding a few long, yellow-green strands of grass, “can I have water? I’m hot.”
“Stay in the shade,” her mother responded.
“I’m sick of having to see these things,” Broaditch was saying. “I hate it.”
She touched his shoulder with her weathered cheek. Squeezed his thick arm.
“I know,” she repeated, shutting her eyes against the bright pressure of sun. “But there’s nothing to be done. Ah, my gruff love, we’ve had many years, you know … many years …”
“Can I have some cheese?” Torky asked, plucking at the sack as she set it down.
“Ali,” her husband was saying, “I have been led around and around … each time I followed fate … each time I came full circle …”
“And found me again.” She released him and sat down among the warm softness and little violet flowerpoints. She unwrapped the wheel of dry cheese. The children knelt close to her now.
“Yes,” he murmured, twisting the spear into the ground. The children were both at the cheese. “Yes …”
“You’re sad, father,” Torky said, chewing, eyes clear, grayish.
“A little, my son,” his father answered. “Because I let the world mark me.” He almost smiled for a moment. “If you can wake each morn and forget yesterday, you’ll grieve but lightly in your life.” He looked tenderly at them both, Tikla involved with a bite too big for her mouth. “Do you understand?”
Torky was serious. Stopped chewing. Blinked. Watched his father’s face almost gravely.
“I think so,” he said.
“Let each day pass like the dreams of the night,” Broaditch went on, leaning his weight into the spear. “They too seem real enough until you wake.” Alienor was looking at him now.
“That’s fine advice,” she remarked.
“Don’t mock me, woman. Well I know my weakness …” He broke off and held his hand out, cautioning them to stillness. He poised, listening to an oncoming swishing of grasses. He peered over the foliage and saw the flapping robe, pale, flat face streaked with blood, the sucking mouth as the man rushed across the dense, sunsoaked field. Broaditch readied his spear, thinking:
If the others are at his heels, I’ll trip them to hell!
Then the priestlike man staggered through a wall of bushes, stumbled to one knee and stayed there, puffing, staring at Broaditch with disgust, fury, and fear until he recognized him.
“You were … with us on … the road …” he gasped and Broaditch nodded.
“Your life seems a miracle, clerk,” Broaditch said, thoughtfully, aware now there was no pursuit.
“There were busy with their booty.” the man seemed relatively unshaken by events. He seemed to take no account of his slashed, swollen head or anything else but getting on: his dark eyes seemed to be looking past whoever or whatever happened to be before them and his body made little, impatient movements while still.
“They were your friends, back there?” Broaditch wondered as Alienor came closer and the children ate and watched.
“My brothers and sisters,” the man answered, getting up, eyes, Broaditch thought, almost like holes, staring past and slightly over their heads.
“That was your family there?” Alienor wondered, skeptical.
“My brothers and sisters in the holy cause.”
“Ah,” said Broaditch, comprehensively. He shut one eye.
I’m ready for any measure of madness, he thought. My whole life has prepared me for it.
“Nothing was said about it on the road,” Alienor put in.
“It’s not a subject for chatter, woman,” was the reply. A faint tic rippled across his cheek as he spoke. “God’s true people led by a great man. He’s gathering his flock.”
“Ah,” Broaditch repeated, not quite rolling his eyes.
“I thought all the great men,” Alienor said, “had, praise Mary, passed from us. They must grow back like wild weeds in a garden.”
The dark eyes with their invisible pupils flicked at her accompanied by a fluttering twitch. She noticed there were no smile wrinkles at his lips.
“Our leader is no weed, woman. Say, rather, a rare and precious flower.”
Both of Broaditch’s eyebrows went up at this intelligence.
“A precious flower?” he murmured.
“A man inspired.” the black, bottomless eyes were on him now, for the first time. “Follow me and you’ll see for yourselves.”
“Then, for a time,” Broaditch responded, “we tread the same way. There’s no harm in a direction, all else lying equal.”
“Which it never does,” Alienor interjected. “Children! Don’t wander!” Torky was drifting into a berry bush, whipping his willow wand at the blossoms. They reached the road and waded into the rich, golden dust. Broaditch glanced back and there was nothing behind, just the lush shimmer of the day.
“Come on, my doves,” he said, still amused. Grinned and spat to the side. The man wen
t on straight, a little ahead, as if he heard nothing, the dust billowing like smoke around him.
II
The pale man was virtually naked as he crossed the fields. His big bare feet were calloused and filthy, rent with scabs and sores. The faded, tattered shreds of a robe fluttered around the bony limbs. His pale, washed-out, grayish eyes were perpetually widened and resembled pools of still water on a dull day. His left hand clutched a warped stick. His hair was greasy and knotted like a mad bird’s nest, the boy thought, watching him come out of the tree shadows, step on and then over a low wall that ran partway along the cart-rutted roadway that twisted like a dusty scar through the green rolls and dips of countryside. The man rushed on; that is, the angles of his body and clothes seemed to rush, and he leaned as if into the violent wind of his passage, everything moving rapidly, tireless, in frantic suspension, although (the boy noted) his forward progress was actually slow. The energy that shook and danced the skinny body seemed to scatter his motion in all directions. He moved as if yanked by an invisible leash. In fact, as if to bear out the simile, his head and neck seemed to be wrenched forward at the onset of each somehow unwilling step.
Behind the boy (who was perhaps nine) a tanned, bright blond young woman in her late teens rose from where she’d been washing her face, dipping the water from a foamy thread of stream. She stared after the ragged, bony figure, whose gait was such a stiffness and struggle, sloshing through the fine dust, shadow a black, jagged shock across the glowing greenness.
“He walks like a blind man,” she remarked, “with the saint’s twitching.”
“Mayhap he is a holy man,” the boy suggested, wiping dull-brown locks from his eyes.
“Or a village loon.” She plucked his rough peasant’s shirt. “We ought to go on. I dread to rest too long in any place until we are farther from the ruined lands.”
“Is the death come this far, lady, do you think?” he asked as they went on roughly north towards the rock-boned, green foothills beyond the peaceful, hot, motionless valley.
“It’s not just the sickness,” she told him, “that we need fear, boy.”
“What then?”
Her expression was like a shadow and a shield for a moment. Her eyes went away, inwardly …
“Never mind, boy,” she told him. “Come along. It’s enough when troubles are here, I think, without calling them on by name.”
She took his hand as they walked alongside a dense wall of trees until they found a break and pushed through the dazzle of shaking leaves and sunlight and pieces of shadow …
“Do you know where we’re bound?” the boy asked her, following the loose shimmer of her pale blue gown that was dusty, stained and torn at the hem.
“Never mind that either,” she said. “You’re all questions, boy.”
The pale, ragged man was violently going around a long, empty curve of road, eyes wide, shocked-looking. The stick cut and twitched at the air when his hand would spring suddenly to life as if to punctuate some obscure inner process otherwise unreflected. He jerked on and on, the dust gradually gathering in his hair, blurring his face and body … and all he saw was the brightness before him passing steadily in dips and leaps, saw the banked, white and yellow flowers on the slopes; loosely sketched poplar trees; bright, vacant sky … shifting shadows … until finally the sun was at his back and his own angled, jerking shape gradually grew out before him as if his substance flowed into darkness and he thought nothing, merely watching out of calm yet hungry emptiness as he was seemingly dragged along by a force oblivious to bone and blood’s frailty, until his shadow and the night were one and he reeled a little, the stored, burning sunlight beating in his head, the stick jerking, gesticulating … then the rising moon spread new shadows and he staggered straight ahead as the road looped away. Then suddenly stepped over an edge and fell silently into a slash of darkness that might have been bottomless, and he still seemed to be walking as he dropped, the stick fanning vacancy …
III
The knight was young, fairly tall, wearing chipped, weathered red and black armor, lacking a helmet. His black, dusty, tightly curled hair resembled a Moor’s, the rawboned woman thought, watching him through the underbrush that clustered on the slope before the little wooden bridge. She gripped the pitchfork tightly. Beside her crouched a short, goatish man in his fifties holding a spear with a cracked tip. There were other women, a few older men and teenage boys and girls hiding in the brush and willows that overhung the stream and path. It was an ideal spot and when the stranger was well out on the narrow, railless span a dozen or so of the motley ambushers fired and heaved and lobbed a volley of stones and makeshift javelins that twisted in flight and went end over end. One old man, as he let fly, fell forward down the slope. The missiles were rattling and splashing down everywhere, one, then another ringing lightly off his armor. The wrong end of a pointed stick struck him in the throat, puffing out his cheeks as the people scrambled, cheering (for some reason), and by the time they were jammed shoulder-to-shoulder on the narrow span he’d recovered enough to draw his sword and fan a single cut that sheared away two out-thrust spears and sent the leaders piling back, screaming, skirts flapping, white beards flopping. A little girl tossed a rock and scurried off, and at the end of the bridge (as the others tripped and skidded, slipped and rolled for the undergrowth) the big woman with the pitchfork and a bent old crone with a carving knife stood their ground together, the old one snarling:
“Curse all thieving bastards! You put no fear in a good woman!”
The knight seemed puzzled. Let his point fall and rubbed his throat where he’d been hit. Swallowed experimentally.
“What means this?” he wondered. “What folk are you, to use me thus?”
Some of the bolder hesitated now on the slope and under the willows that dryly shook the burning sunlight.
“And who be you, then, sir?” the big woman asked. “If not a brigand or worse.”
“Ah, well put,” said the crone in a voice like coughing, brandishing her knife, a little wasp of a woman with steel-colored eyes, threatening him almost symbolically. The rest were waiting partly in peace, fear and menace … “Who be you?”
“I?” the armored man frowned. Knit his eyebrows. One hand unconsciously fingered a raw, uneven scar alongside his right eye. “Why I am …” Broke off. His bare fingers flicked sweat from his eyes. “Never mind that,” he said, staring, then starting forward and all but the two rippled back as if a wind blew them, even the old one giving a step or two, painfully stooping and, as he passed, flailing the blade in his wake. The long woman just stood there, watchfully.
“Cowards!” raged the crone. “You’re all cowards! God curse you all for cowards!”
The knight marched on, surrounded at an impotent distance by the ragged peasants, some raged, some pleaded … some children were already playing.
“Go away! Go away!” a little girl screamed.
“Mercy, lord,” importuned an ancient man.
“Good folk,” the knight said, “I’m hungry and thirsty and have come far.”
“More will follow,” the crone coughed after them. “You’ll see. Feed one dog and the wolves follow!”
He stopped at the well, surrounded at a safe distance. Drew water for himself and leaned his sword on the stones. The people were quieter now. The crone was still coming across the grassless stretch of field, hobbling, knife flashing the fierce, steady summer light.
“I don’t understand all this,” he was saying. “I’ve come a long way and much … much is clouded in my brain.” Drank deeply. “I’m alone, as you see. None follow me.”
“What do you want?” a voice asked from the crowd.
He was staring at the road that veered under the trees beyond the village and vanished. His hand touched his hurt skull again.
The barn was behind him and one of the boys was standing on the big stone to get a better view.
“To eat,” the knight was saying. “Rest …”
&nbs
p; Rest from time, he thought, dark eyes troubled. He kept finding strange things in his mind: pictures … words … things inexpressible as longings, too … He sighed and stared at the road, the dark bluish tree shadows barring it …
IV
“You needn’t bind this one,” Howtlande said, pointing to the short, soft-faced woman who was staring, numbly, straight ahead, not even trying to cover her breasts where the cloth was ripped away. The sacklike garment hung to the ankles, streaked blood showing on her thighs through the rents. Skalwere was knotting the ropes on a sullen, chunky girl’s wrists and looping them to the next in line, a weeping, thin red-haired woman. “Get them moving,” he went on, staring meditatively at one of the peasant men who was face down in the ditch, legs uptilted as if he were diving into the earth, up to his eyes in his own caking bloodmuck.
Howtlande was sitting on the mule. The bulk of his men started straggling ahead in drifting and approximate line. No one even bothered to joke about the women now among the twenty-five or so bandits. Most, he reflected, were masterless men-at-arms, with a few gallows birds and that one, odd, actual knight. The only other knight besides himself in the band. A darkhaired, longjawed, dour middle-aged bastard who told you nothing in any conversation and was unmatched in battle viciousness. Howtlande felt certain he would know the name if he ever were to learn it. He’d only asked once and the eyes had looked at him like dark stones as the fellow said:
“You have the sword.” Voice hard and smooth. “Why trouble further? Call your own horse your own way.”
Howtlande had readily agreed, though he hadn’t tried calling that horse anything just yet. But he couldn’t help speculating about the possible past … he was well-trained, that showed at once, a perfect captain. He must have served kings; perhaps even his own former master, the ball-less wizard.
Hah, he thought, who finally ran short of spells, too … the cringing son-of-a-bitch, I don’t see how he ever took me in to begin with … well, he took enough others. There’s no such thing as a lonely disgrace, it’s always shared with someone …
The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) Page 2
