The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3)

by Richard Monaco

  “What?”

  “Medusa with words …”

  “What?”

  “Turned men to stone with talking at them …” Howtlande heaved onto his side with a vast shifting of flesh and shadow.

  “What things did I do?” Lohengrin asked, then waited … was rewarded by a long, shuddering snore …

  So he sat there watching the coals glow and soften. All the twigs had sunk deep down into the general, dimming mound. It pulsed in the drafting air like, he didn’t quite think, a failing heartbeat …

  There was nothing, just the vague spill of violet embers now, that seemed a trick of the sight … the sticky, lightless night … snores close and far … insects screeching in the trees … and he woke to find he was still sitting there, slumped forward, face near the vague coals and soaked-in heat. As though forming there he saw what he knew must be Clinschor’s long, bony, pale face and big cat’s eyes; silly, uptwisted moustache. He was standing on a hilltop in mists or smoke, grayish robes fluttering as he declaimed (silent in vision or memory) and gesticulated with one violent, abrupt arm … and then sound and words, the booming voice close behind him, Clinschor’s voice, saying: All my secrets are yours, Lohengrin …

  He knew he had to be asleep now, saw the beautiful woman again (mother, he thought) in a long, pale gown, bare feet flicking up the hem, holding a single candle whose flame tossed wild shadows along the stone wall (he knew he was a child, just awakened, on his way back to bed, a urine droplet hitting his leg as he stopped and nervously held himself there; he’d just been to the bucket), turning into a chamber he knew wasn’t theirs (because he’d turned left as always coming out of his room in the stone stillness, through the long, rattling snores of his nurse, padding along the dim, moonstreaked corridor past the empty doors that he never would look into at night and open places where the stairs rose and sank into obscurity, moving quietly in his flannel sleeprobe, thinking the kitchen is only one more bend away, already tasting the soft cheese that always hung from the second arch, bravely ignoring the darkness at his back). He hesitated, rubbing his eyes, then went over. The door was shut and he stood there a few moments (or minutes even, he’d never be sure), then pushed it lightly and it swung inwards with one sharp creak, except he thought it was repeating again and again so he nearly fled and then, chilled, sinking within himself, stared through the blurring of moonbeams at the window arch and saw her face tilted back on the pillow, the bed creaking and the strange, bearded face seeming to float above hers until he registered the arched bodies, gleaming skin, creaking, rocking shadows … He stood in silence, stared, felt something stirring down there, shocking, surprising him, and his hand went to the heat and shock, something new opening as if the cold stones he stood on were sinking away into fathomless night depths … he wasn’t even thinking about it yet and then her voice, an endless sobbing moan that he somehow knew wasn’t pain, and by then he was already running back, bends flying past, air rushing at his ears with the pound pound pound of stricken blood …

  “Mother,” he murmured, half into and out of his sleep, remembering his father too-smooth-shaven, light-haired, greenish-blue eyes brooding, inward (he always thought), stubborn, stonehard …

  Father.

  No.

  But father …

  No.

  Will you teach me to …

  When I get back.

  Gone. And then to her:

  You don’t love him, mother.

  Be still, son.

  You don’t there’s no love he’s always gone … I saw you … I saw …

  Woke full up. Sat there staring as the images fled. Let himself sink back onto his side, the warm hush of night filling his ears …

  XVI

  Broaditch leaned into it as the slope steepened, gripping the bar exactly like a Chinese coolie (though the simile would have been lost on him), tugging the flatbed wagon into the depthless gray morning, sky a dull wall above the hills. He went on steadily, wincing once as an uneven wheel jounced over a stone.

  Alienor and the children followed a little behind, lean Pleeka strode ahead while the ragged, plaguestruck man lay on his back in the wagon and flopped with the bumps. He hadn’t stirred since speaking his last the previous morning. After he’d toppled on his face Broaditch had located the vehicle, refitted both wheels, telling Alienor (who’d been dangerously silent on the whole subject):

  “We can always use it later for something.”

  And she:

  “Aye. We can load all the wandering madmen we pass on it. Save then I must pull it.”

  “Why so, woman?” He enjoyed these exchanges.

  “Because you’ll have to lie there too, being one of them.”

  He’d grinned and felt warm, for some reason …

  Well, he was now thinking, I couldn’t leave him to die. He weighs no more than a man of straw and how such a body made all that voice …

  “How about you lend your back here?” Broaditch called ahead to Pleeka, who didn’t turn.

  “I don’t want him,” he said.

  “Not even to swell the ranks of your faithful crusaders? He looks a fair choice man. Sound of wind and brain.” Chuckled.

  “You’re the one finds him so precious,” Pleeka returned. “Truemen want the living, not the dying …” Then murmured inaudibly. “The best of us, at least … the best …”

  “What’s that? But what do the falsemen want?” Felt a twinge in his lower back and carefully adjusted his leaning stride.

  Be this the first pinch of old age? he asked himself.

  Was just topping the little rise leaving the deserted village and valley behind them. The day was going to be hot. The flick of pain didn’t repeat.

  “That’s your business, fellow,” Pleeka said, not turning.

  “How far is it?” Torky asked. He had just come up beside the clunking wagon, half-trotting, half-skipping, walking backwards now, arms extended at his sides.

  “To where, son?” his father inquired, glancing behind at his burden: the man still lay perfectly flat, filthy, feet wobbling beyond the rags, a few, he thought, happy flies circling and settling in.

  “Which is what he wants to know,” Alienor put in.

  “Woman,” he told her, tapping his forehead with a blunt thumb, “there’s a picture here and I’ll know it when I see it again.”

  Because he intended to find that tiny kingdom again where he’d been a serf under Parsival’s mother … if it still existed …

  After how many years? … Yet as fair a place as any to make for …

  They were never happy, my brother always said so, Leena was thinking, remembering, crossing the field beside a wall of pines: dense to the ground their bluish, hushed energy dulled by the sunless, tin-gray, hot, sticky day. Her feet and calves were sore but she kept the pace, goading the boy through his complaints, because she knew they weren’t far enough yet and she wasn’t going to risk either plague or capture.

  They always were fighting … why am I thinking about this? Lost days … Lohengrin was older so I think it hurt him more …

  She didn’t want to stop because then she’d have to think about what they were going to do next …

  Hills and woods and hills and more hills … my poor brother … poor Lohengrin …

  “No,” she’d said to him, “don’t go for then I’ll be alone here.”

  And he, hookfaced, furious, eyes hard and remote like dark stones under shallow, still water, she’d thought, sitting his thicklegged black horse, sun spilling blood-red over the western hills behind him, saying:

  “Then get out of here, Leena.”

  “How can I?”

  They were alone beyond the outer wall. The stones, she’d thought, seemed smeared with sun’s blood.

  There was always blood everywhere, she thought now, tilting herself up the hill, the boy laboring in front, drifting from side to side, ready (she knew) to complain any second, and she prepared to say: No, keep on … she wanted to halt, drop in her
aching tracks but the blood was behind like a creeping, tidal wall. Always blood and the shadows and loneliness … and those men … those men … she refused to think about that, or about where they were actually going, because the first thing was distance and time, which were the same thing only so long as you kept moving, she thought, since time was no friend when you were still, waiting, chained to blackness or cold stone … back … back to where her father had lived, find it somehow … perhaps … perhaps … distance and time …

  “Leena, can we —” the boy started to pant, rocking his head from side to side.

  “No! Go on.” He said nothing more but she repeated: “No.”

  “Please don’t go, my brother,” she’d said at the horse and man shape, a motionless, dark sculpture in the burning, dying light, the road winding down and away stained by the ruby glowing that fired his black armor (the blood touches each of us it’s a marking I know it’s in my eyes too, she’d thought) and she knew he didn’t really see her.

  “I want to find him,” he’d said, cold, furious, the light bleeding and old.

  “Father? Is that —”

  “No,” he’d said. “No.”

  “I don’t under —”

  “All of them, then.” His hand was on the hilt of his sword where the light dripped. “Those sons-of-bitches … all of them … I’ll teach them something.”

  So melancholy, she thought now, and then he was gone too like father … mother was always wet-eyed … no one was happy … always going … going …

  Hollow-eyed mother, Layla, flesh purpled beneath where the creases showed in the candlelight, brushing her hand at her loose hair, smoothing it, swaying a little across the table.

  Mother, she remembered, you didn’t cry that time and you were always crying …

  “But he didn’t tell me,” she’d said.

  “It matters not,” Layla’d said.

  “I said please stay.”

  “Yes,” her mother’d replied, staring, swaying, and from the bedchamber the deep voice she didn’t really like to have to hear called something she wouldn’t register or recall and her mother said: “Yes ...” again. The deep, male voice.

  “I asked him if he went to find father.”

  Layla laughed dryly, without smiling. The flames moved and ran like blood on the red silken robe as she swayed and caught the winestains at her mouth. The male voice.

  “Wait,” Layla said, “I’m just coming.”

  “Mother …”

  “Look for him,” she said and didn’t even laugh this time, bloodlight rippling …

  And then time went past and she didn’t recall much and then coming out of the sewing room holding a candle and the shock, the shadows moving in the hall, crashing and cries, a servant staggering past, mouth open, full of blood, his silver hairs parted with a neat, dark gash, the whiteness chipped and he fell, vanished into the shadows that moved and there were big men and stairs fleeing beneath her and terrible sounds, shadows, swords, and her mother shouting from above somewhere and the man, the bearded man, falling out of a sheet (he must have wiped his blood with it), she watching as he lurched and twisted, feet still tangled, body spouting like a fountain (so many holes), like, she’d thought, the saint on the church altar sprouting arrows (she used to stare at it during mass), neat red arcs spilling gracefully from his curved and tranquil form … the nakedness of the falling body a shock too (“Call me uncle, child,” he’d liked to tell her in that deep voice she pictured somehow as changed by the beard), rolling past her on the stairs. She’d held her head in a rush, a soundless vacuum of knowing that she was screaming as if she screamed silence, blood splashing and sprinkling over her pale face, arms, loose robe, hot and raw from all the holes and the shadows moved and the men and the long silence rushing away …

  “We don’t stop now,” she told the boy, breath short, legs shaky as they topped the hill and looked down the smooth grayness and dulled green to where the thin road slashed through the empty country and she thought: It must have circled around us … and then noticed the people and the wagon and hesitated, reached for him, thinking No, hands just missing because he was already running, wobbling downslope, calling out, and the coppery-haired woman had stopped, looking up, and then Leena saw the two children and relaxed a little as her legs suddenly sat her down on the stony earth among bleached tufts of weedy grass. She watched him go on, wide-legged and weary.

  They all were waiting, the young boy down there pointing, she could see his mouth moving. She let herself not think now … not anything … for a while … she absently brushed a smoothing hand across her hair …

  XVII

  Stupid curse why do I remember him now? It cannot be the drink for I am ever drunk and he taught the vice to me the pretty bastard …

  “Don’t snore so,” she said, jabbing her elbow into the sleeping man beside her. “You’re all sons-of-bitches anyway.”

  The man mumbled something between a gurgle and a gasp. Stirred.

  “Well I know it,” she muttered on. “Why? … Why must the Devil poison my brain? …”

  The man didn’t quite speak. Sputtered and sighed.

  To make me see his face again … Dear husband, I don t forgive you … She saw him: tall, restless, eyes sparkling like sky in the stray sunbeam that slanted in the high chapel window, the priest’s voice a drone, all the guests a blur, just the whitish-blond hair that flamed in the light, she thinking: I have you now I have you forever my sweet dearest … not even aware of her brother John, the mad priest, in his vestments, watching, leaning on the stone wall in back watching from his pale, nervous face, eyes steady (like a snake’s, she often thought). I’ll never forgive you, Parsival, you shitstain! … you left me … with two children … stupid curse …

  “Peace, damn you!” she snarled, sitting up in the bed, the dried straw rattling and creaking. Hit him as hard as she could in the massive blur of chest and hurt her fist. He belched and said no words. “Son-of-a-bitch barbarian bastard!” she said. The narrow, low-roofed hut was spinning very slowly and steadily at an angle.

  Sweet Mary, she thought, that brew … no lady drinks suchlike swill … I’m no low-born bag of shit … like this barbarian bastard …

  There was a blurring of moonlight at the window that traced some of the wall and the rough beams above.

  “Sweet Mary,” she muttered, holding her torso with long, still graceful hands. Her body had stayed slim and the prints of years didn’t show in such subtle light. The moon caught fine traces of silver in her long, dark hair as she stood up and the floor spun faster … dropped to her knees … sucked in deep, desperate breaths …

  Sweet Mary …

  Crouched there, naked, shivering in the hot, sticky night. The man was snoring again.

  “I want … to go home …” Nodded. “Yes … for I am a lady …” The snores penetrated the spinning blur around her. “Be still, scub … scubscum …” Crawled through the shifting darkness, desperate now, fingers scraping and clawing the planks, desperate for the cooler air spilling around the sagged door, fumbling, scrambling along the wall, hitting her head, then knotting, twisting, spilling, spewing on and on and on … finally she pulled back and sat on her hams, gasping and coughing, mouth and nose bile-fouled. She knew she’d be able to sleep now. Didn’t move, rested on her heels facing the wall, eyes shut and his face still there: the unstained eyes, the shadowy crease down his cheek like a faintly ruled line … so long … so long ago …

  Her hands stayed in her lap as slow tears squeezed out one after another …

  “Oh, you bastard,” she whispered. “You bastard …”

  I’ll leave here tomorrow … no more of this for me … no more … I’ve been weak … go back south it can’t be bad as they say … something must be left … the castle’s still mine … I should find my children … what kind of mother are you? … Nodded. Then laughed, short, sharp like steel on stone.

  “Wonderful children,” she muttered. Opened her eyes, which
changed nothing. Listened to him getting up now, the mattress crackling like fire. His grunts. A racking set of coughs and hawkings. Then big feet slishing over the planks.

  “What’s that stench?” he wanted to know in a thick, blurry voice.

  “Wonderful son …” She swayed a little on her knees.

  “Did you befoul yourself again? You needs learn to drink like a Norse woman.” She heard him bump into a stool. It scraped ahead. “Where are you?”

  He opened the door with strain and banging. Pale light spilled in. The setting moon was over the hills, framed as if in a painting, and then his shadow went through and she heard the spat spat spatting trickle hitting the packed dust outside in the hot, still night. A dog was yapping somewhere in the distance. There weren’t many animals left in the country. Wherever they’d been people were hungry and it was getting worse …

  “Sweetsilk daughter …” Muttered, then, loud: “She’s dead, you bastard!”

  “Be still,” he commanded from outside. She listened to him spitting again.

  “You bastard,” she hissed.

  His blurred shape dimmed the doorway, feet skissing on the gritty floorplanks.

  “Have I been hard on you, woman?” he asked her through a creaking yawn. “Clean yourself, why don’t you? Ah, or come not to bed again this night.”

  “My son … my son was sad … always sad … In his eyes, you could see it in his eyes …”

  “Your son.” The door swung shut and the feet scraped away and then the bed burst into cracklings again. “Clean yourself and sleep …” Grunting … cracklings … yawns … “Wine is your curse, I fear …”