“Wait?” What is this place, then?
“I were weary and half-seared and half-mad and half-blind with smoke and many other halfs besides, to follow the theme straight to my face itself, half as you know …” Where he’d been sliced from forehead to chin, years ago: cut so his teeth showed through his cheek. A pair of armed men were coming up the carved stairs from within. Gawain gestured with his good arm. “Stand a lad at each comer,” he ordered. “Use crossbow and stones when they try to mount up here.”
The men nodded. One was young and very pale. Parsival knew how he felt. The other was a chesty veteran who was already shouting commands into the courtyard.
“You haven’t asked yet,” Gawain said. “I commend your patience.”
“Asked what?” he frowned. “You mean, how you lived to tell the tale?”
“No. But that’s a fair question too.”
“Well?”
“That bastard has limbs of stone, I swear, by Mary’s grace. I hit him two dozen good strokes. His armor folded, yet I saw no blood and he battered me …” Shook his head. “He snapped my blade, and had not the flames come between us, I were a split hare and the skillet only lacking!”
“Who? …” Remembered. “Ah, Lancelot.”
“Pass him by, Parse, at every chance.”
“Ah.”
“When I came free of the flames my horse’s tail blazed like a comet and my single eye was sightless. I was a shorn Samson, I think. Well, come on.” He started down the stairs. “We’ll have to clear the gate for a bit. That’s sweaty work.” Down into the dusty yard, passing the nervous men-at-arms ascending. The peasants stood by the main castle door in the biting, flat sunlight, their shadows clear and hard. “Why do you not ask me?” Gawain wondered, plucking a sword from among several leaning on the wall and tossing it to Parsival. He held the mace braced under the forearm with the missing hand.
“Ask what now? Need we play riddle games?” And then he had it: looked down the yard and saw the barn, sagging, dried-out looking, a sketchy pair of chickens roosting on the violently down-angled roof. Remembered … she was stunningly soft and fluid in the staining moonlight that seeped through the split and separated boards, shining on the gathered hay as on silver … the spot of her navel, the soft-stroked, misty wash of darkness shaping thighs to groin … even the memory drew away his breath …
Unlea … ah … so I’ve been led back to this …
“Is she here?” he asked.
“I would have thought,” his friend replied as they took station by the barred gate where the two fighting men waited, “you’d have asked otherwise still.”
“How, damned riddler?” Smiled briefly, hefting the broadsword.
I threw all these away, he thought. Yet someone’s always handing me another …
He debated dropping it. Went on to the rest of his problem, the old problem of leaving her in the torn silk gown by the river (now a trickle, unrecognizable), watching her return home across a misty morning and then wandering himself, depressed, weary, baffled, and her husband, Bonjio, catching him later as he drifted vague and lost and didn’t look up as they boxed him in and then he slashed back at them out of depressed mistiness, cut with body only in the deadly reflex of all his bitter years and then the shock and outraged No! in his mind as the knight’s hand intersected the bright arc and flew off in a mist of blood as he thought: No, no, I’ve cursed myself I can never I can never … “Very well,” he was now saying to Gawain, “that’s why I got rid of my sword for the second time.”
“Fling open this gate,” Gawain was saying, “on my word.” To Parsival. “Ready, old sheer?” Tilted his covered head. “Or do you want a helm and better armor?” Parsival shook his head. “He’s not here,” Gawain finally said.
They were within the cool shadow of the wall and Parsival was staring back across the white-bright yard at the woman who’d come out into the high arced doorway, gown a watery blue blurring within the interior dimness. He didn’t have to see more than that.
“Not here?” he vaguely responded, remembering, almost violently … tasting it …
God sweet God has nothing changed? … nothing? …
“Nor there either, Parse.” Drew his very long sword and stood solid and easy as a man about to hammer nails or cook a meal. “Nowhere at all. You came back here in good time.”
“I never meant to,” was the unintentionally ambiguous reply.
“Open it!” Gawain ordered.
Parsival hesitated and then light glared in and half-a-dozen surprised raiders stood off-balance in the gateway behind suddenly impactless ax and blade, leaning forward as if against the air, and as Gawain rushed into them like a whirl of wind Parsival thrust his sword deep into the dry, hard-packed ground and followed.
Better to take one of theirs, he told himself, if it must come …
The first ax stroke flicked the hot light and Parsival danced beside it and drove his fist above the leather, vestlike chestpiece and hit bare throat, twisting himself into the tangle of shadows and desperate limbs, flashing steel, all angles and turnings and he kicked, then rammed a bony knee into a massive torso at the moment of balance, tipped him away, turning through the outcries, grunts, raw breaths, rages … heard Gawain’s butchers blade humming and chopping … saw others coming at a run, the mule rider charging, too, flanked by one of the knights, shrill voice above everything, coming as if riding the dust like a storm … next two spearmen blocked him, backed him to the outer wall and he thought:
Now it’s for life entire …
Let them thrust, took the first spear, yanked, snapped it away from the shocked man who instantly tried to run as the other point scraped along Parsival’s chest, burning, and he swung the broken shaft like a club and cracked the puffy face along the cheek and Gawain shouted what became words a pause later:
“Back! Back inside!”
As he jabbed the other, turning, desperately thrusting the man in the side and then there were too many and he ducked arrows, a tossed ax, and moving, spinning with an electric, thoughtfree speed he was inside and the ax-chewed gate thumped and rattled shut and his heart and breath went thick and wild again.
She was crossing the yard, sun flashing in her hair …
So he’s dead, he was thinking, that’s what Gawain was trying to get me to ask about …
“Plague took him,” Gawain panted, as if hearing his thoughts. “He were left unburied in his chamber.”
“Are we doomed, Gawain?” was the first thing she said, standing just outside the imperceptibly shifting shadowline. She was actually looking at Parsival. “Well,” she then said to him, “you seem well enough.”
He pressed his lips together. Watched her face, taking the moment in, effectively blank about what to do about anything …
“Yes,” he finally murmured.
Hammering and chopping shook the portal again. Dust puffed out from the interstices of board land iron. He knew they’d have at least one of those knights posted there now. Another sortie wouldn’t be so easy …
“We cannot hold after dark,” Gawain told her.
What do I want? Do I still want this woman? Is that what brought me hack though I knew not I were coming until I came …
He saw she was afraid and holding it in. Her hands showed it. He remembered she was skittish and very emotional.
Gawain stepped out into the fierce light and craned around at the walls.
“What can be done?” she was asking him.
“Fly,” he said, reasonably.
“He’s right,” Parsival added, unnecessarily. She didn’t look at him. Was she being cold or just preoccupied? For a moment he thought she’d been having an affair with Gawain. The idea was disturbing as well as absurd. Gawain, with half a face …
“Cut our way out?” the tall man-at-arms by the door wanted to know.
“Eight against a hundred?” Gawain pointed out. “So only Parse here or myself might live to boast?” Chuckled within his steel out
er head. “Mind, you cannot kill this bastard or me. We’re like fellows in a minstrel’s tale. We wade through everybody’s blood and never reach the far shore.” Chuckled, hollow, ringing.
“What can be done?” she repeated. “How can we —”
“We let them in,” Parsival said and Gawain paused, then nodded.
“Just so,” he agreed. “While the husband’s at the gate the lover’s out the window.” He paused, suddenly self-conscious.
A nice choice of words, Parsival said to himself. Held his face expressionless. Didn’t quite look at her. Gawain went on.
“Parse and I will wait to greet the —”
“Just one of us,” Parsival said, cutting off the next remark.
“Yes,” Gawain altered his statement. “One only.”
She looked at both. Said nothing. Parsival studied her eyes again, almost hesitant to meet her there … Like deep forest colors, he’d once mused, where the sunlight is strained to a few precious drops …
Yes, he found himself strangely considering, that was life. To see like that was life. The rich wonder … stared, almost tranced … aware that the sweet colors were simply there as the sunlight itself was, impersonal yet intimate … How to express such things?
And then the light flashed within him too and the colors were trees, slanted sunbeams, hushed shadows, and he saw the madly ragged man again standing on a jagged rent of rock. He knew the face, the long nose, wide bony brows plastered with hair and filth … couldn’t quite place it … the mouth was wide, moved steadily in the silence of the vision. There were others there, shapes that seemed melded into the dark treespaces that wavered like seafronds now … the same man superimposed over the sunbeaten yard, fading like an afterglow, strange, shifting, blotted forms around him, the mouth that gulped and spewed its air, starved, hollow, infantlike … what appeared to be a peasant, bulky, stoopshouldered, leaning on a spear in the background against an edgeless solidseeming screen of dark leaves … he namelessly knew him too … these things were somehow joined somewhere to his life like obscure trickles that find a flowing stream …
Unlea was intent on him now.
“We’ll keep them off the walls,” Gawain was saying, “for the rest of the afternoon. It’s too hot for much more of this nonsense. They’ll soon be under the trees.”
The hammering at the gate was slackening. Muffled voices called to one another. Gawain stepped farther into the yard, looking up, tilting his head to give his single eye coverage. A pair of middle-aged serfs were laboring up the steps with baskets of stones.
“Let it rain on their parched heads,” Gawain suggested, shouting to the men on the walls. Then, to Parsival and Unlea: “Rocks and heat are great discouragers of men.”
“Why don’t we ask who they are?” she tried, hands moving slightly, nervously, “And what they want? Perhaps we might —”
“Lady,” Gawain informed her (Parsival thought he seemed more the way he was when they first met twenty-odd years before, as if, perhaps, his mutilation had finally been absorbed too), “what use to parley with the wolf at your throat?” Gestured. “I’ve been wolf enough in my time.”
“All courses would fail, in any case,” Parsival added, almost self-consciously. “They’d likely lie and seek advantages.” To Gawain: “I would say they want food above all else.”
“I would agree, Parse. Soon it will be water too. There’s little enough of either in here to boot.”
“Why can’t we tell them so?” she still wondered.
“And would they heed?” Gawain asked in turn. “Even in normal times?” His voice was tinny in the helm. “Much less now that the world’s dying.”
Her smooth hands went to her face. She was, Parsival noted, trying to be brave. This was her home, after all, bare and lost as it was.
“Could we give them some of our store?” she asked.
“You might return here,” Parsival said, softly, “at a later time.”
“To what, sir?” she asked him. He saw she wasn’t far from tears.
He said nothing. Felt vague and uncomfortable. Gawain headed up the stairs to supervise. Unlea was waiting. He didn’t want to see her weep.
“We’ll see,” he said, taking her hand. It was hot and dry. He felt the slight tremor that wasn’t always visible. “Let me try to help.”
“As before?” she murmured without even rancor, too shaken to really concentrate.
“I tried,” he said. She took her hand away.
“Did you?” she barely said.
“Yes, Unlea,” he said, watching her, “I did.”
All my magic seems to have drained away, he was thinking, as the dusk spread like a pool in the courtyard. Not mine only either … Looked up: the men on the walls still seemed to be waiting, except he knew they were dummies, scarecrows (or scaremen, he quipped) … Unlea, Gawain and the rest were all at the other end of the castle moving through the old moat drain tunnel that now opened into the dried ditch itself. He’d make certain they met with little or no resistance. The sky was a whitish fuzziness above the hollowing courtyard.
He went to the gate where they’d been prying and thumping rather than hacking for the past half an hour. One of the planks was already wrenched free, leaving a strip of slightly brighter blurriness.
He kept his vow technically intact by wielding a long, slightly knobbed horseback mace. Didn’t bother to test swing it as he approached the gateway. A nail burst free with a punnggg. He wondered, distantly, if this time he’d find himself overmatched. The idea didn’t frighten him. He always assumed the time would come …
Always the same epitaph, he said to himself, I tried … Parsival, son of Hertzelroyd and Gahmuret, always tried … succeeding was another matter …
He could be dead, blotted away in a moment, and that wasn’t even exciting anymore. His blood didn’t beat in his ears. He repeatedly resisted the urge to simply stand there and contemplate the moment, the subtle feelings in him that bent with and mirrored, somehow, the shifts of still warm air, melting tones of fugitive light, the stored day’s sunheat in the earth … smell and taste …
I owe this to her even if I hadn’t crippled her husband … I hope I slay no one tonight unless it be ordained beyond my power … if power I have left, or has that all faded with the lost magic and left me in the shadows of a dying world, as Gawain put it … there’s been no rain and not long before there was too much water … how mercies shift and turn to torments …
Several more nails shrieked and popped. Another board gone. Vague forms beyond laboring, grunting.
Dying …
He threw back the lockbar and jerked the gate inwards, spilling two men in the warm, dark dust. The rest seemed empty shapes in dissolving twilight. Dark gleams of armor …
He ran forward, silent, tranquilly determined, heard the fat commanders voice yelling a blurred command, someone snarling back at him and then the first impact shivered up his fluid, violent arms and the man was gone … his body ducked (he was in the flow now and didn’t even have to not think) and he heard the missed swing … struck again a little amazed himself at the almost casual force he freed through himself … another fell, bellowed horribly …
“Come on, lads,” he cried to his nonexistent troops, “charge these womanly bastards!” He hoped he sounded convincing …
Lohengrin was waiting as they attacked the gate, watching the sunset discolor and die beyond the towers. He was watching himself too, monitoring his head, waiting to see if it would betray him again … there was just a dull, pulsing near-pain now …
The other knight stood next to him.
“Note how those bastards on the battlements keep so still,” he said, mockingly.
“Hmm?” Lohengrin was bemused. He was actually wondering if it wouldn’t be better to slip away from all this confusion and violent nonsense. Why overthrow this place? He felt pointlessly pulled along by that fat man’s odd hints and blurred part-promises. He sighed. Did he really want to remember anyway?
“They aren’t living men,” the knight told him, amused, “or my name’s not …”
“Not what?” Mine might be Lohengrin …
“You wouldn’t know me, boy. But it was Galahad.”
“Was?”
“I let him die.”
“Why not tell the others no one’s up there? We could scale —”
“Is there anyone inside you particularly care to kill.”
“Nay. What reason would I —”
“Just so. Let them flee. I’ve slain enough to keep me.”
“Then why are you here?”
“One place is like another. I pass time.” He grunted. “All were shallow when I recall them. This jelly-gutted scum is no worse than great Arthur.”
“Say you so?”
The first nail sprang loose. Punngg!
“I saw much in my time,” the knight went on.
“What do you know of Lohengrin, then?”
“What? Still on that? They say he is cruel, unlike his sire. That he came to be Duke-whatever by fouler means than were common. And served the brute beast Clinschor.”
“Clinschor?”
“Can that name be unknown to you?”
The other nails ripped free and they heard the plank clatter loose. Howtlande was ordering someone to do something just behind them.
“I have forgotten almost everything, sir,” Lohengrin said.
“Then God has blessed you, sir,” said the other. “I remember everything. Which is why I don’t talk much.”
And then the flurry at the suddenly open entrance, cries, a crunching blow … another … They went forward and Lohengrin dimly saw a figure stooping, dodging, striking out, then shouting for his men and Lohengrin braced for the coming shock and the other knight called out over Howtlande’s irrelevant din and Skalwere’s vicious riposte:
“He’s alone!”
And then the suddenly flickergleaming, dancing shadow passed close and Lohengrin’s sword was barely up in time to save his skull (the power of that blow, he semi-thought, was like a lightning bolt) and he fell to one knee — cut hopelessly at the phantom. The other knight, cursing in a mutter, charged past and he heard the mule, shrill, startled, and the fat man’s nasal raging: the dark was all swirling men, grunts, outcries, crashing, as the terrible opponent weaved among them, Skalwere’s voice, diminishing:
The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) Page 11
