The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3)

by Richard Monaco

  “Follow me! Follow me! To the rear!”

  Lohengrin stood there, head throbbing. He held it, waiting … waiting … afraid it was coming back, the strangeness that whirled self and the solid world away …

  I don’t want to be cruel, he told himself. I don’t want to be Lohengrin …

  The crashing had moved farther off along the river road. Shouting drifted back:

  “… bastard! … no … here … You cut me you dungsucking fool! … aiii! … help me … here … here …”

  Then more screams, a different quality now. He knew they had seventy-odd fighters and no single anybody could conceivably …

  Men were fleeing past him suddenly, routed, blurring up out of the night, Howtlande’s voice shriller, hysterical:

  “… Castle! Inside! … Inside! …”

  Others:

  “Save me … Devils … aiiiiiii! …”

  The night reeled with shapes and cries and blind clashing and he fell back with the rest, thinking.

  Counterattack … all this for what? …

  Parsival saw the thin gleam of the stream as he paused a fraction to crack a blundering pursuer across the knees and then saw them coming, shaped by the faint waterglow and knew:

  They followed me from the swamp, good God …

  And there were many more this time. They loped and sprang snarling into the whirling confusion with the certainty of predators from hell. He decided this was diversion enough, and an act of heaven, from his point of view. Pounded himself a free path and took off at full sprint …

  Lohengrin suddenly found himself moving as the elusive and terrible fighter passed like a ghost blown by a phantom wind. He followed as if an invisible tether joined them and the air rushed into his open helmet, light armor links ringing faintly. Passing close along the wall, the combat and agony fading behind, he felt (rather than actually saw or heard) the man ahead as they cut around the rear of the castle and someone shouted:

  “Who’s that?”

  Another:

  “Gris?”

  “Aye. Right enough.”

  Then they were past and the earth was gone and his mind said relax and he hit and rolled in softness and mudreek.

  There was a half-moat here, he thought.

  Crouched to his feet. Heard a whisper of metal and headed along the head-high ditch that ended, crumbling to no more than shin deep, and he was back in the open night straining by starlight at half-forms, following a ghostly hint, cold with sudden anger, determined to do something about something for once, memory or no memory.

  “Where are you,” he muttered. Set his teeth. Followed another slight noise, passed through a hush of pine trees, tripped, rebounded … went on, compacted into the furiousness he knew would sustain him, preserve him until he came to solid grips with something … anything … Whipped out his sword as if that could help and charged on, believing his rage would keep him from hitting a tree full tilt, feeling like tensed steel. “Show yourself,” he crooned under his breath.

  XXII

  Broaditch had backed himself, his family and the two newcomers against a squarish shelf of rock, spear ready, watching the dim crowd gather in the wildly wavering shadows around the firelight. The air stank of sweetish charred meat.

  Broaditch had noted the shattered wagon when they entered the camp. He’d assumed the man was dead and, looking for Pleeka, came out of the fallen night and met him almost at once, standing under the trees at the outer rim of reddish brightness. He seemed uneasy, watchful, not pleased. There were clumps of people nearby. The men all seemed bearded and the women wore hoods. Murmurous movement all around, fragmentary phrases surfacing here and there.

  “… in truth … aye … a miracle … proves justly what father … Father is with him now … aye …”

  “What ails you, fellow?” Broaditch wanted to find out, face close to the other’s flattish, brooding features. “You look stricken.”

  “Things have … changed,” he partly replied.

  “Ah,” Broaditch was impassive, “but they were ever ill, I’d take oath.”

  One of the people passed nearby and Pleeka took him by the shoulder with his long hand.

  “Brother,” he said.

  “Aye?” the smallish, pointed-faced woman, hair fiercely pulled back from her narrow forehead, responded.

  “Sister,” he corrected, “what means all this?”

  “The flame spirit has come among us,” she said, voice dry, inflectionless.

  “Sister,” he shook her shoulder, “what doctrine is this?”

  “The father’s,” she replied, twisting her head back to stare greedily towards the spurting fire. There was a jagged wedge of rock behind it.

  “Where are the hymns and the vesper brothers in white?” Pleeka demanded.

  “What?” she responded, struggled vaguely to free herself to stare. “Are you Trueman?”

  “I’ve been traveling. Converting.”

  “The service has been changed by the father,” she informed him, inflectionless. “And the vesper brothers …” She craned her neck.

  “Yes?” he insisted. “What about them?”

  They proved false to God.”

  “What’s this rot?”

  “Father John discovered their heresies and denounced them a fortnight since. He then proclaimed a miracle to come, and lo, it has come.” She was exultant.

  “What miracle was that?” Broaditch put in.

  “The flame spirit appeared among us! The sign we awaited!”

  She peered briefly into the shadows at the newcomers.

  “Are these with you?” she asked Pleeka. “Where’s your beards? All must wear beards. It’s the law.”

  “Law? Law? What …” Pleeka broke off. “What was done with the vesper brothers?” Broaditch guessed he must have been one himself.

  The brothers and sisters took them as God instructed.”

  A stir swept through the crowd and she struggled away to get closer. Broaditch leaned back to his wife.

  “Ali,” he whispered, “I like this less and less.”

  “The children need resting but my feet plague me to go,” she replied.

  “We best wait for dawn.”

  “And mayhap never see it, husband.”

  “They don’t seem … well, murderous.”

  “Don’t they?” she muttered.

  Someone had mounted the rock, no, two figures, one a long sticklike shape that Broaditch, with shock, realized was the madman from the cart. He planted his long bony feet on the rock like birdclaws. The other moved with sudden jerks, gesturing in what must have been meant, Broaditch thought, as a benediction, then, reedy-voiced, spoke over the instantly hushed crowd.

  “You have all eaten?” he rhetorically demanded.

  The crowd howled back assent. Broaditch was startled by the flat, harsh grating sound.

  There must be a thousand out here, he thought. That’s a few mouths to feed in these times.

  “Has the miracle come?” he demanded.

  Another howl sprang back from the firewrung night.

  “Have I given my promise?!” he virtually shrieked.

  This time Broaditch made out:

  “Yeesssss!!”

  “All the world has been put to God’s sword,” he yelled, and Broaditch found the thin, fierce, whip-cracking voice familiar. “All the. world is dark, brothers and sisters …” There was a low tremulous moan. Broaditch noticed a dwarflike fellow clambering up the back of a near giant, with a pointed knob of a head, to improve his view. The woman was on tiptoes in front of Pleeka.

  “Who is this?” Broaditch asked him.

  “John. The golden eagle.”

  “John?” Broaditch was incredulous and not-quite-outraged yet. “Did you say John?”

  There was more shouting and agreement in the crowd and then John was kneeling before the skinny figure who suddenly stepped forward into the wavering, dramatic forelighting, John’s voice, screaming:

  “The
spirit of fire beloved of the Almighty! Did ye not behold him descend?!”

  “Yyyeessss!” Ecstasy and pain. “Yyesssssss!”

  Broaditch felt Alienor’s hand dig into his upper arm. Tikla was collapsed, sleeping at her feet. Leena and the boy were pressed to the treebole; Torky was drifting a little closer. The dwarf was perched on the giant’s shoulders as if a single creature with a doubled, ominous body towered there or, Broaditch fancied, a demonic father playing with his distorted child.

  He shuddered as the new voice crashed into the night like a great stone. The madman spoke.

  And the other is him … John … my God, what a fit pair if this be so! Except he still didn’t want it to be.

  Alienor remembered more: recalled that voice from behind two decades (as she’d first heard it standing in the castle yard, a prisoner, when he rode up with his black-armored mute knights and hurled a savage speech into them that set the barbarians dancing in frenzy; when he was fuller fleshed, with those absurd upcurled moustaches flipping up and down as he spoke that now were pressed flat to his filthy face, and she instantly wanted to flee from all the impossible madness of all impossible meetings …

  We bore him here, she thought, we bore this thing …

  “Broaditch,” she was saying, crying out, “Broaditch, we did this …” Voice lost under the mounting, hoarse shocks exploding from that spare, shadow-hollowed, gesticulate frame. He bent closer to her.

  “What?” he yelled. “What?”

  “Clinschor!” she raged in his ear. “Clinschor!”

  Clinschor stared at the balding, intense man in the priestlike dark robes a short time after dropping from the pine branch, which he now believed was the giant hand of providence, and watched him tremble with a mixture, he well understood, of cunning, excitement and awe too. He was satisfied. Victory was certain.

  “Are you He that I raised?” Father John had asked.

  “I am the power and the flame,” Clinschor found himself saying. Then he muttered a spell of control. Heard the people gathering, calling to one another, pressing as close as they dared. The circle of space they left around him, he clearly understood, was due to the pressure of his inner potency. He took the man’s right hand in both of his own. Felt cold, irresistible strength flowing into himself as if drawn from all of them. The man John was shaken even through his cunning.

  “Speak to them,” he asked, eyes rolling a little, staring into the other’s unfathomable, grayish hollows. “Come, my lord of flame.”

  Yes, Clinschor thought, that’s correct, my lord is the correct form …

  Standing at the edge of the rock, the fire and shadowforms at his feet, he saw what had to be done. The enemies were already doomed. This time nothing would save them. Root and branch … He’d been purged to utter cold and would never relent again! Stood and let his vision penetrate the night and saw his enemies in the air, on the earth and under it, the walls and spell-barriers that he would shatter to black dust! … yes … Looked over his gathering forces without the slightest hesitation. Felt the feeling, the growing as if he were tall now as the stone he stood on, his head among the treetops. He let all the vast, dark, wheeling space fill him, felt his vast voice and the earth tremble and his eyes fill with tears …

  “I am the fire and the sword,” he told them. “I have come back from death and the bottom of heaven. I shall lead you to the glorious presence. I am come to make all things new!” Barely aware, as he soared, of the howling response as his words took fuller hold … “All things new!”

  XXIII

  She stared at the mule’s backside that, she idly thought, seemed to somehow grow flies of itself, since she never actually noticed any arriving from anywhere else. They stirred, bunched and spread whenever the brushtail flicked and coiled. The sun was steady, harsh on the dry fields where grain and long grasses were bleached and crumbling. She was trying to remember how many days had passed since the rain and found she couldn’t remember; then found she really didn’t care, because her mind was on the wineflask hanging at the mule’s flank.

  She barely noticed Tungrim, chunky, barelegged, straddling the animal, just the leather sack swaying and spinning … Swallowed, telling herself:

  Noon … it’s barely noon … I can wait …

  Telling herself it was merely thirst except she had no real urge for water. On all sides the Norsemen marched quietly in leather-trimmed armor and conical half-helmets, canvas-strapped carts squeaking along, her own mount rocking under her, heat beating at her hood … She kept dryly swallowing, fighting the faint nausea, the pain only a hint around her eyes now, a casual claw touch.

  She thought about asking him for the drink, trying out different ways of circumventing his refusals. Shifted in the saddle and tried to distract herself by looking around at the band of them marching in from the coastline where their famous dragon ships lay moored.

  Tried to interest herself in where they might be going. Failed. Thought about discussing it with him … discussing something, anything with him.

  Hear him grunt or regale me with tales of the virtues of the freezing northlands … God, what a dullard!

  She already knew the answers to her own satisfaction: they’d loot the next starving village. Then the next … What a life, she mused. For senseless waste, it compared favorably with the last years of her marriage. Well, Tungrim had saved her, she had to admit, and her fucked, breakwind husband had “saved” her from her family. At least she owed him that.

  Good Mary and her sweet son what a life! He helped me, the dreary, honest bastard with his platitudes like stale bread … O the wisdom of the Vikings, who can match it? Surely not donkeys or mere stones? … Mayhap a lump of steaming dung might narrow the gap … She glanced again at the sloshing winesack. Then pulled her eyes away. No … no good troubling my mind … but God, wine is a medicine for time! The only one …

  The world was a hot ache, a soreness, and she kept thinking of the soothing taste and gentle touch of the drink, a soft embrace, an intimacy with herself alone, a fullness with herself alone, the thoughts, the wit of herself and the slow, sweet passing of shapes bright and dark, the rolling sun and moon no trouble to her … passing into quiet sleep …

  Can he deny me just a single sip?

  She knew he would. Well, he’d helped her.

  None of them else cared a shitstain … none …

  And there was still the nightmare, the dank passageways under the cold earth of the recent and crudely dug den where the terrible people who’d stolen her from her home hid under the green hills and waited for something she never discovered. The terrible people: squat, yellowish and pale, jabbering endlessly in a raucous tongue (she never learned to decipher a fragment), knights in jet black armor who never spoke or were seen with their helms off or even open … stink, stagnant air … human waste dropped everywhere in the muddy, timbered tunnels for flies and long, shuddering worms … guttering torches, muddy sleeping straw … her rusty chains … waiting in sunless fetidness … waiting so she’d no longer wondered if she were mad but simply how long she would remain so … stringy hair caked with foul mud, lice nipping, skin scratched to bloody streaks … she became so dulled she’d no longer even asked the mute knights or the babblers anything, no longer begging: “Please, why am I kept here? Please! Why did you slay them?” … finally numbed out of time and caring, there was commotion, clashing, cries, and the squat people fled past going deeper into the inner tangles, followed by black gouts of smoke thickening until she gagged and in blind reflex struggled for a life she no longer distinguished from the choking dreams that came and went as hopeless as the grim muck and stones that pressed endlessly in … then flame roar, furnace heat blasting into her as she twisted and roasted, smelling her hair burning, preserved so far only by the layered filth and oil that coated her gaunt flesh and then the rusty chainring snapped from the wall and she was rolling and crawling away through crackling timbers and raining sparks … somehow powerful hands were gripping her, l
ifting her into a rush of sweet, cool air, a new incomprehensible language all around her … shock of brilliant daylight, hot sun impacted in the sea and shimmering on the lush hills, the blur of battle all around, furred and horn-helmeted warriors striking down the black knights and their dwarfed companions … saw on the horizon immense masses of black smoke and ripping stormcloud. She couldn’t know that this was where the war for the Grail was ending in defeat for everyone and the nearly total destruction of the heart of Britain … now a reddish-bearded face with eyes like steel chips peered, smiling, into hers and she heard a screaming she didn’t know came from herself until (as the shock of everything hit and the madness vanished) she was already falling into soft, soothing darkness …

  His mule was beside hers now and her hand already reached out before she was really aware of moving and then he had her wrist, steelchip eyes on her and she heard herself curse him, mechanically, furious, hopeless …

  XXIV

  Lohengrin sped out of the nearly invisible trees, holding his sword ahead as if it somehow lit his way. He was certain he’d missed his man, lost him back at the moat, but was sure, too, there was no reason to go back … and so he nearly ran into the horse, a plunging dark mass that suddenly was motion against an infinitesimally lighter background of field and sky, and then it snorted and there was another ahead and whispery voices. He froze, straining to check his burning breath.

  “He’ll find us,” a male voice was assuring someone, “never fear, Unlea.”

  “I’m not certain I do fear it,” she replied.

  “Well and whatever,” the other rejoined, then to his mount: “Come up, you silly fartwit.”