The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3)

by Richard Monaco

Remembered her round, indrawn face … remembering was suddenly unchecked and he saw her clearly, saw past days in the south of Italy where he’d become a knight … not recalling what had been sealed over, the hurt he never touched or looked at, not seeing again how he’d waked, blinking in the torchlight, the flames thrust in his face as he struggled to sit up in the tangled bed, the woman just covering her face, shadows leaping along the yieldless wall where he now stood, pressed back from the bearded faces, the glitter of eyes that were cold and amused too at his naked flesh as he panted with terror, distantly imagining that the wall would open and he’d be free, racing away through the dark, safe corridors that were so close, just a foot of stone away … safe and dark … trying to talk, say something, not really registering the voices, his uncle there just a harshness, a hopeless wall of chill words and then he was fighting because he couldn’t flee, flames jarring, no blade touching him, just gripping, hard, terrible hands and garlic-creeking, sweaty brutes bearing him down, spreading him out on the bed, screaming like a child as he absurdly swung the pillow at them, trying to kick away the hands, just hissing breath now and the grunting voices, on his back on the silken sheets. His uncle had just tossed her out. And she vanished into the darkness beyond the torches. He kept imagining he would suddenly escape, they’d forget and he’d get out too or she’d bring someone to help him except there was no one … felt the cold armor close all around as they pinned him motionless and his uncle’s voice suddenly, sinkingly, hopelessly clear: “Your father’s sister My wife. Make no plea to me. If you would live, hold your peace. Say nothing about love, you unnatural monster.” And then (he’d sealed it all over) the knife blade glittered like ice in the wild, smoky light and at first it felt cool, slicing quick and sure and then the terrible pain and his wordless throat bellowing, bursting as the edge sheared between frenzied, locked legs and the blood drained into the sheet and from far away (because he couldn’t even lose consciousness yet) he heard her voice too, high, shrill, quite mad … He stood in the hall, pacing in his robes with the lucid sunlight soaking into the dark rugs and Italian tapestries while his mother watched him, stolid, unmoving.

  “You may go without me,” she’d told him.

  “Mother,” he’d said, sawing the air with his arm, “you don’t understand.”

  “I understand. You and your great plans for everybody else.”

  “Come with me. See for yourself how I deal with the world.”

  She shook her head.

  “I care not,” she responded, eyes tracking his pacing, lean body as he passed back and forth before a blue shimmer of window.

  “I shall triumph,” he insisted. “Nothing will stop me. I am called to this.”

  She shut her eyes. Now there was sadness.

  “Oh, Clinschor,” she murmured, “Clinschor …”

  He stopped and stood there, blocking the daylight.

  “Mother,” he said, “there’s no reason to …”

  “Pity you?”

  “Nonsense!” His big, thickfingered hands began plucking at his robe. “I won’t fail. I have renounced ordinary life. Men like me —

  “I’ve heard all this, son. Next you’ll tell me about the secret power. Sooner or later you tell everyone that. I wonder they believe you in anything.”

  “Mother, you have no imagination. There’s the Grail. I …”

  She was within herself and the weeping was invisible from where he stood, and not quite in her voice either as she overrode him.

  “You were always a lonely child.”

  “Mother!” He was furious, hands leaping into fists. “Stop it!”

  “And then that terrible thing was done to you.” Her tears were steady. He rolled his eyes and turned his back.

  “None of it matters,” he said. “None of it matters … None of it matters …”

  “You never listen … I’ve borne it … everything … Christ knows! You … your father …”

  “Leave him out of it!” he yelled into the painted, red tile wall between the windows. “He cared nothing …”

  “That’s not true. You were hurt and lonely and —”

  “It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter! It doesn’t matter!” Suddenly he was hitting the bricks, fists slamming. “Leave me in peace!” Winced slightly as he cracked his wristbone and the pain drove through his arm and then he was standing there, leaning on the wall. “Just leave me alone,” he sighed. “I beg you. Please …”

  She blinked away the last tears.

  “You’re my only son. My only … So I’ll bear this too …”

  “What did I do for you?” Lohengrin was asking, repeating. “In the past.”

  Suddenly Clinschor was holding the young knight’s beaknosed, dark face with both hands, pale gray, strangely luminous stare pouring cold, almost frenzied intensity into the other, who blinked as if suffering a palpable shock.

  “Ah,” the aging man said, “good Bungamarl, I feel it … I feel it close at hand … the Grail is close at hand! …”

  As the soft, large fingers squeezed over the scar Lohengrin winced and this time the pain was a clear memory and he tore himself free as if to reject the image with the moist touching, fumbling fingers, seeing the troops he knew had been his own, chopping down women and shrieking children by a burning hut and felt himself gone cold thinking. They die sooner or later what matter when? Saw himself leap out of a glitter and tangle of berry bushes crashing his mace into a mounted man in a group of others and knew it was done for pay, without even hate … all the hunting and hurting flowed over him, burning his mind … saw a young girl looking up into his face with eyes refusing to weep as he thought: Hurry, little slutting, I long to spend … spend into your fair face … and then, wordless, she took the hard, curved length of him and let it slide, hot and salt-tanged, between her bruised lips and he heard himself saying: “That’s good, you whore.” And saw the tears now and rocked in and out thrusting himself deep into her flushed face … “Work your slut’s tongue!” he commanded … and now, still flinging the puffy hands away from his face and saying:

  “No … no more … I want no past!” Scrambling, scrabbling at the door, pushing so it banged and flipped open and he was already leaping (Howtlande actually calling his name and starting to talk) and running in one motion, tearing through the duskmist that was gathering in the blackened valley, thinking rapidly as his body acted of itself:

  No past … no past … I don’t want it …

  Not hearing Clinschor’s cry behind him:

  “Bungamarl! Bungamarl has been caught by the enemy!”

  The head pain was maddening and he saw more flashes, memories, earth and air twisting, bouncing as lightning hit and ripped everywhere on the high place, figures all shiny black with fiend faces, all silver snapping teeth, steel men, all battling on a narrow strip of ledgelike trail, a batlike shape, great wings billowing and flapping around it … no … a robed man flourishing a thin spear … coming closer … a big man, peasant, bearded … and he knew (as the tilted landscape leaped in shocked light and wind and rain exploded) the man was fighting him, slipping, dodging backwards on the slippery trail. He rebounded off the cliffside, as he closed, slashing through the blunt wall of storm, blade sparking on the stones, flinging open his vizor to better see (suddenly realizing the robed figure was Clinschor) the massive peasant (shown frozen and freed with each strobe of light) whirling something around his head (a sling?), and then it leaped through the violent air (a stone, his mind said), caught by a flash, flash, flash, and twisting his head too late, white violence tearing into his mind, blanking it utterly in a soundless blazing stun … his whole life lay still and open before him, as if he watched from a vast mountain height, and saw everything and felt the hurts successive and cumulative, feeling himself within himself saying wordless and absolute: No more, I won’t feel that any more no more … And there was nothing but the feelings now, as if a cloud gathered edgeless, weightless, shaped by itself, shadowed and lit …


  He paused, running, and shook his head, blinked at his memories … then there were little horned devils taking form out of the twilight and he blinked at them, suddenly hearing the shouting all around, and screams too, and clash of arms; whirling he drew his sword in pure reflex as the savage little men (not that small, however, he realized) drove him back and he hacked and ducked for life and backed into something, a wall behind him he didn’t realize was the second wagon: stroked, kicked, stabbed at the round shields … blocked ax strokes … spear jabs … cuts …

  * * *

  John was just remembering the new sister. Remembering the scene in the tent last night. He was still hoping to master the need, in time. It was the devil’s tempting … a terrible struggle … It would ever build gradually so he’d keep his mind lifted over it, refusing even the memory for a while, as if it had sunk forever out of knowing … kept his mind on their goals … everyday planning … just as now he’d been concentrating on the best way to use that madman he let them believe was a spirit. It was in God’s interest to do so. What a piece of luck it had been. For a moment he’d almost believed it himself … almost … well, after all, God had spoken through him, in a sense … well, they’d follow the poor wight’s path, for now, since one direction would serve as well as another until they swept up whatever sinners were left living in the name of the avenging God. He wasn’t thinking about the girl now … in the name of avenging God of this Armageddon … eating the flesh, consuming the ungodly …

  He half-consciously rummaged through his pack and drew out a strip of salted meat. Began chewing, idly, thoughtful.

  Shifted in the saddle, squinted into the gathering evening, the too warm breeze steady in his face. Purpose, he reflected (keeping the girl far away now) never let the brothers and sisters degenerate into purposeless brutes as had the peasants he’d led in abortive and bloody revolt so many years before. They would fulfill the avenger’s wishes and remain pure. Pure and clean with minds on clean God!

  Chewed, swallowed. Reached up his waterflask from the mount’s withers. Shook it, frowned as he sipped. They were thirsty. It would get worse. God was drying up the earth. The chosen would be known by survival alone. Looked up again at the darkening blue between the valley sides where a few traces of cloud drew a subtle red glowing like droplets of fire or blood. He smiled and one of his captains nearby nudged another and said:

  “See, he is pleased.”

  He had a new sign and felt the thrill of it. He felt an almost rapture. All thoughts of the girl and that business were remote now. His hands came together of themselves.

  “He prays,” the second man, stumpy built, observed.

  A sign … how sweet to feel this intimacy with the vast, mysterious form of nature … how far he’d come from youth when he’d raged in frustration at his father who sat smug in his castle life … then as a priest to a silent God … later stirring up the dull serfs, stuck in hopeless mud and failure after failure … hopeless pursuits … and as the fangs of invasion, plague and social breakdown closed around the land he’d followed that crazed knight, Gawain, and sundry cutthroats on the trail of what they’d sworn was the Holy Grail that would change the world … nothing changed … years, black, empty, silent years … and the new war that at first he hadn’t understood was the judgment come at last and an end to bleak time, cold stars and unconcerned suns marking his vacant life off … an end to stupid, meaningless eating, sleeping, boring knights, dry scholars, blunted monks … he might have died a miserable little priest working a vegetable garden and losing his sight over stale books while great lords went hunting and got drunk and plotted petty overthrows of equally uninteresting neighbors or to set a silly king on a tottering throne, while peasants hoarded grain as best they could and merchants haggled for gold to line their coffins. And now the world and time lay all around him like potter’s clay to shape and finish, and the heart of it whispered inmost secrets in his mind’s ear with voiceless certainty … Now! … At last! …

  The blood, he was about to say, we will drain off all the blood and seal it … He stared at the droplike clouds high up. Oil to keep it from thickening … in clay jars!

  “God has shown me,” he began, “that our people may not thirst and perish in the wilderness and dark places of the earth! Until our wanderings are done we … Broke off because no one heeded and at first he saw only his own people running back and striking blows in a senseless frenzy until the horn-helmed men (he instantly knew were Norse warriors) charged out of the gathering shadows, yelling, and clashing their weapons …

  Broaditch sat up in the dark, rocking wagon, his body merely successive knots of pain that no posture could ease. They hadn’t even bothered to tie him this time. Alienor leaned close.

  “Alive yet again,” she murmured. It was hard to believe.

  He made a sound, then spoke:

  “Spare me words …” The interior tilted one way, his brain another.

  “Poor man.”

  “Need I say,” he groaned, “all went not to perfection?”

  “What of the girl and boy?” she asked, holding tightly as they banged over series of deep bumps and wood creaked terrifically.

  He saw the image and refused to hold it, replaced it almost desperately.

  “I didn’t find her … I suppose I was an ass again … You ought to have fled while you could.”

  “Aye,” she said. “And what of the lad?”

  He shut his eyes.

  “Let it pass, wife. Ask me no more.”

  Tried to get his feet under him and the pain came in series like (he fancied) pinching stone hands. Blinking hard he realized one eye was closed and one tooth at least was wobbly. His tongue found yet another broken. Her hands were gentle on his head and still he winced and heard her gasp touching the lumps there …

  “Sweet saints,” she whispered.

  “Peace,” he whispered, faint and sick to his stomach. “My top is better … better than many a knight’s helm …” And then he felt soft as water, slid, somehow, out from under himself and only dimly felt the hard boards bang into his wide back … then he was awake yet again.

  Just let me take a moment, he thought he was actually saying.

  “I’m up,” he finally articulated. “… a moment … don’t drag back the covers like that … I’m up …”

  XXXIV

  Gawain was quiet now. Parsival hoped he was sleeping it away. The madness. The peasants had settled back down near the last, purplish coals. Someone was snoring, steadily, rattlingly.

  “He drank bad water, you say?” Unlea wanted confirmation. She was stretched out on the rumpled sleeping silks in the dark tent. He sat by the open flap, staring out towards where he knew his friend was lying, not really visible, a yard or so away: just now and then a hinted metal gleaming seemed to surface when he may have stirred slightly.

  “Parsival?” she added, querulously.

  “So I think,” he told her.

  “Will he recover?”

  “Am I a leech to know this?”

  “No. You’re the great Parsival.”

  He folded his arms, eyes tracking in the hollow darkness. “Need I be mocked?” he wondered.

  “Do I mock?”

  “I know not if you do not,” he sighed.

  “Mayhap you pained me.”

  “Forgive me then.”

  A pause. The snores went on. There were no insects, no normal night sounds in that wasteland.

  “Will you not,” she said, slightly hesitant, “come over here?”

  “Hm?” He was preoccupied. “In a moment …”

  Now what? he was asking himself, staring at shapes so vague that the night seemed to press flat and close against his face. Now they say my family lives … I used to dream of this woman and now she’s here … my life is an endless wandering … now what? … Content lies not before or behind for if it be not with you where you are you’ll never come to it …

  After a while he moved within and touched her. Tho
ugh it might never be recovered, he would try because she was alone and needed … him? … Something, needed and that was reason enough.

  And then he heard the first scream out in the darkness and thought:

  Gawain! … Then: No, that’s a woman …

  And then he was charging outside into tumult, panic, another scream, raw and shrill and terribly long …

  He drew the dagger (he kept for woodcraft) and raced past where Gawain had lain (not registering that he’d moved — only later realizing he would have tripped otherwise), plunging down towards the sounds into and among dim forms, demanding:

  “What is amiss, curse it?”

  “My lord?” A man.

  “Yes. Who cried out.”

  “My lord.” A woman. “My sister. Here all cut and horrible!” She was hysterical but quiet. “All wetness and terribly opened … oh … oh … oh …”

  “What? What?” he snapped. “A light here!”

  Gawain? Gawain?

  And the greasy, sudden torchlight (lit on fanned coals) showing the woman, belly ripped from chest to groin by half a dozen ragged strokes.

  He grabbed the torch and raced through the night, blindly angry at everything and for the first time in months (perhaps years) ready and ripe to kill, sick of madness, horror, frustration …

  And then saw the steel gleam ahead through the wildly shifting tree shadows his light flung everywhere and charged on up the crumbling, charred slope, the fire ash in his nose and mouth, yelling now:

  “Gawain! Gawain!”

  And the big knight turned, helmetless, head uncovered, single eye bright; the dark a deep pool in the missing side of his face where the bared teeth were terrible … and then he realized Gawain wasn’t even looking at him.

  “What have you done?” he said, raged. “What have you done?!”

  Panting, holding the dagger up like a pointing finger. The staring eye didn’t see him. “Gawain!” He stepped closer, not looking at the horrible side of his friend. “Gawain …”

  “There’s no such name,” the other said, bending the half of his mouth that could into a smile. “He’s gone at last. WE drove him off.”