“Why did you slay that poor woman?” the light boiled through the smoke, the flesh seeming to melt and reform in the flameflow.
“Woman? I need no woman.” the terribly bared teeth glinted dead white. “I am both and whole now … whole …”
“Whole?”
“Behold!” he suddenly yelled, pointing the handless arm at the virtually halved face. “Whole! Whole again!” the eye was streaming tears, over the creased, handsome cheek and jaw. “At last …”
“Show me your sword, then,” Parsival insisted. “Show me!” He didn’t know why it mattered so tremendously but it did and he wasn’t really focusing on the rest yet.
Gawain seemed in ecstasy, looking far beyond the shadowy figure before him whose part-naked form shook like a mirage in the flame.
“Gawain is gone,” he was saying. “Gone … and were healed … Task not us with what Gawain did …”
Parsival jerked the other’s sword free and saw it unstained, a clean glitter.
Who ripped her then? he asked himself.
“Gawain,” he said, “come back and rest for a time. This spell will pass. It was but the strange, tainted water you drank.”
“He’s gone and we’re free, being of no substance.” His voice was exalted, serene. He seemed, Parsival finally realized, deeply sober. “We’re going away. What matter the means so long as there is healing? This is all poor Gawain ever sought … This is all … and now it’s found. His body and soul restored again. This has now been done.” the single eye shut and reopened. Next he began walking into the night, leaving the other knight standing there holding the superfluous broadsword, watching the other melt beyond the ring of flame into the leafless, limbless trees …
On the way back to the fire Parsival felt eyes in the darkness: swung the torch a few times and stepped aside. A hint … a dim gleam that might have been eyes, possibly an animal, he reasoned. But who ripped the woman? Why?
There were other torches now and the little group huddled near his tent. Unlea was wrapped in light robes, streaked with the inescapable soot. They’d covered the slaughtered woman with a pale fabric.
“Is that his weapon?” Unlea asked.
“Yes.”
“Did … where …”
“Gone,” he told her, still taking it in, understanding it, thinking: It may be better who am I to say nay? Of all poor, hopeless, sad men, who, by Satan’s piss, am I to say any other nay? Let him be whole and so please him … “Gone,” he repeated. “Gawain is gone …”
“This place is damned,” somebody was saying.
“I say we fly now,” another male added.
“At first light,” Parsival said, “we go on. Build up the fire. I’ll stand watch.” Lifted the sword and bent and flicked the torchlight. “None will come too near.” He tried to spit the black dust out but it sucked the moisture from his tongue. “Bring me water,” he said, seating himself on a round stone, his back to the tent. “Try to rest, Unlea,” he told her.
He was suddenly thinking about Layla, his lost wife, remembering the first time they’d drunk too much together, so many lost years past … rolling in the grass together under a sweet, clear autumn sun … in bed winter nights, discussing the trivialities of the day, the absurd pomp and silliness of court … analyzing the infighting and lecheries of the castle … and her revealed hopes told in trust, dreamings, remote to his knowing, yet fascinating childhood wherein she’d once walked and it gone past anything but a reflection of a reflection, something he could never know, roads he would never walk … and he knew she was still there, had always been there all along and it had been all right until he found Unlea again and she was really free this time and now he had to face that as well … that she was really free … and Layla was still there too …
He half-consciously took the flask someone handed him, tilted it up and drank, barely noticing the water was slightly bitter, almost fizzy … drank deep and set it by the rocks.
“Might I stay by you, my love,” Unlea asked.
He didn’t look up.
“Better to rest, I think. You’ll need all your energy come the morrow.”
Sat with the sword resting across his knees until he knew she was gone. Set the flickering torch in the earth before him, watching the flames shifting on the absorbent blackness … the others settled down again away from the dead woman. Sat waiting for the dawn.
Took another drink. Blinked at the slow, starless night … Blinked again sometime later … the heat was steady and thick and he felt wilted, a film of sweat soaking into his shirtlike garment … drifted into sexual thoughts … wondered if he’d always have trouble. Blinked, then kept them shut and then was struggling to reopen them as if they were somehow sealed skin to skin … he felt deadly watchers close around, keen steel looks cutting from the darkness … couldn’t feel the stone under him now or the hot night air … couldn’t feel himself, as if (part of general numbness) he’d melted into the surroundings without being able to feel them. He struggled to wake up from what he believed was sleep and then he knew, saying or thinking:
The water … the water … they gave me the water …
Sat there locked in night, afraid, shadow-watched, losing all sense and shape of himself, not even feeling the heart he knew would be racing on, only the words in what had to be his mind giving any proof that anyone existed there:
The water … the water …
XXXV
Sounds of battle, clash, screams, raging curses, indescribable tenseness everywhere, unmistakable, and this time he got his haunches under him and brushed Alienor aside. The wagon was stopped now. Moved to the door through the stiff bursts of pain and heaved against it, then stood up, giddy but intent, and kicked once … again … on the third it gave and the twilight (bright to him for an instant) showed the swirling fighting and then a bareheaded, link-armored knight appeared, panting, several horn-helmed Vikings leaping and cutting in at him like a wolf pack, and then the knight rolled up into the doorway as a wave of robed, shrieking fanatics broke between them, and the fighting swept away for the moment …
Broaditch looked at Lohengrin’s aquiline, brooding face, bush of black, curly hair, eyes like onyx stone, and knew him instantly. For some reason he wasn’t surprised: remembered that face leaning out from the canopy in the whore’s bed long ago … the old nobleman lying there, blood bubbling from his stabbed chest, the woman trying to slide away, Lohengrin’s cold black eyes holding Broaditch as the steel-wrapped arm almost absently flicked the dagger into her and the cold voice hissed at him where he stood between the rows of tentlike beds, saying he’d die if he spoke … and then the next memory, the battle on the narrow ledge above the Grail Castle in the incredible storm that seemed to tear the earth apart, dissolving it into wild clouds that broke in lightning-rent surf over the peak, rain a near-solid mass, the beak-nosed face glaring in icy fury out of the opened helmet as Broaditch spun the improvised sling, flinging the dull, heavy ball (he’d found in the Grail Castle) in a last, desperate try, the hurricane wind veering it as the knight twisted away. It seemed to follow him and then (because the lightning was suddenly intolerable) explode in brilliance as the wind took Broaditch over the cliffside and hung him on the air in impossible suspension …
All this in one recall and he was already saying:
“In a stew how can you tell fat from lean?”
And Lohengrin crouched and watched outside and inside at the same time, sword half raised.
“What?” he asked, stared hard. “Know you me?”
“More to the point, sir, is the reverse the case?”
“They say I’m Lohengrin.”
“What say you?” put in Alienor.
He watched the blurry, continuing fight.
“My memory is torn,” he said, “and I’m no longer sorry of it.”
“Do you serve these … foul …” Broaditch had trouble getting it out. “… things?”
“No,” said the young man. “I serve no one. I w
ant to lose myself.”
Broaditch nodded, painfully shifting his thick legs out the door.
“There’s an ambition to commend, sir,” he remarked. Studied the dark gleaming eyes that seemed less cold than he’d remembered. Clapped his steel shoulder with a big hand. “Let me get a spear and we’ll lose ourselves together.” In the last wash of day the battlers raised a terrific cloud of black dust.
Some cover, Broaditch noted, as he helped his family down. They all moved around past the halted mules: ears and tails jerking, eyes white, the driver hanging upside down from the traces.
“You knew me too?” Lohengrin asked.
“Lightly, Sir Knight.”
Tikla was whimpering. Rubbing her face.
“Stuff in my eye,” she said.
“Well,” Lohengrin insisted, “tell me nothing. Do you hear? Nothing!”
“So please you.”
And then the knight rushed past, as Broaditch was picking up an abandoned spear, and met two charging robes, zipping their daggerlike blades, springing from a long roll of ashcloud.
“You are not brothers,” snarled one.
As Lohengrin raised his blade and Broaditch came charging up, a flurry of Norsemen turned the confrontation into chaos. The little group moved on, Lohengrin and Broaditch covering the family. To Torky it was forever a dark memory of choking ash, rock-edges against his ankles, the big bulks of his father and the warrior, cries and clashings in the dark, strange voices, strange warcries … huddling in closer to his mother and sister, struggling on into seeming nothingness … invisible action and then brightness just ahead, flames suddenly high and fierce, and for a moment he thought of sunrise, and the big fires at home when the farmers burned autumn leaves, the smell in the cool air that always excited him, sent him running to the blazes … walking home at dusk on the suddenly mysterious, rutted road, moving with prickles of fear as he passed shadowy bushclumps … then smelling the cooking food and hearing his mother’s voice across the cool, violet fields …
The Vikings had closed in all around. John, his best men, plus a mass of hundreds of sparsely armed women, boys and girls were bunched together in the steep-walled defile around Clinschor’s wagon. A wedge of horn-helmed figures were hacking their way through the packed defense when John stood up in the stirrups and yelled:
“Save the father! Save the father!”
And the cry spread rapidly over the din of battle. The brothers and sisters stirred out of a kind of lethargic panic and began moving, chanting it now, louder and louder, led by the younger, the weaponless, chanting it with swelling purpose as if it were a tangible mace to smite with:
“Save father … Save father … Save father …”
Pushing, packed, into the terrible blades, axes, spears, clubs, the front rows screaming, falling, flopping in pieces, vomiting blood, tangling in their entrails, brains spattering sticky and strange, the dead unable to fall so that all the bodies advanced in a rolling, horrid, groping wave pressing the horned warriors back as by a lavalike, inching, irresistible wall of bloody meat and bone as the twilight was sucked away to utter night and only the screams and curses and butcher shop sounds rose over the weakening, now shrill cry:
“… Save … father … Save father … Save …”
The sounds revealed where the believers were still being ground and minced … and then several open supply carts puffed into flame as fabric, wood, tallow, oils went up under Truemen torches, the blazes holding the flank as John and his inner guard fled into the twisting valley while the almost motionless pile of chopped dead secured the rear, the gushing blood turning the ash to sticky muck …
Leena had been marching among the younger sisters and brothers. They’d tied a black robe around her shoulders. Her pale blond hair was gritty with soot and lay flat along her forehead. She kept looking upwards where the day glimmered and died.
She was enduring all this now because the luminous sky was a sign to her, a hint of what waited at the end, when she would finally sight the little castle across the golden wheat fields where the pure air was rich, beating energy. So the other pictures were blinked away and she concentrated on the light that the very fading made more intense and precious. Blinked away even last night because it hadn’t really touched her, just another strangeness that didn’t matter: all of them nude, praying, and John stroking his bent, hard member with both hands and gasping out fragments about Jesus and whores and shame …
And when the horned heads appeared (she knew they were devils and this hell’s gateway) she was unsurprised and kept her sight on the thinning light as the dark and choking hellsmoke rose among the expected screams; raised her eyes because she knew there was nothing else, nothing more she needed to take in ever again, just the light she knew she’d still see after the choking, dry, hot dark closed altogether everywhere. Barely felt it when the cry went up and the mass of them packed together and began heaving into the demon’s weapons, the bodies slamming together, bones cracking and popping around her, the vast weight and pressure closing, small children shrieking and vanishing underneath the mass, some carried along, feet not actually touching the ground, barely feeling the crunch of her own body because she was now able to shut her eyes and still see it, the brightness of it, actually stepping now, walking on the yielding greenness beyond the rippled fields among blazing flowers where trees soothed in the liquidity of breeze and light; actually there in that luminous land where nothing had edges, where each moment enfolded you with a tender, endless kindness and you yourself melted and flowed into the kindness, closeness, and she and the day were one thing and the kindness bore her up as she lightly ran forward like waterflow, destinationless, floating within and without straight into an unbounded softness where she had no thoughts, memories, just followed one pattern of color and music after another, each new, totally absorbing, color, music, scent, softness … each step an infinity of wonder while somewhere forever away swords and axes ripped and there was screaming lost under the least whisper of tune and breath and chaotic blood and blackness lost under the least flickering of ecstatic light … and her racked bone and flesh finally fell away from her, freed her at last from all it could not escape …
Clinschor kept his eye pressed to the opening and watched the battle in the dusk and soot, recognized the creatures of weak softness, strange butterfly-like, bright and flimsy, begging for gentleness, creatures who’d been conjured by the enemy wizards. Cowards all, he reflected with livid hate. Safe in their remote mountain lairs they sent forth their foul minions …
He sneered a smile and decided he’d soon put a stop to this: felt his power stir as he leaned back on the uneven stool (the wagon had just halted) and locked his hands in mystical position and began his first invocation …
Outside, strung on the rope with the others like fish suspended from a skiff, former lord general, Baron Howtlande, of Clinschor’s disintegrated forces, rolled his eyes, sick with fear and fury.
Sleep, he thought, has more reason than waking …
Because by some inconceivable thrust of incomprehensibility there he was roped to that lunatic’s cart about to be slain as part of some profitless horror where there was nothing to gain save more dead — nothing rare, not even food, nothing but blood and buckets of ash and he didn’t know he was moaning under his breath … for nothing … and it struck him like (he didn’t think) St. Paul on the road only this was a dark, not bright, flash when he understood there was nothing to win or preserve but breath and the few days you lived, tasted, touched, nothing to dream about or perish for, nothing to keep but choking ashes as death rose slowly over everything like a tide of mud … so he raged and wept now, heaving against the rope, shaking the others, sawing them back and forth, straining as the fanatics flung themselves on the Norsemen as onto a steel and bitter wall and then some slash or parry had cut the cord and he tumbled with the flopping rest into a gully, onto brittle, crackling branches of char as the fighting lost itself in lightless clouds and he was actually
praying because there was nothing else now, nothing but breath, coughing and prayer …
John was shouting in the thickness and confusion:
“Drive the mares along!”
The wagon driver, over the muffled din of slaughter, now heard what John was aware of: a booming thunder (that no one believed yet was human), rhythmic, a bellowing blowing, shaking the wooden sides of the vehicle as though, John felt, some leviathanic creature were trapped inside, and suddenly he was afraid he’d made a terrible error about that madman and flipped his finger across his chest in a cross-sketch. The booming pounded at the sides like vast, soft fists and the driver stared back once, twice, then leaped over and fled into the thickened darkness as John waited in puzzled shock. The mule team strained on undriven as if to flee the sound they bore behind like a tinpot on a hound’s tail, delicate hooves flicking knee-deep, slipping and tugging, the noise pounding harder and harder, faster and faster.
“The fire lord speaks,” someone called out.
“Father,” another shouted, “release him against our enemies!”
For a moment John almost believed it as the terrific chantbooms seemed to strike inside his belly and chest, somehow match and supersede the heartbeat as if, he sensed, the sound alone could take him over, rule and disport his limbs, drive on his thoughts … He shook his head in sudden fear, then he and the others fled, riding and running ahead on the twisting, narrowing way, seeming chased by the muffled, tremendous echoing that had no more words in it (save what imagination might impose) than breaking thunder or knotted wind … fleeing on, drowning out the horror and tumult of slaughter at their backs …
XXXVI
Perhaps an hour later, Broaditch wasn’t even furious anymore. It went past that. He felt tight clenched around himself like a fist over a stone. They weren’t going to break him because it had gone too far, too many escapes and recaptures and miseries … no more … too many years of wandering and wars … deaths, lost homes, friends, hopes … it was absurd, they were absurd, futile, simplebrained and even roped in a row (to the second cart), in senseless thrall again, cut away from wife and family again, he felt safe because he’d become stone. There were men strung in front and back of him as they stumbled and waded into the twisting, descending ravine.
The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) Page 21
