The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3)

by Richard Monaco

  “Mother said you always turn up.”

  Parsival was watching the deaths as the last shimmers spilled slowly from the tattered flesh and floods of dark and light images fluttered away, and he knew those were the memories of these men draining back to the vast, roiling mind of existence. Watched their lives, blurring dreams, floating like wind-taken leaves …

  Even memories are dreams, he said to himself. Were shells full of dreams …

  His wife was weaving her head and closing one eye to see him clearly.

  “How,” she asked, “did you come here?”

  “Like every other fool,” he answered her, seriously. “By dreaming.” Looked at her now, and then at him. Noted Broaditch on the periphery. Tried to keep their outlines sharp. It was like looking through a rippling stream in sunlight “My wife and son.”

  Creature locked to creature crawled and climbed over one another, swarming up from primal slime into an ever mounting, ever sagging tower, struggling into the best shapes for ripping and kicking free of the unforming mass … and what had been Clinschor felt all this within his outpuffed, cloudy reaches, the clustered frenzy his own body, and endless rage and roar his soul …

  Suddenly his whole swarming self was falling to pieces, dropping, spilling as a razor brightness cut through everything … all his seething parts flopping, plopping down. He clutched and there was nothing to clutch … he scattered into ten thousand battling knots and there was no bottom, no sides … nothing above … all void and falling … falling … and silence blew him away like a wind …

  Lohengrin just stood there, sword in his limp grip. Flickering torch flipping its last wobbling glow around them. Broaditch was helping Layla keep her feet.

  “It was me you didn’t kill, son,” Parsival said.

  The young knight raised his eyebrows.

  “In the woods?” he murmured.

  His father nodded. His son rolled his eyes and nodded too. Of course. The final irony …

  “Christ Jesus,” breathed Layla. “Christ Jesus on high …” She clung to massive Broaditch as to a tree. “Jesus … Jesus … Jesus …”

  Broaditch just looked at him in the weak and changing flameglow. He didn’t want to laugh so he didn’t. And he was thinking about his own family. He didn’t want to laugh, but he’d set out to find this man when the man was still a boy … well, here he was. He didn’t want to laugh. He stood there holding up his drunken wife.

  When finally I am fed in a matter, he thought, fate stuffs my maw to bursting …

  She’s not dead, Parsival was thinking. Then who was it I laid in the grave?

  He reached over and touched his son’s head in a kind of wonder. Because of the streaming light the features kept changing. He was fascinated by the rich wonder of fired hair and eyes and the aquiline carving work of bone and flesh. He knew and didn’t know this living being. Watched him, totally absorbed, as the past kept melting away and leaving him new again. He knew what to say and said it:

  “Forgive me. For everything.”

  Lohengrin blinked at him. Silent, he nodded.

  Layla pulled free of Broaditch and half fell, caught herself with both hands on the stone rim. Stared, kept her violet-dark eyes on her husband. He turned, watching the freshening light gather into her shape, her movements …

  “Why?” she wanted to know, squinting. “Why did you have to turn up?” Waited.

  “Layla,” he said. Names were dreaming too, he noted. Flowered and passed … felt the brilliance shimmer in his heart and understood he existed only to know this, the way a flower existed only to be, unfold and fill and die, which was all a single shining …

  “Nay,” she virtually cried out at him, “don’t say you’re sorry or that you tried. Don’t you dare …” She kept blinking to focus. “You haunt my life! Why must you do that?”

  All he said was:

  “Layla.” Memory came back. It hadn’t really mattered up to now. Gawain had believed one of them was living. “I thought you were murdered.”

  “Naturally.”

  “By your friends,” he said to Lohengrin. Blinked. Expected the radiance to die at any moment, understanding it was tentative, and if his dreams returned darkness would pull the fused worlds apart again …

  Gawain, he thought, remembering him, the bandage-like headdress covering the slashed, halved face, the single eye burning from the shadows, voice whispery and raw with pain:

  “Parse, I had an hundred victories in my life.”

  “Yes,” Parsival had responded.

  “And women …”

  “Yes.”

  “All I ever wanted …”

  “Yes?”

  The eye shut, winked away into the shadows of the head.

  “… was to love,” he had whispered.

  “Ah,” Parsival had murmured.

  “I never did,” Gawain had said. “Never … yet I know what I missed … I know exactly what I missed …”

  Ah, Gawain, Parsival now thought, remembering, feeling it … feeling …

  “They slew Leena,” his wife told him. Glanced at her pale son, who sheathed his blade.

  “So I avenged her, I suppose,” Lohengrin reflected, meaning that he’d slain Clinschor. That’s done her rare good, he thought Stared at his father, amazed, feeling nothing from the past. This was just a living man before him, trying … like himself … just a man … “father” just a word …

  “I was rescued,” she was telling Parsival, “by … by a decent fellow.” She pictured him. Stared … sighed faintly, far away …

  “Thank God,” he answered her. “Where is he now?”

  She shrugged.

  “We were caught outside,” she said, “in that stupid storm.” Shrugged again. “I’m not so drunk,” she added. “But I drink all the time … I’m not content in my heart, you see …” Smiled. Batted her eyelids. The deep eyes were like mists glowing at twilight. “I like it well.”

  “Gentlefolk,” put in Broaditch, “would we not do better to find our way from here?”

  “Parse …” A woman’s voice out of the dark. They all turned.

  “Ah,” said Layla. “Even down here?” she asked, seeming strangely pleased in a way that made Broaditch uneasy. “How little things change, eh?” She chuckled, humorlessly. “The great sage, he ever fell a-flop from wine when I knew him … which was but short time long ago … the son-of-a-rutting-bitch!”

  Unlea came out of the shadows, limping on bloody feet, tattered, swaying, hair in a bundle that, Layla thought, needed only a stray rat for effect.

  “A rare beauty,” she declared, “this one.”

  Parsival was distantly amused. He wondered if his vision would survive these women.

  “Parse,” she said, “thank God I found you. I feared I were forever lost in these dark ways …”

  “Well,” Layla assured her, “you’re found now, my dear …” Chuckled. “Are you the latest victim?”

  “Unlea,” Parsival said, watching the infinitely unfolding brightness turn all the massed earth to a thin mist of music and fire. “This is my family.” Each overlapped the other in light, invisibly intimate.

  She just looked at them, rapidly blinking.

  “And an old retainer,” put in Broaditch, almost smiling.

  Alienor and the children were on top of the soot-choked ravine. The dawn sun was a hazy blur and a few sprinkles of rain spatted here and there from tin-gray, wind-tattered clouds.

  If it meant to rain, she considered, then it was over. There was still healing in heaven. It was that simple, in the end. It was rain or nothing …

  Parsival watched Layla’s flame flicker and lose itself in Broaditch’s fires, which were joined by Lohengrin’s, Unlea’s, his own. Like coals in a vast grate, he decided, each absorbed in all the rest … all beings burned in this cool, sweetness and lit all creation …

  They were going up a long, slow sloping corridor as the last sputters of torch wavered and choked out. Parsival found himself abs
orbed and fascinated by each moment: Movement, the sounds of steps and voices that echoed to endless depths of significance … the very sounds and not what they said stunned him.

  “How can you be sure this way leads out of here?” Lohengrin asked his father, who could just follow the sense despite the overwhelming resonances.

  “It’s all simple,” he replied, “if you don’t trouble yourself.”

  “Like being born, you mean,” his son returned, amused.

  “That trouble comes later, my lord,” Broaditch added from up ahead. “The first part is like resting in a haymow.”

  He was still supporting Layla’s arm, though she was steadily sobering. Parsival brought up the rear with Unlea holding on, limping, in a daze.

  “Do you want to look for him?” Parsival called ahead to his wife.

  She half turned and watched him in the weak torchflutter. His eyes were bright, she noted.

  “Look for a man?” She was amused. “Ha. They always find me, try what I might.”

  What must I do next? he asked into the brilliance that washed through the cloudy stones. What? Because he knew that simply to contemplate this unending glory wasn’t yet possible. There was too much unresolved … there was Layla and Lohengrin and the past weight of all his days … What?

  “Well,” said his son, wryly, “is that what comes of not troubling?”

  The passage ended. The last fut … fut … of the last torch showed a circular room like the inside of a well with no opening, not even a windowslit.

  Broaditch tapped the blocks with the end of his short spear. Raised both eyebrows. Looked at Parsival, still bemused to be here. Remembered setting out to find him and ask about the Holy Grail.

  Great God I was a silly man, I think …

  “Well, my lord,” he said, “last time I found myself in such a situation, I batted with the hardest thing I possessed and knocked a hole through.” He shrugged. “I might have saved myself the trouble.”

  Lohengrin smiled, black eyes intense.

  “The hardest thing you possessed,” he repeated. “Well, how’s your skull tonight?”

  “How know you it’s night, sir?” Broaditch wondered, innocently.

  Parsival was rapt, losing touch with them again. The light was overwhelming, streaming, fanning, changing, singing, immersing their words and forms, thinning them, melting them … He watched. They were all shadowy, fragile husks that fell into death, dried, hollow … vanished in the restless cloudy substance until living light stirred the crumbled, time-chewed shells and filled, firmed and puffed them into shape again … He stood still, trying to hold this illimitable perception perfect, motionless, unruffled, hushed as a windless pond …

  Unlea was shaking his arm.

  “The torch is going out!” she said, and to the rest: the water poisoned him …”

  “Fear not,” mocked Layla. “That’s Parsival the hero. He’ll save us.”

  “If we go back we’ll walk in darkness and be lost forever,” Unlea said.

  “The hero,” his wife repeated. “Darkness becomes you, lady,” she added.

  Parsival realized he really didn’t want to get outside. He didn’t want to move at all. Wanted to stay like a parched man at a fountain, nothing else real but drinking deep and deeper …

  Lohengrin looked up from under his black hooked brows in the last shudders of flame.

  “He wasn’t there when Leena died,” Layla said. “Neither of you were … you bastards …”

  The light dimmed as if he’d blinked against sunlight and Parsival shook his head.

  “I came later,” he said. “I buried her …” He remembered the raw, chopped faces above the ripped and spattered gowns, colorless shadows in the chill moonlight. “In the yard …”

  “My poor girl …” She gritted her teeth. “Did you know about his children?” she shot at Unlea who paid little attention.

  “Well,” said Broaditch, “this room will serve as a fine tomb for us.”

  Parsival watched their heartbeats, each sending a pulsing shimmer into the general glowing like water-ripples expanding, overlapping … each movement left a stain of light in light … each movement dying into the next … these wispy bodies would soon fail and fall but each life could no more cease than a fish could drown swimming. He would have just stayed there if he’d been alone. It was as good as anywhere else. But he felt their fear and a shimmer that was within and without and was and wasn’t just his mind spoke:

  Let it go this time knowing it. You cannot lose forever. You have passed through the door and now go back and do what is hardest, Grail Child.

  And then the rapt touch died into a shock of total blackness and he was already walking (the torch was out) asking himself:

  What do I do about the two women? Because he was back. This is the most difficult of births, Lord, to enter the world knowing what awaits. Crossed in the dark and reached the wall with his hands. No more magic. No more dreaming …

  As if he’d always known this place his right hand found a handle. He tensed his massive back and pulled the arched door open. Stepped out into the fuzzy, blinding noon sunlight, his senses stunned into shatteringly vibrant life, hearing, seeing, smelling, tasting air, touching warmth, day, earth, sky … grass and blue sparkle. He took his first steps, as if entering a temple, into the hush and wonder of the day, drinking in his first breath there …

  Alienor watched the storm front rolling, boiling on like dark surf, over the sunbright, green-blue skies. Lightnings flashed and flicked. The rain seemed to take breath, hold … then rush down. The children stood there with heads tilted back, the water spinging in, spatting on their sooty faces, the blackness starting to run off. Alienor opened her hood and spread it to catch the rainfall. It was cool and sweet. Bubbled in her knotted hair.

  Gawain was on his knees, naked on the earth, crouched over the stippled water that had overflowed from the well. The lightning had passed over and the downpour was steady.

  There was a pale, nude girl across the puddle from him, near the shattered castle wall. She stared into the water, smiling. Their reflections, alive with little impact-ripples, were pale, and both kept dipping up the coolness and drinking. Neither knew it as water, just sheen and glow, a flowing of soft, subtle tones, not reflection but a window, and the dipping hands cupped light and form and they drank lush air washed from lost springtimes where unweeping children played in unending mornings. His face floated near hers, each rainping a perfect moment of color, their pale features watersmooth …

  Gawain remembered Gawain like something lost in mist. Drank again from his palm and felt the colors beat with his heart and gush with his gleaming blood and waterflesh.

  His face and body were finally unmarked by time or strife. He dimly recalled another world of pain, confusion, darkness and terrible sorrows back in the mists that were Gawain the knight. Looked at his clean eyes, smooth cheeks, graceful arch of neck … deep, deep, rich eyes where fields of newness swam in flowering color.

  And her face overlapping, her body overlapping him in the rippling watertight … everything going paler, silvering into twilight … moon-color unfolding in her tresses as wavewinds unstrung her hair where stars were caught … and he leaned from the bank and let himself into the buoyant reflections … falling into her and himself … drinking become breathing … touching, feeling, thinking all drinking … he was whole now drinking … whole … the incredible water filling all of him and the her that was him too … drowning (though he didn’t know it) in her and in himself …

  EPILOGUE

  The rain was steady, washing the mucky soot into rivulets, creasing the blackened earth; running into gullies; gradually filling the streams as the world began to clean itself: puddles rising, cuts of waterflow foaming around rocks, some high ground already showing raw and clear, a rich muddy tang covering the bitter, ashy smell.

  Parsival and Broaditch backtracked through the blasted woodlands. They were trudging up a moderate slope, water sloshing
over their leatherbound feet. Their capes were tied closed and saturated. (Lohengrin had stayed with the women at the deserted fortress.) They planned to search for Alienor and the children, following the ravine at a distance and then circling back beside it. Broaditch felt it was as bad a plan as any other.

  “Well,” he said, conversational, “I hope you found the Holy Grail. You come in sore need of it, I think, sir.”

  Parsival was watching the softened rain tones blending in the mist. The rich, cool, wet air was a delight.

  “Oh, so?” he responded.

  “Aye. With two such ladies. How will you distract them?”

  Parsival smiled.

  “From what, Broaditch?”

  “From yourself, sir. As wondered the chicken when the fox come up the yard.”

  “You don’t fancy they’ll rest content together?” He looked warmly at the big peasant. Thought him a fine fellow.

  “I think nature’s at war with it, Sir Parsival.”

  The tall knight rubbed the back of his neck, thoughtfully.

  Glanced at Broaditch’s ruddy features, grayed temples and beard.

  “I remember you,” he told him, “when you and that other … what was his name, the skinny one …”

  “Waleis.”

  “Yes. When you gave me those fool’s clothes. My mother thought they’d laugh me home again.” A few more steps. The mist smoked around their feet. “I wish they had …” Sighed. “You’ve changed but little, I think, Broaditch.”

  “It’s only fine helmets as show the banging,” he suggested.

  Parsival smiled with pleasure.

  There’s so many to learn from in this world, he thought. Who needs magic? Each turn in the road, each new face is a wonder … There’s your magic … And it didn’t matter whether it had been the water or not that had changed him this time. He didn’t care at all. Layla and Unlea … Broaditch was right, except, he decided, it wasn’t nature but brute custom made the troubles. They were really all so much the same that to fight was to fight with yourself, seek Strangers as you will. All wars began in custom.