The Darrell Schweitzer Megapack

by Darrell Schweitzer

  And again, as dawn glowed in the eastern windows, she clapped her hands, and the whole company vanished but for us three.

  Her voice echoed in the empty hall.

  “Lancelot, I am weary. Come and lie with me.”

  But Lancelot stood and bowed courteously and said, “Lady, I will not. At the court of King Arthur, I am sure I will serve some other lady. I must reserve my faith for her.”

  In a grim, deliberate voice, my mother said to him, “Then take a look at her, and see if you can boast about your faithfulness.”

  The vision came, and through it I followed Lancelot on many adventures, in the course of which he was not always true or faithful at all. There was Elaine of Astolat, who died for love of him. Others wept and tore their hair or went mad as he rode away from them. But Lancelot merely continued on his way, outwardly the finest knight in the world, inwardly his soul filling up with sin like a flask filling with dark and bitter wine.

  One of these ladies he trysted with was my mother, though she was younger in the vision, only a girl. Whether this all happened as part of one of Morgan Le Fay’s schemes, or my mother called out to Queen Morgan in her despair when she lay with child and abandoned, I could not tell, nor could I remark on it; for at once, like water stirred by an oar, the vision swirled and shifted.

  And I beheld Guinevere, the most beautiful lady in the world, as far beyond my own desires as the stars, but worthy to stand beside Lancelot or share his bed, but for the small problem—and in the glory of the vision it seemed a trifle—that she was already, ahem, Arthur’s queen and wife to that same king to whom Lancelot had sworn his honor and his life.

  Yet I saw Lancelot and Guinevere coming together many times.

  They despoiled Arthur’s bed.

  Beside me in the room, not in the vision at all, Lancelot wept loudly.

  “Must this be so?” said my mother the enchantress. “But lie with me, and it need not.”

  “It must be so,” said Lancelot, wounded full sore in his heart.

  And I saw how it was to end. King Arthur discovered he had been betrayed. Queen Guinevere was condemned to be burnt, but Lancelot rescued her, slaying many knights in his war-frenzy, even those who had been his friends. Because of this, Camelot was destroyed, Arthur slain, and the Saxons came again, still smarting from their defeat at Mons Badonicus, but this time flowing over the land like an inexorable tide, until the very name of Christ was forgotten in Britain.

  Beside me, Lancelot howled and beat his breast. He fell to all fours like a beast and tore off his clothing. It was he who wriggled naked in the mud and through the underbrush as the castle faded away in the morning mist. I ran after him, clumsy in the boots which had been his gift, and I only caught up with him after a very long time; and then I was the one who wept, as I saw him grazing among the wild cattle, his face filled with madness.

  He shied away as if in pain when I tried to touch him. Only after much coaxing could I get a woven-grass bridle over his head. Then I led him away from the company of cattle.

  Again a year passed in the forest, and I grew to be a man, tall and strong, and still clad like a man. It was my task to bring Lancelot back to his humanity, to teach him to walk upright again, to make himself clean, to wear clothes, and to regain human speech.

  I suppose my mother looked on all this while, glad at her handiwork, but she never tried to stop me as I undid what she had done. Maybe that too was part of her plan.

  Toward the end of the year, amid the first snows, Lancelot’s reason came back to him, as we two huddled around a fire inside a shelter I’d made of mud and sticks. He spoke of his sins, which were many and grievous. Then he cocked his head strangely, as a bird would, and for an instant I despaired, thinking him mad again; and he said, “Is it not passing strange that the greatest knight in the world should also be a wretched sinner?”

  Thinking only to comfort him, I said, “But he is still the greatest knight in the world.”

  He sighed and said, “Yes, there is that. He is still the sinner, likewise. The two natures are inextricably conjoined.”

  I didn’t know what to say. He sat silently for a long time, while the fire burned down and night birds gathered in branches above us, speaking in their secret speech, which not even I understood.

  Suddenly I said to Lancelot, “Are you my father?”

  He jerked back, as if I had struck him, but then nodded. “I met your mother once, years ago.”

  “Do I count as one of your sins?”

  He put his hand on my shoulder. There were tears in his eyes, but his purpose was firm. He was a man who wept for sorrow unashamedly, but embraced pain, unafraid.

  “Sylvanus, you are half of magic and half of the earth, which is why you must dwell in the forest, not in the enchanted castle, though you, like myself, may visit there under the influence of your mother’s spells. You, like myself, are halfway between the beasts and the angels, which makes us no different from all other men.”

  Then the night birds spoke to me and said that the Queen of this forest, who was my mother, commanded our presence in her hall.

  We rose to go. The dark birds swirled around us like a cloud. Great stags looked up from their moonlit grazing and followed us, as did bears and wolves. Eagles circled overhead, shutting out the stars with their wings. Each creature cried out in his own language that the time was done, the hour was at hand, and the truth would be known.

  Together, in this fantastic company, we entered into the feasting-hall, but there were no lords and ladies, and there was no merriment. Lancelot and I knelt beside my mother the enchantress as she lay atop her dais, her powers fading, her face pale and drawn. Her breath came in painful gasps as she struggled to speak.

  “Lancelot, I hate you with all my heart, for you are my bitterest enemy; but so too do I love you with all my heart as the lover I cannot attain. Therefore I am torn. My heart bleeds, and I am dying. But stay with me and I shall be well. Forget your destiny. Forget Arthur and Camelot. Stay.”

  This time Lancelot did not weep. He shook his head gravely.

  “No, Lady, it cannot be so.”

  And he was the one who stood up and clapped his hands.

  The vision came.

  And I turned and beheld the knights feasting at Camelot when the Holy Grail passed through the hall, and each man was suddenly satisfied with the meat he desired most; and all of them swore the quest of the Grail, Lancelot with all the others. And King Arthur wept, for he knew that these were sinful men, even Lancelot, and that he would never see them all assembled here again, for many would perish in the questing.

  But I saw too that Lancelot and a very few others came close to the Grail. They entered the chapel where it was, but could not pass out of the darkness into the next room to actually behold it. That was given only to Galahad, who was without sin, and therefore perfect. He alone achieved the Grail and was subsumed into Heaven, leaving Lancelot and the other knights behind on Earth in the darkness.

  But Galahad was the fruit of Lancelot’s loins; without Lancelot’s siring him, this holiness would never have been accomplished.

  * * * *

  Then the vision passed, and Lancelot and I stood beneath the bare trees of the great forest, with my mother dead at our feet.

  I looked up once and saw Queen Morgan looking on. I found the expression on her face utterly indecipherable.

  I knew that I would spend the rest of my life trying to understand.

  She must have vanished sometime while Lancelot and I were digging the grave. We labored throughout the day. When we were done, and my mother the Queen lay in it, Lancelot knelt down and wept once more.

  “When this story is told,” he said, “and I know you will do some of the telling, let her be called the Sorrowful Lady, for she was wronged by me; and call this place the Forest of Testing. Here have I been tested and tempered, like a sword at a forge.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  His horse wandered to his side. It had b
een kept safe all this while by my mother’s magic. He mounted and made to depart.

  “Why do you have to go?” I pleaded with him. I wanted to be at his side always. Indeed, to be with him seemed as dear as life itself; it seemed the same thing. “Wouldn’t King Arthur be better off without you?”

  He shook his head and drew rein. “Without me, Arthur would perish at Badon Hill.”

  He pulled away and started his horse at a trot. I ran after him, my long legs keeping pace.

  “But—but—”

  “The quest, Sylvanus, may be hard. It may be filled with sorrow. But it defines who were are. Without it, we are nothing.”

  “Stop! You and that queen…it’ll be horrible! You’re going to kill all your friends!”

  He made his horse go faster.

  “Think of the Grail, Sylvanus! The holiness! We almost made it!”

  He spurred to a gallop and was gone.

  * * * *

  I ran after him, for years. Time in the forest did not move the same as it did in the rest of the world, as I have said, and somehow that enchantment lingered over me like a curse, because I never caught up with Lancelot in all those years, even after my beard was more gray than green and my stride ceased to be as long or as certain. Yet I did not turn from my quest, because, as Lancelot had said, it defined who I was. I fought, betimes, but never became anyone’s champion, or even a knight. I was the one who came where Lancelot had just been and heard tales of him, or told more of those tales to earn my supper. I was the one who beheld him across a battlefield where he defended the King’s standard and did deeds of great worship; and, again, it was I who came into Camelot as a ragged beggar and sat among the poor folk at the far edge of the hall at Pentecost when the Grail appeared before the Round Table and all the knights assembled swore themselves to impossible holiness.

  I saw Lancelot then, but I did not speak to him.

  And I saw the field of Camlann, where Arthur and Mordred were slain. Lancelot arrived too late, and he bitterly wept.

  They say that even as Lancelot wept there, Arthur was borne away in a magic boat to Avalon by three queens, to be buried or to be resurrected; but I did not witness that part of the story and cannot attest.

  I can tell that at the very end of his days, when I too was slowed with age, I came to that monastery where Lancelot had retired in his sorrow, casting off all the accouterments of knighthood to repent his sins.

  I entered his cell. He looked up from his prayers and recognized me, saying, “Are you one more apparition, sent to torment me?”

  I put my hand on his shoulder. “No, I am merely here.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I need to understand what I have seen.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “No, no. If you understand that, then you know who you are. Nobody knows who they are.”

  I was afraid, for an instant, that he was still mad, but the look in his eyes was one of peace.

  “You went through it all, knowing from the beginning how it would turn out. Was this merely God’s irresistible will?”

  “No,” said Lancelot. “It was mine.” He crossed himself and muttered a prayer, knowing he had just committed a sin of pride. “I think I did more good than evil, all told, don’t you?”

  “All told.”

  “Better for Camelot to have fallen than never to have risen at all.”

  “Perhaps.”

  “And the Grail.”

  “Yes.”

  He seized my hand and held it so tightly I thought the bones would break.

  “Ah, Sylvanus! Wasn’t it glorious?”

  KVETCHULA

  “Ruth,” my grandmother Esther once explained to me, “there’s no helping it. You’re a born kvetch. A kvetch is a complainer, a person who complains and complains all the day long and all through the night, because kvetches, they don’t have peaceful dreams. A kvetch can’t stop kvetching no more than they can get rid of the damp when it rains and soaks everybody to the skin. The kvetch just kvetches about being wet; then she sneezes, and then kvetches about sneezing, because a kvetch kvetches, plain and simple. The woid is both a noun and a voib, depending on where you put it.”

  Grandmother Esther said “woid” and “voib” ’cause she’s is not sophisticated like me, though she did go to school.

  So I am a kvetch. The world needs its kvetches, or else why would God make so many of them? A dirty job, but somebody’s got to do it.

  I tell you, it keeps me constantly busy.

  There’s my husband Morris, whom I married out of pity, and that’s the truth, because he needed looking after so badly. Every moment of the day he keeps me hopping.

  “Morris, your spectacles are on top of your head, so stop tearing the place apart,” I have to tell him, and “Morris, did you change your shorts?” (and this in front of people sometimes, but I’ve got to remind him), and also “Morris, stop wearing those awful ties!”

  The ties are the worst part. I don’t know where he gets them. It’s no use if I throw them out, because he always gets more. I swear they’ve got a whole department of devils in Hell just working full time to keep my husband supplied with ties, for the sole purpose of trying the patience of Ruth Leibowitz.

  And my patience has its limit, to tell you the truth.

  The glaring, puke-green silk one, that one I can live with, or the day-glo pink one with the eyeball, even the one with the hula-girl under the palm tree, and I refuse to take seriously the plain white one he wears with a black shirt so he looks like some Mafia don. But his warped idea of class is going to our fancy 20-year highschool reunion banquet showing off a tie with a picnic-table pattern that’s got enormous ants all over it! With that one, he goes too far. That one I took to the office and fed into the shredder, but it did me no good, he has more of them. Maybe they grow in his closet. I swear he wears them just to torment me, such an ungrateful man.

  Then there are the vampires. Morris, he’s partial to wolf-men and mummies and Frankensteins like he is still a little boy, but he is really loves are these vampires, especially the young and sexy ones he watches over and over again on our VCR. Every vampire movie ever made, my Morris he’s got them all, and he sits all day and watches them when he should be mowing the lawn or changing his shorts or something.

  Once, just to make a joke, I ask him if he’s ever seen Mein Yiddishe Dracula, and he doesn’t blink, and starts rummaging among his Mount Everest pile of tapes and says, “I think it’s in here somewhere, Honey Love.”

  My Morris, he’s totally nuts about vampires and such.

  So I’m not surprised—but this is not to say I’m not appalled—when he says, “Honey Love, guess where we’re going for vacation. To Transylvania. I’ve saved up. I’ve already bought the tickets. So we’re going on the Deluxe Vampire Tour.” And then he adds, “There’s no refunds.”

  You could hear my jaw drop in Brooklyn. We live nowhere near Brooklyn.

  Morris, he’s all smiles, like some kid who’s got an “A” on his report card or something. He’s even gone and bought a new tie for the occasion. It’s all black with a glow-in-the-dark bat with motorized wings that really flap. He’s particularly proud of that. And the noise it makes. Whir…flap, flap. Oy!

  Kvetch? Maybe you think I should celebrate?

  So the summer arrives and off we go to the airport with Morris wearing his stupid tie, which delays us because its tiny motor makes the security machines bleep, and the guards look at Morris like he’s a mad bomber with an exploding tie, but finally we get through, and he babbles all the way about Vlad the Impaler, who was not a nice man at all, and nosferatu, a word which could never fit into the crossword puzzle I’m doing to occupy myself with and hide my embarrassment.

  Then we’re in Bucharest and everything gets much worse. Our tour group is forming up, and now there’s a whole busload of people just like Morris. They jabber and jabber things like, “Listen to them, the children of the night, such beautiful music they make,” but I do
n’t hear no music, and I don’t care, it’s so awful, because everyone one of them is wearing that same damn tie!

  * * * *

  Now I have to admit those mountains are pretty, the Balkans or Carpets or whatever they are. (“Carpathians,” Morris whispers in a tone like it’s some crime to make a little mistake in geography, even if I did graduate almost thirty years ago and how many of these Romanians know their way around Jersey City?)

  So they’ve got nice mountains. Almost like the Catskills.

  But the tour, it’s not so nice. Their buses are always late and you can’t find a decent bathroom, and the food is, to talk like Morris for a minute, an unspeakable blasphemy of indescribable horror, which is a pretty accurate description.

  So there they are, all these middle-aged Children of the Night—that’s the name of the fan club, I finally discover—all of them wearing those awful ties, with only me to take care of them, such other such wives as are dumb enough to come being as wacked-out as their husbands, some of them actually wearing flapping bats in their hair, which is something, I swear to you, you will never see Ruth Leibowitz ever do. We traipse all over these Carpathians, go into this crypt and out of that vault, and we listen while long-winded tour guides lecture us as we stand around one more pile of rocks. The guide keeps going on about how only goodness can stop a vampire, like waving crosses and all, so finally I can’t stand it any longer. I ask him a historically challenging question.

  “Well, what did you Commies do, wave a hammer and sickle at them?”

  You see, I know this guide works for the government and since he’s not a kid, I know he’s been doing this for years, that makes him a Commie.

  And Morris he looks like he’s just swallowed a live poodle, and everybody else turns away and groans, with their little plastic bats fluttering like sick birds with no feathers.

  The guide, he says in a low, nasty voice, all the time pretending to be polite, “Madame, I assure you, there are ways.”

  Like the bad guys say in the movies, “Ve haf vays to make you talk.”

  Right now I want him not to talk, but to shut up.