He was impressed. The flashes and thunder were rattling towards the horizon, now.
The shadows barely shifted on her face. Impressed, but not convinced.
“I’ll feed death,” he told her, “until he feeds on me. But I don't promise to love and wed him.”
In the time it took a fading flash of lightning to glint on the dull bars, her slim hand shot through the bars and with fingers of steel and ice locked on his throat, yanked and slammed his face into an iron crosspiece. The next flash was pain in his skull.
I must be sick, he thought. I’m so weak…these women…what is it? First the witch who'd sucked him dry; now this. “I yield,” he grated into the choking fingers. “I yield.”
His famous cold fury was filling him. His forehead was rubbed raw. Enough, he thought, and slammed his thick forearm up into her wrist hard enough to snap bones or bend metal.
He wasn’t sure which was worst: the shock of pain or the fact that her grip locked on unshaken.
“Surrender to the truth,” she cried, singsong, rocking slightly. “Let the cold fill you and become one with dark.” Her eyes seemed to flash or mirror the faint lightning. “You will now be made a knight, undefeatable. Fulfill your quest and you may return here to join the kindred.”
She released him and he staggered back a step. His nose was bleeding. He was too impressed to be angry or even apprehensive.
“Amazing,” he said. “Will I learn the secret of that strength?”
“All the kindred have great powers,” she explained, still singsong and swaying behind the grating. “You will become a knight inestimable, colder than ice, harder than stone, with fists to burst walls and break plate!”
He raised both dark, wet, bushy eyebrows. Maybe he was becoming a believer.
“A joy to ponder,” he said. Rubbed his face. Felt groggy, as if waking up. Smiled. Maybe he wasn’t becoming a believer, at that. Not altogether, anyway.
She paid no direct attention to him.
“You may, if you succeed, become lord of this land in the name of our Master.”
“My rise is certain, then, witch?” He cocked his fierce head to the side. “So long as I surrender? I’d believe you better were you less sweet to see.”
She shifted, gracefully, along the bars. “The hemlock flower looks pleasant to the sight,” she said. “Yet to taste it is death.”
He nodded.
“Which is what you are offering.”
“There is ordinary death,” she said scathingly, “and there is the joining.”
He was focusing, amused.
“My father,” he told her, “whom I little respect in most matters, would probably ask you how, in this, you differ from all other women?”
Her voice had altered and seemed a man’s.
Mayhap I were but feeling weak and she were not so strong as it seemed…
Her voice had suddenly changed, was shrill but, unmistakably, a man’s. “Youth,” it said, without inflection or feeling, no more personal, he thought, than wind blowing through a pipe, “go next to the ruler of this land. There you will be given power in trade for a service worthy of you. Heed this and remember all you have been told. Thou hast been chosen. Do not ponder why. You are young, yet you may be found fit to bear my authority over all men.” Suddenly she opened the gate, and still in that shrill, inorganic voice, said:
“Enter!”
He tried. He felt stuck in stone. Felt he was losing his wits; certainly he was sick of witchcraft.
“When next you come you will enter without effort,” she assured him, in her natural voice this time. “You will soon be shown the way to what you need.”
Suddenly he could move again and he stepped forward as she slammed the gate shut with her effortless strength. In the last flickers of lightning light he was left with an afterimage impression that her hair was bushy and moving as if in an electric wind or, somehow, independently alive, a sense that her face was wide and flat, depthless, eyeless, awful…
And then there was just the wind, fading rain, coolness and relief… He started walking, still groggy, out from under the overhanging rock ledge.
Where’s my horse? he asked himself. Where’s Firetail?
He felt vague, weighed down by a vast, massive softness.
“He’s on top of this damned cliff,” he muttered, “that’s where.”
It seemed infinitely high and far. He wished he could fall up, for a change.
There was a clump of pine trees alongside the cliff face. They swooshed soothingly in the dying wind. He was so spent he could only think about being tired. He went under the massed branches into a peaceful silence. The air was rich with clean scents as he waded into dry fallen needles. He had to sit. He sat. Then stretched out. Then was gone from everything…
PARSIVAL
There was no dawn from the darkness he lay in. And it had to be a dream because the island was back, a mile below his point-of-view, the island he'd seen when he'd gone blank after sipping the drugged wine with the monk and woke up in the strange open stone coffin. He saw again the obscure center that his dreamsight couldn't penetrate; the icy beaches where the dense fogs smoked; the clear inland plains that ended at the impenetrable center.
He dropped down at sudden dreamspeed towards that dome-like blurriness, covering the seeming mile in a seeming instant. As he hit what seemed the surface of the dome (if dome it was) he had an impression of beings and towering structures — and then something like a giant hand batted him aside as if he were an insect.
The blow actually woke him up. His head hurt, eyes unfocused for the moment, so the late afternoon was a blur of sky and treetops massed together so the world was only a general brightness which gradually resolved itself into a graceful movement, a flowing soar that seemed inexpressibly perfect, a harmonious pulsing that lifted him up and up with it until, a few eye blinks later, his eyes reverted to normal focus and he realized it was a white dove beating across the clearing where he lay on his back, still surrounded by the lean, blade-faced warriors…
He grunted and moved his head, tentatively.
“How are you, my Lord?” Lego asked beside him as Parsival sat up, straining because his arms had been bound to his sides as were those of Lego who was standing between two of the small men.
“Where’s the woman?” he wanted to know; couldn't see past the circle of small, oily little soldiers crowded close around him. Even in the open, he noticed, they smelt strong and strange. He decided the odor was like horses in a barn.
Is it what they eat, he wondered, Or what they are?
“They took her,” Lego said. “I know not where.”
Parsival shrugged to test his bonds. They were tight and his arms were stiff and sore.
“Where are the noble knights?” he asked.
He meant the ones King Arthur had sent to bring him back to Camelot.
“They fell or fled,” said Lego.
The rust-armored leader strode forward, bumping his men aside and scowled down at the captured knight.
“Shutting up!” he cried. “No more talk!”
Parsival looked at his eyes to read him, if possible. They were dark, depthless, filled with unfocused fury.
“What did you do with the woman,” he asked him, thinking he'd been to enough trouble over her to have earned a right to know. He knew this fellow was a nasty, deluded, dangerous son-of-a-bitch driven on by winds of nonsense. He expected to be killed, though he really never believed it would actually happen. He always seemed to find room to wriggle and fight free. Yet…
“Soon you know, dog,” was the promising answer. Then, as a form of grammar, kicked Parsival in the ribs with his leather-wrapped foot.
He didn’t wince. Lego snarled and tried to kick the man. “Shitwit,” Parsival commented.
“No talk!”
Tried another kick, but this time the knight twisted aside and locked both legs around the man, chopping him flat on his back. He cursed in whatever language he spoke, ro
lled free like a ball of wire and made to slash the bound man who’d come to a squat, ready.
The little killer wiped his lank moustaches with the back of a hand and glared, barked something, and several warriors rushed up and dove on Parsival who might have rolled and kicked them around for a while, but it was pointless to be banged unconscious, again. His head still rang, he thought, like a dull gong.
“Now you see,” shouted the little leader. “Now you learn!”
They kicked and shoved the two Britons forward through the crowd of armed men. They went back to the strangely squared-off clearing where the ragged tents were pitched.
At the moment two of the foreigners in spiked helmets were dancing around holding up the ends of a big banner of torn black silk. A huge face was painted on it in the color of dried blood. The features were thick and a fat Mongol-like mustache drooped to the heavy chin. The mouth seemed lipless where it showed; eyes dark pits staring straight ahead. He wore what might have been a crown or a turban. Parsival couldn’t tell.
All the men began shouting, chanting, leaping and saluting the image with their weapons.
“Ai ai ai ai-eeeee!” it sounded like to Parsival and Lego. Then they began howling a name – or what seemed a name. “Mmm’a’das-sss! Mnn’a’das-sss!”
Maybe it wasn’t a name. Now they kicked the two captives’ legs out from under them, forcing them to kneel on the soft earth.
“Bow!” yelled the leader. “Bow down! Bow down to him!”
They were shoved and kicked forward until they nearly toppled into a pit that had to be ten feet deep and at least that wide.
Even as Parsival’s sight adjusted (the sunbeams fractured by the tree-line were needles in his eyes) he heard Lego gasp, choke, gag and curse so that he basically vomited the word:
“Shit!”
Because it was too horrible and Parsival felt his heart and stomach bump and sink together so it was pure fear before it became even anger and madness, before disgust, then slow seething outrage.
He was about to go berserk, except he couldn’t win yet, so he shut his reaction down into black, bitter ice, locking his teeth and looking at the sickening violation with stone eyes: the naked woman with a naked man on either side (he recognized two of Arthur’s knights who’d been sent after him: the olive-skinned strong one and the red- haired leader) all on their backs, a round stone placed under each forcing them into an unnatural arch, mouths open in soundless shouts of blood.
That was bad but bearable the rest was no good at all because each had been slashed open from navel to sternum and in the blackening mess of blood and stuff in there Parsival could see that the hearts had been torn out. The three organs had been placed in a row at the bottom of the pit like three strange red-pink squash.
He blinked with his whole face.
“Sweet work,” he said, toneless. Anyone who knew him well would have known that toneless was past the limit. Toneless was death itself swooping in with scythe cocked to cut. “What sweet work you creatures do.”
He shut his eyes. The leader’s voice went on, sing-song, cold, almost hysterical at times.
“The Master eats all enemies!” he yelled in the infidel tongue, then back into fragmented English: “All enemy. We are doom! Master is king! All kneel, all kneel!” His men now whirled in mad circles; scraped and beat the earth with their blades.
“Eat enemies!” they cried in their own tongue. “Eat enemies!” Lego couldn’t look away; Parsival refused to open his eyes.
The leader wasn’t spinning. He tore off his leather and steel armor and stood there nude except for leggings. He was wiry and complexly tattooed as if a long, symbolic history was engraved on his dry-looking flesh. Lego had an impression of a burning city covering the yellowish, papery skin of his flat chest, the smoke boiling into a mass of storm clouds, tiny figures fleeing, two huge cloud masses looking like clawed, bestial hands clawing at them…
“These things they do in God’s clean sunlight,” declared Lego.
Because the nude one had hopped down into the pit like an obscene frog while the others chanted and kept spinning all around, reeling, jerking like murderous marionettes on unseen strings, while the tattooed, wiry one knelt over each body and took what seemed symbolic bites out of their flesh.
“Filthy scum!” Lego yelled, unaware that he was making any sound at all, voice dry and raw. “Devils of filth!”
Parsival opened his eyes in time to see the bony, yellowish gnome pop the three hearts into a sack, licking the blood of the three victims from his lips. He was pulled out of the pit by three of his fellows.
Parsival wasn’t shocked. He’d long since seen too much. He was going to wait until he was able to kill them, if at all possible. He was wondering what he and Lego were being saved for. Could it be worse than this?
These are no followers of the prophet Mahomet, he thought. Though they resemble them in form. These turds have been scooped from Hell’s rankest cesspool…
Yes, he’d seen many things; but this was bad in a special way. He heard Lego’s emotionally overloaded voice scrape away to a gagging whisper.
And then they were jerked upright again and driven forward to where a blackened kettle sat steaming on a heap of embers; on the slope here where the puddling, stinking, discolored stream oozed turgidly downward.
Parsival’s mouth seemed to cloy with foulness. He was looking at the leader’s bare back where the tattoo seemed to depict a line of people (suggesting thousands), arms raised in what could have been pain, despair or supplication, unbound, unguarded, walking into a huge, smiling mouth as crammed with teeth as a shark’s…
The leader emptied the bag of hearts into the cauldron. “Sickening witchcraft,” whispered hoarse Lego. “Dogshit,” said the knight.
The chanting became a howling. The spinning a cyclonic insanity, the fighters careening and bouncing off one another, circling the steaming pot where the tattooed leader with the scar-divided nose shouted in snatches of French, English, and his own snorting and guttural tongue.
He brandished a dipper, now, which he plunged into the kettle and held to his lips.
“Fuck thy sister,” Parsival said, toneless, “and thy mother too with a burning brand.”
MIMUJIN
Later, Sunset
The tattooed little leader was nude, squatting on his heels over a pot of cool, mushy food which he ate with his hands. He faced west where the sky was a deep red wall behind the trees. His people’s campfires were a little distance away.
A tall woman stood facing him with her back to the black and red intensity of sky and shadow. The outline of her garb made her seem a nun. Her face seemed to gleam unnaturally in the ambient light, like metal. She stood very still, arms close and composed. Her voice sounded bored, faintly mocking, remote.
“Mimujin,” she said, in his language, “I care nothing for your rituals. Or your revenge.”
He looked into the pot. The sunset tinted his face so it gleamed like a dull coal.
“Woman,” he responded, “when your people have suffered as have ours, then you may understand the word revenge.” He took some grayish morsel from the pot and put it to his lips, saying: “The Great King, blessed be his name, saved our people. Smote our oppressors. And we became his sword.” Ate, as if everything he did was ritual.
“Nor,” she said flatly, “am I interested in the history of your wretched tribe. We have a bargain. I will guide you to your king. You will continue your good work in this land.”
He looked at her, tall, still, the darkening red behind like clotting blood in heaven as the twilight gradually seemed to absorb her form into the general dimming. It was clear he’d like to have struck her down and knew he couldn’t; had already tried that.
“Sorceress,” he said, flat bitter, furious, “we do what we must.” She felt a pause, a question.
“Yes?” she urged.
“Why do you hate your people so much?” She was amused.
“Do I?”
He shrugged. Only his eyes gleamed at all now; she was just a vague outline, the red almost all black behind her, as if the night had tried to take shape and was just dissolving back to emptiness.
“You give them to us,” he said. Shrugged. Ate another bite from the pot full of darkness.
“When a man is wounded,” she said, “and his wound rots, what do you do?”
“What? Why we burn it with hot steel, and if that fails we cut the limb off.”
“You do this to save him.”
Mimujin nodded, invisible now in the pooling night. “Well then?” he wondered, curious.
“When a people rots,” she explained, “one must do the same.” He grunted. The idea impressed him.
“So our hate for your people may save them?” She agreed:
“A wound may also be cleaned by maggots. The maggots feed and are content. The victim is healed.”
“You call us maggots?” he wanted to know, carefully adding each offense she gave to his collection.
“I call you healers,” she said, invisible now as the tide of night had covered them both.
LOHENGRIN
The next morning he opened his eyes and thought they were still shut. He blinked, rubbed; then closed them one then the other.
Am I struck blind? he asked himself. Because there was only grayness everywhere until his thwarted focus found the shadowy outlines of the massive pine trees that surrounded him. The sweet, rich damp smell was a tonic in his lungs as he finally came fully awake.
He ached; but he was young and it was alright. He sat up squinting into the fog at the hints of forms that melted to vagueness a few feet away. He decided even his bones were damp; the good news was today promised to be as hot as yesterday.
By the time he stood up, rinsed his mouth with water and then sour wine, ate hard bread and salt meat and “went to the bushes”, the mist had turned steamy and was beginning to churn under the sun’s pressure.
Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Page 15
