Lohengrin’s crafty nature stirred. His armor had to be nearby, as well. Probably strapped to the animal.
So he crouched to his feet and quick-stepped into the underbrush which filled in the thin woods to about man-high.
Closer now, he could hear the man grunting and thrashing. The sun was poking and spearing through the hazy cloud trails and Lohengrin realized it was early afternoon. He felt there was still a lingering, faint, charred smell in the earth. The air was warm and a little humid.
“Keep humping and bumping, fool,” he whispered, now spotting the light-dappled, golden flanks of the saddled horse just ahead through the screening brush.
Armor too. A mace was strapped to the neck, a sword to the flank. He has what he wants, I have what I want…
He prepared to mount, making soft, soothing sounds – except, like something from a mad mystery play, the naked knight suddenly popped through the bushes.
“What, done already?” quipped Lohengrin. He coolly freed the mace from its thong and tested the heft, cocking one bushy black eyebrow at the ludicrous apparition. “Why hide your face? Looks it like a dog’s arse?” His witticism soothed him.
The otherwise naked man (stocky, scarred, and knotted-looking) stood there, bushes still swaying behind him, breathing hard inside the helmet that was adorned on top by what the young man took for a brass mouse.
“Ho, ho,” said the man, voice tinny, muffled and very deep.
“Ho, ho?” echoed Lohengrin, studying his genitals: the receding penis and shapeless sac. “Fellow, you should wear a helm over your dick, as well, the sight of which diseased and misshapen stub would revolt the devil himself.”
“Ho, ho.”
“Again? Now I see why that girl was asleep under you. Your wit stunned her like a blow between the ears and what followed left her undisturbed.” Lohengrin forgot his anxiety and discomforts while jibing. “Spare me another ‘ho, ho.’”
“Cowardly thief,” the man rumbled. “Name thyself.”
“Lohengrin of Wales who will cut your head off second. Your nether parts being unbearable to view a moment more.”
“A dangerous boy to a man unarmed.”
Lohengrin grinned and cocked a half-nod at him. “I’ll perform a service to mankind…nay, womankind,” he said.
“Let me have my sword and I’ll serve you as you merit,” the man suggested, voice deep enough to vibrate in the earth.
Lohengrin touched the swordhilt poking up on the other side of the horse. A sword was his preferred weapon.
“Ho, ho,” he said, preparing to mount. “Next time.”
“Hold.” The man came closer. “Hear me, she’s a rare beauty, lad. Wish you not to enjoy her ere you depart?”
The young man leaned on the horse, one hand on the saddlehorn, the other gripping the mace.
“To have one you’d touched first would be like eating the cheese where the rat has bitten.”
“Were you hungry enough, you’d eat the rat along with it, lad. This one is honey to the senses, not yet sixteen. No peasant slut, either. Child of a noble family. Sweet and soft and will deny you no pleasure.” His deep, deep voice was a soothing persuasion.
“I’m not yet sixteen myself,” Lohengrin told him. “And I’ll enjoy spilling your polluted blood if you step nearer.”
“She says no to nothing, whatever you wish of her. I have seen to that. She is a perfect woman.” He inched nearer but Lohengrin read no menace, now. “You’re a stout lad. I like you, I who hate all men. I’ll teach you pleasures you cannot conceive!”
“What fortune that I happened on you,” Lohengrin said, spinning the mace effortlessly in one hand. “Now my life will take shape, at last.”
The bizarre knight headed back into the brush.
“Come with me and find life’s sweetness, lad.” He didn’t look back. “Unless you enjoy men or beasts more than woman’s love.”
Lohengrin smiled.
“That’s my weakness,” he said. “You have me.” But he was curious. An idea was forming that involved taking the girl with him and exploring her charms along the way. He was already following, mace over his shoulder.
Shortly, he was standing over the red haired girl. Her beauty choked his breath. The outspread legs; the reddishgold tuft; the length and naked impact of her. He was instantly excited and now felt she’d been drugged. The idea of her utter helplessness drew at him. The image of how she’d just been vigorously fucked.
He knelt, keeping aware of where the naked knight was, and gently poked her cheek.
“She’s dead,” he exclaimed.
“Go on! Go on!” cried the knight, hopping from foot to foot. “She is perfect! She is sweet… So sweet… Go on! There’s nothing here but your pleasure, boy. No resistance, no discussion… nothing but pleasure …”
Lohengrin lost his erection at once in a spasm of fear and disgust. He’d been so blurry with desire he hadn’t noticed she’d been strangled: livid bruises on her throat, blood on her lips. And the too-deep, dull voice was still inveighing him to mount her and give himself up to exquisite, mad, dark joys.
“You… you fuck a woman you kill …”
The word was cut off by a tremendous blow that imploded his chest. His breath blew out. His lungs felt flattened. The other man had delivered a kick that lifted Lohengrin and dropped him on his back four feet away.
Despite pain, suffocation, light and dark blotches clawing at his consciousness he was, after all, Parsival’s natural son and grandson of the mighty Gahmuret, so he still gripped the mace.
The naked, stocky knight (or whatever he was) went around the horse and drew his sword.
“I’ll put you both together,” he said, in his tinny, dull, deep voice, “one atop the other and I’ll fuck you both till you start to stink too much and then I’ll keep your skulls to piss in.” Laughed. “As you rot you get softer and sweeter, at first.” He suddenly jumped up and down crying out incomprehensible noises as if in the grip of demons or a fit, Lohengrin thought, with a detached part of his mind.
He could only lie there, arms at his sides, the one on the far side from the killer holding the haft. The man was a blur looming above him as if he lay underwater, fading in and out, still airless from the blow. Whatever he was saying had no more content for Lohengrin than the rumble of distant thunder. The flashes in his head could have been lightning.
“Do you know what number you are, boy?” the man was blatting. The boy didn’t understand. His detached thoughts kept going over the fact that he’d been taken like a fool. “I need a monk to inscribe my deeds in a book and keep the count.” Flat, blatting laughter. “You are number —”
But he never finished because the teenager told his arm to strike from that impossible position and he arced the heavy weapon across his body as if it were a willow wand and managed to take the murderous man’s leg from under him just below the knee.
The answering swordcut just dug dirt and the ruined man toppled sidewise in a spray of blood and curses. Lohengrin was just wheezing his first actual breath into the white-hot agony of his chest.
He paid scant attention to the man’s thrashing and blowing as he struggled to open his faceplate – as if that would help. He rolled through a puddle, pounding his fists, splashing mud and foam.
The young man heaved himself to his knees. He’d never done anything harder. He was finally breathing and wondered which ribs were broken.
Holy Mother, he thought.
And then he got up, still holding the mace that was smeared with mashed flesh and bone from the blow that had half-taken off the killer’s leg. He watched him bleed and stop trying to open his helmet. He lay flat in a spreading puddle of blood and muddy water. He was just moaning now.
“One sneak,” said the boy, “met a better sneak.” The other whispered around his moans:
“I slew… I slew… ah… I fucked… ah …”
“Turn your mind elsewhere,” Lohengrin suggested. “You’re done with all that.”<
br />
“Fucked men… women… beasts… ah… ah… the pain is… is …”
The young man rubbed his beaked nose-edge. He touched his ribs next and decided maybe he’d be alright. He found the maniac interesting.
“And there you lie,” he said. “I… have known… ah… pleasures …”
His voice was draining away into gurgles. Lohengrin was thoughtful – by his standards. He watched the man dying. The big leg artery had been smashed apart.
“Why did you not seek fame and power in battle?” he wondered. Squatted down by the man’s concealed head. Worked his helmet off. Nothing special, which surprised him. No demon’s dark and twisted visage: just a plumpish, pale face with small, colorless eyes. “How strange you were.” The man whispered something as he drained away. “What’s that?” Lohengrin bent closer, alert for a possible last attack. “Speak up.”
“Taste her,” the deep, dying voice managed. “No… one… can stop… you …”
Lohengrin stood up, annoyed. He looked at the victim and her beauty stunned him again, dead or not. She looked sweet and soft, outspread and waiting.
What’s wrong with you? He asked himself. She’s not willing, she’s a corpse… why did he waste her like this? Why sleep with the dead? He makes it sound like paradise… taste her…
A spray of small, white butterflies were collecting and recollecting on the bushes among small, bloodred flowers. The young man noticed a fat, black weasel a few feet away mixed in among treeroots and shadows. The dark, bright eyes were alert and deadly.
“I’m alone here,” he said, “but for bugs and animals and a dying madman.” He chuckled. “I’m not alone at all.”
But he knew he was alone. He wasn’t directly facing that fact because of where it might lead his mind. He could have gone on but he looked back at the nude girl. It was true, you could do anything you pleased with her without discussion, consent or force… and none to know.
He rubbed his face violently.
What thoughts are these?
It was like, when he was twelve, finding a dim, musty, remote spot in the cellars of the castle and, stripping off his clothes and lying nude on a blanket he kept there, thrilled and afraid, taking out the stocking he’d stolen from his mother’s lovely attendant whom he thought and dreamed of ever since he’d seen her in the bath, rubbing the stocking on his body, touching himself rhythmically, and, as his passion pyramided, sniffed, inhaled, then, arching in childhood’s first sweet sensual dissolution, crammed into his gasping longing mouth, bit down, sucked, cried out overwhelmed by shame and joy… and then rose, dressed, put it all away and refused to think about it until the hint and titillation, as a day wore on, drew him inevitably back to his secret place…
He’d stopped and forgotten all that two years later after having actual intercourse – though the pure erotic darkness of those moments of strange surrender would haunt his entire life.
“Bah,” he said, because he’d just remembered the silky, pungent perfumy stocking. “Let’s mount and begone.”
Mount her, he reflex associated. Rubbed his face again. Didn’t head for the horse. Thought about things he’d never done with a female. The memory of the stocking and the woman he’d been obsessed with plus the sight of a beautiful naked form before him conspired to pump an unbidden throb of stiffness between his legs.
He was alone there. That was the troubling point. He could do whatever he wanted. And, at his age, he could have sex with himself or another 10 times a day. He knew he came from an excessive family.
“I have a horse and weapons. I can rub my stick later.”
He started to walk to the waiting steed. Found himself turning in a hesitant circle and was looking at her again. Had some vague idea that he ought to bury her or at least cover her. After all, he was a near knight. So he went back thinking about what to cover her with.
Christian burial, he thought. If I’m indeed still a Christian…
Religion was nothing to him. He was distracting himself again from the blot of darkness he wouldn’t look directly at.
He looked at the dead or still dying man again. “You turd,” he snarled. “I’m immune to your talk.”
He considered piling stones over her. The idea of covering that exquisite body bothered him.
What would dead nether lips taste like? His mind asked. It seemed a reasonable question. Who would know?
He suddenly stepped between her splayed-out legs and began to unbutton his breeches. Then caught himself.
“What’s wrong with me?”
He turned and half-ran for the horse. With every step he wanted to go back. As he was riding away he wanted to return. He rubbed himself forward and back on the saddle.
LAYLA
I’ll find a crone and have this baby out, she was telling herself.
She’d been walking steadily on through the deep darkness among the vague shapes of trees and massive glacial stones, heading steadily, but not steeply, down.
“I hate them,” she whispered. “Oh how I hate them,” meant men. The starshine showed just enough to keep her from banging squarely into anything but she still tripped and slipped, now and then.
She didn’t realize the dawn was close until, almost imperceptibly, pale mistiness began to blur the heavens and the landscape started to materialize and show edges and differences.
She’d determined to walk until she found running water to wash in and drink and then follow down to the eventual and inevitable village where streams always led.
But suppose the old woman was mistaken and she really wasn’t pregnant? She hadn’t shown the appetite yet. It had to be very early on. She might have missed last month’s bleeding just reacting to suddenly having sex every day after months of nothing. That kind of thing had happened before. Maybe it had been so slight a staining that she’d just missed it…
Vain hopes, she thought.
The trees were getting sparse and the land was leveling out, though still rough and stony. Not farmland yet, she noted.
Ahead in the subtle exhalations of first light she saw what seemed a long, delicate spire wavering up into the sky’s softly crumbling darkness.
Where there’s a church there’s a town…
As she came closer and the light incrementally intensified, she started to think it was a ruin with just the spire itself left standing. And there were no other buildings visible yet.
She decided she could at least shelter there and there could be a well. Closer now, she saw there were no huts, not even the burnt-out husks she’d started to expect. Just a tower, poked into the earth with no trace of a church either.
Most odd… why build so far and just stop?…
She was now crossing the long grasses that surrounded the place. There was enough light now and colors showed: pale greens, powdery blue and rose sky; the dull, rough grey fieldstone of the tower.
She could see, as she circled the strange edifice, there was no sign that anyone had ever even intended to erect more than the tower because it was closed on all sides, plus no door. Yet there were slit windows, too high to reach.
“Where’s the cross?” she murmured. Never got even that far?
The clouds were pink now. A flight of crows broke over the near treeline, wings loud and sudden; circled the tower once and then went on across the already hot, steamy morning. Watching them, she nearly fell into a pit.
She caught herself and dropped to her knees to look; it looked more like a short tunnel that went under the tower wall. She hesitated. Shrugged and climbed down. At the bottom she had to crawl on hands and knees.
Inside was hot and smoky and surprisingly bright: hundreds of candles lined the intilting walls from the floor all the way to the top. Her first thought was how much work it must be to keep replacing them.
Most of the smoke went up through the steeple tip which was open. She hadn’t noticed the smoke. Smoke instead of a cross.
At first she didn’t notice someone was sitting on the floor in about
the center of the room. As her eyes adjusted to the crisscrossing candlelight and shadow, she saw he was bent forward, seemed fairly old, and wore only a loincloth that left his big, round belly and thick arms and legs exposed.
She decided he was either lost in contemplation or asleep.
Maybe a hermit.
He looks like he’s never too far from food, she thought. If he’s a true man of God he’s bound to have drink too…
Being Layla, she went straight up to him. He didn’t stir or look up.
“Pardon me fellow,” she said. “I —” But he cut her off:
“These are the latter days?” he said, not looking up. His voice was ordinary save that his inflection made every statement seem a question.
“Are they? Why ask me?” she wondered.
The shadow shiftings made them both seem to blur into and out of substantiality.
“Would you be saved?”
She looked around, hands on hips.
“I’d be fed, good sir,” she said. “Who lights all these candles?”
“The living who were the dead?”
Again, she took it for a question.
“I don’t know. What do you think?”
“You are of the dead?”
“I will be if I fail to eat and drink soon.”
“Eat as you please,” he said. “There is food here to feed the still dead?”
“Fine,” she said. She stared up at the rows of candles circling towards the steepletop. “I’m afraid to ask where the food is.” Where’s the ladder to get up there? “Are you here alone, sir?” She sat down in the dry hay. Decided her appetite was a sign of pregnancy. Considered starving herself for spite.
The hay had no particular odor, which she might have found odd had she noticed it. The place seemed strangely sterile. The only real scent was waxy smoke.
“There is bread and salt meat in the cask by the wall,” she was told. “And beer too, if you thirst for it? Sleep where you please?”
“If I please,” she said. “Are you innkeeper or priest?”
Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Page 18
