“Well asked,” the pale, round, swollen-looking man said, still not looking up. His thighs were bowed and immense. He suddenly stood up. The soft, changing light made him resemble a wax figure, melting slightly. “I keep this inn for wanderers?”
She shrugged, taking it for a question again. “Don’t you know?” she asked. She got back up and started looking for the victuals. She kept half an eye cocked on him in case he should turn violent.
“Yes,” he declared, “innkeeper I am?” The days of this world are nearly done?” He folded his arms. She thought them thick as hamhocks. “Death has been seen on his stark white steed? The fell hooves are heard?”
“So you’re a priest after all,” she said, still circumnavigating the interior. “I have found no food yet.”
“The dead don’t feed?” he seemed to ask.
“Not that I’ve noticed. Or are you just telling me something?”
“I have seen the shadow of the angel’s wing? In his hand he held the vial to pour upon the waters?”
“Ah ha.”
“To turn the seas to blood? I have seen the angel of the seventh seal who will bring silence in heaven?”
She had just tripped over the cask. Inside there was cheese and bread. The bread was still moist as if fresh-baked; the cheese dry and hard but very good.
She sat and ate. He sat back down and contemplated the ground again.
“I have seen the star Wormwood?”
“I can’t find the beer,” she said.
“The world ends in the year one thousand?”
“I don’t know,” she answered what hadn’t been a question, chewing and rooting in the cask for something to drink.
“The beer is in the jug?” the seer said, not looking up.
“But what of the unbelievers with different measures of time?”
“Their reckoning is false? As is their vile faith?”
She nodded.
“So we say,” she replied. “But mayhap the world ends only for Christians?”
“Salvation is only for Christians?” he told her – or asked.
She found space between candles and sat down, leaning her back against the intilted wall.
“Lucky for us,” she said, chewing bread. “I better make sure I’m sitting under a cross on January the first.”
He shook his head.
“Neither cross,” he intoned, “nor the blood of God will avail thee aught unless thou be reborn in his light? ‘Unless thou art again born, thou shalt not enter heaven’s kingdom’” he said in Latin.
Now she sipped a little warmish ale from a clay pot she’d turned up. It was delicious. In those days every village had local brewers, usually peasant women with husbands in the fields. Sometimes the results were very good. In this case, it was more proof that there were monks or priests involved because they were, generally, the best brewers.
“And the babe born today or –” She did a rough calculation of her probable term. “– next February? Might as well never come out? Doomed?”
Touched her belly, thinking:
So now I’m just accepting it again… I’d be most blessed by blood between my legs, let alone God’s…
“Woman,” he said, “I speak not of birth in time and pain?” He pressed his short, fat hands together and lifted his face up towards the peak. “You must be reborn into true knowledge? The Antichrist is hard by the door and enters without knocking?”
“Is that why you have only a tunnel into here?” she asked to mildly mock him, now eating cheese with her ale.
He turned and looked straight at her for the first time.
“You did not find this place by chance?” he told her, looking surprised. She was getting used to his rising inflection and resisted answering the non-question. “You show quick wisdom? The knowledge is to find the womb? To find the place of salvation?”
“Find my mother’s womb again?”
He suddenly hurled himself flat on the straw-covered floor, face down. His voice was muffled and gave the impression the words were coming up from the earth.
“The tunnel reminds us of our first birth? You must find the second way?”
She sighed.
“It always comes back to you must find,” she said. “No one ever seems to have a map of anything.”
“Map?”
She took another long pull of the sweetish, satisfying brew. It got better with each swallow. She found herself taking the conversation somewhat seriously, after all.
“This tower is a lighthouse,” the muffled, earth voice said. “As when a ship is lost from port and the steersman sees the brightness in the distance over the storm waves and crushing wind and knows home and safety lies there?” He sighed, or was it the earth, she wondered, half-serious.
“As when the once-holy Jews were led through the desert of death to the land promised of God,” the ground resonated as he shouted now. “We have the cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night, and you can be brought to safety? As when the blood of the lambs, which was even then Christ’s blood, was smeared on the Jews’ dwellings and the Angel of death passed over them, so have we the sign and place of safety and we will guide you to this place and you shall be saved?” Paused. His voice croaked again. “Yes, there is the map?”
She was lightheaded, both from drinking and exhaustion. Wanted to sleep.
“Will you?” she asked. “Will you, indeed?” My life’s miseries have grown from week to week and year to year until to live my life, take the pain and blood, you might as well try to shit out a ten-pound stone from your bunghole. Will you save me, fat monk? Why do I doubt it?”
He shouted so loud the structure seemed to shake. “Doubt or not, we will lead you there, foolish woman!?” She nodded, angry and disgusted.
“Men always know what’s best for me,” she snapped back.
“You will be saved?” he bellowed into the earth. Croaked again, a froggy bleat that seemed like a spasm. “We will pull you back from doom as one pulls a foolish child from the path of a charging horse?” The candle-lined walls actually trembled, this time.
She nodded again.
“Of course,” she muttered this time, “Whether I like it or not.” Finished the pot of ale. “Fine.” Looked at him lying flat on his face. With the hay around it his rear end rose like, she thought, a barrow from a wheatfield. All it lacked, she decided, was a circle of Druidic standing stones around his bunghole.
PARSIVAL
They stayed in the caravan of death after they left the cave and set out through a misty valley behind the ragged hills. The road was beaten deep and rough by hooves and sliced by wheels.
At each fork or crossroad a cart loaded with plague bodies would separate from the main way for several hours; they were the only two left by the time they finally came to a village in rolling, lowland country. It had to be well after midnight under a mostly clear sky and setting half-moon. No one was stirring.
They stopped by the town well. Parsival assumed they’d drink and water the horses. He pulled up beside the other cart. The driver was British; the other wore a turban but no armor.
“Ar, Jack,” the driver said to Lego, who was closest to him, “this one’s ours.”
“What’s this?” Lego responded. “We can’t have a drink?” The fellow laughed.
“That’s good,” he said. “Why don’t you wait till we’ve done here, you’ll enjoy it more.”
This tickled him so much he shook with laughter. He and the other man got down from the seat.
“Well,” said Lego, “go first then, if you’re so thirsty.” He looked at their empty wagon.
“Yer done anyways,” he said. “You better go back fer more or you’ll find some trouble.”
They went around behind the vehicle and started unloading the corpses. Before the knight and the captain could react, they were dumping a naked plague victim into the well. It was half over the rim by the time Lego and Parsival stormed down.
“Anointers!” Lego cried. “Anointers!”
There was a popular theory that plague was spread by monstrous men who anointed places and people with polluted holy water or foul tokens of plague. To be accused of anointing sealed your summary doom.
“Be quiet ya fool!” The Briton hissed. “Ye’ll wake the town!”
“Die, Anointers!” Lego snarled, laying on with his captured scimitar. The turbaned man drew and struck before the Briton even reacted and would have sliced Lego’s arm if the tall knight had not bumped his captain clear with his hip and simultaneously chopped off the top of the turban.
“Pig-eater!” was the infidel’s first comment.
“Here, now,” said the Briton, backing around the well where the deadly dead body flopped, head down in the hole. “Here now …”
Lego chased him, cutting furiously.
“Traitor!” he said. “Devil! …” Cut, cut, stab. “Anointer! …” Stab, then a scream from the Briton as the razor tip nicked his breastbone.
The foreigner was very fast and slippery in the cloud-dimmed moonlight. He ducked under the cart forcing Parsival to chase him around the other side while the little man chopped out at his legs. The knight dropped to his knees within swordreach and faced underneath. He could hear Lego fighting as his opponent backed away down the road, insisting they were on the same side…
Normally, when Parsival fought, his mind was silent and he simply followed events as if he were the enemy’s shadow. But this was distracting. It was almost silly. Villagers were coming out of their homes. Candlelight flickered into a longhouse.
Lego came back, panting and unsatisfied, dabbing at his chest cut.
“He ran… the bastard …” Parsival stood up.
“This rat’s in his hole,” he said. “Let’s leave him to the cats.”
As the peasants came up, armed with sticks and scythes and hammers and stone, Lego told them: “There’s a foreigner under this cart. A nasty beast. An anointer we caught bringing the death to this vill. Putting dead in your well, here. Burn all these bodies and deal with this infidel as you see fit.”
“Good speech,” Parsival approved as one lanky man came closer, holding a staff, yawning.
“Who be you?” he asked.
“Men who fear God and love Britain,” said Lego.
We have to get horses, Parsival thought. We need an army to block the roads, protect the towns and warn the folk…
“We have to see the king,” he said, to himself.
The peasants were getting it and starting to surround the wagon, improvised weapons ready. The man underneath was panting, more from terror than exertion. He heard him farting, as frightened men often did. Lego leaned down, sneering:
“Come out ya windy rat in a hole,” he said, poking his sword under as if driving a cat or dog from under a bed.
The man screamed and lashed a cut wildly at the blade and everyone’s feet who stepped too close. Two men had already dragged the body from the well, the rest (about eight) were reacting to the bodies in the cart. Some women and older men were coming outside now. The fellow underneath was yelling in his own language which wasn’t doing him any good.
One long farmer squatted down to peer into the shadows. The moon had come out of a rill of clouds and the area brightened.
“What use is this?” he asked the infidel, who answered with a slash that cut his cheek.
That was enough. One man had come over with a torch and another with an armful of dry thatch reeds which he tossed under the cart, silently, while the other, silently and instantly thrust the torch and pulled away from the sudden, crackling, smoking blaze. The little man screamed and thrashed around trying to flail away the flames, and then rolled out, clothes smoking. Two other men freed the mules from the traces.
“We got to burn these up, anyways,” the long farmer said to Lego, as the villagers closed around the screaming man who, turbanless, was gleaming bald in the moonlight, waving his blade and patting his smoldering clothes.
Parsival wasn’t watching. He turned to the farmer and said: “Keep the other cart and team. We need two sound horses.”
The infidel was crouched, trying to shield his head from the stabs and blows raining down on him.
The man’s eyes were round and almost frog-like. He studied Parsival.
“Oh, yes?” he responded. “And who be you?”
“Mind yer insolent mouth,” snapped Lego. “This is my master, Sir Parsival of Wales.”
The infidel was silent now. He just lay there like a heap of shadow as they poked him a few last times. The wagonfull of dead had caught fire and the flamelight showed a spreading pool of blood.
“Where’s ‘is armor then?” the farmer wanted to know.
“Ya fool,” said Lego, ready to punch the man, “yer all farmers here. Do you take yer ploughs everywhere ya go?” Lego was speaking now as he had as a village boy.
They picked up the fallen man, who was close enough to being dead, and tossed him on the cart on top of the heap.
“Get us two mounts, fellow,” the knight said, turning to watch the cart burn. “We have to see the king.”
“Aye,” said Lego. “An I’ll pick’m out myself, you churlish, long roll of dung! You’ll not palm off some broken bone-sacks on my Lord.”
One of the men who’d just dispatched the infidel (who was starting to smoulder with the rest of them), short wide, bearded muscular, sweaty, a bloody scythe in his hand, walked into the firelight and confronted them. He was barefoot in hide shorts.
“What if we say ride off on shanks’s mare and be damned to you?” he said.
Parsival gripped Lego’s arm to restrain him. He spoke softly.
“We need to see Arthur,” he explained, “so this whole land may be saved from poisonous death.”
The blocky man rubbed his beard.
“Walk then,” he said. “Yer feet isn’t broken.”
Others had gathered behind him. There were a few chuckles. “We’ve got no lord over us ‘ere,” the long, frog-eyed peasant explained. “This be no manor at all, think what you thought. We don’t relish to give up no horseflesh to any as comes by. An’ you bear the same foreign steel as that there little bastid who’s now a-roastin’.”
“Ya ungrateful pigs!” yelled Lego, violently shoving the fellow sidewise several stumbling steps. “We just saved yer filthy little cesspool of a vill and now I think I’ll shit in yer fucked well, ya fucked, ugly, dull, foul-smelling piss-pans!”
“Hush, captain,” said Parsival, who was coldly angry himself at this point. “You people are behaving with stupid selfishness,” he explained. “You will merit the misfortunes that come upon you, I fear.”
“What’s he sayin’?” the blocky, bearded man wanted to know. “That yer close to death,” answered Lego, “you shit-pot.” Parsival stepped quietly closer to the man. Just in swords reach.
The fire was at his back. His shadow was long and shook wildly over the half-circle of villagers as flames billowed around.
“Your garment ill-becomes you,” he said.
In a flicker of motion that seemed no more than a stray flash of light, the knight cut at the fellow, turned his back and walked to Lego and the long man. Nothing seemed to have happened; but two steps later the blocky man’s hide shorts parted in front along the line of the swordcut he hadn’t even noticed much less felt, and then fell, leaving him shocked, scared, and naked.
“Our horses, if you please,” Parsival said.
MIMUJIN
He walked his little unshod nomad’s pony quietly, alert in the darkness. He heard shouts and clash of arms ahead where across the level fields he could barely distinguish, the outline of the low village roofs where Parsival and Lego had just trapped the little man under the cart.
He sat the horse, totally still in the deeper shadow of a tree when he heard footsteps running, a man panting. Drew his curved blade and waited. As the man drew abreast, Mimujin could see he was too small to be the knight or his companion. He decided to question the fellow before ki
lling him, so he just laid the sword out flat on to catch the light and hissed:
“You stop!”
The man, recognizing the accent, was relieved. Stood breathing hard, hands on knees for a few moments.
“Ah,” he gasped, “two strangers… came with… cart… we were dumpin’… bodies …”
“Strangers?”
“Aye… they fell upon us …”
“Who with you?”
“Varin.”
There were many voices shouting now and a sudden fireglow.
Then a scream.
“You run. He dead.” The man understood and instantly twisted and ducked to try and escape the vicious slash that just creased his head in a sear of fire. He plunged on, in a panic. Mimujin drew his bow and casually shot at the man. Missed. Then rode on, not too fast, watchful, patient. He had only one purpose so it all was simple. The pain where his pinky had been throbbed steadily; was a reminder he didn’t need.
LOHENGRIN
He rode all afternoon through the flat, sparsely wooded valley. Watching the sun’s slow arc, he developed the idea of heading southeast to the Channel; maybe find one of the boatmen who ferried people and animals up and down the coast. He had no clear idea of distances.
Near sunset he came to a wide, gentle river that took big loops as it worked through increasingly forested, low hills. He was on a well-used road now and was just passing through a cultivated area as the sun was setting and the long shadows fused together into general twilight.
He slowed the horse as he came into a village. He was relieved because the animal had developed a slight halt in his gait.
There’ll be a blacksmith, he thought. Or I’ll find a new mount…
Except the place was deserted. As the light failed, he rode through and back again: no people, no animals, no fowls, no dead.
Yet there are crops in the fields, he pondered. He knew enough to know farmers didn’t willingly leave good land. Feudal peasants never really went anywhere.
In one of the thatch-roofed dwellings that were partly dug into the earth, he found a side of bacon (was amazed a villain would have left such a treasure behind) and a hard, black loaf.
Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Page 19
