“I seemed?”
“Well… yes… not …”
He imagined the sand was dribbling out between his lips. Somehow she was closer and the scent of her was like a blow numbing his nose and overriding the burning pain and pressure in his suddenly stonehard penis.
“How seem I now?”
The uptilted face was under him and the robe was wide enough apart for all that mattered to be bared to his eyes and the feral moon.
“My God,” came out of him. “Oh, my God, Shinqua… Shinqua …” And he seized her, as if grasping smoke, and felt instead hot, sleek, soft, exquisite flesh… and went down with her, into the silver light and shadow and almost tender grasses, and far, far away, wishing he’d relieved himself because later he’d be in agony… and then even that was lost, flattened like the grasses by the weight and force of love and wildness that took him and moved him like the ragdoll on a puppet master’s stick…
He remembered. Half-smiled with his half a mouth at the memory of himself once they’d finally finished, wet with one another, mostly naked, shaking with slow, sighing gasps and painful breaths, drunk with one another – except, once he’d come, the pressure pain from his bladder was like a hot spike driven down the diminishing length of his organ and, against her startled and vaguely protesting arms, he’d rolled to his feet and plunged, stifflegged and doubled, around the curve of tent away from her, whispershouting back:
“A moment, my love… a moment.”
From then on they’d met constantly and their affair became notorious. Gawain’s present lord (a rich, strong Baron) embarrassed by the complaints from her husband and unwilling to lose his services in the event he attacked the deadly knight and was killed or maimed, demanded Gawain leave off the affair or leave his service. Meanwhile, the Baron asked him to deliver a fee owed to Arthur, which round-trip would take a month or so. Let the embers cool a little, was the idea.
By then, he’d been with her enough to consider a vacation no great matter, after his initial angry refusal. He agreed to go. She didn’t like it. It turned out she was pregnant. His argument that her marriage protected her got nowhere. All sound advice about preserving herself and being realistic, not running off with a poor, landless, famously amorous knight, was like mist in the wind of her feelings. Her husband’s rage and even pain hit her with the force of a puff of smoke. His threats meant nothing since she knew he couldn’t hurt her. And he wanted the baby which could have been his.
Gawain left secretly. The Baron kept her locked in the castle after her lover left. She got wild and refused to eat, saying she’d starve the unborn child unless she were freed. The Baron gave in to his Captain’s pleading and released her after a week or so, which, he declared, was far too soon. But the husband could not bear to see that beautiful, silky face rent with misery; the eyes savage with pain; long, tight-curled waves of black hair in filthy knots. She was a beauty that none but nobles normally would have come near, much less possessed; and he’d possessed her. And adored her. Every exotic inch.
Naturally, she’d almost immediately followed after Gawain. He’d expected that too and followed, with the idea that at least he could protect her, from a slight distance. The furious Baron, having lost his best fighter, his best Captain, and a vassal woman with child, cursed love and swore an oath that became famous in the land: “If any dare bring such a beauty again into my domain, I’ll have her nose cut off and ears slit like a sow!” And he meant it.
Gawain remembered the last time he’d actually seen her. Opened his eye, as if to drive the image away. Looked at the unblurred panorama of grubby fighters, sluts, and malnourished peasants with the Moses, John, perched on his low rock, holding forth as if the wind itself blew the words endlessly from his mouth.
Shut the lid again and risked the pain of the past.
Shinqua had taken her own horse, a slim, short, quick mare, and ridden towards Camelot. Gawain, halfway there, decided to go back to see if she were alright. It was then that he finally completely faced the fact that he loved her, hopelessly, intolerably. Except, the shattered remnants of the defeated invader, Clinschor the Magician’s troops, in broken, insane bands were still both fleeing and infesting the countryside. South of them, where the war had expressed its full force, dark smoke still was visible on the mountain horizon from the countless burning villages.
He was passing through a defile where the sharp rocks and massed brush made a wall on each side and the daylight was dimmed when he ran into half-a-dozen of Clinschor’s black knights coming the other way. He knew he should have reversed and outridden them. They were terrific fighters, in general and happy, it seemed, to die. Good as he was, there was no sense in taking on a group of them. And they always attacked; showed no mercy. Their only function was to destroy. Whether the cause was won or lost, they tried to kill everything that moved. Some believed they were empty suits of armor full of demonic flame and fell machinery.
But he had a sudden (and unfounded) fear that they’d come from destroying the manor and might have hurt her. He knew it was absurd, but he charged, wielding mace and chain so as to hit the horses too and stop them. He was known for his craft: they could just come at him two at a time and the first was just a shoulder ahead of the second in line, so he swung out to the right as far as the narrow space permitted and drew a sword stroke, checking his horse and leaning away so it just missed him. Like Parsival, Gawain often fought without a shield, depending on his timing and speed. Unlike these fighters, he wore light mail rather than heavy plate. Like Parsival he tended to go for the opponent’s hands, wrists, or knees rather than reaching in for head and body blows. They said Gawain had made an army of cripples in his time.
It worked again because he caught the black knight’s elbow with his counter stroke and heard him bellow. This let Gawain easily wedge his mount between the wall of rock and the injured man, shove sideways and tilt him over into the second knight, creating a jam so that none of them could quite reach him. His weapon had a flexible chain joined to a long, thick handle. Using the beautiful strategy that had made him famous (unlike Parsival who rarely made any plans going into a fight) he was now able to reach over the wounded man and strike the others, which he did, while the animals scraped and neighed and struggled to get free. Gawain hit very hard and very fast and knocked down all but two in a minute or so.
As he followed, he took off his helmet and set it in his lap, forcing his horse forward past the downed men, so he never saw the last one, headpiece crushed and dribbling blood from the faceplate, spring up as he died, like a trodden snake and strike a last spoiling blow at his head from three-quarters behind.
The blow was blinding, his skull exploded into white fire. He may or may not have screamed before he went down, nearly half his face sliced away.
He’d awakened in moonless darkness, face down, shivering in a pool of blood and vomit. Heard voices and assumed they’d come back to finish him off. It seemed distant and reasonable and meaningless. He’d dropped away again under the terrible pain…
As it turned out, a passing farmer had loaded him into a cart, after stripping the weapons from the dead, and taken him to his village where his wounds were treated and bound in poultices. He recovered and, forever after, wished he hadn’t.
He never went to Camelot again though he heard, more than once in days to come, that Arthur had disappeared, left on an unexplained trip or pilgrimage, unattended and hadn’t been heard from since.
He never looked for Shinqua. He never knew she’d set out after him or that, in the end, she went back to her husband and had a son she didn’t dare name Gawain.
Partly opened his eyes and watched the blurs again. Sucked down some more wine.
“I’ll find the Grail,” he muttered, “heal myself and find her again.” Or maybe just wait for the return of Christ next year and sing angelic hymns of holy, sexless praise beside her, if, by some grotesque mischance, I should be one of the chosen blest…
Now he really laughed.
Wanted to vomit too. Kept his eyes tight shut. This is my life…why, what a fucked, dreaming fool have I become, merely because my fucked face was chopped off some years ago… merely because my love is forever lost, and, for all I know, fat as a sow with ten sucking piglets at her teats… merely because I follow idiots to Stupidland… O God, please cause these fools to read aright and see this entire stink and puke of a world purged with flame and terror, cindered and gone forever even if I needs must be pitched headlong into Hell for all time…
Except he couldn’t ever quite give up. No one who loved so absolutely could ever fail to hope. And, he had a new idea: one of the pilgrims recently joining their march had, according to John’s latest vision, brought the final sign from heaven that he, John, had been awaiting. Now their course was clear, the battlefield fixed ahead, the great test just pending.
The new pilgrim was a tall, red-haired woman who wore a golden half-mask and a nun’s black and white habit, save for the headgear. She explained that a vision of the Holy Mother had expressed to her that she must seek out the prophet John and bring him God’s message. She wore the mask, she explained, because Mary Mother-of- God had told her to cover her face until the second coming of her son. It made, Gawain reflected, as much sense as anything else he’d heard recently.
John was excited and delighted. Here was external proof of his mission. His followers were stirred up, those who paid attention, in any case. She brought a map showing where the enemy was hidden and where the Holy Grail was now secreted - on the isle of Avalon.
Gawain closed his eyes tightly again.
Why not? he thought. She’s got some force about her… all in all as good a lost cause as any other I’ve come upon…
Arthur would be there, he decided, if he were anywhere. It would all come together in Avalon. And if there were a Grail he, Gawain, would lock it in his hands long enough to squeeze out whatever truth was in it…
The tall, red-haired, golden masked woman was now up on the rock beside John and suddenly more and more of the armed mob settled down to listen, as the furious little priest indicated her with one clawed hand, shouting:
“Here is the messenger who brought the map! The map will guide us to the Grail! The Grail is the perfect sword with which I, John, will drive back the black doom of the Antichrist and turn aside the fist of death already falling from Heaven to crush all sinners under its hideous weight.”
LOHENGRIN
“The fool was my father,” he said after her.
The girl kept walking into the moon dappled shadows. She called back to him:
“Is your father here?”
“I doubt it,” he replied. “But he was famous for it. He was renowned for it.” He rubbed his beaked nose with his knuckles, a little too hard, thinking about his father.
He stood up. He could just see she’d stopped.
Bah, he thought
“I think you should follow me,” she said. “Why not save yourself?”
“Leaving aside whether I deserve saving, I’ll follow. Come and ride with me.”
He went over and mounted. Walked the animal over to her where she waited, partly shadowed. She pushed back her hood. The silvery glow sketched her pale, oval face on the deep, mysterious background.
“Fine,” she said.
She ignored his helping hand and sprung up behind him with easy grace.
“Welcome to my noble steed.” He noted the sweet length of her leg where the dark dress had ridden up.
“Follow the road,” she told him.
He kicked the horse into a fast, steady walk. She put her hands lightly on his mailed sides.
“And we’ll come to?”
“The others,” she replied. “Already have we seen villages and even castles deserted with only the dying and dead within. There are devils loose in this land. There is poison and plague.”
Lohengrin nodded, looking at her leg. “And we will find safety?”
“Your horse tilts,” she pointed out.
“I had it of an unbalanced knight. But how will we know the path to safety, if all the world’s afire?”
“We have been vouchsafed a map.”
“What fortune.”
“Yes. Death closes in on all sides. The doom is invisible. No army can overcome the Antichrist any more than we can stab a phantom in its insubstantial form.”
He let his bare hand glance along her thigh, as if to stretch. She didn’t seem to notice.
“I’m not too worried by phantoms,” he said. Wasn’t sure just what he meant. “But where is this place of safety?”
“The map shows us.”
“Do you have the map?” She shook her head.
“Our leader is the only one who can read it,” she explained.
“So he tells you?”
“You will see when you meet him. You will understand.”
“Your father is a knight?” he wondered. She was, obviously, not low-born.
“My father is a dead knight, sir.”
He kept thinking about her thigh. Wanted openly to stroke it. “What is this leader’s name?” he asked, just to keep the conversation active.
“A holy man. He uses no worldly name.”
His hand glanced down and rested lightly on her knee. She didn’t seem to notice.
“What otherworldly, then?” he pressed her.
She shrugged and belatedly brushed his hand away. “We call him the leader,” she said.
“The leader.”
They went on in silence. The road was a whitish vagueness that gently rose and fell as they passed under thickening trees. The woods were silent except for breeze rustle and the dinning of insects.
“How far have you come back?” he wondered. He’d assumed, incorrectly, that she’d just left the main body of pilgrims.
“Not far. I waited for a day in the village after they left.”
The moon was high by the time they came to open country. He was trying to find a plausible excuse to stop and make advances. They’d been quiet for awhile now. She made him unduly polite, he noticed, and a little awkward. He liked her though he hadn’t said so, even to himself yet.
“Why don’t we wait until morning to catch up?” he finally asked her.
“I’ll walk on, if stop you must,” she said.
“That’s senseless.”
“I must.”
“Why?”
“A vow.”
“A vow of silliness?”
“I mean to be saved.”
“You truly believe the world will soon end?”
In such case, he thought, rehearsed, we may as well make as much country love as possible…
“I believe that God has spoken to my leader,” she explained, “and taught the way to salvation. And I would save those I can.”
The conversation was not going the way he’d have liked. She reminded him of a young nun, a cousin, who used to visit and endlessly try to persuade his father (who didn’t care) that the Grail had never been brought to Britain, that the quest was a heathen heresy. She had twisted, buck teeth and a chalk-pale face. His father would stare, faintly smile and nod, meaninglessly, while she went on. As soon as possible, he’d excuse himself.
But what would he have done had she been pretty? he wondered. Except he knew that too.
“I am anxious to meet your leader,” he lied.
“Of course,” she said. “It will not be long.”
PARSIVAL
They never bothered to enter the castle. They never actually saw it. In any case, the fog remained dense as a wall and only thinned slightly as they worked their way downslope. By the time they got to the road, it was dawn and visibility gradually increased as they went back east along the valley.
The day stayed gray all morning, although the mists were gone a few miles from the castle hill. A light drizzle pittered down from the dull sky.
Both of them were bleary, chilled, and tired. Parsival couldn’t believe he was actually wearing the red armor again. If it
was a copy, it was perfect in every detail, even to rents and punctures he’d had closed by a smith years before.
It’s the same, he decided. Chafes the same…
They rode until noon, slouched in morose silence. By then, they were out of the long valley again and climbing through a strand of dark pines that blotted the light rain away.
“Rest, my Lord?” Lego suggested.
Parsival nodded and they dismounted on a gentle slope beside the road which, here, had gone back to a scratchy track. They stretched out on the dried and drying fallen needles.
“My Lord,” Lego asked, staring straight up into the dim and soothing matrix of limbs and shadow, “where are we now bound?”
His lord put his hands under his head. He wasn’t even hungry, he realized, though it had been hours since last eating.
“The east coast, as near we can strike it.”
“Then embark for Brittany?”
Lego had been there once. He’d done service for a French prince in a small war. He’d learned that whoever died or was wounded in a skirmish or in a history-changing battle died the same and were maimed the same. A serf, crushed by a runaway cart or stabbed in a drunken melee died the same or scarred the same.
Parsival had tucked the parchment map under his swordbelt. He unwound his arms and unfolded it, rolling on his side to lay flat on the soft needle bed.
“Well, my Lord?” Parsival shrugged.
“On to the coast,” he said. “We need no map for that. Find a ship and head north.” He drummed his fingers.” Most of this shows the Northern seas and lands unknown. The way points to cold.”
“Unknown?”
“Save maybe to the Norsemen.”
Lego popped his eyes in mock disbelief.
“To those nasty lands?” he wondered. “Where dwell those crazed beasts who live only to rape and burn?”
“We’ll need a few to sail us. Who better?”
“Is that it, then, my Lord?” asked Lego.
“Is that what?”
“You mean to follow this toy?” Parsival rolled onto his back again.
Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Page 22
