Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon

by Richard Monaco

  “Hal. Your defender.”

  She looked at him, blinked. “I should what?”

  He grinned, scratching his head, the tight, jet-black curls. “What you will,” he said. “Do you like him?”

  She climbed up over him, face inches away.

  “I love you,” she told him, again. Her breath was warm, silky, scented with sex and the crisped fat from their meal. He liked it. “Am I a slut in an inn? I love you.”

  “You keep telling me that,” he said, getting ready to get up.

  “And you feel nothing?”

  “Nothing?” he reacted, puzzled. “Nay, Jane, I feel many things. I feel you here. The sand. The foul fog upon me.”

  She studied him, inches from his curved nose that would have suited a Persian lord.

  “I see,” she said. “But not love.”

  MIMUJIN

  He was furious: the girl had slipped away during the night. When he woke up there was nothing but fog, closed in, it seemed, inches from his nose.

  She follow horse tracks and I cannot see her… Contemplated setting a trap. Bah, let her follow…

  Then on the kind of impulse he was famed for he suddenly spun around and charged back along the trail, thick, wet fog cloying around him.

  The hoofprints were clear on the softened earth. He backtracked at a sprint for about fifty yards. No sign of her. Stopped, stood still as stone. Watched and sniffed the air for her perfumed scent. “Where you hide?” he raged. “Foul witch!” Drew his curved sword, in frustration, and slashed at the dull grayness. “I kill and eat you heart!”

  By noon he could hear and smell seawater; kept halting to listen; no sign she was behind him. He could tell by the tracks he was gaining on the two riders, now following the same gradually descending cliffline that Parsival and Lego had ridden down to the beach where they’d met the Vikings.

  MORGANA

  She still stood at the water’s edge, hair and robe whipping in the freshening seawind. Two assistants stood with her. One was short, pretty, round-faced and strong in a tunic-like outfit; the other silver-haired, long and lean with a face like an axehead.

  “Feel the wind, old mother?” asked Morgana.

  “Yes, sweet one.”

  “Where we go,” Morgana went on, as she cocked her head, “magic will bounce back on the user.”

  “Do we now take ship?” asked the round-faced girl.

  “No, sweet sister,” answered the sorceress. “A distance north we shall cross the sea and never leave the land.”

  HAL

  Walking now, somewhere out in the damp silence of a field without bush or tree, following the turgid waterflow upstream along the mucky stream’s edge.

  All he could see, eyes open or shut, was roiling mist reflected in the water’s dull surface and, in the mist, her pale, sweetly shaped bare legs pumping over Lohengrin’s broad back as he plowed into her to take his pleasure…

  Eventually he just stopped, sat down and let himself be miserable. Sat in a tent of mist. Started talking to himself about what had happened. He didn’t realize he was thinking out loud.

  “She’s not of any quality,” he said, “to allow herself like that …” The image of being in Lohengrin’s place made it worse. “Disgusting!” he yelled.

  LAYLA

  Except she wasn’t going north anymore. In the mist, the tilts of the ground had sent her into a wide, vague circle. She heard something off to her left… listened… blurred and muffled… a man’s voice raised almost to a shout. No answering words.

  She let herself drift that way. Even the company of yet another madman might improve on utter solitude. Maybe he could tell directions.

  A shout, then silence when she was pretty close. Maybe he was dangerous? She stopped, listened. Heard sobbing. Followed the tears, the broken voice…

  JOHN

  Was slowing, suddenly up to his knees in gathering waves and realizing he was too far out.

  “Cursed bitch!” he croaked in fury and fear. It hurt his throat.

  Stopped. Looked around. Panic stirred. The universal clinging chill mist flowed over him and ten feet of visibility was a lot.

  Which way? Which way? Which way? his mind asked. “Where it’s shallow,” he muttered.

  Suddenly he wasn’t concerned with the follower or the cause; just wanted to get back. He normally didn’t dwell on things past because he’d disciplined himself to think only of the world to come as if imagination itself would solidify his dreams. He wanted to train his followers to forget all that had been. Plough it under. He’d wondered if the witch might know herbs to empty their memories so they could be taught like infants. He’d shared some of his ideas with Gawain who barely resisted cutting off his head to still his mouth.

  He knew many thought him mad but (he’d decided) even madness belonged to yesterday with no assurance yesterday’s lunatic would remain insane tomorrow.

  Still, now, he found pictures from the past coming back… he minced carefully along and tried not to see the images his mind painted on the roiling grayness… Long, long ago, barely out of childhood he saw, again, the bower of yellow and blue flowers and herbs and red berrybushes that his mother had doted on… a sunny morning… his father, the Duke, in his favorite, velvet-cushioned chair the servants had carried out from the castle, his younger sister looking pale and troubled, standing a little apart… his father shaking his head…

  He was always like that, he thought, angry as well as scared, now. As deaf to truth as all these doomed fools…

  Except doom had closed around him, chill gray and impenetrable.

  The scene was vivid and he couldn’t push it away: his father toyed with his pointy beard while John yelled and kicked the earth. His sister was in love with some silly boy knight who’d arrived the day before. Young Layla was always in love with someone. He was a priest, then. He’d predicted she’d turn out a whore. At that time he’d just come to believe that all the dogmas of the church needed to be ploughed under by a free peasantry. He’d left home after this argument so he never learned that her lover had been 16-year-old Parsival on his opening adventure…

  “I have heard all the arguments. When have I stinted on saint’s days?” his father had rhetorically asked. John hadn’t really listened. His sister was standing under a trellised arch, sagging with roses. She was still, pale and lean, watching them. His father kept talking. “… my serfs are content. Should the mule drive the farmer to market?” He sipped wine from a goblet, staining his white beard. A hovering page dabbed at it with a napkin.

  His father said more; his intense son barely followed it, though his tongue found answers enough. He kept watching Layla whom he rarely saw. They argued on; he kept looking at her as if the rich light and shadow had revealed something he couldn’t frame in words but sensed as dark, lost, tragic…

  All this in a flash of memory… remembered leaving the castle, storming down the road furious, shouting, tearing his vestments off and tossing them into the fields, cursing family, nobility, the Church, stripping down to his loincloth, shouting to man and God that he would find a sword of flame and carve the world into a new shape…

  “Gladius Dei, super terram,” he’d cried. Sword of God over the earth. As if he were still fleeing he plunged ahead and was suddenly over his head and swimming. “Ahiii!” he screamed. Flailed the water. He was a rotten swimmer. The tide and undertow had him. He was going out to sea. He was, as a Viking might say, on his way to the kingdom of the fish…

  LOHENGRIN

  He stood up. He felt good, looking down at Jane who adjusted herself and followed suit. He sensed she believed she was bound to him now. He felt a kind of unaccustomed tenderness but, then, the boy loved horses, dogs, and falcons.

  “Let’s not go to the stupid ships and dim idiots,” he declared. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

  “Where?”

  He wet his finger and held it in the air.

  “As the wind blows,” he told her. “I will get back to m
y map.” Rolled his head around, stretching.

  “You have a map? Of what, dear one?”

  He smiled at the “dear one.” Sort of liked it. “My father once found a great treasure. Lost it, of course. I mean to find and keep it both.” Shrugged, facing the wind that was steady from the sea, now, streaming the heavy mist past as if they were moving forward into the future’s inscrutable gray. “I set out with Henry but we got blown off course.” Shrugged. “Come,” he said, holding out his hand. “Dear.” Grinned. He was thinking about having sex with her, again. Later… then the next day. Maybe that was love.

  “The way the wind blows,” she said. Looked at her face and liked it.

  “Let’s find poor Hal. Kiss and make him smile. Better yet, feed him and his gut will digest his heart.”

  PARSIVAL

  Fat, heavy wet snowflakes were slapping into his face as he woke from a doze-dream of a flat, bright-green field with a golden tent in the middle that he kept running for but couldn’t reach as the shimmering silk pavilion seemed to shrink and recede.

  He sputtered and wiped his eyes. The helmsman was still braced into the tiller. The flames in the sconces hissed and stuttered; the sail rattled and creaked. The Viking Briton was crosslegged on a bench, drinking from an asymmetrical cup.

  “Snow?” Parsival called over. “In summer?”

  “Hah,” uttered the stonehard-looking Berserker. “Do ya fancy we be runnin’ south to land of monkey-trees an dark women?”

  “Where then, fellow?” Gralgrim shrugged.

  “We follow your course, Briton.” He spat with the wind, braced against the vessel’s roll and pounding.

  Suddenly the longship heeled violently as a massive gust punched them hard from dead astern. The ship ploughed forward, up and over, suddenly riding following waves.

  “Ho,” cried the Viking, “Thor’s wind! The god’s favor.”

  Lego rolled his starey, lost eyes, clutching the thwart. “Favor?” he wondered, raged. “Favor?”

  Parsival braced himself as the hull vibrated and they slid, accelerated. The crew was already struggling to get the oars in the water and shorten sail: the mast creaked, cloth crackled… they scudded, faster and faster. The wind was an immense, throbbing roar.

  Parsival shouted to Gralgrim the Berserker from about a foot away. “The favor increases!”

  The Viking twisted around. “Un?’ he wondered.

  A cresting wave, almost mast-high, curled over the stern, instantly flooding the deck. The ship pitched wildly. Men shouted and tumbled. Parse easily held on the side with just one of his abnormally strong hands. The ill Lego yelled:

  “Is this an adventure, lord?”

  “No,” he shouted back. “A disaster.”

  The oarsmen struggled to find a rhythm; the next wave slammed over them. Parse hung from the uptipped side, then went under the cold thick water as they violently dipped. A cow went past, rolling, eyes popping, silent, over into the pounding greenish darkness, followed by bales of hay, broken wood, a Norse helmet… then they righted again and the rowers got a little purchase; managed to hang on the crest of a mountain-wave, surfing forward, barely rocking now.

  Lego crept up and huddled beside his lord, shivering as they rushed through a strange silence… a steady roaring that sucked away all other sound into a dreamlike hush…

  MORGANA

  They hurried north up the coastline, fog swirling and drawing around as the wind at their backs shoved them unevenly forward. Morgana led them, enjoying the cooling wild air, the scything, scattered bursts of rain.

  They followed a Roman road which ended, suddenly, at a man-high stone wall. They rode beside along it towards the Channel Sea. It abruptly ended in a crumble of bricks and they continued north within sound of the waves, now. The fog had finally blown to shreds in the shifting, slanting, weakening rainfall.

  “Ride the wind,” she called back to them. “Fear it not!”

  She had no ideas, now, no memories, an emptiness gazing out from herself so that the force and power of the wind filled her and she was floating on it. She let herself fly forward. That was the power of her power. She didn’t want sex, love, wealth, or worldly pomp. Only, maybe, Merlinus understood her need.

  So she flew forward, ahead of herself and her horse the way you might in a dream and looked at her destination: a roughly heart-shaped island surrounded by surf that heaved chunks of ice onto a grim, gritty beach… at the same time she was rocking, gusting forward on the horse…

  If you’re there, Merlin, she said to herself, you’ll not block me…

  MIMUJIN

  There were too many tracks: hoofprints, footprints, as if a small army had passed. The fog was so dense he had no idea of direction. Instead of blundering on, he stopped and watched the diffuse, graying glow that showed where the sun was arcing south and west. He waited for it to move a few degrees, to be sure, then pointed his pony almost dead east. He rode until the two tracks he wanted separated out.

  Grunted with satisfaction. He’d calculated well.

  Finding you I will, he said to himself. Finding you soon…

  He was riding, steadily, nodding in semi-doze, imagining a sweet scene: Parsival and Lego nailed side-by-side, upside down, to a tree while Mimujin, with a dull, notched knife stripped off their skin, reveling in the unspeakable pain, urinating in their contorted, swollen faces… roasting the bloody strips of flesh and sucking on the crispy treats…

  He dreamt of these and other delights the way a lover might dwell on the sweet sights and scents of passion.

  About then the aberrant wind from the south (that was driving the Viking ships madly north and pushing Morgana and her party up the coastline) hit him so hard he nearly went over his mount’s shoulder. The gray vapor billowed wildly and seemed semi-solid.

  He was instantly driven at right angles to his course and tried to force his pony to tack back except the terrified beast backed and charged along with the gale. Sticks and bits of vegetation flashed by, appearing and disappearing in the fog mass.

  “Witch work,” he snarled, kicking hard. “Foul betrayer.”

  PARSIVAL

  The longship was finished, caught from behind by a tremendous sea, it pitchpoled, bow going under, the weight of the wave shoving the stern up and over, spilling everything and everyone on board into the freezing, wild water.

  As Parsival went in, he was holding both Lego and Gralgrim the Viking by their respective leather collars. In a survival reflex he clutched them as if they were buoyant, and saved both without realizing it because he kicked up the back of a monster wave, just starting to feel the actual artic shock as they sledded down the face like surf- riders… rushing on… then, suddenly, in a welter of ice… suddenly out of the fog, there was a beach of dark, stony sand and they slammed into it as the surf crumbled, rolling, gasping, blinded…

  He kept his grip and started dragging them both up the raspy beach, falling, twisting … going under… ice chopping into them…

  They staggered out of the undertow as the waves drained back. Parsival dragged Lego clear and got well up the gritty, dark, ice-flecked sand until they dropped, gasping and shivering…

  This could be the place I saw, he thought.

  Lego was shaking hard, gagging seawater, cut and bruised from the harsh shore.

  “Hah,” he gasped. “The damn land is rocking… by Saint Paul’s piles… unnn… nothing left to puke up …”

  “He has,” said Parsival, indicating Gralgrim who was on his hands and knees, shadowy in the billowing mist, coughing and vomiting. They all were shivering violently.

  Stay here and we die, the knight thought, getting up.

  “Fire and shelter,” he said, over the wind and surfsmashing. Kicked Gralgrim lightly on his butt end as they passed him. “Follow along, mighty master of the sea. I think we’ve come to Viking heaven.”

  SHINQUA

  The second night away they had been camped in a dell under a dulled moon that hung, nearly ful
l, above the fog. The heavy air barely stirred. The fire was dim and smoky a vague glow on the forest floor beside the road.

  He shifted himself closer to her. “Shinqua, I must go back.”

  “Leave me here?” She’d been waiting for something like this. “What manner of man does that?”

  “A man with duties… at the manor… A man with …”

  He drank in her face from closer, now, in the subtle, almost sourceless gleaming, those smooth, rounded matchless features. She could feel him react, the catch in his breath. She thought his pale, bony face improved in the gentle blurriness.

  She was back against a tree bole. Raised one bare foot and ran it along his cheek and neck. He stayed very still. He might have been breathing.

  “Duties?” she wondered, softly. “Really? Duties?” He didn’t move at all, saying:

  “I am not some knight free to ride here and there.” Her toes nibbled, a little at his ear.

  “You are a responsible fellow,” she agreed. “I am a poor, unfortunate woman from a far land.”

  He cleared his throat, staying very still.

  “Well,” he began. “I am no brainless knight… I …”

  She brushed his cheek, again. He lightly rested his fingers on her instep. “Come a little way more with me,” she suggested.

  “Ah… I …”

  “Yes?”

  Held her ankle and knelt himself forward between her legs in the loose dress that had fallen away from her long, amazing thighs. He seemed giddy, gasped and fumbled with his codpiece, almost trembling with welling need. “Sweet creature,” he almost gasped.

  “Sweet dark magic,” she amended, not resisting. “So I am told. Duty has you in its grip, seemingly.”