Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon

by Richard Monaco

  “Oh sad knight,” she whispered into his neck, pressing the ripe fullness of her lips there, above the harsh metal of his armor. She could feel his desperation and her own. “What, my poor love? O, kiss me! I beg it.”

  “Kiss you,” he almost shouted, crushing her into his iron skin until she sighed with pain but made no complaint. Her head was prisoned under his chin. “Kiss you?” he murmured, this time. His breath heaved as if he’d run a mile. “Fare thee most well, my dark jewel… my love, my pain, my heart, my hope …” Holding her harder she gasped with pain and pressure. “Lost forever… kiss you? Were I more than half a man with more than half a mouth, how I might kiss you, then. My heart the only thing left whole and with all that heart, I love thee, from beyond death’s utter night! I love thee… out of all this I cry to thee, from hell and fog and ruined earth. But kiss thee I cannot.”

  “What words you find.”

  “That gain me nothing.” And he almost hurled her away so that she staggered back and went down on the loamy riverbank, almost disappearing into the shadows from where she called back, with broken breath:

  “We have a son!” She just crouched there. “But what, poor Gawain? What?”

  “I cannot kiss thee,” he said, cried. “Nor may I show myself to him.” He backed away, starting to melt into the fog. “I live in mists and nothingness.”

  He drew his sword and slashed at the blurred, dimly gleaming, empty almost-shapes around him.

  “Oh, Gawain,” she said, not loud.

  “I cannot kiss thee,” he repeated, almost shouted. “I cannot.”

  LOHENGRIN

  “Bad meat?” he asked Hal, who replied:

  “Since we ate I’ve had fire in my belly and sour burpings.” He opened and closed his hands, expressively. Obviously, he was letting the past quarrel go, in light of present troubles. “I once was up all night,” he went on, warming to his subject, “spewing loose, stinking liquids from both ends. Bad –”

  “Enough,” said Lohengrin, grinning, despite himself. “Far more than enough.” He went near the fire, half-consciously drawn to the warmth and cheer.

  “I merely state the facts,” concluded the young squire.

  Lohengrin stared into the flames. Wanted Jane to come in and warm up. He was almost amazed by how troubled he was.

  “My mother …” Shook his head. “Jane… ill.” Rubbed one finger down the length of his beaked nose. Turned and went back outside.

  He stood with the light at his back in the deep obscurity and cool rain. Saw nothing much. “Mother! Jane!” he called out. For some reason he felt a sinking, cold within as if belly and heart were chilled.

  There was a stifled, gagging sound towards the well.

  What a plague caring is, he thought. Hal was behind him.

  “Lohengrin,” he said. “Where is she?”

  “Jane?”

  “Yes.”

  He crossed the yard through the wet, misty earth smell. “Jane?”

  He found the well. Saw the bucket she’d obviously raised because it hadn’t been there before. Hal shadowed him.

  “Is she unwell, too?” he wondered.

  “She had the same meat I had,” Lohengrin said.

  She was alongside the hut on the far side. Crouching. Rain dripped from the eaves.

  “My love,” said she. “I am all cramp and burning.”

  Lohengrin lifted her up. She clutched him. She was very hot.

  He walked her around towards the doorway, lifted her into his arms, slipping a little on the slick mud from the runoff.

  So sudden it comes, he thought. Like snuffing a candle… she’s light to bear…

  “The water,” she said, weak and giddy, as they angled through the doorway into the low close room.

  “You want water?” asked Hal, moving with them. “No. Drink not the water in the well…”

  Lohengrin laid her on the straw pallet. The firelight hollowed her face with shifting shadows.

  “I but sipped,” she whispered. She seemed, suddenly, so very small and pale; shivered slightly. “It were foul,” she whispered on. “Gagged in my throat.”

  “Poisoned?” asked Hal.

  “Did my mother drink therefrom?” He was already heading back out, as close to panic as he’d ever come.

  “I know not,” Hal said after him.

  JOHN

  Was barely clinging to the wet rope as the ungainly, fog-whipped ships drifted with the strong wind. When he thought he could hold no longer, his feet touched bottom and he heard the dull creaking and cracking as the unseen vessels began to pile up on some reef or the shoreline.

  All around he heard wind-twisted, muffled shouts and cries. He waded and half swam, desperately, up the shore-slope, over muck, stones and crunchy little shells.

  He passed around the bulk of another stranded ship that showed through the general cloudiness. He could see a level mucky stretch of beach where masses of oily-looking seaweed clung to dark stones. The standing pools showed the ebb tide was going out…

  PARSIVAL

  Gralgrim looked up as if he’d just been offered a very rotten bite of fish, watching the knight in red armor discuss matters with the gnarled tree.

  “Merlin,” said Parsival, “am I come here to finish or begin?”

  The Viking watched him listen and nod thoughtfully, as the branches stirred. “Ah,” he murmured. “Yer master asks a good question.”

  Lego shifted, uneasily. “There’s something deep in it,” he decided, without much conviction.

  “Hoo. Deep enough, I ween. Deep as the sea and mad as a Frenchman.”

  “Why don’t you go back to your country of drunkards and pirates?”

  “I wish no more. Mayhap I’ll ask that tree directions when the great knight’s done his discourse.”

  Merlinus seemed too weary to move. His resonant voice seemed to sound from the earth itself, saying:

  “There is always the final chance, for all things must end in both heaven and earth. This may be your final chance to live outside the dull world, again like a ship that the fresh tide lifts from some dreary and somber shore.”

  “What must I do?”

  Gralgrim considered this. “Pick that scurvy-looking fruit?” he wondered. “Hang yerself from a branch?”

  “My master sees things hidden from ordinary eyes,” said Lego. “Hears, too, meseems.”

  “As before,” Merlinus was saying. He shifted his cloak, slightly, revealing the haft of a sword in his belt. “Go knowing nothing. Take this and keep it from the witch.”

  “Yes, I will go, knowing nothing. What has changed?”

  “I think he can,” said Gralgrim.

  “Enough,” said Lego. “Ah, see there.”

  The branches had shifted in the breeze and they saw the knight reach into a space in the trunk and extract a silver and gold-worked swordhilt with about a foot of broken blade.

  “I will keep this, as you say, sir,” Parsival told Merlin – or the tree – depending on where you stood.

  “Should he no ask a sound stone, too?” chortled the bulky Berserker. “Just to be certain he understood the tree.”

  “Barbarian shitwit,” snarled Lego getting ready to break his pact and break the fellow’s big, round head.

  “Yet,” went on the other, pleased by his effect, pointing, “there’s a bush adjacent that hath a sage look.”

  Lego walked away from him and closer to the knight. “My Lord,” he said, “how did you know to find this here?” Parsival thrust the blade through his mesh steel belt.

  “Saw you not the great wizard give it me?” indicating the tree.

  “So we did,” said Gralgrim. He turned to the knotted trunk and sank to one knee. “I beseech you, great wizard, transport me by the wights of the air to me homeland where …” But could utter no more for laughing.

  “No doubt the joke is good,” Parsival allowed, striding back out of the great hall, “but tweak not Merlinus overmuch. Come outside you both and on w
e go. All will soon be clear, I think.”

  “As soon as we come outside, a course,” gasped Gralgrim. “But, yet, the door seems shut.”

  Parsival shook his head and turned under the arch. Lego, dourly, marched past him.

  “Are you short of sight, Viking?” the knight wanted to clear-up. “The gate stands wide.”

  “Ignore him, my Lord. We ought to toss him back into the sea like a rot-blighted fish.”

  “A spell may have been set to blind him.”

  “The gate stands wide,” Gralgrim howled, rolling over on the grass. “Wizard’s work.”

  The other two went on ahead and the convulsed Berserker, unwilling to miss anything to come, found his feet and followed.

  “There’s a point, my Lord,” Lego pondered. “We may be spellbound while thou art free to see.”

  GAWAIN

  His sole eye weeping, burning, voice choked with pain and passion, he turned away.

  She heard his mail tink and the horse snuff-cough. She was quick so he hadn’t mounted yet, just freeing the reins. Maybe he hadn’t actually meant to.

  So he just stood there in his wetly gleaming, silvered steel, holding the saddle, facing the horse. The arc of moon showed over the low trees across the pond, first hinting of sunrise faintly silhouetting heavy limbs.

  She didn’t touch him, this time.

  “You became tired of me,” she said, “for all your words. Half of heart and half of this and that. Is there another who has your whole heart?”

  “No,” he said, a catch in his voice. His throat felt thickened with feeling.

  “Tell me, knight and man.” Because she wanted to be free if he would not be bound, one way or another. “But tell me.”

  “Another?” He thought about the peasant whore innkeeper where (in a sense) he now longed to be, free of knighthood, feeling and purpose, obligated only to eat, fuck and drink himself to blank sleep. “Another who has my whole heart? Ha, ha.” He still didn’t turn, wooden hand absently hooked on the saddle girth, eye shut. The night sounds droned on as if suspending time as the mist suspended space…

  “I went to find you,” she told him again, staring at his metal back formed from soft moonlight and burnished harshness. “More than once. Tell me, man and knight, why so silent now? And why do you only stand like a tranced madman?”

  His living hand stroked the horse’s warm, damp flank as if he touched her. For all the suffering he’d had, this was a new one because he truly loved and longed (as poets would put it) and had no dream, no dram, no speck nor spot of hope.

  “I am like one 80 years old,” he finally came out with, voice shaking and choked. “Or a dead man come back to endlessly reach for what he cannot grasp. Gawain’s shadow. Cans’t love a shadow or the dead love you?” And then he sobbed a kind of scream that terrified her for a moment. “To have no hope. None.” He flung himself up into the saddle, violent, furious. “A ghost in love with the living.”

  He wrenched the horse around and nearly knocked her down. “Gawain!” she cried.

  “Fare thee well!” he yelled. “My hour up, I now return to hell!”

  LOHENGRIN

  He found his mother next, sitting against a massive tree, almost lost in brush and fog. There was just enough light to show her bare legs opened.

  “Stay away,” she demanded. “Leave me.”

  “Mother, I…”

  “Go. I’ll not die of this. I’m partly glad of it.”

  “Glad to be sick?”

  “A kind of purging. Go. Attend your lady.” He was baffled and rueful.

  “This is… I know not what I feel, Mother. So many things have happened …”

  Images recurred: the lady in the tent; the weird underground fortress and charnel pit; the mad knight using the naked dead girl… and then Jane. “Some things were like enchantments… which I disbelieve …”

  “Go inside, my boy. I bid you, go.” Her voice was strained.

  Inside Hal was kneeling by the pallet where Jane sighed and softly thrashed. He did know what he felt; there was nothing to do.

  “Christ’s words, what?” he demanded of the air and fire-tossed shadows. He was afraid to go near and afraid to leave. “What?’

  “She seems most ill,” Hal needlessly said.

  She rolled on her back, legs straight and rigid. “Lohengrin,” she whispered.

  “Ahh,” he whispered, “I am here.”

  “I was thus sick,” said the round-faced Saxon boy said, “after bad fish.”

  He pointed as she spewed some bubbling vomit from the side of her mouth into the dank straw. Lohengrin felt a convulsion of chill dread. He rushed close and knelt there. Wiped the sticky stuff away with a handkerchief.

  “Oh, sweet Jane,” he said.

  “Even bad salt fish,” suggested Hal, blinking and staring. “O Holy Mother Mary.”

  “She had no fish.”

  Outside Layla stood up and staggered a little. She wanted to wash the blood from her thighs. Saw her son standing in the doorway, looking in and then out.

  “Drink not from the well, mother,” he called over. “Jane says it poisoned her.”

  “There’s a bucket of rainwater over there,” she responded.

  “Clean water. I’ll give her a drink.”

  “Then bring it me, son.” She held her partly smeared dress up, a shadow in the misty moonlight. She wide-stepped over to the crackly hut wall and sat just under the sagged eaves.

  He went in and came back out.

  “She could not drink,” he said. He put the bucket down close to his mother who was dimness in the wet, still night. The rain dripped here and there from the roof and tree branches. “I think she is most ill.”

  “I see you care.”

  She wet a clean linen cloth and wiped herself. He just stood there, breathing steadily, silent. Then he plunged back inside. She sighed. Took and drink, then wet the cloth again.

  JOHN

  Slogging, feet like lead in the sucking muck, he worked his gasping, shivering, miserable way to the stony shore of rotted fish smells, crushed shells and slimy seaweed.

  He could distinguish the side of one ship tilted into the strand. The pilgrims were clambering down and dropping back onto the reeking beach.

  “No reason to give up the cause,” he muttered. “A false start. A new trail. Yes.”

  It seemed to him that to the south the fogs were thinning. He thought he could almost make out the sun’s disk in the lower half of the sky. “A new trail and trial, too …”

  With a sudden rush of energy he stood up and started plopping his feet along the stinking beach towards the people.

  “Hear me!” he called ahead. “The sun returns. All will be clear!” Maybe two dozen watched him coming. They were pale, weary, impassive. He half-hopped to them through the muck with stork-like steps. “All will be clear! Clear!”

  PARSIVAL

  No surprise, he thought, as they came to a clearing where (in the fog, subtly thinned) he saw a blue and yellow silken tent against a dark green background of dense undergrowth.

  The sun, again, softly sprayed soft, uneven coins of light around them and the cool day was spring-like, for a moment…

  “Wait,” he said, “I’ll go in and see her alone.” Because it had to be, his memory insisted.

  “You’ll go in an see her?” Gralgrim liked that idea. Winked one eye at Lego who ignored him.

  The knight went to the tent flap and entered quietly.

  His companions watched him walk a few steps into the shadow of a fifteen or so foot high bluish, pointed rock, covered with soft green moss and sprinklings of tough, spiny, yellow cold-country blossoms. He stopped there and spoke, fervently:

  “Lady I am grieved by what I did to you in those days. I was a foolish boy and caused you hurt. I have been long troubled by this.”

  The Viking squinted. There was a bird, a smallish, graying wild goose, maybe, he decided, pecking at the scrubby grass near Parsival. Lego shifted hi
s eyes, squinting, trying to see the tent in case there was a spell.

  “He’s grieved,” said Gralgrim. “What? Did he once steal its eggs?” Snorted. “Wish I had a fucked fresh egg or even a hard-cooked one saved in salt.”

  “I am pleased to see you well,” Parsival said to the lady who looked like Jeschute. She seemed to sigh and droop her head.

  “He’s pleased she be well,” the Viking said. “Where’s that bow?”

  “You left it behind,” said Lego.

  “Even that skinny fowl would taste sweet, I think.”

  Meanwhile, Parsival had dropped to one knee, with a slight clink of armor and Gralgrim shook his wide-eyed head. Said no more words. “My Lord, should we not –”

  The knight glanced back out of the tent they couldn’t see. “Wait,” he commanded. “I’ll come out in a moment.”

  “He’ll be out,” assured the Viking.

  Parsival stood up and studied her averted face. “I will try not to fail in my purpose, this time,” he declared. She seemed to sigh and went into the back of the tent – which faded into soft mist as he passed through the parted flap and kept walking across the open field.

  Gralgrim noted the bird had gone into the spiny brush. Sighed. “So much fer supper,” he muttered. “This is whom you follow, fellow?”

  “Be still, he’s beyond the comprehension of bumpkin barbarians.”

  “Yet geese understand him pretty well.”

  “Had you half a bird’s brain you might comprehend more.”

  “Aye. You understand him too,” guffawed Gralgrim. “Thus ya must have half a one.” The Berserker enjoyed his little triumph of the last word.

  Parsival now hurried at a partial trot, metal pinging softly. The dark, massed and twisted trees, melted together by the fog that had closed down around them again, were unlit by sunlight. There was grayness and a graceful tower of bluish stone.

  Lego and the Viking watched him heading towards a mass of broken rock that spilled in a twenty foot heap across the tundric plain.