Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II

by Richard Monaco

  “Wait now,” I said.

  She smiled like burst, sugary grapes.

  “For what?” she wanted to know.

  “Until I see what’s befalling me.”

  “Cannot you tell?”

  I went to one knee. Had to. My breath was thick and slow.

  My Lord Christ, I thought, if I thought at all.

  “Ah then,” I said, meaning nothing, taking a deep breath.

  “Who are you?” I think I asked once. Eventually I lay there with one hand over one small, elastic breast.

  “Your plaything, my lord,” she replied. Worthy of a dream.

  “Why is that true?” I think I wondered. You understand, I wasn’t quite awake in the ordinary sense so it was hard to sift inside from outside. Her lips pushed out a pout as if her mouth had gone overripe.

  “What questions,” she told me. I went to those lips and tried to drink out the sweetness, but she pulled away this time.

  “What’s wrong?” I wanted to hear.

  “No more.” The pout had soured now. “You cannot have me now. It’s spoiled.”

  My new resolves melted in the fire of need suddenly terrible. Frightening. Every other time, each pulse of desire had been instantly satisfied. I was just understanding (in my dim, semi-invalid state) that there had been far too many pulses for the time actually spent there, even given that time was a seamless blur …

  She rolled away. I tried to follow. She walked to the nearest wall, leaned on a gilt and red tapestry depicting an expiring unicorn, riddled with arrows, spurting bright arcs of blood.

  There was a silver bowl beside her. She reached it over and sat it on her long, soft, tormentingly silky belly. It looked like blood and snow. I was fascinated.

  “Cherries and cream,” said she. Her voice was like cream. “Ah,” I managed. I suppose I was sweating. I wanted to put her in my mouth, nibble by nibble.

  “Want to taste?” she asked, all dark innocence. She spilled the bowl of sweetness over herself and rubbed her fingers in the ripeness. Then poked one between my lips.

  I sucked the stuff from each small finger. Went on sucking and lapping. I was lost for the moment. She seemed ineffably pleased. Then I bent my face down for the rest of the feast …

  I would doze with that strange, perfumed creature in my arms. Doze and wake and taste, kiss, touch … everything … eat sweets and swallow honeyed wine, floating in a soft and dreamy state that I gradually and only partially sensed was unnatural. I could make love (at least I thought I did) but it was hard to sit up or stand. As if I had a draining fever. I spoke to her from time to time … fragments …

  God, but this girl was exquisite pain to me. I tried to stand but kept toppling weakly forward. No good. I had to crawl. I crawled. I’d never needed like this. Never. I needed that elastic, scented flesh … taste, touch, release, and relief …

  I realized the food and drink were partly responsible. Probably just the drink. Some potion.

  I tried not to crawl, but ended up wriggling over the silky bed floor. She waited, leaning on the soft wall, relaxed, lithe, a knowing, almost hard, expression on her face now. She’d aged slightly in those moments. When I got close to her she stopped me with a foot in my face.

  “No,” she said, “you don’t go on. You don’t obey, so you must be punished.” I went watery. I recalled the story of Samson. Yet I had all my hair.

  I couldn’t push past the foot. The lush foot. I found myself helplessly kissing it. With adoration and self-contempt. I felt a thrill of strange, weak, excruciating pleasure.

  “Please,” I heard myself begging. “please …” She poked the little round toes in my mouth and I licked and devoured.

  “Will you obey?”

  I gasped, “Yes.”

  Fight this, I thought. Easy to think it. Hard to resist when you really want to lose. I wanted to surrender to concentrated sweetness, as in childhood summers, inhaling air laden with crushed ripeness, swallowing life without a thought … But this was tainted. Innocence is a door that swings only one way. Ecstasy was starting to hurt. There was nothing left in my well yet she kept dropping the bucket.

  “Go away,” I said. She was amused. Her expression added more years to her. A teenager with the infinitely knowing eyes of a perverse queen. My queen.

  “Ah,” she said, deliciously, tugging her foot away. “A rebellious slave.” That hurt. I stayed on hands and knees, breathing hard. My head was drowning in scents. I had to escape. To where? The syrupy scents clogged my memories too. How had I come there? Why?

  I tried to stand up again. She’d just walked across the chamber into the blur where my focus drowned in the sweet stuff too. Then I fell again. Almost wept. I had to get out of there to somewhere … where? … Somewhere outside … somewhere … I couldn’t hold the thought (or any thought) for very long. Fuzzy images occurred. I sensed that I had some strange power to change things, affect the solid world, but I couldn’t find the focus. I felt guilty. Images of a sharp-faced boy with curly black hair … I knew I knew him … couldn’t focus … a short, dark-haired, slim woman with expressionless eyes that had been hurt and that made me very guilty too …

  I crawled vaguely on. And then she was back, standing over me, dressed in gold bracelets and waist chains with massive anklets and thigh jewelry. Her hair streamed from under a coppery helmet. She held a short, stiff whip. Her feet were still bare and she kicked me over onto my back. I was so weak and guilty. I sighed and groaned. And then, incredibly, I was excited again. The only stiff part of my spent and yet still spending body.

  I knew I was supposed to do something important, something … what? … something that would wipe away the guilt and weakness.

  The whip crackled across my belly. Pain. Strangely, my desire didn’t abate. “Please,” I begged. She rubbed it with her foot. I writhed with need.

  “Are you a slave?” she asked me.

  “Yes … yes … anything …” So weak, so hopeless …

  “Roll over, slave,” she ordered.

  I managed to roll over. The cushions felt good. I rubbed myself on them.

  “Stop that!” she commanded. “No pleasure for you!” The whip cut deep into my buttocks. I sighed with pain. “Keep rolling.”

  “What are you doing to me?”

  “Roll!”

  I rolled.

  “Please …”

  “You can’t have what you want yet. You have to learn to obey. Will you obey?”

  I nodded, sweating. Rolled, panted. I hit the far wall and bounced a little. I kept trying like a furtive child to stroke myself on the satiny floor.

  “What, slave?”

  “Yes,” I said, “yes …”

  “Roll then!”

  I rolled. Dizzy, my soul on a string. Pleasure and pain were one thing, seething in me. I hit another wall, rebounded, heard her distant laughter. Felt the whip bite again. “Don’t stop!” she commanded. And I couldn’t. I was caught on it like a drowning man tumbling on a sea wave.

  Hit another wall … rolling … rolling … whip-bite … another wall … sweating, panting, half blacking out … dimly heard another voice, contralto, husky, female, saying:

  “Excellent, child. Excellent work. What rare good fortune I am having. I always fear good fortune, however.”

  “Thank you, my lady,” said my tormentor. I saw nothing but blurs spinning past me. For all I could tell she was talking to herself in two voices. It wouldn’t have surprised me.

  “Let him rest, after a time,” said contralto over the soft, swishing sounds of my silk-smoothed passage. “Then we will strip him bare of all he knows; this time I’ll not fail. He’s my bait, aye, and I’ll fix a hook in him too.”

  “Yes, lady.”

  “Yes, in fact and deed.”

  “Yes.”

  They were in agreement, but there was no comfort in it for me. I rolled until I couldn’t draw breath. Spent, at last, blackness drinking my consciousness again, I lay still — except, this time, it
became grayish brightness, and I was walking in a dripping forest. The sky was beaten tin. Rain fell dense as smoke. Seemed to thrash mist from the dark earth. I was moving rapidly and smoothly.

  Suddenly the forest opened in a perfect circle. Great standing stones enclosed the glade. A massive, hooded man (a Druid, I didn’t actually suppose) sat there. I sensed he was unable (for some dream reason) to leave the spot, that he was charmed into place. I had a sense I was supposed to help free him. He held a staff across his knees. That was important. I tried to know why. Then the rain and mist blurred the scene away and darkness flowed from the woods and blotted me out again …

  LOHENGRIN

  Could anyone have believed my ill-luck? I doubt it. I never could. In sight of the island a storm blasted us from out of nowhere.

  Sometimes my luck is good, but only when all is about lost. I’m always tugged back from the brink. There I was holding my horse quiet while spars pin-wheeled, masts went crunching over, waves beat men to pulp against the rocks.

  I was so angry and frustrated I mounted my beast and, sword in hand, I decided I’d ride over the damned sea. I was too young to end at nothing, like this. I was too angry to die.

  I spurred madly as the ship heeled, broached, buckled into the stony shore. Just missed a sudden, jagged crack; leaped a shattered mast; found a goat’s path of bent, bucking boards. I snarled my hate at the insane, devilish elements.

  I suppose a praying fool would have felt the vast hand of God pluck him through the heart of destruction. All I knew was I found beach under us and the foaming, wild-eyed horse crashed through foam and splintering wood almost untouched. A big fragment of something banged off my armored back. I saw white fire but held on. The horse (a superb animal) rode a quarter of a mile inland before slowing to a walk. By then I was myself again …

  It was dead dark but I went on. Why not? May as well be lost moving as sitting still. Seemed like open country. Fog rolled in but that made little difference.

  Stony clicks told me I was on paving. That made it easy. There was, it turned out, a castle at the end of it and dawn too. Along the way I hid the prize spear in a hollow log close to the road.

  I heard the sea beyond the castle. No moat. But who needed a moat on an island? How could a large force be landed? I thought about that. I enjoyed strategy. It would be touch and go.

  This place looked ancient, carved partly out of the living rock. I waited while the light softly grew, and gray became blue and rosy, then gold as the sun broke free of the misty horizon. Dawn always makes me think great new things are possible.

  Nobody seemed to be watching the walls. I rode unchallenged to the gate. I pounded the heavy wood with the hilt of my sword. Satisfying booms resulted. I waited.

  The portcullis lifted partway. No face, just voice. A fat man’s wheeze, I thought.

  “What is it?”

  “Good morrow,” I answered. “Is this Lady Morg’s nest?”

  “How did you come here?”

  “I flew. How else to a nest?”

  Pause. That ground the gears for a minute.

  “Go away.”

  “Everybody always says that,” I said. “Find something novel to tell me.” A skinny dwarf sucked out holding an ax three times his bodylength. I didn’t laugh yet. You never know. “I won’t cut off your head,” he told me. “That’s something better.”

  I liked that.

  “Just tell your mistress that Lohengrin of Wales has arrived.”

  “Lohengrin.”

  “Right.”

  He squinted over that and ground the gears again. “Son of Parsival, the knight?”

  “Devil eat that for breakfast. My mother might have had a lover.” There was nothing in that for him. “You can come in,” he said. He went back under the little door and moments later the gate lifted with terrific creaking, banging, and rattling.

  Good, I thought, we’ll get down to business …

  As I passed through the thick wall, the sun was high enough to stretch long shadows.

  A young, pretty thing in a fluffy, apricot bedchamber gown came across the yard. Only the topmost towers showed reddish sunstains.

  “Greetings, Sir Knight,” she said.

  “Lohengrin,” I said.

  She held up a crystal decanter.

  “Refreshment,” she said, all according to good custom.

  I hefted the thing with an armored hand, nodded thanks, and carefully sipped. Spiced and cool. Good. I swallowed and nodded with pleasure. I’ve since learned more care in my dealings.

  The skinny dwarf pranced over and lifted his oversized ax. “Draw and fight, coward,” he snarled. The girl just stood there.

  “Where’s the witch?” I asked. My lips felt thickened. I kept blinking to clear my vision, to no avail. I was weary as Sisyphus, as my Latin tutor liked to say. That wasn’t all he liked to say. He found many drawbacks in me.

  By the time I understood that I’d been drugged or poisoned, the dwarf was swinging his ax quite slowly at my chest.

  I brought out my sword, but it was as if I struggled underwater. I gripped the hilt about the time the ax softly clunked on my mail. I tried to curse. I was asleep before the ground actually hit me in the face. I think I heard the crash. Perhaps not.

  When the world came back, I was naked, strapped to a rack. Delightful way to wake up. My lips were still partly numb. My eyes worked well enough to make out the same boring dwarf, the girl (who was really slim and lovely), and the witch herself, coppery-haired, blue-eyed, ageless Morgan le Fay. The bitch I’d come to see. The bitch who’d made a business deal with me.

  When I could say something, I said:

  “So glad I came here.”

  “Lohengrin?” Morgan asked.

  “Is this my welcome?”

  “I have no time to be patient,” she told me. “I don’t want to dicker long with you. You came without what I craved, young man.”

  “Mayhap I lost it in the sea.”

  “I know you were wrecked,” she said.

  The young girl seemed sympathetic. “Lady,” she said, “perhaps he —”

  “Be still, Chael. I have no time to chatter. Where is it?” I blinked and focused. I was afraid, never doubt that. But I was angry too. That anger has often served me well.

  The dwarf was grinning. He was ready at the chains that would, I supposed, pull me apart like a roast chicken at a feast. I’d never seen such a thing but I’d heard about them and seen drawings of torture. He looked as if he hoped nothing would go right and disappoint him. Hungry for someone else’s pain.

  “You’re a poor hostess, Lady Morgan,” I said. My wrists and armpits hurt.

  “When I have the spear,” she said, “you go free.”

  She was businesslike enough, but I wondered what her assurances were worth. “When you free me and pay me, as agreed, Lady Morg, you get what you desire.”

  Did I have a choice? The dwarf tensed with suppressed glee. Bluff and die is better than cower and die, I think. Why give satisfaction to enemies?

  She had calm, dreamy eyes. She wore a boy’s suit, a warrior’s. I didn’t like her at all. I like wet and fluffy women.

  “Set a new price, Lohengrin,” she said, nodding to the twisted little creature. I saw the beauty beside her, the one who’d lured me to this doom, start with horror. The chains hummed and my arms and legs were jerked taut.

  “Christ,” I exclaimed. What an ass I’d been. Trust no one. That had been my childhood vow. Now I’d have the motto worked into my shield, if ever I escaped. Trust no one at all.

  And I’d failed in the first list. Shit and a half measure. Being young is no excuse for being an idiot.

  My joints popped and hurt. I broke into a sweat.

  “Your new price,” she told me, “is your limbs left joined to your handsome body.”

  I spat. I was angry again. Pain always made me mad. The girl there, Chael, winced and touched her mistress’s arm. “Christ,” I repeated. It really hurt. There
was a shock in knowing that I could be so easily ruined.

  At her signal, the runt bastard eased up a little, reluctantly. Pretty Chael was like soft flame, golden hair, tinted skin. Her eyes reflected my pain, I thought. That might prove useful.

  “There,” said Morgan the bitch, “you’ve had a small sample of the bad side of the bargain.”

  “Bargain.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Does anybody,” I asked, “ever do business with you twice?”

  “Not unless I require their trade again.” Her eyes were dreamy and amused.

  “Lady Fay,” I told her, “if I once wipe my behind with nettles, I never repeat the experience.”

  “Let go the talk. Where is the spear?” Glanced at the rat-faced torturer, who tensed the chains again.

  “If you pull me apart,” I snarled, “you won’t find it in my spilled guts.”

  “Lady of might,” the torturer rasped passionately, “let me look to see if he lies or not.”

  “Patience.” She leaned her sharp features near me. No wrinkles showed around the eyes. Magic or art? “Where will I find it, young man?”

  “You mean when.”

  I was focused past her, on willowy Chael, the breath of gold, who seemed to be trying without words to tell me something though she wasn’t succeeding. Perhaps she was in love with me. Women, some of them, are very susceptible to nonsense. My mother was, for instance. And my father was half a woman himself in that regard.

  Her eyes were depth less blue, dreamy, intent.

  “When then, Lohengrin?”

  “When I’m free and you pay me in good coin.” I didn’t feel brave but a drowning man should try kicking his feet.

  “Pull him apart,” she hissed.

  There was always that possibility. As the machine hummed and creaked and I prepared to scream, the girl touched her mistress. “Why lose everything, my lady?” she asked, breathy and soft.

  “I exist to be obeyed, Chael,” she said, “as you know.”

  “Yes, lady.”

  That was a limited outlook, but I didn’t say so. My limbs were grinding apart. It finally hit me that this sweet, goldenhued creature was the one who’d spoken in the underbrush at my home. They’d lured me to this with strange promises. How did the witch know so much about me? She must have been a student of my family.