Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II

by Richard Monaco

  Why did so many follow such a madman? I wasn’t really surprised. I’d seen enough of it. Seen little else but. The void had a balm to sooth that as well. My secret knowledge brought a slight smile to my lips.

  They walked me into the old throne room where I’d last seen my mother and where (they’d told me) she’d died of grief for my going away. So there was that too, another cause, another pain for the void to sooth and smooth over until all the struggle stopped and all nature hung in perfect stillness. God was perfect stillness. I saw that clearly. God was nothingness.

  The old banners hung limp and dusty. We went between the pillars and stopped, and we faced the two thrones. The armored cripple, Orilus, squatted like a toad in my father’s seat — though I’d never seen my father sit in it.

  The mad knight’s whiskers poked insanely through his visor. I wondered he’d not choked to death. A perfect instrument of the void. I kept smiling.

  “So, despoiler, you’re amused?” he said to me. He didn’t worry about my reply. “Strip him!” he commanded. I shrugged. None of it mattered. Just the emptiness waiting. My wife would soon join me in the perfect blank, in any case.

  “Let her go,” I said, mechanically, because I was supposed to. “I never wronged you on purpose. And not in fact, either.” I’d said it. I waited while two fools cut my clothes away and stood me naked and wet in the chilly hall. “Do you mean to slay me with chills?”

  The black mist was here too, lurking, forming in the corners, reaching shapeless arms around the old stonework, reaching to embrace that silly, pitiful fool on the meaningless throne. I smiled.

  “We’ll take off all your skin, you creature!” Orilus promised, bouncing slightly in his seat. The chamber was dimming as the strange smoke flowed and gathered among the cobwebs and dusty, stiff, cracked pennants. I smiled. “Inch by inch and then your wife! Yes! You shall suffer! You shall suffer!”

  I paid slight attention: the smoke fascinated me, because I could tell it was boiling up from the dark spot in myself. I had brought their doom to them! The void would eat us all together! I hardly noticed they’d chained me to the wall. I vaguely recalled images from long ago: playing in this room, ducking around the stonework through splashes of sunlight, faded, old sunlight … with some little girl, a cousin perhaps … hiding and ducking in and out of the brightness …

  The emptiness was swallowing all of that too. As if it had never been. Lost moments. I remembered her face, small and fine. A smile and a laugh out of the fading light and it might have been one of my daughters as the mists smoked and swirled about me and I thought No! No! Not this too! Not everything! I wanted to touch the little girl again. I felt the bite of chill knives on my back and heard the distant madman’s noises and then shouts and sounds and swirling darkness like a terrible whirlpool sucking me and all life and light down into nothing and I kept screaming “No!” Wanting to touch the little girl’s hand, see her sweet face that might have been my wife’s or my children’s …

  I struggled then, thrashed and kicked into the walls in the shouts and yells and pain and obscurity. I was sucked down and I fell and fell endlessly into emptiness, reaching up towards the last glimmer of that wisp of golden brightness and the unmarked, untroubled face of that sweet child. Reached …

  LAYLA

  I wasn’t even cold anymore either. … The rain was just there … and then I was looking up into it and it suddenly wasn’t there and I thought I saw the sun or something I’m not sure what I thought I saw because of the fever you see I had fever by then and my brain spun thoughts like gray webs that didn’t mean anything … But I’m certain the rain stopped and there was the sun breaking through, just a slant, a fracture, and (with the fever) I dreamed I could touch it (whatever I imagined I was seeing that wasn’t just sweet sunlight), and I know I reached out through the top of the cage trying to touch it and heard commotion inside unless that was part of nothing as well but it seemed all noise and shouting and bangs and screams… I tried to reach it, touch it, but, obviously, I was just reaching into air between the bars …

  PARSIVAL

  They had me again. Even the void was a lie. There was no stillness and peace at the heart of that swirling darkness. They had me, coming out of the smoke, appearing and vanishing, snarling faces full of fangs, ripping my flesh from my bones, little demons, cripples, big, fat brutes, hard, keen-eyed knights of the table round … They all had me. The pain and fog and madness had me …

  I was being ripped apart, and so I ripped back and then I could move again — except I didn’t move myself. The darkness sucked and whirled me around, filled me with strange power, while my enemies were blown like leaves around me. They were all caught and doomed too; a dwarf lunged for my legs and the smoky power swung my arms and he fell … next a stone pillar was blown past. … next a crippled little monster with a toothy mouth on both sides of his skull and the power smashed him too … and then a tall knight wearing a silver crown whose eyes were blank metal and the power ripped his armor like skin and tossed him howling into clouds of fury … a naked witch sprang up flaring evil fires from her ears and nose. She was chaff too, though my blows missed her … I kept spinning and striking, filled with icy force, on and on as the whole misty world spun too, choking everything into utter, coal-dust darkness … and I believed I would spin endlessly into a nightmare eternity, the void a lie, annihilation a lie … And then a wan of brilliant, golden brightness slammed into me…

  JESCHUTE

  I went back inside after the children were safe. I supposed they were safe. Where was I going to go except to find another nunnery? Well, I had business here first. I had to help my husband. Someone had to.

  There was one guard. My friend who’d once loved me. He was biting into a sausage in the shelter of the archway. His stare was pale and tired. “Don’t go back there,” he said.

  “I must,” I told him.

  “I’m leaving,” he said. “You can come with me. It’s hopeless here.”

  “Yes,” I said. “But not yet. Let me pass.”

  “I should stop you, lady.”

  “Yes. Let me pass instead.” He did. I ran back to the throne room, but by the time I arrived, all was chaos. The place was full of smoke, and men were fleeing, screaming. Sir Parsival flashed past me, spinning, flailing long chains and cutting men down like a reaper. He was stark naked. His chains hit flesh, armor, pillars, and walls alike as if he weren’t aiming. He vanished back into the billows where the others struggled to get away and ran blindly into one another and (I glimpsed as the stinging, choking smoke gusted open and closed) struck blows at one another in blind panic, as if all the battles in the world had been sucked into this little hall.

  Gagging, I slipped along one wall trying to find Orilus. Parsival reeled past me, insanely howling (what had they done to him?) his flesh flapping in strips, laced with blood like a fiend from a fever dream. He smote stone and flesh alike, raising sparks and screams like some blind outpouring of hell’s justice. He nearly struck my skull as I crouched on. I saw dim flames across the hall. All the hangings were on fire. I realized they’d been torturing him, and he must have burst his chains and upset the torches.

  My husband, my poor, twisted husband whom I had loved so long would fall to the blond fool, or knight, angel or devil, at long last. Hate had blown him here like a wind. Hate was the fire and smoke.

  I never found my husband. I groped and stumbled and would have died from the fumes if I hadn’t staggered out the rear archway and fallen down a short stair into cool, fresh air. I lay by an open door, and when I recovered, I went out and went away, this time, without looking back.

  LAYLA

  … and then the cage was gone and there was just sunlight …

  PARSIVAL

  I must have run out the front door, because suddenly I was home in bright daylight. I remember the light melting the dark cyclone that had nearly sucked my soul away. I remembered hitting the wet ground.

  I woke up, and it was
warm and bright. The pools in the mudruts were steaming. I was comfortable when my eyes opened. The sun was strong, and I just lay on my back, weary and shaky. I wasn’t worried. I knew the darkness had swallowed my enemies and I’d been reprieved again. I didn’t know why, but I wasn’t asking the wrong questions yet.

  I felt, while I lay there, that I was safe at last, that I would be able to stay home. But once I moved, stirred my limbs and sat up, illusions vanished and I knew it wasn’t over. Everything hurt. Chains hung from my wrists, battered, twisted and bloodstained. The puddles around me were tinted with my blood. Still too much blood for anything to be over. I sat there naked in the deserted yard and winced and let the sun stun me a little more.

  The pools steamed, they thinned and vanished like the lost threads of all the lost dreams I’d been tangled in. I stood up. It wasn’t easy. I swayed a little. But that was all right; I’d have a little time, a little relief before the dark or smoke or killers or dreamers or fools caught up with me again. I’d stay home as long as I could and love them all as well as I might. I’d try. I swore it.

  Curls of smoke still unwound from the side windowslits and the main door. The smoke looped and hooked into the pure blue sky until the high breezes unwound the dark tangles of stain, thinned the puffs . . . unraveled the last strands until there was nothing…

  Then I went to free my wife.

  If you enjoyed Blood and Dreams, we would be really grateful if you could leave a review on the Amazon page and Goodreads.

  You may also enjoy WEB OF WIZARDRY by Juanita Coulson:

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  AFTERWORD

  When I was eighteen, I fell in love with Richard Monaco. It happened at a bookstore, along the back wall of the sci-fi fantasy section of Oxford Too Books in Atlanta, Georgia. Ask anybody who reads and lived in the metro area in the 1980’s, and they’ll all tell you, this was the best damned used bookstore on the planet. There was nothing you couldn’t get there. If they didn’t have it, they would the next time you came.

  And they had a coffee shop before Barnes & Noble so much as purchased its first bean.

  Anyway, there I was in the stacks with a fistful of store credit burning a hole in my pocket. I’m kind of an obsessive reader. When I get interested in a topic, I read only that topic until I’ve exhausted the material or, more frequently, encounter a new obsession.

  In the fall of my eighteenth year, I was hooked on King Arthur and was looking for a good Arthurian novel. I had long since read Malory, had recently plowed through T. H. White, and would, within the week, finish Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon. I knew if I didn’t find a new book soon, I’d finish Mists and, like some heroin addict without his fix, suffer the painful chills and palsy of withdrawal. I might even be forced to read Excaliber! by John Jakes (and nobody wants that).

  Then I found it, sitting on a table where someone had been browsing while finishing their coffee (as evidenced by the empty, brown-stained Styrofoam cup): Parsival or a Knight’s Tale by Richard Monaco. They tell you never to judge a book by its cover, but that is exactly what I did. The cover illustration was all one watercolored line drawing that wrapped around the spine to the back. On the front was a fairly intimidating red knight riding through the forest pursued on the back cover by this bumpkin looking kid on a sway-backed horse that looked like it would keel over dead if you blew on it hard enough. What it looked like was a comic book illustration, and it got my attention immediately. Seriously, the book was beautiful. It was the first paperback edition, so it had the same cover art as the hardback.

  Stop reading right now and go look it up.

  The fact that, based on the title, it focused on a character other than Arthur, Guinevere, Lancelot, or Merlin was also a nice change of pace. I replaced the empty Styrofoam cup with my own full cup, sat down, and started reading.

  I was only going to read the first page or so, flip around and read other passages to see if I liked it, but the next thing I knew, the bookstore was getting ready to close, my coffee was cold, and I had read at least a quarter of the book. I noted that it was the first book in a trilogy (followed by The Grail War, and The Final Quest). I went to its place on the shelves and saw to my delight that all three books were available (and all three covers were done by the same artist, another bonus).

  I bought them, went home, and read them immediately, even before finishing Mists, something I very rarely do. I enjoyed them so much that for years, I carried Parsival in my satchel in case I decided to read it on the spur of the moment (a precaution that came in handy much more than once).

  A few years later, I discovered a fourth Parsival book in the same store: Blood and Dreams, the one you’re holding in your hands now.

  Decades later, I would meet Monaco when I wrote him out of the blue to ask about an unpublished fifth Parsival book I heard about online. He admitted to me while we were preparing this fifth book, The Quest for Avalon, ready for publication that he always disliked the fourth book in the series. “It was never meant to be a novel,” he explained. “It was a one-off short story I had written for a magazine, and my publishers browbeat me into expanding it.”

  Though I now feel Blood and Dreams is as good as any of the other Parsival books, I had to admit I felt the same way when I first read it, for in many ways, this book has little in common with its predecessors beyond character names, and the multiple points-of-view narration:

  The original cover art, which to be fair, Monaco had no say in, was not nearly as intriguing as the covers of its predecessors. In fact, had it not been a follow-up to Monaco’s trilogy, I’d never have given the book a second glance: The cover (which I hope this new edition improves on) seemed to be drawn with sidewalk chalk and depicted a generic crown in the lower right corner and, inexplicably, a wolf’s head in the upper left.

  Rather than writing a sequel or prequel to his trilogy, a trilogy that for all intents and purposes is about as complete as it possibly could be, Monaco writes an interquel. Blood and Dreams takes place in the years between the first book and the second. Broaditch has not yet left his family in search of his former charge so he is necessarily absent (though Monaco provides a worthy substitute in the character of Veers, Beef’s father). Lohengrin, Parsival’s son, while still just a moody and discontented teenaged boy, is in the process of growing into the self-centered knight he will be by the time The Grail War begins. And a middle-aged Parsival, finding marriage, family, and duty to his king somewhat less than his youthful imagination promised, has not yet withdrawn from the world into the Irish monastery we find him in as The Grail War opens.

  Perhaps the most noticeable difference between this volume and its predecessors is the first person narration. While the narrative points-of-view are still split as in the original trilogy, this tale allows each character to tell his or her own story. A device I originally found off-putting but have come to appreciate as much as (and sometimes more than) the original third-person split narrative. This new narration allows Monaco to blend the plots of fantasy/medieval romance with the cynicism of the hardboiled/noir (a literary device he uses to much greater effect in his hardboiled samurai epic, Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha), something Raymond Chandler attempts in the Phillip Marlowe stories, but that Monaco perfects here.

  Despite these differences, Blood and Dreams is still clearly a worthy successor to its predecessors as Monaco continues to explore the themes he set up in the original novel. As with its predecessors, this book deals with far more than just a retelling of the Holy Grail story. It uses the Percival legend to examine man's conflict between his duty to his family, his country, and himself. The relationship between Parsival and his wife, Layla, brings up questions of marital fidelity, both physical and emotional, and Parsival’s estranged relationship with his son Lohengrin (which reaches its climax in later volumes) becomes a frank look at how even the best of us can, through
our own self-absorption, fail as parents despite all our best intentions.

  These are the very themes that drew me to Monaco’s original series and that continue to draw me to his other works. Monaco’s genius lies in his ability to masterfully take archetypal stories and mold them into metaphors for modern dilemmas. Pick a book at random and you will see it, though I recommend Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha and his 1987 novel Unto the Beast (soon to be re-released by Venture Press) as the next best examples after the Parsival books.

  One final note for those of you who, like me, are obsessed with narrative chronology: Besides the original Parsival trilogy, there are now two other Parsival books: Blood and Dreams and The Quest for Avalon. These last two make a duology of interquels to the original series, and both books take place during the lost years between the first two volumes of the trilogy (hence the name of the duology series). The Quest for Avalon begins immediately after Parsival or a Knight’s Tale, and Blood and Dreams occurs some time shortly before The Grail War. While both novels stand on their own, if you haven’t yet read The Quest for Avalon, then do yourself a favor and fix that soon.

  I fell in love with Richard Monaco at eighteen, and at thirty-eight he became my friend and mentor when I wrote him out of the blue to ask about that unpublished fifth Parsival novel (The Quest for Avalon). Since then, we have worked together to bring two of his new novels (The Quest for Avalon and Dead Blossoms: The Third Geisha) into print, re-release his older novels (Blood and Dreams is just the beginning, we have plans for more), and to release three of my own fictional works (a collection of interrelated stories: Emily’s Stitches: The Confessions of Thomas Calloway and Other Stories and the first two novellasin a series of Westerns retelling the Arthur legends: Guns of the Waste Land I: Departure and Diversion). I would like to thank Richard for all of his help and inspiration over the last few years, but mostly for asking me to write this afterword and allowing me to browbeat him into giving Blood and Dreams another chance. I hope my nagging paid off for you, the readers.