The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3)

by Richard Monaco

  “What wine, Tungrim?” she wanted to know, struggling upright, suddenly frantic, holding onto the rough wall of this hut they’d found deserted yesternight. “Cheap swill brew!” Laughed in derisive triumph. “Cheap swill brew, you bastard! Whore’s son! … I’m noble … and drink noble drinks … whore’s son …”

  “Be still,” he muttered, from just the near side of sleep. “I do … you … well indeed …”

  “You scum!” She reeled along the wall, splinters rasping her forearms. “Clot of asshole spillings …” She took breath and leaned there, pale, naked, frail-bodied, as the door swung open, sucked by the freshening wind. His face was still there, looking at her, tender, remote …

  I’m going away right now …

  The tragic blue eyes, the fine girl’s blond hair, Parsival as he looked twenty years ago …

  “Leave me alone! … Leave me alone! … Scum …”

  She moved and the wall was suddenly gone and the moon, hills, stars went tilting overhead and the warm, packed dirt hit her softly on the back and her body knew there was no point in trying to move while her mind was taking her away … she saw the castle, long table set … servants, knights, ladies … she was talking, smoothing her gown in rich candlelight … the young, smoothskinned knight in red silks leaned in close and it was his face again and she shook her head in violent spasms and (from where she lay) the moon was bitten into by the wall of trees, the last beams like a mist over the dooryard and the other huts … the distant dog yiped shrill and petulant and a bass voice wordlessly cursed and there was suddenly a violent silence … the nightmare returned, the ropes on her arms, the stinking oil torches filling the halls with greasy smoke … then outside, barefoot in her shift, the voices she didn’t listen to … they dragged her to the waiting horses as fighting still flurried in the castle yard. Voices raged and suffered, torches and shadows rushed everywhere in tumult and then she was staring at the girl on the dark ground in slashed silks, drowned in blood and shadows (Leena, she’d thought once only, then stopped her shocked, overloaded mind), face chopped to shreds, arms and legs outflung as if she were actually leaping away … then the warm horsereek, massive muscles under her, her own voice screaming (she didn’t hear it or realize until the raw pain in her throat finally closed it off) and the night rolling and bouncing past, wrists gripped by steel hands, yieldless armorplate against her flesh, hopeless sinking within beyond even fear and her voice only whispercrying over and over into the rush of air, sounds lost utterly:

  “You weren’t here for this … you weren’t here … you weren’t here …”

  XVIII

  He kept running, steady, easy, watching the forest fly past, feeling very good after miles, his legs still fairly firm at each impact. His breathing was even. Tomorrow everything would hurt, but that was tomorrow …

  The trees were old here, massive, bent and turned as if the woods were sagging down under a vast weight of sky, everything grayish-green under strips of tin-bright cloud. The scribble of trail he followed had become a faint thread. He wondered who might use it, as he’d passed nothing but unworked landscape and no travelers. Trails, Parsival reflected, should link something to something else.

  He sensed something suddenly … felt odd … slowed into a walk, listening hard behind himself … nothing, just leaves stirring sluggishly overhead. Sweat clung to him in the humid air now that he moved slowly. Something, he believed, was somehow familiar here. Something …

  They’re not too hard on my heels, he thought. If they followed. Even that lean devil would have his work cut out to hold my pace.

  His flushed legs carried him through floaty, pleasant steps. He was hungry.

  I’ve been here before … wherever this lies, between God’s navel and the Devil’s asshole …

  Another fifty steps and he broke through into a screen of dead saplings, moving carefully, the slightest touch of elbow or foot snapping one or more — they’d fall dryly and lean on the rest. The path had vanished in a scrawl of moss and pebbles. He could only see an arm’s length in any direction, sight blending away into impenetrable grayness.

  There must be a swamp close at hand …

  He went on, twisting through the brittle interstices, ground damp, black and slick. The important thing now was not to turn aside because he’d have to come to low ground and water soon and if this belt of rotting trees was at all thick he could wander pointlessly and be forced to retrace his steps. Meanwhile the grayness was subtly dimming as he used up the afternoon …

  Except it wasn’t really a swamp, just a sluggish twist of stream banked by reeds and soggy-looking, cabbagelike plants.

  One direction or another there’s bound to be a river or lake near … Smiled, sarcastic. Lost again, mighty finder of the nonexistent Grail, among other nonexistent things … Finder in the main of women who dream into his stupid, lost eyes! Stopped smiling.

  And he was almost past it before he noticed the campfire ashes and the straw and timber huts that sat like mushrooms along the bilious shore, vacant, gaping but not quite deteriorated enough to be altogether deserted … It wouldn’t surprise him if those “Truemen” lived here because, he thought, they’d suit a place with scummed and slimy water at the doorstep.

  He paused at the campfire, kicked at the wet, old coals. There was a chunk of what looked like meat on a stick. He idly picked up the charred wood and frowned in surprise; decided his imagination had him in thrall but it looked (the bone and burnt shreds) like a smallish hand … human … thumb and forefinger at least … possibly …

  No, he thought, nonsense …

  There wasn’t enough left to be certain.

  He tossed it back to stick in the ash, incompletely gesturing, fingerlike bones tilted as if to pluck at the darkening air.

  He went on, following the stream now, against the current, hoping to find the main source … he was passing the last, squat, tilted hut when the blur-faced, naked, dead-white man half-crawled out of the doorhole and half-stood on bandy legs, frizzy, wild beard bushing around his head into his filthy, knotted mane. His voice, Parsival decided, was about what you’d expect.

  “Where are the brothers?” it crackled and strained to say. “Has not the father taught that none should walk alone save himself only?”

  It was as if the greenish-gray muck, water, and soggy, crumbling forest were melting into the air, and dusk itself into seamless dankness.

  “Whose father was that?” Parsival said, watchfully.

  Did only creatures like these monkeys survive?

  As the head was cocked to the side there was a fugitive gleam that, he thought, might have been eyes.

  “Not one of the brothers, are you?” the screechy voice demanded.

  “Whose?” Parsival watched the man trying to decide how deeply sunk in madness he was.

  “You are not,” he concluded, shambling forward, walking on two feet and one hand (more or less). “Well, abide awhile.”

  “To supper?” Parsival wondered, thinking about the strange, clawed fragment that might have been a hand.

  “Ah,” said the man, “if you wait a bit the pot will be full.”

  “What place is this?”

  The beard nodded. There were signs of possible amusement.

  “A place of brothers,” was the answer.

  “Forgive me, fellow, but I’m in haste.” He turned to go on and the hunched man with surprising speed scuttled over the slick slime and stood in his path.

  “Wait a bit, sir,” he suggested. “The pot will soon be full. Wait for the brothers.”

  Parsival moved on, not fast. Watched the beard still resting one long arm on the dark ground, a blotted distortion in the failing light. Dusk ate deep blanknesses into the woods and the stream seemed to fall away into a void, a grayish gleam …

  The man gave before him, keeping pace on the narrow space between the foul water and the netted dead saplings massed alongside in a blurry wall.

  “Who are you?” Parsival asked.<
br />
  “Ah. I?”

  “No. I but spoke to the frogs as is my custom,” the tall knight said scornfully.

  Which were booming here and there. He brushed his hand at a cloud of gnats that were suddenly, faint and frantic, flicking at his head.

  “I am called Mogwut,” Parsival was informed.

  “And what do these brothers do, brother?” he further queried the humped blot that still retreated, keeping pace, long arm down like a monkey’s. They were past the last hut. The water-reek was heavy with mud and decay, almost sweet.

  “The brethren be the Truemen,” Mogwut explained. “We follows the father.”

  Parsival was listening above the growing swamp din of insect and frog, chittering, ringing …

  “Lord Jesus Christ, you mean?” he wondered.

  “The living father. John. John of God.” He’d halted now, the dimness like a cloud around him, and Parsival slowed, squinting to see where he was … everything was one blurring … He knew (without actually seeing it) Mogwut had moved again but he didn’t realize how close he was until the shapelessness had scuttled into him, low, hard, all harsh, slippery angles and hot spoiled breath, ripping fingernails, and Parsival felt surprise first, that he’d been so easily closed with, then anger as he tried for a grip on the obscene, panting, tearing, terribly strong, crouching thing (a touch of fear now) that kept grunting and spouting about God as it gnashed at him and Parsival was skidding sidewise, back foot going down the invisible bank, on his knees now, defending his face quick and desperate, blocking and ducking his head as his opponent spoke like a barking:

  “Unbeliever … Unbeliever … stay for the feast … unbeliever …”

  Felt the snaggly teeth rip a strip from his forearm and he was swinging now, snapping terrific punches, catching edges, bone, hair, the creature incredibly rapid and active, teeth snapping, chewing at his midsection, too close … too close … heaved him back, driving to his feet and flailing his elbows, and heard it grunt and curse in the near darkness and a fraction later (too fast, he thought, by Christ!) the ripping, snapping, stinking whirlwind was back, drawn as though yanked by an elastic rope.

  “Jesus!” Parsival swore, embraced it now, teetering on the skiddy embankment, short-stepping, puffing, reeling backwards again, going over locked tight, nails, mouth, barking, steaming breath all close to his face and then the sickening moment, the tepid, foul watershock as the faintly luminescent darkness arced and staggered, then under and up (it was shallow) and the thing he battled was a churning of muck, hung with slimy weeds. Bottom ooze sucked at their steps. The malicious creature was fearfully strong. Parsival worked his elbows again, desperate with fury, and inexplicably found himself with a grip on the pumping, bony arms that felt like leather and steel, and roaring in frustration he lifted the surprisingly light form free of the sloshing, scummy flow, that poisoned each breath and clung in gobs, and spun him, still gnashing his spitting mouth and flapping his hard clawing hands (Parsival felt his own blood running warm over his face) and jammed him, reversed, into the thick bottom and plunged and dragged himself to the shore, hearing the others coming now, the popping rattle as they cut through the dead trees. He ran, blood and breath bursting within him, sight torn by light flashes that illuminated nothing. If there’s but a single other like that one I am lost …

  Running, keeping the dim gleam of stream on his left, skidding but holding the pace, the barking screech (it was out of the mud already) raging, calling out to the others:

  “Follow,” it screamed, “follow Mogwut!”

  Running, running through his scrapes, bruises, rips, thinking he was just starting to discover how ordinary a man he’d really become … or always was, perhaps …

  XIX

  “The holy citadel lies below,” Pleeka told them as Broaditch was just heaving the wagon to the crest of a suddenly acute slope that fell away into a stony valley where the twilight died in slow mists and campfire smoke among dim blots of what, he thought, must be huts and hovels and what seemed a broken-backed fortress or at least an uneven, high wall that (so far as he could tell) blocked off nothing from nothing …

  The girl, Leena, was beside him, Alienor next to her. Then Tikla. The teenage boy and Torky paced along behind the cart.

  Broaditch was sweating. The boy and Torky leaned into it with him at difficult twists and rises. The inert madman or hermit, tortured victim, he thought, or whatever he was, lay flat and still but for his almost random, sighing breaths. Pleeka hurried ahead like a man who finally sees home, long-striding down the twisting, slashed scrawl of trail, his form dimming, Broaditch fancied, as he descended like a sinking swimmer.

  “From here,” he suddenly, shrilly said, “the brothers go out to all parts of the country to pray and bring peace to the suffering. This is the heart of the great crusade of truth.” As the dusk thickened his voice seemed suspended, bodiless. “To heal this wounded land where war, sickness and desolation hold sway …”

  Broaditch was blinking to keep awake and his mind rambled abstractly … thought about roads and trails … about how the earth was so perfectly made that everything had its space and being, and only a hopelessly diseased mind could miss the tender wisdom of arrangement, of breath and air, light, growing, and all intricacies of leaf and blossom, food, water; earth beating like a vast heart, nourishing itself and its creatures endlessly … and then men tracking over it, their needs and fears and hopes pouring them down paths that feet made roads. Where men clustered huts sprouted (because the land ordered this too, its fecund nodes drawing life like water to a pool) and then the lord’s castle, the village … city …

  Leena was staring above the hill at the last stripe of sunset and was thinking:

  It’s there too not the burning it’s not the burning it’s the blood …

  Her fingers worked nervously with the stained linen blouselike garment, rolling, smoothing, bunching it over and over. Because there had been smoke everywhere too, pouring through the halls, filling the chambers, stinging … scorched flesh … and in the yard (where the gate was down) flamelight mounting, roaring, flinging the shadows all around the inner walls, cords chewing into her arms, iron fingers gripping too. The shadow bodies, arrows stuck in (her mind said) like sticks in mud … she wouldn’t focus so they were just curds and spillings of the flailed darkness and as they dragged her to the gate she couldn’t blot away the firecolor and then she knew flame bled too, the restless, running, spilling of it and she shut her eyes tight.

  “Leena,” Alienor broke into her reverie, “that was the name you gave?”

  “Yes.” She didn’t break her stare, holding the blood away carefully.

  “Where came you from, child?”

  She blinked slowly. The last rubyglowing trace was dimming into purple. She held it carefully, watching the night lap over it …

  Broaditch was trying to see Pleeka on the descent. The trail twisted and vanished into the evening. He shrugged, leaning on the tracebar.

  “Save for going backwards,” he announced, “there’s no choice of directions here.”

  “You never cared to do that even when sensible,” his wife pointed out, still studying the teenage girl whose wide, still eyes held the last stains of the sunken sun almost without a blink. “Child,” Alienor asked gently. The girl had really said nothing beyond her name and “Yes, I’m thirsy …”

  “You’re not stopping, are you?” Leena inquired, staring.

  “Not for long, methinks,” Alienor answered, glancing at Broaditch.

  “I want to sleep, Da,” Tikla said, rubbing her eyes.

  “Not till we sound bottom here,” her father told her. Turned to the two boys. “Stay behind and when I tell you, pull back and dig in your heels, eh, lads?”

  “Aye,” Torky affirmed. The other nodded in the virtual night.

  The last red was gone and when Alienor looked the girl was already heading down the zigzag slope.

  “What’s his name,” Broaditch asked.


  “It’s Bink,” Torky supplied.

  “Ah, Bink.”

  “Yes, sir,” the quiet boy responded.

  “Hold on well when I say so.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “A polite lad,” Broaditch said to Alienor.

  A rose in the winter, she thought.

  “No doubt,” he muttered, slipping slightly, catching himself. “Curse it … no doubt I only do this …” Bit his lip as he twisted the stiff bars and flat cart around a violent bend in the spare footing of the trail down. “… this wonderfully senseless enterprise … Grip fast!” he suddenly called back to the boys. Alienor was ahead with his daughter, walking just behind Leena. “The Devil’s piss,” he muttered. “No doubt …”

  I only do this because I started it … no, I amend that, only because it’s senseless …

  He could see what had to be campfires in the valley. He could almost smell the roasting and broiling. A few steps on, cooking flesh scented the rising wind and just that hint triggered his hunger.

  Potatoes are silver these days, he reflected, and meat gold … watch it!

  “Grip, boys!” he said, louder than he intended. Felt the slight tug as they held on and he dug his heels in the stony surface. A steep side went down into vague glimmerings and deeper blots …

  I’m mad … it took me fifty-odd years to be certain of it … easy … easy …

  They were rolling smoothly again but just enough faster so that his legs had to dance a little and he knew it was too late to halt now. Gaining on Alienor and the girl he called ahead:

  “Ali! Clear the path when you can.” Over his shoulder: “You lads hold well on unless I call release, you mind me?”

  “Aye, father,” said Torky, voice quavering from the bounces.

  The cart was terrifically loud now, booming, crackle-creaking at his back, leaping high (when he looked), a dark, tormented crashing out of all proportion to what he knew the actual bulk was, looming in fixed pursuit, the fragile tracebars seeming but straws holding off a vast, dark weight, rushing him faster and faster … legs snapping up and down, jarring his skull, stones digging through his sandals, ahead the blur of Alienor (Tikla invisible in her arms) and Leena’s blond hair a faint gleam, and him shouting now, voice feeble in his throat as the creaking, smashing exaggeration of sound and mass were swallowing up everything … faster … faster … Torky and the boy yelling too and himself, craning around: