The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3)

by Richard Monaco

  As Lohengrin spasmed into Clinschor’s legs and sent him reeling forward into John, who beheld the holy one reaching to embrace him and held him on the wagon step like a lover.

  Broaditch finally gave ground and stumbled back with the others on the rope. Lohengrin suddenly sat up, blood streaking his face as Clinschor squealed, gibbered and frothed, snapping his teeth, clutching the metal, clawing free of his worshipper with the other hand, screaming and raging:

  “It’s mine alone! Mine! None else may touch it!” Rolling and scuttling back into the recesses of the vehicle, squatting, gesturing with his free hand in intricate passes, massive voice intoning now, harsh, abracadabric …

  As John stood still, nodding rapidly, blinking, understanding the meaning, parabolic hints, saying:

  “Yes … Yes … I see … I see …”

  Here was the mystery he was not perfected to grasp yet: “None else may touch it.” That question needed pondering … was there truly an “it” that could be grasped? He smiled as he reasoned. There were many subtle points to be considered … the divine one was taking him yet another step on the path to wisdom and perfection … He nodded as Clinschor frothed and spasmodically scribbled on the flame-shaken air, voice muttering like stormwind in a chimney.

  John turned to the remainder of his followers, raising his arms, benedictory (as Lohengrin was still trying to rise) and victorious.

  “Brothers and children, the spirit has made it plain. Nothing can be possessed for death flows among us like water among weeds and the strong wind leaves only the best trees so those who’ve perished have left us stronger than before! And we go forth again to devour the sinners!”

  The men cheered. Broaditch found energy to dryly spit, which brought back the blood taste. His companion on the line, the gatherer of the dead, Vordit, touched him with bound hands.

  “Why did you bear those blows?” he asked.

  Broaditch shrugged. They were moving again.

  “They’re going to slaughter us like sheep,” he said.

  “They’re all dead mad.”

  “They eat human meat. I saw it. And swill blood.” Spat again.

  They followed the tremendously creaking wagon, crunching over the dry pebbles. John still stood on the steps, arms gripping the doorframe. Inside it was dark again.

  “They’ll find little enough on me,” Vordit said, “as things stand … anyway, I’m dead … what matter?”

  “There’s no humor in such horrors.”

  “Hah. You say so. There’s nothing horrible no more. It’s all one thing … all one thing …”

  “No.”

  “They can roast gooseshit. What care I if they bury us dead in ground or in themselves? We all come to be death’s dung in the end … So there’s nothing neither way …”

  “No,” his massive companion repeated, gritting his teeth, thinking about the walled arbor he’d built at home, the clustered grapes in mellow sunlight … quick birds gusting and rattling the leaves …

  Never, he thought, all one thing …

  The rope bit his raw wrists, his new bruises starting to ache.

  “Never,” he muttered.

  Father, Lohengrin was saying, the tall blond man with blue eyes like dew on crystal leaned above him, and he felt himself reaching up slowly as if the air were liquid, arms too short …

  Father … helpless under a great, soft weight, reaching for the remote face framed by the shoulder-length shimmer of fine hair and then the warm, firm hands gripping him … Father … tipping, lifting up into magic terror and exhilaration, thrilled in fear and joy and surprise as the view unfolded, the rich brightnesses (he knew to call candles), the vast blank and shadowed rushing into mysteries and strange perspectives … an open space, white hard white light points quivered around a perfect glow, … moon, he thought, moon … and then he felt himself scream as he spun and floated in gripless nothing and then the safe hands closed, soft, irresistible and then tossed and caught him again and he screamed with the fearjoy this time and wonder: Father! Father! Father!

  And then the tilting sway banged his head again … the hands were gone and he sat up, shuddering in the blackness, in the terrific, slow creaking and sequence of blowing, bubbling snores that he first took for suffering.

  All Lohengrin’s memories were back. He just sat there with his past slammed into him as if, he thought, it had been rammed through the hole in his head, because he remembered that too, the agonizing fingers clawing into his naked skull, incredible fire and rasping.

  So he snores now, he thought, like any other. Stared with contempt into the unrelieved darkness and now he suddenly became aware of the stink. Clapped his hand to his nose as if that would help. He believed he must be sitting in it and scrambled his feet under him. Or had he soiled himself? He touched and saw he hadn’t.

  This saves your life, he thought, you swine! Because he couldn’t endure this reek (gagging now, tasting bile) long enough to act. It felt semi-solid, flowing, filling his nose, throat, chest, insides … he scrambled for the door, half-doubled over. The bastard sleeps in his latrine!

  The pain was dull and fading in his head. A healing pain, which the other never was. He rarely sickened from wounds, in any case, even without treatment. God knew he’d felt enough of them.

  Outside he crouched on the double step as the wagon labored on in the darkness. In dim torchlight he made out flickers of dark shapes.

  The Truemen, he thought, must be very afraid to push on by night. He grinned. Well, I’m myself again … Frowned. Or am I? … Paused. Do I stick here or wait for those coming? He coolly contemplated the situation. That dream troubles me … Gingerly touched his wound. Everything after that blow seems a dreaming now …

  Make up for lost time, that was essential. He’d … what? … where to start? It hardly mattered. Licked his lips. Was very thirsty. One place was as good as another given the world’s present circumstances.

  There was a third alternative: beat these bastards to wherever they were rushing. Get whatever it was first, whether food, water or Devil wonders.

  He dropped lightly down and ran into the rope and then into Vordit and flashed his dagger to the man’s throat.

  “Not a word,” Lohengrin hissed, then felt the bound hands and understood. Sow confusion, he decided, and reap chaos …

  And cut him free and moved to the next and next after, warning them all to silence. Then the guard came up in dimly fluttering flamelight which just showed Lohengrin’s beaked, harsh-boned, curly head and the silver flicker as the short blade ripped an arc through the fellow’s neck, dropping him soundless in bloodspray and a quiet gurgle that accompanied his flapping, meaningless gestures.

  As the torch rolled and went out, Broaditch stepped near him.

  “You’re free,” the knight said. “The rest is your business.”

  And moved off into the darkness, hugging the near wall in order to bypass the dim, bobbing lights …

  XXXIX

  He’d shifted her on top so the stones and dried mud dug into his back and buttocks and he angled his heels and rocked her as she lifted long and slow, firm around him each ecstatic fraction, each stroke concentrating the thick sweetness, the pressure building … building … burning … she swayed above him, terrific sun brilliant … everything went away, the hard, cutting earth painless now, relentless brightness mere background color … near his face a few spears of quivering green were poked through the blasted soil. Past and future hung there, the only time measured by the beating of blood, bone and flesh, and he shut his eyes and watched the images flash and let thoughts wander …

  All the time … we’ll just do this all the time … AH … all …

  Then he could hold no longer, lifted her on his vibrating, arced body as she twisted and throbbed, sloshing her loins, and he felt it rush, pump, burst as inarticulate words spilled through brain and mouth, pulses, blazes exploding, and then instantly in imploding silence she was gone and earth too, sky … everything gone
into silence … and he stood in a soundless place where clouds rushed up to immense pastel heights. The effect was of an open hall, horizon wide, that lost itself in shifting banks of gentle luminescence. Trees with jeweled leaves shimmered musically … far away the vague, almost outline of himself and Unlea entwined and struggling together almost showed … A young girl flowed from the cloudy gleamings among the strange boughs, behind her scenes forming and unforming, lacy mountains rising, gleaming rivers of rose-pale melting … naked children supple in violet air, playing as if childhood summer twilight were forever sustained, forever dying … flowers sucking slow life from the teeming earth as golden butterflies filled the electric blue air with a sweet chaos of color … and then darkening, ripping, rending … and his eyes were pain in the hot, savage blades of sunlight that razored at his brain and he thought it was his own voice screaming until he saw Unlea over him, crying out and shaking in what he still believed was passion as she twisted his head to the side on the baked, sooty, stony streambed.

  “Stop it,” she cried, “you’ll be blinded!”

  And he realized (in the wildly batting, flitting globes of fierce afterglow) he’d been staring straight into the sun and he wondered for how long … He could barely see what was around him, a blotting, blurring dimness … blinked and blinked …

  “It’s that water again,” he told her and himself, sitting up on his heaped clothes. “The poison still works in me.”

  “You fell over in a faint.” She was pulling her clothes back around herself. “Fie,” she said, touching between her legs, then wadding the hem of her tattered gown and dabbing there.

  “Did I give you pleasure?” he wondered, holding his hands up and squinting through his fingers.

  “What?” she murmured distractedly.

  He heard the tittering before he saw the young girl’s face peering over the embankment a few feet away. Strands of her stringy blond hair caught in the burned bushes that walled along the top. Her eyes were blue and strangely blank. He recognized her from the burnt-out castle miles behind: one of the mad children posing in the ashes. He somehow was certain there were others, knelt his legs under him and reached for his clothes (not out of shame) squinting and blinking as Unlea just stared.

  The girl tittered again. The soot streaked her dead-white skin as if it had been painted.

  “You belong to the beast and the bad,” she said. “The seals are all open now.” Tittered.

  He didn’t bother to answer, jerking his tights and leg mail up, cursing his sight because he couldn’t tell how many more there were as the violent suntorn brightness danced and bounced, veered and popped … and then the other strangeness was superimposed over the swarming inner lights: shapes in the dried, burnt brush and close-set blasted trees beyond: the craning, crawling fish, the red-eyed monkeyform with sharkmouth working … insectile creepings, a pig crouched in the crotch of a tree … things with human faces … the porcine forelimbs swayed slowly …

  He pulled Unlea up beside him. Backed slowly off, holding his sheathed sword over his shoulder. Watching everything at once as best he could through his uncertain sight.

  “You belong to the beast,” she called after them, just her head still poked out of the dark, shiny, crumbly bushmass. The fish had crawled beside her, pop eyes goggling at them in a welter of dancing, orbiting specks.

  Still looking back, Parsival and Unlea moved across the far bank into the bare, black trees on the rim of the deep ravine whose bottom was blanked in shadow.

  When the girl’s face was just a pale spot, featureless, he paused and called back:

  “Why did you slay them?”

  And the immediate response from off to their left, came in a deep male voice that Parsival remembered from the well — the stunted-looking leader, or elder anyway, with the thick beard:

  “They belonged to the foul beast as do you. You spoiled all the green and made nastiness. Hurt the children … Your world is all gone now. Now the children hurt you!”

  “Come,” Parsival said to Unlea.

  “Who are these?” she wondered, adjusting her garments again.

  “Throat slashers.”

  “Unless,” the male voice said, invisible in the charred trees, “you drink the water of cleansing and holiness.”

  “Send me only atheists!” he snarled. “From this day on.”

  “They refuse to be clean,” the voice announced, unsurprised.

  At the rim of Parsival’s sight where the fading sunbursts still danced and spun he saw the fierce fish creeping where the voice was sounding. He yelled over:

  “If any come near let him make ready to greet hell, you poison children!” He saluted the black wall of ruined forest with his drawn blade. “I am Parsival, son of Gahmuret.” He half-smiled at his boast. It was unlike him. But his distorted consciousness was taking its toll. How long would it last? AH the realities and imaginations were mixing and pressing in. “Stay near me,” he told her. “Bear with me if I am strange and wake me if I sleep out of season.” She nodded. “Poison children,” he muttered. Gripped her firm hand. “But did I?”

  “What?”

  “Pleasure you.”

  She looked around.

  “You always do,” she said, “more ways than you know.” She kissed his sooty hand. Rolled her eyes and sighed. “I drip again,” she realized. “Well, no time for that … I think I grow tougher than when last we wandered in the forests together … Heaven, but things repeat themselves.”

  “I think its until we learn from them.”

  She seemed calmer.

  “Can we escape?” she wondered.

  He shrugged.

  “Go far enough and there’s always an end.”

  No, he thought, you never escape …

  XL

  “The point is this, my lord,” Howtlande was saying as the Vikings marched down the ever deepening crack in the earth by fitful torchlight. “The point is, training, organization … I learned a great deal from that madman. For all his errors he was a remarkable bastard. I was not lightly won to his cause, at first. There was a promise then, a call to greatness that seems, in these times —”

  “You must have slain Skalwere with your weight of words,” Tungrim cut him off. “Make your point. You’ll need breath for better things than breaking wind from the wrong hole.”

  “My point, Lord Tungrim, is simple.”

  “Make it then and have done, by Thor’s frozen balls,” the redbeard captain interjected.

  “My point is this,” Howtlande went on, studying their expressions in the wavering reddish flickerstrokes. “Organization. Training. Men become what they’re taught to be. We take hold of the remaining youth of this land and raise them away from everything and teach them only what we want. Give them a new faith, a new outlook.” He was quite excited now. These ideas had been perking in him for some time. Clinschor had shown him the way. “The lord master —” Caught himself. “— the clever bastard wanted the whole world destroyed so he might rebuild it, you see? Eh? He was right. And now it’s been destroyed and we —”

  “What better training can there be than being born and raised a Norseman?” redbeard cut in. “Eh? You fat sack of contending winds.”

  “Well, well,” put in Tungrim, “a man ought not to be afraid to learn a new thing from time to time. Even a Viking.” He glanced over at the pale, mincing, wobbling mule that bore Layla, her face still in fixed profile to him. “Anything ahead?” he called to the lead torchbearer.

  “Nothing yet, Lord Tungrim,” was called back.

  “If they’ll move day and night,” Tungrim stated, “then so will we.”

  “With your support, my lord,” Howtlande continued, “we could begin such a project. Eventually we’d have people with total faith and no weaknesses. Totally loyal. Dedicated to you like monks to God!” He knotted one big fist. He saw Tungrim was musing, turning these ideas over within himself …

  “It may prove a greater feat, fat talker,” redbeard pointed
out, “just to find food and drink.” He leaned into the torch aura shifting around Tungrim. “Unless you mean to chew stones.” He laughed without mirth. “There’s a diet to support your fat.”

  Layla was sweating chill drops. She kept rubbing her tapered hands up and down her forearms. Licked her lips.

  Now what? she asked herself. I feel ill … what do I do? Bear him children? Hah … more of that … do I dream he’s a fine prince and lives not at a court of mangy dogs in crumbling huts where I may spend long evenings chatting with his people about salting fish? Oh, Christ Jesus, be this where I end? … or just follow while they chase grails? … not without wine … I’ll perform nothing sober … sober raise little beast brats if ever we reach his chill homeland? … among amazing bores … nothing without wine … who sees clearly cannot endure life … Parsival seems not so had to me now … those days seem sweetened … bless the wise fellow, though mayhap it were a wife, who first thought to trample the grape which brings sleep’s ease to those who must be waking … I’m so cold … and ill …

  She shivered in a shudder. Almost called out because something had moved against the high rim of the canyon where the bright, twisting strip of stars showed. Something huge moved with spiderlike springing, clawing. She kept staring.

  “What do you see?” Tungrim asked, moving nearer.

  “It moved,” she told him.

  “What?”

  “Something. Up there.”

  “Urn?”

  “Something terrible …”

  “Terrible?”

  She shuddered. Nodded. Didn’t look at him. In the wavers of illumination he saw her hands wringing her arms.

  “What troubles you?” he gruffly asked.

  “Ah,” she replied, “what indeed.”

  “Is something there now?”

  “I won’t miss it,” she said, voice too high and light, he thought. “Terrible things are coming … terrible things …” Kept her stare fixed at the crease of stars.

  “You need rest,” he said. In the background Howtlande was talking to someone else now. “We’ll halt before long, Layla,” Tungrim soothed. “We’ll catch these silly fish and see what we see.”