Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon

by Richard Monaco

  *

  In The Present

  Gawain kicked up the pace of his horse and rode past the column as they now were plodding down the reverse slope into the city itself. He paused, briefly, beside John of Bligh and his one-eyed, one-eared mount.

  “Where will you and these dullards encamp yourselves?” he asked. “In case I decide to rejoin you later.”

  John seemed surprised by the idea.

  “We’re not here to camp but to raise an army,” he responded. “Ere the worlds fails and falls entire to the Antichrist.”

  Gawain knew the story by heart: John was persuaded that Clinschor was the Antichrist promised in the scriptures and that, as the world was poisoned, boiled and broiled in the coming year, he would rule with magic and inconceivable cruelty. John believed that the wizard had retreated to an underground fortress. Only the Grail Sword, wielded by himself at the head of a host of transfigured believers, could cut down the Antichrist and his fell defenders.

  “Still,” said Gawain, absently retightening his wooden hand in its screw socket, “even while saving the world, men need rest.”

  The smaller man cocked his head up at the knight, rocking as his unsteady mount clip-clopped along the (now) pebble-paved road.

  “You mean to desert me? Here, in the shadow of doom?”

  “I owe you no service, Lord Madman. We’re on the same road, for the nonce.”

  He chucked the horse ahead. There were carts and mules and burdened peasants coming and going.

  “There is only one path for everyone,” John called after.

  “Being so,” Gawain responded, not looking back, “nothing can part us.”

  *

  Later

  Cowl in place, horse in a barn, the sun setting in a rapidly graying sky, Gawain stalked along what passed for a main street, stepping over offal mounds and reeking puddles. He’d had directions to a drinking place from the bearded, toothless, one-eared hostler at the stable.

  The inn sat (or rather, sagged) in a pool of stinking mud and was accessed by a duckboard that squished and half-sank as the big knight crossed to the door. He hesitated. Almost went away in a spasm of self-disgust.

  “Be fucked,” he said to the door; kicked it open.

  It got the patron’s attention. Both of them. A fat bald man sitting on a stool in the middle of the dirt floor and a stringbean with orange-red hair at a tilted table bent forward to suck beer from a clay bowl.

  Seeing it was an armed knight (or armed somebody) they watched and waited. He sat down, laid his scabbarded sword on the table. The host came in from the other room and bowed, slightly. He was round and smiling. Kept licking his lips as if some sweet taste lingered there.

  “Yer honor,” he said. “Bring me a whore.”

  “No drink, me lord?”

  “Bring one hemlock and a whore.”

  “What?”

  “Ale.”

  “Ah.”

  “And a whore.”

  “Yes, me lord.”

  And I’ll be content as a man with lice on his balls… as a man with a bee-stung prong… a fishbone in his throat… content…

  The innkeeper brought him a leather jack of drink and a few minutes later, a tall, tense, lean, dark woman barefoot in a shift came into the cave-like room, shielding a candle flame with her cupped hand. She came to his table and set the candle down. As she approached he’d been a little surprised by how good she looked. In the dimness her age didn’t show until she was close. She had high cheekbones and a faraway look in her eyes, hair touched with gray.

  “G’day, me lord,” she said sitting down. He liked her voice. “Yes,” he responded.

  With his head tilted inside the cowl the place was too shadowy for her to really see his features. When she moved the candle closer he pinched out the flame.

  “Sir?”

  “Our business wants no light, woman.”

  He’d already changed his mind. Quaffed the ale in a long steady swallow. He already liked her.

  “We can go out in back,” she suggested. He shook his head.

  “Is he your husband?” Gestured towards the innkeeper who was slicing some cold meat and cheese at the far end of the low, smoky room, covertly watching him.

  She made a disparaging gesture.

  “I’ve borne him two sons and two daughters.”

  “That’s near enough,” Gawain said. “Does he whoremaster your daughter as well?”

  She creased her thin, long lips in a knowing smile. “So, that’s your pleasure, me lord?”

  He couldn’t read how she felt about it.

  “If they look as you must have,” he complimented, “they are rare beauties.”

  She had no expression, saying:

  “The eldest be seventeen and married to a good fisherman. The other fourteen and not for sale. But there’s a hag two doors down who’ll serve ya her babes.”

  “Will she throw in breast milk?”

  “Her dugs give old cheese,” she replied with a faint smile, this time.

  “So he whores just you?”

  Though he raped in war and had done violent deeds without count, the idea of the man selling his worn, pleasant, dignified wife bothered him.

  She shrugged. “There’s others as work for him,” she said, expressionless, again. “But yer a fine gentleman knight, so he offers you his best.”

  The ale was working in him. He gestured the man over. He didn’t quite scurry, holding a fresh jack of ale in one hand and a wooden trencher of meat, hard cheese and dark bread in the other, which he banged onto the battered table. He was sweaty and smelled of stale food and drink.

  “Yer grace,” he said, round, reddened face uneasy, knowing and sly.

  Gawain felt like breaking his head with his wooden hand. His mood baffled him. Why should he care? What point? But, as he sucked down more ale, he found his cold anger growing.

  “Grace? I’m no Duke or Bishop, but I have gold,” he found himself saying. “True royalty,” Lying, “I crave your youngest child. Name a price, innkeeper.”

  “Oh,” mused the man, uncertain but engaged. “Well …”

  “No,” she said: bitter, furious, controlled.

  “Come, come, peasant, you know I could take what I please if I pleased but my pleasure is to bargain. A price, I say.”

  “A price, yes,” repeated the man, clearly lost in calculation. “But sire, with no disrespect, we here as knows how to defend ourselves. This ain’t the countryside.”

  “No, I say,” she snarled, standing up. “You filthy, lying …”

  Her husband cut her off with a casual backhand which staggered her and left the fine nose dripping a thread of blood. Gawain had what he wanted.

  “She’s a perfect little beauty,” the innkeeper said, “all fresh and untouched.”

  He must have gestured in some way because the other men were on their feet, both holding a long stave. “Worth her weight …”

  “You pig!” she cut him off.

  He just ignored her this time.

  “As I’m sayin’, yer honor,” he went on, but this time Gawain who’d noted the two armed peasants with cold relish, spoke over him.

  “Nay,” he said, “as you seem worth your weight in shit, I want you. I long to probe your south-most hole with my stiff dangler.”

  The innkeeper’s face went flushed and wild.

  “Unnatural knight,” he cried, “begone from among us.”

  His cronies had moved in on either side of the table, rather smoothly, he noted.

  “To lose your company would be like losing a bad tooth,” he told them. “Don’t send me away.”

  “Go from here and find your own kind,” said his host. His wife now got Gawain’s point.

  “Be still, ya fool,” she advised, “lest this fellow kill us all.”

  “Not all,” the knight assured her, standing up as her husband drew a chopping knife from behind his back and, simultaneously, both his fellows swung their staves. They’d don
e this before, Gawain realized, as he instantly countered, cutting one stick in half and stepping back away from the other as the woman screamed and the innkeeper surprised him hurling the heavy, semi-square blade with terrific speed and force, point-blank.

  There was no way to avoid it. A death blow slicing into his cowl that his reflex twist barely moved to the left of his nose. The fellow had a special talent for murder, it appeared. But that inch to the left sent the blade into the space where his face didn’t finish.

  They were all stunned when the cowl was ripped back and away and they saw bare skull and teeth. The woman gagged and fled, thinking her husband had cut his face in half. The others froze in shock and terror long enough for the knight to chop down the two of them and then go for the red-faced man who bolted for the back room.

  Gawain was incensed.

  “Wait up, whoremaster,” he pleaded, charging after him, leaving the other two in a welter of blood and pain.

  The pimp didn’t wait; so sore afraid he actually ran through the side wall (loose fitting planking) into the alleyway, squatly ploughing through mounds of refuse knocking man and animal aside until he finally fell flat, exhausted, safe behind a maze of twists.

  Except Gawain stopped two steps outside. The stink alone, he later said, had been enough discouragement.

  “So much,” he muttered, “for the pleasures of Eros.”

  He went back in and found the ale cask. Dipped a fresh jack and drank deep. Began eating some cold meat. One of the wounded men had crawled away somewhere; the other had been hit in the head and wasn’t going anywhere.

  He didn’t realize the woman was still in the room, crouched behind an overturned table, watching him. She stood up.

  “Well,” he said, “what’s this, woman?” He instinctively turned his good side to her.

  “I’m used to ya now,” she told him. “I’ve seen worse hurts and them as was born looking like a trod worm.”

  “You relieve my mind,” he remarked, mocking. “Did ya kill’m?”

  “The world’s fastest fat man? Nay. He rolled from my sight like a kicked ball.” Drank some more, keeping his head turned, after trying to readjust the slashed hood.

  “I’ll mend it if you like,” she offered, coming closer.

  “That pandering, fat nastiness just had me nearer death than any knight in twenty years.” Studied her, from an angle. “Mend what? My torn heart?”

  “I see yer too much alone, sir knight.”

  “Fine,” he snorted. “How much for mending?”

  She touched his face in profile to her. Her hands were cool, stonehard but smooth. She gently stroked his cheek. He felt it melting him.

  “Just yer word on a thing is me price. You tell the word here that if he does any hurt to me or the children you’ll return.”

  “Sorry I didn’t slay him,” he said, nodding. “He was too quick.” Still amazed. “He nearly had me.”

  She was close against him now and her hands went here and there. So he didn’t bother to reflect on how he might have been better off if he hadn’t ducked aside; for once, he was satisfied to be alive.

  “Come up the ladder,” she breathed into his ear, “to the sleepin’ loft.”

  His knees went a little soft; throat felt choked. “Yes,” he managed to agree.

  LAYLA

  She shut her eyes and reopened them very slowly. She knew it and she knew she knew it.

  Stood in the sharp shadow of the thatched hut, the sun a whitish-yellow dazzle in the dusty yard, the bright green furrowed fields of early wheat rolling up the rounded slope towards where the castle sat. Men and women were out in the fields in gray, red, brown, some men stripped to the waist, most wearing turban-like hats or hoods.

  The old woman came out into the hard-shadowed doorway. Her eyes were lost in squinted lines, dress a shapeless grayness. She was holding a heavy clay pot in both hands.

  “You need not show me,” Layla said. “I knew in my heart.”

  “Aye,” said the crone. “The seed did sprout, lady.”

  Layla was staring across the sharp, wooded hills to the empty sky beyond, shimmering in heat haze, the powdery blueness of midsummer. She sighed, not knowing how she really felt.

  “No,” she murmured, unconsciously touching her belly, feeling a strange, annoying tenderness for her husband. It welled out like water through a clenched fist. Hating it, she remembered the first time she’d touched him when he was a strange, clear-eyed, too innocent teenager sitting in an oaken tub in her family castle. He’d stopped there, she thought years later, like Paris tripping over Helen, playing, she’d thought, at knight in borrowed armor. The herb-strewn water steamed around him while she and her sister (to show their father’s courtois) scrubbed him with perfumed soap and she’d learned her own deep weakness and need when she gripped him under the water and shocked them both into one… for a seamless moment and a broken lifetime…

  What nonsense… She sighed, standing here in the golden, mellow August light, staring, she imagined, like a snared bird in a fowler’s trap. I have birthed two and lost another and by God I’ll lose this one too since my soul’s already on the list of the damned so what’s one more stain of darkness?

  Just the memory of him in the tub, her desperate wanting, as if she were dying of thirst and he a full skin of water. Except it wasn’t he, she understood, because I got my wish and felt only worse… She’d touched between his legs, startled them both and in his perfect eyes she saw his need waken. They were so blue… like broken jewels…

  Over the years the soaring promise had fluttered, spun and finally hit the bitter ground like a stricken angel. In that fateful bath she’d gripped his innocence and never forgave him for being the mirror of a magic he never actually possessed…

  “My lady?” asked the old woman, cocking her head to one side. “Bring me a ladle of water, will you?” Layla asked, staring.

  Both gone, she thought, meaning son and husband. No more men… Pictured her last mistake, Sir Gaf, the Greek, and reprised his wet kisses and itchy beard; his insistent but short-lived member. They all have to tell you how the other man is a weakling yet the wrong word at the wrong moment and their fine club becomes a willow wand…

  The crone came back out of the cool interior holding a wooden bowl of water. Layla took it and absently drank. It was warmish and satisfying, tasting of earth and stone.

  “No more men,” she told the hag. “May God damn them!”

  “Hah. The fox had a full belly ere you feared for the goose.”

  Layla handed back the cup and left the yard. Mounted her palfrey by the sagging gate, and sitting astraddle, man-wise, let the horse amble up the hill. She didn’t actually look when a horseman clattered from behind the last hut in the village and reined up close to her.

  She’d just been watching a big ram with dirty, yellowish fur and one gimped leg, clumping and skidding awkwardly across a walled-in muddy field in hot pursuit of a long-legged lamb who kept just ahead with gangly effortlessness.

  She grimaced, recognizing Gaf. “Still around?” she asked.

  She was wondering if she could keep her daughter from all the twists and hurts of growing up; all the phantom joys and hollow nights that attended love…

  “I have come back,” the knight said. He wore mail armor but no helm. His beard was trimmed to a close-cropped point. Maybe, she decided, he thought it made him seem French.

  “I can see that,” she said. Urged her mare ahead, glancing back at the enclosure where the ram seemed to have finally cornered the lamb. The hill beyond which reached up to the square castle silhouette, was just being slowly covered by a cloud shadow. The sun still beat hard and steady where they were. “Why?” she wanted to know. “You ought to make haste back to your sweet bride and mother.”

  She was mildly annoyed to note that he was keeping pace with her. She felt sweaty and grouchy with no desire to deal with him.

  “Spare me your barbs, Layla,” he told her. “I’ll not leave y
ou with that fool and coward.”

  “Which one,” she wondered, deadpan, “particularly?”

  “Indeed, which one.”

  “Do not mistake him,” she warned, wiping her brow and eyes with a handkerchief.

  Why doesn’t he go away?

  “I will have you to keep, Layla,” he said. He seemed, she decided, more tense than usual.

  “Why?” she asked, quite seriously.

  “Life, in other wise, holds little joy for me.”

  She didn’t quite laugh. She wasn’t amused, for one thing; and for another, she’d been brought up to take romantic declarations seriously since so many knights were willing to be maimed and die for the sake of such notions. But she was closer to laughter than awe, at this point.

  She squinted at his face in the dazzling sunlight.

  “I’ll tell you what,” she said, “ride with this token —” She held out the damp handkerchief. “— and return with a dragon’s head and I am yours for eternity.”

  What, she thought, are we children still to follow nonsense like a spellbound moth the shifting and inconstant flame that drops him scorched to oblivion in the end… not likely, Sir Gaf… She was furious now. Thought about the new child one of them had left within her.

  “Do not mock me,” he said. She smiled without humor.

  “So you’ve cropped your beard to come and win my heart,” she said. “Bring me back the head of a pig, or failing a pig, the head of your wife, and I’ll …”

  He went red in the face and leaned over to slap her but she leaned away.

  “Evil-tongued slut,” he snarled, exasperated. He shout-whispered: “Heed me! Mistake not my resolve.”

  She was a long way from the safety of the castle. She knew she should have dissembled until she could slip away. The idea of appeasing this selfish, pompous bastard (as she now thought him) disgusted her. The memory of his distracted caresses, perfunctory kisses had little appeal. She was amazed at how she’d once been eager for those contacts.

  And then I have to lie on my belly and him above and it’s no more use than a glove without a hand in it..