“Ah, sweet… sweet …”
“Yet, not tonight,” she told him.
“Nay, nay,” he said, cried, humping himself up onto her lap. “Ahhhh, my dear black ewe.”
“Nay, nay, my white ram, not tonight. We must travel on still, by moon and mist.”
“Nay, nay …”
And then he stopped, codpiece popped free and dangling, all his heat instantly chilled because he knew that the cool, flat metal suddenly resting along his testicles was a dagger blade. He recalled what he’d heard about her deadly skill. He nodded and took a long, deep breath.
“Aye,” he agreed. “As you say, sweet… Chinqua. Aye …”
“As I say.” She was amused by his gaffe. “I, Shinqua.”
In the diffused moonglow her smile was a clean shock of whiteness.
So on into the massed fog as the moon was a blurry, general roundness overhead; a soft subtle glow which left them just shadows, vague stains floating into muffled vagueness.
While his wife’s face set in scorn and fury was clear in his mind, the dagger blade gleamed just as vividly…
GAWAIN
He and the masked lady or witch were now riding side-by-side along the inland road through the same strange fog that seemed to cover a huge section of the coastal country as if the solid earth itself were heatlessly smoldering. The wind had faded quickly as they moved from the coast.
“What about your followers?” Gawain wondered. “Did you leave them the map?” Didn’t quite chuckle.
“I left them the priest. He’ll lead them to where we meant to go.”
“And where are we meant to go?” He rubbed his good cheek with his real hand. “A love nest?”
“You really know no fear,” she commented, “do you?”
He tapped his helmet where it hung from one side of the saddle (his shield on the other) with his knuckles. “At this point,” he said, peering into the featureless dullness before them, still masses that barely now stirred as they rode with the unseen dawn at their backs. “At this point I live only for fancies so absurd… what could be done to me that might worsen my lot, save, maybe, a too-long life?”
“I can think of things.”
“You, who lead into obscurity as if your unseen nose were a lodestone.”
“Still on my nose.”
“I mean if in truth you have one.” Except it wasn’t that funny anymore. The mood was all fog which threw him back into himself – not his favorite place. “Though I’m not sure I care, where are we bound?”
“As you don’t care. As you hope to be healed.”
“Healed.”
“You are a great knight.” She aimed her mount with her knees like a man. “Who would have expected to find you? There is a great king under the world. Pay him homage and you may be more than healed.”
“Healed.”
“Believe this, O knight, were you but content even as you are, you would be whole again.”
“Were I content.”
Moving on, at a walk, the little circle of gray blur moved with them as they went (so far as he could tell) directly into nowhere.
LOHENGRIN AND JANE
“Halll!” he yelled into the dull, stifling mists. His voice fell flat and died. “Youuuu! Hallll!”
Moving inland the wind fell off east and weakened. Jane had her own horse, this time, riding a few feet behind and beside him. The wet mist trailed from her like a fairy robe. Lohengrin had found the beast tethered near the beach. Cruel to leave an animal like this, he’d said to himself. “You call to the lost,” she said.
“Hal is… well, I brought him hence.”
“You might as well call to yourself.”
“I know not whence I go?”
“If I’m to be lost,” she told him, shrugging, “I’m content to be lost with you.”
“You’re only lost if you have a destination,” he reflected, peering at the featureless screen of billows. “So said my deep-thinking father, once.”
“Do you really hate so …?”
“So many reasons,” he cut her short. “Like waves on the shore, as one dies another rises behind. Yet… I’m not sure I hate… my father wastes his gifts. Lets everything slip through his hands… so I inherit, his only son, mind you, as if I were the bottom name on an entail.” Shook his head. “He’s here… he’s there… he’s nowhere. He… he might have been a great lord… instead he merely kills well.”
“Yet they say he is a kindly man.”
“Who says? Tale-tellers? Bah. I can find what he failed. I have the map in my mind.”
“Maybe better to be lost,” said she. “I weary of map-talk.”
“When I met you,” he commented, grinning, “you were the handmaiden of the map-folk.”
“I am a woman. Like the moon, we find beauty and delight in changing.”
“I’m Mars’s son. He must have topped my mother. I don’t look like him, anyway.”
“Mars?”
“My father.”
“Topped,” she said, with a quiet, sighing hum.
“You’ll wear me thin,” he told her. “I need assistance. Hall! Halll!” he cried again and this time she giggled. “Oh fair and mighty Hal, come lend me thy rough vigor!”
The shouts fell dull and dead. “Follow the map in your mind,” she suggested. “As for me, I am but guided by love.”
“And so are lost.”
“No. With love I am always where I wish to be.”
“Love.” He stared at the nothingness. Had he but known it, he was, now, much like his father, long ago, struggling to grasp the obvious.
“You are finer than you think,” she said, easing her mount close enough to touch his hand, bare below the steel sleeve, with her pale smooth fingers.
“I’ll find my father’s footprints and not fail as he did.” He gestured with the other fist, glaring at the blankness ahead.
“The Grail is a sacred quest, they say, Lohengrin.”
“Sacred?’ he snorted. “Like love?”
PARSIVAL
The icy mist seethed in the steady, offshore wind.
“There were more of us,” he murmured, remembering the vision or dream when he’d sailed high above what he believed was this place, the heart-shaped island.
“More?” grunted Lego, leaning back into the gusts.
Gralgrim spraddle-legged it along, now, semi-upright and, still spitting drool.
That fate again, that I have come to expect and will one day desert me and leave me in ruins, he thought. That fate dropped us so close to shore you’d think it meant something… then, maybe, this Berserker and Lego and what all else mean something?
Because his armor would have dragged him to doom. Water still dribbled out of the joints.
“What now?” Lego wondered.
“If I remember aright,” said the knight, “not far ahead there’s rock and twisted trees,”
“So you’ve been to heaven before, my Lord?”
“Nay. But I’ve seen it, notwithstanding.”
“The map, then?”
Leaning back into the hard wind that blew them onshore, they reached the top of the beach in coils of streaming, chill smoke. Light snow and small hail whipped into them, clittering on their metal.
“Heaven, ya say?” growled Gralgrim.
“Mayhap you sinned, unknowing,” suggested Lego, “and came wrong. What are Viking sins? Are there such?”
“Hah,” snorted the Norseman, “Letting enemies live. Listening to lying foreigners. Foundering a longship.”
“This can’t be Viking Hell, in any case,” Parsival decided, “or you’d be in better spirits.”
“I lost me fucked ax,” the Berserker pointed out. “There’s a true sin.”
Parsival and his captain’s weapons were still at their belts. Lego tossed a two foot dagger to the Viking. “Here,” he grunted.
Gralgrim missed the catch, then scrabbled it up from the frozen sand. “Arr,” he emitted, “a toy for a woman to scra
pe her toenails.”
“Better a short cock than no cock at all,” said Lego.
Now among the black, wet rocks and stunted trees stiff with thorns and bristly leaves, the wind was somewhat broken up.
“Heaven,” said Lego. “Full of wonders and ease.” He huddled down in the shelter of a ragged wall of rock.
Shivering, Parsival went to the nearest tree, drew his sword and chopped branches. Here’s better use for it, he thought. The world lost a great woodchopper when I went to head splitting…
He chipped kindling and set up the fire.
“It’d take Merlinus to light that,” he commented. He sensed or felt or just imagined the old wizard was close by. Somehow. “Merlin,” he whispered, striking the flint from his leather waist bag, in the wet, clutching, icy draughts.
His fingers felt thick and numb, hands quivering as he struck and struck. Shut his eyes and kept striking…
“Good Christ,” said Lego. “There’s witchcraft.”
“There’s fire, anyway,” said Gralgrim.
Because the flames caught and held, sucking and wisping left and right and around in the eddying wind.
Suppose all my actions really have meaning, the knight thought.
Tend to some purpose I but dimly grasp…
“Thank you,” he murmured, like a prayer. Because he was here and it meant something…
LAYLA
The voice had stopped talking or crying or whatever so she paused to listen. Near her a single, twisted tree vaguely seemed to form and un-form as the mist wavered. Seemingly far away, directionless, she heard the muffled drumming of many hooves… or, maybe not…
“Most strange.”
Am I dead, her mind asked. This seems no natural world… the land of ghosts… yet seem I solid… why dread death except to meet again, mayhap, the oafs and fools who plagued me while I lived…
She walked, again, heading towards the scraggly trees, thinking about going to her cousin’s in the midlands so if the baby proved real she might have and leave it there… ideas floated like mist…
“What an existence,” she murmured.
Unless I’m dead, then, what a death…
She was hungry again. That could be the baby, alone. She didn’t want to think. Layla never could help thinking too much about almost everything which (her mother once told her) made her need to drown things out. Which was why she liked honey wine so much, she supposed. She always kept a jug in her chamber and found reason to go there, from time-to-time, during the day. She told herself it was but the sweetness of it. Well, she wished she had some, now. The bitter ale of the Pilgrims of the map had been pretty unsatisfactory.
Now there was a voice, to her right. Stopped again. Maybe the little killers were upon her or survivors of the Map People. She wasn’t sure which would be worse.
“Jane?” asked a male voice, closer, familiar. “Hullo? Be it Jane, I …”
“Greasy Jane from the kitchen?” wondered Layla. She knew the accent, close to her own. “Are you greasy Jack?”
Taking shape out of the wet smoke was Hal, wide face unnaturally pale and apprehensive. She recognized him at once except his normal ruddiness seemed faded.
“My lady,” he said, amazed.
“I am relieved to meet a ghost I know, young Hal. But it worries me there may be more about.”
“Ghosts? Think you I am a ghost, my lady?”
“What else, out here in nothingness?” So like my life since I were wedded, she thought, automatically.
“I know not. Maybe we had come near each other. In any case, do ghosts hunger?”
“Well reasoned. It is said they suffer divers miseries.”
“Do you have aught to eat, my lady?”
“I have ought,” she informed him. “Where is my son? Is he among the vaporous souls?”
“Well,” Hal allowed, sullenly, “I know not.”
“A quarrel?”
“Well,” he replied, shrugging heavily.
He seems changed… still dull, yet… a spark of something… time with my son could change anyone, I suppose…
“Is he safe?’
“In the arms of a fair maid,” Hal muttered. “If that be safe.”
Ah, she thought. “A maid, say you?”
“Well, not so much a maid as I was raised to suppose.”
“My son was raised, yet how he lowers himself.” Play what tune you like, she thought, the dancer finds his own steps…
“I’m very hungry,” he said. “Which way do we go?”
“First, in my sack, take something to eat.” She held it out. “Then we follow the straight road before us.”
“I see no road,” he pointed out, rooting in the bag.
“No surprise.”
“You say things like your son says,” he observed, chewing hard bread.
“Then pity one of us,” she told him, starting to walk into the curtain of undulant blankness. “Come along, young Hal. We wander in nowhere, as my husband loves to do. You see, as someone said, long ago, you become the thing you dread and dislike, sooner or later.”
GAWAIN AND THE LADY IN THE MASK
Gawain just sat there, as the impossibly dense gray flowed past. He reckoned they were heading southwest. He didn’t know that the weather had cleared due west where Lohengrin and Jane headed.
“Do I get a reward for my adventure with you?” he suddenly wondered.
“Still you seek to top me?” she asked amused.
“Umh,” he shrugged, verbally.
“Follow me and you may find a fair countenance, again.”
“Another Grail to heal me.” Smiled in his hood. “If I’m made fair why I’ll return to darkness and you need never dread my love-longing.”
“You came from darkness? Well, the womb is dark enough.”
“Nay. I lost my darkness. I loved my darkness. I could not return to her. I’m a tragic fellow. Sometimes I grind my teeth in rage. Teeth that are ever bared. My emblem.”
“You amuse yourself, at least.”
He was suddenly distant and bored with it all. He didn’t want to think about Shinqua. I need to be drunk, he thought. Been too long…
“Have you wine about you?” he wondered. “Share it and I’ll show you how I drink through the side of my face.”
She took this in.
“I have none,” she told him. “Yet be patient. Theirs is a liquor that heals.”
“Dull talk enough,” he muttered in disgust.
He decided the fog would have to lift, sometime. Back to the manor where she still lived. He was disguised. He would look at her, once more. Just look. Look at her children to see if one in some strange stripe or shade resembled him. He’d watch the way a ghost (which he believed he was) might return for a final moment and incommunicate farewell.
And then he’d make his way back to the coastal town and see if the innkeeper’s wife would reopen her door and arms and legs, too. More than wine to get him to sleep at night was unnecessary. He felt less crazed.
Still, he thought, there’s no telling if I won’t be mad again tomorrow…
Just then he felt contained, without heat or self-pity. Rocked easily with the horse’s gait, stretching good arm up and out to ease a crick in his shoulder.
Ride into nothingness without even hope to trouble me… beside a female who might have a dagger-blade between her legs where the sweet gate ought to be… stick it in her and I’d likely come out with a split prong to match my halved face…
He didn’t quite laugh aloud. Into nothingness, a ghost without dream of future joys and conquests, like someone in the lengthening shadows of old age, no longer staring at far horizons he’d never reach… just eating, sleeping, aches and pains draining away into the inevitable, looming oblivion…
“Small wonder men seek the Grail,” he said, feeling very deep and almost spiritual. He felt close to understanding some mystery: things that had troubled him little enough in the past.
Her voice seemed di
rectionless, blurred by the dense atmosphere. “Small wonder,” she agreed. “Soon you may be changed and the world will mean nothing. No false questing. There will be no more world for you.”
He grinned with the half of him that could.
“Small wonder,” he responded. “So tell the featherless hawk he’s done hunting.” Shifted his rear around to relieve a pinch. “Who do you truly serve, lady?”
“I’ll bring you there, to him,” she promised. “This day’s ride.”
“I’m surprised you serve a mere man.”
“More than a man. And you are fit to meet him and pledge thyself.”
“I doubt it.” Spat neatly out of the good side of his mouth, missing the cowl. “Have you really no jug? I thirst.”
She rummaged in her slung bag and handed one over. He unstopped it and eagerly drank. Then nearly spit again.
“I’ve slain folk for less,” he told her.
“We need water on a long ride,” she said.
“Water is fit for fish. I’ll suck mine from this cloying air.” She liked that. Returned to her point.
“You are well-seasoned,” she said. “Sad and bitter enough to pledge to the true king. We go to his fortress. Enter and come out a dark god.”
He chuckled, amused again.
“Every direction you take leads to madness,” he concluded. “If we went south I ween you show me the trees that blossom into cooked meat.” Laughed. “What say these journeys about poor Britain?”
LOHENGRIN – QUO VADIS
“Which way?” Jane asked, alongside him on her spare, bony mount.
Lohengrin watched the mist fold and unfold as they moved on at a walk. “Some way,” he said. He was sure from the vague sunglow diffused behind them, that they were heading inland again.
“What does your map say?”
“No more maps. I follow what my mind’s eye sees.”
“Bare ladies and great glory?” she wondered archly.
“Nay,” he corrected. “Power.” He smiled. She was looking at his hawk profile, dark and sullen against the ghostly backdrop. Her lips said: I love you, silently. She believed there was something hidden in him, locked behind the casual gate of his personality, young cynicism and edge of cool violence. She believed she could touch and warm him and, maybe, dull the edge of his gnawing fury.
Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Page 30