Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon

by Richard Monaco

  The ground cover thinned to the west where the landscape rolled green under bright blue sky. At the horizon spurs of dense forest showed dark, rich and clear. Was as if they’d come to the edge of a breaking sea of light.

  The knight shook his head. His fancy suggested the shroud had, somehow, flowed from that forbidding structure, her goal.

  Something is going to fix me there, he thought.

  “No more amazements,” he said. “Let us part where I have but half-known you as I have but half-seen you, being, myself, a half thing.”

  She shook her head.

  “Are you half-witted, as well?” she asked. “Maybe half your brain was cut away. You are at freedom’s gate.”

  “My luck is too weak,” he replied, moving off, slowly, melting by degrees into the surrounding mists, “else my head entire would have been taken off. I have no ambitions. What point? What could any offer me? Riches? Power? Gross pleasures? I’ve had all. In the end I will die and have no face.”

  She stopped her mount and watched him as he rode out of the fog she still sat in. She was starting to fade behind the mist as he spoke back to her.

  “You don’t know what you’re giving up, Sir Gawain,” she told him.

  “Nay, I know well. And I go to try once more to… what? Not live for… I but half-live. I go as a ghost come back to look one last time on what I loved and left. That’s better said. Not to be just a simple, bloodstained villain riding, dick first, through all my lingering, dying days like all the bloodstained fools who went before me.” The mist was closing, melting his dimensions as he slowly eased away. “Down the path of shadows to the last, wearing my yesterdays like a shroud, without leaving more than half a glory to my half a name. Farewell, witch who believes in something. In the end, all paths meet in darkness. Or in the windy raving of a village fool telling my story with violent emptiness.” Blurring away now. “I go to view who I most loved in life. For I am, as I say, a ghost now.” He felt remorse, longing, and (strangely) even hope. He didn’t understand the hope. There was nothing to attach it to. But it lived in him, still, like a lost seed in bitter, winter soil. “I go to look my last.”

  The ground-clouds filled in behind him so when he looked back again she was a shape, a shadow… gone behind a dimming wash while he blinked in brightness…

  He was a shape, a shadow… gone.

  She nodded, strangely moved. Unusual: a knight whose soul had bled within him.

  “I’ll show you what’s under my mask,” she called into the abstract fog.

  “Better to have half-known you, my lady,” his muffled voice returned from the blankness.

  “Farewell then, ghostly knight,” she said. “Thou wilt return to the cold smoke. I doubt thou wilt find the solid world, again.”

  PARSIVAL

  “It’s as though we were already dead, in truth, good captain,” Parsival said. “If we fail here I think we’ll never leave.”

  “What?” responded Lego. “Are we cursed into death with without dying?”

  “We are ever in two worlds, I think. We shut one out from the other.” The ravines were now too narrow, numerous and too deep. They started to move along the parallel path of least resistance. The dried blood had left a crease on Gralgrim’s wide forehead. He brought up the rear.

  “I’ve seen no game,” he commented.

  “Mayhap in heaven no food is needed,” said Parsival, half-grinning.

  “Tell that tale to me innards,” scoffed the Viking. The knight shrugged.

  “This is no natural place,” he said. “Or, if so, no natural time.”

  MORGANA

  The unseen sea crashed along both sides of the rocky bar that twisted out into the wind and dense sea fog.

  “Aunt?” called Modred over the tempest. “My boy?”

  “Where go we?”

  She reached back and took his hand.

  “Into a dream without sleep,” she explained.

  “Dream?” Mimujin, almost beside her on the narrow, wild way, cut by wind and flung water, leaned closer, split nose snorting air. “Think you sleeping in bed, eh, witch?”

  “Fear nothing, my boy,” she said. “If you die here you live on hereafter.”

  “Ah-ha,” cried the little Mongol-like killer. “That good. Only one serve king live anyway.”

  “King?” asked the boy.

  “Only king!” shouted Mimujin. “And I will bring him hearts to eat. Who know who heart?”

  “Fear not him, either,” said his mother. “King Arthur?” The boy was uneasy.

  “He no king,” laughed Mimujin. “Maybe you see king, then know a thing.”

  Then a gust nearly spilled the three of them over the low but sheer side into certain, crashing death.

  “We’ll not end suchwise,” she said, as if commanding someone.

  SHINQUA

  She was just sitting behind the mule, staring at the gray before her. The rutted track (that suggested a road the way a thread suggests a robe) blurred away into formlessness.

  Which way woman? she asked herself. No way, woman, she answered. Why do you still feel now what you felt so many years behind? Because you are a fool…

  She imagined faces in the sluggishly undulant shapes: the castle, the wide stream that fed the moat, dark, deep water swimming with gleams… a night when she’d first come to Britain and spoke less English (someone had said) than a magpie. She’d leaned over the bank and looked at her face in the twilit water where her eyes were like moon shimmer and her hue melted her features into the gathering night and she’d wondered if she and the white people were two sides of something that mattered or just one thing like the moon in light and shadow, shifting, changing but the same under the appearance…

  She used to sings songs from her childhood… soft chants… she’d invent new ones trying to put sounds to her feelings that were long and sweet and true… the changing moonlight on the moving water…

  Which way, you fool? Ah, I made him, my strange, sweet, cruel pale and pink faced knight into a song yet he was not a song no more than the light is the moon… Sing, girl-child, sing your dreams and yourself to sleep…

  She stared ahead at the unrelenting whitish-gray, closing her in. “Here’s where you come to,” she said.

  LOHENGRIN

  “Is there any point in just riding to nowhere?” Jane asked.

  They were going down a gentle slope. The fog was worse, if anything.

  “Why not?” he replied, rubbing his eyes which were losing focus from staring at blankness. “There’s nothing here worth staying for.” Stroked his tight-curled black hair, wet from condensation – as was everything else.

  She sighed. It was unnerving. She supposed he was right, but she was saddle-weary. Closed her eyes, which didn’t help. Glad she wasn’t alone. This was like some nightmare; she didn’t put it but felt it that way.

  “I don’t know,” she said vaguely. “I suppose …”

  “Anyway,” he told her, “I come from Castle Nowhere. My father is Lord of Nowhere. As I will be someday, since I have no brothers.”

  “You say things, but …”

  “I say I’m heir to nowhere. All you can see will be mine.”

  “And I, your lady?” she liked saying that.

  “Lady Nothing. It may all be yours too.”

  He was grinning, not harshly, glad she was there. He glanced aside at her pale, thoughtful, fine-nosed profile and dark hair that had a little red in it.

  “What I wish,” she began. “Ah, well… I thought I wished to follow the Map… I thought …”

  “I’ll follow my horse, for now,” he said. “Even nowhere may have an end.”

  PARSIVAL

  “Don’t assume we’re in the world,” he suggested to Lego. “Don’t assume anything.”

  “Assume, my Lord?”

  Gralgrim lagged behind, peering around, club over his shoulder, looking (all scraggly and muddy) thought Lego, a veritable troll with the dried crease of blood dividing his
face in two.

  “We could use a map in this foul place,” the Viking declared, spitting, thoughtfully into the shadows at the bottom of the ravine which was now too steep and deep to cross.

  “Are we on an island for certain?” wondered Lego.

  “Don’t assume it,” replied the knight.

  Where the fog drew back on the other side Parse could see the partly fallen wall and the grayish, weathered stones of the monastery (or its twin) where he’d stopped with Lego a blur and a time and a half ago. The huge metal door was standing open and he thought he glimpsed the same little monk with the round yet sharp-featured face who’d given him the strange wine that maybe was just drugged or maybe something magical…

  “Look there,” he said, pointing. “Where?” asked Lego.

  Parsival called to the monk as the fog closed down again. “You! Is it you? Where is this place?”

  They stopped and stared.

  “I know not my Lord,” said the captain.

  “I asked him,” Parsival said.

  “Who, lord?”

  “The monk. I swear it was the monk.”

  “What monk?” wondered the Viking, spitting down the little canyon, again.

  “Where, my Lord?” Lego asked. “I see but damp smoke and twisted trees. Was it a vision?”

  “Since all’s a dream,” he replied, shrugging, “why not?”

  “Visions a monks,” snorted Gralgrim. “That’s a great use. We need visions a food an’ drink and maybe a woman, in it.”

  As they went on, Lego was thinking how all it took was fog and unknown country to make the world as strange as any sleep-pictures. He’d never felt so cut off.

  “We may be getting close to something,” said Parsival. “There’s news,” said Gralgrim. “More monks, then?” “This country is like a child’s maze,” Parsival commented. Yet what isn’t? he asked himself.

  “Where are the little crabs?” queried the Berserker, meaning the Mongol-like warriors. “I’d like to crack their shells.”

  Always the same puzzle on a different table, the knight considered. The rest of life flowed past like faces in a fever. How to find the heart of this place in the fog… eyes full of fog…

  “Onward fellow doomed,” he said. “All answers are always around the next turning.”

  MORGANA

  The twisting promontory was so narrow the horses went in single file, jerking and starting nervously. The water crashed close on both sides, breaking over the top, in places. The faintly lit fog whipped and shaped past. The waning moon had followed the sun down.

  Modred huddled in the saddle. Mimujin was just behind the famous witch. Three of Morgana’s women had stayed with them and brought up the rear.

  Mimujin hunched and scowled; stayed primed for mayhem. His sliced-off pinky throbbed less, but his rage stayed cold and steady. He’d embraced death. It would all be the same in the end.

  There was snow in the air. Big flakes swam and flickered past. “We are close,” Morgana said, shouted back against the wind, voice sucked away.

  GAWAIN

  He’d crossed a road, worn and wheel-rutted. looked in both directions for maybe twenty feet each way before the smooth, glowing wall closed the circle as if (he’d thought) he were in the center of a huge, silken tent.

  The day was now windless and warm. He took a draw of tepid water from his leather flask. He wished he had spirits.

  Which way? he asked himself.

  He laid back his hood, exposing the scarred ruin of his face.

  There were trees close to the road so he knew he was well inland. The faint glow descending meant west. Good. On the road he went west.

  I believe in nothing much, he thought. Yet, something like a wind blew me where it willed… maybe, finally it will blow fair…

  SHINQUA

  No point in staying where she was any longer, fog or no. Perhaps there was no point in anything.

  And you find Camelot, woman, she thought. I think you’ll get no seat at the Table Round…smiled. ‘Where’s my Lord Gawain?’ I’d ask. ‘Why?’ they wonder. ‘Our son longs to look upon his father’s face and I will bring him there. Of course.’

  She knew it was absurd. They might just laugh at her and ask who the child looked like. If Gawain were there it could lead to bloodshed. She might just say she had a message for him from some lady. But these were idle notions because this trip was just a gesture. So maybe the knight was no more than a target to aim at because her longing was for things that never really were but should have been.

  “What the moon dreams,” she half-sung under her breath, “melts in the sunrise.”

  Stared at the blunt nothing that softly stirred and swirled around her.

  “Melts,” she whispered.

  LAYLA

  They were now stopped at a deep stream bank. Hal paced along the water’s edge hoping to spot fish. He had a notion of stabbing one or two with his sword which was ready in his hand. All he saw was dull, dark water reflecting the suffocating grayness.

  Layla laid back and rested staring up at the changing blankness.

  Upstream there’ll be something sooner or later… some village… something…

  Unconsciously she put a hand to her belly. Felt the old mix of tenderness and dread.

  The sun’s unseen angle suggested shapes in the mist overhead and then, in semi-focus, seemed to form a vague and passing image of something long ago where she was coming out of the dark, cool shadows of the arched corridor that traversed the inner castle wall and opened into the rich gardens that enclosed the middle-sized building on almost three sides, running nearly to the narrow moat. The scents were so intense… perfumes… cool stone… and (as she went out) the sudden rush of hot summer-day’s air and astonishing richness of herb and flower and fecund, still air seeming tactile as some wonderful food…

  And there he was, helmet laid aside, the massed, dense, compacted green summer foliage setting off his bright, Mars red armor, the long blond hair in the caressing breeze and then, looking at her, eyes that seemed to condense and concentrate the blue sky itself with all its untouchable beauty and remoteness and might have spoken (had she the wisdom of the coming twenty years) the secret joy and warning, too…

  Because she’d wanted to touch him. Just touch him.

  Was that it? Seeing someone in a shock and hush of green-gold summer light; young, welling longing overflowing because it had never really been him: golden hair, red armor, graceful strength and wide eyes (it seemed) full of dreaming… no… he was (she now believed) like a picture on a shield, the emblem of her wishes so that walking out of dimness the eyes first sees bright, edgeless blurs that then resolve into merely beautiful, yet mundane things…

  How she’d wanted to touch him, that long gone day. She’d felt lightheaded, afraid, absorbed, lost… stood there, wanting to run to him, at once…

  Ah, she’d thought, Ah…

  GAWAIN

  The road was following the little river upstream. In his little circle of sight he mainly watched the whorls and purlings as the water caught and bent around rocks and sticks and stirred darkly along the greenish black, weedy muck of the banks.

  It gave him new ideas. He just looked; sensed no metaphoric meaning in the twists and whirlpooling water or the stagnant places where flickering, surface-walking bugs flourished. The muck, the stones, the unending, ever-shifting current were all one to him.

  He kept thinking he just might find the castle town by going this way; thought it really made so little difference except for the stupid, incurable hope…

  At this pace, with water and forage, the horse hardly needed rest so he could ride and doze in the saddle when the now moonless night fell and the faint, starshine showed where the trees vanished into the ground fog. He considered how the new moon would be rising before the sun.

  I’ve come back at the dark time, he thought, good for planting, the serfs say… or ploughing under…

  Semi-dozing, things came back, partly
memory, partly dreams so there was a hot humid summer night in a barn hayloft at the edge of the village, the castle maybe a mile away… the moon crossed the opening that was like a window space and he was in her and she under him, soaked with one another’s sweat and scent, breathless with rocking and thrashing together, leaning above her on locked arms, sore, aching but ever besotted by her sweet abandon… the dark gleaming face, rich, parted lips, amazing long, strong legs and two-toned, long-toed feet (like dark golden honey, he’d fragmentarily thought) lifted wide and softly kicking as he drove himself down into her as if he could ever actually get deep enough… on… on… and on…

  “Ahhhh,” he whisper-shouted, now, in this moment’s bitter longing.

  MIMUJIN

  They’d come to a cave or ancient tunnel and were now under the sea. The religious little killer relaxed, slightly. Blew his nose into his hand and the snot spurted from the split nostrils. He wiped his hand on his jerkin. The sea sounds faded behind. His people liked caves.

  He now accepted she was bringing him to the satisfaction he desired. He would fulfill his pledge to his people. Drink in the Red Knight’s agony and eat his heart.

  In the next world he would enjoy the slave-souls he’d slain in this life. Yes. And the sweet delights of whored women and boys. He would revel in his heaven.

  “Ha,” he snarled, kicking his horse forward into the darkness, shadows from himself thrown by the torches the women now held, angling and bending around the damp walls that seemed partly natural, partly worked by who knew what giant race or evil dwarves.

  As if he needed so much light; he could smell his way through any cave to serve his king who hated the bright of day. The feeble surface folk feared the dark while he loved it, a fanged shadow, a whisper of death. Imagined finding Parsival in the caves and burrows of his homeland; imagined how he would toy with the arrogant knight before eating him.