Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II (7 page)

LAYLA

Summer, indeed. The smell of summer when I was a girl came back to me that evening. Evenings like this one were dreamy memories of lost times. Lost. As if the violet wash of the dimming sun had a richness, a special fragrance that blew from all the summers of the past.

I watched a string of glowbugs flow across the fields below the wall. I was looking down from the parapet. A guard was a dim silhouette against the skyglimmer.

I watched the long curve of the narrow river that gleamed away into the deep woods and jagged hills, stone hills, that enclosed this place. I sighed more than once. Sighed for everything that had melted into ghostly mist … to nothing … like that crease of watergleam … to nothing …

So I sighed. A woman learns how to sigh. My husband’s mother, they tell me, used to stand right up here after he first fled this place (a practice he has continued) and she would stare away day after day until she died … instead of going to look for him. I mean, if I’d really wanted the man that much
I’d
have gone after him. If Lohengrin left me and I needed him that much, I’d go looking.

I wished my son would leave. He was miserable here. On the other hand, I knew how to be miserable anywhere.

So I sighed. I was still quite attractive. Dark hair, hot in the loins. I wasn’t standing here looking for my husband. If he came back, he came back. I never knew what he wanted or why. Never.

The air was a slow, dark, rich perfume. The glowbugs spattered like gold on the violet-washed fields.

The summer heat always seemed to gather in my loins. I lived day to day. I had no ambition. I watched my children grow up. Two girls. The boy. The curly-haired, angry, moody boy. I sighed. Rubbed my soft hands on the weather smoothed stones. When I’d first seen Parsival, he was the most beautiful boy imaginable. His hair was almost sparkling gold. Cheeks so smooth and tinted with soft reds. Eyes clear and straightforward. He seemed to take such joy in breathing and seeing. Who wouldn’t have fallen in love with him? He was a dream of hope and youth. I’d wanted him so much. Looked forward to snuffing the candle by my bed at night, alone in my private darkness, picturing him over and over … Every ordinary event of the day was made interesting because I was conscious of him all the time. Everything was enriched. What I do now is just the shadow of that love. Yes, with him or any other. If only we could have spent a lifetime just starting … just starting! So I sigh and keep trying to begin again and I never get back to it.

I now needed just enough wine to put a blur in my sight. I’d had everything a woman was supposed to have, they tell me, and it came to nothing at all.

So I was waiting, watching, as the shadows melted together in the twilight glimmer. Then I saw movement: a blotch that seemed, at first, a stain in my sight. But I knew who it was. Not my husband, either. Far from it. The farther the better. I felt a touch of pleasure and regret. Shadows of love.

I could have ordered the gate barred, but the summer night couldn’t be kept out, nor all the unkept promises in the dreaming evening. Promises and hopes. I needed promises and hopes. More all the time …

I was doing this again out of desperation and boredom. That’s what I liked to tell myself. I’d tell him (the faceless, uncertain outline floating towards me like a childhood imagining over the sweet, dim fields) it was because I was lonely. But that never hurt. Not lonely. That was just an ache in the background. My latest lover drifted towards me.

Gradually, as the horse and rider floated closer, the fused shapes almost came into focus. I saw them, fused, stop at the wall. There was no moat. I remember, a long time ago, having been up all night with some man (I think he had a dark, scratchy beard) and then standing there alone, breathing deep … then spotting Parsival down below, in the dawning, bound hand and foot, surrounded by renegade knights and ruffians. They’d seemed about to slay him, but didn’t. I wondered why. Before our guards could get out there they’d cut him loose and let him go. Someone was always trying to kill him. At some point I stopped really caring either way. I love my son, my daughters. I bore them in blind pain, suffocating, bleeding, my own bigness strangling me, hurting all my insides. I paid for their life. But my husband was just there. Not friend, not lover anymore … just his body …

The rider down there, I knew he was looking up at me. Waiting, knowing it was I.

“Come up,” I said, though he couldn’t have heard.

And he came as if my lips had bussed his ear and my scented breath stung him. I needed this. Against the death that waited, the ages of the earth that would roll over me and all I’d ever known and done … the darkness I could never be left alone in since childhood … the darkness …

HOWTLANDE

He tricked me. That Parsival. Now I know why. We had, I thought, an understanding. Share and share alike. He proved a unique and unreliable fellow.

Tripped me up on that well he’d plunged little Lord Gobble into. Ha. As if a drop into the depths was likely to destroy that tenacious, crippled near-maniac who proved, by the way, a more reliable friend than the great paragon of chivalry.

Little Gobble saved my life. My head was pounding with blood. Upside down like that. It hurt and swelled my face. I thought it would pop like a pressed grape. What a way to perish! How cruel. Plugging a well, staring into utter darkness. My feet kicking just above the ring. A swampy stink choking me. My heart was bursting. Hours, eternities passed … I lost and came back to myself a dozen times a minute. How cruel! I saw things. Flashes. Dreams. Nightmares. I saw my parents. I hadn’t recalled them in years. My father’s defeated face. I saw him riding across the barren fields that had ruined him. (My inheritance.) He was always thin. We all were thin over there. We had the noble crest and barely more crusts than the meanest serf. Is it a wonder I desired more? That I vowed never to end as they had ended? Vowed it a thousand times. Played the fool, the wise man, warrior, plotter … What did it matter? The point was, without riches and power you were brushed aside to starve in the muck. Titles meant little. Why, there were base-born merchants who could buy kings! And honor comes cheap.

So I cursed and spat hate into the blackness through swollen lips. My mind rambled. Pictures from my miserable past reeled through my head as my whole life melted away. I swear I heard no sweet angel voices urging me home to bliss eternal, no, nor glimpsed devils waiting with fire and ice to raze my soul forever.

I was hardly aware of my changed fortunes until I was actually clearing the rim of that damned well. And heard a dismal, shrill voice, gasping and cursing.

“You … bloated bastard …” I suppose that was true. Yet I was strong and nimble for my bulk. I’d been half-starved too many years not to eat well when I could. “Help me … lumped toad!” The voice hissed as I scrabbled and pushed the stones’ sides with ripped, numbed hands. I had recognized Gobble’s voice. I was amazed. Saved, by
him
! How had he escaped?

“Did you,” I asked, puffing, slumped half over the rim on my knees now (how strong that wiry little bastard had to be!) “Did you chew your way to the surface … like a mole?” It was dawn. I blinked at the pale, grayish tones and breathed the cool, sweet, strangely freshened air. Stared at the tremendous castle that we’d fruitlessly and senselessly searched. The dead Druid was still sprawled on the stone flagging, a featureless shadow in first light.

Gobble sat on his palms, facing me. Resembled a malignant monkey: skinny, long-limbed, bent, his head restlessly tilting. My rescuer. Partner. Boon companion. But you can’t trouble to be fastidious when there’s a world to win; I might never come to love the little fellow, but I had to respect his energy and purpose in serving his legendary and ill-fated master.

“Most like a mole,” he snarled, breathing steady and hard. He helped me untie the rope he’d bound my ankles with to hold me up. A strange bucket full of sorrow.

“Ah,” I responded.

“Most like.” He sniffed and hissed. He was the best contact I’d made since coming to these shores. In the bitter, bleak North Germany of my birth the only contacts available were with men dull as stones and brutish as pigs. Now, I’d been to Italy, you understand. I knew what culture was, you see. Ah, the Italian genius for song and finance. I needed a larger, open country for my talents. Italy was too refined and the best seats were all taken.

I leaned up and peered into the well. Spat. Cocked my ear, but heard no impact.

“But really,” I asked him, “how did —”

He cut me off. I hate that. I hate it when people do that.

“It was just muck at the bottom,” he said.

He’d come up behind me, so clearly there was another exit. But whoever heard of an exit from a well?

“I crawled,” he was saying, “aye, through slime and stink … like a worm, a slimy worm … crawled out not far from here, where a shaft had been cut into the underground streambed. “

I stared at his restlessly shifting eyes. He spat, stood up and lurched back and forth.

“I’ll put that filthy bastard into worse muck than that,” he vowed. I knew who he meant. But revenge is silly. Profit is the point. “I’ll hang him by his dick over starved rats … Let them chew his face off …” Spat and limped in a veering circle.

“Well and good,” said I, “but what do you plan now?” You see, neither of us had put it together yet. The clue was under our noses, but much time was to pass before we realized we’d actually smelt it.

“Eh?”

“Go on looking for treasure? Go home?” Not that I meant that. Never go home. But I considered finding a master to serve and work my way up to command. I could outdo others. All I ever asked for was an opportunity.

He leaned close to me. His roving stare wandered around the night sky and crossed my face.

“
We
,” he hissed in pointed, restrained fury, “will find that sodomite son-of-a-bitch.” Hissed a pause. “
We
will find the Grail treasure.
We
will serve Lord Clinschor and help him to victory.”

“Victory.” I was thinking about having just been upside down and swelling to death. Such a fanatic. Well, why not follow along and wait on opportunities?

“Yes,” repeated Gobble, veering around again. “Victory over all the scum of the earth. All the scum will be purged away!”

He wasn’t talking to me anymore. Seemed to be addressing the sky. I wondered what point he was actually making. What did he believe? Who were the “scum?” He seemed excited often by strange, abstract furies. Of course, I hadn’t yet met his master, Clinschor the Great, yet …

PARSIVAL

Of course, everything I try to bury crawls back out of the earth again. Sooner or later.

By dawn I was on the road home. Heading north. I assumed Arthur would forget me for awhile. Maybe for years, if I were fortunate.

So I rode, half asleep, and let the long morning shadows shorten as the packed dirt road unraveled before me. I was hungry and had a sudden taste for cheese. Fresh milk cheese. I had a saddlebag full of hard, salty stuff for the trip. I kept looking for signs of a cattle farm. This was getting to be the right country for it.

I was crossing into foothills where the forest opened up into long, smooth waves of tillable valley. Few peasants in the fields. Little work to do between now and harvest time, I supposed. I’d never actually paid much attention to such things. There were long, golden, pale passages of grain stroked with washes of tiny, violet flowers.

Well, I was about ready to start from plain dirt. As soon as I reached home I’d shatter my sword and hang my armor up to rust. I swore it; I meant it. Life was too bitter and brief to go on with the old way.

I knew there was a town and castle not far ahead when I spotted the tall poles with gibbeted skeletons swaying from the crossbeams. When I was (yes) seventeen I’d attempted conversation with one of them. Better than talking to most of the living, I came to see.

I squinted up at a fairly fresh subject; a serf, a criminal, perhaps condemned for doing what they paid and polished knights to do. There was a crow perched on his head. The face was a shapeless lump. What a disgrace, and no one had bothered to cut the bastard down.

I hissed at the bird and it beat softly and heavily up, trailing an elastic string of something red and raw.

I winced and looked away. Understood the doctrine of the soul: if all were pressed meat and bone moved by strange inner heats and wind, then our universal fate would be unbearable. When I was young I felt the soul, the subtle self touching the subtle tones and wonders of the seemingly solid world around us. I wasn’t much different from those fools who hunted me to hunt the secret of the magic Grail. The search kept the mind off the dead meat side of life — for a time. A distraction. Most human activities were no more than distractions from thoughts of death.

I came to a crossroad. Paused to ponder. I hadn’t been traveling this far north in a long time. Stared across the blindingly sunny fields, thinking about cheese. A rider was coming fast down a long, gentle slope. Dust and heat shimmer made a ghostly shadow out of him. But the glints showed armor. I was pleased he wasn’t coming my way. It could only be trouble. I’d read about times and places where peace lasted for decades. I wished I’d lived in one.

“Keep going, knight,” I muttered and nudged my strong but slightly break-gaited charger along. If I happened on a monastery along the way, I thought I’d just trade my famous red steel for some neutral rags and tiptoe home in disguise.

I passed under a long row of thin trees. The bands of dusty shadow flicked over me. I set my helmet over the front of my saddlehorn. Wiped sweat from my eyes. Wished I had an oriental cloth headgear. I’d seen them in the Holy Land.

Peering back to be sure the horseman hadn’t changed course, I never saw the others until I was halfway around a tight curve that crossed a little hillcrest and a short wooden bridge over a crease of stream. The country was very dry. You felt the dryness in the heat.

The others were in close chase. They straggled down the valley sides, riding gouts of dust as if aflame, crashing through long stands of grain. If nothing else, that proved they were noblemen.

If anything was ever none of my business, this was. So I refused to look back again … for all of a minute. I sighed. Winced at myself. Kept thinking
no
, even as I hauled the big, dense horse around in a yellowish spume of dust and reluctantly clumped back towards the action.

It was my nature, I reflected. At least there wasn’t a woman in it yet.

“Get moving,” I said, “you fat-assed beast.”

The first horseman was veering my way to strike the road just below the cross — what cross? The gibbet with the body? The others had spread out in a rough crescent to close him in if he tried to break left or right. Experts. Nothing like excellence in ripping and killing.

The lone rider saw me now. I assumed he’d assume I was the last nail in his coffin lid. I waved to him. He came on, crossing the road and heading into the cornfield on the other side. I closed. Cut into the forest of tall stalks. Ripening ears clunked into my shield, horse, and armor. I was just high enough to see his helmet seeming to float bounce along the tops of the crisp, bright green stalks.

“Halloo!” I called. That ought to have seemed friendly. No effect. The head bounced on in front of me. I charged on. My mount was no purse-winner in a run. On through the corn: clunk, bang, clink, swish … I heard the others behind me now. They’d hit the field still spread out. Here I was in the middle again. I had vague ideas about getting them all to parlay, to reason together. Vague stuff. I was anxious to know what the quarrel was about so I could go on with a clear conscience. Another vague idea.

The fact was, I could never turn my back. That’s why I had to retire. Sooner or later, someone would always draw me into some insane Grail-hunting scheme or equal nonsense.

The rider on the left was faster than the others. He was gradually cutting ahead. I could see his red plume flapping above the flashing, sun-shattering green. He was forcing the man ahead to veer across my path. I ran straight and cut across his arc.

So we were soon side by side. His visor was closed. He creaked his head around to study me. I was impressed that he hadn’t yet drawn. A cool fellow. Nondescript armor. No markings.

“Why do they seek your life?” I asked. As if it really mattered.

His reply was hollow, muffled by the metal that sealed his head. Your own mother wouldn’t know your voice in one of those pots.

“What?” I yelled back.

“Go suck shit, Parsival!” was the answer.

I had been about to suggest we dismount and use the cover to chew them up one at a time. Or avoid battle altogether, if possible.

On the other hand, he might have just raped or slain one of their mothers. Helping people, you see, can be two- or three-edged.

I mulled over his last suggestion. How had I managed so long without this advice? “Who are you?” I demanded.

But he angled away, closing rapidly with the lead, outside pursuer.

“You breakwind!” I yelled.

I saw the corn stalks flap and leaves fly; a flick flash of sword, crash, rip and a moment later my mount jerked, avoiding a fallen man. The shattered trail veered away again.

I reined up and dismounted. This knight was in blue and silver steel. One arm hung limp. Blood drops spattered the polish.

He groaned. The others passed wide of us, chasing in full fury. The fallen man sat up on crushed stalks. He had a lap full of corn. His horse had run off at an angle. I sighed.

Then I recognized him: the lord who held the manor next to mine. He was blinking hard, sitting up. Trying to get his legs under him. I knew how he felt.

He licked the blood from his lips. His eyes came into focus. Raging focus. “You …” he more or less snarled. Spat a gob of crimson spit.

“Parsival,” I said, helpfully. “I know you, Sir —”

“You bastard …” He struggled. Almost made it up this time. Tipped sidewise and hit with a hollow bang. I decided to wait before helping him up. “I think that’s wrong,” I told him. “I knew both my parents.” He lifted his sword; which meant almost nothing in his position.

“You … and your murderous spawn …”

“Excuse me,” I said, “but I have no quarrel with —”

I didn’t like that part about “spawn.”

“You’ll never escape with your loot.” Pure outrage got him to his knees as he tried to lever himself with his sword. The rich earth was soft here so the blade went deep as if he wounded the ground. “Your sacrilege will avail you naught …” He was cut inside the mouth.

“I don’t understand.” My whole life has been like this.

“Ahh … bastard knight, you and your sneaking son …” Wobbled to his feet, tugging the sword from the ground. A hot breeze swayed the stalks and flicked golden light and green shadow over him.

“What about my son?”

“Hah …” He raised the blade. Pathetic. Ten of him might have been a bother. “You’ve covered his escape but you’ll not —”

“What escape?” I was starting to worry. The muffled voice in the helmet had had a familiar something about it. “Was that Lohengrin?” I blurted. Even my skull can be penetrated in time.

“As though you knew it not, false neighbor,” he snarled, stabbing at me. He was still too shaken to make a full swing. I just deflected the blade but didn’t hit back.

“I knew nothing,” I told him. He’d gone to one knee again. “And I was happy in my ignorance. Good God, man, why would I perch here and justify myself when I could dispatch you with ease?”

“I don’t pretend,” he gasped, “to know your dark mind …” He was up again. “And twisted thoughts. I’m glad I don’t. My soul is at peace.”

“Why were you chasing my son?” I sighed inside myself.
My
son
… He squinched his eyes at me. I beckoned him to speak. The others had crashed out of hearing across the huge field.

“You happen here by chance, Parsival? Am I expected to believe —”

“You waste good air. Answer me straight. “

He puffed out his cheeks. The sun beat down. I was starting to broil in my suit, sitting still like this. I was irritable and tired. Consider the past week. My life was a spider’s web of madness and violent nonsense.

He puffed and reddened with fury. He had temper for brains.

“I’ll tell you this much, sir, your fine bastard offspring will be found by his stink alone, like a dung-lump in a kitchen garden.”

Between rage and hard breathing, he found enough reserve to charge me and make a fair cut for my bare head.

It was kill him or withdraw. I sighed. I couldn’t go home now. I never could go home, it seemed. I steered my horse away and left on a crest of his curses and missed slashes.

Lohengrin
, I was thinking, you silly, unhappy, wretched, rash, half-brained … You’re like … I concentrated on the simile as the bright green cornstalks flicked past, the oven-hot wind rushing past my face … like a raw sore on the tip of my prong …

“What has he done now?” I asked the heat shimmer and the horse’s nodding head. “My idiot by-blow!”