Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (2 page)

GAWAIN

Gawain and the odd monk, John of Bligh, had led the brigands, promising booty and calling it the Grail. Gawain sometimes believed the Grail might restore his ruined face – for want of something else to hope for; the men wanted plunder and women; it was never clear what John of Bligh really wanted, other than to turn the world upside down whenever he found a handle to lift it with.

Gawain had watched from his horse, visor closed over his mutilated features where a sword had chopped the left side of his face away. Watched, half-listening, while Parsival made no real answer.

Watched, as Parsival casually disarmed the one-eyed killer and cracked his head with the spearshaft. Watched and asked himself what he was doing there, feeling disgust and dull depression while Parsival tried to communicate something none of them could follow; not even himself.

In any case, Gawain knew the men-at-arms would soon have the alarm and be spilling out of the castle to save their lord. He shrugged.

What a sad, stupid business, he said to himself. Wanted to lose them all.

PARSIVAL

Parsival watched them go, turning after a moment and leaned on the spear. He looked up and saw Layla at the parapet.

I need to talk to my son, he thought.

“Are you alright, my Lord?” a young groom panted, having sprinted from the side gate, followed by half-a-dozen men-at-arms, in a straggling line, incompletely dressed and armed.

Parsival noted the sallow-faced boy whose hair fell in greasy, uneven bangs. He felt nothing one way or another, at the moment. He’d inherited these vassals and he found them a motley lot – underfed and inbred. He treated them well enough and was known as a fair, if uninvolved master. He was known as moody, a fool for women, a knight who’d lost interest in performance and battle but was too sophisticated for rustic retirement. Since he’d come home, all agreed, everyone ate better because he harried the serfs into working harder and protected their fields; and for reasons he never expressed, he’d freed them and turned them into dependent peasants. He’d been heard once to remark that man had no real property, everything was borrowed and that even his horses and mules were mere responsibility and possession of land was a jest of time. Nobody was sure what he meant and he chose not to elaborate. Layla always believed he tried to live according to some idea he had of how life should be and, as a result, there were no real feelings behind many of his actions. His son, Lohengrin, had vowed never to be like his father because he was sure Parsival took no more pleasure from his passions than from his skills.

“Am I alright?” he belatedly responded. “I have to do something… something …” he murmured again; then to the lad, “Bring me a robe, will you, sirrah?” The men had taken his clothes, naturally.

The youth, at once, stripped off his linen longshirt and handed it to Parsival who tugged his wide back and shoulders into it with some effort. It covered him to just below his butt end.

He waved up to his wife.

“Good morning, Layla,” he called, not quite loud enough for her to hear distinctly. She didn’t reply, if she’d heard.

He was now looking around, squinting his tired eyes, to see what had happened to the chunky, soft-bodied woman he’d been with last night. Just as those men had surprised him he’d been on his knees with her facing away, “driving her to market,” as the villains called it.

He wondered if she’d fled back to her husband’s bed in the guest tower and disturbed Layla. The idea amused and annoyed him. What a life.

We are all come to depravity, he thought. And it is so ordinary and dull, after all…

“Were you injured, my Lord?” asked the captain of the guard, Lego of Stillwater. He was a solid, high-shouldered, lanky, grizzled, graying fighter with a hooked nose and eyes like ruminative drops from a pond.

Parsival was still thinking about his way of life. He didn’t like what he thought.

“I intend to reform a few things,” he said.

“Did you suffer a head blow?” Lego asked, concerned. He saw no blood, however.

“What? … Ah, no.” Parsival gestured. “Changes. I mean to make changes.”

“But my Lord,” Lego was concerned, “how could we have known of your plight sooner or come a step quicker, once we did?”

“What troubles your mind, good captain? I don’t mean to change my men. Just myself, I think.”

He was heading towards the main gate which now stood open. The men moved together, more or less flanking him. He stopped just under where his wife was looking down the sheer, gritty wall.

“Layla,” he said up at her, “are you well this morrow?”

“What mischief have you just made?” she wanted to know.

He smiled. He felt fine. He was alive; sober, cleaned-out, ready to make vows.

“Where is my son?” he called up to her.

Just her head and neck showed, cut off by the smooth, weathered stones. The angle made her long face longer. Her dark, back-length hair was billowing out, riffling in the draughts.

“By St. Anne,” she called down, “and you take an interest?” She looked around in mock wonder. “This is a holy day.”

“I wonder that your tongue does not slice your lips,” he said, not loud enough for her to hear because there was no point. “A blade like that would shave a wudewasa,” which meant a wild man of the woods.

“Behold.” she was elaborating, “This is a day of marvels. I see an ox in the field driving a villain in traces.”

Parsival was paying scant attention. He pondered his faintly baffled men.

“Who has seen my son?” he asked.

No one had. His wife said something else, lost now in the background, then she withdrew from the wall.

“Mayhap,” the captain of the guard offered, “he has gone off again.”

Run from me again…He knew it was partly true. Everything’s partly true sometime or other, he quipped to himself. Then sighed.

He kept walking, using the spear like a prophet’s staff, holding his improvised tunic closed with the other hand, feeling the first twinges of a headache as the excitement wore off and his body reacted to the strain of a sleepless night and the rest of it.

“I’ll talk to him later.” he said, as if the bemused, sleepy men-at-arms really cared. They passed through the gate under the wall into the yard and he saw his son’s black charger, Firetail, being groomed at the stables. The boy hadn’t left this time, not yet, anyway.

The captain kept pace alongside him. He spat thoughtfully into a muddy wheel rut. Patches of weedy grass grew here and there on the hoof-and-foot-chewed earth. The sun was still below the wall and the air was dewy gray, the sky pale rose.

“Aye, my Lord,” he agreed, glancing back now and then as if to assure himself that the brigands who’d trapped his master had not reappeared.

“Well, Lego,” Parsival said, “Do you think me a poor father too?”

“All a man may do is try, my Lord.”

“It’s the general opinion that I’m a stinking father.”

Lego shrugged. Spat again. To their left women were dumping out old, dried and befouled leaves and branches that had been used to sweeten the castle floors.

“Ask me about a horse, my Lord, or a sword and I’ll speak out a view. Or a bird, for that matter. Or food.” He shrugged. “Ask me what I can pretend to know but not of women and children.”

The breeze shifted and they could smell food cooking. “Ask me about breakfast,” said Parsival. He aimed his bare feet carefully to miss the fragrant “meadow muffins” left by the cows.

The castle folk were starting to bustle around. Some noted his odd garb: naked except for an unbuttoned shirt that barely covered his privates. A cook’s boy snickered, pausing by the well to stare, bucket in hand… He had puffy red cheeks and oversized hands. His younger sister hopped and spun up to him.

“Mama said you’d better hurry,” she informed him.

“Plug your ugly face,” he retorted.

While she wasn’t lovely (nose too long, chin too wide) she wasn’t unattractive either.

“Plug your own with dung,” she suggested.

The boy didn’t react, still watching their lord pick his barefoot way across the ruts and muck of the shadowed yard towards the main keep.

“Look at him,” he said. “They say he’s a mad one.” She looked so-what at her brother.

“You talk like the hen about eggs,” she said.

Without a sign he suddenly lashed out with one long, skinny arm. His open hand just missed her head. She ducked back and stuck out her tongue.

“I’ll crown ya,” he said, “Lady Dungface.”

Lego glanced at the children and then away. He was uncomfortable. Parsival always made him uncomfortable. He never knew what to expect.

“Contrary to the general opinion about me, I won’t dispute with my betters,” Lego declared.

“Your lord isn’t necessarily your better, captain. We all bleed the same red.”

Lego responded carefully.

“I hope you’re not about to preach a rebellion of dung-squeezers, my Lord.”

Parsival grinned.

“Any minute,” he said.

He said nothing more because his son had just come out of the main door, looking at his father without expression. His hair was jet black and tight curly. His nose was a fine hook, a falcon’s beak, those who liked him said.

Contrary to common gossip around Ville and castle, Lohengrin had friends. He was proud, sarcastic and moody and could be mean but (his likers said) he was clever, brave, skillful and loyal, in his fashion. His father had once declared that his son’s emotions ranged from surly to furious.

I swear but he has the face of a passing Jew peddler, thought Lego, half in jest.

In truth, though he had no serious doubts about his parentage, Parsival sensed that the lad’s looks added to the distance between them.

“You think what you do doesn’t matter,” Lohengrin said.

“This is your good morning? Don’t you say: ‘I’m pleased you escaped with your life, father?” said Parsival. He instantly regretted it because the response was automatic. He knew he had to be more patient but they instantly slipped into their familiar roles.

“Good morning? I only get to say farewell to you, father. Was your life in question?”

He watched him, dark eyes showing nothing. Parsival sighed. “How old are you now?” he asked.

“Know you not?”

Parsival heard Lego mutter something under his breath.

“What am I, a calendar? You are of age to bear arms.” Parsival said. That was fourteen.

“But not to bear my life.” the boy said.

“As I was. Bah,” he said. “Mine were not footsteps to follow but a track to miss.” He shrugged and sighed. “Bear what you may.”

“You are a great knight, lord.” Said Lego, stolid, sullen. “All men know it.”

“And how as a father?” inquired the hawk-nosed son. He finally had Parsival angry. It usually came to that.

“You task me too far,” he said. “I want to bring peace between us, Lohengrin. I want to help you become a full man.”

“Like you? Full of what?”

Lego cleared his throat. He would have liked to have struck the youngster. He thought about what he would do if he were Parsival.

The parent tried, he went to his son, up the four stone steps. Lego hoped to witness a round blow box to the arrogant child. He was surprised to see his lord, in his odd outfit, take strong young Lohengrin by the shoulders and just hold him. He thought of the biblical story of King David and his son Absalom. The local priest had worked over the tale a few weeks ago. He recalled being strangely moved, almost to tears by the words spoken when the unhappy king of the Hebrews faced the messenger from the battlefield where his furious and rebellious son was trying to overthrow his own father. The messenger gave him the worst news a parent can ever dread and: “When David heard that Absalom was slain he went to his chamber and wept. And thus he said: “Absalom my son would God I had died for thee.”

“I have much to repent of as a father and husband,” the knight was telling his child. “Pray you allow me to do so.”

Lohengrin started to reply and then didn’t. That was new. He was actually surprised. He didn’t pull away from those almost delicate, hard, well-shaped hands that could have practically twisted the head off a bull.

Parsival had no more to say. He stared into Lohengrin’s eyes, wondering how to express to him the strange truth he’d just been touched by. Lego sighed a deep breath.

Parsival had done Lego a service in the wake of a minor battle between King Arthur and some rebellious Baron. Parsival was looking for any of his wounded or dead they might have missed. Dusk was coming on as if it flowed subtly from the rills and stones and sparse, harsh highland trees themselves. He heard shouts and a clank of arms nearby.

He’d been crossing a stony, smooth hilltop. Down in the shallow valley a row of huts smoldered, the dark smoke streaking the warm dusk. He could see the baron’s castle set well up the far hill-slope. That lord and what was left of his forces were sealed inside, repairing themselves and eating bitter bread and turnips, hoping there would be no siege. The fields beyond the huts were littered with their dead.

Parsival had followed the sounds over the reverse slope and found a posse of some of Arthur’s hired men-at-arms (the sort who blurred the boundaries of banditry) had trapped and disarmed a man who’d been wounded in the thigh and deserted by his companions. They’d looped a rope around one armored ankle and were having sport dragging him over the rocky ground.

Parsival hadn’t approved. He was able to accept his way of life only by being as fair and decent as possible. He was always bothered by the memory of times when he had showed no mercy.

“Every time a man is cruel,” he liked to say, “it leaves a dead spot in his soul.”

Like a callus that can never be smoothed from the skin. So he shouted:

“Hold, you base oafs!” He cantered into the thick of them. “If a man be down let him lie, by Christ.”

The soldiers had scattered like schoolboys caught at a prank. At a little distance two had paused and turned around.

“Knight,” one cried, a potbellied man in ragged leathers, “Why do you help an enemy?”