Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (32 page)

LOHENGRIN

Having spent himself inside her, he withdrew and rolled aside onto his back mere moments after Hal had leaped past. He felt that good flow relaxing from deep within himself.

Jane, not finished, rolled back into him, clamping her thighs around his near knee and began rocking, squeezing, gasping.

He peered around, uneasy, wondering who or what had plunged past them.

This is all fine, he thought, but I can’t linger among these weird idiots… Should I bring her? Have to find Henry and soothe him… Smiled, remembering the mad struggle over her. His face still throbbed where he’d been hit. Looked down at her rubbing on his leg. Felt nothing in particular. Wondered, vaguely, why it was taking her so long. Remembered other females he’d been with. Drew no conclusions; then, suddenly, a mental image of the red-haired witch woman who’d held him in some kind of thrall.

No, he thought, violently, that was a dream… I was poisoned… Sex that went on and on in a dimness that existed without day or night… no true sleep or waking…

Stared around at the gray air.

“Are things well with you?” he asked Jane.

She sighed. Leaned up and kissed him fiercely. When she was done, he said:

“I think you should fuck poor Hal.”

“Hn?” she responded, dreamily.

“Poor fellow, he’s altogether in love with you.”

“Who? In love?”

“Hal. Your defender.”

She looked at him, blinked. “I should what?”

He grinned, scratching his head, the tight, jet-black curls. “What you will,” he said. “Do you like him?”

She climbed up over him, face inches away.

“I love you,” she told him, again. Her breath was warm, silky, scented with sex and the crisped fat from their meal. He liked it. “Am I a slut in an inn? I love you.”

“You keep telling me that,” he said, getting ready to get up.

“And you feel nothing?”

“Nothing?” he reacted, puzzled. “Nay, Jane, I feel many things. I feel you here. The sand. The foul fog upon me.”

She studied him, inches from his curved nose that would have suited a Persian lord.

“I see,” she said. “But not love.”

MIMUJIN

He was furious: the girl had slipped away during the night. When he woke up there was nothing but fog, closed in, it seemed, inches from his nose.

She follow horse tracks and I cannot see her… Contemplated setting a trap. Bah, let her follow…

Then on the kind of impulse he was famed for he suddenly spun around and charged back along the trail, thick, wet fog cloying around him.

The hoofprints were clear on the softened earth. He backtracked at a sprint for about fifty yards. No sign of her. Stopped, stood still as stone. Watched and sniffed the air for her perfumed scent. “Where you hide?” he raged. “Foul witch!” Drew his curved sword, in frustration, and slashed at the dull grayness. “I kill and eat you heart!”

By noon he could hear and smell seawater; kept halting to listen; no sign she was behind him. He could tell by the tracks he was gaining on the two riders, now following the same gradually descending cliffline that Parsival and Lego had ridden down to the beach where they’d met the Vikings.

MORGANA

She still stood at the water’s edge, hair and robe whipping in the freshening seawind. Two assistants stood with her. One was short, pretty, round-faced and strong in a tunic-like outfit; the other silver-haired, long and lean with a face like an axehead.

“Feel the wind, old mother?” asked Morgana.

“Yes, sweet one.”

“Where we go,” Morgana went on, as she cocked her head, “magic will bounce back on the user.”

“Do we now take ship?” asked the round-faced girl.

“No, sweet sister,” answered the sorceress. “A distance north we shall cross the sea and never leave the land.”

HAL

Walking now, somewhere out in the damp silence of a field without bush or tree, following the turgid waterflow upstream along the mucky stream’s edge.

All he could see, eyes open or shut, was roiling mist reflected in the water’s dull surface and, in the mist, her pale, sweetly shaped bare legs pumping over Lohengrin’s broad back as he plowed into her to take his pleasure…

Eventually he just stopped, sat down and let himself be miserable. Sat in a tent of mist. Started talking to himself about what had happened. He didn’t realize he was thinking out loud.

“She’s not of any quality,” he said, “to allow herself like that …” The image of being in Lohengrin’s place made it worse. “Disgusting!” he yelled.

LAYLA

Except she wasn’t going north anymore. In the mist, the tilts of the ground had sent her into a wide, vague circle. She heard something off to her left… listened… blurred and muffled… a man’s voice raised almost to a shout. No answering words.

She let herself drift that way. Even the company of yet another madman might improve on utter solitude. Maybe he could tell directions.

A shout, then silence when she was pretty close. Maybe he was dangerous? She stopped, listened. Heard sobbing. Followed the tears, the broken voice…

JOHN

Was slowing, suddenly up to his knees in gathering waves and realizing he was too far out.

“Cursed bitch!” he croaked in fury and fear. It hurt his throat.

Stopped. Looked around. Panic stirred. The universal clinging chill mist flowed over him and ten feet of visibility was a lot.

Which way? Which way? Which way? his mind asked. “Where it’s shallow,” he muttered.

Suddenly he wasn’t concerned with the follower or the cause; just wanted to get back. He normally didn’t dwell on things past because he’d disciplined himself to think only of the world to come as if imagination itself would solidify his dreams. He wanted to train his followers to forget all that had been. Plough it under. He’d wondered if the witch might know herbs to empty their memories so they could be taught like infants. He’d shared some of his ideas with Gawain who barely resisted cutting off his head to still his mouth.

He knew many thought him mad but (he’d decided) even madness belonged to yesterday with no assurance yesterday’s lunatic would remain insane tomorrow.

Still, now, he found pictures from the past coming back… he minced carefully along and tried not to see the images his mind painted on the roiling grayness… Long, long ago, barely out of childhood he saw, again, the bower of yellow and blue flowers and herbs and red berrybushes that his mother had doted on… a sunny morning… his father, the Duke, in his favorite, velvet-cushioned chair the servants had carried out from the castle, his younger sister looking pale and troubled, standing a little apart… his father shaking his head…

He was always like that, he thought, angry as well as scared, now. As deaf to truth as all these doomed fools…

Except doom had closed around him, chill gray and impenetrable.

The scene was vivid and he couldn’t push it away: his father toyed with his pointy beard while John yelled and kicked the earth. His sister was in love with some silly boy knight who’d arrived the day before. Young Layla was always in love with someone. He was a priest, then. He’d predicted she’d turn out a whore. At that time he’d just come to believe that all the dogmas of the church needed to be ploughed under by a free peasantry. He’d left home after this argument so he never learned that her lover had been 16-year-old Parsival on his opening adventure…

“I have heard all the arguments. When have I stinted on saint’s days?” his father had rhetorically asked. John hadn’t really listened. His sister was standing under a trellised arch, sagging with roses. She was still, pale and lean, watching them. His father kept talking. “… my serfs are content. Should the mule drive the farmer to market?” He sipped wine from a goblet, staining his white beard. A hovering page dabbed at it with a napkin.

His father said more; his intense son barely followed it, though his tongue found answers enough. He kept watching Layla whom he rarely saw. They argued on; he kept looking at her as if the rich light and shadow had revealed something he couldn’t frame in words but sensed as dark, lost, tragic…

All this in a flash of memory… remembered leaving the castle, storming down the road furious, shouting, tearing his vestments off and tossing them into the fields, cursing family, nobility, the Church, stripping down to his loincloth, shouting to man and God that he would find a sword of flame and carve the world into a new shape…

“Gladius Dei, super terram,” he’d cried. Sword of God over the earth. As if he were still fleeing he plunged ahead and was suddenly over his head and swimming. “Ahiii!” he screamed. Flailed the water. He was a rotten swimmer. The tide and undertow had him. He was going out to sea. He was, as a Viking might say, on his way to the kingdom of the fish…

LOHENGRIN

He stood up. He felt good, looking down at Jane who adjusted herself and followed suit. He sensed she believed she was bound to him now. He felt a kind of unaccustomed tenderness but, then, the boy loved horses, dogs, and falcons.

“Let’s not go to the stupid ships and dim idiots,” he declared. “Let’s go somewhere else.”

“Where?”

He wet his finger and held it in the air.

“As the wind blows,” he told her. “I will get back to my map.” Rolled his head around, stretching.

“You have a map? Of what, dear one?”

He smiled at the “dear one.” Sort of liked it. “My father once found a great treasure. Lost it, of course. I mean to find and keep it both.” Shrugged, facing the wind that was steady from the sea, now, streaming the heavy mist past as if they were moving forward into the future’s inscrutable gray. “I set out with Henry but we got blown off course.” Shrugged. “Come,” he said, holding out his hand. “Dear.” Grinned. He was thinking about having sex with her, again. Later… then the next day. Maybe that was love.

“The way the wind blows,” she said. Looked at her face and liked it.

“Let’s find poor Hal. Kiss and make him smile. Better yet, feed him and his gut will digest his heart.”

PARSIVAL

Fat, heavy wet snowflakes were slapping into his face as he woke from a doze-dream of a flat, bright-green field with a golden tent in the middle that he kept running for but couldn’t reach as the shimmering silk pavilion seemed to shrink and recede.

He sputtered and wiped his eyes. The helmsman was still braced into the tiller. The flames in the sconces hissed and stuttered; the sail rattled and creaked. The Viking Briton was crosslegged on a bench, drinking from an asymmetrical cup.

“Snow?” Parsival called over. “In summer?”

“Hah,” uttered the stonehard-looking Berserker. “Do ya fancy we be runnin’ south to land of monkey-trees an dark women?”

“Where then, fellow?” Gralgrim shrugged.

“We follow your course, Briton.” He spat with the wind, braced against the vessel’s roll and pounding.

Suddenly the longship heeled violently as a massive gust punched them hard from dead astern. The ship ploughed forward, up and over, suddenly riding following waves.

“Ho,” cried the Viking, “Thor’s wind! The god’s favor.”

Lego rolled his starey, lost eyes, clutching the thwart. “Favor?” he wondered, raged. “Favor?”

Parsival braced himself as the hull vibrated and they slid, accelerated. The crew was already struggling to get the oars in the water and shorten sail: the mast creaked, cloth crackled… they scudded, faster and faster. The wind was an immense, throbbing roar.

Parsival shouted to Gralgrim the Berserker from about a foot away. “The favor increases!”

The Viking twisted around. “Un?’ he wondered.

A cresting wave, almost mast-high, curled over the stern, instantly flooding the deck. The ship pitched wildly. Men shouted and tumbled. Parse easily held on the side with just one of his abnormally strong hands. The ill Lego yelled:

“Is this an adventure, lord?”

“No,” he shouted back. “A disaster.”

The oarsmen struggled to find a rhythm; the next wave slammed over them. Parse hung from the uptipped side, then went under the cold thick water as they violently dipped. A cow went past, rolling, eyes popping, silent, over into the pounding greenish darkness, followed by bales of hay, broken wood, a Norse helmet… then they righted again and the rowers got a little purchase; managed to hang on the crest of a mountain-wave, surfing forward, barely rocking now.

Lego crept up and huddled beside his lord, shivering as they rushed through a strange silence… a steady roaring that sucked away all other sound into a dreamlike hush…

MORGANA

They hurried north up the coastline, fog swirling and drawing around as the wind at their backs shoved them unevenly forward. Morgana led them, enjoying the cooling wild air, the scything, scattered bursts of rain.

They followed a Roman road which ended, suddenly, at a man-high stone wall. They rode beside along it towards the Channel Sea. It abruptly ended in a crumble of bricks and they continued north within sound of the waves, now. The fog had finally blown to shreds in the shifting, slanting, weakening rainfall.

“Ride the wind,” she called back to them. “Fear it not!”

She had no ideas, now, no memories, an emptiness gazing out from herself so that the force and power of the wind filled her and she was floating on it. She let herself fly forward. That was the power of her power. She didn’t want sex, love, wealth, or worldly pomp. Only, maybe, Merlinus understood her need.

So she flew forward, ahead of herself and her horse the way you might in a dream and looked at her destination: a roughly heart-shaped island surrounded by surf that heaved chunks of ice onto a grim, gritty beach… at the same time she was rocking, gusting forward on the horse…

If you’re there, Merlin, she said to herself, you’ll not block me…