Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (33 page)

MIMUJIN

There were too many tracks: hoofprints, footprints, as if a small army had passed. The fog was so dense he had no idea of direction. Instead of blundering on, he stopped and watched the diffuse, graying glow that showed where the sun was arcing south and west. He waited for it to move a few degrees, to be sure, then pointed his pony almost dead east. He rode until the two tracks he wanted separated out.

Grunted with satisfaction. He’d calculated well.

Finding you I will, he said to himself. Finding you soon…

He was riding, steadily, nodding in semi-doze, imagining a sweet scene: Parsival and Lego nailed side-by-side, upside down, to a tree while Mimujin, with a dull, notched knife stripped off their skin, reveling in the unspeakable pain, urinating in their contorted, swollen faces… roasting the bloody strips of flesh and sucking on the crispy treats…

He dreamt of these and other delights the way a lover might dwell on the sweet sights and scents of passion.

About then the aberrant wind from the south (that was driving the Viking ships madly north and pushing Morgana and her party up the coastline) hit him so hard he nearly went over his mount’s shoulder. The gray vapor billowed wildly and seemed semi-solid.

He was instantly driven at right angles to his course and tried to force his pony to tack back except the terrified beast backed and charged along with the gale. Sticks and bits of vegetation flashed by, appearing and disappearing in the fog mass.

“Witch work,” he snarled, kicking hard. “Foul betrayer.”

PARSIVAL

The longship was finished, caught from behind by a tremendous sea, it pitchpoled, bow going under, the weight of the wave shoving the stern up and over, spilling everything and everyone on board into the freezing, wild water.

As Parsival went in, he was holding both Lego and Gralgrim the Viking by their respective leather collars. In a survival reflex he clutched them as if they were buoyant, and saved both without realizing it because he kicked up the back of a monster wave, just starting to feel the actual artic shock as they sledded down the face like surf- riders… rushing on… then, suddenly, in a welter of ice… suddenly out of the fog, there was a beach of dark, stony sand and they slammed into it as the surf crumbled, rolling, gasping, blinded…

He kept his grip and started dragging them both up the raspy beach, falling, twisting … going under… ice chopping into them…

They staggered out of the undertow as the waves drained back. Parsival dragged Lego clear and got well up the gritty, dark, ice-flecked sand until they dropped, gasping and shivering…

This could be the place I saw, he thought.

Lego was shaking hard, gagging seawater, cut and bruised from the harsh shore.

“Hah,” he gasped. “The damn land is rocking… by Saint Paul’s piles… unnn… nothing left to puke up …”

“He has,” said Parsival, indicating Gralgrim who was on his hands and knees, shadowy in the billowing mist, coughing and vomiting. They all were shivering violently.

Stay here and we die, the knight thought, getting up.

“Fire and shelter,” he said, over the wind and surfsmashing. Kicked Gralgrim lightly on his butt end as they passed him. “Follow along, mighty master of the sea. I think we’ve come to Viking heaven.”

SHINQUA

The second night away they had been camped in a dell under a dulled moon that hung, nearly full, above the fog. The heavy air barely stirred. The fire was dim and smoky a vague glow on the forest floor beside the road.

He shifted himself closer to her. “Shinqua, I must go back.”

“Leave me here?” She’d been waiting for something like this. “What manner of man does that?”

“A man with duties… at the manor… A man with …”

He drank in her face from closer, now, in the subtle, almost sourceless gleaming, those smooth, rounded matchless features. She could feel him react, the catch in his breath. She thought his pale, bony face improved in the gentle blurriness.

She was back against a tree bole. Raised one bare foot and ran it along his cheek and neck. He stayed very still. He might have been breathing.

“Duties?” she wondered, softly. “Really? Duties?” He didn’t move at all, saying:

“I am not some knight free to ride here and there.” Her toes nibbled, a little at his ear.

“You are a responsible fellow,” she agreed. “I am a poor, unfortunate woman from a far land.”

He cleared his throat, staying very still.

“Well,” he began. “I am no brainless knight… I …”

She brushed his cheek, again. He lightly rested his fingers on her instep. “Come a little way more with me,” she suggested.

“Ah… I …”

“Yes?”

Held her ankle and knelt himself forward between her legs in the loose dress that had fallen away from her long, amazing thighs. He seemed giddy, gasped and fumbled with his codpiece, almost trembling with welling need. “Sweet creature,” he almost gasped.

“Sweet dark magic,” she amended, not resisting. “So I am told. Duty has you in its grip, seemingly.”

“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 scrape 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…