Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (34 page)

LAYLA

The voice had stopped talking or crying or whatever so she paused to listen. Near her a single, twisted tree vaguely seemed to form and un-form as the mist wavered. Seemingly far away, directionless, she heard the muffled drumming of many hooves… or, maybe not…

“Most strange.”

Am I dead, her mind asked. This seems no natural world… the land of ghosts… yet seem I solid… why dread death except to meet again, mayhap, the oafs and fools who plagued me while I lived…

She walked, again, heading towards the scraggly trees, thinking about going to her cousin’s in the midlands so if the baby proved real she might have and leave it there… ideas floated like mist…

“What an existence,” she murmured.

Unless I’m dead, then, what a death…

She was hungry again. That could be the baby, alone. She didn’t want to think. Layla never could help thinking too much about almost everything which (her mother once told her) made her need to drown things out. Which was why she liked honey wine so much, she supposed. She always kept a jug in her chamber and found reason to go there, from time-to-time, during the day. She told herself it was but the sweetness of it. Well, she wished she had some, now. The bitter ale of the Pilgrims of the map had been pretty unsatisfactory.

Now there was a voice, to her right. Stopped again. Maybe the little killers were upon her or survivors of the Map People. She wasn’t sure which would be worse.

“Jane?” asked a male voice, closer, familiar. “Hullo? Be it Jane, I …”

“Greasy Jane from the kitchen?” wondered Layla. She knew the accent, close to her own. “Are you greasy Jack?”

Taking shape out of the wet smoke was Hal, wide face unnaturally pale and apprehensive. She recognized him at once except his normal ruddiness seemed faded.

“My lady,” he said, amazed.

“I am relieved to meet a ghost I know, young Hal. But it worries me there may be more about.”

“Ghosts? Think you I am a ghost, my lady?”

“What else, out here in nothingness?” So like my life since I were wedded, she thought, automatically.

“I know not. Maybe we had come near each other. In any case, do ghosts hunger?”

“Well reasoned. It is said they suffer divers miseries.”

“Do you have aught to eat, my lady?”

“I have ought,” she informed him. “Where is my son? Is he among the vaporous souls?”

“Well,” Hal allowed, sullenly, “I know not.”

“A quarrel?”

“Well,” he replied, shrugging heavily.

He seems changed… still dull, yet… a spark of something… time with my son could change anyone, I suppose…

“Is he safe?’

“In the arms of a fair maid,” Hal muttered. “If that be safe.”

Ah, she thought. “A maid, say you?”

“Well, not so much a maid as I was raised to suppose.”

“My son was raised, yet how he lowers himself.” Play what tune you like, she thought, the dancer finds his own steps…

“I’m very hungry,” he said. “Which way do we go?”

“First, in my sack, take something to eat.” She held it out. “Then we follow the straight road before us.”

“I see no road,” he pointed out, rooting in the bag.

“No surprise.”

“You say things like your son says,” he observed, chewing hard bread.

“Then pity one of us,” she told him, starting to walk into the curtain of undulant blankness. “Come along, young Hal. We wander in nowhere, as my husband loves to do. You see, as someone said, long ago, you become the thing you dread and dislike, sooner or later.”

GAWAIN AND THE LADY IN THE MASK

Gawain just sat there, as the impossibly dense gray flowed past. He reckoned they were heading southwest. He didn’t know that the weather had cleared due west where Lohengrin and Jane headed.

“Do I get a reward for my adventure with you?” he suddenly wondered.

“Still you seek to top me?” she asked amused.

“Umh,” he shrugged, verbally.

“Follow me and you may find a fair countenance, again.”

“Another Grail to heal me.” Smiled in his hood. “If I’m made fair why I’ll return to darkness and you need never dread my love-longing.”

“You came from darkness? Well, the womb is dark enough.”

“Nay. I lost my darkness. I loved my darkness. I could not return to her. I’m a tragic fellow. Sometimes I grind my teeth in rage. Teeth that are ever bared. My emblem.”

“You amuse yourself, at least.”

He was suddenly distant and bored with it all. He didn’t want to think about Shinqua. I need to be drunk, he thought. Been too long…

“Have you wine about you?” he wondered. “Share it and I’ll show you how I drink through the side of my face.”

She took this in.

“I have none,” she told him. “Yet be patient. Theirs is a liquor that heals.”

“Dull talk enough,” he muttered in disgust.

He decided the fog would have to lift, sometime. Back to the manor where she still lived. He was disguised. He would look at her, once more. Just look. Look at her children to see if one in some strange stripe or shade resembled him. He’d watch the way a ghost (which he believed he was) might return for a final moment and incommunicate farewell.

And then he’d make his way back to the coastal town and see if the innkeeper’s wife would reopen her door and arms and legs, too. More than wine to get him to sleep at night was unnecessary. He felt less crazed.

Still, he thought, there’s no telling if I won’t be mad again tomorrow…

Just then he felt contained, without heat or self-pity. Rocked easily with the horse’s gait, stretching good arm up and out to ease a crick in his shoulder.

Ride into nothingness without even hope to trouble me… beside a female who might have a dagger-blade between her legs where the sweet gate ought to be… stick it in her and I’d likely come out with a split prong to match my halved face…

He didn’t quite laugh aloud. Into nothingness, a ghost without dream of future joys and conquests, like someone in the lengthening shadows of old age, no longer staring at far horizons he’d never reach… just eating, sleeping, aches and pains draining away into the inevitable, looming oblivion…

“Small wonder men seek the Grail,” he said, feeling very deep and almost spiritual. He felt close to understanding some mystery: things that had troubled him little enough in the past.

Her voice seemed directionless, blurred by the dense atmosphere. “Small wonder,” she agreed. “Soon you may be changed and the world will mean nothing. No false questing. There will be no more world for you.”

He grinned with the half of him that could.

“Small wonder,” he responded. “So tell the featherless hawk he’s done hunting.” Shifted his rear around to relieve a pinch. “Who do you truly serve, lady?”

“I’ll bring you there, to him,” she promised. “This day’s ride.”

“I’m surprised you serve a mere man.”

“More than a man. And you are fit to meet him and pledge thyself.”

“I doubt it.” Spat neatly out of the good side of his mouth, missing the cowl. “Have you really no jug? I thirst.”

She rummaged in her slung bag and handed one over. He unstopped it and eagerly drank. Then nearly spit again.

“I’ve slain folk for less,” he told her.

“We need water on a long ride,” she said.

“Water is fit for fish. I’ll suck mine from this cloying air.” She liked that. Returned to her point.

“You are well-seasoned,” she said. “Sad and bitter enough to pledge to the true king. We go to his fortress. Enter and come out a dark god.”

He chuckled, amused again.

“Every direction you take leads to madness,” he concluded. “If we went south I ween you show me the trees that blossom into cooked meat.” Laughed. “What say these journeys about poor Britain?”

LOHENGRIN – QUO VADIS

“Which way?” Jane asked, alongside him on her spare, bony mount.

Lohengrin watched the mist fold and unfold as they moved on at a walk. “Some way,” he said. He was sure from the vague sunglow diffused behind them, that they were heading inland again.

“What does your map say?”

“No more maps. I follow what my mind’s eye sees.”

“Bare ladies and great glory?” she wondered archly.

“Nay,” he corrected. “Power.” He smiled. She was looking at his hawk profile, dark and sullen against the ghostly backdrop. Her lips said: I love you, silently. She believed there was something hidden in him, locked behind the casual gate of his personality, young cynicism and edge of cool violence. She believed she could touch and warm him and, maybe, dull the edge of his gnawing fury.

He hath curly hair like a Moor, she noted. Mayhap the dark blood runs in him…

She imagined strange, blindingly hot tropic places where queer trees (she’d seen pictures in a copy of the gospels showing Adam and Eve in the garden) and amazing beasts where wild, dark peoples loved and hated with terrifying passion…

She wanted to stop again and open her soft places to him, take his keen edge into herself. “It’s foolish,” she almost murmured, “to ride now. We needs must wait for this fell smoke to lift.

He smiled, slightly.

“Sweet one,” he replied, “I imagine to myself that suppose it never does. That the world has forever changed. Now we are all creatures of the mist and so must learn, like babes, the ways of a new world.”

“As in a dreaming,” she said, impressed. “You thought this?”

“It’s easy to invent with the mind,” he told her. “Doing is harder. My father grows forests of nonsense from seeds of idle talk.”

“Well, that knight has great fame, my love.”

He slit his eyes as if seeing through the obscurity. “I’ll find in fact what he’ll find in fancy,” he said.

MORGANA ET AL

Now the mists of the land had flowed to meld with the fogs from the breaking, chill sea that, wind-wracked, crashed into the rocky northern coastline where no ship could beach or launch. The setting sun was a vague, rosy staining in the western blur.

At the end of what had to be a spit of land jutting way, way out into the North Atlantic, the party waited, even her restive son silent and still for the moment.

“We wait,” Morgana said, “for my poison fang. He hath been well-sharpened.”

The faded dark red went blue-black and then the vague, blurred silver where the unseen, nearly full moon rose opposite, hinted its glow into the mist.

“What of the little killers, my queen?” a half-masked woman asked.

“I have set them loose,” was the reply. “They are a drop of poison in the tub of milk. “Soon all will curdle.” She gestured one delicate, pale hand. “Terror will spread and when we return we will gather all these lands to ourselves.” Looked up. “Ah, the fang comes.”

Because the mist stirred the masked handmaiden shuddered a little, imagining she-knew-not-what hellish manifestation; except it was the small, lean, furious Mimujin on his shaggy pony trotting dourly out of the wall of faintly luminescent fog.

He reined up, eyes slit. Morgana gestured, all but her hand perfectly still on the motionless, pale horse, black robe seeming to gather the darkness into her so that everything else seemed slightly brighter.

“Your revenge,” she told him, “is over this bridge. We will cross together.”

“Bridge?” he wondered, fierce, abstractly desperate, tensed for a final (if futile) explosive effort to slash her throat.

“Come,” she commanded, turning her mount and starting along the narrow strand of rocky land that went out and disappeared into the wind-ripped shrouding at right angles to the coastline where surf crumbled unseen and massive.

JOHN

Flailing the chill water, near the end of his strength, a shadow loomed over him like a wall. A ship. He shouted, beat the water, found his natural voice though each cry hurt:

“Here! Down here! This is a sign! I am saved! Triumph is at hand!” Gasping, he forgot to paddle in his excitement and his head ducked under in a welter of sputtering. Resurfaced, sputtering yells, this time.

A long, pale, gap-toothed face (that resembled a chewed joint of beef) peered down.

“Pull me aboard!” John cried up at the face.

“It’s himself,” said the face. “What yer doin’ down there, then?”

“A rope, you dolt!”

Another face, now, round and red. “Drownin’,” it opined, squint- eyed.

“Fools!”

“Eh?” responded joint-face.

“Help me …” Now bubbling and blowing as the ship-side drifted slowly past.

“If we haul him up,” said red-round-face, “he’ll go to makin’ speeches again.”

“Ah, that’s so,” said the other.

Next a woman peered down at the pale, frantic face in the dark water that kept going under as the hands gesticulated, the mouth yelling bubbles as it resurfaced.

“Yuh follered him this far,” she pointed out.

“Aye,” said, Round-face, “an see where we come.”

Silence. John was just splashing, now, trying to keep pace with the drifting ship. Then a rope came looping down; he caught it, desperately clutched. The faces withdrew as if enough had now been done.

So he was dragged alone, unable to climb to the high deck of the ponderous, top-heavy craft that resembled a kind of floating castle. Wood creaked and popped and groaned. There was no direction visible, ghostly hints of other aimless ships all around as he trailed near the stern at the end of the rope… soft splashes, voices of pilgrims and lookouts called and shouted, unseen… insubstantial… shades in some aquatic limbo…