Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon (38 page)

GAWAIN

The mists stayed thin above the stream so that the stars and slim, rising moon were blurred but visible and now shone in the relatively unruffled watersurface. So, as he went past the cart on the soft wet grass, he saw her outlined against the faint luminescence of the stream and the moment she moved her long, graceful arm to touch her hair and shook back her head he knew it was she and his heart and stomach clenched as if in fear.

He stopped at the end of the subtly shifting, cold smoke and watched from under his hood. The droning night bugs were soothing. The air was damp and rich and sweet. He wanted to leave and stay… call her name… flee… wanted…

“Ahhhh,” he apparently voiced in his confusion because she turned, quick and fluid, long-fingered hands each holding a dagger, glinting the muted moonlight.

He was pleased. Smiled, feeling the stiff stretching where his lip edge had been sliced away.

“How beautiful you are,” came out of him, “even but half seen.”

“Keep your distance, brigand,” she suggested.

“Have I not?”

She was a blotted silhouette. Only the twin blades showed.

“I know the ways of weapons, fellow,” she told him, crouching slightly.

“Well I know it,” he replied. “As I am armored, all you need do is slip into the water and I cannot follow.”

“You school me, fellow?

“Again, my lady moor.”

The knives went away as she came closer.

“You,” she said, not even shocked yet. “How can this be?”

He could now make out hints of her soft features. With only one eye he strained less to see in poor light. Then her scent overlaid with the sweat and grubbiness of her recent exertions, seemed somehow sweeter, catching in his throat and heart so that (by the time she was looking up into his face) his impulse to remount and ride had no more force than a tendril of mist.

He twisted his head, keeping his undamaged side towards her, holding a futile but wonderful moment of normalcy.

“Gawain?” her long supple, strong hands closed on both his mailed arms. “You… never came back.” He sort of groaned, as she went on: “I set out to find you when I learned you were not dead.” It was hitting her now.

“Well… I came back… I …”

“Now, sir? Now?” She shook his mailed arms, slightly. “Now, sir?”

“Ah. I could not, before.” He didn’t look at her, face twisted away.

“Were you held captive? Imprisoned in some dread dungeon?”

“Indeed, indeed. In the terrible cell of my head. And there is no hope of parole.”

“Cozening riddles?” She pushed his hood aside. He winced. She touched his face, across his cheek… lips. As her fingers moved he caught her wrist. “Will you not look at me, sir?”

“I came back to see –”

“See?”

“Not be seen.”

“Not be seen.”

He held her away, a little. It wasn’t easy. “Please, Shinqua …”

“So am I called.”

“I love you. More than before. As if I’d never had you at all.” That was better.

“Why speak so brokenly, Gawain? Am I not here? How many nights did I wait and wonder. How many times …”

He almost shook her.

“You know nothing!” he cried. The arm with the wooden hand locked behind her long back. “This moment is more… is more than… Yes, even my speech is broken in halves. I am half a knight in half a world and can but half have you… I have half a love, yet how I burn with it! I, who never needed words now eat and drink them! I live on their empty sound. I, Gawain, who did such… such deeds as… as …”

He was weeping as he clutched her. She felt his agony and shuddered with it.

“Oh sad knight,” she whispered into his neck, pressing the ripe fullness of her lips there, above the harsh metal of his armor. She could feel his desperation and her own. “What, my poor love? O, kiss me! I beg it.”

“Kiss you,” he almost shouted, crushing her into his iron skin until she sighed with pain but made no complaint. Her head was prisoned under his chin. “Kiss you?” he murmured, this time. His breath heaved as if he’d run a mile. “Fare thee most well, my dark jewel… my love, my pain, my heart, my hope …” Holding her harder she gasped with pain and pressure. “Lost forever… kiss you? Were I more than half a man with more than half a mouth, how I might kiss you, then. My heart the only thing left whole and with all that heart, I love thee, from beyond death’s utter night! I love thee… out of all this I cry to thee, from hell and fog and ruined earth. But kiss thee I cannot.”

“What words you find.”

“That gain me nothing.” And he almost hurled her away so that she staggered back and went down on the loamy riverbank, almost disappearing into the shadows from where she called back, with broken breath:

“We have a son!” She just crouched there. “But what, poor Gawain? What?”

“I cannot kiss thee,” he said, cried. “Nor may I show myself to him.” He backed away, starting to melt into the fog. “I live in mists and nothingness.”

He drew his sword and slashed at the blurred, dimly gleaming, empty almost-shapes around him.

“Oh, Gawain,” she said, not loud.

“I cannot kiss thee,” he repeated, almost shouted. “I cannot.”

LOHENGRIN

“Bad meat?” he asked Hal, who replied:

“Since we ate I’ve had fire in my belly and sour burpings.” He opened and closed his hands, expressively. Obviously, he was letting the past quarrel go, in light of present troubles. “I once was up all night,” he went on, warming to his subject, “spewing loose, stinking liquids from both ends. Bad –”

“Enough,” said Lohengrin, grinning, despite himself. “Far more than enough.” He went near the fire, half-consciously drawn to the warmth and cheer.

“I merely state the facts,” concluded the young squire.

Lohengrin stared into the flames. Wanted Jane to come in and warm up. He was almost amazed by how troubled he was.

“My mother …” Shook his head. “Jane… ill.” Rubbed one finger down the length of his beaked nose. Turned and went back outside.

He stood with the light at his back in the deep obscurity and cool rain. Saw nothing much. “Mother! Jane!” he called out. For some reason he felt a sinking, cold within as if belly and heart were chilled.

There was a stifled, gagging sound towards the well.

What a plague caring is, he thought. Hal was behind him.

“Lohengrin,” he said. “Where is she?”

“Jane?”

“Yes.”

He crossed the yard through the wet, misty earth smell. “Jane?”

He found the well. Saw the bucket she’d obviously raised because it hadn’t been there before. Hal shadowed him.

“Is she unwell, too?” he wondered.

“She had the same meat I had,” Lohengrin said.

She was alongside the hut on the far side. Crouching. Rain dripped from the eaves.

“My love,” said she. “I am all cramp and burning.”

Lohengrin lifted her up. She clutched him. She was very hot.

He walked her around towards the doorway, lifted her into his arms, slipping a little on the slick mud from the runoff.

So sudden it comes, he thought. Like snuffing a candle… she’s light to bear…

“The water,” she said, weak and giddy, as they angled through the doorway into the low close room.

“You want water?” asked Hal, moving with them. “No. Drink not the water in the well…”

Lohengrin laid her on the straw pallet. The firelight hollowed her face with shifting shadows.

“I but sipped,” she whispered. She seemed, suddenly, so very small and pale; shivered slightly. “It were foul,” she whispered on. “Gagged in my throat.”

“Poisoned?” asked Hal.

“Did my mother drink therefrom?” He was already heading back out, as close to panic as he’d ever come.

“I know not,” Hal said after him.

JOHN

Was barely clinging to the wet rope as the ungainly, fog-whipped ships drifted with the strong wind. When he thought he could hold no longer, his feet touched bottom and he heard the dull creaking and cracking as the unseen vessels began to pile up on some reef or the shoreline.

All around he heard wind-twisted, muffled shouts and cries. He waded and half swam, desperately, up the shore-slope, over muck, stones and crunchy little shells.

He passed around the bulk of another stranded ship that showed through the general cloudiness. He could see a level mucky stretch of beach where masses of oily-looking seaweed clung to dark stones. The standing pools showed the ebb tide was going out…

PARSIVAL

Gralgrim looked up as if he’d just been offered a very rotten bite of fish, watching the knight in red armor discuss matters with the gnarled tree.

“Merlin,” said Parsival, “am I come here to finish or begin?”

The Viking watched him listen and nod thoughtfully, as the branches stirred. “Ah,” he murmured. “Yer master asks a good question.”

Lego shifted, uneasily. “There’s something deep in it,” he decided, without much conviction.

“Hoo. Deep enough, I ween. Deep as the sea and mad as a Frenchman.”

“Why don’t you go back to your country of drunkards and pirates?”

“I wish no more. Mayhap I’ll ask that tree directions when the great knight’s done his discourse.”

Merlinus seemed too weary to move. His resonant voice seemed to sound from the earth itself, saying:

“There is always the final chance, for all things must end in both heaven and earth. This may be your final chance to live outside the dull world, again like a ship that the fresh tide lifts from some dreary and somber shore.”

“What must I do?”

Gralgrim considered this. “Pick that scurvy-looking fruit?” he wondered. “Hang yerself from a branch?”

“My master sees things hidden from ordinary eyes,” said Lego. “Hears, too, meseems.”

“As before,” Merlinus was saying. He shifted his cloak, slightly, revealing the haft of a sword in his belt. “Go knowing nothing. Take this and keep it from the witch.”

“Yes, I will go, knowing nothing. What has changed?”

“I think he can,” said Gralgrim.

“Enough,” said Lego. “Ah, see there.”

The branches had shifted in the breeze and they saw the knight reach into a space in the trunk and extract a silver and gold-worked swordhilt with about a foot of broken blade.

“I will keep this, as you say, sir,” Parsival told Merlin – or the tree – depending on where you stood.

“Should he no ask a sound stone, too?” chortled the bulky Berserker. “Just to be certain he understood the tree.”

“Barbarian shitwit,” snarled Lego getting ready to break his pact and break the fellow’s big, round head.

“Yet,” went on the other, pleased by his effect, pointing, “there’s a bush adjacent that hath a sage look.”

Lego walked away from him and closer to the knight. “My Lord,” he said, “how did you know to find this here?” Parsival thrust the blade through his mesh steel belt.

“Saw you not the great wizard give it me?” indicating the tree.

“So we did,” said Gralgrim. He turned to the knotted trunk and sank to one knee. “I beseech you, great wizard, transport me by the wights of the air to me homeland where …” But could utter no more for laughing.

“No doubt the joke is good,” Parsival allowed, striding back out of the great hall, “but tweak not Merlinus overmuch. Come outside you both and on we go. All will soon be clear, I think.”

“As soon as we come outside, a course,” gasped Gralgrim. “But, yet, the door seems shut.”

Parsival shook his head and turned under the arch. Lego, dourly, marched past him.

“Are you short of sight, Viking?” the knight wanted to clear-up. “The gate stands wide.”

“Ignore him, my Lord. We ought to toss him back into the sea like a rot-blighted fish.”

“A spell may have been set to blind him.”

“The gate stands wide,” Gralgrim howled, rolling over on the grass. “Wizard’s work.”

The other two went on ahead and the convulsed Berserker, unwilling to miss anything to come, found his feet and followed.

“There’s a point, my Lord,” Lego pondered. “We may be spellbound while thou art free to see.”

GAWAIN

His sole eye weeping, burning, voice choked with pain and passion, he turned away.

She heard his mail tink and the horse snuff-cough. She was quick so he hadn’t mounted yet, just freeing the reins. Maybe he hadn’t actually meant to.

So he just stood there in his wetly gleaming, silvered steel, holding the saddle, facing the horse. The arc of moon showed over the low trees across the pond, first hinting of sunrise faintly silhouetting heavy limbs.

She didn’t touch him, this time.

“You became tired of me,” she said, “for all your words. Half of heart and half of this and that. Is there another who has your whole heart?”

“No,” he said, a catch in his voice. His throat felt thickened with feeling.

“Tell me, knight and man.” Because she wanted to be free if he would not be bound, one way or another. “But tell me.”

“Another?” He thought about the peasant whore innkeeper where (in a sense) he now longed to be, free of knighthood, feeling and purpose, obligated only to eat, fuck and drink himself to blank sleep. “Another who has my whole heart? Ha, ha.” He still didn’t turn, wooden hand absently hooked on the saddle girth, eye shut. The night sounds droned on as if suspending time as the mist suspended space…

“I went to find you,” she told him again, staring at his metal back formed from soft moonlight and burnished harshness. “More than once. Tell me, man and knight, why so silent now? And why do you only stand like a tranced madman?”

His living hand stroked the horse’s warm, damp flank as if he touched her. For all the suffering he’d had, this was a new one because he truly loved and longed (as poets would put it) and had no dream, no dram, no speck nor spot of hope.

“I am like one 80 years old,” he finally came out with, voice shaking and choked. “Or a dead man come back to endlessly reach for what he cannot grasp. Gawain’s shadow. Cans’t love a shadow or the dead love you?” And then he sobbed a kind of scream that terrified her for a moment. “To have no hope. None.” He flung himself up into the saddle, violent, furious. “A ghost in love with the living.”

He wrenched the horse around and nearly knocked her down. “Gawain!” she cried.

“Fare thee well!” he yelled. “My hour up, I now return to hell!”