The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (37 page)

The steel angles crashed, whipped, snapped, sprung, cut through the cyclonic billowing of fumes and flames as the sentient black tower of metal groped and slammed to destroy Parsival. As he banked and dodged close to the ground, aiming for the last shreds of light poking like vague fingers from the rockrubble, the gigantic, twisted hands scraped for him, jagged stone shrieking and sparking. Then, flightless, he was running, ducking, climbing through the rubble, glimpsing the black mask face stooping miles above in the smoky, torn darkness, lit by the flames within its hollow blankness. He was heavy and cold and staggered now, feeling battered, bloody … half blacking out as he wedged himself between two rough blocks, gleaming steel spindle-fingers plucking around him; felt feverish, faint, stone dark everywhere … everywhere … the fanged fish modestly crawled from behind a shattered rock, pop eyes dull and round; the monkeyshape was squatting above him, clicking and clacking its claws together … kneeling in despair and weakness he saw a thin thread gleaming up from the loosely packed rubble, freed in the wake of one of the immense fingers that had just missed him in its frantic, mechanical frenzy … lifted, fell and crawled to the wan, golden trace, his mind saying:
If
I
dream
on
I
die
… Heard the whirring scream of angles and gears crashing down to cover him and for a moment he gathered his will to fight, to smash back at the towering thing of dark and fire …
Stop
dreaming!
… the rock ground together around him. Searing flame dripped on his back. The spider-steel hand closed over him and he understood and went calm and simply let it happen, and as the iron and stone crunched him to pulp he touched the wisp of gold at arm’s reach before him and instantly melted, fingers, arms … all of him … closing his hand on the light, closing himself around it, his heart going up like a flame, like wax in fire, everything melting in golden spray. And all around he saw shimmers that were living beings faintly sketched (like mist near the rising sun) on the blinding truth, their light (like his own) reflecting everywhere. Now flooded by more and more brilliance that burst from heaven and earth, a blinding sea whose waves were music, currents joy, whose tides floated, lifted, moved and suspended everything, gave rhythm to each pulsing heart, filled each mother’s breast with warmth and drink and kissed the flowers with color … all the vast darkness shrank to a speck … there was only light that dissolved and lit the thrill of each instant where time was a mist. Flesh and earth and all was song and had the same sweet light. He was absorbed now where the keenest orgasm of his sexual body would have seemed a dull deadness. He moved towards the misty shinings and saw one had a drawn sword and was holding up a guttering torch, staring into the shallow, walled ring where chopped and draining pieces of men lay at Parsival’s feet. He looked around at the rest of them … Then he bent over the bodies mixed together there. The universal brilliance turned the massed mountain overhead into a shimmer of glass. He picked up a tiny speck of leaden metal that lay near someone’s skinny, contorted arm. Then straightened up and flicked it away. Smiled. Understood.

“I finally found it,” he told the living.

“My God,” one said, “father!”

Layla went nearly sober with incredulous staring as her son brought his torch closer to the blond and silver-haired, blueeyed face that looked peacefully at them. She managed to get to her knees by gripping the wall around what hadn’t been a pit at all. She thought he barely seemed to be looking at them.

“Father,” Lohengrin repeated.

He nodded Through the shifting, streaming brilliance a cloudiness seemed familiar: Lohengrin. He smiled.

“Yes,” he said. And was stunned out of thought and breath again by the glory that breathed everywhere …

Clawing, choking, Tikla weeping, Torky still struggling beside her, Alienor ground into the fine, gritty blackness, crawling forward, butting, thrashing kicks as if swimming, until one hand finally broke through and she lay still a long moment, just her fingers moving, groping into cool air …

Parsival still had trouble keeping focused on their expressions in the sparkle and shifts of radiance.

Lohengrin had stepped over the wall and was standing where he’d imagined only bottomlessness. He actually tapped the stone with his blade tip before he was satisfied. Glanced at the bleeding fragments on the floor, then his father. Recalled, for a moment, all his old resentment and it seemed so far away …

“Mother said you always turn up.”

Parsival was watching the deaths as the last shimmers spilled slowly from the tattered flesh and floods of dark and light images fluttered away, and he knew those were the memories of these men draining back to the vast, roiling mind of existence. Watched their lives, blurring dreams, floating like wind-taken leaves …

Even
memories
are
dreams
, he said to himself.
Were
shells
full
of
dreams
…

His wife was weaving her head and closing one eye to see him clearly.

“How,” she asked, “did you come here?”

“Like every other fool,” he answered her, seriously. “By dreaming.” Looked at her now, and then at him. Noted Broaditch on the periphery. Tried to keep their outlines sharp. It was like looking through a rippling stream in sunlight “My wife and son.”

Creature locked to creature crawled and climbed over one another, swarming up from primal slime into an ever mounting, ever sagging tower, struggling into the best shapes for ripping and kicking free of the unforming mass … and what had been Clinschor felt all this within his outpuffed, cloudy reaches, the clustered frenzy his own body, and endless rage and roar his soul …

Suddenly his whole swarming self was falling to pieces, dropping, spilling as a razor brightness cut through everything … all his seething parts flopping, plopping down. He clutched and there was nothing to clutch … he scattered into ten thousand battling knots and there was no bottom, no sides … nothing above … all void and falling … falling … and silence blew him away like a wind …

Lohengrin just stood there, sword in his limp grip. Flickering torch flipping its last wobbling glow around them. Broaditch was helping Layla keep her feet.

“It was me you didn’t kill, son,” Parsival said.

The young knight raised his eyebrows.

“In the woods?” he murmured.

His father nodded. His son rolled his eyes and nodded too. Of course. The final irony …

“Christ Jesus,” breathed Layla. “Christ Jesus on high …” She clung to massive Broaditch as to a tree. “Jesus … Jesus … Jesus …”

Broaditch just looked at him in the weak and changing flameglow. He didn’t want to laugh so he didn’t. And he was thinking about his own family. He didn’t want to laugh, but he’d set out to find this man when the man was still a boy … well, here he was. He didn’t want to laugh. He stood there holding up his drunken wife.

When
finally
I
am
fed
in
a
matter
, he thought,
fate
stuffs
my
maw
to
bursting
…

She’s
not
dead
, Parsival was thinking.
Then
who
was
it
I
laid
in
the
grave?

He reached over and touched his son’s head in a kind of wonder. Because of the streaming light the features kept changing. He was fascinated by the rich wonder of fired hair and eyes and the aquiline carving work of bone and flesh. He knew and didn’t know this living being. Watched him, totally absorbed, as the past kept melting away and leaving him new again. He knew what to say and said it:

“Forgive me. For everything.”

Lohengrin blinked at him. Silent, he nodded.

Layla pulled free of Broaditch and half fell, caught herself with both hands on the stone rim. Stared, kept her violet-dark eyes on her husband. He turned, watching the freshening light gather into her shape, her movements …

“Why?” she wanted to know, squinting. “Why did you have to turn up?” Waited.

“Layla,” he said. Names were dreaming too, he noted. Flowered and passed … felt the brilliance shimmer in his heart and understood he existed only to know this, the way a flower existed only to be, unfold and fill and die, which was all a single shining …

“Nay,” she virtually cried out at him, “don’t say you’re sorry or that you tried. Don’t you dare …” She kept blinking to focus. “You haunt my life! Why must you do that?”

All he said was:

“Layla.” Memory came back. It hadn’t really mattered up to now. Gawain had believed one of them was living. “I thought you were murdered.”

“Naturally.”

“
By
your
friends,” he said to Lohengrin. Blinked. Expected the radiance to die at any moment, understanding it was tentative, and if his dreams returned darkness would pull the fused worlds apart again …

Gawain
, he thought, remembering him, the bandage-like headdress covering the slashed, halved face, the single eye burning from the shadows, voice whispery and raw with pain:

“Parse, I had an hundred victories in my life.”

“Yes,” Parsival had responded.

“And women …”

“Yes.”

“All I ever wanted …”

“Yes?”

The eye shut, winked away into the shadows of the head.

“… was to love,” he had whispered.

“Ah,” Parsival had murmured.

“I never did,” Gawain had said. “Never … yet I know what I missed … I know exactly what I missed …”

Ah
,
Gawain
, Parsival now thought, remembering, feeling it … feeling …

“They slew Leena,” his wife told him. Glanced at her pale son, who sheathed his blade.

“So I avenged her, I suppose,” Lohengrin reflected, meaning that he’d slain Clinschor.
That’s
done
her
rare
good
, he thought Stared at his father, amazed, feeling nothing from the past. This was just a living man before him, trying … like himself … just a man … “father” just a word …

“I was rescued,” she was telling Parsival, “by … by a decent fellow.” She pictured him. Stared … sighed faintly, far away …

“Thank God,” he answered her. “Where is he now?”

She shrugged.

“We were caught outside,” she said, “in that stupid storm.” Shrugged again. “I’m not so drunk,” she added. “But I drink all the time … I’m not content in my heart, you see …” Smiled. Batted her eyelids. The deep eyes were like mists glowing at twilight. “I like it well.”

“Gentlefolk,” put in Broaditch, “would we not do better to find our way from here?”

“Parse …” A woman’s voice out of the dark. They all turned.

“Ah,” said Layla. “Even down here?” she asked, seeming strangely pleased in a way that made Broaditch uneasy. “How little things change, eh?” She chuckled, humorlessly. “The great sage, he ever fell a-flop from wine when I knew him … which was but short time long ago … the son-of-a-rutting-bitch!”

Unlea came out of the shadows, limping on bloody feet, tattered, swaying, hair in a bundle that, Layla thought, needed only a stray rat for effect.

“A rare beauty,” she declared, “this one.”

Parsival was distantly amused. He wondered if his vision would survive these women.

“Parse,” she said, “thank God I found you. I feared I were forever lost in these dark ways …”

“Well,” Layla assured her, “you’re found now, my dear …” Chuckled. “Are you the latest victim?”

“Unlea,” Parsival said, watching the infinitely unfolding brightness turn all the massed earth to a thin mist of music and fire. “This is my family.” Each overlapped the other in light, invisibly intimate.

She just looked at them, rapidly blinking.

“And an old retainer,” put in Broaditch, almost smiling.

Alienor and the children were on top of the soot-choked ravine. The dawn sun was a hazy blur and a few sprinkles of rain spatted here and there from tin-gray, wind-tattered clouds.

If it meant to rain, she considered, then it was over. There was still healing in heaven. It was that simple, in the end. It was rain or nothing …

Parsival watched Layla’s flame flicker and lose itself in Broaditch’s fires, which were joined by Lohengrin’s, Unlea’s, his own. Like coals in a vast grate, he decided, each absorbed in all the rest … all beings burned in this cool, sweetness and lit all creation …

They were going up a long, slow sloping corridor as the last sputters of torch wavered and choked out. Parsival found himself absorbed and fascinated by each moment: Movement, the sounds of steps and voices that echoed to endless depths of significance … the very sounds and not what they said stunned him.