Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon
Read Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Online
Authors: Richard Monaco
Tags: #Literature & Fiction, #Mythology & Folk Tales, #Science Fiction & Fantasy, #Fantasy, #Historical, #Sword & Sorcery, #Arthurian, #Fairy Tales
© Richard Monaco 2012
Richard Monaco has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988 to be identified as author of this work.
First Published in 2012.
This edition published in 2016 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.
To
Darsi Monaco & Jodi Armstrong Monaco
For Their Unwavering Help and Support
With Special Thanks to
Professor Leverett Butts for his Editorial Input, Assistance and Friendship
In the Hills of Northern Wales
Predawn. The only hint of morning was where the ragged, fang-like hills subtly seemed to form like dark clouds from the general night, traced by the melting gray evanescence of first light.
On the rough, weedy, stony North Britain soil, the ashes of a campfire were a dull purple, shapeless warmth in the chill mist. Here and there, in bundles of shadow, maybe a dozen men slept, snored, shifted, sighed and groaned. Two were awake, sitting across the blurred coals from one another. There was enough glow to outline a knight with chainmail hauberk, topped by a monk’s hood and the other, a smaller man wearing the shadowy vestments of a priest, long-faced, restless, thin, intense.
They spoke softly, at first. The knight had a husky, almost expressionless tone as if he were either terribly tired or a convalescent barely holding his own.
“He’ll come out to see me,” he was just telling the other. “Why, we are joined together like a monster twins sharing a common body.”
The small man kept weaving left and right and nervously plucking at his garments. His voice was high-pitched and often shrill, even in a whisper. “So say you, so say you Gawain,” he responded. “But what if he doth not? Do we besiege his castle with our miserable troop?”
Gawain leaned back, resting his head on the padded saddle he was using for a pillow. The summer air was rich and soft. The dew-mist was just becoming visible as the light imperceptibly intensified.
“You don’t understand,” Gawain replied in his weary voice, “we are not here to fight Parsival. If we fought, you would probably all die and I would escape with my life.”
With his right hand he touched the right side of his face through the hood: there was really no left side. A sword stroke had peeled him to the teeth. It had somehow healed. Horribly. His left hand was carved wood that could hold a shield (rarely used by him) or a sword if he wished.
“You fear him,” the other shrilled.
“No. But you should. Harken, he will come out because we are brothers and he owes me.”
“Have you the same mother?” Gawain didn’t exactly answer.
“False priest,” he said coldly, “our mother is war and our father death. Are we not brothers?” Paused. “I ask my brother to heal me.”
The “priest” was weaving forward and back, now; like a child who needed to go to the bathroom. His hands cut the grayish air. “I?” he went shriller. “I?” I am the only true priest.” He spoke now as if addressing a crowd. “I am the hope of the serf, peasant and all the broken and beaten men! I must have the Grail concealed by this demon Parsival! It belongs to the people. It belongs to the oppressed, the helpless, the hurt! I will forge its metal into a sword to cut down all nobles and kings, priests and bishops, aye, even to the vile spider who weaves his webs from Rome!” He stood up as if jerked to his feet by an invisible string. His sudden tirade had awakened a few of his followers.
“Be quiet, you son-of-a-whore,” one snarled, re-rolling himself up in his sleeping cover.
The shape of the hill above them had emerged into a grayish slope. A pair of unseen birds began an antiphonal question and answer. “Should the Grail heal me,” Gawain told him, “I’ll let you have it to carve the whole world up with, John-the-priest.”
John was flapping his mouth and jerking his limbs like a carnival puppet, caught in the crashing torrent of his vision, spewing words (Gawain thought) the way a mule pisses in thick, dark, erratic spurts:
“Parsival will yield up his secret. He will join our cause or die! I spit on his vaunted strength!”
Gawain sat up: shouted at the sleepers who’d somehow managed to sink deeper despite John’s harangue.
“Arise, you shit cups!” he yelled. “We want to beat the sun to the castle.”
*
“With the power of the Grail sword the world will kneel and a new age begin!” He jerked left and right as he held forth. “This is the final year!” Next ends the world! With the Grail sword I can save the chosen!”
Gawain had heard it all before. “You have more wind than the sea,” he told him. “And who said the Grail was a sword?”
One of the men actually threw a fist-sized clod of dried mud at the wobbling priest. Missed.
Gawain stood up. Stretched his limbs. Yawned hard.
“I will hail the gatekeeper myself,” he announced. “Call out Parsival.” Shut his eyes for a moment. “He will help me to the Grail,” he murmured, “and I will drink from God’s cup and be made whole again.” Nodded. “Then let ends end.”
Should it prove to be a sword, he thought, as thinks that loon, I’ll jam it in his southmost hole…
Behind the cursing, groaning, spitting and rustling as the men stirred, he heard a long, lucid, lyric bird suddenly trill in the distance. He took it for a sign, a murmur from God.
The grass was fresh-looking as the dew burned off in the morning sun. The hot beams had just cleared the tree line beyond the open area that surrounded the little castle. The hillside sloped smoothly away down to the streak of whitish dust that was the valley road. Beyond it were dark, sod-roofed serfs’ huts and fields.
Parsival stood there, nude, leaning on a jagged-tipped spear, watching Gawain, in his green and battered armor, leading his sorry-looking lot of predatory foot soldiers back down the slope. He rode his thick-legged charger in a kind of furious slow-motion. He was followed, at a little distance, by the second mounted and armored man: the fanatic John of Bligh, who had wanted to kill Parsival after making rambling speeches about visions of the future and what he would do with the power of the Grail. Yet another madman, Parsival noted, on that markless and meaningless quest.
He took a deep breath. The summer sun was pleasant on his skin… The day promised to be less humid.
So I really am going to live after all, he thought.
He glanced up at the battlements. Several of his men were still staring down at him from that helpless distance. Others were just pushing through the partly opened gate. They would have been too late, in any case, had things taken a worse turn. He’d been surprised while drunkenly making love to his guest’s chunky wife on the long grass in the dark before dawn.
He was found at first light, the dull gray melting into deep, dark red. Gawain and the others couldn’t believe their luck: he was not only outside, essentially alone; but unarmed and stark naked. For a moment Gawain thought maybe that bird had been Heaven’s messenger.
It’s always a woman brings a man low, he thought, watching Parsival, startled, pulling out and back from the kneeling lady who, seeing the men, stifled her gasps of pleasure and crept backward on hands and knees until she brought up against the castle wall. They’d been closed in with nowhere to run.
John the ex-priest had demanded the Grail while Gawain sat silent with visor closed. John had bobbed, fomented, fumed, gesticulated, weaved, threatened, promised, pleaded and waved a knife in the knight’s face then pressed it to his neck.
Parsival couldn’t oblige, as he had no idea where to locate the Grail so with death’s blade literally at his throat, the sun coming up behind the spiky hills, he suddenly (inexplicably) felt filled with light and lightness and sweetness as if he were a cup and that benediction were water overflowing him infinitely… His eyes followed a bird soaring, very high, catching the first rose-gold beams of the rising sun and, for a measureless instant, as in a dream, there was no distance between them and he seemed to be looking down on himself looking up…
So he’d asked, begged for his life for the first and only time; without fear, just so that incredible bliss and wonder would not be cut short:
“Gawain, please don’t kill me!”
“Then lead us to the Grail, Parsival, my old companion.” Parsival had laughed and shook his head.
“Yes,” he said, “but I have. I’ll show you.”
“Is it here?”
“Yes. Exactly.”
“Inside?”
Gawain leaned his blank faceplate closer and Parsival could see his own reflected face distorted: too long, eyes too big, chin coming to a point. The others closed around, scarred, grim, mangy faces dulled by hardship, disaster and routine cruelty. Most were former soldiers gone brigand. A pitiless audience for a strange sermon.
“Yes. And outside too, my friends. Anywhere you like. Like seeing something in the night, the more you look the less it shows.”
“Arr,” said one, with a slit nose and one eye, “he’s mad.” Raised his spear to kill him.
Gawain had warned them not to try it and said they would learn nothing from a dead man, even if they, somehow, managed to slay him. Two weren’t convinced.
“The Grail is moonshine, anyway,” one-eye said. “Let’s kill this pretty swine and roast his liver.” His missing eye was a raw socket, gaping, myriad tiny muscles flickering whenever the good one moved. “I’ll skin the bastard!”
He thrust his jagged-tipped spear and the tall, pale, naked man instantly burst the ropes on his wrists, effortlessly disarmed his attacker and, cracking his head open, dropped the fellow flat on his face in the loose-lying wheatgrass. The rest were persuaded to leave by reason and instinct. Gawain was amused. He’d warned them.
“Violence has no meaning,” Parsival explained, as they left, heading back down the slope. He shrugged and turned back towards the castle. Sir Gaf’s round little wife had run away after picking up her clothes. “No one wins a battle,” he murmured. “Save, maybe, the dead.”
The moment he’d believed the one-eyed man was about to cut his throat, it was as if he’d died and his soul had been shaken awake. He stood there now, trying to understand what had happened. Like a threadlike rill of purity winding through the world’s stale, lifeless muck, he thought he saw all he’d missed and lost in his life and might discover again.
Frowned now, a mere quarter of an hour later, because there was nothing to remember but the facts. The light (or whatever it was) that had overflowed his soul was gone. He was so tired his stomach cramped and his eyes hurt.
An image from childhood came to him: he was eight or so, alone in his sleeping chamber, kneeling on a worn wooden bench under the long, narrow, glassless window where thin, clean spring sunbeams sprayed softly over him. He saw again the smoothly carved bench back; remembered tracing with his finger the whittled scriptural scene of a big-leafed tree (he couldn’t know was a palm) in the center, a round-faced angel in angular robes jabbing a sword point at the naked man and woman who seemed to huddle away into the rougher carven cuts where wild beasts and monsters crouched among harsh stones, all fixed in the wood of themselves forever, and it wasn’t until that moment in the present, leaning on the spear and remembering, that he realized the image had been Adam and Eve.
He shook his head, amused, thinking how children could look at something again and again without having to form associations. That was better than talent, to have no compulsion to insist on meaning.
He had liked sitting or kneeling there and looking outside at the castle wall where the tops of distant hills and open fields just showed above the crenellations. At certain times of day the sunbeams, angled through the window, would catch lines of dustmotes in golden fire. He remembered trying to catch the shining specks where they winked into brightness like points of magic – but whenever he’d open his hand he could never tell if there was anything in his palm…
I have been doing practically everything wrong since I was six years old, he decided.
He stood there, muscular (with a recent rim of softness around the beltline) scarred, tall, leaning into the spear he’d propped into the soft summer earth, blond hair stirring in the warm, morning breezes. The dew on the blowing grass sparkled as it vanished.
His wife, Layla, had just come to the battlements with the servant who’d shaken her awake, crying: “My lady they’re slaying Lord Parsival!” She’d rushed through the dim, cool hall, grey robe swishing around her, bare feet padding, rapid and soft, over the smooth stones and occasional napless rug, flicking past narrow windows full of brightness until she was outside, squinting and blinking into the risen sun. And now she was thinking (because he turned out to be safe): One day I will come and he will be dead and I will be 99 years old… or more likely he’ll live to miss my funeral…
She turned her attention back to her nude husband posed like a bony-kneed archangel, craning his head around as if searching the sky. The bird was gone.
“I thought you said he was in difficulties?” she commented. “So it seemed, my lady,” said the servant.
She sniffed.
“There’s the usual result of my husband’s troubles,” she said, looking at the angular, ill-armored man sprawled face down and silent on the wheatgrass. Even at a distance she could make out the red shock of blood around the balding skull. “A dead man other than himself.”
She knew it should have meant more to her but it didn’t. Where Parsival was concerned she felt a grayness, most of the time, except when he exasperated her into actual anger or outrage or despair.
She sighed and tapped her short, shapely fingers on the gritty stone. Why didn’t he go away again? He was always going somewhere. He lived a life of pretexts. Once that had bothered her. Right now she was hoping all her guests would leave too. Even her lover, the Greek knight, Sir Constantino Gaf.
His prickly beard is always in my nose, she thought, irritated at her passivity. She was tired. Her eyes were reddened and the sunlight hurt. Too much wine, too much last night… always too much and too many…
She stared down at her husband. He seemed entranced or maybe sodden with drink.
“Where are your clothes?” she called down, not really caring; curious. She had an uncle who’d taken to strolling around the family castle nude, going to the bathroom anywhere he pleased until they locked him in the tower. “Are you drunk?”