The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (15 page)

XXV

At a certain point Broaditch realized they were trapped. He let himself and the others be led without resistance towards the great fire. The madman they now knew was Clinschor had stopped speaking and the other man (John, the leader) came forward again on the ledge. Pleeka was just ahead of Broaditch.

Close to the fire the blank rockface was impressive, the two figures on top commanding. At first Broaditch didn’t realize they were being discussed.

“Brother Pleeka brought these creatures here,” John declared, reedy, annoyingly insistent.

Broaditch was sure who he was now and yelled up at him:

“Are you not John of Bligh?”

“By Christ, you’re right, I think,” murmured Alienor. She held both her children before her, surrounded by the dark masses.

“I brought them as converts,” Pleeka was answering. No one paid attention to the interruption. Pleeka’s remarks seemed to amuse some of the crowd whose breath and stink swelled around them. The flames popped and hissed. The smoke seemed to hint at strange shapes as it sluggishly rolled overhead, great creeping things with many heads and twisted limbs …

“Ha!” somebody called.

“Hoo!” another.

“The brother has been away,” John said, with easy humor. “He knows not the new ways of the holy people.”

“What new ways?” Pleeka demanded. “Our ways were founded in truth and God’s light! What new ways need we? And who is this —”

John cut him off.

“God’s will changes at His pleasure,” he announced. “There can be no converts because the brothers and sisters are a whole folk. The lost race of Trueman from the days of the prophets!” A sighing; a breathstink went up from the massed holy ones, still a little numbed from Clinschor’s insane but matchless rhetoric. “We are the inheritors of the earth in these final days! The final days of the old world!” Sighing. “This is the day of Armageddon! The twilight of time …” The crowd was swaying and humming a strange dirge or universal keening of infinite and primal pain. “This is a time and a half time!” John suddenly screamed and Broaditch squinted hard past the flames at the shaggy-looking, dark-eaten figure. “A time, time and a halt time!” Sighing, sighing … “We are the people of the judgment! We are the mouth with teeth to chew the sinners!!” Sighs and outcries and moaning and the dirge … “To chew and swallow the sinners and the accursed of God!”

The mass went into a frenzy, blotting away Pleeka’s shouts, his sweaty, fire-shaken face tilted up, mouth struggling soundlessly.

Things
rarely
flow
easy
and
smooth
, Broaditch thought,
but
here’s
all
rapids
and
falls
… Leena stood, eyes shut, holding the boy.

Finally Pleeka’s hysterical voice broke through and Broaditch heard:

“You’ve profaned everything!” he was yelling. “Everything!”

“Seize them all!” John ordered. “For their tongues are as the tongues of serpents!”

Broaditch dimly saw Clinschor’s long head bobbing, nodding madly as if in agreement as the other spread out his hands in nervous benediction, pacing slightly, erratically from side to side through the entangled shadows and flameflashes.

God
, Broaditch thought,
what
a
crew!
Every
madman’s
found
a
home
at
last
…
even
the plague
seems
to
shun
these
creatures
…

His spear had already been snatched away and he decided not to struggle hopelessly to save it. Watched flailing, vociferous Pleeka overcome by a swirl of them, broken pieces of his shouts audible:

“… betrayed … promise … promise …”

As Broaditch and the others were lifted, yanked and bound with wirelike cords, carried into the darkness, the organlike tones of Clinschor swelled over all in immense disproportion to the stick figure form:

“I will create the new kingdom and overcome the evil forces of weakness and sickness and confusion! This triumph shall outlive the ages! We shall raise in stone the final monuments of blood and time!!”

And the rest was lost in cheering howls, clashing of metal and the curses and gratuitous buffeting as several blows rocked his solid head and the sounds became the music of some lost and maddened world of plague, seas of blood, drying, dying earth … how could any bear it, he wondered abstractly, how could hopeless and fragile flesh bear this crucifixion of all nature? …

Then a dark, closed wagon, the door slammed shut behind them.

“Are you intact, Alienor?” he asked.

“Torky,” she was saying, soothing. “Torky.” As he wept.

“Mama … mama,” Tikla clung close in the black, musty place.

They
must
keep
pigs
in
here
, Broaditch thought.

“Where are you, papa?” Torky scrambled around, tensed. “Papa …”

Pleeka was still raging:

“Betrayers of God! … Betrayers of God! … Children of Gog and Magog!”

“Torky,” Broaditch said, “we are all here and still live. Come to my voice.” Heard the boy moving then felt his hot, surprisingly hard touch. Thought how he was changing with the days and hoped these times would not wound his heart forever … He held him silently now …

“God will be revenged,” said Pleeka to no one present. “The beast will be cast down and broken! …”

Leena was embracing the young boy. Only the full adults had been bound. She crooned to him, not thinking about the blood. The fire had showed it everywhere, splashed on all of them in running rose stains. The fire was bleeding … She calmly didn’t think about it.

All Broaditch believed he wanted, as he strained carefully against his bonds, was not to surrender to this. There had to be a sane moment in every madman, a clean spot in every leper. So, he concluded, somewhere in this wasteland, there had to be a garden, in all this broken, bleeding, burning life …

He sighed and sank back on the foul-smelling boards. Pleeka muttered inaudibly now. His head stung and was starting to ache …

“Never mind,” his wife was saying, “You tried. You have always tried, Broaditch.”

“Woman, I …”

“Never mind!” She was fierce, almost harsh in her tenderness. Her head touched his solid shoulder. “Say no word, husband. Say no word to me.”

He nodded. Rested. Let his eyes gradually tune into the faint strands and blots of light that showed at cracks and around the door. Sighed and sat, not even thinking anymore. Just waiting, patient and still, terrifically intent, nothing in him even asking for sleep yet. Sitting solid as carven, indestructible granite. Felt his son’s hand on his arm gradually soften as his tense breathing steadied … waiting … not thinking …

Leena was praying, fingers twisting the rope belt of her garment as if it were beads. The dark made it hard to keep the shapes away, the faces in the gusting torchlight, harsh beards, unlooking eyes, the metal smell of the blood sticky on their clothes and faces as she pushed at the closing shadows, flopping, arching, kicking, raw sound bursting from her without words, begging her father and mother for relief from the hands that kept coming back, from stonehard bones, the sheer heaviness of men, pulling, pushing, grunting, blood and suffering, her own blood draining down there darkly beyond help or reach (masses of stony shadow crushing her flat as though not just the raping men but the whole world lay on her, the horse snuffs and smells nearby, laughter … a barking dog … ), her painful blood draining down her wrenched thighs … draining into a void that sucked her down too past all struggle and outcry … the savage, rhythmic pain prying her from her body … And now she pushed the images away, forehead resting on the planks, eyes pressed to the thinnest crevice where almost light showed edgeless as water, praying, the boy across her lap, hands twisting the knotted rope as if to tell or untie it, soundless lips steady, praying the way another might strike blows …

XXVI

The sun was setting behind a wall of violet-dark clouds. The fields opened before them, silvery, water-vague. The mules, horses and marching men seemed to float along.

“We don’t stop tonight,” Tungrim had announced. She was riding next to him again.

“I don’t care,” Layla said.

“We eat on the march, as Norsefolk should.”

She wasn’t looking at him.

“And drink,” she said. Waited. She knew he’d be frowning He was, she’d previously reflected, a serious barbarian.

He said nothing.

“What can you still want of me?” she asked. “Think you have not had all?”

“Mock me not,” he returned, gruff, uncomfortable. He shifted on the steady mule. Their shadows had melted away into the silvery wash. One of the marching Vikings called over to him:

“Tungrim, we’re far from the sea!”

A few others guffawed.

“Aye, right so,” one added.

“Peace, my brothers,” Tungrim said. “I promise it will wait for us till we return.”

Laughter and a fairhearted cheer. Someone began singing, lilting, high-pitched, haunting … another joined in … Long grasses rustled softly … fireflies scribbled obscure, hinting twists and streaks on the dimming air.

“Well?” she finally said, still not looking towards him.

“Here,” he said, ripping the wineskin free from his mount’s withers and slamming it blindly at her hand, and then she, unhurried, uncorked it and held herself still, except (and she knew it) something inside was at the edge of frantic.

“You can say it,” she informed him, tilting it up now, amazed at how she relished and sustained the moment, the first stinging, bitter wash over her tongue and burning warm in her throat … She shut and opened her eyes. Shuddered. “You can say what you like, my lord Tungrim.”
Dunggrim
…

“I ought to have left you where I found you.”

Held her in his thick arms in front on the unsaddled horse riding down to the beach where the longships were drawn up in line like, she’d imagined, mysterious giant fish in the bright moonlight. Barrel-bodied horse hissing through the sand, the burning stronghold far above and behind them now, the sea air helping, clearing her lungs and mind …

“I am called Tungrim,” he’d told her. “Prince in the north-lands.” Reined up by the dragon-prowed ships. “I am come to this land to find a damned kinsman.” They’d dismounted and she’d fallen on the cold, damp sand and he’d helped her up and held her. His head came a little above hers. He was very wide and thick.

“You’re a fine-looking wench under it all.” He’d given her a swallow of rich sweetness (it didn’t burn until far down within her) that was mooncolored and she later learned was called honeywine. She’d coughed and looked into his face, eyes deep, dark and lost …

That was … and now she took another swallow. The impact was less this time. She felt very comfortable and even a little amused. Men were silly beings. All of them. This bear wasn’t so bad … Fuzzy-backed … but what did he expect from her? That was a question … No, not what, but rather when would he say it out because all he had was her body and time and few of them would ever be so satisfied even when it was all they actually wanted after all.

“Am I still a fine-looking lady?” she wanted to know. “Have I not stolen your heart, sir?”

He didn’t respond. She wondered if he was going to rage again. She felt almost giggly. The peaceful night drifted past marked by the silent yellow streaks and spots … as if in echo the stars were showing. She smiled.

“Tungrim?”

“Hmm?”

“I never told you my name.”

“Did I ask?”

“Ah.”

“What is it, woman?”

“What seek you here, in this country … besides loot? You once said …”

“Loot? There’s precious little loot. This land is cursed unto death.”

“Then?”

She drank again knowing he was watching, though his face was set straight ahead. She smiled within herself because these were her best moments, when first it took hold, before the memories spilled into it too and then she had to drink to hold them away and mute … but now it was still fine, light and easy as being young and courting in the castle garden to music and tender candlelight, except … except there was always a small stone under her back, she thought … always a stone …

“It were once a single thing,” he replied.

She thought he meant well. Felt warm from the drink. Meant the best he could. He might have chained her to his bed if he’d liked. What a shock she’d suffered, torn away from everything. She’d never really understood how unyielding and chill the outside was, until she was dragged from her home. The world finally closed down around her to a few blank feet of dimness, filth and misery …
No
,
no
, she thought,
not
yet
…
I
care
not
to
remember
yet
…
leave
it
smooth
and
blank
,
for
Jesus’
sake!

“And what is now, Tungrim?”

“I seek Skalwere, the traitor. This be a blood matter. And Viking men turn not aside from such!”

“And what is not a blood matter?” she murmured.

“Do you mock me? You said I were … pompous.”

“Did I? I remember not …” She felt his hurt with strange surprise. Reached and touched him gently. “I mock you not, sir.”

He turned to her, features an edgeless gleaming. The soft light brought back one of the memories: a phantom face on a twilit lawn, kneeling beside him on the silky, warm summer grass, tentatively touching his bared chest … the phantom, beautiful face, long hair a watery sheen gathering the blurry light and she said, both to the ghost and to Tungrim, tenderness, lostness in her tone:

“My name, though you haven’t asked, is Layla.”