The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (20 page)

Parsival licked dry lips. His saliva felt gluey. The sunheat was sucked into the dark earth. The air pulsed as at an open furnace. He wanted to drink but something said:
wait
.

“Come to my sweetness, shadowman,” the swaying girl said. “Come to me …” her hollowed face flickered with tension.

“She invites,” the nosebeard said. “Taste the sweetness, the honeywater of life.” His voice was whispery. The boy still writhed his head into the wall … the girl twisted and embraced the stone … and there were others stirring here and there around the yard …

Parsival turned and strode away after Gawain, who was heading for the road. Something in him was still drawn to them and feared … feared …

Went out the gate through the ovenlike afternoon. He thought he understood and was saying to himself:

It
doesn’t
help
.
None
of
it
helps
…
they
try
but
it
doesn’t
…

The stars were bright over the dim wasteland. Unlea had just gone into the silken tent. Parsival stood, uncertain, just without. The peasants were sitting quietly, depressed by the unrelieved desolation beyond anyone’s imagination. Heat, thirst, weariness was wearing and wearing … He was surprised to hear someone singing and realized it was Gawain.

And
not
a
dirge
either
, he thought, smiling a little.

He rasped, but not unpleasantly, a lilting ballad. You might have danced to it … Then Parsival’s mind refocused on his own situation. Stared at the closed tent, while Gawain’s incongruously merry voice shaped itself in the hot, close evening …

After a few more restless moments Parsival pushed the flap back and went inside. Sensed her sitting in the empty dark where his straining sight touched nothing.

“You honor me,” she murmured.

He knew from her voice it was all right. He let out a long breath.

“Unlea,” he said. “Do you want me to leave?”

“Make not a farce of it.”

“I’m sorry. Forgive me.” He sat down near her voice. Felt the wisps of her breathing, a faint, sweet scent. She managed to keep surprisingly clean, he realized. Knew he must be getting fairly rank, himself …

“Never mind sorry,” she said. It was still in her voice. Obviously.

“Unlea, I —”

“Nay,” she cut in, touching his lips unerringly in the dark. “Pray, say so little as you might.”

“I …” his lips tried under her fingers.

“Nay. Naught, I say.”

He stopped and then felt bare flesh, soft and shockingly limitless.

Ah
, he thought,
yes
…

Things were suddenly running too swiftly … too much was unexplained … what did he really feel? Her hands were plucking at his linen shirt, touching soft, sleekhanded.

He kissed her, held himself into it, shifting his nose to better breathe. She pressed herself up into him. Even in the dark he seemed to see her there, apart from himself, somehow surprised by the idea that she was so intensely, desperately groping, drinking at him as if sweetness would flow from his flesh, and he couldn’t release himself into it, thinking she was somehow dreaming him, that her end was a dreaming and he wanted it too, the comfort of losing himself in it … thinking too how many tears he’d kept for this moment (he still heard Gawain’s roughly lilting song over the ashy stillness of the night), missing her, missing the dream of her … and now, locked invisibly out, he knew it was going to be hopeless even as she helped him with his shirt and tight-fitting pants …

He shifted around beside her, naked, and her hands kept gripping and pressing his smooth, muscle-thick chest and wide back, thrashing her loins over his leg, startled (because he was cool) by the wet, burning contact, and he kissed her breasts and belly, arms, hands, shoulders, neck and felt hopeless as she struggled herself tighter and he tasted sweat too and inhaled her musky sweet and sour and his own harsh smell … thoughts were too rapid because he was trying to convince himself:

This
is
good
and
sweet
look
how
beautiful
she
is
and
all
yours
to
use
as
pleases
you
…

Ran his fingers between her legs, probed rhythmically into the hot wound, felt her open to him and gasp into that frenzy and still he floated far, hopelessly, above it …

This
is
good
this
is
lewd
and
sweet
…

Touching himself (turned so she couldn’t tell what he did), hand racing, trying to hold the lewd images of whores in stews and fucking … tense, sweating … aware he’d created this problem because he believed it was too late to relax and start again … And then there it was at last in spite of his mind floating far from the locked coolness of his body (his sweat lay on him like ice), there it was, growing, filling, slow and sluggish but definitely improving … he concentrated on it, half oblivious of her except to keep free of her limbs and hands so she wouldn’t know. There was moist heat and perfume on her breath as she licked his neck and face with intense abandon that seemed to push his mind even further away so that he could, nervous and desperate, only long for relief, wish it could be as in the past … remember from far away what it had been like to be fused in the forever of loosened moments … straining, pulling, testing and turning his indecisive and treacherous organ with her breath at his ear:

“… my love … take me … my love … I give myself … take me …”

Strumming himself now with almost fury against dull and spiteful flesh he levered himself over and between the thighs that she reflexed wide and he, afraid to wait, chanced everything on a semi-flaccid thrust and was amazed to find himself sealed safely within and next began to violently, tensely jerk his hips into her fluid outlines (as if all the love-skills of twenty-odd years had never been), gradually lengthening his strokes as he rode more securely and finally, confident again, holding himself back from the edge, feeling strong, smooth and easy and then, remembering her at last with a start of guilt:

“I love you,” he told her quickly, “ah, sweet, dearest Unlea …”

Except he somehow missed himself in the middle and knew it and the fear multiplied suddenly … Unlea rolling her head back and sobbing and squeezing her legs together, asking in sighs:

“Where are you? … Have you spent? Love? … I cannot feel you …”

Stopping now, cold and furious. Silent and hopeless above her, all muscles tensed and rigid but for one, not even able to be amused yet when she said:

“It’s all right, Parse … peace … just a moment more …” Rolling her futile hips against his futility. “A moment, pray, dearest love …”

“I’m out of moments.”

“Oh … very well … it’s all right …”

“It’s not all right.”

“Your hand, my love,” she softly pleaded. “Please … your hand then …”

As he was moving aside he heard it and went to his knees, frowning, and silenced her:

“Be still, woman. Wait …”

Listening and then the strange cry repeated. Something between a wail of torment and awful joy. He went to the flap and leaned out into the warm, burnt-smelling air, blinking at the failing moon just over the eastern hills … voices … then the cry again, closer, falling into a strange, infinitely prolonged sighing.

He clutched his tunic and went out, scanning the lessened darkness, now silvery, cold-lit. His shadow showed and a blot: a figure stood on a rock outcropping against the wall of dark beyond that was impervious to moonlight.

“Gawain?” he called, watching the figure. A woman’s voice, a commoner by accent, spoke nearby:

“He’s lost his wits with the moonrise, me lord.”

The figure on the rock (that he now realized was his friend) howled again and began to emit long drawn-out hums:

“Hummmmmm … Hummmmmmm …”

The woman’s voice floating, directionless in the pale night:

“It were the moonrise done him. He come loose in the brain when the light touched him.” Voice smoothed by time and use, hard like a polished stone.

“Gawain,” said Parsival.

“Ahhh,” was the apparent answer, “my mother comes.”

“Gawain?”

“So fair to see sailing above the treetops in sweet white-silver …”

“Gawain.” He could see he was watching the moonrise, arms upraised, pale linen head covering phantasmal in the gleaming air.

“Away! Away, you shadow!” Gawain cried.

“What’s wrong?” Unlea was calling from the tent. The peasant voice answered:

“He come mad by means of the moon, my lady, as I have seen before. Meg Tweensel went to all fours like a dog … Have I not seen the like? Oh no, not I, not I.”

Parsival gripped the entranced knight by the arms, shaking him where he perched on the ledge.

“Shadow of nothingness,” he was informed for his trouble. Then a howl — terrible, feral: “Awwwowwwwwwwwwwwwiii! O lovely mother I sing to thee! O mother of the night I thirst … I thirst!”

“What dread is this?” said Unlea, close behind him now.

Another peasant, older voice, male.

“He be drunken, then, the lord knight?”

“Nay, nay,” said the female, “he fell to the moonbeams. In my village …” She went on and the man cut over:

“Mad then, is he?”

She was grave:

“In sooth. Mad.”

Ah.”

Gawain leaped down from the rock and embraced his friend.

“Such beauty and wonder!” he cried from under his pale hood. “I am all wonders of light and time.” He danced in an ecstatic half-circle. “The dark is all brightness …” And, uncanny, howled again.

“The Devil hath him,” the male voice explained to the increasing, semivisible audience.

“Aye,” another agreed. “And why linger we here in this place of hell? Eh?”

“It’s the moon,” the woman insisted, “not no devils.”

“Drink the water with me, Shadowparse,” Gawain insisted.

The
water
, Parsival understood,
there’s
something
in
it
…

“Gawain,” he said, “hear me …” Broke off as the older warrior was trying to stand on his head in the absorbent blackness of ashdust where the moongleam was swallowed totally. Then, falling, laughing, coughing as the fine powdery stuff caught in his throat. “Bring a light!” Parsival yelled. “Find that damned skin of water!”

Rushed past Unlea (a pale robeshimmer — feet vanished into the pitch, lightless earth) who asked: “What?” and stormed towards the steady charcoal fireglow, almost snarling: “Get that damned skin!” Because he was afraid and didn’t dare even think that maybe Gawain had mixed it in with the main drinking supply because then he’d have to deal with finding fresh water here … “Find it, in the name of Jesus!”

XXXII

When the door opened and the hot, dusty light blasted into the closed wagon Broaditch crouched with his family, holding his arms (with the loosened bonds) as if helpless. Two men stood in the golden glare, armed. Studied their blinking captives for a few moments.

Pleeka worked his way towards them on his knees. A third man crouched between the other two, tall, angular, hair wild and uneven and without the beard nearly all the rest wore.

“So,” Pleeka said, calm but tense, “you come at last. Brave enough to look at me now?”

“Ah, Pleeka, my brother,” the tall man, John, said.

“Spare me
brother
,” snarled the other.

“Peace. Our ways are Gods ways.”

“Mama,” Tikla suddenly cried, “I’m afraid, mama.”

“Hush, sweet thing,” her mother crooned.

“Cease blaspheming, dog,” said the man with an ax.

“Stay thy righteous fury, Garp,” John commanded.

“Cracked John himself,” muttered Broaditch under his breath.

“We were to save all we could and who we could,” Pleeka accused.

“That’s done with now,” came the smooth, certain answer. “Planting is done and now comes reaping.” Broaditch saw his eyes, how they rested nowhere, like Pleeka’s.

“Reaping what?” the ex-lieutenant demanded.

“Life,” insisted John, in his best reediness. “Life!”

Leena and the boy were crouched by the door. She kept her eyes closed because the brightness pouring in had become the soft, water-rich fields surrounding her grandmother’s castle (where her father had been raised, and it was a legend to her, a dreaming), where the flowers in the grass were jewelstain and the sun sparkled on old stone that seemed soft and she felt long sweet easy days under an almost moveless sun and quiet voices in cool shadows, as if all summers were distilled and suspended in yielding, goldenwarm crystal … there were no marks or rents and she could watch this landscape without darkness and the other terrible stains that she refused to name or color …

We’ll
get
there
, she was thinking,
soon
…
soon
…
God
will
light
our
steps
and
hold
back the darkness
…

“Take these,” John said and the axman reached in and dragged Leena and the boy out into the violent, streaming daylight. “I give you your chance, brother. Rejoin the Truemen or perish.”

“It’s always perish,” Broaditch muttered. Felt a rising heat and hate. “With these mad bastards.” Snarled.
Again
and
again
and
again
, he thought, hating.

“God will deliver me,” Pleeka said with scorn (Broaditch rolled his eyes), “and cast you and the beast to destruction.” He laughed, not pleasantly.

“What will happen to those children?” Alienor called out, cold, furious.

The axman, short, bushy-headed, leaned in, closing the door, the halo of sun left his face a hollow blackness. His voice was fanatical, stony.

“The brothers and sisters will take them to themselves,” he informed her.

And then the door slammed the darkness into them, blank and palpable.

“Well, husband,” she said, “what do we do?”

She felt him stonestill and concentrated.

“Wait for nightfall,” he muttered. “Wait for nightfall.”

Pleeka began to sing quietly, madly to himself, mumbling …

“Just wait …” Broaditch said again.

“We cannot help them … not a grain’s worth,” she said to no one. She didn’t weep. “Not a grain’s worth …”

Walking behind Clinschor’s closed wagon, surrounded by Truemen, Lohengrin was leaning close to the slit in the paintless door and made out the figure within, sketched in the dimness by vague and dusty fingers of light: the bony man rocking on an uneven stool, long face and madly twisted moustaches plastered to the sweaty, grimy, greasy face, pale, washed-out, bluish-gray eyes peering from under the terrifically knotted brow, graying hair stringy across the forehead.

“I know you,” Lohengrin said, with wonder, bushy brows raised, setting off the beaked nose.

“I called you to me,” Clinschor asserted. “You have returned to me.” He saw his magical fire reaching out and touching the young knight.

Lohengrin thought the unwavering eye had a spectral glow, as though its light was not all reflection of the day. Lohengrin vaguely recalled a deep dark place and this voice commanding him and strange terrors whirling all around.

“I know you,” he murmured again.

“I need my loyal ones.” the eye was close and he moved it as if screwing into the other’s, inches away on the other side of the crack.

And as Leena and the boy were being hustled past they saw the knight following the dilapidated wagon, as if his nose had been tacked to it, and she opened her mouth already crying out before even shock or tears (because she knew that hooked profile from the cradle), struggling for the first time since capture, tugging towards him as they pressed her away into the black, choked, advancing horde of beards and hooded women, shouting:

“Brother! It’s Leena! … Brother … Lohengrin! … Lohengrin! …”

He pulled his face from the eye in the slit for a moment, looking for the voice he thought he’d heard. Clinschor’s bass rumble had muffled all other sound … saw nothing but the somber marchers wading through the clinging dust in long, uneven masses like, he thought, insects over the parched fields at the border now of the skeletal, black forest.

“Look at me!” Clinschor demanded. His forehead was flat against the inner boards so an eye seemed sole and suspended in the dark strip. Lohengrin blinked at it.

“We near the end,” the rumble intoned from around the eye. “I have been resurrected,” it confided. “My forces are gathering about me. My day is come. A few have been chosen to survive these days whence I may bring the golden kingdom to pass! I have been resurrected to this end.”

Lohengrin blinked.

“Tell me, if you know,” he said. “Who am I?”

He saw the flames again, everywhere … billowing, massed smoke … crashing like hell’s surf, armies sinking under and bursting into flame … heard this voice raging, ringing hollow like steel and stone above the bursting fury …

“You are my right hand,” came through the slit. “My angel of power. My loved one.”

This seemed colorful but unenlightening.

“Is my name Lohengrin?”

The eye grew sly. Squeezed its lid.

“Son of him,” the voice rumbled, “who kept it from me. Son of the Grail-thief.”

“Whose son?”

Things were coming back, pushing to come back through the again mounting pain in his head that was a white-hot wire drawn through the left temple, searing, beating through the skull, blanking, damming back floods of remembering. He sighed with pain. The sun beat and beat and beat at the back of his head and he staggered suddenly, leaning both hands on the splintery wood that rocked and tipped and fell on and on away from his twisting, intercaught steps as he reeled and weaved and tried to grip the flat wall … falling away … away … caught somewhere, falling, saw the light-haired man (he knew now was his father) riding in rain and mud out of the castle gate, his mother, Layla, following and himself, shouting something, in fury and misery, then words too:

“You don’t love us! You never loved us!”

And then that fell away and his mind was all alone in darkness crying out:

Father
…
father
…
father
…

And then it was night; the march had paused. Broaditch crouched by the space in the wood he’d managed to enlarge by fingerchapping scraping and prying for hours with his belt buckle. He could see the campfires, the glow sucked up by the charred earth and trees.

Unsteady silhouettes moved past the flames like beings of shadow. There were fragments of what seemed garbled singing. He tried to see how many stood near the wagon. Didn’t have enough angle. In any event, there was no choice but the risk or stay here. Spoke over his shoulder:

“You,” he hissed, “Pleeka. Your hands are free. Will you join with me?”

As he spoke he set his powerful grip around the edges and braced his torso into it.

“Aye,” Pleeka said, flat, inflectionless.

“You wait,” Broaditch told his wife. “If I come not back by moonset, find your way north by east and trust to God. If I live I’ll follow after. I always do.”

He pulled, slow, steady, hands swelling with blood, until his sight was rent by white flashes and then … then the old boards gave, twisted … snapped dully. Cool air washed over him. He stepped, panting, carefully out into the firegleaming darkness.

“I am your father,” the lanky, beardless man was telling Leena, sitting stiffly upright on the burlap tent floor, dark robe, pale face and hands lit by smoky lantern light that redly gleamed on the expressionless faces of two girls in their midteens, lips set, big eyes darkly watching, robes tight to the necks.

Leena just watched him, on her knees close to the hide wall.

“Where did you take him?” she wanted to know.

“I am your father,” he repeated, touching the girls.

“My father is Parsival,” she said. He paid no attention.

“All things are holy. We celebrate life in all things.” She saw his meat-red tongue slip out and along his underlip. “I wish you to join the sisters.” One of the girls reverently kissed his hand, eyes dark, showing nothing. The other smiled faintly at Leena or perhaps at some secret …

Leena shut her eyes to see what would be there: the bright vision of the castle or the stained, bleeding landscapes … nothing … just the purplish dark of her flesh. Reopened them.

“Come here, child,” John told her. His pale hand made a softly jerking motion.

She stared. Didn’t move. The girl who’d smiled crossed over to her.

“He’s the father,” she said, quiet, confident.

“The world is over,” the other one said.

“He leads us out of the darkness,” said the first. “I knew this when first I heard his voice.”

“I knew too,” said the other. “I knew.”

“I was alone on the road fleeing with the others from the fire and the sickness … My parents had traded me for grain …”

“Ah,” murmured Leena, sympathetically.

“I passed through many hands,” she continued. Her dark hair hung very straight behind her. Leena impulsively touched her arm: cool, dry. The girl went on in her strange, hushed fervency: “Father freed me from the dark life. Father freed me. I have found peace. We all were hungry and now there is food.”

“Yes,” John said, smiling and opening one long hand to her. “We are Truemen. Keepers of holiness and the scourge of the unrighteous. I shall be the father of many nations. I am that am, the father and the blood of Christ and His flesh also.” His hands shaped at the air and his lean head tilted from side to side as he spoke. “I give my children holiness and life. The life from within me. The father shall give you sweet delights to heal your pains.” He shut his rapt eyes. “Child, come to the father, bring your torn heart to be healed.”

And the dark girl held her hand, swaying her across the red-lit space, feet bare and quiet. Leena stared, doubting, for a moment, hoping:

Heal
…
can
he
heal?

Everything was blurry from strain, sleeplessness, hunger and fear … blurry … She staggered and the slim girl held her …

Broaditch moved carefully across the charred, whispery earth, staying behind the bare, depthless treeshapes as much as possible.

They were moaning or singing again. Chunks of burnt wood and branches crunched softly underfoot as he worked around closer to the banked fires that were mostly charcoal glow and little flame.

He hadn’t had to debate it with Alienor because you didn’t start deserting children. Not in a dying world where all you had to keep was how you felt about what you’d done with life.

They seemed gathered in a compact mass around the long pits of hot coals. It looked like a pig roast and then he smelled it broiling, sweetish, fat rich and he realized how hungry he was.

Fresh
food
,
no
wonder
they
moan
like
that
… Speculated about carrying some away with him except there never was a safe way to do anything.

Found a stone after poking around in the sooty ground, the size of his hand … Moved closer to the crowd. Heard a terrible, muffled scream, tearing, frantic, drowning itself in a sloshing gurgle. His neck hairs prickled. The droning chant went on …

He moved around a dim treehole and was almost among them, holding the stone inside his loose shirt. The wavering coal-light melded everything into general shadow.