The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) (27 page)

And then the tilting sway banged his head again … the hands were gone and he sat up, shuddering in the blackness, in the terrific, slow creaking and sequence of blowing, bubbling snores that he first took for suffering.

All Lohengrin’s memories were back. He just sat there with his past slammed into him as if, he thought, it had been rammed through the hole in his head, because he remembered that too, the agonizing fingers clawing into his naked skull, incredible fire and rasping.

So
he
snores
now
, he thought,
like
any
other
. Stared with contempt into the unrelieved darkness and now he suddenly became aware of the stink. Clapped his hand to his nose as if that would help. He believed he must be sitting in it and scrambled his feet under him. Or had he soiled himself? He touched and saw he hadn’t.

This
saves
your
life
, he thought,
you
swine!
Because he couldn’t endure this reek (gagging now, tasting bile) long enough to act. It felt semi-solid, flowing, filling his nose, throat, chest, insides … he scrambled for the door, half-doubled over. The
bastard
sleeps
in
his
latrine!

The pain was dull and fading in his head. A healing pain, which the other never was. He rarely sickened from wounds, in any case, even without treatment. God knew he’d felt enough of them.

Outside he crouched on the double step as the wagon labored on in the darkness. In dim torchlight he made out flickers of dark shapes.

The
Truemen
, he thought,
must
be
very
afraid
to
push
on
by
night
. He grinned.
Well
,
I’m
myself
again
… Frowned.
Or
am
I
? … Paused.
Do
I
stick
here
or
wait
for
those
coming
? He coolly contemplated the situation.
That
dream
troubles
me
… Gingerly touched his wound.
Everything
after
that
blow
seems
a
dreaming
now
…

Make up for lost time, that was essential. He’d … what? … where to start? It hardly mattered. Licked his lips. Was very thirsty. One place was as good as another given the world’s present circumstances.

There was a third alternative: beat these bastards to wherever they were rushing. Get whatever it was first, whether food, water or Devil wonders.

He dropped lightly down and ran into the rope and then into Vordit and flashed his dagger to the man’s throat.

“Not a word,” Lohengrin hissed, then felt the bound hands and understood.
Sow
confusion
, he decided,
and
reap
chaos
…

And cut him free and moved to the next and next after, warning them all to silence. Then the guard came up in dimly fluttering flamelight which just showed Lohengrin’s beaked, harsh-boned, curly head and the silver flicker as the short blade ripped an arc through the fellow’s neck, dropping him soundless in bloodspray and a quiet gurgle that accompanied his flapping, meaningless gestures.

As the torch rolled and went out, Broaditch stepped near him.

“You’re free,” the knight said. “The rest is your business.”

And moved off into the darkness, hugging the near wall in order to bypass the dim, bobbing lights …

XXXIX

He’d shifted her on top so the stones and dried mud dug into his back and buttocks and he angled his heels and rocked her as she lifted long and slow, firm around him each ecstatic fraction, each stroke concentrating the thick sweetness, the pressure building … building … burning … she swayed above him, terrific sun brilliant … everything went away, the hard, cutting earth painless now, relentless brightness mere background color … near his face a few spears of quivering green were poked through the blasted soil. Past and future hung there, the only time measured by the beating of blood, bone and flesh, and he shut his eyes and watched the images flash and let thoughts wander …

All
the
time
…
we’ll
just
do
this
all
the
time
…
AH
…
all
…

Then he could hold no longer, lifted her on his vibrating, arced body as she twisted and throbbed, sloshing her loins, and he felt it rush, pump, burst as inarticulate words spilled through brain and mouth, pulses, blazes exploding, and then instantly in imploding silence she was gone and earth too, sky … everything gone into silence … and he stood in a soundless place where clouds rushed up to immense pastel heights. The effect was of an open hall, horizon wide, that lost itself in shifting banks of gentle luminescence. Trees with jeweled leaves shimmered musically … far away the vague, almost outline of himself and Unlea entwined and struggling together almost showed … A young girl flowed from the cloudy gleamings among the strange boughs, behind her scenes forming and unforming, lacy mountains rising, gleaming rivers of rose-pale melting … naked children supple in violet air, playing as if childhood summer twilight were forever sustained, forever dying … flowers sucking slow life from the teeming earth as golden butterflies filled the electric blue air with a sweet chaos of color … and then darkening, ripping, rending … and his eyes were pain in the hot, savage blades of sunlight that razored at his brain and he thought it was his own voice screaming until he saw Unlea over him, crying out and shaking in what he still believed was passion as she twisted his head to the side on the baked, sooty, stony streambed.

“Stop it,” she cried, “you’ll be blinded!”

And he realized (in the wildly batting, flitting globes of fierce afterglow) he’d been staring straight into the sun and he wondered for how long … He could barely see what was around him, a blotting, blurring dimness … blinked and blinked …

“It’s that water again,” he told her and himself, sitting up on his heaped clothes. “The poison still works in me.”

“You fell over in a faint.” She was pulling her clothes back around herself. “Fie,” she said, touching between her legs, then wadding the hem of her tattered gown and dabbing there.

“Did I give you pleasure?” he wondered, holding his hands up and squinting through his fingers.

“What?” she murmured distractedly.

He heard the tittering before he saw the young girl’s face peering over the embankment a few feet away. Strands of her stringy blond hair caught in the burned bushes that walled along the top. Her eyes were blue and strangely blank. He recognized her from the burnt-out castle miles behind: one of the mad children posing in the ashes. He somehow was certain there were others, knelt his legs under him and reached for his clothes (not out of shame) squinting and blinking as Unlea just stared.

The girl tittered again. The soot streaked her dead-white skin as if it had been painted.

“You belong to the beast and the bad,” she said. “The seals are all open now.” Tittered.

He didn’t bother to answer, jerking his tights and leg mail up, cursing his sight because he couldn’t tell how many more there were as the violent suntorn brightness danced and bounced, veered and popped … and then the other strangeness was superimposed over the swarming inner lights: shapes in the dried, burnt brush and close-set blasted trees beyond: the craning, crawling fish, the red-eyed monkeyform with sharkmouth working … insectile creepings, a pig crouched in the crotch of a tree … things with human faces … the porcine forelimbs swayed slowly …

He pulled Unlea up beside him. Backed slowly off, holding his sheathed sword over his shoulder. Watching everything at once as best he could through his uncertain sight.

“You belong to the beast,” she called after them, just her head still poked out of the dark, shiny, crumbly bushmass. The fish had crawled beside her, pop eyes goggling at them in a welter of dancing, orbiting specks.

Still looking back, Parsival and Unlea moved across the far bank into the bare, black trees on the rim of the deep ravine whose bottom was blanked in shadow.

When the girl’s face was just a pale spot, featureless, he paused and called back:

“Why did you slay them?”

And the immediate response from off to their left, came in a deep male voice that Parsival remembered from the well — the stunted-looking leader, or elder anyway, with the thick beard:

“They belonged to the foul beast as do you. You spoiled all the green and made nastiness. Hurt the children … Your world is all gone now. Now the children hurt you!”

“Come,” Parsival said to Unlea.

“Who are these?” she wondered, adjusting her garments again.

“Throat slashers.”

“Unless,” the male voice said, invisible in the charred trees, “you drink the water of cleansing and holiness.”

“Send me only atheists!” he snarled. “From this day on.”

“They refuse to be clean,” the voice announced, unsurprised.

At the rim of Parsival’s sight where the fading sunbursts still danced and spun he saw the fierce fish creeping where the voice was sounding. He yelled over:

“If any come near let him make ready to greet hell, you poison children!” He saluted the black wall of ruined forest with his drawn blade. “I am Parsival, son of Gahmuret.” He half-smiled at his boast. It was unlike him. But his distorted consciousness was taking its toll. How long would it last? AH the realities and imaginations were mixing and pressing in. “Stay near me,” he told her. “Bear with me if I am strange and wake me if I sleep out of season.” She nodded. “Poison children,” he muttered. Gripped her firm hand. “But did I?”

“What?”

“Pleasure you.”

She looked around.

“You always do,” she said, “more ways than you know.” She kissed his sooty hand. Rolled her eyes and sighed. “I drip again,” she realized. “Well, no time for that … I think I grow tougher than when last we wandered in the forests together … Heaven, but things repeat themselves.”

“I think its until we learn from them.”

She seemed calmer.

“Can we escape?” she wondered.

He shrugged.

“Go far enough and there’s always an end.”

No, he thought,
you
never
escape
…

             
XL

“The point is this, my lord,” Howtlande was saying as the Vikings marched down the ever deepening crack in the earth by fitful torchlight. “The point is, training, organization … I learned a great deal from that madman. For all his errors he was a remarkable bastard. I was not lightly won to his cause, at first. There was a promise then, a call to greatness that seems, in these times —”

“You must have slain Skalwere with your weight of words,” Tungrim cut him off. “Make your point. You’ll need breath for better things than breaking wind from the wrong hole.”

“My point, Lord Tungrim, is simple.”

“Make it then and have done, by Thor’s frozen balls,” the redbeard captain interjected.

“My point is this,” Howtlande went on, studying their expressions in the wavering reddish flickerstrokes. “Organization. Training. Men become what they’re taught to be. We take hold of the remaining youth of this land and raise them away from everything and teach them only what
we
want. Give them a new faith, a new outlook.” He was quite excited now. These ideas had been perking in him for some time. Clinschor had shown him the way. “The lord master —” Caught himself. “— the clever bastard wanted the whole world destroyed so he might rebuild it, you see? Eh? He was right. And now it’s been destroyed and we —”

“What better training can there be than being born and raised a Norseman?” redbeard cut in. “Eh? You fat sack of contending winds.”

“Well, well,” put in Tungrim, “a man ought not to be afraid to learn a new thing from time to time. Even a Viking.” He glanced over at the pale, mincing, wobbling mule that bore Layla, her face still in fixed profile to him. “Anything ahead?” he called to the lead torchbearer.

“Nothing yet, Lord Tungrim,” was called back.

“If they’ll move day and night,” Tungrim stated, “then so will we.”

“With your support, my lord,” Howtlande continued, “we could begin such a project. Eventually we’d have people with total faith and no weaknesses. Totally loyal. Dedicated to you like monks to God!” He knotted one big fist. He saw Tungrim was musing, turning these ideas over within himself …

“It may prove a greater feat, fat talker,” redbeard pointed out, “just to find food and drink.” He leaned into the torch aura shifting around Tungrim. “Unless you mean to chew stones.” He laughed without mirth. “There’s a diet to support your fat.”

Layla was sweating chill drops. She kept rubbing her tapered hands up and down her forearms. Licked her lips.

Now
what
? she asked herself.
I feel ill … what do I do? Bear him children? Hah … more of that … do I dream he’s a fine prince and lives not at a court of mangy dogs in crumbling huts where I may spend long evenings chatting with his people about salting fish? Oh, Christ Jesus, be this where I end? … or just follow while they chase grails? … not without wine … I’ll perform nothing sober … sober raise little beast brats if ever we reach his chill homeland? … among amazing bores … nothing without wine … who sees clearly cannot endure life … Parsival seems not so had to me now … those days seem sweetened … bless the wise fellow, though mayhap it were a wife, who first thought to trample the grape which brings sleep’s ease to those who must be waking … I’m so cold … and ill …

She shivered in a shudder. Almost called out because something had moved against the high rim of the canyon where the bright, twisting strip of stars showed. Something huge moved with spiderlike springing, clawing. She kept staring.

“What do you see?” Tungrim asked, moving nearer.

“It moved,” she told him.

“What?”

“Something. Up there.”

“Urn?”

“Something terrible …”

“Terrible?”

She shuddered. Nodded. Didn’t look at him. In the wavers of illumination he saw her hands wringing her arms.

“What troubles you?” he gruffly asked.

“Ah,” she replied, “what indeed.”

“Is something there now?”

“I won’t miss it,” she said, voice too high and light, he thought. “Terrible things are coming … terrible things …” Kept her stare fixed at the crease of stars.

“You need rest,” he said. In the background Howtlande was talking to someone else now. “We’ll halt before long, Layla,” Tungrim soothed. “We’ll catch these silly fish and see what we see.”

“No,” she said, “it will catch us first.”

“What will?”

She laughed, too high and light.

“Oh, it will, it will,” she told him, staring. “It will.”

“What’s that, mama?” Torky asked.

They were nearly to the rim of the ravine now. She could see Pleeka ahead against the stars. She heard it too: a deep roaring above them, stormsound.

“Wind, it would seem,” she told him. She could hear Pleeka still raging flatly, independent of listeners, as he clambered on.

“… so … so … so,” he was saying, “all was betrayed and stained and let the great mouth swallow all except these I’ve pulled from the jaws … the jaws … I save food from the jaws … all will be eaten save these and let them be stones against the teeth! … so … so … so …”

She was easing Tikla higher on the fairly easy incline they’d reached. Pleeka was just mounting over the top and the wind struck at the same moment, like a black wall blotting out the stars, and he seemed to hang, float free and dissolve as driven ashdust blotted him away and he passed over them, his sounds swallowed by the terrific, pounding howl that shook the cliff stones, and then soot was pouring down and she was desperately sliding and scraping with the children towards the far bottom, the dry choking stuff, that seemed the dryness of the dark precipitate, spilling down like rain in hell …

Lohengrin realized one of them had kept pace with him as he ran ahead down the twisting channel that was now about an armspan wide. He had a fleeting fantasy it would end in a blank wall.

He heard the other coming closer. Suddenly stopped and turned, skidding a little on the smooth pebbles, silently drawing and holding the blade straight out before him.

The following foot impacts stopped.

“Who are you, sirrah?” the knight demanded, then realized: “Ah. The big fellow.” Smiled invisibly. “You helped me. My memory’s back now.”

“Does that content you, sir?” Broaditch wondered.

“You’re a shrewd Jack,” Lohengrin decided. “How are you called?”

“Broaditch of Nigh.”

“You were nigh onto my back … Well, walk on with me. I mean you no hurt. All that’s run water …” They headed on, fast, though the big freeman kept a few cautious steps back. “Anyway, I think you did me a great service.”

“Did I?”

“You snapped the halter fate had round my neck. You broke my memory, I mean, fellow.” Sheathed his blade and kept one hand stretched out before him now. “Where there’s a top there’s a bottom,” he commented. “Beginning has an end.”

“Must it, Lord Lohengrin?”

“What did you throw at me?”

“On the hilltop?”

“Where else? I told you, my past is back with me. But what was it, nay, come out straight, I say.”

“I cannot tell for certain.”

“What?” Their pace had slowed as the walls closed in. They kept bumping and scraping around zigzag turns. “Your hurled that mystery well enough to break my head. I love you not for that part.”

“Your sword was not idle, sir.”

Well behind there was a sudden silence: the wagon obviously could go no further. The outhouse on wheels, was the gist of Broaditch’s thought. There were faint shouts.

“They’re all mad to the pate,” Lohengrin declared.

“I knew your father as a boy,” Broaditch told him.

“Ah. Him …”

“And his mother too, for all of that.”

“If this narrows more …” They went sidewise now. “It’s good we’ve eaten little lately … You knew grandmother, did you? They claim she was queer of brain too. It follows the family. I don’t follow the family.” Glanced up and saw no stars at all now, a void … “I was the bad one. Blasphemous and so on. Well …”

“You were none to meet in a lonely place, I think.”

“What? Oh, I remember. I sought your life for a time.”

“I pray it’s a habit you broke.”

“Strangely enough, it ceased to matter after I became duke of now nonexistent lands.” Chuckled dryly. “Or lord general of an annihilated host.” Shrugged. “The past turned to ashes. What matter you saw me slay some long lost phantom?”

“Unless it trouble your conscience.”

“I dare not feed one at this late date. The bill would break me.” He groped along. “But why did you follow me?”

“I didn’t.” Which was true, because he assumed Alienor and the family had enough start to be well ahead.

And
it’s
not
likely
a
dead
end
else
I’d
have
met
them
coming
back
…

“Hark,” commanded Lohengrin. There was a steady roaring.

“If that be water,” Broaditch muttered as they worked their way, bumping and scraping, through the jagged zigzags, “we’ll shortly have more than we can drink.”

“I think it be wind, Jack.”

The sound was building, coming on as if flowing down the ravine behind, embellished now by screeching gusts.

“Right enough,” Broaditch agreed, clawing around a bend. “What next?”

“Trust the Devil,” said the panting knight, “he’ll provide.”

Vordit was alone near the deserted wagon, sitting in the dark. The Truemen were gone and now he heard the Vikings coming behind but didn’t look up. “You’re free,” the big peasant had told him after the knight had cut them loose.

“Free,” he now muttered. Listened to the storm building up behind the oncoming shouts of conversation. He rested his back on the rough wall and waited. “Free …” His mouth was too dry to spit or he would have. “I’ll just step home now and plant me crop … Freedom’s sweet …” Would have spat. Didn’t look up from his sullen contempt when the horned warriors charged past, torches whipping out in the sudden, black, strangling gusts of ashdust. Didn’t move as it flooded over him …

Cursing, Clinschor popped out the door in a rush of fecal stench and was jumping up and down in the twisting torchlight, left hand clenched tightly around the metal fragment of what he was certain was the Holy Grail. He felt its force pulsing up his arm into his bony frame.

The wagon was jammed tight between the walls. Hopelessly. As the thundering voice raged at the beasts and driver and finally at nature herself, John watched, in awe, the terrible, flashing, glow-eyed fury of the holy being that possessed him.

“Use your powers,” he cried out in sudden ecstasy, “mighty one!”

The mighty one paused in his raging and lifted one contorted hand as if to reach and rip the dark walls apart, then closed his fist.

“Not yet,” he said. The torch flames phut-phutted in the first fingers of wind. “We are close … close …” And with surprising, spidery agility he clambered over the vehicle and down the far side. As the others followed, he raced and vanished into the lightlessness beyond. “Soon we are home … soon …” He saw the hall of the earthgods where power rose from the deepest foundations of the world, a vital darkness like flame that needed but the touch of the Grail … the
touch
… the wordless voice was explaining, showing him without images, teaching without precept, the voice within the bones of his head, intimate, infinite, hollow with chill force, made clear that he and the power would be one at last, the earth itself would be his body, subterranean fire his blood and stone his bones …

Aiiii
, he thought in trembling delight,
yesyesyes
… actually running now as the voice urged him on and he tripped and bounded off the narrowing sides, spinning and half-spinning, laughing … just one touch of the Grail and the hollow force … just one touch …

And then the storm hit, blasting and sucking air, washing floods of ash (because there was no rain) down the streambed, the first invisible puff already among the rearmost, choking, eye-stinging …

Alienor and the children, who were well behind even the Vikings, had crawled halfway down the slope and found a deep crevice in the rockface. They’d crept within, safe, as terrific gales puffed, billowed and snapped.

They held one another in silence. She didn’t even pray. And the children didn’t cry. Just held each other …