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LAYLA

By sundown they caught up with his family and retainers, camped with some hide-covered wagons and half-a-dozen horses.

Layla had given up arguing and berating him, for the moment. Her back was sore from banging into his armor for hours. She was more frustrated than nervous. She blamed her husband, naturally, but only to a point; after all, this idiot had been poured from the same mold of selfish, jackass men. She saw the campfire about the same time she smelled the roasted meat.

“Well,” she asked her ex-lover, “and what will your mother think of this?”

“My mother,” he said. “Ha, ha. That’s good.”

“Did her husband keep two wives?”

“My father? Ha, ha.”

“Flawless dolt,” she said, “Will you tell her you’re so mad with love for me that you stole me away?”

She longed to smack his bearded face but that was impractical at the moment. They were among the tents now. She thought what a charming outing this was going to be.

“Mad for love?” he wondered. “I want your husband to come fetch you. He has insulted me and thinks himself safe. He thinks.”

“Something you spare yourself as much as possible, Gaf,” she said. “Listen, how will Parsival divine that you’ve made away with me? He will consider I’ve run off for spite, if ever he comes home to learn I’m gone.”

A man stood up from the fire and moved towards them. He held a spear like a staff, leaning a little. His outline was just a blot against the warm flamelight as the sun went deeper red, becoming just color now and even that staring to drain away as if the horizon clouds actually sucked up the light…

“I left word,” her captor assured her. “He’ll learn. He’ll learn. He’ll be brought to heel like the hound he is.”

She twisted her head to look back into his bearded, shadowed face, the eyes unwinking glints.

“I cannot believe I let you have your way with me,” she signed. Shook her head.

“You liked it well enough,” he grunted.

“Do I like an itch because it feels pleasant to scratch it?” she asked.

“You itch? Did a bug bite you?”

“You were but the treestump the dog rubs his hind against.”

“I begin to understand your husband,” he snorted.

“Good,” she responded. “Then why not be like him and leave me at once?”

He reined up by the fire, his man-at-arms holding the horse while he half-lifted Layla down, dropping her so that she hit the earth hard enough to stumble. His wife was there

“Good even my lord,” the soldier said.

“Have any passed this way?” Sir Gaf demanded.

“None, Lord, save a mendicant monk and a charcoal burner.”

Sir Gaf dismounted, heavily, favoring the leg he’d hurt in his breakfast brawl with Parsival. It reminded him. He glowered and spit with spite.

“You never bucked me off,” quoth Gaf. “Or him, either.”

Layla liked that.

“Never bucked is right,” she said, “We hardly felt the riders.”

His wife giggled at this racy pass though her face stayed expressionless.

“Feed yourself and be still,” said Gaf.

He handed her a seared rib. She took it but didn’t bite yet.

“Your husband means to draw mine by using me as bait,” Layla told her. “That’s like setting out a pot of honey to catch a toad.”

His wife bit the rib. Wrinkled her whole face this time.

Gaf stood there. He was now spilling beer from a jug directly into his throat, head backtilted. He paused long enough to say:

“I’ll clip him close when next we meet.”

“If you don’t free me,” Layla said, “I’ll clip you while you sleep.” She turned to the wife who seemed unmoved. “You astound me,” she told her.

“I?”

“You live with this man and yet…have you never tried to slay him?” Layla queried.

The lady shook her roundish head.

“I do not grasp your import,” she said. Her husband was now ignoring both of them, absorbed in his beer.

Layla’s face seemed to keep changing expressions in the uneven firelight.

“Ha,” she said. “I bring nothing from across the seas but I’ll import some advice from the Italians: Better a short life than a slow death.”

PARSIVAL

He and the woman had rolled to a stop together on one of the circular ledges about one third of the way to the bottom of the spiral pit which must have been the entrance to a mine, he concluded.

“Have you killed most of them yet?” she wanted to know as he helped her up and out.

He sighed. Whenever he’d brag at all…

“There are a few left,” he admitted.

The soldiers were riding around the spiraling roadway rather than attempting to cut across and be spilled like Parsival had been. It would take them time to circle down.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Come on,” he said, taking her arm, helping her climb to the next level.

“You want to reach them sooner,” she wondered.

“I do,” he replied.

He was timing it, so by the time they scrambled up three levels all but one horseman in the posse of seven had passed them. Now they’d have to come back uphill which would allow their quarry to run lower and evade. The rest, were on foot and, of course, were scrambling down the sides from level to level.

“I’m good at this business,” he told her. “I’ve tricked them.”

“Yet we still seem surrounded.”

The last rider had just come up, reining back and raising his scimitar, shouting incomprehensible words that clearly meant, “Stop!”

“I’m not bragging,” the knight assured her.

He stepped close and gripped the man’s calf just above the pointed boot, forcing him to slash straight down wildly whilst he yelled in agony as the terrible grip closed. Parsival leaned under the stroke, took the sword and tossed the little man down to the next level.

“There,” he said. “Come.”

Mounted her behind him on the armor less pony these Mongol-like fighters favored.

Headed up the spiral towards the next clump of opponents, foot-soldiers who came running, leaping and skidding form several directions. He brushed them aside: banging, kicking, cutting. No bowmen yet. Kept climbing.

As he came over the rim he saw Lego coming out of the trees. Reacted to his loyalty once again. The next thing he noticed were the arrows zipping and hissing out of the woods at them.

Lego got his shield up fast. A couple sparked and skidded off the steel. Then he saw his lord actually deflect two or three shafts wit the edge of his open hand. He realized the woman had been hit. Then he was trapped.

They wheeled their horses and crashed back along the forest trail to the main road. They reached it at the same time as the three knights from Arthur’s court who’d been following at a distance. Their visors were open.

“That’s enough,” commanded the lean, red-haired, long-nosed leader. “You have defied your king long enough.”

Parsival shifted the slumped woman around to the front of his saddle. She groaned. He’d been afraid she was dead. He was trying to get a look at her wound, which was the reason it was Lego who saw the sideblow swung by the burley, big-jawed knight. Lego lunged nearly out of the saddle in a hopeless effort to block the stroke that laid the flat of the blade alongside his lord’s bare skull. Even so, Parsival’s reactions were so quick he actually rolled a little with the blow as a tremendous, red/black blotting soundlessly burst in his head and seemed to push him face forward onto the rutted road.

“Ahh,” he whispered, rolling to his knees, holding both sides of his head as if to keep it intact.

The little fighters had already swarmed out of the woods and surrounded everybody. The split-nosed leader came panting up, on foot, yelling both his language and crippled English:

“You stand still! You caught! You stand still!”

The three knights didn’t: they charged instantly, in unison, swords ready, shields up. Parsival was tempted to follow them, except his legs weren’t part of him yet. The woman lay sprawled in the dust.

They reared to a sudden stop as a wedge of mounted “infidels” rose up to block them. Parsival’s head felt like a broken bell.

“Well, lord,” Lego said. “Gone but a day and I find you with a woman.”

Parsival went on his hands and knees to her and carefully ripped the fabric away from the arrow wound. A strand of blondishbrown hair unwound down his forehead and he shook his head to keep it out of his eye.

He saw the arrowhead had penetrated her ribcage and the pain and shock had knocked her out. He realized it wasn’t deep enough to cut her lungs, but there would be no way to push it through: he’d have to pull it straight back the way it had come.

Lego was watching the three knights circling their horses, looking for a weak point; there were too many warriors now. He was waiting a chance to strike down the one who’d hit his lord.

Parsival took a careful grip on the shaft, deciding to take advantage of her unconsciousness. He braced his left hand on her breastbone, held his breath and pulled with a steady wrench.

Praise our lady, he thought, because the head was small, narrow and oval with no reverse edges to stick between the bones. So it popped free, followed by a gout of blood. She groaned and thrashed for a moment.

“Get the medicine bag from your horse,” he told Lego. He’d pack the wound with a field poultice before binding it. He knew that more wounded survived who were treated by fellow soldiers than those who fell into the care of professional surgeons.

At the rim of his attention, he saw the foreign warriors had shut them in; but if they’d meant to kill they’d have already done it.

Lego came back with the bag. He was looking at the newcomers his lord hadn’t seen yet. Parsival found what he wanted and started dressing the wound, aware of the clash and jangle of horses and metal looming over them. He assumed it was Arthur’s men. The sun was low and right in his eyes where he faced southwest on the road so it was all shadow and dazzle and he didn’t understand what Lego was talking about when he said:

“These are strange knights.”

“Aye…and days, my friend.”

Parsival squinted and shielded his eyes, looking up not at Lego, but into the silvery facemask that was now close to him. The rider leaned down.

What? he thought. What?

Because it was a skull face with blood-red fangs; the distorted, furious grimace of a demon in deep black armor, darker than the shadows themselves. And he was shocked because he knew them, twenty years ago, while escaping from the madness, plague, fire and famine of those days, returning home he’d been tracked by twelve of these black armored killers, the last (he’d believed) of the dark army whose lord and leader Clinschor, the eunuch, devil, wizard and fiend, had unleashed on Britain in an effort to conquer the land and possess the Holy Grail.

Parsival, weak and weary, far north and near his home, had been caught up with on a white pebbled dry-wash that served as road in the Welsh highlands. His memory was true: the steep banks, violet highland flowers on the rocky, scrubby hills; the black knights: with their carnival facemasks charging him again and again and again. Him: striking, blocking, twisting, ducking, blacking out, the world spinning gray, bright and dark…finally the earth slapping him flat on his back and it was over, and when he returned to consciousness he found he was the only one left alive or unbroken……

He’d been a boy then. The boy who’d found the unfindable Grai Castle, by seeming chance, and then left, and lost the way back forever…….a fierce, hopeful, dreaming boy with a fighting talent that seemed to possess rather than obey him. A skill that was poetry and pain. A violence cursed with elegance.

He remembered in a bright link how he’d lain there in the white pebbly wash among the dead and dying Black Knights – sleeping, half-waking, shivering with fever from his wounds, the mist-paled Northern sun seeming to appear then flick away into moonless night. Eventually, he’d wakened and healed.

Those killers had followed him for literally hundreds of miles. They’d been sent by the tyrant Clinschor to take the Grail from him. This mistaken belief had become his life’s chief curse. The Grail, he’d said, was like tin can tied to a cat’s tail that drew all the dogs to him.

Absorbed in the memories, he touched his head where the flat of the sword had just hit. Winced. There was blood and a bump. When he stood up to face the Black Knight who was regarding him from horseback, reeled and staggered forward, groping to hold himself up on his horse that suddenly wasn’t there…falling…bracing himself to hit the ground that wasn’t there either…nothing under him but nothing…darkness…

LOHENGRIN

The wide road tilted steeply down and ran straight into the valley where the shadows were gathering, filling the rills and clefts with an almost tidal rush as the sunset died into livid purple and deepening red.

Young Hal looked up, frowning, watching the crescent moon blotted out as a vast hand of cloud clenched it. The horses were uneasy, feeling the tension of the coming storm. Lightning flashes jumped, shifted and wildly shadowed the underbellies of the thunderheads.

"Now we'll be soaked, he complained.

Lohengrin cocked his head, concerned with the sudden straying of the road. The horses were bracing back to keep from skidding on the pebbly surface.

"There's bound to be a village along such a broad way,” he assured Hal.

"Yet do I doubt you," Hal responded. "Peradventure we should camp and take shelter."

"Where? Here? This is like a child's slide." Indeed, the horses couldn't help accelerating. The hooves clacked and scraped as the slope dropped away. "Who could come up this stupid road?" The two of them were tilted hard back in their oversized war saddles. "Goats?" Faster and faster down now, approaching a gallop. "Christ!" he cried as they plunged into a sudden mass of trees, the road purely theoretical now. The night had closed in and under the clouds it was as dark as a closed room except for the shudders of oncoming lightning.

The first winds ripped around in the upper branches, swirling leaves loose.

“What a place," Hal complained, in a gasp, clutching reins and saddlehorn as they crashed down far too fast.

Under the massed, creaking branches the darkness was now total. The wind puffed and strained, violently. Even huge trees groaned and crackled. Unseen dust and dirt whipped into their eyes. Lohengrin cursed in short, furious barks. The horses were terrified.

Then lightning hit a tree nearby, so close the sound was more pressure than noise and the flash shocked their eyes, the afterglow a blinding greenish-red...and the bolts in the air everywhere so that the forest flung wildly in staccato convolutions.

And then suddenly they were at the bottom trying to slow the totally spooked mounts. The flashes showed they were still on the wide, straight road. When another big bolt blasted a nearby tree to flaming splinters, both horses reared in panic. The young men barely kept their seats.

"You shithead," Lohengrin snarled, kicking the beast forward savagely.

And then the rain finally came scything down like knuckles on a fist of wind. At least it was warm. They struggled into the stinging gusts that clittered and drummed on the shields and armor strapped to the horses while the light and shadow twisted around them.

At some point the road must have turned and they didn't because they were suddenly out in the open again. The wild light showed twisting downpour empty fields around them and mist that boiled across the fields as if the clouds had been driven into the earth. In the leaping stormlight he glimpsed a metal gate in a wall of shadows. He took it for a trick of the eyes. Squinting and shielding his face with one hand he forced his mount for it, flanked by Hal, who'd fallen back somewhat. He had an impression of a long, low castle wall, strangely folding back into itself as if the wildly shifting shadows were part of the structure Hal was shouting something off to Lohengrin's left. He wasn't far but his voice was sucked away by the storm. The wind shook them in their saddles.

“Christ," Lohengrin said. “Christ."

In the leaping stormlight he glimpsed a metal gate in a wall of shadows. He took it for a trick of the eyes. Squinting and shielding his face with one hand he forced his mount for it, flanked by Hal, who'd fallen back somewhat. He had an impression of a long, low castle wall, strangely folding back into itself as if the wildly shifting shadows were part of the structure.

He was thinking they could shelter from the wind a little there. In the flashes it really seemed to be physically moving, the gate jumping forward, back...to the side. Suddenly it was right in front of him, glinting. He had an impression it was set in the inner crease of a V formation of dark stones that had once been part of a great, structure, now shattered and jumbled.

Leaning back and forth in the saddle against the blasts of mists and wind that let up skightly as he entered the open end of the V. He saw the gate was perfectly intact: a doorway, he thought, into rubble.

The broken stones on each side of him were 10 or 15 feet high. As he went deeper into the narrowing area (that must have been a courtyard) the gale puffed overhead, roared and whispered; but he could sit straight now and the horse settled down a little.

He stopped in front of the perfect arch and massive portal. Dismounted and secured the bridle to one of the arm-thick bronze bars close to the hinge. Then he gripped the double handle and braced to pull. He was surprised, staggering back, because there was no resistance: it swung open as if the pins had been oiled that day.

Hesitating, he looked back for Hal. The open triangle forming the entrance was maybe thirty feet deep. He could see no more than forty, when lightning permitted and then just billows of dense mist and downpour. Shouting would have been futile so he shrugged, gave the horse a pat and a word in its ear, and went inside, leaving the gate open behind him.

He hoped to find enough roof intact for a night's shelter. He was surprised to discover a sudden, steep tunnel cut through the stone and then dipping the way, after the arch of the mouth, the throat suddenly drops down - except, balancing himself at the brink, he discovered neat stairs cut wide enough to make descent acceptable if nerve-wracking.

Adjusting to the flickering flashes from the doorway he went down a few steps: too fast. It was hard to stop. He leaned backwards and just caught the sides of the shaft with his outstretched hands. About five feet across. He paused. The wind and thunder was a distant hollow pulsing here; and the flickers from above barely broke the darkness.

How deep is this? he wondered. Twisted his head around to look up where he'd come. About twenty feet. How did I get down this far already?

He didn't want to go back yet. There was nothing behind but the storm, finding Hal and hearing him complain. He had a vague idea there might be something valuable below - a treasure or old weapons....He didn't really believe it but his recent experiences reminded him of minstrel tales where anything was possible.

In any case, he carefully went down keeping both hands stretched out to the walls, into darkness that had become thick enough to sit on.

This is stupid. There's probably no bottomland what's down there? He had no means of making a light. This is a fool's enterprise fit for my father... I'll wait at the

top....

Even as he twisted around to climb he realized he should have just backed up because his foot slipped immediately and skidded. Even as he cursed he was on his belly, sliding down, feet first, on his chainmail surcoat, streaking sparks and rasping like a Hie as he gathered speed over the stone steps.

"Holy Virgin!" he exclaimed.

He gave himself up for dead as he protected his face with his forearms and sickeningly accelerated. The steel was already burning hot from the friction.

What a stupid death! he thought.

And then there were no steps; nothing under him and he dropped, spinning slowly

end over end into total blackness. Then, inexplicably, he felt as if his body had dissolved and there was only a tiny point of himself left in a vast, lightless silence. He relaxed, strangely.

His mind automatically insisted it had to be a terrific uprush of air cushioning him. He couldn't tell if he was still actually falling.

And then an instant impact: crunching, grinding, powdery crumbling through what seemed unseen brittle layers of lumps and sticks or loose straw which gradually slowed him until he finally stopped, buried in a heap of scratchy fragments of what he decided, deep breathing himself back from shock, might be kindling wood.

I could have broken my neck, he pointed out to himself.

He sprawled there, several body-lengths deep. He had a sense of being at the bottom of a well. Wondered if the stairs came all the way down.

He half-climbed, half swam to the crumbly surface. Struggled, kicked his way Juok to the back wall and groped around it. It was square and wider than above. There were no stairs. He couldn't stand upright because of the brittle stuff he rested on so it was a little time before, groping higher, he found space behind what he'd assumed was the wall of the well. Apparently he'd dropped into a bigger chamber from a hole above.

This could be good or bad, he thought.

He clambered up and over and was now outside the square full of whatever had cushioned his otherwise fatal plunge, standing on solid stone flooring. He stood a moment, brushing chips

and splinters from his hair and mail surcoat

.He stared up the shaft and imagined he saw faint winks of the lightning outside. Maybe just his eyes reacting to total darkness. He shrugged. Now what?

This is my father's type of nonsense, he said to himself. I can't believe this….Still, if there's a way in there usually a way out,...

Lohengrin wasn't given to panic; but this was pretty much whistling in the dark. Then he realized something. He leaned over the lip of the square enclosure a picked up a long stick from the heap. As he felt it carefully and knew he was right: a human bone. An arm or a child's leg. A pit of bones.

Mary's sweet milk, he thought.

Tossed the bone aside and drew his sword. He felt better holding it. He groped forward, using the blade like a blind man's stick. The metal clinked on the stone flooring. The air was damp but not unpleasant. It turned out the square charnel pit was set in the center of a square room. Who was collecting bones? he wondered. A troll? They'd obviously been dumped from above. But they were old, dessicated.... "Alright," he murmured, after going around the chamber twice, touching the walls, "there's no door." Or it's hidden or subtly set and I missed the latch. Sheathed the sword. He made another circut, reaching as high as he could, running his hands over the smooth, ancient stonework. By the third futile pass he was nervous and tired enough to sit with his back on the wall, facing the bone pit. He breathed steadily to calm himself. Told himself he'd try again. Shut his eyes. He had no idea what time it was. Tiredness softly pulled at him. He felt leaden. He went out as if he'd dropped into another well except this one had no bottom. No shattered bones—nothingness... And the women were all beautiful. He counted eight of them. Their bodies were full and golden, trimmed with rings and thin gold chains that covered nothing. Their naked bodies were sleek, stunning lines and rills, shadows and archings; the bare feet had bright rings on each toe. There was music and they danced. Reedy music with bright cymbal clashes. He watched as if nothing else had ever been.

As they swayed and spun closer to him he noticed each girl had at least one blemish on her body: reddish black blotches that suggested swollen birthmarks. He was attracted and nauseated at the same time. "Who are you?" he heard himself saying. "What is this? What is happening here?" A perfectly formed, nude girl with exquisite features, long hair the color of hot embers, came and knelt at his feet. Her eyes were amber, haunting. She put a finger to her lips. "Shhh," she murmured. "You ask too many things. Ask nothing and you will get everything." "No questions," he snorted, "even in my own dream." "You have been chosen for the gift of power." That was nice. He accepted that he was asleep or had a fever, but was enjoying himself. He became aware of the chamber suddenly: garish gold and red. If he tried to focus too long on any area it blurred into a dark hole. Now a stooped, hooded man in red and gold robes came toward him. He hadn't noticed him before. The robes wavered like a shadow. He was holding something out in front of himself with both hands. Lohengrin tried to see what it was but when he looked directly it dissolved into a head-sized blot that seemed a hole in the dream he assumed he was in. For an instant, through the hole, he thought he glimpsed a landscape: a vast view of ragged stones and distant, sharp-edged mountains under a sky of wild, black clouds and deep red as if the atmosphere itself were dully burning.

The scene was compelling and seemed to draw at him. He had an impression that if he somehow let go he'd be sucked through the hole into that forbidding yet fascinating world. He sensed (but didn't see) life there: strange, dark and powerful. Then the hole became a blot again and then a face because the bent little figure in the redgold monk-like hood was suddenly standing over him. The face swam in shadows. He kept trying to focus on it—except it wasn't a face, it was a skull-shaped goblet..looked like reddishblack metal. Silly nonsense, he thought. He was supposed to drink. He felt that. The girl's muddygold-colored body was close to him. Her too-short fingers were intimately soothing and stroking him as the hollow-topped skull bumped under his chin. Drink, she soothed, somehow in his mind. Drink and become the great lord. He liked that. The great lord sounded good. He reached for the cup. Why not - it was only fever-dreaming. Looked into the hollow. The same hole again: window into a barren, dark landscape under the bloodred smoulder of sky that seemed depthless. It was like a well. He didn't want to fall. He could see and sense things out there where far and near seemed strange. There were human-like beings standing or floating (he couldn't be sure) on some flat, jet black clifftop and the one in the center echoed the gesture of the cowled cripple except his head wasn't a skulicup, it was swollen, all huge mouth gnashing long teeth opening wider and wider -Lohengrin felt it pulling at him.

“No, no, no!” he insisted. “What is this place?" He was suddenly shouting and the woman seemed to cry: "Be still!" Her voice becoming an echo that repeated and overlapped itself until there was only the darkness again, the wall of the pit and himself yelling over and over: "What!? What!? What!?" GAWAIN He woke up after midday, surprised by what seemed a din outside the dim, comfortably cool place where he lay, naked, on his back on a blanket laid over clumps of hay. The smell told him it was a bam or stable. The noise reminded him he was in the city: voices calling, talking; shouting children; bells ringing; carts banging; music and drums in the distance.... Reached for the woman. Then sat up, looking for her. He'd left the wooden hand screwed in with the joint wrapped in a silky fabric. He was in a hayloft in a stable, as he'd thought No animals present, either he noted. But it was in use, you could smell the dung and horsereek.

He remembered being led here by her, struggling up the ladder, spilling half a jack of ale over himself and her and finding it very funny. Remembered fragments of the night: her strong, smooth, long limbs, tender breasts, her mouth all over his body...It was the best thing he'd known in so long, he'd almost forgotten reality.... Of course, she was gone now, he told himself. She woke sober and saw my face. Likely she's still in flight... He started when he heard her sudden voice at the foot of the ladder: "So ya finally stir yerself," she called up. "I've got hard-cooked eggs and mare's milk.” Her head and shoulders now showed in the loft as she paused there on the steps. “And yer hood be sewn." He grinned, turning his face away so she only saw the strong-jawed profile and long dark brown hair almost untinted by gray. "Am I in the same world I fell asleep in?" he asked. "This seems a pleasant place." "Yu've earned some respite," she told him, kneeling up beside him, now, barefoot and naked under a loose, fresh white linen shift that probably (he later realized) was her best that she'd gone home to put on. Though he'd lain with noblewomen in finest samite gowns, sporting fair jewels and traced with rare perfumes, he was touched by this as by Christ's parable of the widow's mite, whose gift was greatest because she was poor and gave, with her mere pennies, all she had.

"I thank you, woman." "Me pleasure, Sir Gawain." She laid the cowl over his lap where he sat, crosslegged, and gently touched his shoulder. He nodded. He felt good; yet his eyes were teary - and not with self-pity. "Yes," he said, thickly. "I do thank you. Yet, I disremember your name." "You never asked, me lord." "Yes?" "Enea," she told him. He adjusted himself into the cowled cloak, still sitting. "You need not cover for me, sir knight." "I know," he said. Quaffed some milk. It was warm, musky, rich. Offered her a sip which she took. "Where is your excellent husband this morrow?" She shrugged. "Somebody took away dead Tom," she said. "I don't doubt it were him sneaked back." She took a bite of egg and handed him one. "I don't doubt he's hiding and watching to see if you be gone. In fear, he'll be." He took her by the shoulders and squeezed, tenderly. “I -” He began and stopped Realized he wanted to take her with him. Wanted to tell her that. But where? On the road with the madman John and the rest? Why would she want to? Ice or fire, he decided, uncomfortable either way.... Yet, might I linger here? Because it was that nice to make love again...in any case, he could not have borne seeing Shinqua even if she (and he believed it) she'd accept'him as he was, the horror of his wounds.... She was looking at him, faintly smiling. "I've had no such humpin' ere this," she told him, "in all me time. You was as loved by the great ladies, I expect, as salt peas by pigeons." He guffawed. He couldn't believe how good he felt. "None ever made," he said, "as fair a comparison." She laughed - something rare, as it turned out. She reached down his crotch with both hands and followed with her mouth. He was surprised, stiffened, at once into the world's sweetest discomfort. "Ah," he exhaled. "Ahhh...." Her mouth worked him. Held him so that when she let it free, the cool air was a cold shock, and her absence. She knew it. "Don't know what yer misssin' till it's gone, eh?" she whispered, cheek on his thigh. "Why did you stop?"

“Aye?” He realized he wanted to take her with him; tell her that. Where? On the road with the madman John? Why would she want to? Ice or fire, he decided, uncomfortable either way….yet, might I linger her? Because it was nice to make love, again. In any case, he couldn’t bear the idea of seeing Sqinqua even if she’d actually accept the horror of him. This one was smiling, faintly, just looking at him. “Had no such humpin’ ere this,’ she told him. “You was as loved by the great ladies, I trow, as salt peas by pigeons.” He liked that. Grinned and let himself relax into feeling good. Why not? It would soon pass. “Savory comparison,” he reflected. “You be a humorous sort,” she said, chuckling. “In yer own style.” “I laugh like a priest prays: in fear and doubt.” “Fear not ne doubt,” she murmured, reaching down his crotch with both hands and following with her mouth. He was surprised and stiffened at once into the world’s sweetest discomfort. Sighed and hummed, reflexively. Her mouth worked him, held him so that when she broke contact the cool air was a cold shock and her absence an ache. She knew it. “Why did you sto "So you'd see what missin' in yer life, me lord." "As though I knew not," he said, rubbing his hand in her hair, gently trying to shift her head back where it had been. "I want to grip ya to stay," she told him. "As I see yer a wanderin' man." "Yes," he murmured. "I'll -" Gasped as her intense, deep, mobile mouth came back ^ cover and sooth'his need again, "...take over...your husband's business," he joked in ecstasy And shut his eyes and lost what he meant to say. "...ahhh...Christ!...ahhh...." LAYLA She was brooding, sitting in the tent by the light of a wan oil lamp, bare feet on the rug floor. She was in her shift with a traveling cape over her shoulders for a robe. She'd just washed her face and hands for the night and was waiting to get sick again. That was the first thing she hated about being pregnant. There were others. She sat there, torn, because she couldn't help an^punderglow of tender warmth that diffused within as if from the seed itself. At the same time her mind kept saying: Not again. Jesus and Mary, not again! She barely glanced up when the tent flap parted and ^^r mother came in and stood there, stocky, dour and unfriendly. When Layla didn't react, she said: "Well, whore, I'd hoped we were rid of you and your delightful family." Layla was scraping at the cuticle of her little toe, waiting to get sick. She didn't look at the woman.

"I'm not here by choice," she responded. "I wasn't missing you and that hairy sneak so much I couldn't stay away." The Lady Gaf tilted her short neck forward and stamped her foot. "You led my son into sin," she declared, bitterly. "Oh, surely," said Layla, done with the toe now. "As the fly led his mate to dung." Smiled, almost looking at the stout lady. "What is that?" "That is this," said Layla, "flies love shit and need none to guide them to it." "Well," said the other, "you are both fly and shit together." Layla liked that idea. "Like the mystery of the Trinity," she reflected, "vinegar to reason but honey to faith." She pulled her sock-like buskins over each long, pale foot. "Why don't you help me escape?" "Would that I could," the mother muttered. "Ah, but your son's in love with the dung." "He's a fool." "Not a fly?" She thought about the seed again, the spot of life and heat that had been jammed into her most intimate recesses. She felt the strange anger and tenderness mixed again. She couldn't decide which father would be worse.

Because she'd slept with Parsival within a week or so of the other. They both f/iA/) been sodden with wine: blurry, edges softened, sleeping awake...instead of fighting that night they'd gripped together in a burst of reluctant joy, not kissing, like two shipwrecked strangers clutched together in the heaving of the sea.... Later, lying side-by-side, neither wanted to talk; afraid to talk. She'd felt him waiting for her to fall asleep so he could get up and go prowling. The older woman stared at her. "You bring trouble without profit," she said. "I bring? Ha. You came to my manor with that prize son of yours. He took advantage of my drunkenness." Like my husband, she thought. "Ah, so you say," the mother cut in. "Yet you were half-drunk each day between matins and vespers. There's no taking advantage if that's your natural state." "I wish I were half-drunk now," Layla said. "Meanwhile, I was merely r captured and dragged here, as you must know. I have no wish to spend anothyer hour with your mulish sod of a son. Let me say-" "You are as bad a guest," the mother snarled, " as you were a hostess." But she was cut off: "Guest? Guest?" She remembered lying next to Parsival that last time, realizing she didn't care where he went or what he did. She'd wanted to tell him "Go, go!" except then he probably would have stayed, just to prove something. She sighed. Looked at Lady Gaf.

"Listen," she suggested, reasonably. "Why don't you help me leave? You are not happy I'm here." "My son must have his reasons. He rightly seeks justice for your husband's insults." "That's funny," Layla said, mirthlessly chuckling. She refocued her attention on her toe. "Your son is a prince of pigs. Justice for him would be to slice bacon from his flanks." Mrs Gaf sat on a stool, her back very straight. The weak glow from the lamp filled her face with pits of shadow. Say what you please," she commented. Now Layla was thinking how it might be the son who'd made her pregnant What an idea. She didn't look up, saying: "Listen, woman, if my miserable husband actually takes enough interest to come after me, your lout of a son would find himself knocked flat as a cowflop." There was little doubt of that. She shook her head. "When it comes to breaking heads he doesn't disappoint." Madame was unimpressed. Her small, dark, cold eyes were moist-looking like stones in a stream. "I was born Italian," she announced. "In my country we have learned one need not always stand up to fight" Layla raised an eyebrow. "You think us clods?" she wondered. "Think you'll poison all your enemies? I warn you, beware of Parsival." Poison his cup, she thought, and he'll spill it by chance. Put a viper in his bed and he'll fall drunk on the floor that night....V he showed up angry they'd all be in Hell before breakfast. "Fornication might get him," she allowed, "if you could find a pretty woman with the plague."

"He's not the only warrior in the world." He'll come to get me out of duty and kill out of duty but without honor, Layla thought He'd rage if I said so but with him it's duty without honor. He'd tiptoe past the bedchamber where I'd be deceiving him, I think, and not care who knew it, yet if the same man who cuckolded him, cursed me or showed my disgrace in public he'd drag him to the lists and batter him to pulp.... She sighed. Because she believed all he wanted was his freedom to do what he pleased and his conscience demanded that she also could do what she pleased so he might think himself just The whole point is I wanted him to force me not to do what I pleased, she thought The fool... "Invite him here, Italian," she said. "It will be as much sport as watching hogs butchered." Her mind wouldn't stop: I'm going to have another child...I'm going to have another child...God damn them...God damn them to the Devil's deepest shithole.... LOHENGRIN The blackness made Lohengrin feel like a speck because the only things that existed were the things he actually was touching. His hand hurt. It was stretched up over his head as if in blind Roman salute to the stone wall where he knelt. His knees hurt too. "Fine," he whispered or thought; he wasn't sure. "Fine...." When he tried to lower his hand he discovered it was stuck in a hole in the abrasive stone. Caught as if in some monkey trap. He eased himself upright and gingerly moved his hand. His fingers were caught as if in rock jaws.

I must have put my hand in there and then the wall slipped...or something.... He was afraid they would clamp down further and crush his bones. In a near panic he jerked free, ripping the skin. Most of what had held him crumbled. "The wall bit me," he murmured. The idea was, somehow, funny. Because there were actual teeth gripping his knuckles. "Christ..Christ..." Part of a jawbone. There must have been a skull entombed in the wall and he reached in while asleep. That was his best idea. He slammed the bony fragments against the blocks and yelped when it bit him again as it shattered. He felt blood on his hand. Madness, he thought, do I die down here? His fingers were numb. They tingled as he rubbed them. Holding down serious fear, he moved almost frantically around the inner perimeter again except this time, in mid-stride, he tripped over what proved to be a raised landing for a set of stairs. How did I miss it before? He went up one step, another...another...up...up...he felt a draught Impossible, this wasn't here...the hole in the wall must have opened it.... He imagined the space where the skull had caught his fingers was some kind of doorlatch. He groped and stumbled up, panting, touching the walls on either side, thinking, as if it meant something: I've been bitten but not eaten... bitten but not eaten...they let me go...they let me go....

RICHARD MONACO

Here's the opening of the 5th Parsival book....more to come

Parsival: The Lost Years

a novel by

Richard Monaco

PROLOGUE

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 dull purple, a shapeless warmth in the chill mist. Here and there, in bundles of shadow, maybe a dozen men slept; snored, shifted, signed and groaned.

Two were awake, sitting across the blurred coals from one another. There was enough glow to outline a knight with a chainmail hauberk, topped by a monk’s hood; the other, smaller man wore 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 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 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 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! This Grail sword will 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 trill in the distance. He took it for a sign, a murmur from God.

PARSIVAL

999 AD

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 likes 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, irritatated 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?”

GAWAIN

Gawain and the odd monk, John of Bligh, had led the brigands, promising booty and calling it the Grail. Gawain sometimes believed the Grail might restore his ruined face – for want of something else to hope for; the men wanted plunder and women; it was never clear what John of Bligh really wanted, other than to turn the world upside down whenever he found a handle to lift it with.

Gawain had watched from his horse, visor closed over his mutilated features where a sword had chopped the left side of his face away. Watched, half-listening, while Parsival made no real answer.

Watched, as Parsival casually disarmed the one-eyed killer and cracked his head with the spearshaft. Watched and asked himself what he was doing there, feeling disgust and dull depression while Parsival tried to communicate something none of them could follow; not even himself.

In any case, Gawain knew the men-at-arms would soon have the alarm and be spilling out of the castle to save their lord. He shrugged.

What a sad, stupid business, he said to himself. Wanted to lose them all.

PARSIVAL

Parsival watched them go, turning after a moment and leaned on the spear. He looked up and saw Layla at the parapet.

I need to talk to my son, he thought.

“Are you alright, my lord?” a young groom panted, having sprinted from the side gate, followed by half-a-dozen men-at-arms, in a straggling line, incompletely dressed and armed.

Parsival noted the sallow-faced boy whose hair fell in greasy, uneven bangs. He felt nothing one way or another, at the moment. He’d inherited these vassals and he found them a motley lot – underfed and inbred. He treated them well enough and was known as a fair, if uninvolved master. He was know as moody, a fool for women, a knight who’d lost interest in performance and battle but was too sophisticated for rustic retirement. Since he’d come home, all agreed, everyone ate better because he harried the serfs into working harder and protected their fields; and for reasons he never expressed, he’d freed them and turned them into dependent peasants. He’d been heard once to remark that man had no real property, everything was borrowed and that even his horses and mules were mere responsibility and possession of land was a jest of time. Nobody was sure what he meant and he chose not to elaborate. Layla always believed he tried to live according to some idea he had of how life should be and, as a result, there were no real feelings behind many of his actions. His son, Lohengrin had vowed never to be like his father because he was sure Parsival took no more pleasure from his passions than from his skills.

“Am I alright?” he belatedly responded. “I have to do something…something…” he murmured again; then to the lad, “Bring me a robe, will you, sirrah?” The men had taken his clothes, naturally.

The youth, at once, stripped off his linen longshirt and handed it to Parsival who tugged his wide back and shoulders into it with some effort. It covered him to just below his butt end.

He waved up to his wife.

“Good morning, Layla,” he called, not quite loud enough for her to hear distinctly. She didn’t reply, if she’d heard.

He was now looking around, squinting his tired eyes, to see what had happened to the chunky, soft-bodied woman he’d been with last night. Just as those men had surprised him he’d been on his knees with her facing away, “driving her to market,” as the villains called it.

He wondered if she’d fled back to her husband’s bed in the guest tower and disturbed Layla. The idea amused and annoyed him. What a life.

We are all come to depravity, he thought. And it is so ordinary and dull, after all…

“Were you injured, my lord?” asked the captain of the guard, Lego of

Stillwater. He was a solid, high-shouldered, lanky, grizzled, graying fighter with a hooked nose and eyes like ruminative drops from a pond.

Parsival was still thinking about his way of life. He didn’t like what he thought.

“I intend to reform a few things,” he said.

“Did you suffer a head blow?” Lego asked, concerned. He saw no blood, however.

“What?...Ah, no.” Parsival gestured. “Changes. I mean to make changes.”

“But my lord,” Lego was concerned, “how could we have known of your plight sooner or come a step quicker, once we did?”

“What troubles your mind, good captain? I don’t mean to change my men. Just myself, I think.”

He was heading towards the main gate which now stood open. The men moved together, more or less flanking him. He stopped just under where his wife was looking down the sheer, gritty wall.

“Layla,” he said up at her, “are you well this morrow?”

“What mischief have you just made?” she wanted to know.

He smiled. He felt fine. He was alive; sober, cleaned-out, ready to make vows.

“Where is my son?” he called up to her.

Just her head and neck showed, cut off by the smooth, weathered stones. The angle made her long face longer. Her dark, back-length hair was billowing out,

riffling in the draughts.

“By St. Anne,” she called down, “and you take an interest?” She looked around in mock wonder. “This is a holy day.”

“I wonder that your tongue does not slice your lips,” he said, not loud enough for her to hear because there was not point. “A blade like that would shave a wudewasa,” which meant a wild man of the woods.

“Behold.” she was elaborating, “This is a day of marvels. I see an ox in the field driving a villain in traces.”

Parsival was paying scant attention. He pondered his faintly baffled men.

“Who has seen my son?” he asked.

No one had. His wife said something else, lost now in the background, then she withdrew from the wall.

“Mayhap,” the captain of the guard offered, “he has gone off again.”

Run from me again…He knew it was partly true. Everything’s partly true sometime or other, he quipped to himself. Then sighed.

He kept walking, using the spear like a prophet’s staff, holding his improvised tunic closed with the other hand, feeling the first twinges of a headache as the excitement wore off and his body reacted to the strain of a sleepless night and the rest of it.

“I’ll talk to him later.” he said, as if the bemused, sleepy men-at-arms really cared. They passed through the gate under the wall into the yard and he saw his son’s black charger, Firetail being groomed at the stables. The boy hadn’t left this time, not yet, anyway.

The captain kept pace alongside him. He spat thoughtfully into a muddy wheel rut. Patches of weedy grass grew here and there on the hoof and foot chewed earth. The sun was still below the wall and the air was dewy gray, the sky pale rose.

“Aye, my lord,” he agreed, glancing back now and then as if to assure himself that the brigands who’d trapped his master had not reappeared.

“Well, Lego,” Parsival said, “Do you think me a poor father too?”

“All a man may do is try, my lord.”

“It’s the general opinion that I’m a stinking father.”

Lego shrugged. Spat again. To their left women were dumping out old, dried and befouled leaves and branches that had been used to sweeten the castle floors.

“Ask me about a horse, my lord, or a sword and I’ll speak out a view. Or a bird, for that matter. Or food.” He shrugged. “Ask me what I can pretend to know but not of women and children.”

The breeze shifted and they could smell food cooking. “Ask me about breakfast,” said Parsival. He aimed his bare feet carefully to miss the fragrant “meadow muffins” left by the cows.

The castle folk were starting to bustle around. Some noted his odd garb: naked except for an unbuttoned shirt that barely covered his privates. A cook’s boy snickered, pausing by the well to stare, bucket in hand…He had puffy red cheeks and oversized hands. His younger sister hopped and spun up to him.

“Mama said you’d better hurry,” she informed him.

“Plug your ugly face,” he retorted.

While she wasn’t lovely (nose too long, chin too wide) she wasn’t unattractive either.

“Plug your own with dung,” she suggested.

The boy didn’t react, still watching their lord pick his barefoot way across the ruts and muck of the shadowed yard towards the main keep.

“Look at him,” he said. “They say he’s a mad one.”

She looked so-what at her brother.

“You talk like the hen about eggs,” she said.

Without a sign he suddenly lashed out with one long, skinny arm. His open hand just missed her head. She ducked back and stuck out her tongue.

“I’ll crown ya”, he said, “lady dungface.”

Lego glanced at the children and then away. He was uncomfortable. Parsival always made him uncomfortable. He never knew what to expect.

“Contrary to the general opinion about me, I won’t dispute with my betters,” Lego declared.

“Your lord isn’t necessarily your better, captain. We all bleed the same red.”

Lego responded carefully.

“I hope you’re not about to preach a rebellion of dung-squeezers, my lord.”

Parsival grinned.

“Any minute,” he said.

He said nothing more because his son had just come out of the main door, looking at his father without expression. His hair was jet black and tight curly. His nose was a fine hook, a falcon’s beak, those who liked him said.

Contrary to common gossip around Ville and castle, Lohengrin had friends. He was proud, sarcastic and moody and could be mean but (his likers said) he was clever, brave, skillful and loyal, in his fashion. His father had once declared that his son’s emotions ranged from surly to furious.

I swear but he has that face of a passing Jew peddler, thought Lego, half in jest.

In truth, though he had no serious doubts about his parentage, Parsival sensed that the lad’s looks added to the distance between them.

“You think what you do doesn’t matter,” Lohengrin said.

“This is your good morning? Don’t you say: ‘I’m pleased you escaped with your life, father?” said Parsival. He instantly regretted it because the response was automatic. He knew he had to be more patient but they instantly slipped into their familiar roles.

“Good morning? I only get to say farewell to you, father. Was your life in question?”

He watched him, dark eyes showing nothing. Parsival sighed.

“How old are you now?” he asked.

“Know you not?”

Parsival heard Lego mutter something under his breath.

“What am I, a calendar?” You are of age to bear arms.” Parsival said. That was fourteen.

“But not to bear my life.” the boy said.

“As I was. Bah,” he said. “Mine were not footsteps to follow but a track to

miss.” He shrugged and sighed. “Bear what you may.”

“You are a great knight, lord.” Said Lego, stolid, sullen. “All men know it.”

“And how as a father?” inquired the hawk-nosed son.

He finally had Parsival angry. It usually came to that.

“You task me too far,” he said. “I want to bring peace between us, Lohengrin. I want to help you become a full man.”

“Like you? Full of what?”

Lego cleared his throat. He would have like to have struck the youngster. He thought about what he would do if he were Parsival.

The parent tried, he went to his son, up the four stone steps. Lego hoped to witness a round blow box the arrogant child. He was surprised to see his lord, in his odd outfit, take strong young Lohengrin by the shoulders and just hold him. He thought of the biblical story of King David and his son Absalom. The local priest had worked over the tale a few weeks ago. He recalled being strangely moved, almost to tears by the words spoken when the unhappy king of the Hebrews faced the messenger from the battlefield where his furious and rebellious son was trying to overthrow his own father. The messenger gave him the worse news a parent can ever dread and: “When David heard that Absalom was slain he went to his chamber and wept. And thus he said: “Absalom my son would God I had died for thee.”

“I have much to repent of as a father and husband,” the knight was telling his child. “Pray you allow me to do so.”

Lohengrin started to reply and then didn’t. That was new. He was actually surprised. He didn’t pull away from those almost delicate, hard, well-shaped hands

that could have practically twisted the head off a bull.

Parsival had no more to say. He stared into Lohengrin’ s eyes, wondering how to express to him the strange truth he’d just been touched by. Lego sighed a deep breath.

Parsival had done Lego a service in the wake of a minor battle between King Arthur and some rebellious Baron. Parsival was looking for any of his wounded or dead they might have missed. Dusk was coming on as if it flowed subtly from the rills and stones and sparse, harsh highland trees themselves. He heard shouts and a clank of arms nearby.

He’d been crossing a stony, smooth hilltop. Down in the shallow valley a row of huts smoldered, the dark smoke streaking the warm dusk. He could see the baron’s castle set well up the far hill-slope. That lord and what was left of his forces were sealed inside, repairing themselves and eating bitter bread and turnips, hoping there would be no siege. The fields beyond the huts were littered with their dead.

Parsival had followed the sounds over the reverse slope and found a posse of some of Arthur’s hired men-at-arms (the sort who blurred the boundaries of banditry) had trapped and disarmed a man who’d been wounded in the thigh and deserted by his companions. They’d looped a rope around one armored ankle and were having sport dragging him over the rocky ground.

Parsival hadn’t approved. He was able to accept his way of life only by being as fair and decent as possible. He was always bothered by the memory of times when he had showed no mercy.

“Every time a man is cruel,” he liked to say, “it leaves a dead spot in his soul.”

Like a callus that can never be smoothed from the skin.

So he shouted:

“Hold, you base oafs!” He cantered into the thick of them. “If a man be down let him lie, by Christ.”

The soldiers had scattered like schoolboys caught at a prank. At a little distance two had paused and turned around.

“Knight,” one cried, a potbellied man in ragged leathers, “Why do you help an enemy?”

“Let the fallen lie,” came the answer. “We are not cut-throats.”

“Lohengrin,” he said to the boy, “if I could tell you….”

“If you could tell me,” his son said back. He noted what seemed tears in his father’s eyes. This was odd. “What?”

Parsival had dismounted and stooped beside the wounded man who looked up at him with gratitude and a wry smile that Parsival instantly liked.

“Arr,” he grunted. “Chivalry. I have lived to see it.”

“May you live to see more.”

“Something often talked about.” He winced and caught his breath.

Parsival looked around. The soldiers had all re-gathered now at a little distance.

“An enemy is usually an accident,” said Parsival.

The fallen man shut his eyes and signed from his wounds.

“I ask a boon, chivalrous knight,” he whispered.

“Which?”

“Leave me a leather of water.”

“I’ll do better than that.” Parsival cocked his head, thoughtfully studying the man. “Friends should not be an accident.”

In the following years they had become fairly close. Lego had become Captain Lego and a loyal vassal. Although he was from the lower nobility (a younger son and so not heir to anything but his brother’s whims) and entitled to knighthood he refused to be knighted. He was like a modern Sergeant Major who rejected not only the responsibility but the very look of being an officer. Also, though not technically a peasant, his mother was not highborn.

“What have you from me, my boy,” he asked Lohengrin, “beyond power and rage?”

“A broken wit, father? A lying nature? A cruel indifference altogether?”

“You had better hope your lance will match your tongue,” Parsival said, “or else you will talk yourself into death before you have twice shaved.”

His son yawned and rubbed his eyes, looking up at where the far wall cut across the pink and blue sky. He was enjoying the clean morning air. His father’s reddened eyes disgusted him; and why was he half naked? He refused to deign to bring it up. He’d been out drinking and had made a fool of himself, obviously.

“I want to be knighted,” he said, seriously. “I mean to start shaving this morning.”

Lego guffawed.

“Ah,” he said, “How can you hurt those little hairs?”

“Are you then prepared to serve and study arms at your uncle’s?” Parsival wanted to know.

Lohengrin was still studying the sky. He was thinking about breakfast and hunting later. The peasants and serfs had been complaining about boars in the fields.

“I want to be knighted as you were,” he said. His eyes said something else. He was thinking it was time for him to leave that place and go and do the secret thing he’d planned since he was nine years old. The thing he never mentioned. He was sure it was now time…Then they’d see something. Then his father would see something.

Parsival shook his head and tossed his spear into a muddy rut, in disgust. The shaft quivered and rippled the puddle.

They now went into the castle together, into the cool dimness, the daybright still shimmering with each eyeblink for a few steps.

“You think you are part of a tragic tale, Lego?” he asked wryly.

“Not yet, my lord.”

“Not yet.”

“The…what-do-they-call?” Lego frowned his eyebrows. “Before the play…”

“Aye. The prologue.”

His shod steps echoed as they entered a large chamber; Parsival’s bare feet were virtually soundless on the cool flagging.

“I mean to make it right,” he said, “if I can.”

“If you can.”

“With my wife, as well.” He sniffed out a chuckle. “Her ladyship.”

Lego showed no reaction.

“I see,” he responded neutrally.

“I mean it.”

“I said nothing.”

“You said nothing. Yet you disapprove.”

“What right have I to such a position, my lord?”

They stopped by the table that was still being set for breakfast with bowls of fruit, mugs of weak beer, trays of roasted eggs, toasted bread, strips of salt and smoked meat and fish plus trenchers of mash and wild honey.

The servants seemed unshaken by their master’s odd garb, which left most of his legs bare. Castle folk were used to seeing one another in various states of undress. Some of the girls who’d heard talk about Parsival and Sir Gaf’s wife, traded looks.

Parsival and Lego stood there and began eating. The semi-dressed knight was pondering a bowl of berries when his wife’s voice caught him and his stomach sort of winced.

“Ah,” said she, “you break your fast ere your guests have stirred. You and your precious lackey.”

“He’s a captain, not a lackey,” Parsival responded, not looking up, sighing, because what was the point? With women facts were futile since she wanted him to feel something and the means to feeling didn’t matter. He knew that. “And you call them my guests?” He put a strawberry into his mouth, savoring the cool, almost over-ripe richness. “Well, has not Gaf had his host’s best?”

Lego didn’t quite smile.

“He likes your jibes,” she noted. “My husband was not once called fool, for small cause. He wants but cap and bells.”

She crossed the chamber. She’d changed into a deep rose, silken robe. He didn’t look directly at her. He was hoping no storm winds would stir.

I need to try…he thought. A new approach…or….

He drank from a cup of thick, spiced buttermilk.

“Maggots are guests too,” he couldn’t help but say, “feeding on what’s dead.”

Lego imperfectly stifled a guffaw

“Good fool,” Layla said. “Now sing a song for your food.”

Parsival felt his captain tense beside him.

“Were it your wife,” he commented, “you would, I imagine, kick her like a snapping cur.”

Lego shrugged. Said nothing. Looked nowhere.

“Kick me,” she sniffed, just standing there, hands lost in the deep, sunset-colored folds of silk. Daylight was fuzzy brightness at the huge, open main door.

Parsival set down the cup and looked at the floor before his long, pale bare feet.

“I have, myself, let the wine sour,” he pointed out. “Whom might I flog if my head aches from drinking it?”

Here they come, he thought, glancing across the room where the visiting family was just coming to table: Sir Gaf, round, wheathaired wife and dumpy, jowly, moist-faced mother. Gaf (Layla’s momentary lover) had a roll in his gait and ridiculous (Parsival thought) confidence. In a fight he’d soon be kissing the ground….

Not that he was normally jealous. He didn’t feel his honor was bound up in Layla’s chastity. Sauce for the goose was sauce for the gander, too. This knight was nothing if not even-handed. But Gaf’s obvious misapprehension of his strength and skill was annoying. He felt a warrior ought to be realistic. And, too, there were rules of courtly love, written and unwritten: some held that husband and wife could never be true lovers since love was the heart’s wild freedom and might not be tamed by law.

The dark, short, stocky, slightly bowed knight swaggered up to the spread and nodded at Parsival with slight contempt. Lego bristled, at once.

“Some as are haughty,” Lego said, to no one in particular, “is like the mouse that scratched the cat.”

The blocky knight paid no heed but his mother, picking up a hard, green pear, reacted:

“We start our day with proverbs from a peasant? And view the bare behind of our host.”

“Ah, ha,” said the host’s wife. “he’s a very courtier, for style.”

The son took notice. Scratched under his beard with a thick thumb.

“Is it not an insult to have us break-fast with a low-born dog?”

“Cats, mice, now dogs,” said his barelegged host, staring out the door into the day’s hot, rich brightness. “What about goats and cows? Is this a castle or a farmyard?” Looked back into the relative dimness of the room, more or less at the family, blinking at the purplish afterimage of the door. “A farmyard,” he said, judiciously and Lego guffawed, again.

Layla didn’t like that.

“My husband keeps low companions,” she announced, “to assure his own stature.”

Chunky Sir Gaf rubbed and scratched his curly beard, again. His mother crunched into the hard pear, then poked a short finger into her mouth and worked a loose tooth. There were stools but no one but she was sitting. She put down the fruit and tried a slice of pork.

“Mayhap he is too deep in the habit and has become low, himself,” Gaf pronounced.

Parsival touched Lego to check his response, saying:

“Ah.” Took a bite of sweet, soft cheese. “Your wit soars like a clipped falcon. Or those wingless, trudging birds of legend.”

“Clipped?” put in the lean, long-faced captain. “I’d say feathers of lead, my lord.”

“Silence, churl,” snarled Gaf, stepping over and snapping a backhand with his wide fist at the soldier’s face. Missed, as Lego slapped the corky arm aside.

The furious knight snatched up a knife from the table and hooked at Lego’s lined, insubordinate face.

“Hold,” said Parsival, effortlessly catching the thick wrist in mid-cut and tugging Gaf off-balance, driving his hand down so hard the blade broke off in the table, snapped tip quivering.

Gaf then, foolishly, drove his fist at his host’s fineboned features; met air as Parsival leaned away, then countered with a terrific kick to the knee that popped something and dropped the knight on his side, cursing fluently. His mother was howling, meat filling her mouth. The wife looked away, embarrassed. Layla, incensed, flung a ripe peach at her husband and hit Lego in the chest.

“You bastard!” she cried. “Go away like you always do!”

“What did I wrong?”

“Some say this is the last year of the world,” she said. “If I am so misfortunate as to meet you in eternity, husband, there will be time to tell you.”

“You’ve hurt my boy,” the older woman almost howled, on her knees beside him, wiping pork fragments from her lips with the sleeve of her dress and holding him.

“Ought I have let him kill me? Boy?”

“There you stand,” Layla continued, “with your balls and dangler in the wind and your arse for all to see.”

Parsival raised both hand over his head, in frustration which made things much worse as it raised his shirt several inches more. The wheathaired, bubble-shaped wife looked back, now; her mother-in-law shook her fist; Gaf clutched the table in an effort to rise; Layla rolled her eyes.

“Are you now a pagan wrestler?” she wondered. “What a display.”

Lohengrin was just coming through the sunbright door in his black tights and red and white, loose shirt. Out of the corner of his eye Parsival saw him and shook his head. Nudged Lego.

“Retreat,” he said. “The enemy has the field.”

Sir Gaf, partway up, lost his grip on the smooth tabletop and fell blockily back on his mother who gushed out wind from his weight in a kind of belch and outcry. The round wife finally got up to assist. She stole another look at Parsival whose arms were back at his sides. Layla just stood there. A woman servant came back with a mug of something and took the scene in as one who’d seen the play before.

“Leave it and go,” Layla told her. “Bring back a sack to cover my husband. Or fool’s skins.”

“Trust me,” the bearded knight hissed, “I shall slice out your liver and roast it, you damned cuckold!”

“Enjoying break-fast?” wondered Lohengrin, sauntering up, grinning.

“Don’t involve yourself,” said his mother. Then to Gaf: “And you, have a care what you utter.”

“Sounds like a quarrel in a stew,” put in Lohengrin. He loved acrimony and, especially, to see his father under fire.

With help, Sir Gaf got up with his stout mother, but his leg buckled, again. His eyes bulged with anger. He leaned, heavily, on the table full of food.

“Stench and cuckold!” he went on. “Coward!”

Parsival, moving away towards the hall and stairs, started to raise his hands,

again, then checked himself, grinning. Glanced back at Layla and shrugged.

“My lord,” said Lego, “he hath called three times now. Should not his meat be served?”

“He has enough to digest,” his lord replied. The woman had come back holding a bright yellow robe. He shook his head at her. “Not my color,” he told her. “Anyway, I’ll leave as I came.”

“Just so you leave,” snapped Layla.

“Cuckold,” repeated Gaf.

“Mind your mouth, oaf,” Layla recommended. She suddenly had no notion of why she’d let him in her bed. A silly, self-righteous, selfish man.

I have no judgment, she thought. I let asses mount me….

“We must fly this den of murderers,” mother Gaf said.

Lohengrin was delighted at the break in monotony.

“Father,” he called over to the retreating knight. “Why do you creep from the fray?’

“I’ll fray you like a worn sleeve, my son,” he snapped.

“Ha,” reacted his son.

Parsival spun and went for the boy with his open hand drawn back. The boy didn’t flinch, still enjoying himself.

“Now strike down your son,” Layla said, heading over. She always got between them, sooner or later.

“Accept my challenge, you stinking bastard,” blustered Gaf, leaning heavily on his mother and the table. “Meet me on the field of honor or be known a coward,

hereafter!”

Parsival shrugged and, on impulse, raised his arms over his head, exposing again what ought to have been private. The mother covered her eyes. Gaf’s bovine wife stared, as if to recall something. Layla sneered. Lohengrin laughed, actually taking his father’s part, for a change. Lego, in disgust, went to the door and out into the morning’s dazzle.

Not an hour since, Parsival was thinking, I was breathing bliss that makes air coarse and hearing the musical sighs of angels past the dull ear’s utmost capacity….And now I am back with my family….

With a movement so swift and economical that it seemed a blurring swallow’s flight, he glided three steps to his son and, even as the boy tried to duck back (finally afraid he’d pushed his father too far) caught his two shoulders in that incredible grip and lifted him, effortlessly, off his feet.

Layla was still coming to intervene, slippers skidding on the smooth white tiles – then she stopped, surprised, because her husband suddenly, fiercely, kissed his son’s lips and then released him.

“You are all ridiculous,” he informed them. “So am I. But I love you, Lohengrin, despite what you choose to believe. And your mother, too.”

And then he padded, barefoot, across the hall in silence until Sir Gaf cried out:

“On the field of honor, coward! On the field!”

Parsival went up to his second-floor chamber. He was weary to the bone. His stomach and nerves shuddered with exhaustion. His eyes were sore. His thoughts

dragged through the molasses of his mind.

He went straight to the big bed and threw himself down on his back. Covered his loins and legs with the silk sheets. The feel was cool and soothing. Sunlight creased in through the slit windows.

Without energy to move much, he tugged some more sheet over his face, rolling partly on his side. He lay for awhile and slowly felt the tension melt from his limbs.

“My son,” he muttered, adjusting the material so his nose was clear. Yawned and rubbed his face. “My wife….”

Noises in the castle yard kept him from dozing off completely. He’d drift for a moment, then snap back to his headache and sore joints.

Dozed and was instantly in a field of golden flowers that seemed dense and, somehow, heavy with color, set on either side by massed, rich, deep green trees in a perfectly straight line to the horizon and he understood, dream-like, this was what he’d always wanted: follow the straight line to the end, into an epiphany of summerich light because his life had been nothing but twists and turns….

He blinked himself back. The sheet had shifted from his face. The light at the windows hurt. His left eye throbbed. He tried to relax his forehead by gently rubbing it. Covered his eyes again and heard himself start to snore…was running straight and gently upslope between the flanking walls of trees, through the ankle-deep and knee-high flowers as if his body were dissolving into light…running behind a nude woman who moved just ahead of him in blurred perfection like a roll of wind forming shapes in the golden blossoms…and he needed to touch her and end the reaching…closer, she seemed to have been formed from the flowers, a living hush flowing…reached and ran and reached as if he might be wafted into her glowing substance…reached….

“…and if you do, I’ll crown you with this jug, you bastard!” a reedy woman’s voice was scolding, outside. A man muttered something back and might have spat. They were close under his second-floor window.

In a lull he went under again and this time he was in a tunnel, smoothly carved that almost melted into black, unreflecting stone. Pitch dark, yet he could see. Sensed he was down deep and that mountain masses of rock lay above him. The tunnel twisted and bent back on itself like (he dream-thought) the intestines of some stone behemoth…then a dead end where a niche had been hewed into the black wall, a ledge with something like a vase or jar there’s, a shadowy blurring in a gout of darkness.

Sensed menace and power all around and that the container held the heart and soul of the darkness which pulsed and spread its lightless beams out into the eternal stone night, beat steady and yet measureless…sensed a watcher watching as he reached for what he now dream-perceived as a fat cup with holes to grip; he gripped and realized he held a living black skull because the mouth bit down and held him fast….

He woke in soundless screaming and just lay there, sweating in the twisted covers….

Always dreams come back, he said to himself.

The man outside snarled something at the woman. Parsival dozed again. Came back. The woman was saying:

“…the world ends, ya old fool….”

He dozed. Shuddered awake, to hear:

“…this is the last year….”

The man (probably the husband) said:

“You’re as mad as that priest who says such….”

Heard that much rebuttal but was out again when the woman said:

“The Antichrist is everywhere. Water will turn to blood….”

Asleep, Parsival was seeing rivers, lakes and seas all staining red with naked corpses bloating in the waves.

“…we must flee to the Holy places…the Great Whore is already among us,” she went on, reedy, penetrating.

The knight was awake again, panting. Felt numbed, as if drugged.

“What?” the husband’s voice cut through the murmur of outside sounds, “is ya damned mother come again to stay?”

Parsival’s laughter finally fully woke him. He stared straight up at the low, vaulted ceiling. The quarreling voices faded as the couple moved off.

Outside there was suddenly noise and banging and shouts. Horses and armored men, he realized. Because of the dreams he kept his aching eyes opened and listened:

“What?” a voice cried.

“Where is your lord?” another, deep, irritable, demanded.

“In heaven with his holy host,” said the first he now knew was Lego’s.

“Mind your mouth,” the irritable voice advised.

What is this? Parsival wearily wondered.

“It seems more like you must mind, my lord knight,” Lego responded. “you are, after all, within our walls here.”

“Think you churl,” was the retort of a new voice, cool and logical, “that your walls will long stand one brick on another if Arthur the King willed it otherwise? Call your lord.

By now Parsival had dragged himself to the embrasure and tilted his head far enough out to look down into the dusty yard where the high sun now beat hot and steady.

He blinked, saw Lego in his leathers, leaning on a staff, saw the open gate, and the castle people gathering, the soldiers alert: the three armed, mounted knights reined up at the main steps about fifty feet to his right. One was drinking from a pot of water held up by one of the castle grooms. They sat with their helmets on their laps.

Parisival leaned out far enough and called down:

“Here I am without my choir of angels.”

They all looked up.

“Parsival?” The rough voice said. It belonged to a balding, bearded, middle-aged knight who seemed familiar.

“For the most part,” he called down. “What do you want of me?”

“All of you, save your jibes,” the logically-voiced knight said. He was long-limbed, hair dull red, nose long with an uptilt. The blunt sunlight flashed on his mailed hands as he gestured with near delicacy. “For body and soul, as we know, are you not vassal of your master?”

Parsival took that in. The sun was hot and felt good on his face. He shut his eyes to soothe them.

Vows, he thought, are cheaply broken though dearly sold.

He said:

“I’m hoping to sleep. Unhorse. Lay aside your gear and troubles. Rest. Eat and drink. Later we can parse body and soul.” Parse. He liked that.

Back to bed, he thought. Considered going out and napping on the hillside under the lime trees. Nothing felt better than a doze in the sun and cool shadow.

“Do you object o my point?” the long knight, the leader wanted to know.

Parsival was annoyed. He’d had his fill of trouble, when you counted the plates.

“Rest and we’ll speak later,” he called down. “Else you may object to my point.”

He meant his sword They got it. He smiled, because he was, after all, their host.

“Give me your message,” he said, “from my sovereign liege. Then wait upon yourselves.”

“We expected a more gracious-“ one began to say. Parsival cut him off.

“Enough of this babble,” he snarled, “my head aches with it.”

“King Arthur calls you to service,” the redhaired, long faced leader snarled back.

“Ah ha. For my singing?”

“Will you say nay to him?” the burly one wanted to know.

“I agree to attend upon the king and sing holy chants. My fighting is off-pitch these days.” Out of the mode, he thought.

He pushed back from the deepest windowslit and let himself sink back into the bed.

The next thing Layla will find me here and my torments will mount…I need no summons to spill blood. Yet I’ll go to him and speak it to his face…He yawned and rubbed his eyes. I’ll strike only who first strikes me…if I cannot run away first…Shut his eyes and tried again to concentrate on what had happened that morning.

“First I was fucking that lady and she made sounds like a pig which is what I’ve come to,” he whispered aloud.

My life is a barnyard…

He lost focus. Sleep lapped at his thoughts and there was a flutter of darkness, a lapse of sound and time…and then he tensely jerked awake again.

“Christ,” he whispered, “fucking and then set upon by Gawain and those

witless…” Sighed, feeling sorry for Gawain. Sighed again, feeling sorry for

everybody.

When I sleep all is real, he thought, when I wake all is real…what would happen if them came together?

He brought himself back again to the point where he’d expected to die and tried to recapture the…what? The floating up? The widening? The blast of light? Tried to bring it back. Held his breath. Imagined his soul was soaring among the angels…was that dreaming? Was it both?

He was still just lying there with a headache. Tried to calm himself deeply, asked God to bring that lost moment back. Prayed with all the humble sincerity and simplicity he could muster. Waited…fell asleep again…shook awake with a worse headache.

He sighed.

“Everything slips away,” he told heaven or just the vaulted ceiling.

The way his childhood had slipped away. Which he really always missed the most. Maybe he’d lost the Grail, maybe he hadn’t; but he knew he’d lost his childhood and that had been the most real of all places, in his memory it was all one seamless summer, dappled fields awash with pure dazzle and the scent of rich, ripe sweetness…endless time…energy and interest without bottom…as if he’d wandered in and out of time like a wounded angel.

He shut his eyes.

I don’t want to be young again, he thought. I just want to find those days again and walk in them now…

Opened his eyes. Sunbeams slanted across the fine dust in the air giving the light golden substance. He imagined the fanning brilliance was a bridge and that he could make himself small and weightless and ascend that span of light and follow it to mysterious golden realms. A daydream. But it hurt. Because he remembered lying there thirty years before watching the dustmotes. He believed there were small, misty, effortless beings who fed on sunlight. He used to imagine their world where clouds were solid as earth.

By Saint Stephen’s nether eye, he thought, I cannot rest…He blinked and the chamber was just dull stone and sunlight again. No magic kingdoms of air….

He heard a footstep outside the room.

“Who’s that?” he demanded, afraid it was his wife. A neutral female voice responded:

“Marga, my lord.”

He pictured her: young, slim, freckled, nervous.

“Marga,” he said, “go and fetch my man Captain Lego. Tell him to read two good horses. Tell him to cinch and bit himself for a long journey.”

“Yes, my lord.”

He had the idea and instantly approved it: get away without having to deal with Arthur’s emissaries or his family.

He was out of bed and getting ready in one movement. He splashed water on his face, took a drink from a mug of honey wine he kept in the niche by his bed. It had to be nearly noon now, he decided.

He could reach the broken hills by sunset this time of year. An easy ride. Just himself and Lego. Men without women. No apples to bite; no sweet fruit of doom.

“Now where are you off to, you bastard?” Layla inquired from the doorway. She wasn’t shouting anymore he noted, just simmering ferocity. If he didn’t stir her, he hoped she wouldn’t boil over.

“I must heed my liege lord’s summons,” he lied.

“Ha, ha,” she said in that tone that was not encouraging. “Why do I doubt you?”

He paused, halfway to the doorway, watchful.

“I will return as soon as I-“

“Spare me the list of foods I never eat. Return when you will or never. You are no husband to me.”

He brushed past her now, heading into the corridor. The air was cool there. He didn’t want to leave on a bad note. He tried again:

“I would like best to be a good father.”

“You were too late to the feast,” she said.

“Yes, but I’ve come,” he said, pausing in the dimness, looking back into the room. The sunlight angled behind her, falling just short of where she stood so that she seemed a dark outline, depthless as a distant shape in the evening.

She was shaking her head. She was thinking about how three months ago she had been ready to fall in love with him again.

It was the spring, she thought. I can’t help being a fool in the spring…

They’d gone to the little lake and swum and made love despite the nightchill. Talked about taking a trip together to the seacoast with their daughter…let themselves dream a future for a little while; then Sir Gaf and his family arrived and settled in and the weather went cool and rainy and the mood got lost somewherel…

She sighed.

“Too late,” she said. “Too late. I will not trust you again, Parsival.”

“Let me teach my son to trust me,” he said. “Let him attend me and go where I go for some days.” He was thinking out loud.

“And even though you tied him to your mount,” she said, from the depthless image that was herself, “I ween we would chew himself free from you like a snared wolf.”

He considered that. A feeling sank in him that almost forced tears from his eyes.

He swallowed, without a voice from the moment, Layla knew she’d hit home and said nothing more.

Next Morning

In the first grayish vagueness of pre-dawn Layla awoke because the bed sagged and a man grunted and breathed too hard.

For a moment she thought it was her husband and was mildly annoyed, thinking he’d come to try and apologize once again. She was curled to one side; felt a hand stroking her bare belly under the light summer satin coverlet. She brushed at it and twisted away.

The hand followed and next a wiry beard was pricking her neck and she inhaled Gaf’s sour-milk smelling breath.

She pushed him off as she sat up, big masses of pillows behind her. When they moved the thin canopy poles swayed. The bed was old, she tangentially noted, and needed some repair.

“What do you want here?” she asked, almost snarled.

He knelt on the fluffy, crackly mattress wearing a puffy, dun-colored robe. Where it parted she could see his gentials, swaying. She’d seen them before. With the sun coming up, she had no desire for the view in blunt daylight.

“I want what you have granted me before,” he declared, voice thick with (she thought) either drink or heat. His member seemed, she noted, uncertain. She remembered him topping her two nights ago, crushed down under his weight, feeling him poke at her until he found the place, at last.

“I’ll grant you leave to go,” she said.

“Aha,” he said. “Come to me, my sweetness.” Knelt himself forward, tipping the bed like a boat.

She got out on the far side and tossed the sheet up over him. While he lashed at it, struggling to get free, she simply left the chamber, saying, over her shoulder:

“Return to your wife and mother, Sir.”

“Bitch dog,” he called after her, catching in the sheet so that he knelt out of the high bed, cracking both knees on the tiled floor, the thin rug little protection so that the hurt Parsival had given him was doubled into blinding agony. He yelled, without words this time. Layla was gone.

An hour later, the sun streaming in everywhere, King Arthur’s three emissaries were washing their faces from the bowls held by servants in another wing of the medium-sized castle. The slit windows faced east and looked across the morning fields that seemed to shimmer in sheer freshness.

Sir Gaf hobbled in, leaning on an undrawn sword for a crutch, darkbearded face sweaty with pain.

“The great coward has fled,” he announced, too-loud. “He fled me and you as well.”

“What’s this?” wondered the red-haired, long-faced leader who stood shirtless, water dripping from his face. “Who fled?”

“Great coward Parsival,” Gaf snarled and winced. “The cuckold has run.”

“Cuckold?” the stocky, olive complexioned knight said, looking up from where he was rinsing his mouth and spitting into a bowl.

There were two servants attending, both male and about fourteen, pages-in-training loaned to Parsival’s household by a noble neighbor some ten miles south. One was small with a deformed upper lip and slight limp; the other was stocky,

strong, flaxen-haired, blue-eyed and murmured to the other, smaller fellow:

“There’s more cuckolds in this castle than flies on cheese.”

The other smirked, bobbed his head, nervously.

“Aye, Henry,” he whispered back, “and this one’s the captain of them.”

“And Parsival the King.”

At the same time Gaf was saying:

“Track him and kill him, as I will myself so soon as I am healed of my hurts.”

The stocky knight made two fists and stared at his leader.

“You see, Alinn,” he told him, “we should have gone straight to-“

“He cannot have gone far,” Sir Alinn of the red hair said. “Dress and we’ll eat as we ride.” Looked at Gaf. “Look you, fellow, say cuckold all you please, for any man may be deceived; but say not coward of a knight second only to, maybe, Lancelot. Pray you never meet him in anger.”

Gaf glowered at him, then limped out, sword click-clicking down the stone corridor, echoing as he struggled away in silent fury.

“Must we slay him?” the thin, third man asked, from where he was now urinating into a copious bedpan. Sir Alinn was rubbing his long nose, thoughtfully.

“His Majesty wishes us to give him every chance to see reason,” he yawned and said. Belched. “And killing such a fellow is not lightly contemplated.”

“Well then?” asked the stocky, dark knight.

Alinn shrugged.

“We follow,” he said. “We keep talking sense to him.”

“And finally,” the third said, “we talk with a mace blow for I fear his ears are stopped.”

Alinn sighed and shrugged again, gesturing to the pages for the jug of buttermilk Henry the blue-eyed Saxon held. Took it and swigged, staining his chin with the pale richness.

“What think you of you lord Parsival, boy?” he wanted to know.

“A famous knight,” he replied.

“Ah, yes. Still, why do you imagine he refuses his service to his liege lord?”

Henry shrugged, uncomfortable.

“I know not Sir Parsival’s mind, Sir,” he said, creasing his wide, normally smooth forehead. He was looking at the buttermilk left in the bowl Alinn still held, absently. “I know it is a great offense to refuse service.”

The knight nodded. Noticed the young man staring covertly.

“Would you like some? he offered the bowl which Henry (or Hal as friends called him) took at once, without ceremony, and gulped down major swallows, amusing Alinn and the others. “Don’t they feed you here, boy?” Alinn asked. “You seem stout enough.”

Coming up from air, Henry answered:

“Yes, Sir. Why they set a good table here.” The three knights were grinning now while the other page rolled his eyes. “This buttermilk is rich and tangy. My friend Lohengrin likes to say I have an understanding of food.”

The stocky knight guffawed.

“If you ever come to be knighted,” he said, “on your arms you’ll wear a goblet crossing a stuffed goose.”

They laughed and then Alinn commanded:

“We’re off within the hour so ready yourselves.” To Hal: “Pack us food for the road and mind you, eat it not before you deliver it.” Grinning. “Not even a mouse’s nibble, do you hear me, boy.”

PARSIVAL

His armor was packed on the mule tethered to Lego’s saddle. The beast swayed reluctantly behind the mount.

Parsival rode in front at a walk up the twisting narrow trail. He felt neutral. He planned to stop at the top and nap for an hour. The rocking of the big dappled gray horse was soothing.

A wall of huge clouds was slowly starting to cut off the sky. The sun was arching down at two o’clock and would soon be swallowed by the massive greenish dark thunderheads. He could see distant flickers of lightning around the immense bases. They were still too far away for the atmosphere to tense yet. He reckoned they were still hours away.

“My lord,” Lego said, behind him.

“Yes, Lego?”

“Why did you bring your knightly gear?”

Parsival didn’t look back, replying:

“You mean if I intend to retire from the field?”

“Aye.”

Lego could have happily dispensed with the balky, stumpy mule.

“Mayhap,” Parsival said, “I will offer my steel to the saints.”

Or maybe I mean just to do something dramatic…he thought. I have to be careful of that, of mere gestures…

“To a new life.”

“I have not worn out my old one, my lord.”

“My new life. You are to be a witness.” Parsival glanced back. “Then you can go home with the testimony.”

“My lord…” Lego began.

“Yes?”

The captain brooded now. Reached back and jerked the mule’s halter.

“Stinking dung!” he said without venom. “My lord, you ought to have …”

“Yes?” I ought to have struck my son?” Parsival looked back at his companion. He respected Lego very much and was willing to consider any advice, at this point.

“Maybe,” Lego knitted his thick eyebrows together. “Yet the beaten horse but strays the further.”

Parsival nodded.

From here he could see the long valley and his home in the distant mist. He thought he understood why monks choose high places; not so much as to see God, but to escape from men. He already felt the events of the morning had happened years before, and were melting into memory’s mists…

“You’re just a witness, Captain Lego,” he reminded him. “Once you’ve seen what you see, you will return alone.”

“Hah. Give your sense to Frenchmen, jokes to Germans, calmness to Italians.” He thought a moment. “Soap to the infidels.”

Parsival smiled appreciatively.

“What’s this advice, Captain Lego?”

“Only give to those incapable of receiving.”

Parsival chuckled.

“If they tried to take, Captain Lego, he added.”

Lego smiled and spat into the dust. He had two daughters; no sons. He scratched around his beard. Went back to thinking about getting them married. They were ripe, he thought, for trouble. 15 and 17. The eldest had bad, crooked teeth and a cast in one eye; the other ate too much. Always chewing down bread and honey. He always said she should have been a nobleman’s child. As soon as he came back from this expedition he would look into the situation. He nodded to himself.

He might have thought it better to have had sons except for his lord’s example.

To get his mind on something else, he asked:

“Where are we bound?” Because Parsival had been so mysterious. He seemed to be dodging Arthur’s emissaries but there had to be more to it.

“These seem dark sayings,” the soldier felt.

“But dawn will come apace,” the knight told him.

The hilltop was rocky, barren except for stringy bushes and pale, spiny-looking flowers. Parsival realized just how elevated his castle actually was because they hadn’t climbed more than a mile and suddenly they were above the tree line.

The monastery was just ahead. It had massive walls and timbered roofs. The stones were grey and wet-looking. A strange silence, Lego thought, seemed to infuse the place. No chanting, no bells, no barking dogs, no voices on the breeze.

“My lord,” he asked, as they dismounted in the courtyard and watered the horses at the trough.

“Yes, Lego?” Parsival was scanning the building, the slit windows showing nothing by shadow.

“Do you mean to enlist here?” Lego wondered.

“I mean to ask a question,” was the Knight’s reply. “What I do depends on the answer.”

Lego rested his arms on his mount’s saddle. The late sun was still hot on his face.

“Mayhap, you will speak to the stones here, my lord,” he offered.

Parsival went to the door. It was iron with brass overlapping straps. Slightly polished and rustless. He pushed hard. It stood solid. He drew his sword and

knocked with the hilt. The door must have been hollow because it rang like a gong, rich, resonant as if the whole dull building were ringing sweet and deep.

Parsival just stood there, leaning into the sound. His memories were haunted. Pictures came: a field of bright misty-silver grass and milky flowers like recrudescent dreams. And across the gleaming field, a wall of translucent stone and a crystal gate that was just opening; movement beyond a haze of gold, figures that might have been dressed in golden armor moved and seemed somehow portentous, mysterious, profound…He shook his head as if to clear it. The sound was dying away now.

“Well,” said Lego, “that bell should stir them. It would bestir the dead.”

And then the door swung silently inwards and a little monk with a narrow, reddened face like (Parsival thought) a ferret, was tilting his neck around the jamb.

“May you speak?” Parsival asked.

The monk shook his head, and motioned the knight inside. Parsival followed him.

“I’ll wait for you out here,” said Lego. “I have little taste for the monkish mysteries.”

The knight followed the monk down a high, narrow corridor that suddenly sloped steeply upward. There was a single step so high they had to half climb to gain the incline.

It must mean to have a humbling effect, he thought. The monk bounded, silently, up the extreme slope. Parsival followed feeling the strain in his legs.

At the top they entered a square, windowless chamber. On what the knight took for a carved stone coffin sat a man he assumed would be the Abbott: bold-faced, middle-aged fellow with short arms and a razor thin nose. His eyes were lost in his cheekfolds and squinted brows.

“Do you speak?” Parsival wondered.

The face was a strange combination of ascetic and worldly: The full, purplish lips, constrasting the edged nose; the fleshiness of the face against the bony head and sharply pointed jaw. A fat-thin face the knight decided.

“I speak,” the monk said, his voice high-pitched.

“Did you expect me?”

The Abbott smiled, for Abbott he was.

“Did you say you were coming, Sir Knight?”

Parsival smiled, scratched behind his ear, and took the situation in.

“I expect mysteries,” he said. “Perhaps too often. Perhaps I miss them too much.”

“Man is certainly a mystery. That such a divine and marvelous work should sink so deep in self-made mire.”

Parsival sighed and nodded. He looked and there was nowhere to sit unless he were meant to perch on the coffin or whatever it was.

“I despaired of my life,” he said. “I lived sealed behind a fortress of errors.”

The Abbott nodded brightly. He seemed to be enjoying himself.

“That is a good beginning,” he said. “You’ve got to remain despairing for

much longer, however, if you hope for results.”

“A mystery?” Parsival wondered.

“Hardly that, my son. You clearly want to repair your life, not wash it away in a sea of prayer and meditation. But only when the tooth rages do we seek to pull it out.”

Parsival thought about that. He scratched behind his other ear.

“You may be right, Father,” he said. “And afterwards I may swim. Isn’t that so?” The monk smiled. He tilted his head to one side.

“You might,” he agreed. “But you might merely drown.”

“Do you have any suggestions? Parsival wanted to know.

“You came here for suggestions.” It was a statement to the possible question. Parsival nodded. Shrugged. Scratched again.

“You had better start over, Sir Knight, don’t you think? You clearly missed your way.”

Parsival nodded. “Yes, I took a wrong turning twenty odd years ago.” He closed his eyes to collect his thoughts. “I saw something, just this morning.”

“Saw something?” The Abbott reached down into the seeming coffin, and Parsival realized it was hollow and open, the monk just braced on the thick edge. He came up with a small loaf of bread and golden goblets.

“Maybe it was a mark on the trail,” Parsival continued.

“Here,” said the Abbott. “Are you not thirsty?”

Parsival went over and sipped the wine. It was sweet, red, scented with a spice. It burst with slow heat in his belly. “What signpost did you see, Knight? A vision?”

Parsival shook his head. Had another sip. It seemed to strike him softly behind his eyes so that his sight was blurry and the windowless chamber, lit by oil lamps seemed suddenly brighter. The Abbott lost his outline, for an instant, and seemed just a softly covered shape with out sharp features of certain edges. It was interesting. It was pleasant. He liked the wine.

“No,” he replied, “not a sight…it was a feeling…something perfect and beautiful – a great solitary power filled me…” He drained the goblet. The floor seemed to tilt like the deck of a ship in a slow swell. He wanted to say more. The wine made it very easy and poetic. “What have you given me?” he wondered.

“What have you asked for?” the Abbott returned.

“Nothing yet…but to be resolved in my mind…”

“The mind teases itself to confuse you. That is not what you are asking for,

Sir Knight.” The depthless outline seemed to gather the unsteady shadows into itself so that the Abbott appeared to be a human-shaped hole in the dim chamber. “The mind can never, of its own working, be resolved.”

The warmth stayed even as he swallowed more wine. The stone flooring remained tilted but didn’t shift.

Strange drink, he thought. This is somehow like the mysteries of my younger days when I would wander into and out of portents at will….

“I think I really hoped,” he said, expository, because there was no connection personally with a shadow, “I hoped that …somehow…I would find my way into a place without death in it.”

The Abbott (such as he truly was) may have responded; he couldn’t be sure for a moment because of the strange drink and the tilting and the dimness..

“What?” Parsival asked.

“If I were you, Knight, I would try again.” said the Abbott sagely.

Parsival nodded, half-hearing, setting down the goblet on the stone with a faint clink. He sighed and turned away. Shut his eyes.

Felt what had to be the priest’s hand on his shoulder although he hadn’t been standing that close to him. Then felt what he was certain was a soft, deep, heavy blow in the center of his back that seemed to stun his heart. Frightened, he tried to open his eyes…couldn’t. Tried to move; couldn’t. Couldn’t feel the floor or his feet….nothingness…

His mind was fast, lucid though he couldn’t feel his body…next he was

standing on a fog-shrouded beach of chill-looking, gray, gritty, glassy sand, ice crusting the shoreline with massive, freezing surf crumbling just behind him. He felt nothing. The mist billowed and shook in the windblasts.

What desolation, his mind said.

Found himself moving inland though he couldn’t actually see his body, as if he were merely floating eyes. There were little creatures, furtive shadows in the mists, seemingly armed and savage…he had an impression they were, somehow formed from the fog and ice. He glimpsed their faces: long mustaches and oblique eyes which seemed to glare, reddish, feral…they moved constantly, seeming to melt in and out of substance as the fogs filled and shifted…

Mist creatures? his mind wondered.

He drifted inland, steadily as if the wind propelled him and he kept passing over the little creatures without really perceiving any purpose to their activities…he paused over a pit that seemed slashed from the harsh, frozen soil. Glimpsed three mutilated bodies laid out head-to-head at the bottom.

Then the fog was gone and there were green fields all around: bright, tiny blue

flowerlets; clumps of spiny, twisted trees…he was rising now, soaring into a

clear sky.

Saw a line of people in mixed dress led by a single knight in red armor, too high to make out features, moving in single file, twisting, zigzagging as if following some unseen and needless path on that perfectly flat plain. He had an impression the leader in red was reading a map.

Rising higher he discovered this was an island, vaguely rounded or heart-shaped: foglost shore, a green band surrounding the center that was just blurring, no cloud, no surface, as if his eyes simply failed to focus.

Higher…higher…the isle was a spot on a vast, shrouded sea…a speck…gone…

His eyes popped open and he was staring straight at the vaulted roof, flat on is back in the stone “coffin.”

What? asked his mind. What?

He sat up. Then stood, as if in an empty bath. The monk was watching him. The floor seemed level again.

“What happened?” he wondered.

The monk was across the room by the entrance.

“You lay down,” said the monk.

Parsival blinked. His sight was clearer. He could see the round, thin-featured face quite well. The floor was firm. He heard a fly buzz near his ear and flicked his hand at it.

“I thought I’d come here and be told something,” he murmured, climbing out of the tub-like artifact.

“Told what?”

“I don’t know.” He felt sober. Dull and sober. “I don’t really know why I came here.” Rubbed his face. “I just had a dream.”

“Well, sleepers do dream,” the monk said, without emphasis. “Are you now awake?”

The tall knight went over beside the little man. At the doorway he stood at the too-steep ramp. He had an impression that if he slipped he’d slide to the bottom like a child on a slicked board.

“I suppose I’m just running away again,” he murmured.

“Go back the way you came,” the monk said, as if giving casual directions.

“Back home?”

“No. The way you first went. Go back that way. It won’t be the same.”

Parsival wondered if the Abbott meant he wouldn’t be the way he was when he first left his mother or if the road would now veer differently. Or both. Or neither. He reached for the man’s arm as he asked the question except the fellow had moved, slightly and silently, like a shadow. In the dimness he seemed to float back across the room to the coffin.

Parsival felt too weary to follow or even go on talking. He turned towards the stairs. He didn’t want to look back and find the mystic had disappeared or shifted shape or something….

Hours later Parsival and Lego were working their way back down, facing the

sunset. The horizon hills cut a wedge into the speck of hot sungold that burned into the gathering clouds.

“Aim always at the sun,” he remembered and smiled. Lego noticed it.

“Something, my lord?”

“My wife’s father once gave me advice. I took it.”

Lego grinned. He considered the matter.

“Always a mistake,” he said.

“Nay. It led me in circles. He told me to ride always into the sun and so I went east at dawn and west by dusk.” He chuckled and shook his head. “My error was finally riding straight. I came home and fell into misery.”

“It is easy to find the lumps in the bedding,” Lego said, “but a man must make the best of his life. It passes like piss in a stream.”

Parsival was looking at the sun. It was so perfect, he felt, beyond thinking. The way the colors toned and blended, melted the clouds into a twilight mystery of light and dark.

“Bad cheese, my Captain,” he said, “is still bad. There’s no way to keep it on your stomach.”

I’m going to do it again, he thought. I’ll get to aim at the sun again….He noticed something: a puff of dust down where the trail flattened into the valley itself. He read it at once.

“Ah,” he said, “here comes the other side of chivalry.”

Lego frowned leaning up toward his horses neck.

“I was taught,” he said, “to heed the proverbs of the serfs but otherwise to keep my distance from them.”

“And to be courteous to all.” Parsival added, grinning. “To trust no one. To

break open heads. To defend the helpless. To war for the good to the gates of the Holy City itself.”

“The proverbs never failed.”

“Here’s one,” Parsival responded, watching the horses coming toward them out of the hoof dust. “trust not Greeks bearing gifts.”

Lego pondered this. A Greek merchant had sold him a saddle once at a very good price. He supposed that could be like a gift.

Lego pondered this. A Greek merchant had sold him a saddle once at a very good price. He supposed that could be like a gift.

“Why not?” he wondered. Parsival shrugged. Considered.

“Know you not the tale,” he replied, “of the knight Ulys who hid in a horse?”

“Nay. But of wood. I heard it of a minstral at court. Sir Ulys and his men hid in the horse which was left at the gate. When his enemies dragged it into their castle out they leaped and slew the lord and most of his men.”

“Out from a wooden horse?”

“So runs the tale.”

“It was hollow as a cask?”

“I imagine.”

Lego turned over the idea. A few points occurred to him.

“How long were they within the horse?” he asked at length.

“I know not.”

“Were it overlong, they’d have to void piss and shit within.”

Parsival smiled and agreed. He was watching the riders come.

“Tellers of tales,” he commented, “often leave a few pegs out of the bridge.”

“What a stink that would be,” Lego posited, watching the riders. “Are these Greeks coming here?”

“No. Knights of Arthur’s table. They intend to practice chivalry on me, I think.”

“How do you mean?”

“They’ll tell me if I say no to the king-which I have every right to do-great sorrow will be my fortune.”

“Well, we all have had the lesson: be courteous to all, but fear everyone.”

The riders were close enough to them now to see the glint of arms and armor. Between the heatshimmers and the dust the men seemed to be forming their substance out of some vague, intermediate stuff.

“I have proverb,” Parsival said. “If they press me too closely: Be not the lamb who bites the wolf.”

Lego nodded and chuckled. He appreciated that.

“They’ll shortly be nipped, my liege.”

“Nay.” he said. “Not nipped.”

Because he knew what he was going to do. It was suddenly clear. Mad, but

clear. He smiled at himself.

It was mad. He watched them coming and considered it. He felt a rush of laughter bubbling up within him instead of cold rage. He shook his head and kept grinning as the three knights reined the bulky chargers up in a jingle, clip-clop and clitter of arms.

Parsival and Lego had already stopped. Captain Lego watched as his master dismounted, stood there and began stripping off his clothes and tossing them into the bushes until he stood in what amounted to a loin cloth.

The mounted men opened their visors. The leader removed his helmet and set it over his saddlehorn. Lego saw that, indeed, these were the emissaries sent by the king. The lean, sour-faced, redhaired leader looked puzzled but determined.

“Parsival,” he said, “what does this nonsense mean?”

“It means I am mad,” the famous knight returned, “or a fool.”

He kept on his sock-like buskins. He fell on his knees in the dust.

“Are you angels of God?” he demanded.

The leader raised both eyebrows. He didn’t like this much. He glanced at the other men.

“Were we such,” he replied, “we would call you to heaven instead of to his majesty.”

“A shrewd answer,” said Lego.

“I don’t recall the rest,” Parsival said, standing up again.

“What say you?” the knight wondered.

“You’re made of shiny stuff,” Parsival told them, halfsmiling. “You must be angels after all.”

“Enough of this,” said the wider of the other two knights. “Will you come to your lord or no?”
“What makes a man a knight?” Parsival asked. Deadpan. He heard Lego guffaw up behind him.

“Honor.” said the leader. “Have you forgotten, perhaps?”

“Who makes a man a knight?”

“The king to who -” started the second man then caught himself in fury. He didn’t enjoy being baited. Who would?

“If you be not a knight within yourself, none can cause it from without,” overrode the leader of the three. “Do you mean to mock us Parsival?” Parsival shook his head. He wasn’t quite smiling. He looked past them now at the sundazzle on the fields where the dust of their passage was still puffing out steadily and thinning away.

“Nay,” he answered him. “I mock nothing. I will start afresh. I want the king to make me a knight again, from without. Perhaps it will take away the curse of the first time.”

“Curse?” The second, the wide one said. “The pride of heaven, a curse?”

Lego chuckled, looked down and couldn’t believe what he was witnessing.

“That’s good,” he said. “The pride of heaven is good.” Parsival remounted. He kicked his horse lightly and rode past them without looking back. Lego followed. The knights watched them go, dustgouts spurting under the hoof impacts.

“We will follow at a distance,” the leader said.

“I think he’s mad,” said the second man.

The third, short and wide with a bull-like face, had another view:

“It’s his cunning and craft. No more. He means to deceive us.”

“What matter?” said the leader, thoughtfully stroking his long nose with his forefinger, squinting. “He’s no man to provoke. We’ll follow at our leisure.”

GAWAIN

He watched the backs of the mismatched men at arms and bandits marching behind John of Bligh who was now riding a dull gray, one-eyed, one-eared horse that he’d decided perfectly represented the half-blind, half-deaf Christian churchmen of the world. He’d announced this, greatly to Gawain’s amusement and the mens’ incomprehension.

They were several days march away from Parsival’s castle (where they’d left him standing naked, holding the spear with their comrade sprawled at his feet); but still hight up in the rugged Welsh highlands, following the road to the sea and the only settlement resembling a city north of England itself. It was perpetually misty here. The last two days it had drizzled steadily and was chilly as autumn. The men were unhappy and getting hungry. They’d been promised look and fresh converts – which meant women.

Here the fog was rising and thickening as if the earth were coldly smoldering.

Looking from the rear, John on the gray horse was no more than a bulging and

thickening of the mist itself and the men seemed to be following him into increading insubstantiality.

Disgusted with them and himself, Gawain was half inclined to just turn back the way they’d come. There was no way to ride very far from the road here on that jagged mountain ridge so you only had two choices of direction. Decided to wait until they reached the lowlands. He knew his hope was probably vain. He’d always been a realist –

until that terrible wound had cut him off from life and love, not so many years ago. It had taken months for his face to heal as much as it ever could, and before he left to ride off into brooking fury and isolation, he’d curse those who’d saved him.

He’d lived like a bandit after that, almost never letting himself think about the part of the past that hurt the most; so that only sometimes, while dropping, as drunk as possible, into the feverish dreams that usually waited at the end of his consciousness, sometimes he’d see the woman he could never know again…there was no way to control it as real memories would seep into the nightmares; remembering her was the worst. The name he never let himself say: Shinqua, exotic and passing beautiful, goldendark skin, eyes like shadowed, distant places, a velvet touch, a heat and natural perfume that stopped his breath and heart…

After being challenged by a young knight, thirsty for reputation, in an inn, he’d gotten the notion that the Grail Parsival had been so obsessed with, might be the miracle for him.

At that time he didn’t have the famous wooden hand yet to replace the flesh one he’d lost along with half his face. He’d learned to fight shieldless, one-armed, one-eyed, depending more and more on craft and speed. He’d knocked the lad down without much trouble in the muddy yard near the horses. The peasants and one other knight who’d been sleeping in a chair by the fire came out to watch. It was a cook, autumn twilight. Stars were showing.

Gawain, wearing his monk-like cowl and a mail shirt, had one foot on the fallen knight’s swordarm and his blade at his throat. The boy groaned: the flat side of the blade had banged his head, leaving a massive, bleeding lump that probably wouldn’t prove fatal.

The average-sized, balding but still young knight who was watching from under the timbered, dirt-floored overhang, squinted into the grayish dimness at where Gawain’s hood had pulled back on the good side of his face.

“I know you,” he said.

“Not turning, Gawain said:

“I know you too, Erec.”

“When you never returned, it was said you went in quest of the Cup of God, as have so many.”

Gawain stepped back from the semi-conscious boy. Sheathed his sword. Started for his horse.

“Farewell, Erec,” he said, not looking back.

“So it’s true, then?”

The other knight followed him across the dimming yard as three or four of the peasants were carrying the loser out of the mud and back into the inn.

“True? You don’t want to see what’s true, Erec.”

“Where are you going?”

Gawain stood by the horse, his hand on the saddle, brooding, remote.

“Back to the Kingdom of Nothing,” he said.

And it was then that the idea of finding the Grail occurred to him.

Better than nothing, he’d joked to himself.

Meanwhile, he stood there because he really wanted to ask and was hoping his fellow knight would bring it up first. So he waited.

“You were injured,” Erec said, looking at Gawain’s left arm where no hand showed at the bottom of the loose sleeve. “Do you mean to return?”

“What is there for me? I belong to Nothing.”

The other man got it, and said:

“She ran away to find you. Her husband brought her back. She has given birth to a male child.” A pause. “Will you return?”

“A child,” Gawain murmured. His life had run out and away, in a moment, like spilled water, with a single swordcut from a dying adversary. What was the world where children played, to him, now? Or the world where she mattered? Or anything mattered? No more than water spilled and gone forever mattered. “What belongs to nothing must to nothing go.”

He flung himself upon the horse and sat there. The only meaningful light now as the firebright in the inn windows. Everything else was drained and vague.

“The black woman spoke of you,” said Erec.

“My Lady, you meant,” Gawain said, sharply. “For she is my Lady.”

“So please you.”

“Tell her, I charge you…”

“Yes, Gawain?”

His good eye wept and, he knew, with a sick despair, that the torn blind socket on the left side wept too, in sightless grief.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing.”

Spurred the horse onto the road and was lost in the night. Sir Erec watched him go, glint faintly once or twice as his mail caught the last flicks of firelight, as if he were riding out of the world like a phantom into the land of death…

PARSIVAL

Now it was dark. The sky seemed encrusted with the stars. There was no moon yet. Lego was saddlesore and baffled.

“My lord,” he asked as they were moving beside a stream, palely phosphorescent, hinted in the forest darkness. Lego could smell the water, mud and wet green.
“Yes, Captain?”

“We must have passed the castle in the dark.”

“I meant to. I mean to go on alone, Lego.”

“Nay, my lord. I have my duty to your person.”

Parsival was a blurred shape moving just ahead of him. The air was warm and comfortable. He re-dressed himself from a saddlebag. He was wearing a sleeveless leather vest over a buttonless linen shirt. He’d put on Saxon-style sandals that tied around the calves plus breeks that amounted to shorts. A short, thick-bladed dagger was strapped to his belt.

“I release you,” Parsival said over his shoulder. They moved up by a deep curve in the stream where the trees closed massively in overhead. “In the morning you return.”

“But where will you go?” Lego asked, as, after dismounting, they watered and tethered the horses.

“To the king, Captain. But I expect to get lost along the way.”

Later, lying on the soft grassy earth beside Lego, listening to the man’s gentle

snores, Parsival reviewed the day. He sighed and stared up into the dark blots of the branches overhead, where here and there a piece of sky showed with a little star spark. He remembered the intensity, the urgency of the morning when he was about to die. He tried to recreate that moment. He couldn’t. He tried to somehow reach himself up into the darkness, into the vast night sky that rolled in perfect silence over him. But nothing happened. He sighed again.

“It’s wanting a thing,” he murmured, “that drives it off.”

He shut his eyes and let blankness come. He needed blankness. The earth was soft and the blanket he’d spread beneath himself was a real comfort…

He opened his eyes and the world was now a ghostly, dull grey dawn. He glanced over and saw Lego was sleeping, curled on his side.

Ah, he thought, rest easy, good fellow…I will journey alone, again…

He moved quietly and unhitched his horse. He’d strapped the armor to the flanks before turning in so the mule could be left with Lego.

He led the horse in near silence along the dew-wet grasses into the misty obscurity of pre-dawn.

I’ll stop to wash and piss and chew some loaf after the sun is fairly risen…

It was still grey an hour later (he was mounted now) because the wooley fog had rolled up from the sumpy area he was just skirting.

He was aiming at where he knew the sun would be rising, though it was still invisible. The fields rolled smoothly here and only now and then did the thin line of trees (long trunks, a cluster of branches high in the vagueness) loom up, mysteriously.

It’s foolish, of course, but I’ve got to go a little mad or there’s no hope for me at all…since I can no longer even pretend to fall in love…

His horse paused at a crease of streamlet that gleamed dull grey in the mistlight.

He frowned and then smiled, suddenly remembered his mother. Another lifetime ago.

She gave me advice, he thought, and I really should have heeded her: “Cross not

streams at dark fords…” Smiled. We’ll start with that again….because she’d never said how big the stream had to be, just dark.

He urged the charger forward but didn’t cross the thread of water; instead

followed it as it looped downcountry in easy, wide curves. Trees, sparse at first, gradually thickened in around the water. After awhile, the horse had to work to pick a steady way.

Perhaps a mile further on, the trickle simply folded into a cluster of golden flowers and was gone into the earth.

The mist was burning off, now. The fist clear sunrays lanced into his eyes. He blinked and squinted. In the dazzle he thought he saw a woman in a bright gown standing in the clearing, a sky-colored tent behind her.

A moment later he realized the field was empty. It was an impression rather than a hallucination. The effect was like an image.

“Spirits?” he asked aloud. “A vision?”

The woman had seemed stunningly beautiful: tall, hair a dark rush, long exquisite limbs. A trick of the eyes, he concluded – except he knew it meant something. Like a dream, or a memory, or a vision…are they trying to come together?...will the world become a blur of dream, madness and solid earth?

Lego sat up suddenly. He’d been dreaming something violent. The pictures faded quickly. Smoke and smudge and swords, darkness lit by tortured flames…something in black and glowing armor, with red eyes like coals. Terrific

unsounds that burst his ears.

He realized at once that his lord had left him behind. He’d expected it. Parsival was moody, even melancholic these past few months.

Troubled in mind, he reflected, but does he think my oath so light that I will kiss the wind and depart?

He yawned and stretched and scratched. Who could blame his master? What a family life he’d had. Lego shook his head.

My own life, he thought, is far from perfect, yes. But my lord has been chewed like a rabbit in a nest of weasels…

He thought about a number of things standing there, taking in the situation, letting himself fully wake up.

I need a woman again, he thought.

The last one had been a peasant girl he’d seen working in a field as he rode by, marching his men-at-arms on the way to battle. How long had it been? Over a year, he decided.

They’d camped near the village and he’d slipped away at dusk.

He’d found her eating a bowl of salted peas and pork, resting barefoot, against a haymow as the shadows went darker and depthless, the sunset draining away like water into a dry field. It was a rich moment. He’d felt strangely, intensely alive. Maybe it was the prospect of a battle the next day. He’d felt that strange fear and anticipation a young man feels (though he was nearly forty at the time) realizing, without putting it into words, that the power of women is in the power of refusal because the only thing men really want from them couldn’t be raped into possession. So they had to give it willingly and could withhold it in a moment. Any of them had the power. Otherwise all you had was the body and a sheep would do as well.

They hadn’t had to say much. He’d squatted on his hams close to her and nodded. Probably he’d smiled. She’d nodded back, sucking the grease from her hands. He’d liked that. She was dark-haired, full-lipped with smoldering eyes. He’d been hit at once.

She’d offered him a rib bone and he’d chewed, thoughtfully, watching her eyes watch him.

“Well, your lordship,” she’d said at one point.

“I am not a lord, girl.”

“You be not a miller be you?” She’d said smiling. Her teeth weren’t bad, he noticed, pleased. She’d licked her lips with a red, pointed tongue. “Or a reeve?”

He’d chuckled and had shaken his head, liking her. The tension of anticipation had been strong but not unpleasant. Not the way it would have been were he actually a young man.

Age has the advantage, he later reflected, of permitting a man to enjoy certain of his discomforts; like an old cheese, where the mold becomes satisfaction.

“It’s an honest trade,” he’d said. “Miller, at least.”

“Aye. There be no end of honest ways to go hungry.”

“Well,” he’d said, “you’ve eaten.”

“This week.” She’d stood up and cocked her head toward the hut. “There’s

nobody about. Come on then.”

He stood there in the misty morning, blinked and remembered that, for some reason: the rankness, muddy, sour hay smells, spicy smoke…the crush of straw under them, her strong yet sweet sweat, powerful calves rocking, locking down his legs, the hot shock between them.

He blinked and blocked away the memory, now.

“No good thinking that way,” he told himself. Not when alone, with no woman in sight.

By the time he’d mounted he knew he would simply follow Parsival. After all, he was a vassal. What child had not been told the tale? How the seneschal and his wife, who, when their lord’s castle fell and he was killed, and as the victor was about to slay the infant son of that lord, he being a male, the vassal and his wife cried out that it was their child dressed in the noble robes to fool the enemy, and so they were forced to stand by while the baron discovered their own child who was the same age, and cut his head off on the spot. They’d saved their leige’s boy. That was the point. Lego knew perfectly well he could not have done such a thing, but that was the ideal. He was far from ideal, he realized, and wasn’t sorry.

He smiled at the thought. He believed the tale overdone but it rang true enough in spirit: you are supposed to be loyal to the death. It didn’t matter if the lord was insane or cruel or foolish; you were supposed to be loyal.

Parsival had dismounted and was poking around the glade, as if to find something tangible where there had only been an effect of light. The sun was hot now.

Bees were stirring among the lean, blue, thistly looking wild flowers.

“This feels familiar,” he murmured.

He was thinking it had to be a place from his childhood. He looked around, trying to recover an image. Nothing came to him.

What am I looking for? he thought, A ghost of which mistake? Because they had all been errors except among the errors, false starts and hopeless endings, as, among thorns, exquisite flowers have blossomed, so there had been other things, moments rich in life and joy…other things…

He remembered. There had been a tent. There could have been no trace of the tent, even a week later much less decades. But he remembered now, how he’d wandered into a lady’s tent (wearing a fool’s ratty hides that his mother had covered him with in the forlorn hope of keeping the world from wanting him) and how he’d kissed and fumbled in his almost supernatural teenage ignorance…kissed and fumbled her into total ruin in the end, by accident.

Ah, but what is pain? he asked himself. Only the mind which holds on to shadows…

He hadn’t thought of that woman or that business in years and years and now, suddenly, the memory was a vivid stun and he saw her, her lovely, pale breasts naked on the sleeping silks and furs where she lay waking into fear, startled by the strange beautiful young boy crouched over her.

“What was it?” he murmured. “What was the name?”

Jeshute, he remembered. That was it. It all came back to him: her husband, the mad duke black bearded, vicious, unforgiving, after tormenting his wife, finally falling to Parsival’s lance; and later, to his own insensate, self-consuming fury: actually chained to his horse because his back was broken, charging Parsival on a narrow trail, missing and wedging himself between two trees, raging, demented, helpless and doomed as the (then) young knight rode away….What was it, fifteen years ago? He never found out what had actually happened to her back in those torn, firefilled, bloodsplattered, tormented days. Days when he’d lost every trace (or so he believed) of his youth. He frowned now, troubled, thinking about it. He was drawn by a strange retrograde current that was sucking him back into past shadows…Why? Why now after all that time?

What happened to her? he wondered. How many causes had he set in motion to effects he knew nothing about. It would be good to find out…Yet it was absurd, he knew, though it followed from everything else, because absurdity was the soil in which his garden grew.

Perhaps I’m going to find out what became of everything I touched and so I’ll owe nothing to God or to man when I’m done – I’ll have forgiven myself, been purged of consequences…He recognized that this was already an obsession. He was caught because it wasn’t just walking over the same paths (if indeed they were) of his youth, it was living it again.

“This time,” he said, “If a damned door opens I won’t let it shut. I’ll jam my

head in and let it be crushed.”

He kicked the earth. He stared at the grass.

It was here, he thought. I know it now…

There, in the misty morning of the last day of his childhood. There…

If that woman be alive then I must right the wrong I did her, he thought, calmly, like a man about to undertake an all consuming feat. There’s my repentance. There’s my expiation…

He understood it was a vow he was making. And like anyone making a vow, he felt instantly better, as if something were already accomplished.

He found it important to speak aloud now: “I’ll find her, and save her.” As if he believed it. As if she might need saving. It didn’t matter. It was his impulse and could guide his life through what might otherwise be a pathless trek. Because if he meant to drop his past purposes he certainly needed new ones.

LEGO

At the same time, a mile or two away, Lego was riding and brooding. He followed the river and hoped for the best. The sun went higher and higher and the heat burned towards afternoon like an open furnace door.

He rode steadily, squinting across the general dazzle. He picked up Parsival’s tracks without much trouble and he sat with one leg across leaning on the horses neck, watching the steady flow of matted grass and dusty earth rhythmically marked by the puckered broken circles of unevenly printed horse hooves at once alike and yet as various as snowflakes…it was hypnotic…

So at first he didn’t realize the fact that there were too many prints, suddenly, and it hit him just as he looked up and saw three riders cresting a grassy ill perhaps a mile ahead. He squinted at them across the lush valley. His stomach clenched at once. He spurred the big roan forward.

Would I were going to the sea shore to rest in the sun and row a skiff, he thought, yet, instead, I ride on the road of troubles…

LOHENGRIN

Lohengrin had left that morning. He’d made up his mind to get away while his father was absent. He’d planned it for weeks. A young squire (whose family had sent him for training, as was the custom) had agreed to go with him. Lohengrin liked the fellow just enough. He thought young Henry of Aud stiff and stuffy, even somewhat foolish; he assumed he was brave enough.

“Why wait and suffer what they tell us.” He’d reasoned with the lad who was, in fact, a year his senior, at sixteen. “We’ll strike out for ourselves. Win our knightly spurs in the old style.”

Lohengrin liked the idea of the old style. He liked stories about more lawless times than theirs. He liked the idea of knights banding together against the world and winning riches and honor and various unclear glories. Mainly he liked the idea of being free to come and go as he pleased and fight whom he chose.

His eyes were dark, intense, magnetic, persuasive. His tongue was precocious and convincing and so the two of them had slipped away just before dawn and by mid-day found themselves miles down the valley on the main south road, roughly paralleling the direction taken by Parsival and Lego, and indeed, Arthur’s emissaries.

The sun seemed to impact the dust flat on the hoof-chewed surface.

Lohengrin was sweaty. He hated hot weather. Both of them rode with their armor and fighting gear strapped to the horses’ whithers.

He opened his loose, linen shirt to the navel. His dark, surprisingly thick chest hair showed, matted and wet.

“Now I have misgivings,” said young squire Henry.

“What?” wondered Lohengrin. “Are you a girl-heart?”

“Nay, as you might know. But will they not send after us and bring us back in shame?”

Lohengrin spat past the horse’s shoulder. He smiled faintly without humor. “Hah,” he uttered. “You will not find me a light burden to carry in any direction. There is no dishonor in what we do.” He wiped his eyes. “I think my flesh will melt to the bone. And sweat to me nothing.”

Henry took this in. He stared across the lush, rolling fields, serious, uneasy. His face was roundish, with wide slightly protuberant eyes. He didn’t look like he battered his brain with violent thinking; the few ideas he had, however, were nailed down to stay.

“How will we eat?” he wondered. “After a day or two our supplies will be gone, I think.”

Lohengrin smiled with real amusement this time. He shook his head in disgust. He realized why he liked having Henry with him: because Lohengrin loved to mock and stir things up. Even if he liked you well enough, he still enjoyed pricking the needle in.

“You eat beyond what is human,” he commented. “Maybe your grandfather was a horse.”

Henry’s brown, small eyes looked seriously at his companion. He had no sense of irony or sarcasm. Many of Lohengrin’s sayings, consequently, were lost on him.

“I am well proud of my blood,” he said stolidly, “and the deeds of my forebearers.”

Lohengrin almost laughed. He looked sidelong at his companion with a provoking air. “I am proud of Lohengrin,” he said. “Let the rest be fucked in their ears and asses.”

Henry said nothing more. He looked contemplative and uncomfortable. Lohengrin always made him uncomfortable. He was about to ask himself if indeed he had not made an error in joining him. “Surely,” he said at length, “we will come to a village before long.”

Lohengrin looked uninterested.

“Do you long so for the company of villains?” he asked Henry.

“No,” responded his companion, “but base fold make some excellent dishes.”

He nodded thoughtfully. He remembered things. “Some nobles think only the dainties from Italy are worth swallowing.” Lohengrin seemed incredulous.

“You concern yourself with such things.” He wondered.

“Naturally. I think the foods of our country are greatly underrated. Did you ever have flatfish and thistleweed stewed with clams such as the peasants eat at my manor?”

Lohengrin chuckled. “I’ll drink salt water and chew dry oak leaves,” he said, “in trade for one of their choicer wenches.”

“What’s that? You’d mate yourself with a serf sow?”

Lohengrin shook his head. Henry was hopeless.

“What have you fucked above a sheep or two?” he wondered.

Henry was offended.

“Do you think me unnatural, Lohengrin?”

“A wench with a bath is a clean hole,” Lohengrin said, “but a sheep dripping Arabian perfume is still a foul beast.”

Henry was agitated. His eyes flashed.

“Why do you link me to such Godless practice?”

Lohengrin guffawed. He was really enjoying himself now. He shifted around in the saddle to better look at his victim.

“Haven’t I seen you rightwise linked?” he snorted. “linked to a sheep’s arse?”

The strong, stocky Saxon youth stood up in his stirrups. “Cease!” he cried, baited, furious.

Lohengrin couldn’t control it. He was shaking with laughter.

“What a sight,” he said. “Fear not, I’ll not reveal your vices to your lady.”

Henry sat back down, looked uneasy.

“I have no lady,” he said, nervously.

“Ah, have you not?” Lohengrin cocked his head to the side. “Come now, Hal.”

Hal was sullen. “I have not.”

They were just entering a thick, dark wood of mainly saplings massed together. The thin trees made a soft-looking grey wall.

“I know her well,” Lohengrin said. He did. His aunt’s daughter. A slightly thick-waisted, but pretty-because-young flaxen-haired girl, a year his senior. “I had her kiss me stick,” he said, breaking up.

Henry’s eyes flashed. He’d had just enough.

“You lie,” he cried. “she never-“ then cut himself off, realizing, finally, he was merely being provoked.

Lohengrin squinted ahead across thickly bright green, almost overrich fields and rolling foothills. He felt confident. Life would be his. He stretched and cracked his finger joints. He felt good.

“You want serf’s pasty bread?” he asked, rhetorically.

“I-“

“I mean to make war, like any other lord. I have an idea of booty.” He looked quite cold, his eyes suddenly dark and still. Henry didn’t say anything watching him, uneasily. “We’ll raid and we’ll rule,” Lohengrin assured him. “I’ve made my plans.” Which was true. He’d sketched them out during long, dull afternoons in the castle yard, in his chamber, or riding in the neighborhood. They were crossed between the just possible and youthful daydreaming.

“Plans?” asked Henry.

Lohengrin came back from the cool distance of his inner vision.

“We’re heading to the seacoast,” he informed Hal. “I’ve thought it through. We’ll gather foreign and masterless men about us.”

Hal blinked. “Gather men? What men would follow two boys?”

Lohengrin didn’t quite smile. But he was amused. He felt the cold spring of strength rising within him, in his belly and head, and almost ecstatic power and confidence.

“You’ll see who follows,” he said, quietly, “and who dies.” Because he felt, in fact, that no one was better. No one who sat in large castles with small armies at their disposal, yes, not even the king himself, would have any more claim to glory, or power than Lohengrin of Wales. He saw his future. He would have women for sport, hounds past counting, an army to rip and smash whatever stood between him and…but the thought was really only a feeling and the precise final goals were still vague outlines of battles and big fortresses and triumphant processions…

“You’ll see well who follows,” he repeated. Because he’d kept his real purpose, the one that was clear to him, private; although now he was content to tell Henry, now that they were on the road. “I mean to win where my great father lost,” he said. “Then we’ll see.”

Henry nodded. Frowned.

“Win what, Lohengrin?”

The dark-complexioned young fighter stared straight ahead, not looking at anything.

“When I was small he’d tell me the things he told no other,” he said.

Hal nodded again. Shrugged.

“Fathers share their wisdom with their-“

“Bah!” Lohengrin cut him short. “My father had no wisdom I ever noticed. Better to take the advice of a chirping bird.”

Hal shrugged again.

“Well then,” he said, “what is your import?”

“He told me many times, the story of how he tripped over the Grail Castle.”

Hal looked as thoughtful as he ever did.

“But you always say –“

“I always say my father was stupid. But he almost found something that might, like Arthur’s Excaliber, give a man power in this world. I mean to succeed in taking hold of this Grail that all men desire.”

Now Hal was amused.

“Ho, ho,” he emitted. “And you a boy will succeed where the great Knights of the Round Table all have failed?”

“We’ll see who’s great, Henry. I have a map.”

“A map? Let me see –“

“Hal, you are precious,” Lohengrin cut him off yet again.

PARSIVAL

Parsival remounted and rode across the glade into the harsh looking woods beyond: The trees were very old and gnarled here, and bent thick, branches twisted close to the ground so that he had to work around them and stoop constantly. “Even if I had a destination,” he muttered, finishing as a thought: I’d be lost in an hour…

The heat was oppressive as the sun mounted into bronze, blazing noon and broke through the leafed interstices in burning spears and boiled a hot steaminess from the damp earth. He was glad he’d stripped off his armor and the leather vest. He just wore a loose, linen shirt, and his bare legs were comfortable.

He kept slapping at insects, sweaty and miserable. Enough was enough. He contemplated turning back. And then he heard the steady whoosh of running water and he aimed towards the river, well downstream at this point.

The trees arched away here so he decided to follow the curves for awhile. The river was wide and not-too-deep.

“What vile heat,” he told the day.

He halted the horse and dismounted. Leaned down and dipped his face and hand in the coolness. Nothing ever felt better.

He blinked and stared. Sunscatter created bright greenish, golden fannings of light. He remembered, as a boy, staring and imagining that strange fairy-like beings lived there among the fluid fronds and mysterious rocks and shadows.

A flash of silver as a fish winked suddenly into a lance of sun and hung there. He was tempted to draw his sword and impale it because it was so elusive, so momentary – like, he thought, all the bright things that eluded human grasp.

He leaned back from the water and cocked his head. He heard voices: a shout and a high pitched cry.

“What’s this?” he wondered, aloud.

“You pig!” a woman cried out. “Curse you!”

He stood up and headed for the sound: downstream, close.

He went around a sharp bend. A man was raging in wordless fury. A woman had just fallen half into the water on hands and knees. Her clothes were ripped. He saw bright blood spots on the white pebbles. By the cut of the man’s stained, ripped clothing and the quality of it, Parsival took him at once for a well off townsman.

What a world, he thought.

He rushed forward the last few steps and got between them. He had a feeling the man was about to deliver a blow on the light haired woman’s head. He kicked the fellow in the side sending him into the shallow water flat on his back.

“You bastard,” the man cried, in a somewhat high pitched, raspy voice.

Though the woman was obviously low born too, Parsival instantly helped her to her feet, as if she’d been a lady. That was his way. She stood there blinking, startled, breathing hard. One eye was bruised and her lips were cut. Well, peasants are always fighting. But these both, he had already noted, seemed more refined that the usual run.

She’s a beauty, Parsival thought.

Meanwhile, the now dripping wet man scrambled to his feet, clutching a big smooth stone in each hand, eyes slits of fury, thin chin beard plastered to his cheeks.

“I will break your head, you bastard!” he raged.

Parsival glanced at him and raised an eyebrow, speaking to the woman:

“Is this your husband, who so abuses you?”

She looked weary, haunted, but furious. Her eyes were dark blue, face freckled and pale, hair a reddish-brown.

She wiped her lips with the edge of her hand and smeared the blood. She cast a fierce look at the man who edged closer, cocking his arm as if to throw one of the stones, obviously worried by the virtually unarmed man’s total indifference.

“The priests joined us indeed,” she said. “At the very door of the church.”

“Mayhap I ought not to judge this knave too harshly,” Parsival reflected, “since two and a hundred times have I longed to serve my own wife thus.”

She paid scant attention to his ruminations.

“Loan me your dagger, fellow,” she said, “and I’ll sever the bond.”

He noticed she was well spoken. Not unheard of in a peasant but really rare.

The man finally kicked his courage free and whirled the stone at Parsival’s head.

The knight nodded just to make it whiz past his ear, not really looking away from the woman.

“Repeat that folly,” he told the fellow without turning to him, “I’ll send you on a dark journey.”

“You pig!” she said to her husband. “You dog’s stool! You-“

“You whore!” he interrupted. “How curse me when you dipped your head over that pardoner’s prong! While I –“

Parsival was both bored and amused. He accepted the contradiction without analysis.

“I might as well have stayed at home,” he declared, “to hear such discourse.”

“Ah, did I indeed?” she wondered, standing, wide-legged to face him. “At least he had a bone and not a boiled sausage!”

Parsival raised an eyebrow and nodded.

“That’s plain talk,” he commented.

“Yer a slut!” the man declared, raising the second rock. “Yer twice a slut.”

Parsival wagged a finger at him.

“Mind,” he warned. He noticed the fellow’s eyes were reddened: maybe drink or recent weeping. No doubt he had cause for either or both, Parsival thought.

“He is a man,” she told him, as if they were alone at home bickering among the turnips, Parsival thought. “Not-“

“Boiled sausage,” Parsival put in. He shook his head, grinning. “For Godsake, no more of this. Have I just come to another room in my own castle?”

“Ya great ass,” the man addressed him, “ya fancy yer indoors?” Shook his head still holding the second stone at his side. “He’s a loon.”

Parsival sat on a fat rock, under a sweeping willow tree. The shade was pleasant and the smell of the water was cool and refreshing. His horse had finally come up and was waiting, nuzzling the surface of the stream.

“There’s no sense in fighting,” he told them. They both just looked at him now. The woman plastered back strands of her wet, disheveled hair.

Really very pretty, he noted again where her traveling dress was torn and hitched up, the long graceful sweep of pale leg held his eye. More than pretty…

“Are you a disguised priest,” she wondered, “come to make peace between us?”

“There’ll never be any peace, you bitch,” said the man.

“Eat dung, Hubert,” she recommended.

Hubert’s mood suddenly changed. He dropped the stone and went and sat on the bank.

“Go with him to his castle,” he suggested to her. “He looks a right lord.”

She studied the horse, saddle, clothes, light armor.

“It’s a knight’s gear,” she pointed out.

Parsival realized he should just go, he was watching himself begin the process of acting silly because it was a female, and he’d soon be inventing, he realized, reasons to linger.

“Where are you bound?”

“Where indeed?” she replied. “Ask the fool there.” Hubert the fool didn’t look up. He spat towards the water.

“Women,” he said dully, “take out the heart of a man.”

“Ha, ha,” she said. “What might you know of men, Hubert? Or hearts, for all else?”

Parsival tried again. He really did want to leave. He felt a strange obligation to do something. This was life as he knew it.

“What has brought you here?” he asked them.

She was now kneeling, washing her face in the stream, cupping the water to her hurt mouth.

“I rode a mule named misery,” she said.

“Be not so harsh,” Parsival suggested. “You seem not provisioned for a long journey. Is your village close to here?”

“We have no village nor no course,” Hubert declared, bitterly. “So that leaves us no distance to go.”

“Ah,” said the knight, “here’s logic at least, but what drove you here?”

“Troubles,” the woman said, standing up and facing Parsival. She was bold-eyed, strong, with a slim, very good body. He almost knew how she’d feel naked in his arms: strong, nervous hands; the smooth wiry back and shoulders; the pressure of hip and thigh….

He blinked the thought away; rather, tried to blink the thought away.

Didn’t quite meet her dark, knowing eyes. She understood. She was almost

sure already, watching him from under her eyebrows now as if she actually could read his thoughts. It rarely took women long, he knew. He tried to stay cool and remote with the usual success. He avoided looking down at her legs. That was a start.

“I came form the land of fools and cruel, useless men,” she said.

Ever I am drawn, he thought, to the same slim beauties with needle tongues…He blinked. Still, she’s well spoken for a peasant wench…..

“Well,” he offered, “we may all journey together for a time, towards better places.”

The man, Hubert, didn’t quite look up, sitting with his arms on his knees brooding, sullen.

“Do so, by all means,” he said, sourly. “She’ll lie flat in the field for you at the point of your lance, the slut.”

Parsival didn’t get it at once because he was only half-listening. He was wondering if he should bother at all with this. Twice, now, is a short space of time, the world had dissolved: first the blade to his throat, then the in the monastery…as when you lay sick and feverish….

“But I don’t battle women,” he protested. “Even were she armored cap a pe, bearing sword and buckler. Anyway, I gave up my lance.”

“Were a woman hid in armor,” she said, thoughtfully, “how would you know if you battled her?”

“Bah,” muttered the man, “you’ll thrust into her, never fear.”

“Oaf,” she sneered, not looking at him.

“Come now,” Parsival said, “I am not that sort of fellow.”

He felt faintly like an ass, saying that: under certain conditions he was exactly that sort. “Anyway, you’re in luck because I’ll journey with you for a time.” He smiled. “But you must give me your oaths to make the peace between you.”

“Ha, ha,” said the man, scornfully, “we’re in luck, as you are, yourself, if you meant to travel with us and hear every oath ever framed.”

LEGO

Now, Lego came over a knoll into denser forest. The tracks were still plain and overlaid his lord’s. Were these the knights sent by the king? He had to assume they meant harm. It was prudent and natural.

Each time he passed through a deep treeshadow the coolness was a shock. The hot, thick, wet air; and then the coolness. He urged the horse on into a canter. When all this was over, he decided, he’d ride to the village of Arsra and see his 17 year old daughter. She’d married a man of law, a pardoner. He was thin, dour, with a sallow complexion. He did his duty but no more, not by a hair. Lego didn’t exactly delight in his company, but he enjoyed her wit and the way she looked at life. He missed her. He nodded to himself, thinking that, watching the roots and leaves and sun and shadow flick and flow past.

up to the squarish castle silhouette, was just being slowly covered by a cloud shadow. The sun still beat hard and steady where they were. “Why?” she wanted to know. “You ought to make haste back to your bride and sweet mother.”

She was mildly annoyed to note that he was keeping pace with her. She felt sweaty and grouchy and had no desire to deal with him of all men.

“Spare me you barbs, Layla,” he told her. “I’ll not leave you with that fool and coward.”

“Which one,” she wondered, deadpan, “particularly?”

“Indeed, which one.”

“Do not mistake him,” she warned, wiping her brow and eyes with a handkerchief.

Why doesn’t he go away?

“I will have you to keep, Layla,” he said. He seemed, she decided, more tense than usual.

“Why?” she asked, quite seriously.

“Life, in other wise, holds little joy for me.”

She didn’t quite laugh. She wasn’t amused, for one thing; and for another, she been brought up to take romantic declarations seriously since so many knights were willing to be maimed and die for the sake of such notions. But she was closer to laughter than awe, at this point.

She squinted at his face in the dazzling sunlight.

“I’ll tell you what,” she said, “ride with this token-” She held out the damp handkerchief. “-and return with a dragon’s head and I am yours for eternity.”

What, she thought, are we children still to follow nonsense like a moth the shifting and inconstant flame that drops him scorched to oblivion in the end…not likely, Sir Gaf…She was furious now. Thought about the new child one of them had left within her.

“Do not mock me,” he said.

She smiled without humor.

“So you’ve cropped your beard to come and win my heart,” she said. “Bring me back the head of a pig, or failing a pig, the head of your wife, and I’ll…”

He went red in the face and leaned over to slap her but she leaned away.

“Evil-tongued slut,” he snarled, exasperated. He shout-whispered: “Heed me! Mistake not my resolve.”

She was a long way from the safety of the castle. She knew she should have dissembled until she could slip away. The idea of appeasing this selfish, pompous bastard (as she now thought him) disgusted her. The memory of his distracted caresses, perfunctory kisses had little appeal. She was amazed at how she’d once been eager for those contacts.

An then I have to lie on my belly an him above and it’s no more use than a glove without a hand in it..

She had to get away. Fast….

LOHENGRIN

He felt dulled, drowsy, enervated….He could barely open his eyes and what he then saw was all bent into blurs.

He felt he didn’t belong there, that he ought to get out but time and the past seemed to be melting away….

He kept considering crawling across the silk and velvet floor to the tent opening – except he wasn’t sure which way was right. To his blurred sight the interior seemed a seamless dimness.

“What has this witch done to me?” he murmured. The air was suffocatingly close, hot and densely perfumed. After what seemed ages of stagnant time he managed to roll over onto his back. “Have I been here for days?” He tried to recall when he’d eaten last. He couldn’t tell if he were hungry or thirsty.

I never believed in witchcraft…He feared he’d be spellstruck forever, prisoned in fairy twilight like a fly in amber. He’d heard tales of supernatural races that hid behind screens of deceptive magicks and might madden and obsess humans.

He closed his eyes again (or thought he did) and seemed to dream that he was lying enchanted in the tent and he told himself her was dreaming and then reopened his eyes ( or thought he did) and was still nude lying in a strange, gray world of slow-flowing mists where shapes stirred almost into forms but never quite revealed themselves…and there was one, a shadow that might have been cast by some remote, gigantic statue (he sensed that much) that yet lived and had a message for him which made him feel that he would, somehow, be made into something as powerful, massive, enduring as stone and that his life would be monumental…

And next he blinked and was looking down the length of himself across his belly at the top of her head where it was wedged between his legs and felt that her mouth was drawing all the strength out of him, like a pool draining away, being drunk away. It had to be a dream: neither pleasant nor unpleasant.

She seemed to drain him until blackness flowed in and filled the almost empty pool of himself and then he was gone…

And then his eyes popped open again and a bright glare burned into them and a voice nagged and he winced.

“Rouse yourself from this pitiful torpor,” the voice was saying. “I have waited an hour or more for you. My guts are hollow. I was in a way to chase a rabbit with my sword when I bethought myself: yonder lies a tent and there must be victuals within.” Big Henry was looking around the silk and satin interior. “No doubt you have eaten and forgot to call your companion.”

Lohengrin just looked at him from under his black, thick eyebrows, his eyes like dull, burnt coals. He wondered who this clumsy-looking, pout-lipped oaf was.

Where is she? he wondered to himself. Do I sleep or wake?…

He suddenly sat up. The light from the parted flap was blinding. He held his temples under the matted, curly black bush of hair. Henry was still saying things. Lohengrin remembered who he was now.

I feel better…As if a spell had lifted. He stood up. Swayed slightly but that was all. A few blackish dizzy spots holed his vision but that was all. One, as it was fading and his sight cleared, gave a fleeting impression of a graceful female body topped by a skullface…and then there was just the sting of factual sunlight.

“Where is she?” he wondered.

“What?” Henry was still poking around the tent.

“The woman.”

Henry liked that.

“Ahha. So this is what reduced you to ruins.”

Lohengrin grimaced, wryly, looking down at his naked body. He found his garments here and there and began putting them on.

“How long were you outside?” he wondered.

“Some little time. I saw a woman come out. And then I came in.”

Lohengrin looked at him while sitting there, tugging on his metal-studded, pointed, low boots.

“She was a beauty, eh?” he said.

Henry shrugged.

“She had red hair,” he said. “She went into the woods. I didn’t see her face.”

Lohengrin was staring again, as if rapt.

“It seemed a long time…..” he murmured.

“It seemed forever to me,” said his companion. “When you’re waiting to sup, the sun stands still in the sky.” He was poking around now, lifting cushions and what not. Wrinkled his nose. “It reeks in here like a Sunday mass between the scented smoke and the old women stinking of flower-water. And you say you found no food?”

Lohengrin stood up to strap on his swordbelt.

“I have to say I did not look, Henry.” He headed outside into the green and blue brightness. “Mayhap I fell into a sick dream when I went within. The close air…”

It seemed possible now, out in the blunt daylight. Anyway, that was better than being mad. He finished dressing in the hot sun. The tent was empty. There was no witch, no woman even. The whole business meant nothing and didn’t bear thinking about.

He squinted up into the trees, not looking back, even when his starving companion came out of the tent.

“We go forward,” he said, as if to Henry, “on the road to destiny.” He liked saying that. He’d heard a tale-teller tell it.

“The only road I seek,” said Henry, is the road to roast meat.”

As he braced and swung his leg up over his horse’s back, and Henry mounted beside him, Lohengrin thought:

It was no dream……it was not a dream at all……

LEGO

Lego was following the river trail about an hour behind his lord. He came to the place by the wall where he noted many sets of hoofprints coming together. He dismounted and studied the signs: Parsival’s horse joined the rest and cut through a break in the wall into the forest.

No marks of a fight, he thought. It was hard to imagine Parsival being taken against his will. odd…..odd…

He remounted and followed. A short distance in, the trees opened into a little glade where the sun lay in hot, mellow brightness on the wild grass and stony earth. The air was heavy with afternoon heat; grasshoppers flipped semisidewise like chips of brown wood or flickers of grass; bees stirred in the bushes; birds twittered and the day murmured in a way that made him long, suddenly, to stop and stretch out and sit in the shade like a day-dreaming child.

A few yards later, just before the forest closed in again, he heard the snarl of flies in the brush. He twisted his mount aside to see what was dead because he noticed the horse snort and shy slightly, as horses will when they smell blood.

So he wasn’t too surprised to see the dead man (he didn’t know was recently Hubert the Bailiff) lying on his back with his chest cut open, both eyes wide, stunned and glassy. The bush’s shadow hid the worst of is wound but blood fresh enough to be still red was spattered around him like dew in the relentless sun.

Lego unconsciously touched his swordhilt and squinted hard into the waiting treeshadows. The hot breeze plucked at the grasses and ticked the heavy leaves. He felt watched. He sneered, without knowing it, breathing carefully. He liked being alive. He suddenly felt there were so many things still worth doing. He hoped his lord hadn’t been killed, somehow.

“Come on if you’re coming,” he whispered, waiting while his horse jogged its head and snorted, nervous, uncomfortable, flicking its tail and ears at the stray flies that drifted from the feast. “Let’s have it now.”

Nothing. Just the buzzings and whooshings and general murmur of the afternoon. So he drew his blade anyway, rested it across his armored lap, and urged the horse back along the trail into the trees.

PARSIVAL

They came out of the cool trees into an open place that was almost perfectly squared off as if the pines and other trees had been chopped to frame a space of barren, stony rise that wasn’t quite a hilltop. A dark, muddy trickle of stream pooled and puddled its way along the shallow slope.

The woman immediately noticed the bugs: the air was full of nasty, tiny midges that went straight for the ears. She grimaced and kept slapping at them. This spot seemed far more humid than the rest of the forest. And there was a foul odor. Parsival realized (with revulsion) they’d been using that sluggish little stream as a latrine.

“Christ’s eyes,” he muttered.

“Who are these creatures?” she asked.

“They seem like infidels from the Holy Land.”

“Why came they here?”

The tall knight shrugged, running his fingers through his long, brown and copper-streaked blond hair.

“Maybe to rescue us from the grip of Jesus,” he remarked, wryly.

The leader came out of one of the sorry, stained, ragged tents pitched along the near wall of evergreens. He sported a red, greasy turban and ragged robes over the same light, rusty chainmail favored by most of the others. A scar sliced down his forehead almost vertically and virtually divided his wide, flat nose before ending in a pucker at his upper lip.

“What is it to be?” Parsival asked him.

The fellow responded in damaged English.

“You are a knight?” he said.

Parsival blinked.

“I am sunset,” he said, staring at the little man.

“We bring knights to someplace,” the fellow elucidated.

“Wonderful,” Parsival told him.

“We look for king.”

“Your king is missing?”

“You know where is king?”

He tipped his head and blew out one of his nose-halves onto the ground and wiped the nostril with the back of one hand.

“Your king?” Parsival reiterated, trying to decide how seriously to take this talk.

“No our king. KING.” He waved his arms around, inclusively.

“King Arthur?”

The fellow scowled and rubbed his noses.

“Bah,” he said. “Great king. King of allbody.”

“Ah,” said the tall knight. “THAT one. No head.”

The woman poked at Parsival.

“What is this madness?” she wanted to know.

The two of them stayed on the horse who was just dipping its head to lick a fetlock. The ragged-looking troops had gathered around them and were silently, avidly watching. Parsival felt somehow that he and the woman were giving them an appetite. “They look live wolves,” she concluded.

“I’m no lamb,” the knight said. He let himself center within, not focusing on anything, waiting for the crisis. He’d decided it would be an interesting fight.

“King,” the leader demanded, shrill, tense, “where is king?”

“Which king?” Parsival wanted to know. It struck him this was a formula, somehow like a ritual because the fellow didn’t really seem that interested in his response; he rubbed his strangely split nose with his middle finger, then drew his curved blade with a jerk and gestured at the sky.

“Tell or die!” he screamed. “Tell or die!”

Parsival nodded as the woman shrank back against him.

“Very well,” said the knight, holding her shoulders with one hand, and , with the other, brushing his long, blond bangs away from his eyes. “I’ll reveal all.” He pointed. “Follow the sun for seven days and nights. Especially nights. When you come to the river of blood, swim or sink, as you will. On the far shore you come to the king’s kingdom.” He smiled with half his mouth. “You’ll know it by the stink.”

“You jest with these?” she ask-whispered, afraid.

He shrugged. He realized the oily-dark little man hadn’t paid any attention anyway. He’d sheathed his blade and was snarling commands at some of his men.

“Jest?” replied Parsival. “For all I know it’s sooth and a half.”

“Will they kill us now?” she asked.

He shrugged.

“Who knows? They seem right mad. Before we die, tell me your name.” He’d just remembered she hadn’t said; or, if she had, he’d missed it.

“Eda.”

“Ah.”

“I’m afraid.”

“Don’t fear yet.”

“Will they slay us?”

“Not all of them. Only a few, if any.”

“Why is that?” She twisted as if to look at his face.

“I will kill most of them, if it comes to that.” He brushed at his hair again and made a mental note to trim it soon. “Maybe all.”

She didn’t drink the whole cupful because she said:

“Am I a babe to be soothed by a tale? She sniffed. “You’re not even armored.”

“You err. I am armored.”

“In madness?” She watched the leader who was now squatting on his hams, having a bite of dried meat with his scimitar in his lap. She kept studying his scarred, divided nose, wondering where his breath went.

“No. It’s a skill I have no pride in,” the knight told her.

“You are that strong?” She twisted around to glimpse his face just above her own. The ragged troops seemed to be gathered, waiting for something.

“Other men are, often, that weak.”

He stayed centered, looking at the treetops interlacing a rich blue edge of sky. He didn’t see any birds. He was wondering if every time someone tried to kill him he might have a mystical vision. The burnt hay scent of her hair was a distant distraction.

The leader came close and peered up at them. His expression wore a kind of permanent fury. Spittle flew in a fine mist from his mouth when he shouted and Parsival could smell the strange acridity of his breath.

“You ignorant,” he cried.

“And you annoy me,” the knight said. “Everyone always liked to tell me I was ignorant. My wife still delights in it.”

“We want king who dwells under earth,” the leader said. “We look.” He moved his arms, significantly. “We seek…we make sacrifice to him…we ask…we follow…we pray.”

“Quite a full roll,” Parsival commented. “I commend your energy if not your demented purpose.”

The warrior screwed his face into a scowl that twisted his divided nose as if he had two faces trying to form a double fury. He swept his arms to include his men.

“We are one!” he cried. “We will find lost king!” Then, apparently, shouting the same sentiment in their common tongue, they all clashed their weapons and chanted for a few moments.

“Let us part now,” said the knight, “and we will look too. And if we find your king I’ll come straight to you.”

The little man smiled. The scowl (Parsival thought) was better. The lean, contorted face was close to the horse’s shoulder as the beast drifted a step or two, nodding into a clump of grasses.

“He, ha,” the dwarfish leader said. “You no go.”

“Ha, hoo,” said Parsival. “Say you so?” To the woman: “A fine lot of trolls.”

“You learn soon.”

Parsival tried one:

“Why do you seek this king-in-the-ground?”

The face was right under him now, looking fiercely up. The knight resisted kicking the pointy chin.

“He holy man. He will take…”

“Take?”

“What was stole.” The face was grim. “Enough. Now come or you die.”

“I love a choice,” the tall, wide-shouldered knight replied as he freed his foot from the long stirrup and flicked a kick that should have dented in the little fellow’s ear. Except he was snake-quick and ducked and snapped a cut at Parsival;s near leg so fast it was almost sliced.

With cheers of pleasure half-a-dozen more warriors charged forward, circling to enclose the riders. The woman started to clutch at his legs so Parsival shoved her forward into what resembled jumping position, face close to the horse’s neck.

He needed a sword. He drew his long dagger and deflected the next slash from below.

“Christ!” he hissed, seeing that more little men were coming from all sides. “This is no jest.”

“I thought you were going to flail them all like bunches of grain,” she reminded him.

“That’s not a quote,” he responded, turning the horse hard and fast, looking for a gap to ride at.

With an ululating wail the line of wild-looking, scruffy fighters charged, scimitars chipping the hot summer sunlight.

“Oh, God,” she said. She shut her eyes.

“Here come more madmen,” he said, wheeling the horse, then breaking it backward, high-stepping hooves spatting mud as he withdrew across the sluggish streamlet, stirring up nasty clouds of nipping black bugs. “Always madmen.”

The attackers spread wide to cut him off, as he’d expected. He shoved her forward once again onto the beast’s neck to give himself striking room.

“Hold fast,” he said.

“Can we escape?” She shut her eyes.

He aimed the horse suddenly on a slant (now that he’d spread them out) wrenching violently around so that he was now rolling up their curved line.

“Can they?” he replied, setting his teeth for combat, dagger held along his thigh, as his mount’s chest and legs were knocking the first two down. The rest circled to close again but he twisted violently the opposite way and broke free of their net.

He felt the strange, hot, high excitement of combat. His concentration was tight but fluid. He saw everything without really looking. He was aware that there were bowmen coming into it now. That wasn’t so good. Short bows. Handy in thick underbrush.

He stopped the horse dead so that the nearest man could cut at his side. She screamed. He kicked up into the fellow’s armpit, whipped sidewise and grabbed the thin wrist. By breaking the force of the stroke he was able to twist the curved sword free as he backed and whirled his mount around again and looked for another thin spot in their line.

One little fighter with scattered stubs of teeth in a distended mouth darted close to snatch at the reins near the bit and stab the horse in the throat. Parsival lifted him by kicking the mount into rearing and before he could drop back and escape the knight’s blade poked into his ribs and he went down with a curse and scream.

“God save us!” the woman, Eda, gasped.

A moment later the first arrow whizzed under his chin. He was impressed by the instant accuracy.

“Piss,” he said.

He wheeled so that his back was to most of them, to cover the woman a little. He didn’t like the situation, but didn’t want to quit yet. Cut the animal left, right, left, right, left, left, right…

Another near miss and a few wild shots scattered into the trees. He needed the trees badly. Crashed across the mucky stream at a canter and cut in among the pines. Altered the horse’s gait now: slow…slower…fast…stop…back… up…forward—fast, keeping the treetrunks in the way.

She clung to the animal’s neck and gasped and reeled with the intense movements. The knight was good; very good. Had he been armored he might have slain most of them, as he’d told her.

He couldn’t lose himself in the trees because the foot fighters had been scattering around him and infested the bushes and shadows. The sunbeams flicked and flashed through the branches. His sweat beaded his face in the hot air.

Arrows banged into wood and skittered through leaves.

“Piss,” he repeated as one bare-topped little fat belly burst from behind a fallen treetrunk, wild moustaches flying and stabbed a spear at Parsival’s side.

The tall knight parried with the scimitar, then skidded the blade down the haft and chopped wristbone. The infidel yipped and rolled under the fallen tree to escape another awesome counter-stroke.

A ricocheting shaft hit Parsival in the back and the almost spent shot nicked a rib.

“Wormy bastard clods!” he yelled, yanking the horse hard left and down a sudden slope where the trees were suddenly gone. He slammed through a last screen of high berrybushes and realized the little devils had driven him where they wanted because suddenly there was loose, dried-out clay and dirt and the hooves were skidding and slipping down a suddenly too-steep drop that ran in a huge circle: a pit, with worn crumbled ramps corkscrewing down. He realized it was a long abandoned excavation. An open mine.

The infidels (as he thought them) were turning up all around then. Working, scrambling down the crumbling ramps to get at him as all he could do was hold the reins and Eda (who was now screaming) as the horse slid almost on its rump down and the sky and the rim of the pit leaped and rocked with each wild careen and bump as they hit each narrow ramp too fast to stop.

There was going to be no way to ride back up the huge spiral even if they weren’t spilled any second: bowmen on top could skewer half an armored army trying to fight their way back much less one gearless knight and a frightened woman.

They’ve got me this time, he thought. Like a pig in a sack…….

And then the straining, outstretched forelegs caught behind a stony ridge and Parsival cursed as he heard the awful snap of the bones and horsebleat, the woman’s shriek and felt himself and her sail out and down with at least fifty feet to go to the bottom; a sickening space…then a simi-soft but solid wham as the earth seemed to punch him with a vast, dull fist and he went from bright to instant blackness…

Lego had come out of the trees into the squarish clearing at the far side from where Parsival and the woman were crashing across the mucky stream into the dark pineshadows with the whole crowd of smallish warriors fanning out, dodging close, then back, actually driving the knight towards the abandoned mineworking just beyond the wall of trees…

Lego recognized his lord, stood up in his stirrups and drew his sword, cantering fast in pursuit. A bowman took a running shot at him and missed. Then he was in the thick trees and bush, cutting left and right to find a way, slowed like Parsival so that he couldn’t really gain much on the men. He rode down a straggler and had the satisfaction of seeing him bang off a treetrunk and spin down flat/

Sweating, kicking, yawing hard he came out of the trees onto the sudden slope in time to see Parsival and the woman go skidding and scrambling down. Lego shouted, as if that would help. It was not so steep where he was and he managed to halt his rank-sweating charger sidewise, horse and rider tilting, trying to inch back up on the best angle possible.

He dismounted, sword in one hand, and leaned into the reins as the big hooves scrambled in the powdery soil. It was hard going and he was panting by the time they struggled back to the more level treeline.

Half-a-dozen bowmen were waiting: small, dour, dark. He sighed, dropping his swordtip and leaning against the heaving flanks of the almost spent, blowing animal and took his own deep breaths that might prove to be his last at any moment…

LOHENGRIN

Lohengrin and Henry had come to a miserable village. The thatch and log roofs were broken and the few cows and horses scattered in the fields were bony and torpid-looking, not moving far or often. The heat was heavy, steamy. The place felt like a bog, Lohengrin decided. Even the grass and breeze seemed somehow exhausted, barely stirring. For a moment he had an impression the whole was embedded in foggy crystal.

He was still groggy from whatever had happened to him in the tent. The sun rang his head like a dull bell. He understood he wasn’t himself. He had no focus, he was neither annoyed nor impatient; he just wanted to be quiet and not have to deal with anything for a while.

Hal kept commenting on this and that but Lohengrin hardly paid attention. He was vaguely anxious because he kept worrying that he was, somehow, going to be drawn back into that state or spell.

Because the path kept tilting like a slow swell in the sea, the sky and trees stayed blurred and he felt the heat was making his stomach churn. He needed to rest. His companion’s voice blurred into the hot drowse of afternoon. The hot breeze rattled the thick leaves and the birds, insects, a soft rushing of water- all became a soothing, hypnotic hum……

So that he blinked several times when the young peasant said something to them from the side of the road. The fellow was actually squatting on his heels on the low wall of a stone bridge that crossed the winding river – the same one they’d all been independently following.

The peasant’s feet were bare, reddened and bony, giving Lohengrin a fleeting impression of lizard-like toes and a long V of a face with tiny eyes lost in a network of creases. He wore baggy, sack-like, dun-colored clothing. Both long-fingered hands cupped his chin, pointy elbows on knees.

Lohengrin reined up. Rocked slightly in the saddle.

“Churl,” he addressed the fellow whose head was patched wit unseemly bald spots set off by tiny curls of red hair glinting like dull, uneven flames.

“Where do you wander, knightlings?” the fellow asked in a high voice that wasn’t quite as disrespectful as his choice of words.

“To glory,” Lohengrin said, hand on hip, sarcastic.

Out of the droning, soft rush of afternoon he didn’t quite catch Hal’s comment.

“Well then,” the disturbingly misshaped fellow said, raising both fire-tipped eyebrows to reversed V points, “stay on the path that dips steady. You’ll find such glory as will content you.”

Lohengrin cocked his head. He was debating where to kick this apparition to best pitch him from his perch.

“Are you a prophet, ugly one?” he asked. He felt vaguely dizzy again, suddenly.

“Eh?” Henry said. “And you but bend your stare on nothingness and speak to birds?”

Lohengrin swayed and blinked and rubbed his face. There was a bird on the bridge wall: a frowsy-looking crow with one toeless foot hopped unevenly, flicking its quick, dark bead of an eye at the two horsemen. Its feathers had a coppery tint in the flat, hot sunlight.

Lohengrin grunted.

I was poisoned, he told himself. It will wear off…

He looked straight ahead now, past the arched, nodding horsehead at the twisted, shadowlost road that rose and dipped in an almost choppy effect that made for hard and somewhat giddy going.

The trees had closed in here and the way was getting gloomy and often overgrown. There couldn’t have been much traffic out there. Henry was complaining (his companion felt) as regularly as the drip from a water-clock.

Lohengrin was trying not to really notice anything or think too much. He wanted to avoid talking to anymore birds.

“We’re lost for certain,” Hal was saying. “Night will find us nowhere.”

Lohengrin looked around. The trees virtually walled off both sides of the road. The heat stayed oppressive even in the shade. There were bare and broken limbs everywhere. Only high up did thick, dark green overarch and block the sun- which, to judge by the thin, stray beams that worked through the cover to the forest floor, was certainly angling down to sunset.

Lohengrin felt more alert now, as if he’d dozed off just enough back there. Nothing weird had happened for a couple of hours at least. Maybe it was all over.

“You’re worried about supper,” he said.

“Yes.”

“How did I divine this?” Lohengrin grinned. “But what’s this now?”

The road (if you could call it so) rose and twisted up a rocky slope. The air was thick with no breeze at all and a smell of earth and faint rot. The way forked here.

They halted horses. The stream had veered off someplace behind them. The left direction seemed less rocky and cluttered. Lohengrin felt the trees seemed like they might open out a little past the first visible bend.

“Let’s try it this way,” he decided. Booted his mount lightly in the new direction. Sure enough, it was immediately smoother, wider, and seemed to gradually descend.

“How do we know we won’t get lost?” Henry wondered. He followed a horselength behind.

Lohengrin peered ahead as they rounded the bend and lost sight of what was behind them. He smiled. There were paving blocks here, wildly overgrown on the edges but set (by whatever pioneering Roman engineers centuries before) so close together that only sparse weeds forced their saw-edged-harsh-green-hardiness up between the cracks and joints.

The trees fell back and they found themselves heading for the sunset, the sun a fat, reddening ball settling into the end of along, straight valley.

“A bird told me,” Lohengrin answered, at length.

This new, solid road ran almost straight down and across open fields where the dusk seemed to wash in and pool like a soundless tide.

“There have to be folk down there in such a p

LAYLA

By sundown they caught up with his family and retainers, camped with some hide-covered wagons and half-a-dozen horses.

Layla had given up arguing and berating him, for the moment. Her back was sore from banging into his armor for hours. She was more frustrated than nervous. She blamed her husband, naturally, but only to a point; after all, this idiot had been poured from the same mold of selfish, jackass men. She saw the campfire about the same time she smelled the roasted meat.

“Well,” she asked her ex-lover, “and what will your mother think of this?”

“My mother,” he said. “Ha, ha. That’s good.”

“Did her husband keep two wives?”

“My father? Ha, ha.”

“Flawless dolt,” she said, “Will you tell her you’re so mad with love for me that you stole me away?”

She longed to smack his bearded face but that was impractical at the moment. They were among the tents now. She thought what a charming outing this was going to be.

“Mad for love?” he wondered. “I want your husband to come fetch you. He has insulted me and thinks himself safe. He thinks.”

“Something you spare yourself as much as possible, Gaf,” she said. “Listen, how will Parsival divine that you’ve made away with me? He will consider I’ve run off for spite, if ever he comes home to learn I’m gone.”

A man stood up from the fire and moved towards them. He held a spear like a staff, leaning a little. His outline was just a blot against the warm flamelight as the sun went deeper red, becoming just color now and even that staring to drain away as if the horizon clouds actually sucked up the light…

“I left word,” her captor assured her. “He’ll learn. He’ll learn. He’ll be brought to heel like the hound he is.”

She twisted her head to look back into his bearded, shadowed face, the eyes unwinking glints.

“I cannot believe I let you have your way with me,” she signed. Shook her head.

“You liked it well enough,” he grunted.

“Do I like an itch because it feels pleasant to scratch it?” she asked.

“You itch? Did a bug bite you?”

“You were but the treestump the dog rubs his hind against.”

“I begin to understand your husband,” he snorted.

“Good,” she responded. “Then why not be like him and leave me at once?”

He reined up by the fire, his man-at-arms holding the horse while he half-lifted Layla down, dropping her so that she hit the earth hard enough to stumble. His wife was there

“Good even my lord,” the soldier said.

“Have any passed this way?” Sir Gaf demanded.

“None, Lord, save a mendicant monk and a charcoal burner.”

Sir Gaf dismounted, heavily, favoring the leg he’d hurt in his breakfast brawl with Parsival. It reminded him. He glowered and spit with spite.

“You never bucked me off,” quoth Gaf. “Or him, either.”

Layla liked that.

“Never bucked is right,” she said, “We hardly felt the riders.”

His wife giggled at this racy pass though her face stayed expressionless.

“Feed yourself and be still,” said Gaf.

He handed her a seared rib. She took it but didn’t bite yet.

“Your husband means to draw mine by using me as bait,” Layla told her. “That’s like setting out a pot of honey to catch a toad.”

His wife bit the rib. Wrinkled her whole face this time.

Gaf stood there. He was now spilling beer from a jug directly into his throat, head backtilted. He paused long enough to say:

“I’ll clip him close when next we meet.”

“If you don’t free me,” Layla said, “I’ll clip you while you sleep.” She turned to the wife who seemed unmoved. “You astound me,” she told her.

“I?”

“You live with this man and yet…have you never tried to slay him?” Layla queried.

The lady shook her roundish head.

“I do not grasp your import,” she said. Her husband was now ignoring both of them, absorbed in his beer.

Layla’s face seemed to keep changing expressions in the uneven firelight.

“Ha,” she said. “I bring nothing from across the seas but I’ll import some advice from the Italians: Better a short life than a slow death.”

PARSIVAL

He and the woman had rolled to a stop together on one of the circular ledges about one third of the way to the bottom of the spiral pit which must have been the entrance to a mine, he concluded.

“Have you killed most of them yet?” she wanted to know as he helped her up and out.

He sighed. Whenever he’d brag at all…

“There are a few left,” he admitted.

The soldiers were riding around the spiraling roadway rather than attempting to cut across and be spilled like Parsival had been. It would take them time to circle down.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Come on,” he said, taking her arm, helping her climb to the next level.

“You want to reach them sooner,” she wondered.

“I do,” he replied.

He was timing it, so by the time they scrambled up three levels all but one horseman in the posse of seven had passed them. Now they’d have to come back uphill which would allow their quarry to run lower and evade. The rest, were on foot and, of course, were scrambling down the sides from level to level.

“I’m good at this business,” he told her. “I’ve tricked them.”

“Yet we still seem surrounded.”

The last rider had just come up, reining back and raising his scimitar, shouting incomprehensible words that clearly meant, “Stop!”

“I’m not bragging,” the knight assured her.

He stepped close and gripped the man’s calf just above the pointed boot, forcing him to slash straight down wildly whilst he yelled in agony as the terrible grip closed. Parsival leaned under the stroke, took the sword and tossed the little man down to the next level.

“There,” he said. “Come.”

Mounted her behind him on the armor less pony these Mongol-like fighters favored.

Headed up the spiral towards the next clump of opponents, foot-soldiers who came running, leaping and skidding form several directions. He brushed them aside: banging, kicking, cutting. No bowmen yet. Kept climbing.

As he came over the rim he saw Lego coming out of the trees. Reacted to his loyalty once again. The next thing he noticed were the arrows zipping and hissing out of the woods at them.

Lego got his shield up fast. A couple sparked and skidded off the steel. Then he saw his lord actually deflect two or three shafts wit the edge of his open hand. He realized the woman had been hit. Then he was trapped.

They wheeled their horses and crashed back along the forest trail to the main road. They reached it at the same time as the three knights from Arthur’s court who’d been following at a distance. Their visors were open.

“That’s enough,” commanded the lean, red-haired, long-nosed leader. “You have defied your king long enough.”

Parsival shifted the slumped woman around to the front of his saddle. She groaned. He’d been afraid she was dead. He was trying to get a look at her wound, which was the reason it was Lego who saw the sideblow swung by the burley, big-jawed knight. Lego lunged nearly out of the saddle in a hopeless effort to block the stroke that laid the flat of the blade alongside his lord’s bare skull. Even so, Parsival’s reactions were so quick he actually rolled a little with the blow as a tremendous, red/black blotting soundlessly burst in his head and seemed to push him face forward onto the rutted road.

“Ahh,” he whispered, rolling to his knees, holding both sides of his head as if to keep it intact.

The little fighters had already swarmed out of the woods and surrounded everybody. The split-nosed leader came panting up, on foot, yelling both his language and crippled English:

“You stand still! You caught! You stand still!”

The three knights didn’t: they charged instantly, in unison, swords ready, shields up. Parsival was tempted to follow them, except his legs weren’t part of him yet. The woman lay sprawled in the dust.

They reared to a sudden stop as a wedge of mounted “infidels” rose up to block them. Parsival’s head felt like a broken bell.

“Well, lord,” Lego said. “Gone but a day and I find you with a woman.”

Parsival went on his hands and knees to her and carefully ripped the fabric away from the arrow wound. A strand of blondishbrown hair unwound down his forehead and he shook his head to keep it out of his eye.

He saw the arrowhead had penetrated her ribcage and the pain and shock had knocked her out. He realized it wasn’t deep enough to cut her lungs, but there would be no way to push it through: he’d have to pull it straight back the way it had come.

Lego was watching the three knights circling their horses, looking for a weak point; there were too many warriors now. He was waiting a chance to strike down the one who’d hit his lord.

Parsival took a careful grip on the shaft, deciding to take advantage of her unconsciousness. He braced his left hand on her breastbone, held his breath and pulled with a steady wrench.

Praise our lady, he thought, because the head was small, narrow and oval with no reverse edges to stick between the bones. So it popped free, followed by a gout of blood. She groaned and thrashed for a moment.

“Get the medicine bag from your horse,” he told Lego. He’d pack the wound with a field poultice before binding it. He knew that more wounded survived who were treated by fellow soldiers than those who fell into the care of professional surgeons.

At the rim of his attention, he saw the foreign warriors had shut them in; but if they’d meant to kill they’d have already done it.

Lego came back with the bag. He was looking at the newcomers his lord hadn’t seen yet. Parsival found what he wanted and started dressing the wound, aware of the clash and jangle of horses and metal looming over them. He assumed it was Arthur’s men. The sun was low and right in his eyes where he faced southwest on the road so it was all shadow and dazzle and he didn’t understand what Lego was talking about when he said:

“These are strange knights.”

“Aye…and days, my friend.”

Parsival squinted and shielded his eyes, looking up not at Lego, but into the silvery facemask that was now close to him. The rider leaned down.

What? he thought. What?

Because it was a skull face with blood-red fangs; the distorted, furious grimace of a demon in deep black armor, darker than the shadows themselves. And he was shocked because he knew them, twenty years ago, while escaping from the madness, plague, fire and famine of those days, returning home he’d been tracked by twelve of these black armored killers, the last (he’d believed) of the dark army whose lord and leader Clinschor, the eunuch, devil, wizard and fiend, had unleashed on Britain in an effort to conquer the land and possess the Holy Grail.

Parsival, weak and weary, far north and near his home, had been caught up with on a white pebbled dry-wash that served as road in the Welsh highlands. His memory was true: the steep banks, violet highland flowers on the rocky, scrubby hills; the black knights: with their carnival facemasks charging him again and again and again. Him: striking, blocking, twisting, ducking, blacking out, the world spinning gray, bright and dark…finally the earth slapping him flat on his back and it was over, and when he returned to consciousness he found he was the only one left alive or unbroken……

He’d been a boy then. The boy who’d found the unfindable Grai Castle, by seeming chance, and then left, and lost the way back forever…….a fierce, hopeful, dreaming boy with a fighting talent that seemed to possess rather than obey him. A skill that was poetry and pain. A violence cursed with elegance.

He remembered in a bright link how he’d lain there in the white pebbly wash among the dead and dying Black Knights – sleeping, half-waking, shivering with fever from his wounds, the mist-paled Northern sun seeming to appear then flick away into moonless night. Eventually, he’d wakened and healed.

Those killers had followed him for literally hundreds of miles. They’d been sent by the tyrant Clinschor to take the Grail from him. This mistaken belief had become his life’s chief curse. The Grail, he’d said, was like tin can tied to a cat’s tail that drew all the dogs to him.

Absorbed in the memories, he touched his head where the flat of the sword had just hit. Winced. There was blood and a bump. When he stood up to face the Black Knight who was regarding him from horseback, reeled and staggered forward, groping to hold himself up on his horse that suddenly wasn’t there…falling…bracing himself to hit the ground that wasn’t there either…nothing under him but nothing…darkness…

ace as this,” Henry thought. He was thinking about coarse peasant loaf and hung sheeps’ milkcheese and ale. “It stands up to reason,” he concluded.

LAYLA

By sundown they caught up with his family and retainers, camped with some hide-covered wagons and half-a-dozen horses.

Layla had given up arguing and berating him, for the moment. Her back was sore from banging into his armor for hours. She was more frustrated than nervous. She blamed her husband, naturally, but only to a point; after all, this idiot had been poured from the same mold of selfish, jackass men. She saw the campfire about the same time she smelled the roasted meat.

“Well,” she asked her ex-lover, “and what will your mother think of this?”

“My mother,” he said. “Ha, ha. That’s good.”

“Did her husband keep two wives?”

“My father? Ha, ha.”

“Flawless dolt,” she said, “Will you tell her you’re so mad with love for me that you stole me away?”

She longed to smack his bearded face but that was impractical at the moment. They were among the tents now. She thought what a charming outing this was going to be.

“Mad for love?” he wondered. “I want your husband to come fetch you. He has insulted me and thinks himself safe. He thinks.”

“Something you spare yourself as much as possible, Gaf,” she said. “Listen, how will Parsival divine that you’ve made away with me? He will consider I’ve run off for spite, if ever he comes home to learn I’m gone.”

A man stood up from the fire and moved towards them. He held a spear like a staff, leaning a little. His outline was just a blot against the warm flamelight as the sun went deeper red, becoming just color now and even that staring to drain away as if the horizon clouds actually sucked up the light…

“I left word,” her captor assured her. “He’ll learn. He’ll learn. He’ll be brought to heel like the hound he is.”

She twisted her head to look back into his bearded, shadowed face, the eyes unwinking glints.

“I cannot believe I let you have your way with me,” she signed. Shook her head.

“You liked it well enough,” he grunted.

“Do I like an itch because it feels pleasant to scratch it?” she asked.

“You itch? Did a bug bite you?”

“You were but the treestump the dog rubs his hind against.”

“I begin to understand your husband,” he snorted.

“Good,” she responded. “Then why not be like him and leave me at once?”

He reined up by the fire, his man-at-arms holding the horse while he half-lifted Layla down, dropping her so that she hit the earth hard enough to stumble. His wife was there

“Good even my lord,” the soldier said.

“Have any passed this way?” Sir Gaf demanded.

“None, Lord, save a mendicant monk and a charcoal burner.”

Sir Gaf dismounted, heavily, favoring the leg he’d hurt in his breakfast brawl with Parsival. It reminded him. He glowered and spit with spite.

“You never bucked me off,” quoth Gaf. “Or him, either.”

Layla liked that.

“Never bucked is right,” she said, “We hardly felt the riders.”

His wife giggled at this racy pass though her face stayed expressionless.

“Feed yourself and be still,” said Gaf.

He handed her a seared rib. She took it but didn’t bite yet.

“Your husband means to draw mine by using me as bait,” Layla told her. “That’s like setting out a pot of honey to catch a toad.”

His wife bit the rib. Wrinkled her whole face this time.

Gaf stood there. He was now spilling beer from a jug directly into his throat, head backtilted. He paused long enough to say:

“I’ll clip him close when next we meet.”

“If you don’t free me,” Layla said, “I’ll clip you while you sleep.” She turned to the wife who seemed unmoved. “You astound me,” she told her.

“I?”

“You live with this man and yet…have you never tried to slay him?” Layla queried.

The lady shook her roundish head.

“I do not grasp your import,” she said. Her husband was now ignoring both of them, absorbed in his beer.

Layla’s face seemed to keep changing expressions in the uneven firelight.

“Ha,” she said. “I bring nothing from across the seas but I’ll import some advice from the Italians: Better a short life than a slow death.”

PARSIVAL

He and the woman had rolled to a stop together on one of the circular ledges about one third of the way to the bottom of the spiral pit which must have been the entrance to a mine, he concluded.

“Have you killed most of them yet?” she wanted to know as he helped her up and out.

He sighed. Whenever he’d brag at all…

“There are a few left,” he admitted.

The soldiers were riding around the spiraling roadway rather than attempting to cut across and be spilled like Parsival had been. It would take them time to circle down.

“Now what?” she asked.

“Come on,” he said, taking her arm, helping her climb to the next level.

“You want to reach them sooner,” she wondered.

“I do,” he replied.

He was timing it, so by the time they scrambled up three levels all but one horseman in the posse of seven had passed them. Now they’d have to come back uphill which would allow their quarry to run lower and evade. The rest, were on foot and, of course, were scrambling down the sides from level to level.

“I’m good at this business,” he told her. “I’ve tricked them.”

“Yet we still seem surrounded.”

The last rider had just come up, reining back and raising his scimitar, shouting incomprehensible words that clearly meant, “Stop!”

“I’m not bragging,” the knight assured her.

He stepped close and gripped the man’s calf just above the pointed boot, forcing him to slash straight down wildly whilst he yelled in agony as the terrible grip closed. Parsival leaned under the stroke, took the sword and tossed the little man down to the next level.

“There,” he said. “Come.”

Mounted her behind him on the armor less pony these Mongol-like fighters favored.

Headed up the spiral towards the next clump of opponents, foot-soldiers who came running, leaping and skidding form several directions. He brushed them aside: banging, kicking, cutting. No bowmen yet. Kept climbing.

As he came over the rim he saw Lego coming out of the trees. Reacted to his loyalty once again. The next thing he noticed were the arrows zipping and hissing out of the woods at them.

Lego got his shield up fast. A couple sparked and skidded off the steel. Then he saw his lord actually deflect two or three shafts wit the edge of his open hand. He realized the woman had been hit. Then he was trapped.

They wheeled their horses and crashed back along the forest trail to the main road. They reached it at the same time as the three knights from Arthur’s court who’d been following at a distance. Their visors were open.

“That’s enough,” commanded the lean, red-haired, long-nosed leader. “You have defied your king long enough.”

Parsival shifted the slumped woman around to the front of his saddle. She groaned. He’d been afraid she was dead. He was trying to get a look at her wound, which was the reason it was Lego who saw the sideblow swung by the burley, big-jawed knight. Lego lunged nearly out of the saddle in a hopeless effort to block the stroke that laid the flat of the blade alongside his lord’s bare skull. Even so, Parsival’s reactions were so quick he actually rolled a little with the blow as a tremendous, red/black blotting soundlessly burst in his head and seemed to push him face forward onto the rutted road.

“Ahh,” he whispered, rolling to his knees, holding both sides of his head as if to keep it intact.

The little fighters had already swarmed out of the woods and surrounded everybody. The split-nosed leader came panting up, on foot, yelling both his language and crippled English:

“You stand still! You caught! You stand still!”

The three knights didn’t: they charged instantly, in unison, swords ready, shields up. Parsival was tempted to follow them, except his legs weren’t part of him yet. The woman lay sprawled in the dust.

They reared to a sudden stop as a wedge of mounted “infidels” rose up to block them. Parsival’s head felt like a broken bell.

“Well, lord,” Lego said. “Gone but a day and I find you with a woman.”

Parsival went on his hands and knees to her and carefully ripped the fabric away from the arrow wound. A strand of blondishbrown hair unwound down his forehead and he shook his head to keep it out of his eye.

He saw the arrowhead had penetrated her ribcage and the pain and shock had knocked her out. He realized it wasn’t deep enough to cut her lungs, but there would be no way to push it through: he’d have to pull it straight back the way it had come.

Lego was watching the three knights circling their horses, looking for a weak point; there were too many warriors now. He was waiting a chance to strike down the one who’d hit his lord.

Parsival took a careful grip on the shaft, deciding to take advantage of her unconsciousness. He braced his left hand on her breastbone, held his breath and pulled with a steady wrench.

Praise our lady, he thought, because the head was small, narrow and oval with no reverse edges to stick between the bones. So it popped free, followed by a gout of blood. She groaned and thrashed for a moment.

“Get the medicine bag from your horse,” he told Lego. He’d pack the wound with a field poultice before binding it. He knew that more wounded survived who were treated by fellow soldiers than those who fell into the care of professional surgeons.

At the rim of his attention, he saw the foreign warriors had shut them in; but if they’d meant to kill they’d have already done it.

Lego came back with the bag. He was looking at the newcomers his lord hadn’t seen yet. Parsival found what he wanted and started dressing the wound, aware of the clash and jangle of horses and metal looming over them. He assumed it was Arthur’s men. The sun was low and right in his eyes where he faced southwest on the road so it was all shadow and dazzle and he didn’t understand what Lego was talking about when he said:

“These are strange knights.”

“Aye…and days, my friend.”

Parsival squinted and shielded his eyes, looking up not at Lego, but into the silvery facemask that was now close to him. The rider leaned down.

What? he thought. What?

it was a skull face with blood-red fangs; the distorted, furious grimace of a demon in deep black armor, darker than the shadows themselves. And he was shocked because he knew them, twenty years ago, while escaping from the madness, plague, fire and famine of those days, returning home he’d been tracked by twelve of these black armored killers, the last (he’d believed) of the dark army whose lord and leader Clinschor, the eunuch, devil, wizard and fiend, had unleashed on Britain in an effort to conquer the land and possess the Holy Grail.Because

Parsival, weak and weary, far north and near his home, had been caught up with on a white pebbled dry-wash that served as road in the Welsh highlands. His memory was true: the steep banks, violet highland flowers on the rocky, scrubby hills; the black knights: with their carnival facemasks charging him again and again and again. Him: striking, blocking, twisting, ducking, blacking out, the world spinning gray, bright and dark…finally the earth slapping him flat on his back and it was over, and when he returned to consciousness he found he was the only one left alive or unbroken……

He’d been a boy then. The boy who’d found the unfindable Grai Castle, by seeming chance, and then left, and lost the way back forever…….a fierce, hopeful, dreaming boy with a fighting talent that seemed to possess rather than obey him. A skill that was poetry and pain. A violence cursed with elegance.

He remembered in a bright link how he’d lain there in the white pebbly wash among the dead and dying Black Knights – sleeping, half-waking, shivering with fever from his wounds, the mist-paled Northern sun seeming to appear then flick away into moonless night. Eventually, he’d wakened and healed.

Those killers had followed him for literally hundreds of miles. They’d been sent by the tyrant Clinschor to take the Grail from him. This mistaken belief had become his life’s chief curse. The Grail, he’d said, was like tin can tied to a cat’s tail that drew all the dogs to him.

Absorbed in the memories, he touched his head where the flat of the sword had just hit. Winced. There was blood and a bump. When he stood up to face the Black Knight who was regarding him from horseback, reeled and staggered forward, groping to hold himself up on his horse that suddenly wasn’t there…falling…bracing himself to hit the ground that wasn’t there either…nothing under him but nothing…darkness…

LAYLA

By sundown they caught up with his family and retainers, camped with some hide-covered wagons and half-a-dozen horses.

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