Parsival: Or, a Knight's Tale, page 29
“Are you so old and weak now, brother?”
“I don’t know what I am.” Sighed and stared at the stone across from him. “I don’t know what I am . . . I wish I could go back to the beginning . . . I wish I could be a boy in the castle woods, in long summer evenings. . . . Ah, God . . . I wish I could go back to the beginning . . . ”
“But you can’t,” she said quietly, “so you’ll try again. Don’t indulge yourself. It always disgusted me when you indulged yourself like this.”
“What do you know of it?” he frowned.
“Heed me,” she said, tossing the core to the floor for the dogs, “you will try again. You can’t live otherwise. I know you well, brother.”
He sat, silent, his back to her now, facing the rain and fog below.
“God help me if that be true,” he finally said.
CVII
Parsival sat uncomfortably in the tilted chair in the dense shade of a yew tree. The day was hot and close. Flies buzzed around a partly eaten haunch of beef. He flicked his hand languidly at them when they circled his head. At the far end of the banquet table Layla was in intense conversation with a graying, darkbearded knight in neat, rich garments. Parsival thought he had a sly eye. Didn’t like him much. But didn’t care much either.
His stomach was sour, gas pockets stirred vaguely in his bowels and he swore he could feel the twists in there. The heavy woman on his right fingered the wen beside her nose and then wiped her greasestained lips with the back of her hand. She was working, he could see, on starting another conversation with him. He imagined no salvation from the old man on his left: frail, whitehaired, crisply wrinkled, glazey-eyed, with the perceptive faculties of a weathered stone.
They were, at least some supposed them to be, relations of Layla’s. That was all he knew. They were in company with the handsome mature knight who apparently was not a relative — at least too close a one. Watching them use their eyes on one another Parsival tried to decide which was the snake and which the bird — and ultimately gave up. He stifled a yawn and considered the circling flies, the little greengold flecks and flashes over the changing meat. He gently pressed his stomach. There were some years of softness there now. He’d heard someone remark that you could often tell a man’s age like a tree’s age by the rings on him.
“To this day,” the woman grimly pronounced, “fear of the plague keeps even bandits and trolls off the roads.” She sucked her forefinger clean. “Arthur himself, they say, has shut himself in and begged preserving spells of his wicked sister. Ah, but we were turned away from many a castle gate on the long way here. My sweet father spurned like . . . like,” she hunted for an appropriate word to express the infamy of it; meanwhile she sucked another finger. “ . . . like a stray dog from a table. . . . Ah, if my husband were living — ” Crossed herself, denting her shapeless bosom and burping moistly. “ — God preserve his gentle soul. If he lived still they’d have had to answer for such insults. He’d have ridden back the whole way to each gate to seek satisfaction. But then, there are no such men today . . . ” Another finger went in up to the second joint.
His bleak reveries and the tale were interrupted by a stone striking the halfdevoured centerpiece with a dull thuck, scattering the flies in a glittering frenzy. Then came a piercing childscream.
A bony little redfaced girl about six had pressed her hands to her head as if in a paroxysm of agony, breath sucked so deep that the anticipated sound was suspended and then torn from her as if, he thought, the darkest damned in hell had found an outlet through her larynx. In the background, looking uncomfortable, was a boy about four, dustcovered, windblown, wiry black hair streaked with trails of bright, fine blond. Behind them both a stout, depressed-looking peasant matron hovered anxiously. Layla was up out of her seat like, he thought, a drawn blade.
“Damn you,” she was crying out, “what have you done now?”
Parsival turned away to look for the flies.
“Lohengrin,” cried the girl, “he won’t give it to me!” And then wailed again her disproportionate howl.
Parsival looked back.
“You wicked boy,” Layla said, “what have you done?”
“He won’t give it,” the girl reaffirmed.
Now Parsival was watching a serving girl flirt with a young man over by the cooking fire. From her short, shapeless sack of a dress, beautiful, lean, barefooted legs flashed the sun as the couple mock-wrestled, hands locked, pushing and laughing. His narrowed eyes went up and down her legs, the arched insteps, sleek calves, faint twinkling of living thigh muscle . . . His hunger toyed with her and he barely noticed the yowling and sharp words on his left.
“You just flatten your ass on that bench!” a voice, he correctly identified, of penetrating scorn was saying, he realized, to him. “And stare at wenches.”
He looked up, irritated and faintly embarrassed. The little girl’s mother (a fullbodied lady just reaching the far side of her prime) was on one knee comforting her child; his son’s bare back was just winking out of sight around a loop in the castle wall; Layla was standing, hands on hips, frowning down at him.
He mumbled something about her talking nonsense.
“He’ll grow into a woodsbeast,” she averred, “or simple as his father.”
“I love the boy,” he replied, not quite relevantly, he knew, and wondered why he had to say that. He felt half-hearted about it though he certainly did love him . . .
“You can say anything with ease,” she told him. Then she headed down the long table, smiling at the knight who was petting and patting a large, bristling dog who’d just planted oversized paws in his lap.
“Ah, good Boarfang,” he was saying, “good my lad . . . This is a true hunter,” he called up to Parsival and the others. “The apple of my eye. . . . Wait until you see him in the field.” He nuzzled the dark neck, joining his own beard to the dark fur and very nearly provoking an unpleasant comparison from his host. His eyes laughed up at Layla as she seated herself again.
The roundish mother released the child who promptly went off in the direction taken by Lohengrin.
“He better let me have it,” was her last word. The lady shook her head, smiled at Parsival, and came to the table.
“Children,” she said.
The old, wizened fellow stirred himself.
“Is there a pasty course to come?” he wanted to know.
“True courtesy,” the relative with the outsized wen pronounced, “is taught among the gentlest nobles from the cradle. Respect of women being the first law of refinement.” Now her thumb went into the mouth for a solid sucking. Then she spoke on: “But if you speak of good pasty, well, at the table of Prince Talric of Elausus, in Cornwall, let me tell you all, that . . . ”
Parsival was elsewhere. The old man was scratching himself under his tunic, lips moving soundlessly; Layla was up strolling with the dog’s dark master; the peasant lass and lad were on the grass eating leftovers with the cooks; the flies were settling down in restless clumps on the meat while a few flicked up and down around a fish head that gave back (Parsival felt) the same stare glazed and melancholy as his own; a new dog was bellyinching toward the table; the sunlight imperceptibly shifted its slant; a pocket of gas burbled deep within him. . . . He vaguely noticed that the plumpish mother was watching him very closely . . .
CVIII
The night was humid, warm, full moon flashing in and out of silver-hemmed clouds. The breeze was fragrant. Taper light trembled in a few castle windows. Down by the pond frogs and insects united in an astoundingly loud chorus.
The wine he’d taken in was a steady pressure as he teetered down the stone steps and stopped and stood on the sloping field of grass. Looking up he noticed two moons sliding out from a cloudbank. He shut one eye and chortled to himself. Decided human senses were silly. Not to be trusted.
He strolled out along the hillside, peered down at where the peasant huts clumped together. No lights at all there. He started down in that direction, placing his feet with care and thinking about those long, lean legs from the afternoon.
The silver light blinked out.
He stopped, fumbled and opened his codpiece. Held himself with both hands and squirted out a high, stinging arc that drummed softly on lush ground. Hummed a snatch of tune. Then, for some reason, remembered something: the Red Knight urinating in pain . . . the memory of those days came rushing back and for a moment, though he didn’t know why, he felt like weeping. . . . Then giggled:
“Why, he had the pox,” he said, “and I wondered what caused his pain . . . I was simple, it’s true . . . ”
Then he remembered killing the Red Knight on the field at Camelot. Frowned.
“That was a stupid business,” he muttered as if angry at something. “Stupid . . . ”
Went on a few steps. Remembered the bright blood spraying down the spearshaft that he’d held locked to the knight’s throat.
“Stupid . . . knighthood . . . dunghood . . . ” Brightened and chuckled, pleased.
“Fuckhood,” he said, grinning, weaving down the slope, the air cool through his opened pants.
He remembered the girl in the barn with Gawain and the other man, Sir-what’s-his-name? Erec . . . His head looking gravely from the pole. . . . Her eyes like sea colors, a helpless lost look in them, untouchable, a strange innocent boy there too, but nothing which particularly included him. That bothered him and his mood went down again as the moon popped out. Something there in her he could never reach or touch. Like the fish in the boyhood stream he used to try to catch with his hands and even threw stones at because they were so vibrant and mysterious and then finally spearing one it became just a dead fish . . .
“It’s all like that,” he announced to the night. “No way to get a grip on anything. . . . Trust me, it’s true. . . . Just like grails or what you will . . . easier to catch fish or fucking than grails though . . . ” He laughed at that. “ . . . All fucking grails though . . . all of it . . . ”
“Indeed?” remarked a woman’s soft voice at his shoulder. He turned, slightly sobered, to see the roundish woman. She was wrapped in a mantle. Feet bare. Surprisingly small and pretty, he noticed. Well, she wasn’t really fat.
“Indeed, my great ass,” he told her, for some reason.
“Is it, my lord?”
He paid no attention.
“You’re Lila,” he said, as if it were a momentous disclosure.
She smiled and lightly touched his forearm, traced the chiseled muscle lines, the fine hairs.
“You’ve had much drink,” she murmured.
The peasant legs seemed too far away all at once. He nodded agreement with this idea.
“So you don’t deny it,” she remarked.
“Lila,” he said.
“Yes?”
She was near but as he reached for her she stepped back.
“Pray,” she said, “spare me a minute’s courtship.”
“Courtship?”
“Am I a wench in a stew?”
“What?”
“I’m a woman,” she said.
He swayed and took thought.
“Why don’t we fuck, then?”
She laughed.
“When I was a girl,” she told him, “knights spoke in wondrous poetry when they courted.”
He was dimly interested.
“They did?”
The moon went in and quickly out again. She turned her face up to it.
“In tales,” she whispered.
He was debating whether or what to do. He had a fuzzy suspicion there was going to be a price to pay if he stayed here. He wasn’t sure what.
“Age,” she was saying, “is a narrower cage for a woman.”
“Don’t you want to fuck?” he asked, baffled.
She took a few steps away from him and looked down at the looming, deep, elusive shadows of the old trees, the gleaming fields . . .
“Ah,” she said, pointing downslope, “lovers come out in the night like white moths.”
He couldn’t entirely follow this notion.
“Is that poetry?” he wondered.
He suddenly was annoyed at his numbed head. Wished he were much drunker or totally sober.
“Of a sort,” she said, pointing. “Look there where some clods are doubtless off to country sport.” She was whimsical. “Even in the sty tonight,” she sang, “the pigs feel the passion of the moon.”
“What pigs?” he asked, squinting down the knoll where she pointed and then she leaned in against him, soft, warm, a gush of womanly perfume. Her robe parted and he felt the moist heat of her. Something is moving down there, he thought.
“My husband says I’m a pig too,” she whispered at his ear. “Says I’m a common pig.”
CIX
He had turned her on her knees, facing away from him on the grass. The moon was down now and her soft, bubbleround body was a dim outline. It was easy to smell where she was, he thought, grinning within the numb reaches of his wine-stung mind. A sweet and reeking mix of him and her: sweat, semen in spicy sauce. She wriggled and tilted her rump higher, impatient. He rested his hands on those wide, white buttocks. She sighed and pressed herself backward, snorting her breath so that he suddenly understood her husband’s nickname because it was very close to oinking and he smiled and gripping himself with a sort of satisfied indifference lifted forward to join with her, balancing on knees and toes: soft, lubricious, hot, slick and easy contact and he pressed more oinks out of her past even noticing now, feeling himself all run into his groin, concentrated there in a dense burning, punching himself volitionlessly at her, into her, anonymous organs drawn by their innermost suctions and then he burst, locked himself to it, bursting as with a shuddering sob of a sigh the bubble of ecstasy swelled and then popped far too soon and there was a sinking in his stomach and cold sweat on his bare flesh as he looked around at the dim shapes and he realized that was what she’d seen and with his fear he felt absurdity as she kept squishing herself backwards in search of what was already a memory and he settled back on his heels aware that the figures were all around them and that in his present condition there wasn’t much to do but sit on his heels and wait — and then a mealy voice said:
“Who’s got hot water?”
And Parsival thought: so they’re not all deaf and dumb.
“Hot water?” a shrill voice asked and mealy replied:
“What you throws on two dogs, lout.”
General laughter.
Parsival just waited and listened absently to his pounding heart. The woman understood now and crouched silently on her knees, covering herself with her hands — like a picture of Eve, he thought.
Then a crunching, steelshod kick took him in the ribs and pitched him on his side where he could while away some time struggling for breath.
“Rutting bastard,” the shrill voice declared.
Another voice, reedy, authoritative, demanded:
“Is your king home tonight?”
“You have poor courtesy,” mocked still another; one that even in his pain seemed familiar to Parsival. “There is royalty at your feet. With his cod a-dangle as ever. He was never altogether the fool he was taken for.”
Then a sharp, then dulling pain behind his ear, bright light, dark . . . blank . . .
CX
It couldn’t have been too long: the dawn was cloudy, landscape graylit, brightening gradually. His eyelids quivered, stuck, then popped open. He was still naked; his hands were bound behind his back. Men sat and stood on the slope. He twisted to look around: the woman wasn’t in sight. A few of his men-at-arms were looking down from the battlements at this body of men before the gates. All they have to do, he realized, is keep the bars up and this crew will never enter. Pity I’m out here.
The blunt morning dissolved the shadowy terrors and revealed lumpy and lank rogues in mismatched gear where he’d expected silent, black demons. Only two were fully caparisoned, obvious leaders, and stood apart. One wore his visor down; the other, standing over Parsival, had a long, narrow, restless face, sandyred hair and eyes that didn’t seem to actually pause on anything; and, though Parsival didn’t know it, was called John of Bligh.
“Where is it?” he asked in what amounted to a whispery shriek.
Parsival forced himself to sit up and promptly vomited. He recognized winereek mixed with the sour bile. Several of the gentlemen were tickled into considerable delight. Now that he was up he wished he were down again. His head was very bad. The repeated demands by the bony man didn’t help.
“Where are you keeping it?”
“Be damned,” Parsival muttered. He was staring at a seated varlet whose lumps of flesh swelled through his ropebound snatches of mail like, he thought, a bound roast beef.
The large knight in the background stepped forward and squatted facing him.
“Best give it up,” he said in his muffled but familiar voice.
“I know you,” Parsival said.
“There’s no help for you in that,” the voice said.
“Why waste breath?” inquired John of Bligh, pointing his blade at the prisoner’s crotch. “For our sacred cause we must have it. . . . Speak or you’ll do without what you abuse anyway!”
“Just take off one and clept him the Great Wizard,” the fat man with the mealy voice called out.
“He means it,” said the still visored knight.
“Gawain,” Parsival said.
The visor blankly regarded him, eyeslits dark.
“Gawain had two arms,” it said, “and a whole head entire. This is something less than Gawain.”
John pressed the point just over the root of Parsival’s mischief. Bright blood welled there.
Parsival stared at Gawain’s left hand: the right reached over and stripped off the gauntlet revealing wooden fingers.
“What do you want with me, Gawain?”
“Nothing with you,” whispershrieked John. “We want the Holy Grail.”
Parsival shut his eyes briefly.
“You think it’s in my pocket?” he wanted to know.
