Read Online Blood and Dreams: Lost Years II by Richard Monaco - Free Book Online Page B

back and forth.
    “I’ll put that filthy bastard into worse muck than that,” he vowed. I knew who he meant. But revenge is silly. Profit is the point. “I’ll hang him by his dick over starved rats … Let them chew his face off …” Spat and limped in a veering circle.
    “Well and good,” said I, “but what do you plan now?” You see, neither of us had put it together yet. The clue was under our noses, but much time was to pass before we realized we’d actually smelt it.
    “Eh?”
    “Go on looking for treasure? Go home?” Not that I meant that. Never go home. But I considered finding a master to serve and work my way up to command. I could outdo others. All I ever asked for was an opportunity.
    He leaned close to me. His roving stare wandered around the night sky and crossed my face.
    “ We ,” he hissed in pointed, restrained fury, “will find that sodomite son-of-a-bitch.” Hissed a pause. “ We will find the Grail treasure. We will serve Lord Clinschor and help him to victory.”
    “Victory.” I was thinking about having just been upside down and swelling to death. Such a fanatic. Well, why not follow along and wait on opportunities?
    “Yes,” repeated Gobble, veering around again. “Victory over all the scum of the earth. All the scum will be purged away!”
    He wasn’t talking to me anymore. Seemed to be addressing the sky. I wondered what point he was actually making. What did he believe? Who were the “scum?” He seemed excited often by strange, abstract furies. Of course, I hadn’t yet met his master, Clinschor the Great, yet …

 
    PARSIVAL
     
    Of course, everything I try to bury crawls back out of the earth again. Sooner or later.
    By dawn I was on the road home. Heading north. I assumed Arthur would forget me for awhile. Maybe for years, if I were fortunate.
    So I rode, half asleep, and let the long morning shadows shorten as the packed dirt road unraveled before me. I was hungry and had a sudden taste for cheese. Fresh milk cheese. I had a saddlebag full of hard, salty stuff for the trip. I kept looking for signs of a cattle farm. This was getting to be the right country for it.
    I was crossing into foothills where the forest opened up into long, smooth waves of tillable valley. Few peasants in the fields. Little work to do between now and harvest time, I supposed. I’d never actually paid much attention to such things. There were long, golden, pale passages of grain stroked with washes of tiny, violet flowers.
    Well, I was about ready to start from plain dirt. As soon as I reached home I’d shatter my sword and hang my armor up to rust. I swore it; I meant it. Life was too bitter and brief to go on with the old way.
    I knew there was a town and castle not far ahead when I spotted the tall poles with gibbeted skeletons swaying from the crossbeams. When I was (yes) seventeen I’d attempted conversation with one of them. Better than talking to most of the living, I came to see.
    I squinted up at a fairly fresh subject; a serf, a criminal, perhaps condemned for doing what they paid and polished knights to do. There was a crow perched on his head. The face was a shapeless lump. What a disgrace, and no one had bothered to cut the bastard down.
    I hissed at the bird and it beat softly and heavily up, trailing an elastic string of something red and raw.
    I winced and looked away. Understood the doctrine of the soul: if all were pressed meat and bone moved by strange inner heats and wind, then our universal fate would be unbearable. When I was young I felt the soul, the subtle self touching the subtle tones and wonders of the seemingly solid world around us. I wasn’t much different from those fools who hunted me to hunt the secret of the magic Grail. The search kept the mind off the dead meat side of life — for a time. A distraction. Most human activities were no more than distractions from thoughts of death.
    I came to a crossroad. Paused to ponder. I hadn’t been traveling this