Read Online Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon by Richard Monaco - Free Book Online

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.”
    “What does the child look like?”
    “Like any other.”
    “Not striped dark and light? Or a sullen mixture?”
    “Like any other.”
    “There’s some lesson there.” He squeezed his good eye shut and open. “Tell her, I charge you …”
    “Yes, Gawain?”
    The 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 redressed 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