“Hold,” he said at the top of the muddy crest. Stared through the thin, charred trees at shattered, blackened walls Headed over, the big peasant a few strides behind.
He instantly understood, even before he totally registered the pale, naked body sprawled in the shallow pool around the well that stood there like a tower over a moat. The legs and arms were outspread as if trying to grip all the grayish-white and dark water where the wall and the sky showed … face down, the chopped short arm making a final, sardonic point, Parsival imagined, might have pleased the once tormented knight.
The long-haired, very thin girl had a hollow, haunted face. Her eyes were wild, wide, absorbed, tracking past them again and again as Broaditch came up on the soggy, flowing muck and stopped. Her eyes moved as if following invisible butterflies …
“You won’t believe it,” he said to Parsival, “but I know this place. I passed it the first month I set out to follow you from home … long ago …”
“Ah,” murmured the knight. He’d just realized he felt the light now without seeing it, without having to see it. It was there, a warmth within … all around, in mysterious flow squeezing each beat into his heart, each pull of rich breath …
“Aye,” confirmed the powerful peasant, folding his solid arms across his thick chest, looking from the girl to the floating man. “I did. I keep passing over the same ground for all that I wander far.” Reflected. Watched the pale body slowly turning in the greenish-gray water. “Do you know these?” the surface churned pale in the rain.
“One of them,” Parsival said softly.
Ah Gawain, he thought. Ah …
The well continued to slowly flood. The downpour was muted and steady.
Broaditch remembered the place from that summer’s day, misted (like the mist that ghosted here around the dark stones) through the twenty-odd years between, when the dead lay around the burned and shattered walls, dried, swollen in a field of goldenrod ashimmer with bees, the twisted forms awash in glowing lushness …
“I was looking for you,” he repeated. “Your mother had just died.”
The girl’s gaze kept following nothing, over and over and back again … shifting … circling …
Broaditch kept following the lost image that seemed to drift over the wet, dark gray landscape. Recalled riding in from the road (that had been absorbed back into the markless earth), his mule’s withers deep in the golden flood, the bees’ drone a soothing murmur almost like riverflow … saw himself glancing back to where Alienor and Waleis (skinny, awkward, gripy, long dead, dreaming Waleis) waited on the now nonexistent road that led to vanished days and adventures … stood there, remembered, and hardly knew he wept or why.
The hollow-faced girl followed whatever it was across the tin-flat sky, then down the arc and across the dark horizon. The rain pulsed steadily through her tangled hair.
“Well,” said Parsival, “you found me.”
“I no longer was looking, my lord.”
Parsival waded knee-deep. His reflection was dim and cloudy. The water was warmish. He reached for Gawain … then checked himself. The rain whooshed quietly all around.
“No,” he whispered, “you’ve drunk deep at last, old friend. I’ll not trouble you now.” Who did you visit in an empty house? “Farewell.” There was nothing to it. He felt the spot of warmth in him that would never cool. You came and went and only fading, cloudy pictures stayed. “The tale is told at last,” he said, motionless in the dim water as the day dimmed imperceptibly into mistgrays. “At last.” As the girl furiously didn’t watch him; and Broaditch wrapped himself in his own mantle of memory.
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Table of Contents
PROLOGUE
I
II
III
IV
V
VI
VII
VIII
IX
X
XI
XII
XIV
XV
XVI
XVII
XVIII
XIX
XX
XXI
XXII
XXIII
XXIV
XXV
XXVI
XXVII
XXVIII
XXIX
XXX
XXXII
XXXIII
XXXIV
XXXV
XXXVI
XXXVII
XXXVIII
XXXIX
XL
XLI
XLII
XLIII
EPILOGUE