Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon Read Free Page A

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