Free Lost Years: The Quest for Avalon by Richard Monaco

only been an effect of light. The sun was hot now.
    Bees were stirring among the lean, blue, thistly looking wild flowers.
    “This feels familiar,” he murmured. He was thinking it had to be a place from his childhood. He looked around, trying to recover an image. Nothing came to him.
    What am I looking for? he thought, A ghost of which mistake? Because they had all been errors except among the errors, false starts and hopeless endings, as, among thorns, exquisite flowers have blossomed, so there had been other things, moments rich in life and joy… other things…
    He remembered. There had been a tent. There could have been no trace of the tent, even a week later much less decades. But he remembered now, how he’d wandered into a lady’s tent (wearing a fool’s ratty hides that his mother had covered him with in the forlorn hope of keeping the world from wanting him) and how he’d kissed and fumbled in his almost supernatural teenage ignorance… kissed and fumbled her into total ruin in the end, by accident.
    Ah, but what is pain? he asked himself. Only the mind which holds on to shadows…
    He hadn’t thought of that woman or that business in years and years and now, suddenly, the memory was a vivid stun and he saw her, her lovely, pale breasts naked on the sleeping silks and furs where she lay waking into fear, startled by the strange beautiful young boy crouched over her.
    “What was it?” he murmured. “What was the name?”
    Jeschute, he remembered. That was it. It all came back to him: her husband, the mad duke black bearded, vicious, unforgiving, after tormenting his wife, finally falling to Parsival’s lance; and later, to his own insensate, self-consuming fury: actually chained to his horse because his back was broken, charging Parsival on a narrow trail, missing and wedging himself between two trees, raging, demented, helpless and doomed as the (then) young knight rode away… What was it, fifteen years ago? He never found out what had actually happened to her back in those torn, firefilled, bloodsplattered, tormented days. Days when he’d lost every trace (or so he believed) of his youth. He frowned now, troubled, thinking about it. He was drawn by a strange retrograde current that was sucking him back into past shadows… Why? Why now after all that time?
    What happened to her? he wondered. How many causes had he set in motion to effects he knew nothing about. It would be good to find out… Yet it was absurd, he knew, though it followed from everything else, because absurdity was the soil in which his garden grew.
    Perhaps I’m going to find out what became of everything I touched and so I’ll owe nothing to God or to man when I’m done – I’ll have forgiven myself, been purged of consequences…He recognized that this was already an obsession. He was caught because it wasn’t just walking over the same paths (if indeed they were) of his youth, it was living it again.
    “This time,” he said, “If a damned door opens I won’t let it shut. I’ll jam my head in and let it be crushed.” He kicked the earth. He stared at the grass.
    It was here, he thought. I know it now… There, in the misty morning of the last day of his childhood.
    There…
    If that woman be alive then I must right the wrong I did her, he thought, calmly, like a man about to undertake an all consuming feat.
    There’s my repentance. There’s my expiation…
    He understood it was a vow he was making. And like anyone making a vow, he felt instantly better, as if something were already accomplished. He found it important to speak aloud now: “I’ll find her, and save her.” As if he believed it. As if she might need saving. It didn’t matter. It was his impulse and could guide his life through what might otherwise be a pathless trek. Because if he meant to drop his past purposes he certainly needed new ones.

 
    LEGO
     
    At the same time, a mile or two away, Lego was riding and brooding. He followed the river and