The Final Quest (The Parsival Saga Book 3) by Richard Monaco Page B

bouncing behind them atop a cart loaded with raw and scorched potatoes. A pair of cows were snubbed close to the rear and lowed from time to time. He smelled their rich, sourish warm breath.
    He tried to sit up and the pain was white iron claws in his skull.
    “Aiii,” he sighed and held his head with one hand.
    “Good morrow,” a bluff, smooth voice was saying.
    He turned his eyes that way. The speaker was mounted, keeping pace with the toiling cart, the rising sun behind him so that he was a bulky, blinding silhouette.
    “Good morrow,” the voice repeated, “knight in the cart.” A chuckle. “Better such disgrace, I think, than be left behind, don’t you agree?”
    “Ahhh,” the hurt knight sighed.
    “I thought you were dead.”
    “Why … Why …” He was still trying to see the man clearly, but the sun was almost directly behind him and the beams stabbed into his sight. He twisted his face away.
    “The next village is in view,” the voice (he couldn’t know) of Finlot called back to Howtlande who, mounted on his mule, looked away from the knight on the potatoes. Howtlande rattled a crudely sketched map of the territory.
    “Excellent,” was his response. “Unless they have famous lords like this one among them I expect little trouble.” He smiled with oily satisfaction, sucking on a scrap of cold pork fat, tongue lashing at the greased edge of his moustache. He leaned out of the sun over the sides of the halting wagon and fixed the injured fellow with his dark, active eyes that coldly belied the netted, perpetual humor wrinkles surrounding them. “Well, are you with us, lord general?”
    Holding his head with both hands, the knight struggled up to a semi-sitting position on the food heap that shifted under him. His neck was stiff, back out of joint. The unrelenting pain clawed at his head. He sighed and leaned against the wicker side that sagged a little and creaked with each slow jounce of the wheels …
    “Ahhhh,” he murmured.
    “He ought to been dead,” was Finlot’s opinion. “I lain a five-pound hammer over his noggin. His helmet’s all flat.” He sort of sniggered. “He ain’t bled a lot, considering.”
    “Well, well,” Howtlande declared, “you were not treating with an ordinary knight. This is a great and legendary fellow.”
    “Oh?” Finlot wasn’t too sure. “All them what I hits on the noggin is fair ordinary.”
    “Which great one, do you say?” a new voice behind the pain and sunbrightness pushed in: the dour warrior with a red silk surcoat.
    Howtlande leaned back up into the brightness, holding his mule’s neck. Sucked thoughtfully at the ball of fat in his stubby hand. He looked suddenly sly.
    “The lord general,” he said.
    “Which lord general?” the dour, nameless knight persisted. “And of what?”
    “Do you know him not, sir which-and-who?” Howtlande narrowed his already squinty eyes. When the dour knight said no more he went on: “Well, if you will not say who you are yourself expect no floods of information.” Grinned, the fat shining on his lips which he ineffectively wiped with the leather sleeve end that hung raggedly below his steel wristlets.
    The knight in the cart was staring, holding his hand up against the sunglare.
    “You,” he said at the bulky figure featureless with the hot sky behind.
    “Yes, general?” Howtlande was feeling expansive.
    “You know who I am?”
    “Would that not take much knowing, sir?” was the reply. “Had you a wife it might tax even she to know you altogether. Or your mother, say, I —”
    “By Odin’s dangling fuck-maker,” a new voice interjected with disgust, and the knight didn’t bother to turn his eyes because there was pain enough in looking straight ahead. “He’s like a great wind that blows and rages to shake a straw!”
    “Well put, Skalwere,” Finlot called out. “If we could fight as fierce as he speaks long and to no point, why none could hold us for a heartbeat.” Guffaws here and