The king's forest was shrouded in a humid morning mist. The knight's dapple gray steed trod wearily along a path cut out amidst a congestion of venerable trees. Their heavy and moist verdant limbs sagged and blocked what little light there was spreading through the bleak heavens.
The brown beaten earth, muddy from the morning's vapors wrought upon his spirit. Heart-heavy from the battles he had fought and because of the bodies pierced with lances and arrows he had watched bloodying the Arabian sand he had fled, and with a countenance scarred by pain, the knight made his way to his father's decaying castle where the old man lay in his never-ending paralysis, this day now seven years.
He was hungry and he was thirsty, and from a tree hung with ripened apples, he tore off one. He bit into it and the tang and snap of its sour-sweet nectar made him shudder. The memory of something he would rather have been forgotten passed through him like a current of lightening through a disturbed sky. The loss of a smile^Åthe absence of a caress^Å. Then everything was dark again and he could not remember what it was that he had^Åwas it thought or felt -- or only wished for?
He bit again into the apple. For just such an act Persephone was locked in hell with a man she feign would not have had as her husband. But the knight could not imagine such a fate would be his. For just such an act were our first parents cast out from paradise to spend the rest of time lost in the serpent's spell.
Slowly his horse took the hill outside the crumbling castle wall, crossed over the lowered drawbridge spanning a dry moat, avoiding the rotten planks, entered beneath the old portcullis, never now lowered, and made his way through the dusty and deserted alleys surrounding the principle structure, a building of ill-pointed stones, until, entering the stable yard he saw the seneschal and the groom sitting at a plank drinking ale from pewter flagons and eating mutton flesh.
It was a dreary night to return, the burly seneschal remarked by way of greeting, looking up at the knight without standing.
Better business might have brought you back. But it didn't. This is what we've got. You've come too late.
Too late, the knight repeated, understanding.
The burial was frugal. Spades turned the rocky earth in the graveyard, and no processional accompanied the casket, which was lowered into the hole. The knight and the seneschal cast clumps of thumping earth upon it and then it was covered over and trod upon. A rough stone slab marked the place.
The lands are barren; the rents, unpaid; the stables, empty. There is nothing here for you. I shall not remain, the seneschal said adjusting the crupper on his burdened horse.
Barren, not only the land; barren and gloomy within the great hall; no fire roaring in the hearth at the far wall -- where fire had always been. Cold, barren, dark, and dreary.
Paralysis for the man; a curse for his demesne. Paralysis lifted by death, the domain is yet damned. And now it is yours. Heed my counsel if you are wise and get you as far from here as land and water may allow, for all that will grow here are incapacity and debt.
Leaving the castle standing like a blighted oak, as he had come so the knight left and dined in the forest on nuts and berries and drank from the bubbling springs. In the evening he roasted a swallow his arrow had pierced in flight and slept blanketed in the threadbare caparison that covered his horse.
A checkered shade fell across his slumbering form at sunrise. A ghastly old man leaning on a stick hobbled on the path alongside which the knight camped. He sang:
Avoid the forest of no-bird-singing, Says an old man with matted hair. Young man with trials beginning, There is no way to grace but through despair. In times like these beware.
What means this rhyme old man? the knight said.
The meaning of a rhyme will penetrate with time. I must be gone. Doubt not that you saw me.
Indeed the air was empty. The knight shook himself as if returning from a trance.
He thrashed on through the forest, now no path to guide his horse along, into a depth he did not know. The blare of old battles blasted his ears with echoes from a past that no longer was. Loss was here by its presence.
At midnight under a golden copper moon he reached the hut he had not known he had been seeking.
You come upon your hour, a savage, dark-haired woman wrapped in a jade green mantle said in greeting.
He looked dazed as he dismounted.
No cause for confusion, she said. Tired and hungry you come without victory from a useless quest where nothing has been gained. You are sick with the disease of men. You will eat and you will sleep and the world will renew itself. Don't ask me when.
As you say, the knight muttered, I am sick with the disease of men. The ground became unsteady beneath his feet and he collapsed even before he might enter through the door to take a seat at the table prepared for him or lie in the bed turned down for him.
Wet and muddy in the morning, battered by rain drops and covered with earth he staggered to his feet.
Like Adam rising from the clay, the woman said laughing, handing him a cup.
Drink, she said.
Eagerly he quaffed and could not tell if the brew were sweet or bitter, quenched his thirst or endowed him with a thirst which never might be quenched.
But not restorative, the draught brought him down, shaking and sweating. Chill scraped his bones.
With strength drawn from the barks of trees and herbs buried deep in the forest, she led him to her bed. He saw her as a blazing blurry figure shrouded in a fog sending off the icy colors of diamonds struck by the rays of a winter moon.
When he was drained of poisonous infections, she mounted him and gazed upon him till he rose and straight inserted him inside her and pulled from him what little life was left to fertilize her barren womb with laughing hope.
He wandered through her cavernous depths afraid and aggrieved with a loneliness that picked at the bones of his soul.
Five years in the form of a broken man he labored as her slave, snared rabbits and gathered firewood, blank-eyed and obedient, but from their union nothing grew.
I have used you now these five years and you have given me nothing. I have held your body and directed your thought. I have made you rise at my will and decline as I willed it also. I have tamed your flesh and enslaved your spirit. You have performed your task like a prisoner, never for love, never has love grown in you, and for that reason I am barren, and for that reason I cast you out with this bitter curse: you will wander and often you will seek love from those who will cast you out, shame, use, and humiliate you, but never give you the love you will crave and pitifully demand and never realize.
As she had in the beginning, now at the end she offered him a cup from which he drank, and haze which had settled with his first drinking from the cup now lifted, and he looked at the woman and did not know her. Mounting his horse as if it were the morning of the night before, not five years later, the knight set out to find a world where everything had not been lost.
In the distance, a settlement appeared carved out in the center of the forest: a set of buildings girdled by cultivated land, all encircled by a low stone wall, say, half a man's height. On the pathway to the settlement, under an entrance formed by branches pruned to make an archway, a young man with the intense eyes of one who has seen what other men do not know, kept the gate.
Good day to you, the knight in greeting spoke.
And to you, sir, may the day be fair and fairer yet the ones which follow.
The knight bowed gently in response to so sweet a blessing so courteously wished from one so fair and pleasing, and courteously returned it.
What place is this? the knight inquired. Among what men am I come?
It was the monastery, formerly, of a Roman brotherhood, but the order was dispersed when land taken by Rome was restored to the crown. This little patch is so out of the way, as you must know, and of such insignificance that it lay unused and ready for the taking by any who might squat here.
We are a brotherhood of once lost souls. Slowly we have gathered here, and grown in numbers. Slowly by our work, by our cooperation, and by the mixing of our spirits in the discovery of ourselves and of each other, we have cast our spell upon the place. Together we have worked a magic on it which in return it works upon us. By surrender and discipline we have achieved a stillness of the spirit and a corporeal joyfulness which we had not, before we gathered here, imagined to be possible.
How do you sustain yourselves?
Mornings we work. We grow vegetables and herbs and flowers in the gardens, fruit in our orchards, and wheat in the surrounding fields. In pastures, we graze our cows and goats and sheep. We make furniture in the workshops, and we keep the buildings in repair and continually add to them decorations, for beauty is a co-ideal with labor for us. Beauty and labor are the two elements which combined are at the root of our devotion, and all our discipline is in the service of devotion.
Devotion, to what? the knight asked gently, or to whom?
To each other, answered the youth, and to our brotherhood.
The knight was silent, and the lad continued, You look a well-knit, although a humbled, soul. Enter and observe us, join with us as you will and perhaps you will decide to become one of us and stay among us and partake in our labors, our services, and our pleasures.
The knight, surprised, thanked the fair-spoken youth and was guided by him to a stable where he left his horse to a gentle groom who lightened it of its load and led it to a stall and water and hay.
The knight he took to a small cell, gave him a hooded robe of oatmeal color woven cotton that covered him from head to foot, bade him exchange it for his travel-worn garments, wearing it only over his naked form, and left him by himself.
A tallow candle lighted the cell, and above a small brazier, leaves and flower petals dried and shriveled, and as they did the cell was filled with a mind-absorbing smoke.
Unable to keep his heavy eyelids open the knight began to slip into a miasmic lethargy and flames undulated behind a wall of broken stones and the forest path fled beneath his feet as the night sky filled with a honeyed golden moon and the onerous drone of monks chanting in a brown chapel swam in his mind like clouds across a primaveral azure.
He caught himself falling and gasped when he felt a man's firm and gentle grasp upon his shoulder.
As if not moving under his own will but guided from without, as if a pulse in the hand that was fixed on his shoulder had become his motor, the knight rose and was led through a stone studded path carved through an orchard to what had been the monastery's chapel.
Dark within but speckled by the colored sunlight patterns cast upon the floor through the stained glass windows of yellow, ruby rose, and cobalt blue, the knight felt a heart's ease previously unknown and sunk to his knees before a man he knew somehow was master there and lord.
In service bound you are becoming one of us. Open now before your lord Nothing once Now a slave And full of your lord's desire
This the leader of the pagan congregation chanted also on his knees facing the knight and cradling in his large hands the yielding head.
We long for you to touch us master Press our nipples to your chest Lips upon our lips You draw our breath >From out our bodies And fill these emptied vessels up with yours To hold us hard within your hand And take command of everything we do and think Our master is our food and drink
This was the response in full throated chorus the assembled members of this brotherhood in unison chanted.
A sweet and viscose luminosity covered the thoughts of the knight's mind. He shuddered and fell upon his face and was left to lie there as the others, their choral chanting done, filed into the daylight from within this transcendental gloom.
Naked later in the evening the knight rose up from his supine position on the stones and went into the night to seek his brothers, for he longed to serve.
Look he comes now with nothing in his eyes, the others remarked as he approached, and when he was near they welcomed him saying, What would you have?
I would learn to serve and to dwell among you and surrender to you.
As we all do, so you shall do and be one of us.
As you all do, so shall I do and be one of you.
They slept in pairs in one great hall, and he was partnered with the youth whom first he saw upon the path before the gate.
Naked in the summer's night, lying atop the bed, not yet asleep, his mate beside him took him in his arms and whispered in his ear before kissing him upon the lips and joining spirits at the mouth, This is how it is with us and so it shall be, too, with you. Yield yourself and be among us as a brother.
The knight shuddered as a current pulsing through him taught him of a power not his own, which he had never known, to which he now, surrendering, capitulated. Stiffening in his bedmate's arms he felt his soul embraced and spent his seed in fellowship before the night was out.
The morning glow upon his face brought gladness to the eyes of others and before the heat of noon, with others, nearly naked in the garden he pulled up weeds and tended beds with careful watering and caring nurture.
The noon hour come, the fellowship assembled in the cool refectory and sat together and moderately quaffed of mead, and cut from dark brown loaves and aged cheese and shared in vegetables red and green, almonds and dates, lemons, figs, cashews, and prunes.
And many months the knight among them lived like this and spent himself in gladness with them.
Always with one, though, whose gaze had penetrated his, he did not join.
There was a lake, cool and gently flowing to a low stepping falls which filled a pool, scarce higher than a man might stand, and afternoons on summer's days they stretched along its margins and sported in its waters and dallied with each other in twos or larger groups.
Emerging from the water, one among them, the one he had not known, but who was lodged within his soul, saw the knight recumbent by the verdant edge. Uncommonly well-knit was he and his grace smote his seer's eyes with lustful wanting more than for the others of the men.
Naked and bronzed with beads of water glistening on his sun-polished skin he approached the knight and making slight obeisance, began in this way to speak.
Knighthood's flowers do not grow more fairly than I see yours to have bloomed. I hope I may be the sun that has prompted your blossom.
Blushing slightly, now risen to his feet, and with a bow returned, the knight responded, Fair knight, whom I have often humbly looked upon, it honors me to gather praise from one who might claim it all as his own.
The other took the knight's face in his palms and gently on the lips planted so sweet a kiss that the knight in rapture caught himself or would have fallen in a swoon and returned the kiss with a sweetness no less enchanting, and hard they were together lost in each one's strange divinity.
Evening after dining and chanting, they met alone in a small room in a wood beside the garden. It had been a chapel, and the knight's new companion said, I would have you as my own to cherish, my steady bedmate and my slave. Feel how my spirit works within your heart, how my will usurps your mind, how your senses have been opened to my influence, how your pulse quickens at my touch, and how my gaze commands your flesh. Now everything you are is mine.
The knight shone upon his master knowing it was true. His heart was light, his senses eager. Transfixed by priapian splendor, he yielded to the one authority his mind beheld in a dazzle of submission.
But the others when they saw the exclusivity of this bond were vexed.
It is in contradiction to the rules of our order, they said with indignation, and sets one higher than the other, upsetting the decorum of devotion.
They went under cover of night alone in the darkness of the forest without a guide but their own instincts.
The morning light showed a bowed stone bridge arching over a swiftly rushing stream. The lane, once the bridge was crossed, opened into the town square, and in the dawn the journeymen were setting up the stalls, and market women and farmers were converging on the square carrying the yield of the earth and driving the culled of their flocks and herds.
The knight upon his horse, his master, upon his, rode past the market, for the life these people led would not be theirs. They had gone too deeply into each other's souls in a forbidden way, removing themselves from mankind's diurnality with the love they had chosen.
Passed then this village and back through the forest, they made their way once more to the crumbling castle which had once commanded wealth and pageantry before the old knight, the knight's father, fell into paralysis.
Stable and hall were empty. The groom and seneschal had disappeared.
Here, said the knight, is what I have to give.
They scoured the forest around and brought much wood back for a fire, and in the large hearth at the end wall of the great hall, they kindled a great blaze.
Here is a place, his master said, extending his hand and indicating the landscape, where we can garden, grow, and graze, and explore the mysteries we have begun.
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