Date: Thu, 15 Jun 2006 16:43:17 +0200
From: Julian Obedient <julian.obedient@gmail.com>
Subject: A Knight in the Forest

1.

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.

2.

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.

3.

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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