by Peter David
“Arthur,” Ron began imploringly.
But Arthur put up a hand, and simply said, “Ron…would you give us a minute, please.”
Cordoba hesitated, but then said, “Of course, sir.” He gestured to the Federal agents, and they backed out of the room, closing the door behind them.
Gwen wasn’t sure what she was expecting…some kind words from Arthur to Brady, perhaps. Some comments of encouragement.
Instead, Arthur moved as if galvanized into action. “Percival, the Grail. Now.”
Without question, Percival handed it to him, but there was clearly concern on his face. Gwen knew exactly what was going through his mind: He was wondering if Arthur was planning to hand the Grail over to Brady. Percival was far too dedicated a knight to offer protest if that was Arthur’s decision, but it was obvious to Gwen that such a move on Arthur’s part would be crushing to Percival’s spirit. He had vested far too much of himself into the Grail. If it left his possession once more after he had finally reacquired it, Gwen didn’t doubt that—despite his immortality—he might well fade away and die.
Arthur apparently knew what Percival was thinking as well. “Trust me, Percival,” he said with a brief smile.
“As ever, Highness.”
Arthur crossed quickly to the table that Brady had rolled in. He took the bottle of wine, headed over to the sink, and upended it, draining the contents. Then, setting the bottle down, he picked up the decanter of water with his left hand and held it over the goblet. “I have absolutely no idea if this is going to work,” he said. “But I figure a slight chance is better than no chance at all.” Slowly he poured the water into the Holy Grail, filling it nearly to the brim. Then he looked at Gwen and tilted his head in the direction of the wine bottle.
She understood and started to move toward it, but Brady was faster. He picked up the Grail and, ever so carefully, reverently, he expertly transferred the contents from the Grail into the wine bottle. For good measure, Arthur repeated the procedure twice more, and Brady twice more poured it over until the wine bottle was nearly full. Then Arthur put the water decanter down, picked up the cork to the wine bottle, and handed it over to Brady. Brady shoved the cork back into the bottle as best he could.
“I wish I could do more for you, Brady…give you more…”
“You’ve given me hope, Mr. President. That’s all I can ask.”
“All right, then. Guard that with your life. And you have to swear to me that you will not drink from it yourself. At least not while you’re in good health.”
“I swear, sir.”
“Because we’re dealing with strange powers. Powers that are far beyond our understanding. They are not to be meddled with lightly.”
“Yes, sir. I won’t drink from it, I swear. I would never in any event. Because if drinking a portion of this somehow cures my Linda…I’ll want to make sure to keep some of it around in case there’s some sort of relapse.”
“I believe you, Brady.” He gripped him firmly by the shoulder. “Don’t be too much in a hurry to leave. Don’t act as if you have some sort of contraband in the wine bottle. Remember, you are doing nothing dishonest. Godspeed to you, then.”
Then he turned and handed the Grail back to Percival. Gwen noticed that Percival made a little, relieved sigh as he took it from his king and tucked it back into his coat. Arthur straightened his jacket and said, “Percival…Gwen…I believe it’s time to go.”
“What about Merlin?” asked Gwen.
“We’ll pick him up from his room before we leave. Whatever meditating he’s doing will simply have to wait.”
But Merlin was not in his room, nor any of the rooms nearby. This caused a certain degree of consternation among the Secret Service, who were obviously not sanguine about the notion of the strange young boy with the mysterious relationship to Arthur just casually wandering around the White House somewhere. But with minutes ticking by, it was finally decided that Merlin could always be removed at a later date. Right now the main thing was to get Arthur out of there, and as conspicuously as possible.
So it was that the thousands of people gathered outside the White House, waiting for their shot at a miracle…waiting for an appearance by their latest savior…were surprised to see a large helicopter, a Sikorsky VH 3D, lifting off from within the White House grounds. It stayed relatively low as it glided forward, and as it hovered above the crowd, the powerful beating of its propellers caused all manner of shouting and confusion below. Hats blew away, people struggled to keep their coats wrapped around themselves against the brisk night air, and errant newspapers and discarded trash swirled about.
Then the side door of the Sikorsky slid open and a cry went up as Arthur Penn appeared in the opening. It was easy to tell it was he, because the army personnel who were keeping the people back had sweeping searchlights swinging through the night sky, and one of them was trained on the copter. This hadn’t occurred by happenstance. The men on the ground had been informed of what they were to do because the people in the White House wanted to make damned sure the people on the ground knew that Arthur was aboard the chopper.
He was locked into place via tethers, and he addressed the crowd through a loudspeaker.
“My friends…as you can see,” he called down, “I am departing the confines of the White House! Therefore, I am now asking you to return to your homes! No good will come from your extending your stay here! Someone will get hurt, and I would not wish that for all the world!”
The crowd was not uniform in its response. There were some who waved signs that said, ANTICHRIST! and CHRISTIAN HATER! and BURN IN CAMELOT! plus more that were even more emphatic in their condemnation of him. He supposed he couldn’t blame them. He had openly challenged their core beliefs. After the mess of a press conference, he had told Gwen that he had simply been asking questions, nothing more. To which Gwen had replied that maybe there were some questions that shouldn’t be asked, ever…because not only could they not be answered, but people didn’t want to know the answers in the first place. He had thought at the time she’d been wrongheaded in her thinking, but now he wasn’t so sure.
Nevertheless, interestingly enough, the supplicants vastly outweighed the Arthur-haters in the crowd. Their voices quickly overwhelmed those who were shouting abuse, and some of them even knocked the protesting signs out of the hands of the critics.
And those people shouted up at him. “Save us!” they cried out. “Help us!” “Cure us!” Children were thrust into the air, clutched in the hands of their desperate parents. Arthur looked down and saw them all, with all manner of defects ranging from a baby with no eyes to a toddler with horrific burns upon his body.
There were others as well. Not babies, but adults, all of them in various stages of walking decay. In his time as king, he had toured leper colonies. In his time as president, he had inspected and investigated areas where the poor congregated. He had witnessed firsthand their frustration and misery. On those occasions when a natural disaster had arisen, Arthur had been the first one on the ground to help provide aid and succor wherever he could…a tendency that his supporters had labeled heroic, his critics had dismissed as grandstanding for the TV cameras, and his security people had called “aggressively suicidal” since they were never able to secure fully the environments into which Arthur was thrusting himself.
But he had never, in all his days, encountered anything like this. Truly pitiable, they had come in wheelchairs and wagons, on crutches or on dialysis. The sick, the needy, the wanting, the dying. So many pleading for his help and far too many to help…and no absolute certainty that aiding them would do the least bit of good. For every one that he helped, there were a hundred more. It was the same old problem as before: He couldn’t help everyone, and so he was frozen into impotence, unable to aid anyone.
So many were shouting and screaming his name that they all blended together in a cacophony of desperation. Looking back into the chopper, he made a circular gesture with his pointer finger. He could h
ear the disappointed roars from below. They were crying out to him, raising their voices in entreaty.
They were doing in actuality what Brady had said he would be willing to do in theory. They were praying to him, begging him to help them make their lives better. They were treating him as if he were some sort of god who could, with a wave of his hand, make their lives better somehow.
Except…well…wasn’t he? He knew he was no god, to be sure. Despite his long age, despite the two worlds of magic and mundane that he straddled with moderate success, he was still human. Still capable of being killed just as easily as any other man.
Then again…so was Joshua, son of Joseph, otherwise known as Jesus. Wasn’t he? Wasn’t that the entire point?
With no other idea of what else to say, Arthur bellowed through the loudspeaker, “Return to your homes! Await my instructions! If you believe in me…do as I say! I shall return,” said the king, “but not to here. Go home and wait for my word! Bless you all!”
Arthur stepped back into the helicopter, and the door slid closed. As one of the crew helped Arthur off with the rig, he saw that Gwen—belted into a large, reasonable comfortable chair—was staring at him. “Don’t say it,” he warned.
“‘Bless you all? Wait for my word?’”
“You know, once upon a time, when I told someone not to say something, they bloody well didn’t say it.” Arthur sighed.
“Don’t you think you sounded just a touch messianic there?”
“What’s messianic about ‘bless you’? It’s what people say when someone sneezes.”
“No one was sneezing down there, Arthur!” she pointed out. “They were looking for…I don’t know…a sign or something. You blessed the crowd! All you needed was a balcony and some robes.”
“And a large funny hat,” Percival added. “It doesn’t work without the large funny hat.”
She fired him an annoyed look. “You’re not helping, Percival.”
“True. But then again, I wasn’t trying to, so it doesn’t bother me too much.”
“Gwen, I had to say something to them,” Arthur said reasonably as he belted himself in. One of the flight crew checked to make sure that Arthur was secured and, once he was satisfied, gave a thumbs-up to the pilot. The helicopter had, until that moment, been moving very slowly. But once the pilot knew that Arthur was safe in his seat, the Sikorsky angled away quickly, embarking on its journey. “My entire purpose was to get them to leave the White House. To leave Washington and go home…”
“And wait to hear your word.”
“To await my word, yes. A common enough term.”
“Arrrrthur,” she moaned, covering her face with one hand, “don’t you see how it’s going to sound? How it’s going to come across? You meet with a representative of the Pope, you practically come right out and say that not only is everything the Church knows wrong, but you’ve got the smoking Grail to prove it…and then you wind up preaching to your followers from on high and telling them that you will return to them!”
“Well, wasn’t that in a book about me? The Return of the King?”
“That wasn’t Arthurian! That was Lord of the Rings!”
“Oh. Was it?”
“Yes!”
“I think you’re confusing it with The Once and Future King,” Percival said helpfully. “That one was you.”
“Really. Which one had the little people with the hairy feet?”
“The Return of the King.”
“Ah. All right. My mistake, then.”
“Arthur, this isn’t funny,” Gwen admonished him. “You’re setting up a situation that’s, at the very least, incendiary.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked at him suspiciously. “And, frankly, I’m not entirely sure that you’re unaware of that.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
She leaned back in her seat and closed her eyes. “I don’t want to discuss it now, all right? Please?”
“As you wish.”
“I’ll tell you one thing, though: As soon as he turns up, Merlin’s going to chew your ass over this.”
Arthur chuckled. “This is one of those moments where I’m relieved to have picked up some of your vernacular. Otherwise, that would have summoned for me a most disturbing image.” He looked out across the rapidly receding landscape of DC. “I hope he catches up with us soon.”
MERLIN GLANCED UPWARD and saw a helicopter flying low over the city, angling upward and gaining altitude with every second. It struck him as a curiosity, but nothing more than that.
The Washington Monument stood strong and proud against the moonlight. Merlin had never quite understood the design point; it was a touch too phallic for his tastes. Still, even he had to admit that, at certain angles, it could look impressive. Amazing what mere mortals were capable of accomplishing when they put their minds to it.
Part of him thought that he was wasting his time as he approached the Reflecting Pool. This was a long shot at best. Still, he had to admit that the Secret Service agents might well have had a point. It was the exact sort of body of water that the Lady would have preferred. Flat, unmoving, almost like a vast sheet of glass. As was always the case with her, the fact that it was only a couple of feet deep would have made no difference. There were mystical forces at work when the Lady of the Lake chose to make her presence known, a warping of space and time. The truth was even though they had been lovers an age ago, there was still much about Nimue that Merlin didn’t fully comprehend. He supposed that that was as it should be. The oceans that covered three quarters of the world remained an endless mystery, and women as a gender were mysterious as well. Nimue was the incarnation of both, so her nature demanded that she be damned near unfathomable.
“The Lady of the Lake. Unfathomable.” This prompted Merlin to laugh slightly at his own inadvertent joke. But then he wiped away his amusement and faced the Reflecting Pool. “Nimue!” he called out to her, and there was more than just the speaking of her name in the summons. There was the feel of magiks that were old when the world was young. “Nimue, I summon you here! I summon you to this place, at this time! In the name of the unnamable, by the power and presence, I summon you! I summon you!”
He waited.
Nothing. Not a ripple.
“Nimue! Get your flabby ass out here, now!”
That did it. The center of the pool suddenly began to roil fiercely, to bubble and foam. Merlin was sure that he heard the faint sound of trumpets in the distance. He folded his arms and waited, and the water seemed to peel back upon itself, folding and twisting, then there she was, lifted up dead center with her arms outstretched in a most dynamic pose. He hated to admit it, even to himself, but she was certainly a splendid creature. The last thing he wanted to do, though, was give any hint that he thought that.
There was vast annoyance in her face, and she placed her hands on her hips, her head tilted slightly.
“Flabby?”
“I needed to get you here…”
“Flabby?”
“You told me about the Spear, but you didn’t—”
“You want my help and you’re calling my ass flabby? My ass is taut, Merlin—”
“As I know from personal experience, Nimue. I just said it to get your attention, and by the way, considering how you’ve been fiddling with me, it was as much as you deserved.”
She looked as if she were about to shout at him some more, then her ire evaporated and she smiled with thin lips, as green as seaweed. “Well, aren’t you just the little trickster. And I suppose I have been a bit naughty…”
“Just a bit, yeah,” Merlin said sarcastically.
“Still…you could at least apologize for—”
Merlin threw up his hands in exasperation. “I apologize, all right? Satisfied?”
She walked across the water to him, her feet making little splish splash noises as she did so. “It’s a grudging, halfhearted apology, but I suppose for you, that’s better than nothing. All right, Merlin, you’re forgiven.”
“I’m relieved. Now will you please, in the name of all that’s unholy, tell me what—if anything—you know about the Spear? And how do you know it?”
She stopped a few feet away from him. “You don’t have to sound so huffy about it, Merlin. If you hadn’t lost the thing in the first place, you wouldn’t be in this situation.”
“And if you hadn’t imprisoned me in the second place, I’d have had a thousand years or so to find it again.”
“A valid point,” she admitted. “That was rather mischievous of me, wasn’t it.”
“It’s in the past. Forgive and forget, that’s my motto.”
Nimue laughed at that, and the water beneath her foamed in sympathy with her. “Since when is that your motto? I would have thought it would be ‘lie in the high weeds and seek revenge.’”
“That’s my backup motto. Nimue—”
“Very well, very well.” She sighed. “The Spear…”
“Yes. The Spear.”
“The Spear of Destiny is in the hands of a very powerful necromancer. Not just a necromancer…an alchemist.”
“An alchemist?” Merlin made a face. “One of those fools obsessed with transforming lead into gold?” He made a dismissive wave. “Penny-ante tricksters, dime-store charlatans, the lot of them.”
“This one is far more than that, Merlin, and he’s thinking about a good deal more than transmuting chemical elements.”
“Really.”
“Yes, really.”
“All right, Nimue, I’ll bite. What is he thinking about, then?”
“Basic elements. Purity. Purifying things through basic elements.”
“Do you have to speak in riddles, woman?”
“I don’t have to, no. But it amuses me to do so, and it’s kind of fun to watch you squirm every now and then.”
“Really. And how fun do you think it would be,” Merlin inquired, “to suddenly find yourself laboring under a spell of absolute veracity? They’re not a lot of fun, Nimue. They tend to split the mind open like an overripe cantaloupe, and the person subjected to it doesn’t always quite return to normal. And if you think your status as the premiere water elemental of this sphere somehow renders you immune to it, I am perfectly willing to show you that you are tragically mistaken.”