The boy scrambled out of the hole where he had been digging. "Hal! It's Hal, Bea! He's come back!" He ran down the hill of rubble, waving frantically as Hal loped up to meet him, followed by eleven very unusual looking men. "Hal, you've got to help us, and we don't have any time to lose," the boy panted as they neared one another. "Taliesin was in the basement when the building came..." He glanced at the motorcyclists behind Hal. For some reason, they had all fallen to one knee and bowed their heads. "... down..."
"What?" Hal yelled. "He's under this?"
"We think he was over there, where Bea and those other two people are digging. Please, Hal, we've got to hurry." He ran back to join the others.
Hal swiveled toward the knights. "All right, men, follow me," he ordered. "Move it!"
Like an army, Hal and the knights swarmed over the wreckage, using boards and window casings as shovels.
"What be we searching for, treasure?" MacDaire grunted as he helped Lugh move a massive block of concrete.
"The Merlin," Hal said, unable to disguise his hopelessness.
Arthur looked up, wiping the sweat from his eyes. "Curoi MacDaire," he said softly. "And Lugh."
"We'll find your wizard for you, Majesty," MacDaire said reassuringly before he moved on.
A young blond man gave him a quick smile as he gathered up an armload of bricks. "Fairhands, the standard bearer." Arthur squinted. "Gawain's here, too. And there's Kay."
Hal stared at him. "You know their names?"
"I remember..." Remember how to be a king, the old woman who spoke to him through Beatrice had said. With those words she had given him a gift, the final piece of the puzzle Beatrice had envisioned. "I remember everything," he said.
The other tenants and bystanders jumped in to help. While they worked, Kate went to the neighboring apartment buildings to collect any tools available. By the time the police arrived, they had dug nearly to the foundation.
"All right, everybody clear out!" an officer ordered, but no one paid him any attention. Finally the police, too, joined in the excavation.
"We've got one," a neighbor called. The diggers moved to the spot and worked until the first of the bodies was pulled out. It was a man, his charred face no longer identifiable as human. Everyone stepped back in silence as the police extricated a second body in the same condition.
"Must have been a fire," one of the officers said as a third body was found. This one had a face. Its expression was one of abject terror.
The grim excavation went on in silence as an ambulance and fire trucks pulled up, followed by a TV news van. Within minutes the site was ablaze with lights. A reporter, having hastily gathered her material from one of the neighbors while applying her lipstick, related the story of the building's mysterious collapse to the television camera.
A few feet away, Arthur and Beatrice spotted a hand beneath a pile of broken concrete. "Hal!" he called. The TV cameraman waved at him for silence as the reporter continued her narrative. "Over here! Help us, please! Hurry!"
Hal and the knights rushed to his side. The fingernails of the uncovered hand were blue. The rest of the body was buried too deeply to pull out.
"It's him," Arthur said.
Twelve pairs of hands thrust into the dirt. When they came out, they were holding Taliesin's lifeless body.
"He has not the look of a living man," Dry Lips said gently.
A paramedic squeezed between the knights to check Taliesin's eyes and pulse. "This one's gone, too," he said, signaling for a stretcher.
"No!" Arthur hugged the old man, lifting his shoulders off the ground like a rag doll. Taliesin's head lolled to the side. "He's not dead, he can't be! He had the cup!"
"Get a shot of the kid," the reporter hissed. Bright light flooded over Arthur.
"Get the hell out of here, you ghouls," Hal snapped.
"Keep rolling."
Two paramedics came by with a stretcher. "We'll take the body," one of them said.
"Don't touch him!" Arthur screamed. At his words, four of the knights stood to face the paramedics like a wall between them and the boy.
"Suit yourself," one of the men holding the stretcher said with a shrug. "We got too many for the wagon as it is."
As they walked away, Launcelot knelt on one knee before Arthur. "My lord," he said quietly, "I would pray, if I have your permission."
The boy looked at him through eyes weary with suffering. "Launcelot," he said softly. "You've come back, too."
"Aye. And to stay, if you can find it in your heart to forgive me."
Arthur touched his shoulder. "I do, friend. Now pray. Pray for the Merlin, who is beyond the help of even his own magic."
Hal closed his eyes. He remembers, he thought. The knights have returned, and so has their King.
As Launcelot bowed his head to pray to his god, the other knights knelt also, Kay and Gawain, Lugh with his spiked helmet, Dry Lips and MacDaire and the young men who had died before their faces had weathered. They all knelt to call upon what gods they knew to bring King Arthur's wizard back from the Summer Country.
Fog, that was what it was, the kind of thick milky fog that used to enshroud Camelot after a heavy winter rain. Taliesin felt himself tumbling through it like a seed.
"Blast it all, I know I'm dead, and I know where I'm headed," he shouted. "This pointless charade is wasted on me, I tell you!"
But his journey continued uninterrupted, his body circling end over end. After a time he began to think that perhaps this was the void he had been expecting. If so, death apparently involved a great deal of movement. He tucked his hands inside his robe and waited.
"Ah, there you are," came a woman's voice.
"Indeed, and I've become damned dizzy getting here, wherever this place is."
His endless spinning slowed, then stopped. The fog around him cleared.
"Is that better?"
Taliesin tried a few tentative steps. He felt rubber-legged, like a seafarer standing on solid ground for the first time in months, except that the ground under his feet was anything but solid. It was the same milk-white fog, surrounding him on all sides, leaving only a globe-shaped space around him.
He touched the fog experimentally. It sent out tendrils of vapor between his fingertips.
"Well?" he demanded. "Is this home?"
"No, Merlin." The ball Taliesin stood in glowed with golden light. When it subsided, the Innocent stood beside him.
He staggered backward. "I... I didn't recognize your voice."
"That's because it wasn't a voice at all. Nor is this your body." She poked him in the area of his navel. Her fingers went right through him. "I'm afraid you left that buried under a heap of soil and building materials."
"Yes, I had no..." He choked on his words as he felt his heart breaking all over again. "I had no wish to keep it any longer." He went down on his knees before her. "Innocent, if this is to be the state of my death, it is too good for me."
"This is not death," the Innocent said gently. She put her arms around him and cradled him like a baby. "This is love."
He felt her soul pass through his own, filling him with her forgiveness and joy. "You were so young," he whispered, weeping into her bosom. "I killed you."
"I am old beyond counting, Merlin. And do not presume to know more than the gods you serve."
"The gods ask too much," he said bitterly.
"Ah, yes. They ask for all you are, and all you may be. And for your reward, all they give you is yourself."
With her hand she swept away a patch of fog. In the space, far below, he saw his body, held in loving arms just as he was being held now. But the arms around him were not the Innocent's, but Arthur's. And kneeling around them both were the Knights of the Round Table.
"Why, they're back," he said. "There's Tristan and Bedwyr and that rascal MacDaire... They're all down there with the boy."
"The circle has closed, Merlin. You have closed it. The Age of Arthur has begun again."
"Good heavens, i
t's..." He looked over at her in astonishment "It's Beatrice!" He leaned back over the hole in the fog. "But that's quite impossible—"
"Everything is possible," the Innocent said. "I should think you'd know that by now."
"But she was you! Your vessel. When you gave me your power, her body was supposed to expire. It had to!" He shook his fists in agitation. "Yours was the spirit inside her, and you're gone."
"Perhaps she has another spirit now."
"Whose?" he demanded belligerently.
She shrugged expressively. "It might be anyone's. Your student Nimue's, perhaps."
"Nimue? The one with all the questions?"
"A student is supposed to ask questions. You certainly did."
"But she never washed."
"Oh, come now. She was lovely when you brought her to Mona for Arthur's burial. The locals thought she was the Fairy Queen."
"Hah! Fairy Queen indeed. She used to eat frogs, heads and all."
"But she loved you, Merlin. I felt she was a good choice."
"Nimue." His face was a perfect blank.
They sat in silence for a moment. "Well?" his teacher asked finally. "Would you like to go back?"
"Under the circumstances, I'd have to think about that." He turned to her and grinned. "Is it too late?" he asked, squirming to his feet. "Have I decomposed?"
"I think not," she said, smiling.
"Then I must... I must..." He poised himself at the edge of the clearing, his eyes squeezed shut, his hands curled into fists, preparing for the jump but too frightened to take it.
"Is it enough?" she asked.
"Is it what? Is what enough? Confound it, you're talking in riddles again."
The Innocent laughed with a sound pure and tinkling as a bell. "Enjoy your life, little bard," she said, and pushed him through the opening.
He felt himself falling, floating languidly through space, drifting formlessly toward the place where Arthur held the body of a dead man, refusing to let it go. With a shudder the Merlin entered the body again, and was immediately assaulted by all manner of aches and infirmities—wheezing lungs and sprained ribs, a bruise the size of a man's hand on his thigh, a tooth knocked loose, a broken toe.
"By the gods, life is a trying condition," he grumbled.
"Taliesin!" Arthur's face, just coming into focus, was filled with happiness. To the other side was Launcelot, weeping into his chain mail.
"You again!" Taliesin muttered. "Still praying, I see.”
"Welcome back, old man." It was Hal, of course. None of the others would have the effrontery to address the King’s wizard as "old man."
"It certainly took you long enough to get here," Taliesin complained. He looked around at them all. Launcelot, Galahad, Arthur, all of them brought out of the mists of time to try the dream once more.
Perhaps, he thought, perhaps this time they would succeed.
"Hello, Mr. Taliesin." Beatrice squeezed between two of the knights to stand shyly before him. She was wearing a hospital gown with a man's leather belt around it. She was covered with dirt from head to toe. Her hair was wild.
"Good evening, child," he said. "I'm pleased to see you again."
Is it enough? The Innocent's question rang through Taliesin's mind.
He felt laughter, like bubbles, pouring out of his chest. He hugged Arthur, then stretched his arms as far as he could all around to touch the others.
"Yes, it is enough," he said, fairly leaping to his feet. "Oh, my, yes."
Chapter Forty-Two
The television cameras caught it all. A bevy of reporters from news organizations all over the city had arrived on the scene in time to film what they called a "street-tough motorcycle gang" on their knees in prayer around a dying old man. And when Taliesin had come to and then leaped up to embrace them, every edition of the next morning's news had its lead story.
"People here are calling it a miracle," a woman shouted, thrusting a microphone in Taliesin's face. "What do you have to say about what happened to you?"
"Why is it so blasted bright here?" the old man groused, squinting into the camera lights. "Go away, all of you."
"Forget him," another reporter said. "Get the boy."
The lights shifted to Arthur. "What's your name, son?"
"Buzz off," Hal said. Lugh growled. For a moment, millions of television sets throughout the Tri-State area were filled with his snarling visage.
"I am Arthur," the boy said calmly, "and these are the Knights of the Round Table."
"Cut!" one of the reporters yelled. "The kid's cracking jokes. It'll wreck the human interest angle."
The lights swiveled back to the excavation, where the police and emergency crews were pulling out still more bodies. Only one reporter, the woman who had arrived first, kept her cameraman trained on Arthur. He spoke to her.
"The time of horror is past," he said somberly. "This is a new era, and in it we will find peace and hope and true brotherhood."
The reporter exchanged glances with the cameraman. He shrugged, but kept the tape rolling while Arthur continued.
"This will not be easy for many of you to accept. You have lived in fear and pain for so long that distrust has become natural to you. Violence has become ordinary. Evil has become acceptable. But this will change. Slowly, and with effort, you will lose your fear, you will heal your wounds, and you will walk in the light of your own perfection. This is my promise to you."
He walked away toward the knights who were waiting by the motorcycles. The reporter's mouth hung open slackly.
Zack, who had been listening to the boy speak, ran up behind him. "Arthur, I heard you," he said earnestly. "I mean really heard you."
The boy kept walking.
"Look, I know you think I might have had something to do with this because I knew Aubrey, but I swear to you I didn't."
Arthur turned back toward him.
"Kate just told me what happened in there." The words dried up on his lips as the earth around the building shifted, whirling in a slow circle.
"The ground's giving!" the police captain shouted. "Get away!" Hundreds of people obediently scrambled onto the street.
On the site of the fallen building, tall mounds formed and erupted in the ground. Pieces of metal and wood and sparkling shards of broken glass churned as if they had been spat out of the mouth of some underground monster.
Then a hand shot out to the surface.
In it was a metallic sphere.
"The cup," Taliesin said, closing his eyes in despair. "He has the cup."
"Yes," Aubrey said, dragging himself out of the filth. "I have it still, despite your paltry efforts." He shambled out of the pit, his bare feet treading on slivers of glass that left no wounds. His long black garment was burned to tatters in places, yet his face and body were unmarked. No one spoke as he staggered past the crowd to face the boy.
"So you're Arthur," he said.
"I am."
Aubrey laughed. "All this trouble, for a child whose neck I could have broken with one hand."
Hal and Launcelot stepped in front of the boy, but Arthur pushed them aside. "What do you want?"
"Oh, didn't your tame sorcerer tell you? He's seen to it that as long as the boy is alive, the cup will always come back to him." From the folds of his sleeve he took the curved dagger he had used in the ritual of sacrifice. "So, naturally, he can't remain alive."
Kate screamed. The knights got into formation around Arthur.
Twenty policemen drew their weapons. "Hold it or we'll shoot!" the captain warned.
"Fire away," Aubrey said, his eyes never leaving Arthur's.
The policeman fired. Aubrey winced as the bullet entered his body and left it, leaving two holes that healed almost immediately. The other officers emptied their cartridges into Aubrey's back. His garment flew apart to hang in ribbons at his waist, but he remained standing. When he turned to face them, the wounds closed before their eyes.
"Jesus Christ," the police captain muttered. T
hen, collecting himself, he called out, "Take him!"
When the officers rushed toward Aubrey, he raised one arm in their direction.
Tendrils of smoke poured from his fingertips. It flowed out of him in streams, puffing into billows. The policemen stopped in their tracks, gagging, as the foul cloud engulfed them.
Around the knights, the smoke thickened to form a solid wall encircling them, creating a barrier between them and the outside world. Inside that barrier there was no street, no city, no time. The air was still, and charged with magic.
"I thought we'd like some privacy," Aubrey said, smiling.
Preparing to charge, Lugh broke away from the others. "No, that's what he wants us to do," Hal said, wrestling him to a halt. "We can't leave Arthur open. Back up." He looked past Lugh to the others. "All of you."
The phalanx of knights, with the boy in the center of them, moved quietly toward the motorcycles, where Taliesin had stationed Beatrice. The two children would be safe there.
"Don't bother trying to hide him from me," Aubrey said casually, stroking the curved blade of the dagger. "This was forged from Mordred's sword. Do you remember him, Merlin?"
The old man's jaw clenched. In his mind's eye, he could still see that final, mortal blow that had set the world back by a thousand years. "Oh, gods of the sky," he whispered. "Gods of the sea and earth..."
"Go on, wizard, try your magic. Do you think that because you gave them what they wanted, they will rush to protect your boy-king who rules from behind the backs of his flunkies? Did they protect him at Camlan?" He chuckled. "No, Merlin, they did not, and they will not. This fight is Arthur's, not yours."
Taliesin's hands shook. The magician was right, he knew. Arthur had chosen to lose at Camlan, and the gods had been pitiless.
As your reward, you have only yourself, the Innocent had said.
The gods would give Merlin nothing for resurrecting them from death. After his great feat of magic, even the great wizard had been left with only himself.
Just as Arthur, in the end, would have only himself, now and always.
"Nothing could stop that sword from finding its way to you, little king," Aubrey taunted. "Do you remember its sting as it pierced your heart?"
The Broken Sword Page 37