The werewolf struggled against the combined efforts of Sirs Bors, Menaduke, Agravain and Accolon to pin it down. Knight X — that is to say, Sir Lancelot — extended the sword so that the point touched the space between the werewolf’s neck and left shoulder blade. The wolf shrank from Excalibur, as if perceiving a light obscured to the rest of us. “Whatever happens, keep your grip,” said Sir Lancelot to the restraining knights. As if he were signing his alias, he made a deep incision in the shape of an X. The werewolf writhed and yowled in pain. The knights held him fast as the sword sliced through to uncover the lupine gland: a hairy black lump the size of a crab apple, malignant and mocking.
Everything of Sir Lancelot was concentrated upon the sword point. Excalibur danced in his hands in an absurdly dainty manner. The werewolf bucked and thrashed and foamed at the mouth. Sir Lancelot cut around the remainder of the gland and thrust beneath it. This time, the wolf’s howl had an undertone that was reassuringly human. Sir Lancelot bent Excalibur in a lever-like motion. The gland was expelled with a wet pop and flipped up in the air like a tossed coin. I caught it in a bowl and passed it to Sir Pellinore, who threw it into the fire where it sizzled and writhed and seemed to shriek with a woman’s voice, before vanishing in a puff of blue smoke. The werewolf looked at Sir Lancelot with a hangdog expression, panting feebly, its tongue lolling and receding to human shape and size. The rest of its features did likewise, until Sir Gareth lay naked in a pool of blood, twitching and shivering in a grim parody of childbirth.
†
“That witch queen filth will pay for cursing an Orkney!” said Sir Gawain, slamming his empty cup down so hard it cracked in his hand.
“I propose something more than simple revenge,” said the King.
“Oh, there’ll be nowt simple about it. I’ll give her a curse alright. I’ll give her a curse where the sun don’t shine.”
“Peace, Gawain.”
“Don’t give me ‘peace’ after all she’s done! And all to get to you.”
“I did not call this meeting to discuss my sister’s desire to make me pay for the sins of my father,” said the King.
“How can you say that, sire? Every attempt on your life so far has been relatively manageable,” Sir Kay said. “But tonight — tonight was on another level! The people will demand we strike back.”
“And strike we shall. But if what happened to Sir Gareth is to have any positive effect, we must learn from it. The curse was not intended merely to kill me, although I do not doubt that was Morgan’s preferred outcome. It was a warning.”
“Warning against what? Women with more loose upstairs than a rat-ridden hovel?” said Sir Gawain.
“A warning against questing for the Grail. Sir Perceval has seen it.”
Those who had not heard Sir Perceval’s story now turned to him with undisguised awe. “It’s true,” he said, his fervour subdued but no less potent. “I almost got it, but it was too well protected.”
“So Morgan likes her trinkets and she guards ’em well. Big deal,” said Sir Gawain.
“The Grail is more than a trinket,” said Sir Perceval.
“Much more,” said the King. “Merlin spoke to me of it once. The Grail has the power to do whatever the achiever wants it to. The ultimate treasure. I understand what you are all saying. The attacks on Camelot, on the kingdom, have been getting steadily worse, and yes, I am partly to blame for that. There have been… other things on my mind, besides wayward Giants and marauding dragons.” The King looked at Sir Lancelot.
“Your biggest problem is not from any beast, but from man,” said Sir Lancelot, unfazed. “I’ve been out there, I’ve seen it. The lawlessness. The mockery of Camelot justice. It would make you all weep. I do what I can, but I’m just one knight. The tide of violence is rising, and soon it will be lapping at the foot of your Royal Tower.”
“Then this is exactly the opportunity we need,” said the King, “to rouse us from our slumber! Perceval has shown us the way. We go to the Otherworld. We bring the fight into the realm of Annwn — right to Morgan’s doorstep, Gawain — and we take away the Grail, her greatest treasure, for the glory of Camelot. Now do you see?”
“Ha! Let the brigands challenge Camelot justice when we have the Grail!” said Sir Pellinore.
“Just hang on a minute,” said Sir Lancelot. “Who exactly do you propose to send on this quest?”
“The inner circle; we seven,” said the King.
“And leave Camelot unguarded? No. I will stay.”
“I need my best knights by my side. There are many who are capable of keeping Camelot safe in our absence.”
“And many more again who would be delighted to see it fall. Some of them even sit on the Round Table.”
“We will only be gone for weeks, Lancelot; a month at most,” said the King. “And when we return triumphant with the Grail —”
“Which we will!” said Sir Perceval.
“— it will be the start of a new Golden Age!”
“Like the old days, eh Artie?” said Sir Pellinore.
“That’s the spirit, Pellinore. Just think of all the new Chronicles you can tell, Kay.”
“Lord knows, the bottom of the barrel won’t take much more scraping,” Sir Kay smiled.
“Then it’s decided. We leave at first light,” said the King, getting to his feet. “Pack lightly. Lucas, prepare the Prydwen.”
†
“And that is my dilemma,” I said to Beaumains. “After everything we have both seen today, how can I leave Camelot?”
Beaumains chewed her lip. “King Arthur suspects nothing of Mordred’s schemes?”
“What he does notice, he sees with the same short-sighted eyes he always turns to his brother’s activities. As for the things the Master does not see, I have always chosen to keep them from him, knowing the guilt he feels where his brother is concerned. Now, I wish that I had not.”
“It does not seem like the best time for Arthur to be going anywhere.”
“The Master’s mind is made up. But I cannot go gallivanting off on a quest! My place is here.”
“Lucas. What is it, what’s wrong?” she said.
“Nothing. It is just the dilemma. You know how I hate things being unresolved.”
“There is something else. Tell me.”
“I am fine,” I said, avoiding her eyes.
“You are not. You have not been yourself for months.”
“Please, Beaumains, it is late. I would prefer to talk about it some other time.”
“Ah, so you admit there is an ‘it.’”
“An ‘it’ I insist you drop.”
“I am not going anywhere until you tell me.” She pulled a chair over to the doorway and sat down. “And neither are you.” She crossed her legs and folded her arms.
“You really are the most exasperating woman on the good green earth.”
“On it, under it, above it, beyond it.”
Defeated, I sat back down again. “It is hard to explain in words. At least, it is hard to explain it in plain words. To be a good butler here, to serve someone as great as the Master, one cannot lose one’s head, even if — no, especially if — everything around one is magic and pageant. What this has always boiled down to for me is a domestic common sense — service sense, if you like. I have always maintained that such a quality is essential to the successful running of Camelot. Ideally, this means that one should be here, but also not here. A part of things, yes, but never too close to anything. It follows that I, above all people, do not merely set this standard, but exemplify it with every fibre of my being.”
“And you do it very well,” she said, but it did not sound entirely like a compliment.
“But recently, I have been feeling… like I did when I was a boy, waking up in the middle of the night with a vicious cramp in my legs. My mother would comfort me by telling me it was just my developing bones finding their feet, so to speak.”
“Growing pains.”
“Exactly. This fee
ls like that, but inside my mind. Everything I know is being pushed around by unseen forces, pressing against the top of my head so that I find myself flummoxed by even the simplest task. More than that, I keep catching glimpses of something else, something that keeps trying to break through and make itself known to me.”
“What do you mean, ‘something?’”
“Words or sayings I have never heard before. Pictures sometimes, shimmering at the edge of my vision. Whatever it is, it comes from beyond me, I know that. Maybe from beyond this world. And I fear the effect it is having on my work. I am past my threescore years, I am reaching the end of my working life.”
“Rubbish.”
“But I do not fear the effect of it, half as much as I fear the thing itself. I do not want it. I will not have it. I will master it, Beaumains. It will not beat me.”
I realised to my shame that I was shaking, my hands clenched into tight fists, my back hunched and stiff. Beaumains put her hands over mine.
“Then, that settles it. You must go with them,” she said. Her touch was warm and soft and light.
“I cannot leave Camelot. Not after today. After I have prepared the ship, I will beg the King’s leave to stay here.”
“But you said it yourself. The solution to what troubles you may lie beyond this world,” she said. I nodded weakly.
“But Mordred —”
“I am more than a match for Mordred. Come on. I will help you make a start with your packing.” Beaumains began to arrange a pile of my things on the bed.
I suddenly knew what had made me pause on stepping through the door, at the very start of our evening meeting. It was not the feeling that I was witnessing such moments of domestic tranquillity for the first time. But that I was seeing them for the last.
Day Five
I
I stood on the edge of the collapsed cliff, the immense vortex churning at my feet. I reckoned the time to be well past midnight, perhaps even approaching dawn, but the colour of the sky was now so unnatural it was hard to say with any degree of accuracy. Neither was my trusty pocket watch of any use; its face bruised and broken, damage undoubtedly sustained during my many recent exertions. My hands were wet, and I noticed for the first time that they were covered with blood. More to stop their incessant shaking than anything else, I wiped them on my shirt, thinking that the stains would be a devil to get out. The spectral forms within the vortex swirling up out of the Otherworld resembled clothes in a giant washing machine. This small image of normality calmed me down enough to check again for a pulse in the motionless body at my feet. Nothing. My hands started shaking again, and this time I clasped them tightly together, sending a sharp tang of blood up to my nostrils.
I tried to think of something else I could have done. Something that I could still do. But what? What could I do for any of them anymore? More to the point, what did I even want to do for them anymore? Perhaps the Grail, I kept thinking, perhaps the Grail. Then, remembering where the Grail had gone, I dismissed it from my mind. But there it stubbornly remained, printed across my thoughts as indelibly as the bloody stains on my shirt.
Time was running out. What was I thinking — time had run out. Even now, back in the stadium, the last of the Master’s life-blood was draining from his body, and only one person could save him. Even now, the gap between this world and the next yawned fully open, and only one person could stop the destructive forces his own return had unleashed. But Merlin was nowhere to be seen.
I stared into the swirling abyss of the portal. For the moment it was calm and quiet, as if it were drawing one last long breath before disgorging the last of its contents into the world. When we had first opened it, the magical vortex had possessed all the wild unpredictability of a tornado. Now, however, although awesome in circumference, it nestled against the remains of the cliff, a domesticated apocalypse challenging you to think of it as the end of all things.
Then I saw him. Standing on the shore below me, at the base of the breach where the rift disappeared underground. Cloaked and hooded and beckoning. Very well, then. I picked up the body in my arms and stumbled down the crumbling remains of the cliff to where the wizard Merlin waited.
II
Immediately following the triumph of Sir Lancelot’s troops with ‘Operation: Hostile Takedown,’ I had returned to Camelot. It was my hope that the Master would have witnessed the victory himself on television, or at least been told the news by Megan and her colleagues. By now I was highly concerned to see him, it being several hours since I had left him in their care. So I teleported first to Lower Camelot, the better to arrive in the Royal Tower unannounced.
Materialising in my old quarters, I was surprised to find myself in a room full of people. Several soldiers were hacking chunks of stone out of the wall and passing them to men and women in white coats, who sat in front of a vast array of test tubes, microscopes and computers. One of them looked up abruptly at the sudden arrival of a stranger in their midst. “Who are you?” she said. “Where’s your pass?” A soldier dropped the stone he was carrying and reached for his revolver, which I took as a cue to try my luck elsewhere. The Lower Great Hall was the first place to enter my mind, and that is where I went.
The place in which I arrived bore little resemblance to everything I had previously known. Huge chunks of the roof and its covering of floorstones had been removed between the crossbeams, giving strange jigsaw shaped views of the Great Hall one floor above me. My intricate winch and pulley system was being dismantled; the sturdy ropes of a thousand conveyances hacked down, iron counterweights whose ballast had delivered dishes to many a feast passed along a line of soldiers and heaped carelessly in a corner. I wondered why they had not used my water-powered conveyor belt for this purpose, until I saw water seeping from where the pipe network had been wrenched out of the wall. Everywhere, people in military garb bustled around me, heedless of my presence, their sole purpose apparently to destroy every last trace of my subterranean invention. Steel ladders lined the empty lift shafts, and via one of these I climbed upwards, parting the tattered remnants of a tapestry and stepping into the Great Hall.
Here it was the same story as below. The north wall had been entirely knocked down, as had the room behind it, which we had once called the Green Room. The space ahead of me stretched out into the open air and as far as the courtyard, the ground becoming steadily more impassable the closer I got to the Royal Tower. Radar dishes, machinery and power generators blocked my way. Men and women scurried about, speaking incomprehensible words into their headsets. Thick cables snaked to and fro in such profusion it was a miracle nobody tripped over them. Nobody but myself, I should say, for with my very next step I caught my foot under one of these electrical vines and went sprawling to my knees.
I was about to teleport up to the Royal Chambers when Megan appeared in front of me. So swift and sudden was her arrival that it was almost as if she had an amulet of her own.
“Megan, thank goodness I have found you,” I said, getting to my feet. “What on earth is going on here?”
“What do you mean?” she said.
“The dismantling of Lower Camelot. Had I known it would result in so much disarray, I would never have allowed you access in such numbers.”
“Correct me if I’m wrong, but this time two days ago, none of this —” she circled her hand airily “— existed.”
“Well, no, not as such —”
“And as far as everybody was aware, none of you existed, either.”
“Indeed, but —”
“Then what did you expect? The world has been turned upside down, and for all they know, it’s about to end.” She smiled a smile as black as a raven’s wing. “People want explanations. And I for one think they deserve them.”
“Yes, well. Put like that, I suppose I can understand,” I said. I understood nothing of the sort, but her words were having a curious effect on me, which I tried to ignore by addressing the purpose of my return. “I take it you know of Sir Lancelot’
s success in quelling the dragon menace?” I said.
“Yes.”
“Then the Master also knows of it?”
“No.”
“May I ask why?”
“He’s got other things to deal with.”
“In that case, I would like to inform him of it; as well as speaking to him about other matters.”
“Not possible,” she said.
“Excuse me?”
“I told you. He’s busy.”
“Busy in what respect?”
“He’s about to be interviewed,” said Megan.
“I see. Well, I suppose that is a positive move, but I would still like to talk with him. I only require a moment or two.”
“His interview is with the military. The reason King Arthur’s not allowed to see anyone at the moment is because he’s under arrest.”
“Under what charge?” I said.
“Charges. There are lots of them. But to save time, let’s group them under the general heading of ‘threat to national security.’ ”
“But, this is preposterous!”
“No, this is the Official Secrets Act.”
“I do not follow you.”
“ ‘I do not follow you,’ ” she mimicked, in a self-pitying whine. “Don’t worry. You will, soon enough.” There was that smile again. Megan walked back to the Royal Tower, where two guards flanked the only entrance from ground level, blocking the door with rifles that parted as she approached. “Oh, and by the way,” she added, turning back to me, “if you’re thinking of scurrying in through any of your pathetic secret passages, don’t bother. They’re either guarded or blocked off.” The rifles crossed again behind her.
I was, to put it mildly, incensed, more determined than ever to reach the Master, and to get to him before she did. But when I touched the amulet, to my surprise, nothing happened. I touched it again. Still nothing. The confounded magical item had chosen the very worst moment to break! When I started to think of the Master, it was the same as when I had tried to teleport to Sir Perceval and the Grail, or attempted to picture Merlin. His form was shrouded in a thick mist, with only the vaguest visible outline. The more I tried, the deeper the fog became, billowing out and threatening to fill every corner of my mind. The mist dissipated as soon as I stopped trying, leaving me to consider clearer thoughts.
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