The Third Magic

by Molly Cochran

  Still, he was tough. As Hal picked up speed, he saw the small man leap onto a motorcycle and peel away from the parking area with a screech of tires.

  It took a moment or two for Hal to realize that Pinto was headed toward him. As the caravan of knights pulled onto a two-lane highway, Hal saw that the man behind him was pulling something out of his saddlebag as he rode.

  It was a gun.

  Oh, great, Hal thought, feeling a hundred years old. Just great. After the events of the morning, an impromptu gunfight was just what he needed.

  He veered off the road onto the hardscrabble dirt. What everyone needed was time. Hal and the knights would just clear out for a little while, long enough to give the creep with the gun a chance to come off whatever bad high he was on.

  In the distance, he saw smoke from the campfires in the makeshift tent villages that had grown up around Sturgis for Rally Week. Nobody would follow them out here, he thought.

  He was wrong. The gunman was right behind them, gaining fast. As he drew closer to Hal, he aimed his weapon carefully. Then he fired.

  It took Hal a moment to take in the entire scene. First, there were the knights, who were beginning to realize that all was not well. Too far from the campsite even to be seen, they were slowing down, confused, and generally making targets of themselves.

  To make things worse, a cream-colored Cadillac was cresting a hill on a road cutting through the countryside where they were riding, its driver blissfully unaware that he was heading for what promised to be a first class disaster. And of course, behind him was the nut from the street in front of the bar, teeth bared and shooting his gun like Yosemite Sam. It was a big gun, too, from the sound of it, probably a .45 Magnum.

  It was indeed a Magnum. It tore a hole the size of a dime into Hal's side as he tried to signal the others to turn back toward the town. He skidded out of control, falling off the motorcycle a second before it hit the ground. He was quickly losing feeling in his right arm. Blood was pouring from beneath his jacket onto the dry, yellow grass. And the nut was coming directly at him.

  "Oh, man," Hal muttered. This was not a method he would have chosen to depart this life, shot by some fool at a motorcycle rally while the knights wandered off without a clue about how to live in the twenty-first century. "Hell of a thing," he slurred, beginning to feel stuporous.

  Pinto was screaming like a banshee and aiming at him with both hands.

  And then in the next instant, the gun was flying behind him, and the scream of victory had turned into a wail of confusion and pain. Pinto's right hand was moving up and down mechanically. Growing from the center of its palm was Lightfoot's dagger.

  Stunned out of shock, Hal managed to roll aside as the gunman's bike moved over the spot where he had lain a moment before.

  Launcelot rallied the men into a charge. Eleven motorcycles came together in a single point. Fairhands and Gawain lifted their spears. Lugh swung his mace over his head with a whoop of delight. Six swords gleamed under the midday sun.

  At that moment the Cadillac came over another hill. The driver's face was a mask of bewilderment.

  No one paid attention to the car. By the time the charge was in full force, Pinto had pulled the dagger out of his palm, and his hand was now spraying blood in all directions. His face was virtually painted red with it, making him look even more ferocious as he careened blindly forward.

  In the front rank of the charge, Gawain let loose his spear. It caught Pinto a glancing blow on his shoulder— just enough of a wound to cause pain. The second spear, belonging to Fairhands, missed the man entirely, hitting instead the windshield of the Cadillac, which shattered into a million shining crumbs, and then coming to rest at an angle on the left side of the driver's neck.

  The Cadillac swerved wildly, heading toward Pinto and Lugh, who was immediately behind him. More out of panic than anything else, Lugh let fly his mace, which sailed over the biker to land with a thud on the Cadillac's roof. At nearly the same moment, Pinto's motorcycle crashed into the side of the car just behind the stunned driver, who still had Fairhands' spear lodged in his flesh. As Pinto was ejected from the bike and shot neatly into the Cadillac's back seat, the driver began to cough up blood.

  Through the final moments of this debacle, a siren and a cloud of dust from the direction of the town announced the presence of the authorities. For a brief moment, every head turned toward the approaching police vehicle.

  Pinto was the first to move. Inside the car, he sat up, wiped the spray of blood from his eyes, and then yanked the spear-tip from the driver's neck. The man's blood was copious, but not spurting, and Pinto was familiar enough with wounds to know that he would probably live, at least for a day or so. He snaked his one functional, if bloody, hand over the gaping hole in the driver's throat to stanch the flow of blood.

  "Get going," he growled. "Now."

  A hundred thoughts ran through the driver's head at once, but all were superseded by the inescapable, if temporary, need to obey the psychopath who was holding his throat in a death grip.

  Titus Wolfe floored the accelerator.

  Fortunately for Pinto, the man in the cream-colored Cadillac was, despite his infirmity, an exceptionally good driver. Also, although he was unaware of this fact, the man had even more to lose if waylaid by the police than Pinto did.

  In the back seat, next to Pinto's blood-stained buttocks, was the molded plastic case containing the one-of-a-kind components for the bomb that was created to destroy a nuclear missile base. Piercing the case with several four-inch spikes was a medieval iron mace.

  It took Titus less than seven minutes to lose the local cops. They weren't the problem. The problem was Pinto, who had kicked the suitcase, mace and all, onto the floor in an effort to make himself more comfortable while he was performing crude first aid on a man he believed to be just another hijacked driver.

  "For God's sake," Titus objected through a gush of his own blood. "Be care—"

  "Shut up, shithead," Pinto responded, getting a firmer grip on Titus's throat. He felt uneasy, at a level of consciousness he did not quite understand, that the driver of the Cadillac did not appear to be as terrified as he should. He felt even more uneasy after the car skidded to a stop and a gunshot from the front seat thudded through the upholstery.

  Pinto gave a little yelp as he looked down reflexively to see if he had been hit. In that moment of confusion, Titus whirled around, gun in hand—it was a small Beretta, an extra to be carried in one's sock, but capable of real damage at point-blank range—and stuck it beneath Pinto's chin.

  "I think you had better be the one to shut up," Titus rasped, drooling blood.

  Pinto screamed. It was a wild, charging battle cry such as Titus had never heard. All he could see for the moment was a close-up of Pinto's teeth—smelly brown tombstones going in all directions—while the Beretta was knocked out of his hands.

  Later he would puzzle over that moment, wondering if he had lost his weapon to this psychotic ignoramus because of his injury, or because he had just never encountered anyone as crazy as Pinto before. Agents, even terrorist agents, operated under some sort of guidelines. They used reason. Even if they were willing to die during the course of a mission, they generally tried to stay alive. They talked, threatened, fought, deceived. They didn't just scream into your face.

  A split second after Pinto knocked the gun out of Titus's hand, he dived into the front seat. Titus saw that coming, at least. He tried to break Pinto's nose, but by that time they were both so covered with blood that the heel of his hand, which was supposed to kill Pinto, instead merely slid off his face without even stopping the crazy biker from lunging at him. The gun discharged again, into the door, when Pinto's foot inadvertently got the trigger mechanism stuck on the seat adjustment lever. They both dived after it, crashing their heads together. Titus vomited blood into Pinto's lap. Pinto tried to kick him away. The movement of the seat caused the gun to go off several more times before finally coming loose from the lev
er and sliding beneath the passenger seat, where it was lodged too tightly for either of the men to retrieve.

  All in all, they scuffled inside the car for less than five minutes, at the end of which both of them lay back, exhausted, slick with blood, and bruised in all their joints from striking the hard parts of the automobile.

  "Idiot," panted Titus.

  "Asshole," breathed Pinto.

  Thus was born a partnership between two men whose destinies would come to be entwined, in the unlikely yet inexorable way of fate, with the legend of King Arthur.

  Chapter Fifteen

  DESTINY

  Puma Mountain, South Dakota

  The sword's name was Excalibur, from the Celtic calad-bolg, meaning "voracious."

  It was magnificent, this hungry-bellied man-eater of a weapon, with its gold pommel studded with polished gemstones, its blade gleaming with its own cruel intelligence: a sword created, it was said, by the ancient gods themselves and given as birthright to the great King of the Celts.

  "Can you see it?" Taliesin whispered.

  In the black scrying mirror, dazzling now with moonlight, the sword stood shrouded in a film of what looked like smoke. "Yes," Arthur said, his eyes unblinking. "What's around it?"

  "Rock."

  "But I can see through it."

  Taliesin's mouth closed into a thin line. "That's because it's a vision," he snapped. "You're looking not with the eyes of the senses, but of the soul. Don't be a dullard."

  He struggled to maintain a stern expression, but inwardly the old man was whooping for joy. The boy was better than he had been four years ago, sharper, more intuitive, possessed of a capacity for vision and magic usually found only in trained druids.

  Even Arthur Pendragon had not been able to see through a scrying mirror. The King had tried once or twice, at the Merlin's urging, but had quickly given up, muttering about feeling foolish.

  But this one could see even through the rock!

  "Concentrate," Taliesin said softly.

  Arthur rubbed his hands over his face. "I'm sorry," he said, breaking the connection in the mirror. "I lost it."

  The old man sighed. "It happens. Rest for a moment. The vision will come back." He leaned back, bracing himself with his long spindly arms. "Tell me, Arthur. Do you ever see this sort of thing on your own? That is, without trying?"

  "I never try," Arthur said tersely, hoping that would be the end of the conversation.

  It was true; he never tried to see beyond his normal senses. He never had to. Ever since the televised incident in New York, during which he had been in a kind of trance, episodes of uncanny clarity had been happening to him with increasing frequency. Mostly it had been small things: being able to find missing objects, or knowing when one of the farm animals was going to have trouble delivering its young. But there were stranger occurrences, too, such as the time a hired hand on the farm had died, and then had told Arthur in a dream where to find his family.

  Or the girl.

  No, not the girl, he thought, feeling himself sweating cold. The girl was not a vision. She was an indication of insanity.

  Nameless yet familiar, she stole into his dreams and the timeless moments before sleep when everything seemed possible. She came again and again—not the vague, pneumatically breasted fantasy of a teenage boy who knew no females, but a rather conventionally pretty girl with gray-green eyes and the slender fingers of an artist. She seemed real, achingly, blood-poundingly real to him, so real that there had been nights when he had waited for her to come, prayed that she would. And then they would have conversations, sometimes desultory and trivial, sometimes burning with importance, outrage, tears. She would complain about her mother, or talk about God. It didn't matter. Arthur just liked to hear the sound of her voice.

  When he spoke, he would tell her his plans for the future, and it also did not matter that he knew his plans would never materialize, because by then Arthur realized that the girl was not real, that she was no more than an outcropping of his growing madness.

  He had read that schizophrenia often manifested in the young, bringing to promising lives barely begun a horror which no human being should have to live through. The disease was characterized by florid and utterly believable hallucinations, both visual and auditory....

  It was her hair that informed him.

  She rarely appeared with the same kind of hair. Sometimes it was blond and flowing, like a river of gold. At other times, the hair was hacked short, dyed jet black and sticking out in all directions. And there was a third version of this nameless, wonderful girl, too: a vision in veils and headpieces, or with long chestnut curls bound by ropes of gold and silver.

  Yes, the hair. Only a lunatic would change the color of his dream lover's hair and never learn her name.

  "Arthur?" The old man was peering into his face. "Do you want to tell me something?"

  He inhaled sharply. "No. That is... No." His face turned toward the moon, enormous now, sitting fatly on the tops of trees beyond the mountain. "I just get confused sometimes." He spoke in a whisper. "It's as if I can't remember where I am. Maybe I'm still in there." He nodded toward the scrying mirror. "There, I mean."

  "Oh, but that's good," Taliesin said. "It means the veil is getting thinner."

  "Veil?"

  "The veil between the worlds." Taliesin squatted on the rock, perfectly comfortable. "What you see is not merely another place, but another life."

  "I know that." He looked away, muttering, "I also know that mental hospitals are filled with people who believe they're King Arthur."

  "Now don't start that," Taliesin said. "Just because you're extraordinary doesn't mean you're mad."

  The moon shimmered. Maybe the reason he was going insane was because he was constantly subjected to insanity, Arthur thought. If he could only go, just go, find a job, learn a trade, get a place to live, make some friends...

  "Let me put it this way," the old man said, settling comfortably on the ground. "Every person on the planet has lived many times before. And most people remember those lives, or at least parts of them. How else would you explain a young Irish girl's fascination with Peruvian weavings, or a person in Iowa who is deathly afraid of water?" He smiled. "But they can't make sense of things because they won't allow themselves to believe the memories."

  ... Instead of always listening to how he had been the bloody High King Grand Poobah of the goddamned Dark Ages...

  "Although, if the truth be told, most of the time, it's probably for the best that humans don't remember. Doesn't do much good for a house painter to recall that he used to be the Queen of Sheba, does it? Heh, heh." The old man smiled, savoring his little joke. "Anyway, it's different in your case. You see, Arthur Pendragon's life was unfinished. You were killed by magic. In the karmic scheme of things, the death didn't really count." He waved a hand in front of Arthur's blank face. "I say, are you quite sure you feel all right?"

  Arthur forced himself to pay attention. "Yes, I'm fine." He took a deep breath. "So you're saying that because something interfered with his—that is, my—former life, and made me die before my time, I got another life to make up for it?"

  "Just so. At the time, everyone knew you'd come back. Even the Christians, although I don't know how they reconciled that with their belief that people are permitted only one body through all eternity." He shrugged. "Odd new religion, that." He tapped the scrying mirror. "Let's continue, shall we? What else do you see?"

  Arthur frowned as he stared into the smoky vision. "Nothing. Woods." He looked at Taliesin. "Where is this place?"

  "Camelot," the old man answered with relish. The boy was perfect. "You're looking at Camelot, before the castle was built. The spot where the sword came from is very sacred. It's said to be the burial site of ancient heroes, watched over by the Cailleach herself."

  "The what?"

  "The Cailleach. She's a goddess, very old, known sometimes as the Wild Hag. According to Celtic lore, it was she who made the very mountains
of Britain."

  "Did you worship her when you were a druid?" Arthur asked.

  "Not really. She was too old, even back in the fifth century. No one knew much about her, not even what she represented or how she was worshipped in the time before time. No, the Cailleach is one of the truly ancient gods."

  "Did she put Excalibur there?"

  He shrugged. "Perhaps. No one knows. But it was put there for you." He smiled. "For the Great King."

  Arthur closed his eyes. He was getting a headache. "Taliesin ..." His voice caught.

  "Yes, Arthur?"

  "What if... Well, what if I don't want to take up that life again?"

  The old man sat back, aghast. "I beg your pardon?

  "I mean, Arthur Pendragon was a great man, there's no doubt about that. He united the Celtic tribal kingdoms. Got rid of the Saxons. Brought order out of the chaos of post-Roman Britain. But..."

  "But what?"

  Arthur looked levelly into the old man's eyes. "That's the point. All that's been done. It doesn't need to be done again."

  "What on earth are you talking about?"

  "I'm talking about me, Taliesin! Arthur Blessing, Boy Nobody. Why can't that be enough?"

  "Nonsense." The old man waved him away with a smile.

  Arthur clasped his hand. "No, don't dismiss me." He made sure Taliesin was listening before he went on. "Look, I appreciate all that you and Hal have done for me, but I think it's time for me to go."

  "Go?" The old man was genuinely perplexed. "Go where?"

  Arthur released his hand, smiled, shrugged. "Wherever," he said mildly. "That's how most people's lives go. They're free to choose what they want to do with their time on earth."

  Taliesin looked stunned. "That may be true for them, but good heavens, child, you're the King of the Celts. You can't just go wandering off like some bohemian."

  Arthur breathed deeply, trying to be patient. "Be reasonable, Taliesin. This isn't England, and it isn't the fifth century. What do you imagine I would be King of? Jones County, South Dakota?"