"On a lighter note, police have arrested eleven men who claim to be the Knights of the Round Table," the news announcer said as the camera focused on a group of large, loud men in various states of inebriety being surrounded by uniformed police. "Yesterday evening, the as yet unidentified individuals were apprehended while attempting to scale Mount Rushmore. Their plan, according to a spokesman, was to carve a fifth face into the side of the mountain."
The camera now shifted to a shot of Lugh Loinnbheimionach, wild-haired and sporting a leather jerkin open to the waist, climbing meekly into the back of a police wagon. In the background were the carved likenesses of the four Presidents, brightly lit against the night sky.
"Whose face would have joined the ranks of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt?" the newscaster asked, grinning. "You guessed it: King Arthur's."
Hal made a strangled sound. "I'm going to kill them," he said, hobbling from his bed to the bathroom, where his clothes were hanging on the door. "Take their necks in my bare hands one by one, and—"
"Oh, no," Taliesin said. He was at the window. "They're right outside. The police station must be nearby."
"Good," Hal said. "I'll turn myself in as soon as they're all dead. Ouch." He touched his wound gingerly. "At least Arthur's all right."
"Well..."
Hal looked up. "He is all right, isn't he?"
Taliesin cleared his throat. "I'm sure he's fine. It's just that... Well..."
"Where is he?" Hal bellowed.
"I'm afraid he's somewhere in the Black Hills. On something of a ... a walkabout, you might say."
"Alone?"
"Yes. That is—"
"Jesus," Hal muttered. "You, too."
"Now, really—"
"Just save it, okay?" He stumbled out of the room and limped toward the elevator.
Fortunately, Taliesin could move far more quickly than Hal.
They had intended no wrongdoing. Curoi MacDaire made that clear from the beginning. In fact, they had followed Hal's orders to the letter after the debacle with the gun-toting biker. As soon as the lone police car left in pursuit of the Cadillac bearing Titus Wolfe and Pinto, the knights had escaped into the hills and remained there, determined to behave like good citizens until Hal's return.
It was not until long afterward—several hours later, in fact—that the men, bored and uncertain about what to do in Hal's absence, wandered into a roadside tavern called the Tally Ho Bar, where they learned from a rack of picture postcards about the American marvel called Mount Rushmore.
"Who might these blighters be?" Dry Lips asked after the tenth round of ale.
"Kings, I'll wager," Tristan said.
"But they've no crowns."
"Aye. ‘Tis America, remember."
Dry Lips nodded sagely. "What say you, barkeep? Be these kings, whose faces are carved into the rock?"
The bartender looked up momentarily from the sink, where he was washing glasses. "Sort of," he said, noticing that they were all carrying weapons. "Presidents, kings ..." He glanced at Dry Lips' narrowed eyes. "Same thing, I guess," he finished gamely.
The knights passed around the postcard in silence. Finally Gawain, who rarely spoke, said the words that all of them were thinking: "Arthur's face should be up here."
There was a moment of electrified hesitation in which the men's eyes shifted intensely from one to the other. Their jaws clenched. Their hands caressed the hilts of their swords. Then Kay banged his fist on the table, shattering the quiet.
"That's settled, then! We'll put the great King's image on the mountain!"
A cheer went up. "Where would it be going?" Bedwyr asked passing the postcard to Fairhands, who was the most artistic of the lot. "Here, do you think, between these two blokes?" He pointed to the space between Lincoln and Roosevelt.
"Perhaps at the end," Fairhands replied. "Here, beside this fellow with the big nose." He pointed to the carving of George Washington.
As the knights rose as a man and lumbered toward the door, their swords clattering, the bartender set down his cloth with an air of annoyance.
"Someone planning to pay for those drinks?" he asked the group at large.
"Of course," said Curoi MacDaire, grinning. He swaggered forward and tossed a small leather bag to the bartender. "And a fine ale it was, my good man!" With a salute, he followed the others outside.
The bartender opened the bag. Inside were eight quarters.
With a curse, he picked up the phone and dialed the police station.
They were enjoying an afternoon of song in the Pennington County jail when Taliesin appeared, furious, with their bail.
It seemed that the knights had hardly begun the climb up the south face of the illuminated mountain when they were surrounded by police and taken promptly into custody. Despite the hyperbole of the police reporter who accompanied the arresting officers, the knights had not really done much wrong besides underpay the bar bill at the Tally Ho. They had not begun to climb the mountain (although they had been vocal in their intention to do so) at the time of their encounter with the police, and so could not be charged with either being a public nuisance or disturbing the peace. In the end, their weapons—and the objects they carried in full view could only be loosely interpreted as such—were confiscated, their debts at the Tally Ho satisfied with a fistful of twenty dollar bills which the Merlin produced, and they were, at least temporarily, set free.
"I suggest you ride into the mountains as soon as possible," the old man said, "before Hal makes a scene on the street."
"Is he here?" Launcelot asked.
"He was nearby, in one of those places where they saw off your limbs."
"My son!" Launcelot choked.
"It's quite all right. He was leaving when I had to come to the aid of this sorry bunch." Launcelot looked abashed. "My thanks to thee, Wizard," he said humbly. "Might we be of help?"
"You've helped quite enough already, the lot of you," the old man snapped. "Just keep these fools in check. Now be off with you."
"Not so fast." Hal lumbered up beside them. He was grimacing and holding the wound on his side.
"You have an injury," Launcelot said.
"And you're going to have one, too," Hal began, but a hand-held camera moved into his line of vision.
Since news of the arrest first broke, a number of reporters had made the connection between the antics of the strangely attired Britons on Mount Rushmore and the accounts of four years before concerning a young boy with miraculous powers who disappeared one night in New York City.
"Aye, he ought to have his face up there on your mountain, that's what I've been telling ye," Curoi MacDaire was pontificating into a microphone. "Do ye not know who the boy is, then?"
"Who?" the reporter prodded.
"Peter Pan," Hal said, shoving the camera and microphone away.
"Peter who?" MacDaire asked pleasantly.
"Get moving," Hal said.
Taliesin gave a map to Launcelot. "The boy's here, more or less," he said, pointing to an X in the Black Hills region. "Do you think you can get these fools there without being televised or imprisoned?"
"I can," Launcelot said, stoic in his shame. "But..." He glanced over at Hal, who was sweating profusely.
"Take him with you."
"Wait a minute," Hal protested, but the old man made a dismissive gesture. Launcelot put his arm around Hal and led him firmly toward the motorcycles. "You'll be riding with me, then," the big knight said gently.
"No, no." Hal screwed his eyes shut, trying to focus. His voice was growing weak.
"Hist, Galahad," Launcelot said.
Hal followed without another word.
At a discreet signal from Launcelot, the men slowly left the parking area, the noise of their motorcycles diminished in the pandemonium of the street.
"Sir, do you know anything about the missing boy?" The hand-held camera was now focused on Taliesin.
"What?" he asked irritably, pushing the camera o
ut of his face.
"Four years ago, a boy named Arthur Blessing was kidnapped off the streets of New York City by a gang of motorcyclists—"
"For heaven's sake, it was nothing of the kind!" he sputtered. "No one was kidnapped. The boy was only…" He saw the reporter's eyes gleaming with anticipation. The man had slanted the story in order to get him to talk.
"Go on," the reporter urged.
With a squeal of frustration, Taliesin raised his fist, as if he were about to strike the reporter, then stomped away into the crowd. The reporter tried to follow him, but couldn't find the old man anywhere. A moment later, the motorcade roared down the highway leading out of town.
Titus Wolfe looked out the hospital window at the motorcyclists vanishing down the road.
He had just missed him. It could not have been more than twenty minutes ago that the man who had identified Titus to the FBI had occupied this very room. The floor nurses had not seen him leave.
It was uncanny, Titus thought. Hal Woczniak had known he was coming.
Simply uncanny.
"Sir, may I help you?" a tall nurse with suspicious eyes asked.
"I was just watching the crowd outside," he said pleasantly, automatically ridding himself of his British accent.
His hair was colored dark and cut so that he appeared to be balding. He wore colored contacts as well as glasses, and in his mouth he kept a small device to alter slightly the configuration of his teeth. The result was astonishing: Even his mother would not have recognized him as the man in the FBI sketch.
Titus turned to leave, allowing the nurse to see the bandage on his neck. This was the one place where a wounded man would not look out of place.
Chapter Nineteen
THE SECOND MAGIC
By the time Hal and the others left Rapid City to find Arthur and bring him back to the fold, Taliesin was feeling ragged. He had Walked Through the Rock so many times in the past two days that he was no longer certain that he even had a body to dematerialize anymore.
Nevertheless, as he had no desire to remain surrounded by the loutish members of the press who were congregated there in such profusion, he knew he had to make one more effort.
As the reporter slogged after him, firing rude questions and generally making a nuisance of himself, Taliesin moved his hands in the ancient silent language of druid magic called Ogham, and tried to quiet his mind. That was the difficult part. His lessons with the Innocent had taken place on Mona, where silence was the norm and talk was discouraged. Here, in the middle of motorcars and cheap music from every doorway and people shouting everywhere, going into one's inner silence required all his powers of concentration.
Sinking, releasing, leaning farther into the magic as his hands moved in the untranslatable alphabet of Ogham, he prepared, first, to leave his body, and secondly, to maneuver the molecules of his body around the molecules of whatever obstacle he might encounter on his journey, and to do it all at the speed of thought.
He left his body easily. Most people who became druids knew how to do that before their twenty years of study even began. The second step was more delicate: It was the painstaking process of slowing his life force to the vibration of rock while concentrating, distilling his energy, directing the mass of moving atoms that was his body as if it were a handkerchief he were transporting telekinetically. Easy, easy, keep the mind clear, not the smallest fragment of thought must interfere with the process, right, move steadily through the rock, ignore the objects, clear, clear...
Brigid.
The name fell like an anvil on Taliesin's fragile transitional state. He came crashing into reality in the middle of the Oahe River, ten feet in front of a fifteen-ton barge filled with garbage.
The old man screamed; the barge struck him head-on at twenty-five knots. Within sixty seconds he lay floating in the jetsam in the wake of the vessel, quite dead.
"Good heavens," he said, looking aghast at his lifeless body as it drifted, surrounded by empty milk cartons and orange peelings, behind the garbage boat.
"Well, get it out of there," came the Innocent's voice.
Taliesin looked around in hopeful anticipation, but there was nothing to see. Without a body, he simply floated in the void between the worlds. "I say, I'm back in the Summer Country."
"It is the usual place for the dead," she said.
"Oh. Quite. Er, the body. Do you suppose it's—"
"Good as new," she said as Taliesin suddenly appeared, clothed in his old flesh and dressed in a dry robe of iridescent stars on a blue background.
"Why, thank you," he said, touching his head. "Barely a dent."
"It's just an earth suit," she explained. "Easily mended. Still, one should take proper care of one's things."
"Indeed," he said. "I became distracted. Most distressing."
"You should be long past that sort of mistake, Taliesin. How could you allow your concentration to break so utterly?"
"Oh, I don't know," he said, irritated at being chastised yet again by his teacher. "I was tired. I've had a busy day, and it was a difficult transfer. And ... Oh, yes. The name."
"What name?"
He cast about. "Brigid. Yes, that was what set me off. I remembered the name Arthur called when he was daydreaming—"
"I beg your pardon? You encroached on the boy's thoughts?"
"Well, I did have to find him," he waffled. "All right, yes, I did."
"You're worse than the worst parent," she said coldly. "No wonder he's left you. You take his future away from him, and then monitor his thoughts. For shame."
"Dash it all, I was only..." He closed his eyes and tried to calm himself. "Never mind that," he said. "The point is, he was seeing Camelot before it was Camelot. He'd seen the same thing while he was with me. Except that in this new vision, a woman appeared. Someone I didn't know."
"Heaven forbid," the Innocent said dryly.
"But don't you see? There wasn't anyone named Brigid in Arthur Pendragon's life. Unless you count the ancient goddess Brigid, of course. But this wasn't a goddess. It was a flesh and blood person. A yellow-haired woman. And he knew her. He kissed her, Innocent."
"So?"
He hesitated. When he spoke, he did not meet her eyes. "So I would like to go there."
"Ah," she said. "Now I understand. You wish to learn the magic to take you to this place."
"This time," he corrected.
"Yes," she said, smiling. "It's part of the Second Magic, you know."
"I know," he said, biting his lip.
"As I told you, Taliesin, the Second Magic springs from the first. You must become, you must believe, long before the creation can take place. First it is created in the mind. And so you must see it there."
"Yes," he said softly, his eyes closing.
"Do you see it?"
"I do. Perfectly."
"Good," the Innocent said. "Now create it for me."
His eyes opened, blinking. "But that's what I don't know how to do."
She looked dismayed. "Can you make it small?" she asked, holding out her cupped hand. "Like one of those pretty glass globes?"
He frowned. "Well, perhaps," he answered uncertainly. Then, straightening his shoulders and clearing his throat, he began.
Becoming very still, going into a place of profound concentration, the wizard called upon the elements to mix by his will in his hands, molecule by swirling molecule, a clear glass globe. "Careful," he whispered, fixing its reality in place, knowing that for a few moments, before his mind fully accepted the globe as existing, it might cease to be.
"Very good," the Innocent said sweetly. Then, with a casual wave of her hand, the globe grew beyond the dimensions of Taliesin's hand to encompass both of them and then slide beyond the horizon of a landscape filled with pine trees and boulders, where a castle of white limestone rose out of the morning mist.
"Good heavens!" Taliesin exclaimed. "Where are we?"
"Inside the globe."
Taliesin gave a small involuntar
y squeal of delight. "This is what I made?"
"Yes," she said. "This is the past you created."
"Look," the old man said, pointing in the distance. "There's the stronghold of King Leodegranz. He owns Camelot at the moment."
"Really?"
"It's an old graveyard," he said. "As I was telling Arthur..." He shielded his eyes and pointed toward a little rise in the distance. "I say, there's someone now." He dashed up ahead, panting and wheezing. "Blast it all, that's not the girl," he said.
The Innocent caught up with him. "The girl in Arthur's vision, you mean?"
"Yes. This one's got dark hair."
"Of course," the Innocent said. "That is Guenevere."
"What?"
"You created the past you wanted," she said softly. "I told you that was how it worked."
"Damn!" Taliesin looked out over the rolling green hills so full of promise. "It was a lovely time, though, wasn't it," he said, almost to himself. "A lovely, lovely time..."
Chapter Twenty
THE SWORD IN THE STONE
Imbolc, The Festival of Brigid
February 2, 506 A.D.
Guenevere walked quickly over the frost-covered ground, her cape pulled tightly around her.
She had been coming to this spot since her childhood. It was her special sanctuary whenever she wanted to be alone, or not alone, or surrounded by magic. For there was real magic here.
Guenevere did not talk about it with her family, since they were followers of the New Religion, which frowned upon magic, and called it demonic. And among those who followed the old ways, there were few who took the magic seriously. Even the Great Sabbats like Imbolc, days once revered as times of high magic, had been degraded into little more than excuses for festivals. Indeed, it was now quite out of fashion even to admit one was religious.
Her father, King Leodegranz, took pride in being a modern man. Any talk about magic or the ancient gods was dismissed as foolish superstition.
Leodegranz hadn't always been so hard-headed. It had been he, in fact, more than his wife, who had taught Guenevere the stories of the fierce Celtic gods, making them seem so real that his young daughter could all but see them standing before her.
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