Her timing was good. Better than good. Arthur was finally safe from the men who had been after him. What he wasn't safe from was publicity. In that, Emily might be able to help him more than Hal could. The knights were a target that could not bear much scrutiny.
And, like it or not, Hal's place was with the knights. They could not survive without him. Arthur could. Arthur would, in fact, be far better off if he were away from Taliesin's schemes and the knights' uneducable barbarism. With Emily, Arthur would one day be able to reclaim his life. And it would not be the vague and grandiose future the old man was so certain lay in wait for Arthur, but the normal future of a normal American, with a wife, a job, and the opportunity to think for himself. Arthur had never wanted more. He had certainly never wanted to be the reincarnation of a legend.
"There's another thing," the reporter said. "Miss Blessing said to tell you about her..." He looked down, embarrassed. "Her face. She thought you might not know."
"Her face?" Hal asked. "What about her face?"
The reporter swallowed hard. "I... um, well, I think she was in a fire or something. She's pretty badly scarred."
Hal felt himself go cold. She had burned. Burned, and he hadn't been there with so much as a kind word. How long had she been in the hospital? How often had she wondered, while she waited for the skin on her face to grow back, if Arthur was alive?
"Are you okay?" the reporter asked.
Hal looked up, startled. "Yeah," he said. "When's the story going to run?"
"Tomorrow. It won't be front page, though."
It wouldn't have to be, Hal knew. By the time they arrived. Dawning Falls would be a circus.
"Consider it your fifteen minutes of fame," the reporter said in an attempt at jocularity. "Now, if I might have a few words with you about—"
"Just get out of here," Hal said. "Please." Lugh, Dry Lips, and Agravaine stood up at once, brushing the crumbs from their mouths.
"Sure," the reporter said, moving swiftly toward the exit.
"We've got a new destination," Hal announced. He told the knights that they would be traveling eastward to deliver Arthur to his aunt in New York State.
"But the boy belongs with us," Kay objected.
"He belongs where he'll be safe," Hal snapped. "We can't do that for him anymore."
As he signaled for them to leave, he felt a curious sensation, something he had not felt in years. Not since he sat next to a woman in a yellow dress and tried to tell her that he loved her.
He wondered if Emily still had the yellow dress. He wondered if she had any recollection of that day, when there was so much possibility that Hal had truly believed that he might finally be, for the first time in his life, in the right place at the right time.
Who was he kidding, he told himself. From the cold tone of her message, Hal knew that Emily still regarded him not only as the kidnapper of her nephew, but also as the man who had betrayed her love.
Because he had. Their love was one of the things that had to be sacrificed to save the boy.
He touched the bandage beneath his shirt. A thin film of blood came off on his palm. The trip would be hard, but not impossible. They would arrive in Dawning Falls, hand over the boy, and say good-bye to them both.
That would be the impossible part.
Yet that, too, he would manage, he thought. He was doing this for Arthur. Because it was the boy's time now, not his own. Hal's time was long past.
Arthur trekked desultorily through the butterscotch-scented wilderness of ponderosa pines that made up the otherworldly forest of the Black Hills. Using the sun as a compass, he tried to maintain an easterly direction. Although it made no difference where he went, he wanted to avoid traveling in a circle.
Hal was no longer in danger, of that he was certain. The old man had helped; he always did. Had he heard Arthur's call? He probably had not needed it, anyway: Taliesin knew everything.
Arthur Blessing doesn't exist, he had said. According to the old man, Arthur had only been born to finish out the life of a king who had died sixteen centuries before. He would have no life of his own, no destiny other than what waited for that vanished, moldering king. Whatever Arthur did, Taliesin had informed him, that destiny would catch up with him.
But if that were true, Arthur thought, if his life was no more than a construct created by the old man in order to continue someone else's life, then why would he even want to find himself? He would be happy living as King Arthur Pendragon, wouldn't he? He moved on. Taliesin was wrong. He had to be. However Arthur had come into being, he was alive now, and he belonged to no one but himself. He repeated that over and over, trying to make himself believe it. But he knew that was not quite true.
Because the incident in New York was not the only time he had acted without quite knowing what he was doing. It was just the only time others had been aware of it. Several times during his life Arthur had seen people who had turned out not to be present at all, or had held conversations with people who had not existed outside of his imagination. On one occasion, he had even believed that he had communicated with the dead.
It had been a part-time farmhand who had died suddenly from a bee sting. The doctor in the emergency room said that the man, a Vietnamese refugee named Tran, had died of anaphylactic shock even before the ambulance arrived. It had been a terrible situation made worse by the fact that Tran had had no ID on him at the time of his death. No one knew where the man lived or who would claim his body.
Because the knights could not be trusted to exercise any sort of sensitivity in the matter, Hal had enlisted Arthur's help in making a street-by-street search of Murdo, the biggest town in Jones County, for someone who knew Tran. It had been the first time Arthur had been permitted off the farm since their arrival, and he had hoped to justify his new freedom with some success in the search, but neither he nor Hal had turned up anything.
Then, nearly three weeks after the death, long after Tran's body had been buried in the county graveyard, Arthur had a dream in which the deceased Mr. Tran told him that his family lived in Minneapolis, Minnesota, at the Sterling Apartments on Hudson Avenue, and that he would require what he called a "prayer doll" in addition to the pay that was owed him.
Among Tran's personal effects were several items that were out of the ordinary, including a minuscule fan trailing pieces of folded colored paper and a tiny pouch made of gold cloth, but nothing resembling a doll. Arthur even looked inside the pouch to see if a doll might be inside, but found nothing except a mat of goat hair.
To say he had his doubts about this vision would have been an understatement. For one thing. Tran had spoken to Arthur in perfect English—a feat the living Tran, who knew only a few hundred words in his new language, could never have managed. Nevertheless, Arthur took Hal's truck in the middle of the night and drove 217 miles to the Sterling Apartments in Minneapolis, where he found a Vietnamese family named Tran living on the basement level. The nine residents of the apartment included Tran's mother, Minn, who worked in a candle factory within walking distance and spoke a little English.
Arthur had tried to communicate the news of Tran's death to her in simple but compassionate terms. He told her that her son's body had been decently buried and that his grave had been decorated with flowers in the American way.
"How you... know?" Minh had asked, unable to find more exact words for her question. But Arthur had understood.
"I had a dream," he said, and she had accepted this explanation.
After giving her the hundred twenty dollars owed to her son for his labors on the farm, he produced the plastic bag containing Tran's personal effects. Minh took it with trembling hands and looked inside.
"Is there a doll in there?" Arthur asked quietly, his face red with embarrassment.
Minh looked up through tear-glazed eyes. "Doll, yes." She held up the fan with its braided construction-paper tail. Then, sniffing, she picked up a pen and drew two lovely almond-shaped eyes beneath the fan, transforming it into the liken
ess of a dancing girl wearing a headdress.
"Face getting wear off," she said, trying to smile.
Arthur puzzled for some time about Tran's visitation. He never told anyone, and confronted Hal's questions about the unauthorized use of his truck with stony silence. In time the knights had convinced Hal that Arthur had simply wanted to kick up his heels; but Arthur had never explained.
It was not that no one would believe him. The knights would, without question. He could have told them that Elvis had come back in a rhinestone spaceship and they would have believed him, such was their loyalty. Even Hal, who had a lot of sense, managed to discard it when it came to Arthur. It was as if he, of all the people in the world, were somehow not subject to the laws of nature. If Arthur said something, then it must be so.
Perhaps this was why he had not told the knights about his clairvoyant dreams: because they would have believed him even if he were lying.
Nor could he attribute episodes like the one with Tran to simple insanity. That was the easy explanation, of course, the first level of weirdness in the multilayered parfait of impossibilities that was Arthur Blessing's life. If he ever wanted to learn the truth about himself, he knew, he would have to look beyond the pat answer of madness.
But if he weren't mad, Arthur thought, then what of the girl?
She had been coming into his thoughts more frequently than ever in the past few weeks. In her golden-haired guise, he even knew her name: Brigid.
Brigid. His nostrils flared at the mere thought of her name. I will love you forever.
How ridiculous! He shook his head. He had never even met this person.
And so he could only surmise, with great bitterness and resentment, that Brigid was a memory of the Other.
That was how he had grown to think of the glorious King Arthur whom Taliesin and the knights and even, at times, Hal, believed was so wonderful. Arthur Blessing did not find him wonderful. The Other had taken his life and his future away from him. It was as if had been adopted by people who had lost a son, and insisted that he behave exactly the way their beloved lost child had. He, Arthur Blessing, did not count in this strange universe of magic and timelessness. Nothing he liked, did, thought, said, wanted, shunned, or feared mattered a damn to any of them. Not only did they think he did not exist; they were dead certain of it.
But he was not. Not certain at all.
Beyond Jones County, beyond Puma Mountain and the Black Hills, was a whole world where no one cared if King Arthur had returned from the dead or not. There were, he would bet, a good number of people who had not even heard of King Arthur. Among them he would only be Arthur Blessing, and allow the Other to die and remain dead.
In the distance he heard a low, familiar rumbling. At first he tried to run, to seek a hiding place among the tall rocks. He ran into the shadows, covering his ears to block out the sound. But it only grew steadily louder, as he knew in his secret heart it would.
Whatever you might do, that destiny would catch up with you.
It had been foolish to think he could run away. Wherever he went, he would always be found. He would never escape the Other. He had been created to live out the life of another man, and nothing he could do would change that. The magic was just too strong.
As the first motorcycles pulled into view, he stepped out from behind the rocks and waited. Bedwyr waved, genuinely glad to see him. Curoi MacDaire and Lugh both greeted him with upraised fists as they roared nearer.
Only Hal, who stopped some distance away and removed his helmet, looked less than delighted.
Arthur walked the length of the motorcade to him. "Did Taliesin tell you where to find me?" he asked dully.
"Yes," Hal said. "I'm sorry, kid. It was worth a try."
Arthur mounted the motorcycle behind Hal. He did not speak again until after the incident that sealed Arthur's fate forever.
Chapter Twenty-Three
THE LOAVES AND FISHES
After the media blitz in Rapid City, the press became a permanent fixture on the motorcade. Occasionally Launcelot would cast a baleful glance at Hal, asking the unspoken question: Why are you doing this to Arthur?
This trip was in total defiance of Taliesin's directive to keep the boy in the midst of the knights, and he would be furious. Nevertheless, the knights could no longer assure Arthur's anonymity or safety, and Hal was prepared to face the old man. His only thought now was to get the boy to Dawning Falls, New York, without incident. As the news helicopter circled overhead, Hal knew that even this simple task would be more difficult than it seemed.
No one had expected Arthur's fame, which had flared into being one night four years before and then died away to nothing, to suddenly rekindle. It seemed that all America was suddenly terribly interested in the comings and goings of an eighteen-year-old boy.
Some were already calling him a new Messiah; others denounced him as Satan, come with an army of evildoers on motorcycles.
It had always been like that with Arthur, Hal reflected. Through no fault of his own, the boy seemed to find his way into the very soul of his civilization. Arthur thought of himself as an ordinary American kid, and Hal had done his best to maintain that identity for him, but he had always been plagued with doubts about who Arthur Blessing really was.
Ever since he met Arthur, it had seemed that Hal's life had been pushed along on some predestined plan. He had thought only to keep the boy safe, to keep him anonymous, but that had not been possible. Arthur himself had told the world about his extraordinary past, which had reached beyond this lifetime, beyond this millennium. And now, strangely, instead of dismissing him as a charlatan or a fool, the boy was being believed, for good or ill.
It was all as if everything that was happening was meant to be.
Hal tried to dismiss these thoughts. Despite what Taliesin believed, Hal had always operated under the assumption that Arthur was nothing more than an ordinary kid, and that he deserved the same chance for happiness that every other kid had. And now everything seemed to be conspiring to take Arthur's anonymity away from him, pushing him into a role he had never consented to play.
Hal did not like the buzzing helicopters or the television cameras that followed them on their route, or the reporters that swarmed around them like insects whenever they stopped. He did not like the protesters with their placards calling Arthur names, or the screaming faithful, holding up talismans as they passed, or the infirm reaching out to them in desperation, as if the exhaust from their motorcycles could heal them of their ailments.
He looked back at Arthur. What had this boy done to both of their lives? What had he done, by doing nothing other than being born?
Launcelot's hand touched his elbow. Ahead of them lay a crossroads marked by an abandoned one-room church. This was where the crowd had gathered to wait for them.
They filled the four corners of land abutting the crossroads, sitting in folding chairs, playing cards, drinking beer from coolers scattered around the ground. They peered out of Airstreams and Winnebagos, sheltering their eyes from the sun, or wiped the sweat from their faces with grimy cloths. Music from dozens of different radio stations competed discordantly as the knights approached and the crowd moved inexorably onto Route 1-90 heading toward Sioux City.
Hal tried to swerve around them, turn around, but several hundred more seemed to dart out of the hillsides as they rode, making it impossible to escape.
Ambush, Hal thought. His eye caught Launcelot's. The knight was thinking the same thing. Were these people armed? Was the best course of action to abandon their bikes and fight? Overhead the helicopter swooped lower.
Hal was relieved. A massacre was less likely if the killers knew they were being recorded by television cameras. He signaled for the men to stop and told Launcelot to protect the boy. Then he dismounted, took off his helmet, and walked toward the waiting crowd.
They were poor, they said. Poor people gathered from the hard streets of Chicago and the other big cities of the Midwest, and from the
shacks and rusted trailers of the countryside. A movement had begun in Chicago, where the magic of television had told them Arthur had been born, and the poor had come to welcome him home.
"Give us a miracle!" someone shouted, and after that the cry was almost continuous.
"He can't… listen, everyone…" Hal held up his hands, but it was no use. The crowd, hot and thirsty in the summer sun, did not want to hear what he had to say.
They wanted Arthur. They wanted a Messiah, to make them happy. Beyond them, and on the other side of the mob, traffic had begun to back up. A lone horn sounded, followed by another.
Hal looked back at Launcelot, who stood with the others cross-armed on the highway in a protective circle around the boy. The pavement around them steamed with ground heat; the air around them waved, making the circle of muscular men seem like a mirage.
And then, out of the mirage, like a figure from a dream, walked Arthur.
The crowd broke into wild cheers. Some headed toward him, but the others held them back.
"No," Hal moaned, moving instinctively toward the boy, but Arthur held up a hand to stop him while he walked confidently forward.
Hal hesitated, then obeyed. The mass of people seemed to be managing itself, leaving space around Arthur.
Anxiously, Hal ran his hands through his hair. Every nerve in his body was on full alert. This was precisely the situation he'd hoped to avoid: having Arthur surrounded by a mob of people demanding that he make their wishes come true. All in the middle of a snarl of traffic on the hottest day of the year, while television cameras moved in from all directions to capture every moment of the debacle.
Arthur raised his hands, and the crowd quieted. But before he could speak, a breeze began to blow. An audible sigh of relief rose from the people standing on the hot pavement. The waves of heat that had given the knights a surreal appearance vanished. Then, within less than a minute, the sky darkened and filled with fast-moving clouds.
The Third Magic Page 17