The Third Magic

by Molly Cochran

  Hal moved back to join the knights. He planned to disperse them through the crowd. They all knew that their prime directive was to protect Arthur at all costs. Hal did not like to see the boy so vulnerable.

  "Bit of luck, this weather, eh?" Curoi MacDaire said, gesturing skyward with his eyes. "Could have got ugly, this lot."

  Indeed, the crowd was now comfortable and good-natured, no longer insisting on a miracle, but waiting courteously for whatever was to come.

  But what could that be? Hal thought, panicking. Whatever he might have been in another life—and even now, even with the presence of the knights and Taliesin's wizardry, Hal was still not certain that any of that meant a damn, anyway—Arthur was not even a man yet, let alone a king. These people were expecting too much.

  He gave Launcelot the word to move the men into the crowd slowly, so not to frighten anyone. They did, gradually widening the circle around Arthur, who was still standing with his arms upraised and his eyes closed.

  And then, in the silence, a soft rain began.

  "Thank God," Hal said. People were unlikely to riot in the rain. They would soon disperse, and the whole thing would be over. It was time to think about an alternate route, though, Hal noted.

  Launcelot was staring at him. "What's up?" Hal asked.

  The big knight said nothing, but his eyes never left Hal's.

  "You're not thinking... Arthur didn't do this, Lance. Keep yourself together."

  At that moment a truck carrying twenty thousand bottles of designer water that had just been bottled at its source in northern Illinois crested the hill. The truck's driver, completely unprepared for the tangle of traffic in what was usually an empty stretch of road, stomped on the brake and skidded out of control on the rain-slicked pavement. He careened squarely into the back of another truck, a semi filled with North Atlantic smoked salmon. The point of impact was the refrigeration condenser, which immediately turned the metal container of the semi into an oven. To make matters worse, the semi had jackknifed to the side, crashing in turn into the vehicle immediately to its right. This, too, was a truck, a bakery truck whose back doors flung open as hundreds of bags of America's Best Bagels flew out into the crowd.

  The recipients of the bagels jubilantly raised their prizes in the air, and an atmosphere of jollity immediately took hold.

  "The food literally rained down from the sky," a smiling television reporter said into a camera, trying to speak loudly enough to be heard over the incessant claxoning of the halted cars. The reporter in the helicopter announced that police were on their way to detangle the traffic, but already the irate drivers were leaving their cars to threaten the assembled pedestrians, and particularly Arthur.

  It all might have become awkward again, had it not been for the driver of the salmon-carting semi, whose curses rose above the rest of the din as he threw large salmon carcasses out of the sweltering truck.

  "Pigshit!" he howled. A motorist who had just exited his car to complain caught a fish in his arms. It was fragrant, but not yet stinking.

  "Lox!" he shouted.

  A bagel-bearer rushed toward him.

  Thus did the feast begin. Before long, everyone, including the horn-honking motorists, was partaking of what the reporters called "manna," but which really would have been a quite standard deli breakfast with the addition of a schmear of cream cheese. The man carrying the bottled water donated his entire load, having been directed on the phone by the company's vice president of marketing to do so. With all the television cameras in attendance, the generous gesture would advertise his company's product more effectively than a massive campaign.

  It took the police more than an hour to clear the traffic. Even so, hundreds remained on the sides of the road, watching the young man who had never moved nor spoken a single word. Even the police, following some instinct about crowd control, had not touched Arthur Blessing.

  After the roadway was clear, Arthur walked back toward the circle of motorcycles. It was still his custom to ride behind one or another of the knights, as he had since he was a child. Although it was never spoken, whomever Arthur chose to ride behind felt as if he had been conferred an honor. The knights all stood beside their bikes, eyes forward, hoping that he would choose them. Fairhands, the youngest of the lot, stepped forward as Arthur approached.

  "Take it, Highness," he said. "I will ride behind you, or with one of the others."

  Arthur smiled genially and straddled the seat. "Thank you," he said.

  The crowd parted for them as they left. In their wake was a sea of waving hands.

  Launcelot lagged behind, paying no attention to the people who followed him as he walked toward the abandoned church. They were shouting questions at him, questions about Arthur, no doubt, although their words were no more than muted sounds to him.

  All he saw, all he knew or felt in the rawness of his bones, was the church.

  It was a humble enough structure, to be sure, with its flat-painted, finger-stained doors and its spindly aluminum cross sticking out of its roof like an antenna; but to Launcelot, it was a wonderful building. He had seen great cathedrals during his time in twenty-first century America, but they had meant no more to him than the gigantic skyscrapers of Manhattan. That was to say, they did not touch Launcelot's view of reality.

  He had accepted the fearsome oddities of the New World with the resignation of a man who was being punished for a great sin. For that was what he felt himself to be, an audacious, blackhearted example of human degradation who had been relegated to a special hell.

  All the world—no, worse than that, all of history—knew what he had done with the queen, the wife of the High King to whom he had pledged his life. He deserved to suffer for that, and he had. His punishment had been to submit to the magic of an evil sorcerer who was leading him through an alternate world of unimaginable horror. There were buildings big as mountains here, and headless horses with mechanical hearts. There were places like the great stone block from which Hal had been rescued, where one's arms and legs were routinely sawn off. Under the ground were huge rumbling snakes called subways that devoured anyone foolish enough to venture down the many stairways leading to the netherworld.

  And yet in the midst of these dreadful surroundings, he occasionally saw things that made him remember his life on earth with painful piquancy.

  Such was the Church of the Lord's Fellowship, which stood at the crossroads where so many had gathered to see the young king. It resembled a church Launcelot might have seen during his own time, a grand church compared with the beehive-shaped wattle huts where most of the Christian holy men in Britain lived. This church could not have existed in Britain, of course; but in Gaul, where Launcelot had spent his boyhood, the Christians had made deeper inroads. There were great churches like this in Gaul, where thirty or forty people at a time raised their voices in prayer to the invisible God who had lived as a man and died in humility and pain.

  The sight of it had filled him with awe from the first. But then, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes ...

  That was something that still puzzled him. The others had not noticed, naturally; most of them were pagans with no knowledge of the New Religion. But Launcelot was a Christian, the only one of the Round Table knights to have come converted into Arthur's service. He was familiar with the story of the Messiah who had fed multitudes.

  What he did not understand was why it had happened again, and here, of all places. Launcelot's Christ was a distant being, a figure from centuries past who had lived in a faraway, almost mythical land. That these people would try to reenact the biblical story with Arthur at its core seemed to him to be both sacrilegious and bizarre.

  Hesitantly he approached the entrance to the church. There was so much he needed to know, so many questions. Why had they all been brought to this place with Launcelot?

  Some of the knights, like young Fairhands, had done no real evil at all in their lives. Had he been summoned from the Summer Country simply because he had kn
own a sinner like Launcelot? Was God so unfair?

  And Arthur. What on earth was Arthur doing here, and at such an age? He had been a great king, yes. And his pulling the sword from the stone had become the stuff of legend. But why had he come back? To produce miracles replicating those of Christ?

  Whose work was this, God's or Satan's?

  Launcelot needed to pray. He reached for the door.

  It had been bolted with a metal device. Not for you, the door seemed to say to him. The church would accept sinners, but not suicides.

  No, of course the doors would be locked, the knight thought. This was hell, and God did not dwell here.

  Launcelot mounted his motorcycle and roared down the road to join the others.

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  A STAR IS BORN

  In Grenoo, Louisiana, Mary Faith and Ruth Ann Newcastle looked over at one another from above their glasses. Mary Faith turned down the volume on the television.

  "The loaves and the fishes," she said.

  Her sister patted her white hair pensively. "Do you think it matters that it was Jewish fish?"

  "Jesus was Jewish," Mary Faith said.

  "Oh, dear, yes." Ruth Ann fanned herself with the TV Guide. "What do you suppose it tastes like?"

  Mary Faith sniffed. "Wouldn't know, and wouldn't care to know," she said.

  On a farm near Jacksonville, Texas, an African American family consisting of five adults and ten children all got on their knees.

  "Hallelujah," the matriarch said. Her name was Martha.

  Her youngest son, Roland, an entertainment lawyer who practiced in New York City, had been about to refuse to participate in Martha's call to worship, but his wife had smiled and touched his elbow. Go ahead, her eyes told him. She's your mom.

  "Thank you, Jesus," Martha intoned.

  "Thank you, Jesus," the others repeated.

  "He's not Jesus," Roland said. "His name is Arthur, or some damn thing. Yes, Arthur, as in King Arthur, which he thinks he is. I can't believe we're all here on our knees in front of the television set adoring some Marjoe white bread con artist."

  His mother narrowed her eyes at him. "Don't you start," she rumbled, her massive forearms flexing beneath her shawl. She looked back at the television.

  "Shut up, Roland," his brother Tony said placidly. Tony had remained in East Texas to work the farm. He weighed 350 pounds and bench-pressed over six hundred.

  Roland grew silent.

  "The Messiah don't have to be black," Martha said.

  "If he was, he'd be sent to jail," Roland muttered under his breath.

  "Shut up, Roland," Tony said.

  In Minneapolis, Minnesota, Minh Tran bowed three times before the prayer doll left to her by her dead son. The boy who had brought the doll to her was in need of her prayers.

  Slowly she rolled her ivory prayer beads between her palms and began the long chant whose words had been transliterated centuries ago from ancient Sanskrit writings.

  Minh did not understand the words of the chant, but that did not matter, since the words and their meaning were of no importance. It was the sound of the prayer itself that held the magic. Through her chant, she would set up the vibration of a holy thought that would travel through space and envelop the quiet American boy who had once driven so far to tell Minh that her son had died.

  Before she began the ritual of the chant, she had been watching the television, on which the boy had appeared, surrounded by a nimbus of light. Minh had only seen such a light once before, when she had been a very young child in Saigon.

  The light had appeared around a monk who was buying a papaya from a street vendor. Minh had watched him shyly from around the corner of a building. He spotted her and smiled as she ducked behind the crumbling stones. In those days Minh had been afraid to speak to anyone. She had awakened one morning to find her mother lying dead, her face red as a demon's and her tongue cut out. Minh had fled, screaming, and for three days she had lived on the street, hiding from whomever might have come into the apartment where she and her mother had lived and then taken nothing but her mother's tongue.

  By the time she saw the monk, she was dizzy with hunger. And so she was surprised and delighted when she peeked again from behind the building to find the papaya, freshly cut and waiting for her.

  After she ate the papaya, the monk, who was still a young man, picked her up and carried her to a weeping woman whom Minh would come to call her mother, although she would always remember that her real mother had died without her tongue, and that no one had ever found out who had killed her, or why.

  All of Vietnam was in chaos then, with soldiers and businessmen and criminals from everywhere filling the streets of the city, getting drunk and finding women and laughing, while just outside the perimeter of lights they were cutting one another with knives and shooting bullets into village children. Some said that the Americans were the barbarians; others, the French. Still others blamed the northerners, who had embraced the ways of the Chinese and turned their backs on sacred things and the ancient Buddhist chants.

  But the monk had believed that they were all wrong, that everyone who lifted a hand in violence insulted the gods and brought shame upon all humanity.

  At least that was what he said before he sat down in the middle of the Street of Plum Blossoms and recited the short poem that was the summation of his life and thoughts.

  Later, Minh would understand that he had chosen that particular street for his final act of humanity because the flower of the plum tree blooms even in snow, but she never heard the poem, because the woman to whom she had been given turned away then, sobbing loudly and trying to cover Minh's eyes and ears as she ran down the street with bouncing short steps.

  But before she was taken out of sight of the monk, Minh saw the glow around him once more, and it was brighter than before, a halo of light that nearly blinded the girl as she watched the young man in the process of accepting his death.

  When she heard the thwoop of flames as the monk immolated himself and the gasps of the other people on the street, Minh turned around and for a moment, before the weeping woman pressed Minh's face into her chest to prevent her from watching, saw the monk sitting calmly in the midst of a gasoline-fed fireball. But the aura around him was stronger than ever then, diminishing even the flames that surrounded him.

  Since that day Minh had chanted for him, sending the sound of her prayers to whatever realm the monk now dwelt, believing him to have been one of the true holy beings alive at any given time on the plane of earthly life.

  But for today, she would chant for the boy who had brought rain and food to the people on the road. Because he, too, had a wide aura of light around him. Like the monk in Saigon, his life was burning too brightly, and would soon be extinguished.

  Titus Wolfe watched the last minutes of the broadcast from the bar of the Bluejay Motel. At the far end, near the restrooms, Pinto played intently on a pinball machine.

  Pinto had left him reasonably alone. That was something in his favor. He spoke little, and fended for himself. Titus had no idea where Pinto got any money—stole it, he supposed—but he seemed to have some, at least enough to feed himself. Titus saw little of him during the evening, when he himself stayed in the motel room, out of sight until his wound healed. Pinto only returned to sleep, smelling of beer, and Titus asked no questions.

  Meanwhile, Titus's entire appearance had changed. Aside from his dark hair with its artificial bald spot, his moustache, and the overbite provided by the dental appliance in his mouth, he had also made a point of eating as much as he could. Already the contours of his normally sculpted, almost gaunt face had filled out a little. Nothing changed one's appearance like weight gain. Within three months he would be unrecognizable.

  It would take at least that long for the panic in Cheyenne to die down. That was all right. There was plenty of time to get back to the missile silos. The important thing now was to get out of the country.

  But that, too, would h
ave to wait. Sea Legs was not scheduled to dock in Atlantic City for another two weeks. Titus had confirmed the pickup through an Internet connection with the Coffeehouse Gang made at the public library. The captain of the boat would not jeopardize his operation by changing his schedule. It was up to Titus to avoid capture until the appointed time.

  Fair enough. Who was the Fed, he had wanted to know. The one who had been shot and hospitalized.

  The answer had come within four minutes: Hal Woczniak, former FBI agent. During his truncated hospital stay, he had met twice with current agents.

  Titus did not ask for any more information. The Coffeehouse Gang would already know that Woczniak had given Titus's description to the Feds. Now they would be watching Titus. The FBI would not catch him alive, he knew. Lucius Darling and his network would never permit that.

  So it was important that he make the rendezvous with Sea Legs. But that was two weeks in the future. Between now and then, a great deal could happen.

  He was about to order another drink when the television screen filled with the image of a huge crowd assembled on I-90. The scene showed a motley group of people, some chowing down on the salmon and bagels that had spontaneously been offered, some on their knees and in a state of bliss.

  "Assholes," a patron of the Bluejay Lounge said.

  "Yeah, some people'll do anything for a free meal."

  "They want to be on TV, that's all it is."

  Then came the angry motorists, the frustrated policemen, and the men on motorcycles who looked nervously toward the boy who was at the center of it all.

  "And him!" a bleary-eyed fellow working on his third boilermaker huffed, pointing to Arthur Blessing's image on the screen. "You'd think the little shit was God Almighty, the way they go on about him."

  "Drugs," someone offered by way of explanation. "Got to be on drugs."