Taliesin's breath caught. "Will you use it?" he asked.
"Yes."
Taliesin's mouth felt dry with excitement. Could it be that the Magic would be unnecessary, that the boy was ready, at last, to accept his role as King? "Then you... you'd like to stay here?" he asked.
Arthur smiled. "You know we can't do that. The knights are mine for life. My life. Once I'm gone, they can go back to the Summer Country."
"But that would be just like this place!" the Merlin said brightly.
"Not exactly," he said softly. "I wouldn't be there. Your King would."
The old man hung his head. Had the boy known that all along? It had taken himself sixteen hundred years to figure it out.
Arthur Pendragon, High King of Britain, only existed in the Summer Country. This boy might share the King's soul, but his physical life had always been his own. The life which the Merlin had taken from him, and which was now coming to an end.
Trembling, the old man bent slowly until he knelt on the cold stone in front of the boy. "Please forgive me," he whispered.
The boy touched his shoulder, and Taliesin felt a radiance wash over him, as if the sun itself resided in the tips of Arthur's fingers. "There is no question of forgiveness, old friend," he said.
"I will do anything you ask of me," Taliesin said.
"Good." He helped Taliesin back to his feet. "We need to go back. To my time."
"But why?" the old man said, agonized. "There is nothing that awaits you on that plane."
"Just the one thing." Arthur smiled crookedly.
He meant his death. It was coming swiftly. They could both sense it.
"Would it take a lot of magic to send the knights home before I... before it happens?" He took a last look out the window at the men who had cared for him so loyally and lovingly since he was a child, in a world as alien to them as the moon. They should not have to see their child murdered.
Because that was how it was going to happen. He saw that very clearly now.
"I'd like to send them off with dignity and a certain amount of ceremony."
"I understand," Taliesin said, his gaze downcast. "I can arrange it."
Arthur turned back around, calmly, serenely, as if he knew that his life would last for another fifty years.
"I'll tell the men to get ready," Arthur said.
Arthur called the knights off the practice field and lined them up. "We're going back," he said. The pleasant breeze stilled, and the air felt suddenly thick. "Tomorrow morning, you will return to the Summer Country, and your proper King."
"But that is you, Highness," Fairhands said.
"No." He smiled. "Although it has been my privilege to know each of you, I am not your leader. Camelot is not my home." He stood tall. "My name is Arthur Blessing. That is who I am. It is who I have always been."
There was a long silence. At last Bedwyr called out, "Then I shall follow you, Arthur Blessing, unto the ends of the earth!"
Fairhands bent onto one knee. "I, too, my lord."
"Aye," Lugh agreed.
In a body, each of the knights bowed before him. Then Launcelot rose to stand before the boy. "Do not put me from you," he said huskily. "For I would rather remain in hell with you than find my way to Paradise."
Taliesin watched from the window of the King's chamber. How bravely does he accept his mantle, the old man thought. What a good choice the gods made.
That night, while the knights and wizards and ghosts slept, Arthur kept vigil by the yellow rock of the Tor.
Here there were no lights except for the stars overhead, no noise except for the forest creatures who moved by night. It was into this dark and silent world that Arthur Pendragon had come, he mused. For the first time in many years, he did not think of that distant being as the Other. The High King had once been a living being like himself, neither man nor boy, but poised between the two, and burdened with a responsibility that he had not pursued.
He sat up. It was true: The great King of the Celts had never sought the crown. He had never jockeyed for power. He had not pursued his own ambitions. He had not even insisted on keeping his woman.
But he had done what he could. Every day until the moment of his death, which he knew with certainty was coming on the day of the battle at Camlan, he had done his best in service to the crown which had been thrust upon his head.
Could he have stopped the Saxon invasion if he had stood up to the petty kings?
Would he have been a happier man if he had kept Guenevere as his queen?
Might it all have been different without the sword in the stone?
A figure appeared in the clearing, her face lit by the light of the full moon.
"Gwen," he said softly.
"Someone is coming," she said urgently. "A man. I think he's going to try to kill you."
He took in this information without emotion. "So that's how it will be," he said.
"We have to get out of here."
"And go where?" he asked calmly.
"I don't know. Back home."
He nodded. "What will you do?"
She hesitated for a moment. "I need to bury my mother," she said.
"Could you check on Emily for me?" he asked.
"Sure, but won't you..." She frowned. "Arthur, aren't you coming?"
"I won't be able to stay long," he said softly.
"Oh." Her face fell. "I'd hoped—"
Another lifetime, thought the part of her that was Brigid. And for that moment, Gwen knew just how long she had loved this boy.
Slowly he took her in his arms and brought her to him. Their lips touched. A thousand images flashed behind their eyes as they struggled out of their clothes to come together as they had for thousands of years, the two of them, by whatever names they had taken, Brigid, Macsen, Guenevere, Arthur, the boy, the man, the King, maiden, mother, crone. None of it mattered. Nothing mattered now except that they were, however fleetingly, together once again. That at last they both belonged.
She touched his face. "Don't go," she said.
His eyes welled. "It's not my choice."
She made an almost imperceptible gesture of acceptance. "I understand."
"Do you?"
Her eyes were sad, old, wise. The eyes of the dying queen. "Yes," she said. "I do."
"I love you, Gwen," he said.
"I love you, too."
He held her fiercely to him. "I said I would wait for you forever," he said, "and I will. However long it takes, wherever you are, I will find you. I promise you that."
A tear fell from her face onto his cheek. "I'll remember," she said. She kissed him again. "But all we have in this lifetime is tonight."
"Yes."
"Will it be enough?"
"It will," he said.
The moon shone upon them, naked in a field of wild-flowers.
It was all either of them had known of happiness in their lives, and it was enough.
In the blue predawn hours, Arthur, Merlin, and the knights gathered on the Tor.
"Not too close to the stone," the wizard said, preparing the magic that would take them back. "The thicket's grown considerably in sixteen centuries. Wouldn't want to be stuck inside it." He cleared his throat. "Now, then." He shook back the sleeves of his robe.
Then there was one white flash and a moment in which they felt as if they were floating in fog. When it cleared, they were standing just where they had been, except that a huge expanse of impenetrable brambles now surrounded the great yellow stone for a mile in each direction.
Launcelot drew his sword.
"Not that way," Taliesin said gently. He raised his bare hands, and the brambles and thorns shimmered before him, then melted away into air, closing again behind them as the men moved forward into the new century.
Behind the wizard walked Arthur and Gwen, side by side. Although nothing had been said, the others stayed apart from them, allowing space for the invisible nimbus that surrounded the young couple like a shroud. The knights pulled up
the rear, with Launcelot in the center of the front line.
Death lay thick on the air, heavy as ropes. Launcelot did not know why Arthur was going to die, or how. He only knew that it would come to pass, just as it had before. How many more times would he be forced to walk behind Arthur on his way to death? For even in his own hell nothing, nothing could be worse than this: to feel the same sorrow in life after life, the same regret, to watch the great King fall time and time again because of the venal desires of cruel and petty beings, like a lion brought down by jackals.
And who were the jackals this time, Launcelot mused. Who had taken the place of the petty kings in this life? The ones with the sirens and guns, or the ones who made the pictures on the television?
Or was it just all the lost ones clinging to Arthur, wanting him to bring them the happiness they could not find for themselves? Were all Kings expected to provide what only each man himself could find, and therefore always fail?
He looked up from his ruminations to find, to his astonishment, a large white wolf, very old and quite blind, loping beside him.
"Don't be alarmed, Lance."
The knight's face reddened. It was the damned pagan magician again, he thought, his fist clenching around the hilt of his sword. "What the devil are you doing now?" he growled.
"I absolve you," the wolf said. "When this is done, you can go to your god."
Launcelot coughed. "Blasphemy!" he sputtered. "How dare you, you heathen trickster—"
"Because you understand. It was for you that he came back."
The knight was taken aback. "What? For me? What are you talking about?"
“To show you that he forgave you. And Guenevere. And the Merlin, too. That he'd forgiven all of you from the beginning." The wolf panted. "It was the love he had for you that mattered, not your betrayals."
Launcelot stood stock still.
"You'll go home this time, knight. To heaven."
At first he did not respond. His gaze darted from the wolf to the Merlin, and then back again. Then his jaw began to tremble. His lips worked, trying to bring himself under control before he allowed himself to speak. "I'm a soldier," he said hoarsely. "A soft afterlife will be no reward for me." He kept his eyes facing forward, unwavering. "With Galahad gone, I'll stay with the boy, if it's all the same to you."
The wolf cocked her head, understanding. "There are many ways to look at heaven."
In the next moment the animal was gone. Launcelot looked to the others, who had passed him and continued walking toward the rock.
Finally they came upon it. The altar stone stood in the center of the clearing Merlin had made, massive and yellow and worn smooth with time. In the middle of it jutted the ancient sword Excalibur, just as it had sixteen centuries before, when Guenevere first came upon it, just as it had been left sixteen centuries before that, when the priestess Brigid had thrust it into the altar of the Cailleach.
Chapter Fifty
VORACIOUS
The Tor first appeared to Titus Wolfe through the window of a taxicab. Parched and shivering with fever, he had taken the cab from Dover, giving the driver all the money in his possession, a wad amounting to some four thousand pounds.
There was something forbidding about the sawed-off mountain. To Titus, it looked like some ancient ziggurat standing as a challenge to him. As the cab approached the village of Lakeshire and the Tor at its outskirts, he felt his heartbeat quickening, thudding louder with each passing moment.
"What's that you said?" the driver asked genially. It was his last fare of the day, and luck was with him. It hadn't been the first time a drunken sailor had given him a month's pay for a ride. Usually that ride ended up at a whorehouse, but he didn't mind making the extra effort to drive the fellow to Lakeshire. There was still plenty of time to get home, play some darts, buy the lads a pint...
Titus grunted fuzzily.
"Is this where you wants off, gov?" the cabbie said, louder. "Not that it matters. I can drive you wherever you says, long as it's—"
"Here." Titus tried to rouse himself to action. His lips felt stuck together. It hurt to pull them apart. He blinked twice and propped his hands on the arms of the taxi’s doors. He could smell himself, stale, unwashed, redolent of whiskey and vomit. "I'll get out here."
He rummaged in his pockets, turning them inside out. "I'm sorry."
"Already paid in full, sir," the cabbie said with a grin. The grin wobbled uncertainly as his passenger lurched out onto the open road. The poor sot had given him every cent he'd had, and didn't even remember doing so.
Feeling guilty, the driver reached into his pocket for a bill. The least he could do for the man was to leave him enough money for a meal and a phone call after he sobered up. "'Ere you go," he said, holding out a tenner, but Titus had already spilled out of the cab and was shambling across the road toward the Tor.
The driver got out, put the bill away, and then closed the back door which Titus had left wide open. "Christ," he said, shaking his head as he got back behind the wheel.
As he drove back the way he'd come, he passed a car parked alongside the road. The driver of this vehicle, a tweedy sort in his late sixties, was getting out as the cab passed. He gave the cabbie a cordial nod and stretched grandiloquently.
The cabbie might not have noticed the man at all, had it not been for one thing: The tweedy man had been taking something out of the car as the cab crested the hill, something he had hastily placed on the front seat as the cab passed.
The cabbie had only seen the object for a moment, but he had been fairly certain of what it was, if only for its incongruity in the hands of the professorial looking gent who had been carrying it.
It was an automatic rifle with a telescopic lens.
Odd sort of place for a hunt, the cabbie thought.
Lucius Darling looked after the receding taxicab for some time, holding his breath and cursing silently. He was getting old. He should have heard the cab's engine as it crested the hill. He should not have taken out the rifle so carelessly.
Chances were that the driver had neither noticed nor cared. And Darling would be changing cars within the next ten minutes. Lakeshire's parking lots would be filled with cars so easy to steal they might as well have their keys in the ignition. He would choose a Honda, if he could find one quickly. The favorite of car thieves everywhere, a missing Honda would cause no more concern to the police than a domestic argument.
As for his being identified by the cabbie, he'd take his chances. Darling had no police record whatever. If anyone cared to trace him through the rented car to his home, he would simply bring out a large barometer approximately the length and shape of a rifle, complete with canvas shoulder bag, and explain that he had been indulging in a hobby of weather tracking.
But it would not come to that. It never did.
He had killed sixteen of his former protégés. Titus was one of the last of the Coffeehouse Gang's bright young things. They had been recruited and developed to be the muscle of the organization, the eyes and hands of the KGB in Britain. But their time had passed. With Titus went the end of the dream, if it had ever been a dream. The very word seemed like an obscenity now, after all the killing, all the deceit and betrayal.
Darling had not meant to become a monster, no more than had Titus and Edgington and the rest. Monsters all, slain by their own kind.
He followed the small figure of Titus Wolfe as it staggered up the winding path leading to the top of the Tor. What he was planning to do there was anybody's guess. But then, Titus was not well in any sense of the word. Whatever demons he planned to meet at the crest of the hill were his own concern.
Darling would wait. He would give his beloved student a few more minutes.
He took a deep breath, reflecting on the fragility of life. For the man climbing the Tor, these breaths were his last. Within minutes his heart would explode and his legs would buckle beneath him. Titus's eyes, once eager with curiosity and aflame with passion, would circle dully and then
open wide in surprise before glazing over, his juices inviting the insects to feed upon him.
Titus Wolfe's ascent up the hill was laborious and stumbling. After a time, he did not even know why he was making the arduous climb. Only the image of the Tor in his mind kept him at his task.
Once, when he fell, the spidery weapon he had assembled before the debacle at Miller's Creek fell out of his jacket. He picked it up, barely able to hold it, so great was his shaking. His left hand, with its missing finger, was swollen beyond recognition. The bandage that had kept the area clean had long since fallen away. Now the stump was red and pus-filled, its edges turning black.
The infection had spread. He was burning with fever. He had neither eaten nor drunk anything in days. So much for disguising myself as a fat man, he thought. He was parched. His eyes hurt.
Come back to the Tor, the familiar voice sang to him. You will come back to make things right.
He was on all fours now, scrambling over the dry stones, cresting the final ridge. Yes, the Tor, he thought. He was almost home. Blinking from the dust, he crawled toward the clearing he knew he would find. He had seen it in a hundred visions since the night he had left Dawning Falls. There would be a man there, waiting for him.
The man he was supposed to kill.
Titus halted, confused. He could not remember who the man was or why he was supposed to kill him.
To make things right, the voice reminded him.
Oh, yes. It was a King of some sort. An assassination. It had all been planned long ago, even before the Libyans.
Squinting, he thought he could make out shapes in the clearing. Taking out the gun with its high-powered telescopic sight, he snapped it into position. Just to see.
The man would be waiting to die, Titus thought. It would not be a problem.
But he did not see a man at first. In the sight of the gun stood a woman. He frowned, adjusting the scope. What woman would be here?
And then he saw. It was his dead daughter, come back to life like his stick figure drawing. And in the foreground a white blur, moving, blocking his view.
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