Fall of Knight (11 page)

“I said,” Arthur repeated, adopting the same tone that Ruehl had used earlier when clarifying who “me” was referring to, “it is not mine to give.”

“I don’t understand,” said the Cardinal, his voice tinged with disdain. “You claim to be a king. If that is the case, then I’d think a king could do whatever he wanted to do.”

“In theory. I, however, am a civilized king,” replied Arthur, “and thus tend to recognize the rights of others.”

“Mr. Penn,” said Ruehl, looking as if he were fighting to keep his temper in check, “let us be…” He glanced uncomfortably at the cameras, clearly wishing that the reporters were not in the room recording every word that was being said. “Let us be candid here. It is in your best interests to cooperate.”

“Is it now?”

“Yes. From my understanding, you are in dire need of all the friends you can acquire. The Senate is holding hearings into the specifics of your election, with the contention that if you are who you say you are, then your election to the presidency represents a massive fraud. Furthermore, I noticed when I arrived the gathering crowds in front of the White House. These are people who are making—there is no other word for it—pilgrimages. The sick, the dying, crawling out of their deathbeds and coming here in the vain hope of drinking from the Holy Grail and cheating death.”

“Former President Penn is more than aware of that, as are we,” Ron spoke up.

“What sort of cruelty, then, is it to these people that you are offering them false hope—”

“I’m not offering anyone anything,” Arthur said a bit heatedly. “The Grail was obtained as part of a quest in which good men and women risked their lives in pursuit of a higher purpose. I did not seek to publicize either the Grail’s existence or its restorative powers. These came about thanks to the fact that modern technology deprived us of our privacy. The fact that there are now people seeking the Grail’s aid is not…unforeseen by me.” He hesitated and looked slightly pained. “The problem is obvious. It was one thing to act quickly when that reporter was stricken. But if we begin a policy of treating some, then we must treat all. People must be discouraged from gathering outside the White House, because if they are not, they will come from all over the globe in a never-ending stream. Washington will shut down. And I will spend the rest of my life doing nothing else but ministering to the ill. Were I a saint, I suppose it might be an endeavor I would undertake. But I am not. And furthermore, there is a simple aspect that is being overlooked: The Grail is not mine.”

“Not yours?” said the Cardinal. “I don’t understand…”

“The statement is self-explanatory. The Grail is not mine. It is his.” And he gestured toward Percival to come forward. Percival took several strides forward, looking as if he was gliding as he did so. “You may have read about him in literature. This is Percival. He is one of my knights.”

Immediately flashes began going off as the reporters started snapping pictures. Percival winced against the barrage of lights but remained stoically silent. Several reporters were calling out asking to check the spelling of his name, since there was some confusion as to whether it was Percival, Parcival, or Parsifal.

“Gentleman!” Ron shouted above them, quieting them. “You are here with the understanding that you will pose no questions unless invited to by the participants. You are being allowed here because of the historic importance of this meeting. We will not have this degenerate into a free-for-all.”

“This is ridiculous!” the Cardinal said, as if Ron hadn’t spoken. “There were no black knights of the Round Table!”

“Oh, you’re an expert in that field now, are you?” Arthur asked in amusement. “Have a good deal of first-person experience?”

The Cardinal sputtered a moment, then calmed himself by taking a deep breath and forcing a smile that looked like something a pit bull would display, presuming dogs could smile. “So not only are you King Arthur, but you have one of your knights of the Round Table with you as well. How…impressive. Very well. Should I address you as ‘Sir Percival’?”

“‘Percival’ will be fine,” rumbled Percival. Ron could tell that the Grail Knight was deliberately pitching his voice lower to sound even more impressive. Inwardly he grinned at that. Percival had been around long enough to witness the slow, steady battle for equal rights that had been the legacy of blacks in America. So here he now was, in the White House, with everyone including an emissary from his Holiness waiting to hear what he had to say.

“Very well. Percival. Your…liege here…would that be right?”

This generated some more guffaws from the press until Percival said with complete sincerity, “That would be right.” The seriousness with which he addressed the clearly sarcastic question of the Cardinal silenced all the laughers.

“Your liege has said the Grail does not belong to him. That it is, in fact, yours.”

“Were Arthur to order me to present it to him, I would do so. But he would never do that. He has far too much respect for me.”

“And I’m sure it’s well earned,” the Cardinal assured him. “But let’s get down to it, then. Since the alleged Grail belongs to you…and presuming you heard the directive from His Holiness…”

“I heard it,” Percival confirmed.

“Then you would certainly have developed your own answer, yes?”

“Yes.”

“Excellent!”

“And the answer is no.”

The Cardinal was out of his seat when Percival said it, and this time he made no effort to restrain himself. “How dare you!” snapped the Cardinal. “How dare you dismiss a request coming directly from His Holiness in such a disrespectful manner!”

“To be fair, your Eminence,” Ron said quickly, trying in futility to stave off complete disaster, “I saw nothing disrespectful in Percival’s tone.”

“It isn’t his tone! It’s that he’s saying ‘no’ at all! The Catholic Church—”

“I don’t trust the Church, sir,” Percival said quietly. “I have a few more years of existence than you. I am a Moor, sir, and I have witnessed firsthand the brutality that organized religion—particularly yours—can inflict upon people. I risked life and limb to obtain the vessel, and I see no reason to entrust it to a sanctimonious institution that has a history of inflicting torture and death upon innocent people.”

The Cardinal was across the room, boiling mad, ignoring the TV cameras and the bevy of reporters, ignoring Ron’s frustrated efforts to get him to sit back down and take a moment to calm himself. “I won’t stand here and be libeled by you!”

“Slandered. Libeled is written,” Percival said, his calmness seeming to grow in inverse proportion to the Cardinal’s rising anger. “Moreover, it’s neither if the statements in question are true.”

“You’re referring to matters of ancient history…”

“I know you have no offspring, Cardinal,” Percival said quietly. “Nevertheless, I’m sure you can comprehend how parents can look at their adult children and, to them, it’s only yesterday that they were infants. Decades of time pass in a subjective eyeblink. It’s much the same thing. The Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition, the Borgias, hundreds of other incidents big and small, many of which have been lost to the history books…they’re like yesterday for me, Cardinal.”

“You cannot possibly be insinuating that the positions taken by the Church or popes in those times remotely reflect the thinking of the Church now. And to focus only on the evils that can be laid at our door without taking into account any of the great things we’ve accomplished to benefit mankind…”

“I don’t deny that your church has also done good works,” Percival said diplomatically. “And the current Pope, whom I’ve never met, may be a perfectly decent agent of your God’s works on Earth. But you’re suggesting that I turn the Grail over to the Church permanently. I know what I’m talking about when I say that forever is a long, long time, and a lot can happen. If I am to accept the proposition that where the Church is now does not reflect where it once was…then certainly you have to admit that where the Church is now likewise does not necessarily reflect where its policies will be a hundred, two hundred years from now. And if those policies are less than beneficent, and you have the Grail in your possession…well, let’s just say that I feel more comfortable with the Grail in my hands rather than yours in the long term.”

One of the reporters could no longer contain himself. “How did you become immortal? Did you drink from the Grail too?”

There was an outside chance that Ron might still have managed to avoid complete chaos if he’d moved quickly enough to head off Percival’s reply. But even as he tried to say, “We’d rather not go into that at this time,” Percival spoke over him without hesitation: “Yes.”

“It doesn’t just cure you?” said another reporter, and a third called out, “It makes you live forever?”

“No!” shouted Ron.

“It can,” said Percival.

At that moment, Ron would never have believed that matters could possibly get worse as he tried to slam shut the floodgates that had burst open because of Percival’s flat admission. Everyone was talking at once, shouting out questions, and Ron was barking orders that the room was to be cleared while reporters were starting to push forward, each one bellowing questions one over the over.

Yet they did become worse, and that was because Cardinal Ruehl, raised in the rough streets of New York, was accustomed to making himself heard over the most raucous demonstrations. So despite all likelihood, when it seemed that all the voices were blending into one vast cacophony, Ruehl’s voice managed to get above all of them as he bellowed,
“If that cup can do what you say it can do, it belongs by rights to the Church because it acquired its powers through the might of our lord, Jesus Christ!”

To make matters even worse than that, it so happened that Percival was capable of being even louder than the Cardinal.
“Bullshit! Not only do its powers predate Christ, but it’s entirely possible that he acquired whatever abilities he might have had by drinking from the cup!”

At which point it was no longer necessary for anyone to shout. Both exchanges had been easily heard, and a deathly silence fell upon the room. All that kept going through Ron’s head at that moment was
Thank God POTUS isn’t here, thank God POTUS isn’t here…

“Are you telling me,” the Cardinal said slowly, as if he were weighing the notion of declaring a sentence of death upon him, “not to mention the millions of Christians throughout the world…that our lord Jesus Christ—”

It was entirely possible that Percival might have said something else, something far more severe, except that Arthur himself interrupted Percival before he could continue. “He is not telling you anything,” Arthur said. His jumping in prompted a glance from Percival, but the obedient knight instantly silenced himself in the face of his liege lord’s taking back control of the situation. “He is simply suggesting possibilities. I will grant you that these are possibilities that the Church may find upsetting, even blasphemous, to contemplate. Then again, once upon a time, the Church found it similarly blasphemous to suggest that the sun did not revolve around the Earth. Those who have suggested notions unpopular to the Church have faced everything from excommunication to torture and death, and yet subsequent generations decided their claims had merit and were true. So perhaps, just for once, the Church might want to keep an open mind before trying to destroy someone with an unpopular opinion.”

But the Cardinal wasn’t buying it. “We are not speaking of a forward-thinking notion that was subsequently proven true via science. We are speaking of a concept that is core to our very faith. The divinity of Jesus Christ can, must, and does come from his divine father who art in heaven. You cannot possibly suggest otherwise.”

“Were you there?” demanded Arthur.

“Of course not. That changes nothing.”

“The only thing that remains unchanged is humanity’s stubborn insistence on refusing to consider that which is beyond what is already accepted dogma.” Arthur shook his head in disappointment. “What in the world does it take to get people to look beyond themselves? When are we going to reach a point as a species where ‘What if?’ are not the two most profane words that anyone can utter?”

Gwen, who had kept so quiet that some had practically forgotten she was there, put a hand on Arthur’s arm. “He doesn’t understand, Arthur. They’ll never understand. And maybe it’s better. The last thing you want to do is challenge the beliefs of—”

“Why not challenge beliefs?” Arthur replied. “How else will new beliefs ever develop if the old ones remain sacrosanct? How will people learn? Grow? How else will they learn to—”

“To what?” demanded the Cardinal. “Learn to leave their God behind? Learn to abandon their faith? And who are they supposed to turn to, sir.
You?
Is that what this is about? Are you trying to create a cult of Arthur?”

“All I was trying to do was live a quiet life,” said Arthur. “Apparently that wasn’t enough.”

“So instead you return. How like a king.”

“I cannot say I appreciate your attitude,” Percival spoke up, and there was unmistakable menace in his voice. “Or your sarcasm.”

“And I do not appreciate this…this theater! This farce!” The last bits of the Cardinal’s more stately demeanor crumbled away as his street-warrior persona broke through the veneer of reserve. “This is just idiocy! Some sort of ridiculous game! A con! That’s all it is. You people are trying some sort of con game, and you don’t want us to have the alleged Grail because you know that you’ll be found out and exposed as liars and hypocrites!”

Arthur, who had seated himself at Gwen’s urging, exploded to his feet, standing with such fury and force that Percival—who’d been moving forward—stopped where he was.
“How
dare
you impugn my honor, sir!”

“Well, then why don’t you do something about it?” sneered the Cardinal. “Why don’t you strike me down with Excalibur!”

Instantly Arthur’s hand was at his side, and both Ron and Gwen shouted “No!” at the same time. It made no difference. Arthur gripped the invisible pommel of the sword that always hung, unseen, at his side. Enchanted by Merlin’s magiks, it was never visible unless it was withdrawn from its scabbard. That was exactly what happened as Arthur pulled the sword free from its sheath. It made almost no rasping sound as the blade left its sheath, but when Arthur whipped the enchanted sword around, it hummed through the air with the sound of a thousand angry bees. The mighty sword glowed with power, and swung straight at the Cardinal as if it were hungry to plunge itself in to him.