The Broken Sword (10 page)

Yes, Hal thought, he was very good.

And so while Arthur was still an easy target with nowhere to hide, just a moment or two before Hal would have been expected to turn over the cup, he dropped it to the pier with a clatter, then threw up one leg in a high three-sixty roundhouse kick that knocked the gun out of the man's hands.

The move took Aubrey completely by surprise. He had been expecting a retired FBI agent with the reflexes of a walrus, but the American's timing had been a work of art. Before he could recover from the first blow, Hal grabbed him by the throat and pummeled Aubrey's head into the splintered boards.

And the cup rolled on, down the pier, slowing as it crested each warped plank, veering first right, then left, glinting dully in the moonlight, until it came to rest at Beatrice's feet.

She picked it up, unbelieving, then held it up to show Arthur.

"Hal!" the boy called. "We've got it! Come with us!"

Hal looked up. It was only for an instant, but an instant was all it took for Aubrey to grab the gun lying on the pier. He smashed its stock across Hal's cheek.

As Hal reeled backward, Aubrey caught sight of the boy and took careful aim. Hal lunged at him on all fours, like a wild bull, dragging him down. A shot fired into the air as the two men rolled over one another toward the edge. Then, as Arthur watched, rooted to the place where he stood, Aubrey kicked upward with both feet, sending Hal hurtling over the edge.

Staggering to his feet, Aubrey aimed at the water and fired. Once, twice. Then he turned and crouched, directing the fat web of the barrel directly at Arthur.

"Hurry," Taliesin whispered as he threw Arthur bodily into the open hold of a ship. The interior was stacked with crates. He shooed Arthur and Beatrice up the ramp and over the crates into the darkness of the hold, where they sat in numb silence as the gunman from the pier fired at the place where they had been a moment before.

In the distance, some sailors were walking and shouting good-naturedly to one another in what sounded like English. Arthur stared into the blackness of his hiding place, hearing them but unable to concentrate on their words. Unable to think of anything but the sight of Hal windmilling into the water, and the shots that had followed.

They were both gone now, Emily, who had raised him from infancy, and Hal, who had been the only father he'd ever known.

Hal...

Hal was dead.

In time, the sailors walking down the dock approached the ship and finished loading the crates. Their ribald jokes and loud voices turned the atmosphere around the pier from silent terror to a workaday warmth, but Arthur felt none of it.

For him the world had ended, and when Beatrice reached out in the darkness to clasp her hand over his, he felt only the hot tears of his loss running down his face.

O
n the dock Aubrey
waited, his jaw clenching both from the pain in his face and from his impatience. He had expected the drunken sailors to pass the ship where the old man and the children with the cup had entered. He stood in the shadows, feeling the blood harden in the fine lines around his eyes, as the men took their time loading the hold.

He did not mind the pain; Aubrey knew he deserved every bit of the beating the American had given him. He should never have depended on Saladin's relatives to kill for him. The gunman who had come so highly recommended by the Lagouat clan had failed miserably, and would never be seen again.

It had been essential that the American be killed first. With his protector dead, the boy would have led Aubrey straight to the cup. Then three shots in the darkness, and the cup would have been his, with no witnesses, no problems.

He would never use the relatives again.

"Hey, you!" one of the sailors called, pointing unmistakably at Aubrey. "What do you want, huh? You got a problem or what?"

Cautiously, Aubrey took two steps forward—not enough to show his face, but enough to allay any fears the sailor might have. "Where is this ship headed?" he asked pleasantly.

"Port of New York."

"Ah." From where he stood, he could see the ship's name, the S.S.
Comanche,
on its prow. "The container port in Newark?"

"Yeah," the sailor answered. "And we're shipping out now, so get your ass out of here."

"Certainly," he said genially. He walked back along the dock to the place where the American had fallen. It had been difficult to see, particularly with blood running in Aubrey's eyes, but he had sensed that one of the bullets had struck.

The tide was going out. With the active surface current in the Strait of Gibraltar, the corpse had probably already begun its journey down the twelve-mile-wide channel separating Tangier from Spain. By daylight, it would be swallowed by the vastness of the North Atlantic.

So all there was to do was to reach the United States and wait for Arthur Blessing and his magic cup when the S.S.
Comanche
docked. Despite Aubrey's colossal frustration, the thought of taking the cup in America was rather thrilling. In a country where violent crime was so commonplace, it would be easy to kill two children and an old man.

He would find someone—no Arabs, please, not after tonight—to get rid of the girl and the old man. But the boy's death had meant a great deal to Saladin. Aubrey would kill Arthur Blessing himself. He would take his time, find some inventive method of doing away with the little bugger.

For old times' sake.

As the ship pulled out, its foghorn booming, Aubrey saluted it with a little wave of farewell.

 

 

 

 

THE SWORD

D
awn was breaking, and
Hal was cold. It had been nearly seven hours since he had emerged, frantic and gasping, from the grip of the undertow that had carried him away from shore.

The first few moments had been a welter of confusion and despair. Images of the past hour—the waiter's blood spurting out in the dining room, the panicked stampede to the exit after the fire started, the dark man's smile as he held the gun to Arthur's head at the pier—came to him in a jumble, mixed with the sensation of the water and the sound of Katsuleris' two bullets thudding into the pylon near him as the current carried him under.

His only thought at the time was to breathe as the riptide smashed him against underwater boulders and tangled him in kelp. Afterwards, he wondered why he had bothered; and yet he had fought against the current, fought with all his body and will for one gulp of air before the tide grasped him again, pulling him out farther, farther into the cold black water of the channel.

The second time he came up, he was nearly unconscious. The black water had melted into the starless sky seamlessly. Hal was not aware of when the current had let him go, or of when he had started to breathe again. All he knew was that he was floating alone in the channel with a piece of rotted board under his head. Both his shoes and one sock were missing. So was his watch. Dim lights were scattered like pinpricks in the black shroud that surrounded him. There was a larger light somewhere to the left of his big toe: The lighthouse in Tangier, he presumed.

Miles away.

He might have slept then; he didn't remember. Then, as the sky was changing color from black to cobalt and a thin, sparkling line of light appeared on the waves in the east, he heard something. It was only momentary. When he strained to hear it, the sound was gone, drowned out by the susurration of the waves. Still, Hal was certain he had heard something.

Then he saw it, off to the west, barely visible against the still-inky sky: a boat. It was a trawler of some kind, steaming toward him. As it neared, the noise Hal had heard grew steadily louder, then stopped abruptly as the trawler's engine was cut. The men on board were shouting to one another in a language Hal didn't recognize as they lifted a net heavy with fish onto the deck.

He tried to signal to it, but found that his arms were too stiff with cold to lift. He struggled in the water, managing only to knock away the board on which his head and chest were resting. With the effort, his legs stiffened with cramps, and he felt himself going under again, flailing, gasping for breath.

"Hey!" he shouted. "Over here!" He heard his voice ring across the water with a curious loudness before being silenced in the swell of a wave. Water washed over his head. He sputtered and coughed, then went under again. It would be an easy death, he thought.

And Arthur? Was he dead, too? During his last moments on the dock, Hal had been the only thing between Arthur and the killer.

But they had the cup. Yes! Arthur still had the cup, and Taliesin was with him. The old man would look after Arthur until Hal found them. Suddenly he wanted very much to live.

"Help!" he yelled, disappointed that he sounded so feeble. His voice had seemed loud only a moment ago.

Or was it an hour…

His last conscious memory was the sound of the trawler's engine starting up again.

The castle was filled with ghosts.

In the Great Hall, Hal sat among them at the Round Table, uncomfortable in the big chair. They watched him, these long-dead men dressed in chain mail and leather, their eyes attentive. The chair had stood empty for sixteen hundred years, while one of their number had gone into the world, born and reborn, again and again, looking for their lost king.

Then, as they watched, a swirl of moondust encircled the Siege Perilous and the visitor who sat upon it. Hal gasped as light frozen from a time that had passed into legend a millennium before burst into life and gathered around him.

"Galahad,'' one of the knights whispered. He was Launcelot, first among the Companions and father to the young knight who had been chosen for this special, earthly quest. Launcelot had recognized him even though his son now bore a different face and a new body.

"Galahad!" the others affirmed, their voices deafening in the cobwebby silence. They raised their swords to him.

"But I'm not..." Hal protested. “You don't know..."

But they drowned him out, calling the name again and again because they remembered, as he himself did not, that the name was his own, and that he had indeed, after sixteen centuries of searching, found the King.

Water gushed out of his mouth. Hal came to, coughing, his eyes streaming. He gulped a mouthful of air, convinced with half his mind that it would kill him, but unable to resist.

It tasted of fish. It gurgled in his lungs and he coughed again, so hard that it drew his shoulders up off the hard surface where he lay, then thumped him back down again.

Someone had covered him with a blanket. Hal could not yet feel its warmth, but his arms registered the prickliness of the wool. A stranger's face moved in front of him, very close. The man's skin was lined and brown from a lifetime in the sun, with two deep creases between the palest of blue eyes. He spoke in the strange language Hal had heard on the sea, then turned his head to repeat it to a group of men who had gathered behind him. Slowly they came into focus, each of them frowning down at Hal.

"
O Borracho
?" the man asked. Hal shook his head. The man said something else, waited in vain for a response, then sighed.

"
Americane
," one of the men behind him said, holding up Hal's wallet. The man with the blue eyes stood up stiffly and examined it, glancing at the wad of hundred-dollar bills inside, riffling through the documents attesting to Hal's existence: a New York driver's license, an out-of-date voter registration card, the business card from his last place of employment—a garage in Marrakesh specializing in European cars—and a torn piece of old newspaper. "Arold," the blue-eyed man read, trying to sound out the name on the driver's license. "Arold Wocks… Wuzzi..." Shaking his head, he handed the wallet somberly to Hal.

"Woczniak," Hal said. "Thank you." His throat still burned from salt water. Blinking hard to keep his thoughts in focus, he fished half the bills from his wallet and offered them to the man. "Hey, thanks for helping me out," he said, struggling to rise. "I'd like to…"

The man with the blue eyes shook his finger at the money, then gently pushed Hal backward so that he was leaning against the cabin wall. He adjusted the blanket around him and made a gesture for Hal to rest. Then he turned away and shouted at the others.

Hal watched for a few minutes while some of the men gathered up thousands of sardines from the deck of the boat and tossed them into a hole in the floor and others untangled the big nets, readying them to cast once again into the sea. The blanket and the sun overhead were beginning to warm him. The gentle motion of the boat was lulling and comfortable.

He did not know when he fell asleep, but when he awoke, the sun was nearing its zenith and the boat heading toward land. It was not Tangier. The houses of the small village along the shore were not Moroccan, and the people he saw at the dock were white. He had gone to the other shore, then. To Spain? But the language was not Spanish. The musical tongue spoken by the men on the fishing boat sounded, to Hal's untrained ear, like an admixture of French and German.

After unloading the trawler's catch into a van filled with ice and lined with plastic shower curtains, the man with the blue eyes helped him to his feet and led him off the boat.

On the dock, a man cooking eels on a smoky grill waved to them. The sailor with Hal waved back, then gestured expansively at the collection of crumbling stone and plaster houses on the cobblestone street above them. "Santa Amelia," he said lovingly, leading Hal up some rickety wooden steps. "Portugal."

"Portugal?" Hal repeated. "I can't be in Portugal."

He looked up and down the road. Behind the sardine van, which was heading into the inland hills, walked a mule led by two children. Two boxy women wearing cotton dresses and ankle socks smoked cigarettes beneath a weather-beaten poster with the symbol of the Communist hammer and sickle on it. "American Embassy?" he asked.

The fisherman held up a finger and nodded, the universal symbol for "wait." Then he took him by the arm and led him up the street. "Olazabal," he said, thumping his chest.

"Olazabal? That's your name?"

The fisherman nodded. "Juan Marco Olazabal." His lips curved into something almost resembling a smile on his taut, sculpted-stone features, then thrust his chin at Hal. "Arold," he added.

"Hal. Call me Hal."

"Hall. Okay."

O
lazabal's house was on
the village's main street. Made of stone, it was immaculately whitewashed, with a garden in back. The fisherman threw open the front door with a bang and a shout. His wife, stirring a pot of some fragrant stew over a woodburning stove, smiled shyly, wiped her hands on the stained apron she was wearing, and came to take his hat. She bowed politely to Hal, then immediately placed two wooden bowls filled with clams and sausages in red broth on the table, along with a basket of crusty bread and a bottle of pale wine, which she poured into coffee cups. Olazabal wiped his hands on a rag and sat down, gesturing toward Hal's bowl.

"Ameijoas,"
he boomed, smiling.

Hal tasted it and thought he would die of happiness. As he ate, he realized that it had been his first meal in more than two days.

"Bom?"
Olazabal asked.

Hal nodded.
"Bom,"
he repeated. "Very good."

With a roar of good humor, the Portuguese slapped him on the back so hard that the piece of bread in Hal's mouth flew across the table. Then he laughed some more.

By the time dinner was over, Hal could barely sit upright. "I have to get to the Embassy," he said breathlessly. "I floated over to Portugal without a passport, and I've got to get back."

"Passaporte. Si,"
Olazabal repeated, holding his finger up again. "Ah." His stone features broke into a gap-toothed smile as the wooden door creaked open and a young woman walked in.

"Antonia!" he shouted.

"Papa," she answered breathlessly, removing a scarf from her head. "Mama." She nodded at Hal, but no one introduced him. Both Olazabal and his wife shouted a torrent of remarks, gesticulating freely toward their unexpected guest. As they spoke, she looked over at Hal, her expression alternately friendly and appalled.

"My father says he found you in the ocean," she said, sitting down at the table across from him.

"You speak English."

"Yes. I work in Faro, a short distance. Many English come there. Also Americans. How did you come to be in the ocean so many miles away?"

"I fell in. Off a dock in... Tangier."

"Tangier! But you should not have lived!"

"You're not the only one who feels that way," Hal said.

"No, my English is not perfect. I meant it is very far to Tangier. A long distance to stay in the ocean." She smiled. "Do you have family in Tangier?"

Family. Arthur was as close as Hal had ever come to having a family. Arthur and, he had once hoped, Emily. Were either of them still alive?

He couldn't think about that, he told himself. It would do no good. He would have to assume they were, that Emily had gotten out of the hotel, and that Taliesin had taken Arthur and Beatrice out of the city to a place of safety.

The question was, where?

Antonia was still smiling sweetly, waiting for Hal to answer her question. "Uh... no," he said. "I was just passing through."

"Then perhaps you were meant to come here. To help someone."

Her gaze could have bored holes through him. She was looking at him so intently that he was tempted to check over his shoulder, but suppressed the urge. "Yeah, maybe so," he said, trying to be agreeable.

Olazabal said something lengthy and mellifluous, accompanied by a variety of gestures. When he was through, Antonia nodded. "My father insists that you spend the night here, but I will take you to my place of work in the morning, if your health is good."

It seemed like an odd invitation. "Well..."

"I work in the passport office. You have lost your papers, yes?"

"Oh. Yes. Well, just my passport. I've still got my driver's license and things like that."

"Then it will not be a problem." She patted his hand. "You wish to go back to Tangier, yes?"

"Yes," Hal said. "Thanks."

Tangier was as good a place as any to start looking for Arthur.

But first he would find the bastard who had thrown him off the dock. Whoever he was, he knew about the cup, and would go after Arthur until he got it.

The cup, the damned cup! Hal almost hoped Taliesin would just leave it for the man to find. But he wouldn't do that. The old man knew even better than Hal what would happen if the cup fell into the hands of someone like the man on the dock. It was a vessel of dreams and wonder, too precious and too dangerous to be set loose in the world.

He sighed. He wished he'd never set eyes on the thing.

D
uring the evening, the
small house was filled with neighbors coming to get a look at the strange visitor who had been fished out of the sea like a sardine, but shortly their fascination for him diminished. The men played a pokerlike card game called
mus,
and the women gossiped in whispers, standing or seated on stools around an old woman draped in black like a nun. She was apparently the local wise woman who, according to Antonia, dispensed advice on every subject from giving birth to winning at cards. Occasionally one of the men would excuse himself from the
mus
table to consult with her as well.

"Dona Theresa is a
bruxa,"
Antonia said. "A witch. They wish for her to tell them how to win at the cards."

"What happens if they lose?" Hal asked.

Antonia shrugged. "Perhaps she will give them better advice next time."