The Broken Sword (26 page)

Taliesin, however, had known it too well. Even in ancient times, evil had risen all around him, like the stench in a slaughterhouse.

He had been at his brother Uther's castle in Tintagel, on the southeastern tip of Wales, when word arrived that the druids had been massacred on their own island. While the castle occupants debated whether Mona had been attacked by the Romans or the Christians, Taliesin raced for the stables without packing so much as a jug of water.

He galloped for three days and two nights, stopping only long enough to buy a horse when the one he was riding collapsed from exhaustion beneath him. He reached the channel separating Mona from the mainland at sunset, and only by threatening a ferryman at the point of his dagger was he able to reach the island.

It was still smoking from the fires which had been set. No rain had fallen since the incident, and none among the herdsmen and fishermen from the mainland had dared to venture onto the place where so many powerful and angry spirits dwelled; and so it was that Taliesin was the first to see the carnage.

He noticed the trees first, from the boat. The massive oaks that had stood since before anyone's memory were charred sticks poking into the twilit sky.

"Come back for me tomorrow," he told the ferryman, who was looking around bug-eyed, as if expecting the ghosts of the dead to fly out at them. With a sigh, Taliesin took out a small leather pouch filled with silver and tossed it at the man's feet. "Tomorrow," he repeated.

The ferryman picked up the pouch and weighed it in his hand, considering if the silver were worth the risk.

"Daylight," he said. "Not night."

"Daylight," Taliesin agreed.

Finally the ferryman gave a curt nod and poled his craft back into the water.

And Taliesin was alone with his dead.

As he walked the familiar paths into the island's interior, the silence was so deep that it made his ears ring. There was no birdsong, no chattering of squirrels, no rustle of leaves. Every fragment of life here was gone. But as he walked deeper into the interior, the feeling that crept upon him was even worse than the specter of death. Something terrible had happened here. He could almost smell it.

The first sign was at the mounds where the holy ones had lived. On one of them, atop the scarred grass, lay a man's severed arm. Beside it was a large pentagram, its top pointing downward, drawn with blood.

"In this holy place," Taliesin whispered, numb with shock. Farther away, long gray objects swung from trees. They were the bodies of druids, still wearing what was left of their robes after the fire. There were dozens of them; most had fallen to the ground, the blackened ropes still around their necks, their faces distorted.

In what had been the sacred grove of oak trees—in the same sacred circle, in fact, where the rites of Beltane had been celebrated—five women lay naked, their throats cut.

"Who could have done this thing?" he rasped.

It is how the gods have chosen to die
, came the answer. Taliesin did not know whether the voice had been the Innocent's or his own, but the thought of her sprang into his mind, and with it a pang of fear that felt as if his guts had been cleaved by an axe.

The cave where she lived was nearby. There was no sign on the outside that betrayed any violence, but he knew, he knew.

He walked slowly into the sacred dwelling, dreading what he would find. Breathing shallowly to keep from vomiting over the stench of corpses dead more than four days, he stepped over the bloated, maggot-riddled bodies in the entranceway. These were horrible enough, he thought, but at least they had been killed quickly, with knives or swords. A trail of blood led through the passage toward the high chamber where the Innocent had, not so very long ago, listened to the petitions of her charges.

"Don't be here," he whispered roughly, feeling sweat pour into his eyes. "Don't."

And then he saw her, and a moan like the wailing of the dead themselves rushed out of him to fill the profound void of silence there.

She lay on the flat slab of the altar stone. On her belly was the sign of the reversed pentacle, and from beneath it her entrails had been pulled to spill over the sides of the stone. Through her feet were the blades of black iron knives. Her eyes had been plucked out. In her cupped hands, placed over her chest, was her tongue.

Taliesin fell to his knees. "Why?" he shouted, his voice echoing through the empty cave. "You could have fled, become invisible, walked through the walls! You were magic, you could have done anything! Why did you remain here?"

This time her voice was unmistakable.
It
was my time,
she said, somewhere between the echo of his words and the silence that followed them.
This is death in life, Taliesin, the black in the white. But the wheel will turn again. You will turn it. You and the one who lights your way.

"I cannot!" Taliesin screamed. "I do not possess enough magic to bring back the gods! There is not enough magic in the whole world for that, not in the whole... world..."

S
he had never known
evil, but he had.

And in the end, after all the Innocent had tried to teach him, Taliesin understood only one thing:

The gods were truly dead.

 

 

 

 

THE KINGDOM

"L
ords and ladies, the
tournament will begin in thirty minutes! Take your seats for the joust of the year—the year fourteen twenty, that is!"

"Fourteen twenty?" Kay chuckled. "The fool doesn't know what year it is."

"Time's passed since we last rode with Galahad," Curoi MacDaire said, snapping the map in his hands and squinting at it. "It's not four sixty-one anymore, Kay. Can't you see how things have changed? It's fourteen twenty now." Slowly he turned the map upside down. "It's damned hard to read by moonlight."

"Give me that!" Dry Lips snatched it away. "I told you Gawain should navigate. He's found our way through the whole of Britain, and now when we need him most—"

"Can't read," Gawain said, leaning against the side of the truck. "Map'd do me no good."

"Get away from the truck!" Hal shouted from beneath the hood. "Bedwyr's trying to change the tire."

Kay smothered a laugh. "That's one thing to be said for horses. You never have to change the legs on 'em."

Hal clenched his teeth. His life had become a nightmare since meeting these lunatics. On the plane they had behaved like wild men, guzzling every can of beer on board and then tossing the empties over their shoulders onto the heads of irate passengers. They spat peanuts at one another. Agravaine threatened a steward with his claw when he was told he couldn't have more pie. Lugh tied up one lavatory for several hours, flushing the toilet and running the water in the sink until the flight's supply was exhausted. Tristan, Fairhands, and Geraint Lightfoot serenaded a young woman at full throat, over the strong objections of a snarling executive trying to work at a laptop computer. When he broke the laptop over Fairhands' head, the resultant fracas almost caused the plane to go down.

They had been delayed at JFK for two hours while various complaints were lodged against the British Ski Team, and were able to leave only after Hal paid everyone, including the airline, for the damage they had incurred.

After finally renting a truck—a pickup with a removable top, which the knights removed instantly—Hal's charges demanded more food. He was heading for the nearest McDonald's Drive Thru when Dry Lips spotted a billboard for a restaurant in Jamaica, Queens, named The Round Table, advertising
a feast fit for a king!
and
all the roast beef you can eat!
When Hal refused to detour through Queens, the knights jumped out of the truck and began walking in different directions in search of the wondrous dining experience that awaited them at the Jamaican Round Table.

Five hundred and twenty dollars later (including damages), Hal was trying to find his way back to the expressway when MacDaire insisted on reading the map for him. Hal was inclined not to trust him at first, but the Irishman was so sure of the route—and Hal so exhausted—that he allowed MacDaire to guide him.

"To the right here, that's a good lad. You see, that'll be putting us on the way."

"The way to the city?"

"Aye, 'tis certain. Oh, and now here's a fine road to follow, right here you are, by Mithras!"

Half asleep, Hal followed the road until two things happened almost simultaneously: One was that he noticed that the urban landscape had changed not into Manhattan, but farmland. The other was that a tire had blown out with enough force to swerve the truck completely across the road into a field.

When he got out, the knights in the back of the truck were laughing heartily as Lugh swung his mace over the side. The right rear tire, directly beneath him, had a hole in it the size of a golf ball.

"What the hell are you doing?" Hal shouted.

Lugh looked crestfallen. The mace fell with a mighty thwack that punctured the truck's body in four places.

"Oh, shit," Hal said.

Lugh snickered.

"Crudely put, but a fine idea all the same," Tristan said, hitching up his ski pants as he stretched. "I won't be but a moment."

"Nor I." Geraint leaped out of the truck with the grace of an acrobat. Lugh lumbered after him, the mace swinging over his shoulder.

"Lugh! Leave that here!"

Lugh looked back, shrugged, and tossed over the weapon. It landed square on the middle of the hood, denting it with a deep crater. The radiator beneath it began to hiss.

"Great. This is just great," Hal said, throwing open the hood with a crash. Steam engulfed him. A stream of oil shot into his eye.

"The bloody thing's afire!" Kay shouted. "Hoses at the ready, eh?"

Following Kay's example, the remaining knights rallied around the engine, urinating copiously onto the radiator.

"Get away, you morons!" Hal yelled. He took a deep breath and backed away. "Just... give me some room, okay? I can fix this. Everything will be fine," he said in a voice that sounded far more calm than he felt. "Bedwyr, do you know where the jack is?"

"I do, Hal. And I can work it, too. I studied the pictures."

"Good. Go to it."

Proudly Bedwyr walked to the middle of the road, assembled the tool, and cranked it so that all his fellows might see. When the jack stood at its apex, he stepped back. "It is done, brother," he announced.

Hal peered out of the hood to see. "It's supposed to go under the truck, for chrissake," he snapped.

Correcting his error, Bedwyr had the fender raised and the exploded tire off by the time Geraint called to them. "It's a joust! A great joust, just over this meadow!"

Kay waved him away. "We've no time for it, boy," he said importantly, flicking his finger on the incomprehensible map. "The wagon may catch fire at any time, and we must be prepared to quench it." He leaned against the vehicle protectively. The jack fell over, and the truck came crashing down.

Bedwyr jumped up in a fury. "You near to killed me!" he raged, coming at Kay with arms outstretched.

"But the joust! There's more than twenty knights assembled on the field, all to fight at once."

Geraint's announcement stopped even Bedwyr. "Twenty knights? Is it to be a battle, then?"

"No, a tourney! And they're clad in outlandish style, armored from head to foot."

"This I must see," Kay said, hulking toward Geraint, the rest following eagerly behind.

"Hey, come back!" Hal shouted. "We've got to get to Manhattan!"

MacDaire stopped long enough to retrieve Lugh's mace. "We'll be back by the time you get the wagon fixed." He took a few steps, then circled back to pat Hal on the shoulder. "Though to tell the truth, lad, I think we might have been better off with horses," he added with a wink.

S
tretched across the entranceway
between two large gray papier mâché towers was a banner reading
renaissance fair.
Throughout the crowd of tourists milled ladies wearing conical hats and young men in doublets and hose. Occasionally a jester with bells on his hat jangled by, juggling and reciting silly poems. Stalls selling shepherd's pie and toad-in-the-hole reached to beyond where Hal could see, along with fortune tellers, quaint-looking games of chance, a puppet theater, jewelers, potters, glassblowers, leather workers, haystacks onto which children propelled themselves from swinging ropes, stacks of flower garlands, and a fire eater on a tiny metal stage.

Hal wandered through the huge crowd, straining for a glimpse of one of the Companions. He had given up on the truck after ten minutes, but the knights had already been well out of sight. By now they were thoroughly dispersed in what was possibly the only place in New York State where eleven men from the Middle Ages could wander at will without being noticed, at least until they killed someone.

His first clue was an overturned metal drum in front of an ale stall. "Thank God Lugh left his mace behind," he reassured himself as he headed toward it.

"Did you see a bunch of guys... uh, big, talk kind of funny—"

"Hey, you with them?" the stallkeeper demanded, tripping over the fallen barrel to get to him. Hal backed away. "Don't you go nowhere, Bud!"

Hal broke into a run. A thousand feet away and to the left he spotted a young man who looked like a jester, except that all the bells had been ripped off his hat and the knees of his hose were torn. He was sitting on a wooden bench talking and gesticulating with what might at one time have been a lute. The instrument's strings were severed and curling, and the neck swung at a broken angle from the wooden body. Several young women in costume stood around him, clucking sympathetically.

"Like I need this bullshit, you know?" he lamented to the women.

Hal almost hated to ask. "Bunch of big guys?" he ventured, unconsciously bowing out his arms. "Long hair..."

"No deodorant," the lutist finished. "They almost killed me."

"Consider yourself lucky," Hal said, but the lutist was preoccupied in recounting his tale. "Just because I didn't know a
song.
Jeez, I wasn't even asking for requests or anything. I was just walking along playing 'Greensleeves,' which is the only thing I know how to play on the lute, when this big dude with beer foam all over his face yells, 'You! Boy!'"

The lutist put his hand on his hip. "Now is that rude or
what?
He says, 'Play the Greasy Harlot's Jig.' I swear, that was the name. So I says, 'I don't know that,' like very polite and professional, you know, but then this guy starts to
sing
it, and I mean really loud, and the rest of them join in for like fifteen verses. I guess it's their club theme song or something. And then they start dancing."

"Which way did they go?" Hal asked.

"Oh, man, did they dance. It was like something out of a Fellini movie. And the whole time this lunkhead keeps smacking me and yelling,
'Play
it!
Play
it, damn you!'"

He wiped his forehead with his sleeve. "So finally I says,
'Sir,'
like that,
'Sir,
I
said,
I don't know The Greasy Harlot's Jig.' And he yells. 'Well, then you're a damn slow learner, you dickless bastard!'"

"Good old Kay," Hal said under his breath. "Which way—"

"Then he whips out this
sword!
Like this real
sword
, made of steel or whatever, and he says he'll skewer me like a chicken, and I'm trying to get the hell out of there because these other goons with him start whipping out their swords, too, except for one guy with a
spear,
for God's sake..."

One of the sympathetic ladies around him offered the unfortunate musician a bottle of water. He poured it over his head. "Hey. I can play piano at the Marriott in Long Island City anytime I want. I don't need a summer job with people threatening to kill me, you know?"

"Which way did they go?"

"Meanwhile, about a million people are gathering around, and they think it's all part of the schtick, they're clapping and singing the refrain about the greasy harlot while these guys are smashing my lute like it's a potato chip, and I'm sweating my ass off thinking these psychos are going to
murder
me and nobody's even going to know, everybody's going to think they're using retractable blades or something—"

"Which way did they go?" Hal shouted.

"Do you think I care?" the lutist shrilled. "I crawled between someone's legs and got up running."

"I think I saw them heading toward the joust," one of the costumed women answered. "That way, over to the left. It's like a stadium. You can't miss it."

Hal took off at a trot, trying not to imagine what the lutist's condition would have been if Lugh had been in possession of his mace.

From under the bleachers surrounding the tournament field, two men in fifteenth-century armor rolled. As Hal ran toward the entrance, he saw them get up with some difficulty and then dash headlong into the crowd of tourists. Inside, more would-be knights lay dazed around the perimeter of the field. With a sinking feeling Hal spotted Kay and Gawain on horseback, knocking the armored men off their steeds with long, fancifully painted lances. Each time one of the hapless actors fell off, one of the Companions scrambled to take his place astride his horse. Bedwyr was climbing on a mount now as the unseated "knight" clanked away, his metal-sheathed arms upraised in terror. Kay cantered his horse around the rim of the playing field, waving and bowing to the spectators.

Suddenly the crowd got to their feet, cheering wildly. Onto the field rode Lugh, grinning and swinging a prop mace over his head like a lariat.

"Oh, no," Hal groaned.

One of the actors threw his helmet and visor to the ground. He might have stomped off, except that the armor he wore was so heavy that the only part of him he managed to get to a standing position was one leg, from the knee down. He was working on the other when Lugh spotted him.

With a shriek, the actor toppled over sideways, his arms covering his head, while Lugh delicately jumped his stallion over him. The spectators roared. Hal looked for a place where he could throw up.

"A lavish tourney," someone said beside him. It was Launcelot, his sober demeanor for once lightened. He raised a fist in salute to Lugh for his feat of horsemanship. "These modern days are not so uneventful as I might have thought. It is a good time to be a man."

Dry Lips threw a spear over the heads of the audience. It landed with a thud on the roof of one of the food stalls, to the screams of those standing nearby.

"Galahad! Hal!" Launcelot ran to catch up with him. "Have we displeased you?"

Hal stared at him. He didn't know where to start. "Displeased?" he repeated.
"Displeased?"
He waved his arms. "Gee, you might say that, Lance. Now that you mention it, my life hasn't exactly been a barrel of laughs nursemaiding a bunch of medieval warriors whose idea of a good time is throwing spears into a crowd. I'm not really crazy about staying up all night wondering when you guys are going to kill someone just for the hell of it. You... Oh, never mind."

"Hal—" Launcelot put his hand on Hal's arm.

"Look, it was a dumb idea to bring you along, and I'm sorry to leave you to fend for yourselves over here, but I just can't wait any longer. There's a thirteen-year-old kid who needs me, and I've got to find him." With a final glance at Launcelot, he turned away. "Sorry."