The Broken Sword (37 page)

Kate had fallen to her knees, shaking with fear, her hands clutching the cup that had brought her life back to her. Taliesin lifted her gently. His touch was cold as ice.

"Take everyone out of the building," he said.

She offered him the cup. "The Grail," she said. "This belongs to you." With a final look at the old man and the terrifying magic he had conjured, she ran toward the ladder and climbed up.

Around him swirled the chaos he had wrought. By sacrificing the Innocent, he had brought about the rebirth of the gods. It was the greatest magic he had ever known. He regarded the cup in his hand. The Holy Grail, vessel of eternal life, a suitable possession for the Merlin.

He tossed it on the floor. There was nothing more of life he wanted.

Yes, he thought, this was a fitting way to die.

Facing the magicians who had brought him here, he spoke in a voice like the wind: "Now we shall go into the void together, we killers of the holy ones."

The walls bellied in. First a trickle of earth, dry as sand, seeped from behind the foundations of the building. Then it poured into the room, throwing up billows of dust, the deep cracks splitting open with a sound like thunder.

The magicians shrieked. The fire that had surrounded them spread to the ceiling, evading the inrushing earth. They scrambled for the ladder, but it was too late. The timbers supporting the structure cracked with a boom and caved in.

Through the rising dust and flames, Taliesin saw Aubrey Katsuleris crawling toward him.

"My son," the old man rasped, choking in the unbreathable air. "Come die beside me, Thanatos, so that we may be judged together." He sank to the floor, gasping. "Our crime was the same, you know. We both killed her, you in your time, and I in mine." He laughed bitterly. "What a fine joke the gods have played on us both."

Then the last of the beams gave way and the building folded in on itself, filling the room with brick and rubble.

D
r. Shanipati was still in
attendance when Beatrice called Arthur's name.

"That's her brother, I think," the nurse said. "He's outside."

"Bring him, bring him in quickly," Shanipati ordered, scribbling in his notebook. He had never seen such a thing, even with the yogi. The girl had spoken,
spoken
— positively a beta wave function—while the EEG still registered in the theta range. "Are you certain this is working correctly?" he asked when the nurse returned. He tapped the monitor hesitantly with his index finger.

"I wouldn't know. Would you like me to call a technician to check it?"

"Yes, please. Do that." He looked at the young boy in the doorway. "You are named Arthur?" he asked.

The boy nodded.

"Please." The doctor gestured for him to come by the bed. "I think she is asking for you. Of this I cannot be certain, however, because..." He looked up at the monitor, still reading intense theta activity, then at the boy, and decided it would be too difficult to explain. He moved to the chair at the foot of the bed. "Go ahead. I will not disturb you."

Arthur bit his lip as he approached Beatrice. "I think the old man's in trouble," he said softly. "I have to help him, but I can't leave you here because..." He stole a glance at the doctor. "Well, you just have to take my word for it, you've got to wake up. We can't do anything until you wake up." He shook her. "Oh, please come back, Bea. He needs us bad."

Shanipati grabbed hold of his wrists. "You must not touch her!" he cried out. "She is in a very delicate state. If you disturb—"

"Leave him alone." Beatrice opened her eyes. They were milk-white.

Babbling in a torrent of Hindi, Dr. Shanipati leaned over her with an opthalmascope. This was impossible, he thought, quite certainly impossible! He had examined her eyes not a half hour earlier, and there had been no trace of blindness then. Yet these were the eyes of an individual who had been sightless from birth. A very old individual at that, judging from the retinal scarring. Very old...

"Do go away, Rasheesh. No one will believe this report of yours, anyway," she said with the voice of an old woman.

Shanipati fell back, scattering the notes he had left on his chair. "What did you say?" he asked in a whisper.

"You've been trying for centuries to convince people that there's more to them than flesh and bones, but they've never believed you." She waved her hand at him idly. "That's just as well. It is not important to prove the existence of the soul." She smiled. "All that matters is to perceive it."

"All that… One moment, please. I wish to write that down." He bent to pick up his papers.

"Come quickly, Arthur." Beatrice waggled her fingers. "Time is short, and I must be certain that you know what to do before I say good-bye."

"Good-bye?" the boy whispered. "But you can't—"

"Shh. I can do whatever I like. Everything is possible, child. Try to remember that." She clasped his hand. "Now listen to me. A great deal of trouble has been taken to bring you back into the world and keep you here, but now things are up to you. What you do, how you live from this moment on will be of immense consequence. Do you understand?"

He took a moment to find his voice. "Yes," he answered. "I know who I am."

"Good. Taliesin did a fine job." She smiled at him. "This is your time, Arthur. The wheel of destiny has come full circle, and you are at its center." She closed her eyes, then opened them again slowly. "I'm afraid living is getting to be rather too much of an effort for me."

"Bea!” his voice broke. "Bea, don't die. Please don't die..."

"Remember how to be a king, and how to be a man. Be strong. Do good. Bring honor to your soul."

With a soft sigh, she lay back on the pillow. The EKG above her registered a flat line.

"Nurse!" Shanipati shouted, knocking Arthur out of the way to begin resuscitation procedures on his patient. "Call at once for defibrillators!" He glanced at the monitor. What he saw there nearly caused his hands to still. Within seconds, every life sign registered by the bank of machines had ceased, with the exception of one: Beatrice's theta wave was still coming through as a dense, fast-moving band.

The doctor continued to pump her chest while his eyes remained transfixed on the monitor, watching the evidence of a mind functioning without a body.

"Crash cart's coming," the nurse announced. "Son, you'll have to wait outside—"

"Be quiet!" Shanipati snapped. The nurse left the room.

Arthur moved silently to Beatrice's side while the neurologist struggled to revive her. Above them both, Beatrice's theta wave continued to expand until it filled the monitor. As they watched, a light appeared in the center of the black screen and then grew to fill it, a light so intense that they both had to shut their eyes and turn away to keep from being blinded.

Shanipati shouted something in Hindi. Arthur picked up Beatrice's hand and held it tight while the light burned through the room like lightning.

Then, in an instant, it was gone.

The monitor beeped. Eight functions appeared, all normal. There was no theta wave.

Beatrice sat up. "Oh, dear," she said. "We're not at Planet Ice Cream, are we?"

Equally stunned, Shanipati and Arthur looked at each another as the crash cart lumbered in, accompanied by the usual army of doctors, nurses, technicians, and students.

Dr. Coles was among them. Holding a pair of electric paddles, he approached Beatrice, frowning in bewilderment. "Are we in the right place?" he asked.

Shanipati flicked on his opthalmascope and peered into Beatrice's eyes. "She can see," he whispered. He turned toward Dr. Coles. "A most extraordinary recovery." He bounded toward the electroencephalogram. "I will show you on the printout. The patient, as you recall, was comatose..." While he was speaking, Coles gestured for the resuscitation team to leave.

"That was a monster zone-out," Arthur said quietly into Beatrice's ear. "You sounded like an old lady—"

"I saw her, Arthur! She's the one I always dreamed about. Only this time she didn't tell me I was going to die. She said she doesn't need me anymore." Beatrice looked at their hands, still entwined.

Arthur blushed, disengaging himself. "Well, now that you're okay, we've got to get out of here, and I mean right now." He peered over her shoulder at the two doctors conversing with one another. "I'll explain everything to you on the way. You can walk, can't you?"

Beatrice nodded.

"Can you run?"

Shanipati was tossing the unscrolled printout over his head like a lunatic. "There! You see? Heart rate zero. But the theta! Look at the theta!"

While he spoke, Beatrice pulled off the contact points connecting her with the monitoring machinery. The printout halted abruptly.

"What are you doing?" the doctor squealed, whipping his head around toward them. "You must not disconnect yourself. It is very important—"

"Let's go," Arthur said, throwing off Beatrice's bed-sheets.

The two of them ran past the doctors at breakneck speed, then wove through the route Arthur had designed to take them out of the hospital and into the city streets.

"A
rthur! Beatrice!"

The taxi stopped at the red light as the children dodged through the night traffic.

Zack would not have known they'd left the hospital at all if he hadn't gone up to the fourth floor in search of Arthur, where he was told by a harried-looking Indian doctor that the boy had run out a moment before with his patient. Alarmed, Zack had jumped in a cab and headed for the Center. He'd spotted them turning down 55th Street.

"Hey, guys, wait up!" he shouted as he paid the cabbie, but Arthur and Beatrice roundly ignored him. "Kids," he said.

Halfway up the block he heard a tremendous noise, like some slow, sustained explosion, and shifted into a sprint until he caught sight of the Center. Surrounded by a nimbus of dust, the building was crumbling into the ground like a sand castle.

"Kate!" he shouted, pushing past the people gathered in the street.

Dressed in a yellow bathrobe, she was kneeling on all fours on top of the wreckage. Beside her were Arthur and Beatrice. The three of them were digging through the debris with their hands, throwing aside bricks and pieces of broken timber.

"Oh, Jesus," Zack said, running toward them on the shifting, rubble-strewn earth.

"He was standing right here," Kate sobbed.

"Who?" Zack asked, his eyes tearing with the flying dust.

"Taliesin. He's buried under this." She wiped her nose with a grimy arm.

"What happened?"

"Just dig, okay?"

The debris settled, opening up a hole near Arthur. He and Beatrice jumped into it, scooping up armfuls of broken wood.

"It's not safe here," Zack said.

"Then leave!" Arthur shouted. "It was your friend who did this, and you were probably in on it!"

"My... who are you talking about?"

"Aubrey," Kate said. "You don't know what he was into, Zack. But no, he didn't do this. Taliesin did."

Arthur looked up momentarily. "The old man?"

Kate nodded, swallowing a sob. "He was no ordinary old man, Arthur."

The sound of motorcycles filled the street "That must be the police," Beatrice said, picking a long shard of window glass from the ground. "I asked someone to—"

"Arthur!" one of the motorcyclists shouted as he dismounted.

The boy scrambled out of the hole where he had been digging. "Hal! It's Hal, Bea! He's come back!" He ran down the hill of rubble, waving frantically as Hal loped up to meet him, followed by eleven very unusual looking men. "Hal, you've got to help us, and we don't have any time to lose," the boy panted as they neared one another. "Taliesin was in the basement when the building came..." He glanced at the motorcyclists behind Hal. For some reason, they had all fallen to one knee and bowed their heads. "... down..."

"What?" Hal yelled. "He's under this?"

"We think he was over there, where Bea and those other two people are digging. Please, Hal, we've got to hurry." He ran back to join the others.

Hal swiveled toward the knights. "All right, men, follow me," he ordered. "Move it!"

Like an army, Hal and the knights swarmed over the wreckage, using boards and window casings as shovels.

"What be we searching for, treasure?" MacDaire grunted as he helped Lugh move a massive block of concrete.

"The Merlin," Hal said, unable to disguise his hopelessness.

Arthur looked up, wiping the sweat from his eyes. "Curoi MacDaire," he said softly. "And Lugh."

"We'll find your wizard for you, Majesty," MacDaire said reassuringly before he moved on.

A young blond man gave him a quick smile as he gathered up an armload of bricks. "Fairhands, the standard bearer." Arthur squinted. "Gawain's here, too. And there's Kay."

Hal stared at him. "You know their names?"

"I remember..."
Remember how to be a king,
the old woman who spoke to him through Beatrice had said. With those words she had given him a gift, the final piece of the puzzle Beatrice had envisioned. "I remember everything," he said.

The other tenants and bystanders jumped in to help. While they worked, Kate went to the neighboring apartment buildings to collect any tools available. By the time the police arrived, they had dug nearly to the foundation.

"All right, everybody clear out!" an officer ordered, but no one paid him any attention. Finally the police, too, joined in the excavation.

"We've got one," a neighbor called. The diggers moved to the spot and worked until the first of the bodies was pulled out. It was a man, his charred face no longer identifiable as human. Everyone stepped back in silence as the police extricated a second body in the same condition.

"Must have been a fire," one of the officers said as a third body was found. This one had a face. Its expression was one of abject terror.

The grim excavation went on in silence as an ambulance and fire trucks pulled up, followed by a TV news van. Within minutes the site was ablaze with lights. A reporter, having hastily gathered her material from one of the neighbors while applying her lipstick, related the story of the building's mysterious collapse to the television camera.

A few feet away, Arthur and Beatrice spotted a hand beneath a pile of broken concrete. "Hal!" he called. The TV cameraman waved at him for silence as the reporter continued her narrative. "Over here! Help us, please! Hurry!"

Hal and the knights rushed to his side. The fingernails of the uncovered hand were blue. The rest of the body was buried too deeply to pull out.

"It's him," Arthur said.

Twelve pairs of hands thrust into the dirt. When they came out, they were holding Taliesin's lifeless body.

"He has not the look of a living man," Dry Lips said gently.

A paramedic squeezed between the knights to check Taliesin's eyes and pulse. "This one's gone, too," he said, signaling for a stretcher.

"No!" Arthur hugged the old man, lifting his shoulders off the ground like a rag doll. Taliesin's head lolled to the side. "He's not dead, he can't be! He had the cup!"

"Get a shot of the kid," the reporter hissed. Bright light flooded over Arthur.

"Get the hell out of here, you ghouls," Hal snapped.

"Keep rolling."

Two paramedics came by with a stretcher. "We'll take the body," one of them said.

"Don't touch him!" Arthur screamed. At his words, four of the knights stood to face the paramedics like a wall between them and the boy.

"Suit yourself," one of the men holding the stretcher said with a shrug. "We got too many for the wagon as it is."

As they walked away, Launcelot knelt on one knee before Arthur. "My lord," he said quietly, "I would pray, if I have your permission."

The boy looked at him through eyes weary with suffering. "Launcelot," he said softly. "You've come back, too."

"Aye. And to stay, if you can find it in your heart to forgive me."

Arthur touched his shoulder. "I do, friend. Now pray. Pray for the Merlin, who is beyond the help of even his own magic."

Hal closed his eyes.
He remembers,
he thought.
The knights have returned, and so has their King.

As Launcelot bowed his head to pray to his god, the other knights knelt also, Kay and Gawain, Lugh with his spiked helmet, Dry Lips and MacDaire and the young men who had died before their faces had weathered. They all knelt to call upon what gods they knew to bring King Arthur's wizard back from the Summer Country.

F
og, that was what
it was, the kind of thick milky fog that used to enshroud Camelot after a heavy winter rain. Taliesin felt himself tumbling through it like a seed.

"Blast it all, I know I'm dead, and I know where I'm headed," he shouted. "This pointless charade is wasted on me, I tell you!"

But his journey continued uninterrupted, his body circling end over end. After a time he began to think that perhaps this was the void he had been expecting. If so, death apparently involved a great deal of movement. He tucked his hands inside his robe and waited.

"Ah, there you are," came a woman's voice.

"Indeed, and I've become damned dizzy getting here, wherever this place is."

His endless spinning slowed, then stopped. The fog around him cleared.

"Is that better?"

Taliesin tried a few tentative steps. He felt rubber-legged, like a seafarer standing on solid ground for the first time in months, except that the ground under his feet was anything but solid. It was the same milk-white fog, surrounding him on all sides, leaving only a globe-shaped space around him.

He touched the fog experimentally. It sent out tendrils of vapor between his fingertips.

"Well?" he demanded. "Is this home?"

"No, Merlin." The ball Taliesin stood in glowed with golden light. When it subsided, the Innocent stood beside him.

He staggered backward. "I... I didn't recognize your voice."

"That's because it wasn't a voice at all. Nor is this your body." She poked him in the area of his navel. Her fingers went right through him. "I'm afraid you left that buried under a heap of soil and building materials."

"Yes, I had no..." He choked on his words as he felt his heart breaking all over again. "I had no wish to keep it any longer." He went down on his knees before her. "Innocent, if this is to be the state of my death, it is too good for me."

"This is not death," the Innocent said gently. She put her arms around him and cradled him like a baby. "This is love."

He felt her soul pass through his own, filling him with her forgiveness and joy. "You were so young," he whispered, weeping into her bosom. "I killed you."

"I am old beyond counting, Merlin. And do not presume to know more than the gods you serve."

"The gods ask too much," he said bitterly.

"Ah, yes. They ask for all you are, and all you may be. And for your reward, all they give you is yourself."

With her hand she swept away a patch of fog. In the space, far below, he saw his body, held in loving arms just as he was being held now. But the arms around him were not the Innocent's, but Arthur's. And kneeling around them both were the Knights of the Round Table.

"Why, they're back," he said. "There's Tristan and Bedwyr and that rascal MacDaire... They're all down there with the boy."

"The circle has closed, Merlin. You have closed it. The Age of Arthur has begun again."

"Good heavens, it's..." He looked over at her in astonishment "It's Beatrice!" He leaned back over the hole in the fog. "But that's quite impossible—"

"Everything is possible," the Innocent said. "I should think you'd know that by now."

"But she was you! Your vessel. When you gave me your power, her body was supposed to expire. It
had
to!" He shook his fists in agitation. "Yours was the spirit inside her, and you're gone."

"Perhaps she has another spirit now."

"Whose?" he demanded belligerently.

She shrugged expressively. "It might be anyone's. Your student Nimue's, perhaps."

"Nimue? The one with all the questions?"

"A student is supposed to ask questions. You certainly did."

"But she never washed."

"Oh, come now. She was lovely when you brought her to Mona for Arthur's burial. The locals thought she was the Fairy Queen."

"Hah! Fairy Queen indeed. She used to eat frogs, heads and all."

"But she loved you, Merlin. I felt she was a good choice."

"Nimue." His face was a perfect blank.

They sat in silence for a moment. "Well?" his teacher asked finally. "Would you like to go back?"

"Under the circumstances, I'd have to think about that." He turned to her and grinned. "Is it too late?" he asked, squirming to his feet. "Have I decomposed?"

"I think not," she said, smiling.

"Then I must... I must..." He poised himself at the edge of the clearing, his eyes squeezed shut, his hands curled into fists, preparing for the jump but too frightened to take it.

"Is it enough?" she asked.

"Is it what? Is what enough? Confound it, you're talking in riddles again."

The Innocent laughed with a sound pure and tinkling as a bell. "Enjoy your life, little bard," she said, and pushed him through the opening.

He felt himself falling, floating languidly through space, drifting formlessly toward the place where Arthur held the body of a dead man, refusing to let it go. With a shudder the Merlin entered the body again, and was immediately assaulted by all manner of aches and infirmities—wheezing lungs and sprained ribs, a bruise the size of a man's hand on his thigh, a tooth knocked loose, a broken toe.

"By the gods, life is a trying condition," he grumbled.

"Taliesin!" Arthur's face, just coming into focus, was filled with happiness. To the other side was Launcelot, weeping into his chain mail.

"You again!" Taliesin muttered. "Still praying, I see.”

"Welcome back, old man." It was Hal, of course. None of the others would have the effrontery to address the King's wizard as "old man."

"It certainly took you long enough to get here," Taliesin complained. He looked around at them all. Launcelot, Galahad, Arthur, all of them brought out of the mists of time to try the dream once more.

Perhaps, he thought, perhaps this time they would succeed.

"Hello, Mr. Taliesin." Beatrice squeezed between two of the knights to stand shyly before him. She was wearing a hospital gown with a man's leather belt around it. She was covered with dirt from head to toe. Her hair was wild.

"Good evening, child," he said. "I'm pleased to see you again."

Is it enough?
The Innocent's question rang through Taliesin's mind.

He felt laughter, like bubbles, pouring out of his chest. He hugged Arthur, then stretched his arms as far as he could all around to touch the others.

"Yes, it is enough," he said, fairly leaping to his feet. "Oh, my, yes."