The Third Magic (18 page)

"How you... know?" Minh had asked, unable to find more exact words for her question. But Arthur had understood.

"I had a dream," he said, and she had accepted this explanation.

After giving her the hundred twenty dollars owed to her son for his labors on the farm, he produced the plastic bag containing Tran's personal effects. Minh took it with trembling hands and looked inside.

"Is there a doll in there?" Arthur asked quietly, his face red with embarrassment.

Minh looked up through tear-glazed eyes. "Doll, yes." She held up the fan with its braided construction-paper tail. Then, sniffing, she picked up a pen and drew two lovely almond-shaped eyes beneath the fan, transforming it into the likeness of a dancing girl wearing a headdress.

"Face getting wear off," she said, trying to smile.

Arthur puzzled for some time about Tran's visitation. He never told anyone, and confronted Hal's questions about the unauthorized use of his truck with stony silence. In time the knights had convinced Hal that Arthur had simply wanted to kick up his heels; but Arthur had never explained.

It was not that no one would believe him. The knights would, without question. He could have told them that Elvis had come back in a rhinestone spaceship and they would have believed him, such was their loyalty. Even Hal, who had a lot of sense, managed to discard it when it came to Arthur. It was as if he, of all the people in the world, were somehow not subject to the laws of nature. If Arthur said something, then it must be so.

Perhaps this was why he had not told the knights about his clairvoyant dreams: because they would have believed him even if he were lying.

Nor could he attribute episodes like the one with Tran to simple insanity. That was the easy explanation, of course, the first level of weirdness in the multilayered parfait of impossibilities that was Arthur Blessing's life. If he ever wanted to learn the truth about himself, he knew, he would have to look beyond the pat answer of madness.

But if he weren't mad, Arthur thought, then what of the girl?

She had been coming into his thoughts more frequently than ever in the past few weeks. In her golden-haired guise, he even knew her name:
Brigid
.

Brigid. His nostrils flared at the mere thought of her name.
I
will love you forever.

How ridiculous! He shook his head. He had never even met this person.

And so he could only surmise, with great bitterness and resentment, that Brigid was a memory of the Other.

That was how he had grown to think of the glorious King Arthur whom Taliesin and the knights and even, at times, Hal, believed was so wonderful. Arthur Blessing did not find him wonderful. The Other had taken his life and his future away from him. It was as if had been adopted by people who had lost a son, and insisted that he behave exactly the way their beloved lost child had. He, Arthur Blessing, did not count in this strange universe of magic and timelessness. Nothing he liked, did, thought, said, wanted, shunned, or feared mattered a damn to any of them. Not only did they think he did not exist; they were dead certain of it.

But he was not. Not certain at all.

Beyond Jones County, beyond Puma Mountain and the Black Hills, was a whole world where no one cared if King Arthur had returned from the dead or not. There were, he would bet, a good number of people who had not even heard of King Arthur. Among them he would only be Arthur Blessing, and allow the Other to die and remain dead.

In the distance he heard a low, familiar rumbling. At first he tried to run, to seek a hiding place among the tall rocks. He ran into the shadows, covering his ears to block out the sound. But it only grew steadily louder, as he knew in his secret heart it would.

Whatever you might do, that destiny would catch up with you.

It had been foolish to think he could run away. Wherever he went, he would always be found. He would never escape the Other. He had been created to live out the life of another man, and nothing he could do would change that. The magic was just too strong.

As the first motorcycles pulled into view, he stepped out from behind the rocks and waited. Bedwyr waved, genuinely glad to see him. Curoi MacDaire and Lugh both greeted him with upraised fists as they roared nearer.

Only Hal, who stopped some distance away and removed his helmet, looked less than delighted.

Arthur walked the length of the motorcade to him. "Did Taliesin tell you where to find me?" he asked dully.

"Yes," Hal said. "I'm sorry, kid. It was worth a try."

Arthur mounted the motorcycle behind Hal. He did not speak again until after the incident that sealed Arthur's fate forever.

THE LOAVES AND FISHES

A
fter the media blitz
in Rapid City, the press became a permanent fixture on the motorcade. Occasionally Launcelot would cast a baleful glance at Hal, asking the unspoken question:
Why are you doing this to Arthur?

This trip was in total defiance of Taliesin's directive to keep the boy in the midst of the knights, and he would be furious. Nevertheless, the knights could no longer assure Arthur's anonymity or safety, and Hal was prepared to face the old man. His only thought now was to get the boy to Dawning Falls, New York, without incident. As the news helicopter circled overhead, Hal knew that even this simple task would be more difficult than it seemed.

No one had expected Arthur's fame, which had flared into being one night four years before and then died away to nothing, to suddenly rekindle. It seemed that all America was suddenly terribly interested in the comings and goings of an eighteen-year-old boy.

Some were already calling him a new Messiah; others denounced him as Satan, come with an army of evildoers on motorcycles.

It had always been like that with Arthur, Hal reflected. Through no fault of his own, the boy seemed to find his way into the very soul of his civilization. Arthur thought of himself as an ordinary American kid, and Hal had done his best to maintain that identity for him, but he had always been plagued with doubts about who Arthur Blessing really was.

Ever since he met Arthur, it had seemed that Hal's life had been pushed along on some predestined plan. He had thought only to keep the boy safe, to keep him anonymous, but that had not been possible. Arthur himself had told the world about his extraordinary past, which had reached beyond this lifetime, beyond this millennium. And now, strangely, instead of dismissing him as a charlatan or a fool, the boy was being believed, for good or ill.

It was all as if everything that was happening was meant to be.

Hal tried to dismiss these thoughts. Despite what Taliesin believed, Hal had always operated under the assumption that Arthur was nothing more than an ordinary kid, and that he deserved the same chance for happiness that every other kid had. And now everything seemed to be conspiring to take Arthur's anonymity away from him, pushing him into a role he had never consented to play.

Hal did not like the buzzing helicopters or the television cameras that followed them on their route, or the reporters that swarmed around them like insects whenever they stopped. He did not like the protesters with their placards calling Arthur names, or the screaming faithful, holding up talismans as they passed, or the infirm reaching out to them in desperation, as if the exhaust from their motorcycles could heal them of their ailments.

He looked back at Arthur. What had this boy done to both of their lives? What had he done, by doing nothing other than being born?

Launcelot's hand touched his elbow. Ahead of them lay a crossroads marked by an abandoned one-room church. This was where the crowd had gathered to wait for them.

They filled the four corners of land abutting the crossroads, sitting in folding chairs, playing cards, drinking beer from coolers scattered around the ground. They peered out of Airstreams and Winnebagos, sheltering their eyes from the sun, or wiped the sweat from their faces with grimy cloths. Music from dozens of different radio stations competed discordantly as the knights approached and the crowd moved inexorably onto Route 1-90 heading toward Sioux City.

Hal tried to swerve around them, turn around, but several hundred more seemed to dart out of the hillsides as they rode, making it impossible to escape.

Ambush, Hal thought. His eye caught Launcelot's. The knight was thinking the same thing. Were these people armed? Was the best course of action to abandon their bikes and fight? Overhead the helicopter swooped lower.

Hal was relieved. A massacre was less likely if the killers knew they were being recorded by television cameras. He signaled for the men to stop and told Launcelot to protect the boy. Then he dismounted, took off his helmet, and walked toward the waiting crowd.

T
hey were poor, they
said. Poor people gathered from the hard streets of Chicago and the other big cities of the Midwest, and from the shacks and rusted trailers of the countryside. A movement had begun in Chicago, where the magic of television had told them Arthur had been born, and the poor had come to welcome him home.

"Give us a miracle!" someone shouted, and after that the cry was almost continuous.

"He can't… listen, everyone…" Hal held up his hands, but it was no use. The crowd, hot and thirsty in the summer sun, did not want to hear what he had to say.

They wanted Arthur. They wanted a Messiah, to make them happy. Beyond them, and on the other side of the mob, traffic had begun to back up. A lone horn sounded, followed by another.

Hal looked back at Launcelot, who stood with the others cross-armed on the highway in a protective circle around the boy. The pavement around them steamed with ground heat; the air around them waved, making the circle of muscular men seem like a mirage.

And then, out of the mirage, like a figure from a dream, walked Arthur.

The crowd broke into wild cheers. Some headed toward him, but the others held them back.

"No," Hal moaned, moving instinctively toward the boy, but Arthur held up a hand to stop him while he walked confidently forward.

Hal hesitated, then obeyed. The mass of people seemed to be managing itself, leaving space around Arthur.

Anxiously, Hal ran his hands through his hair. Every nerve in his body was on full alert. This was precisely the situation he'd hoped to avoid: having Arthur surrounded by a mob of people demanding that he make their wishes come true. All in the middle of a snarl of traffic on the hottest day of the year, while television cameras moved in from all directions to capture every moment of the debacle.

Arthur raised his hands, and the crowd quieted. But before he could speak, a breeze began to blow. An audible sigh of relief rose from the people standing on the hot pavement. The waves of heat that had given the knights a surreal appearance vanished. Then, within less than a minute, the sky darkened and filled with fast-moving clouds.

Hal moved back to join the knights. He planned to disperse them through the crowd. They all knew that their prime directive was to protect Arthur at all costs. Hal did not like to see the boy so vulnerable.

"Bit of luck, this weather, eh?" Curoi MacDaire said, gesturing skyward with his eyes. "Could have got ugly, this lot."

Indeed, the crowd was now comfortable and good-natured, no longer insisting on a miracle, but waiting courteously for whatever was to come.

But what could that be?
Hal thought, panicking. Whatever he might have been in another life—and even now, even with the presence of the knights and Taliesin's wizardry, Hal was still not certain that any of that meant a damn, anyway—Arthur was not even a man yet, let alone a king. These people were expecting too much.

He gave Launcelot the word to move the men into the crowd slowly, so not to frighten anyone. They did, gradually widening the circle around Arthur, who was still standing with his arms upraised and his eyes closed.

And then, in the silence, a soft rain began.

"Thank God," Hal said. People were unlikely to riot in the rain. They would soon disperse, and the whole thing would be over. It was time to think about an alternate route, though, Hal noted.

Launcelot was staring at him. "What's up?" Hal asked.

The big knight said nothing, but his eyes never left Hal's.

"You're not thinking... Arthur didn't do this, Lance. Keep yourself together."

At that moment a truck carrying twenty thousand bottles of designer water that had just been bottled at its source in northern Illinois crested the hill. The truck's driver, completely unprepared for the tangle of traffic in what was usually an empty stretch of road, stomped on the brake and skidded out of control on the rain-slicked pavement. He careened squarely into the back of another truck, a semi filled with North Atlantic smoked salmon. The point of impact was the refrigeration condenser, which immediately turned the metal container of the semi into an oven. To make matters worse, the semi had jackknifed to the side, crashing in turn into the vehicle immediately to its right. This, too, was a truck, a bakery truck whose back doors flung open as hundreds of bags of America's Best Bagels flew out into the crowd.

The recipients of the bagels jubilantly raised their prizes in the air, and an atmosphere of jollity immediately took hold.

"The food literally rained down from the sky," a smiling television reporter said into a camera, trying to speak loudly enough to be heard over the incessant claxoning of the halted cars. The reporter in the helicopter announced that police were on their way to detangle the traffic, but already the irate drivers were leaving their cars to threaten the assembled pedestrians, and particularly Arthur.

It all might have become awkward again, had it not been for the driver of the salmon-carting semi, whose curses rose above the rest of the din as he threw large salmon carcasses out of the sweltering truck.

"Pigshit!" he howled. A motorist who had just exited his car to complain caught a fish in his arms. It was fragrant, but not yet stinking.

"Lox!" he shouted.

A bagel-bearer rushed toward him.

Thus did the feast begin. Before long, everyone, including the horn-honking motorists, was partaking of what the reporters called "manna," but which really would have been a quite standard deli breakfast with the addition of a
schmear
of cream cheese. The man carrying the bottled water donated his entire load, having been directed on the phone by the company's vice president of marketing to do so. With all the television cameras in attendance, the generous gesture would advertise his company's product more effectively than a massive campaign.

I
t took the police
more than an hour to clear the traffic. Even so, hundreds remained on the sides of the road, watching the young man who had never moved nor spoken a single word. Even the police, following some instinct about crowd control, had not touched Arthur Blessing.

After the roadway was clear, Arthur walked back toward the circle of motorcycles. It was still his custom to ride behind one or another of the knights, as he had since he was a child. Although it was never spoken, whomever Arthur chose to ride behind felt as if he had been conferred an honor. The knights all stood beside their bikes, eyes forward, hoping that he would choose them. Fairhands, the youngest of the lot, stepped forward as Arthur approached.

"Take it, Highness," he said. "I will ride behind you, or with one of the others."

Arthur smiled genially and straddled the seat. "Thank you," he said.

The crowd parted for them as they left. In their wake was a sea of waving hands.

L
auncelot lagged behind, paying
no attention to the people who followed him as he walked toward the abandoned church. They were shouting questions at him, questions about Arthur, no doubt, although their words were no more than muted sounds to him.

All he saw, all he knew or felt in the rawness of his bones, was the church.

It was a humble enough structure, to be sure, with its flat-painted, finger-stained doors and its spindly aluminum cross sticking out of its roof like an antenna; but to Launcelot, it was a wonderful building. He had seen great cathedrals during his time in twenty-first century America, but they had meant no more to him than the gigantic skyscrapers of Manhattan. That was to say, they did not touch Launcelot's view of reality.

He had accepted the fearsome oddities of the New World with the resignation of a man who was being punished for a great sin. For that was what he felt himself to be, an audacious, blackhearted example of human degradation who had been relegated to a special hell.

All the world—no, worse than that, all of history—knew what he had done with the queen, the wife of the High King to whom he had pledged his life. He deserved to suffer for that, and he had. His punishment had been to submit to the magic of an evil sorcerer who was leading him through an alternate world of unimaginable horror. There were buildings big as mountains here, and headless horses with mechanical hearts. There were places like the great stone block from which Hal had been rescued, where one's arms and legs were routinely sawn off. Under the ground were huge rumbling snakes called subways that devoured anyone foolish enough to venture down the many stairways leading to the netherworld.

And yet in the midst of these dreadful surroundings, he occasionally saw things that made him remember his life on earth with painful piquancy.

Such was the Church of the Lord's Fellowship, which stood at the crossroads where so many had gathered to see the young king. It resembled a church Launcelot might have seen during his own time, a grand church compared with the beehive-shaped wattle huts where most of the Christian holy men in Britain lived. This church could not have existed in Britain, of course; but in Gaul, where Launcelot had spent his boyhood, the Christians had made deeper inroads. There were great churches like this in Gaul, where thirty or forty people at a time raised their voices in prayer to the invisible God who had lived as a man and died in humility and pain.

The sight of it had filled him with awe from the first. But then, after the miracle of the loaves and fishes ...

That was something that still puzzled him. The others had not noticed, naturally; most of them were pagans with no knowledge of the New Religion. But Launcelot was a Christian, the only one of the Round Table knights to have come converted into Arthur's service. He was familiar with the story of the Messiah who had fed multitudes.

What he did not understand was why it had happened again, and here, of all places. Launcelot's Christ was a distant being, a figure from centuries past who had lived in a faraway, almost mythical land. That these people would try to reenact the biblical story with Arthur at its core seemed to him to be both sacrilegious and bizarre.