The Third Magic (37 page)

S
he had never objected
. Her acquiescence was what broke his heart the most.

"I'm sorry," Arthur the King, who had forgotten how to be a man, said to the woman he loved.

Guenevere was silent for a moment. Then she said, "This is how it must be. For my sins."

"For mine," he corrected.

Guenevere's brow creased. "Arthur," she said wonderingly, "Do you believe that we will return to live an earthly life again?"

He was taken aback by the question. Guenevere had been a Christian for many years, and had forsaken such pagan beliefs. "I don't know," he said.

"Who shall you become?" she asked. Unconsciously her hands had risen, almost into an attitude of prayer. The look in her eyes was pitifully earnest.

"No one can know that," Arthur said gently. "Even the Merlin of Britain cannot see that far."

"Sometimes I see... that is, I dream, or perhaps it's something I see before I dream, I don't know... I see myself as someone else, a woman with long golden hair and a dagger made of black glass in my hands …" She took in a swift inrush of air and blushed. "I know it sounds outrageous—"

"No." Arthur spoke quickly, then held out his hand to touch her own. "No, I've... What you've said..." Their eyes locked together in mutual torment. "My sword was there."

"Excalibur," Guenevere whispered.

Their hands, clasped tightly together, broke apart. The two were silent.

"Everything is possible," the King said to relieve the silence.

"Then perhaps we'll see each other again," Guenevere said, smiling to conceal the pathetic hope in her eyes.

"Of course. I'll come by the convent to visit." He did not look at her when he spoke. He knew how shallow his words sounded, how inadequate. It was not what she meant at all, he knew. But he could not bear to think that he would not see her again until they were both beyond death.

And it was his fault. She had not asked to be put away like an unwanted toy. He was wronging her, wronging her so greatly that he dared not even ask for her forgiveness.

He rose, wanting to run away from his shame.

Guenevere cast her gaze down. Of course he had not understood. Perhaps it was not even his desire to encounter her again in another life. Why should he? She had betrayed him with his best friend.

"Well, good-bye, then," Guenevere said, smiling gently.

Arthur looked at her once more, seeing the girl whom he had known was to be his soulmate the instant their eyes met, and then walked away from her for what he believed would be forever.

"G
uenevere," Arthur said now
, kneeling near the body of the young girl.

"Here. Over here." The voice called him through time, through death and life and death again. "I'm Gwen this time, remember?"

Through a white mist he saw her, spiky black hair, tight jeans. "I've stayed behind for you," she said. "It's hard to do. The others have left."

"What others?"

"Brigid. And Guenevere. There's just me. I've waited."

He looked at her for a long moment through the mist. Then he smiled. "I'm glad you did," he said.

She looked down shyly. "You hardly know me."

"That's why I'm glad you waited."

"Guenevere was sad because she had sex with Launcelot."

Arthur laughed. "I guess everyone knows that."

"Yes, well, she wanted to be punished for that, so she suffered for a long time."

Arthur thought of Launcelot. That was why Lance had gone away, too. To punish himself. "For what?" Arthur said. "For loving someone."

"We mess up our lives by thinking too much," Gwen said.

"I know."

"What will happen when you take me back into the world, Arthur?"

He hesitated. "You'll have a wonderful time," he said.

"With you?"

Arthur turned away. "I don't think so."

"But I've waited my whole life for you! We all have, Guenevere and Brigid, too. Over and over—"

"I don't have much time left," Arthur said.

Gwen looked puzzled. "To live?"

He nodded. "I don't really have a life of my own this time around. Actually, I'm just somebody's magic trick, living out someone else's last days."

"But it's someone you used to be."

"It's not who I am now."

"Who is that?"

Arthur smiled. "That's the problem." He held out his hand. "Come on."

A
rthur's eyes rolled back
in his head. His back arched. His hands and feet shook uncontrollably, even as he held fast to the dead girl's body.

"You have to come back with me now," Arthur said, in the netherworld they occupied. "We can't wait."

"But your body! What is it doing?"

"It's allowing me to bring you back, Gwen."

"But it looks as if it's dying."

"It is. In stages. Humans aren't supposed to be able to do this. Bring you out of this place."

"Are you not human, then?"

"Yes, but it's a different sort of human. It's like having a life in the second octave. Most of the time, we come back with no memories at all of who we used to be. We start over from zero. But I know what it's like to be alive and to die. So there are new things for me to learn."

"Like bringing people back from the dead."

"Yes," Arthur said.

"But it's killing you."

"That's because the earth plane isn't where I should be learning this. It's not compatible with being human." He laughed. "So now you can ask me again if I'm not human. The riddle just goes on and on, like a merry-go-round."

"Couldn't you just be Arthur? That is, you, who you want to be, and forget all this other stuff?"

Arthur looked at her levelly. "Then I wouldn't be able to bring you back, would I?"

Arthur felt the rain hitting his face like needles, then running into his mouth, tasting of his own sweat. He felt exhausted. How long had he been here, he wondered, clutching the dead girl as if he could bring her back to life? "Gwen," he said softly. "Gwen, can you answer me?"

His hands throbbed, hot, giving off heat in waves. Beside him, Gwen stirred. The vibrance of her life seemed to hum around her. Her cheeks flushed red. Her eyes opened.

She stared vacantly ahead, unable to speak.

"Just rest," he said, putting his arm around her. Though the rain was chilling and the mud uncomfortable, Gwen was in too fragile a state to move, and Arthur was too tired.

They had both almost fallen asleep when the earth exploded and seemed to turn inside out.

Above everything was the mud, a tidal wave of mud flying around them, slapping them with rocks and splinters of wood, mud so thick that Arthur was certain they would be suffocated by it. It took them both down in the first second. By the time the sound of the explosion subsided, they were buried in mud two feet deep.

Behind them, the house had collapsed. Only one wall remained standing. A stairway was attached to it. A chimney still stood, as did several radiators and a few random pieces of furniture that seemed to float in a sea of splinters. A dozen or more fires smoldered through the mess, occasionally breaking into flame, then subsiding in the rain.

"Hal!" Arthur cried, scrambling to his feet. Gwen only blinked, the fingers of her hands splayed out in front of her, her mouth open and filling with mud.

Arthur looked back at the smoking, burning wreckage, and then at the girl. "You have to stay here," he said gently, pulling her out of the mud and onto a part of the wooden platform that had not been destroyed. He put her hand on one of the fallen guardrails.

She reached up and touched his head. Her hand came away bloody.

"Wait for me here," he said.

He slogged through the slime and debris, blinking away the blood and rain that was pouring into his eyes. His mind was still foggy from the seizure, but he forced himself to focus, running into the nightmare landscape, tripping over the piles of boards and nails and scraps of paper and metal and wood that lay everywhere and still fell out of the sky like confetti.

"Mom?" Gwen called behind him. To Arthur's dismay, she was lurching into the wreckage, her legs scraped raw, blood streaming from her nose. "I saw my mother…"

"Gwen, don't," Arthur said. He held her by both shoulders. "Go to the road and wait for the fire trucks. Someone's got to have reported this. It's not safe here."

"But you—"

"Just go!" he shouted, pushing her toward the road. She staggered away, sobbing.

It would be better for her not to see what lay among the fires.

The body of Mr. Santori, the security guard, was recognizable only by the nametag that was pinned to his uniform. One dismembered arm lay near his feet. His face was gone.

"Hal," Arthur whispered, choking as he beat out a fire that was threatening to billow. He felt sick. What was happening was not within the realm of possibility. All of the strange, impossible things that had gone before—the healing water, the trances, the power of his hands, even the uncanny occurrence when he brought Gwen back from the state beyond death—all these were acceptable to his mind. But losing Hal was not.

"Hal!" he shouted, throwing boards aside, burrowing into the piles of matchstick-sized wood. He had to keep looking, keep digging, because he could not bear the thought of being able to do nothing.

Beneath a radiator he spotted something. It was a finger. Near it was a metal watchband. Arthur dug wildly through the rubble, his hands bleeding and filled with splinters. Beneath a ceiling beam he saw the back of a head.
Hal?
He thought, feeling his breath catch. Could he heal Hal? Arthur wondered. If there were enough left of him...

The face was a woman's. There was no body attached to it.

Arthur's eyes stung from the smoke, though so little of the house was left that it was clearing rapidly. He heard himself whimpering as he searched the same places again and again. There was not a single object within sight that was larger than a bicycle wheel. "Oh, Hal," he moaned. "Please come back. Please, Hal..."

He isn't here,
Arthur thought, suddenly brightening. Swallowing quickly, he bustled through the wreckage once more, telling himself that Hal had not been in the house when it exploded, willing the idea to be true. Yes, that was it, he knew it. He could feel it. Hal's going to come walking through the door any minute. He must have been outside when the bomb went off.

He dug through the wreckage faster. His hands were running with blood. Yes, Hal had probably been outside. Checking out the security guard's car in the driveway. He'd gone out another door, on the other side of the house. Or he might have gotten stuck behind something when it happened, and been blown into the yard somewhere. There were always stories in the newspapers about cows being picked up by tornadoes and deposited in the next county, still chewing their cud. Or maybe he's in the basement, stuck underneath a beam, and in another minute I'm going to hear him cursing and yelling at me to get him out.

He dug deeper.

At the bottom of the pile, where the trap door had once been, Arthur found a single motorcycle boot.

He stared at it for a while—a minute, perhaps, or an hour—before holding it to his chest. His hands trembled.

In the distance, the wail of police and fire sirens cut through the silence. The rain had stopped. The first rays of sunlight shot through the cloud cover.

Hal was gone. It was the only thing that Arthur was certain of.

The day was dawning, and a Messiah was about to be crucified.

MESSIAH

T
he first spectators began
arriving just after the police and the fire trucks, in the soft light of dawn. From the first scream, the scene was one of chaos and horror.

The television cameras were there almost from the beginning, and the press poured in until, by six a.m., there were more newspeople than onlookers. And that is what the ordinary people had become—onlookers. There were no more faithful, no more devotees, only witnesses who stared in horror as the paramedics sorted through the debris for bodies and the firemen waited behind them for the bodies to be moved so that they could hose down the already rain-soaked ground.

A group—no one seemed to know where they came from—began to chant, "Arthur Antichrist." People who had traveled long distances to experience the healing water found the well smashed and the water ineffectual.

And through it all the cameras rolled.

The police questioned him again and again. In another part of the grounds, Gwen was subjected to the same scrutiny.

"No, he didn't kill anyone!" she shrieked hysterically. It was clear that she was on the verge of shock, wild-eyed, trembling, her speech rapid, her thoughts disconnected. "He healed me. Someone shot me... It's my blood, only I don't have the wound anymore... The guy was one of my mother's boyfriends, only it was my real father. My mother's dead, too. I think he killed her. His name was Bob, at least that's what he said. Then he killed me. I knew I was dead because I saw my past lives..."

The paramedics were taking the bodies of Pinto and the guard into the waiting ambulance as a television camera followed them.

"Messiah or murderer?" a news reporter asked into the camera. The next shot was a telephoto image of Arthur's face, seen only briefly between the heads of two policemen. "The famous healing waters of Miller's Creek, New York is the unlikely scene of a bizarre murder involving a young man who had been touting himself as a latter-day Jesus Christ and his girlfriend, who claims that she was resurrected from death by her lover."

Here the network news showed the photograph of Gwen and Arthur touching hands on the day of his arrival in Dawning Falls. It was followed by Gwen Ranier's unsmiling senior class photo, showing her in full Goth makeup, with kohl-rimmed eyes, black lipstick, and six earrings.

"Police discovered the couple covered with blood at the site of a devastating explosion that destroyed what thousands have called the 'Healing Sanctuary' because of what many considered to have been miraculous properties in the water here.

"Apparently the explosion has destroyed the well that fed the healing waters of Miller's Creek. Pilgrims, some of whom have traveled hundreds and even thousands of miles, are being turned away disappointed."

The network now showed an old woman in a walker standing beside the muddy banks of the overflowing creek, shaking her head and wiping a tear from her check.

"Meanwhile, there is no official explanation for the two brutal murders which, according to police sources, may only be the tip of the iceberg." Here the reporter consulted a notebook.

"Police have found body parts that, when identified, may bring the death toll to four or more," she read. "Since the devastation here has been so extensive, it is possible others were present at the time of the explosion, but have not been recovered because there are simply insufficient remains."

The reporter spoke directly into the camera now. "Police have not determined why the victims of the deadly explosion were at this site at this time. Known as the Healing Sanctuary, the water here was reputed to have saved the lives of thousands. But the overriding question is, who would have wanted to destroy it?"

The group accusing Arthur of being the Antichrist took up their chant again as Arthur was led by a police escort toward the waiting patrol cars on the road. "Killer!" they screamed.

The media people and the other spectators rushed to surround him. All Arthur saw was a sea of faces, a mob of screaming, wailing mouths.

"Messiah!"

"Satan!"

"Antichrist!"

"Why didn't you heal the people here?"

"What have you done to the well?"

"Why did you let them die?"

Arthur looked around at the wall of faces, all of them shouting. The words they spoke no longer made sense to him. "Hal," he said quietly. "Oh, Hal, did you have to go?"

B
ut of course he
did. Arthur knew that.

The reason nothing was left of Hal was because he had thrown himself on a bomb. It was something Hal would do without question.

You are what you are, and you do what you can, he had said. Hal had lived by those words, Arthur thought as the police led him through the mob. In the end, Hal had died, just as Galahad had died, in service to him.

Oh, Hal.

Maybe you were right to leave,
Arthur thought. After the events that had happened, he was not at all sure that dying was not at least partially a conscious decision. This life had not brought Hal much of what he had wanted. Perhaps he had simply made up his mind to leave, and events had accommodated him.

Well,
Arthur thought
, I
can leave, too.

That was something he had known ever since the incident of the loaves and fishes at the crossroads. When he had closed his eyes, it was not to bring rain, as it had, but to leave his body. His body, and eventually the planet. He had been preparing to die.

It hadn't worked. Something had happened: a slight shift in consciousness, a small fear of death, perhaps. Whatever it was, instead of oblivion, the rain had come, and Arthur had returned to the screaming, shouting, adoring voices around him without remembering what he had intended to do.

But there were no adoring crowds today. The adulation had turned overnight to hatred, the blind faith to suspicion. As it had with every Messiah in history.

These people were not prepared for what he was. He still did not understand his gift, this strange outgrowth of the Merlin's magic gone wrong; but he did know that whatever power he had been given was wasted on human beings.

The taste of life in his mouth was bitter. He had had enough.

He closed his eyes, hearing a deep thrum inside his mind, the silent sound that would engulf him and lead him to the Summer Country. The noise around him grew muffled. All the shouting and commands directed at him, the jarring sounds of traffic and claxoning horns and machinery, the purposeful, probing questions of reporters, the chatter of idle passersby, the occasional burst of laughter or wail of an infant... All of the auditory detritus of life around him dimmed, as if a giant bell jar had covered everything.

He could no longer feel the humidity in the air or the sun on his face. He was traveling far, through that plane of memory and illusion, into something clearer, stiller, into the eye of the storm.

"A
rthur ..." It was Gwen's
voice, entering his silence.

"Are you all right?" he asked with his mind.

"I'm afraid I'm going quite mad down there," she answered wryly. A moment later she appeared beside him, just the two of them in a limitless expanse of white.

"How did you get here?" he asked. "I didn't know... Oh." He realized that the woman he was talking to was Guenevere. "I thought you were Gwen."

"I am," she said patiently.

"I think I was supposed to get to know her, but..."

"But you're going to kill yourself instead?"

"It's only a matter of time, anyway, Guenevere." He paced. "And not much left of it at that, from all indications."

"Then hadn't you better do what you came to do?"

"I beg your pardon?" he asked archly. "I've hardly had the opportunity to do anything, in case you hadn't noticed. Thanks to the Merlin, the life I was supposed to have lived as Arthur Blessing was blithely exchanged for another that I'd already lived!"

"Now, now," Guenevere said. "You did enjoy being King, didn't you?"

He blinked, touched his face. He had a beard. He shook his head, astonished. "Why, that's who I am now, isn't it!"

The queen made a noncommittal gesture. "You are who you are," she said.

Arthur sat down beside her, on a bench that materialized as soon as he thought of it. "What, er... what exactly was it I was supposed to do, Guenevere?"

She raised her eyebrows. "Don't you remember?"

"Well," he waffled. "I... I suppose ..."

"You came for me," she said, quietly but firmly. "You said you would wait for me. But instead, I've waited for you, again and again. For three lifetimes I've waited. But something always seems to get in the way."

"Oh. But naturally, there were matters that had to be taken care of. Your vow as a priestess in one life, my duties as King in another. And in this one, of course, they're all making me out to be some kind of tinpot god created for their entertainment."

"It has nothing to do with them," she said irritably. "It's about knowing who you are, and what you are, and what it is you want, and what things you have to leave behind... As Hal said, it's about doing what you can." She arranged her skirts around her. "He was giving you a message, you know."

"Hal?"

"No one ever loved you more," Guenevere said. "Except for me. That is why I am here."

"You are what you are, and you do what you can," Arthur repeated.

"Go back," she said. "Finish out the story." She took his hands in hers. "And remember who you are."

He came to abruptly as a rock struck him, the pain in his head throbbing.

"Antichrist!" someone shouted from the crowd.

"Look, he's bleeding!"

"Heal yourself, miracle boy!"

"It was a fraud. And the girl's in on it."

"Those punks on motorcycles, too."

"Heal me!"

Again the cameras swiveled toward him. Gwen, too, was being led away. Two police squad cars were waiting on Germantown Pike. One for each of them. He caught her eye. She was terrified.

Don't be afraid, he tried to tell her, but he knew she would not understand him in this way. She was fully human; while she was conscious, she had no inkling of being anything except Gwen Ranier, a friendless girl who the police believed had killed her own mother.

If she only knew her worth
, Arthur thought. And then he looked out on the crowd around them.
If they all did.
He stopped cold. The idea made his breath stop. All these people, the invalids, the accusers, the complainers, the vicious ones, all of them were here because they did not believe that their lives were good enough to do the things they wanted to do.

Just as he himself had not believed.

Oh, my God,
he thought. That was why the Grail didn't work all the time.

"It can't give you what you don't already have," he said.

"What'd he say?" a reporter shouted. A dozen microphones were thrust through the protective circle of the police. The officers shoved them away.

"Hurry up, goddammit." A television camera was bearing down on them and its operator, a sweating, smelly man with greasy hair and an expanse of belly showing beneath his shirt, motioned for the reporter to come forward.

"I think he's trying to give a statement," the reporter said in her most outraged tone to the police. The reporter took a deep breath, then looked directly into the camera with eyes of steel. "Police are strangely unwilling to permit the young man at the center of this tragedy to speak," she said.

"Oh, for God's sake," the chief of police said. He motioned for Arthur's escort to stop. "Okay, kid, you want to say something? Go ahead."

Suddenly Arthur found himself in the middle of a silent circle, with microphones arrayed like spears around him. He almost wanted to laugh. It was all so simple, really. The people there—the ones who had come to the healing waters, who had looked for a Messiah, who had eventually needed only to kill the one they had once worshipped—suddenly they seemed harmless to him, childlike, understandable, worthy, forgivable.

"They're just afraid of dying," he said into the microphones. He looked out over the crowd. "But that's the easy part."

"Arthur!" a woman's voice called. It was Emily, running up from the road. Someone shouted her down. The protesters began chanting again. The reporter who had gotten the police to grant the interview with Arthur slipped in the mud and fell hard against one of the officers. Misinterpreting the event, another policeman drew his club. Instinctively, the other officers formed a circle around their prisoner, pushing the microphones out, causing the media people to complain loudly and shout questions at Arthur. The din grew even louder as the news helicopter once again appeared overhead. In the distance, the ambulance taking away the bodies receded. The fire truck pulled away.

Into this cacophony of voices and mechanical sounds came the motorcycles.

With a roar that rent the air, the knights lunged into the police circle like a herd of bison. They came, single-minded, powerful, and fearless, the horsemen of the apocalypse come for their own.

As they barreled through the crowd at breakneck speed, Launcelot extended his arm and plucked Arthur out of the police circle like a daisy. On a parallel course, Dry Lips grabbed Gwen around the waist and slapped her neatly in front of him. The rest never even slowed down.

"W
here are we going?"
Curoi MacDaire mouthed as they headed down the highway.

"Somewhere that's not here," Launcelot shouted in response.

The pursuit began at once, with the police making up only a segment of the group of vehicles following them. A van from a television news team kept trying to weave through the traffic, despite loud warnings from police bullhorns. Observing the success of the van, the other motorists were not about to fall away. It was a strange procession, a parade to nowhere.

About a half mile down the road, someone dressed in rags of such an extreme condition that he looked like a beggar from the Middle Ages stood directly in front of them, gesticulating wildly. Arthur recognized him at once. It was Taliesin, theatrical as ever, directing them into the woods.