Unlucky Charms (The Cold Cereal Saga) (25 page)

“Merrows,” said Merle. “A sort of Irish mermaid. With so much of the seas disappeared here, I was hoping they might be hanging out in the lakes. The females are all honeys but the males are all hideously ugly, so they tend to be partial to human men. I’d been thinking we’d have to steal a couple of their caps, but the way that Clara was going goo-goo for you reminded me that I’m traveling with
People
magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive for 2010.”

“I’m embarrassed for you that you know that. And what about these caps?”

“Don’t ask me why, but without one of those caps or capes they can’t dive beneath the water. But if we get a couple of them, we can go
SHOOM!
down to the bottom of the lake like rockets. Once we’re at the bottom I’m pretty sure we’ll find a door, a door that’ll take us to any lake we want. So how about sweet-talking those gals out of a coupla hats?”

John sighed and prepared. He couldn’t merely be a man who wanted some hats. He needed to be a man who loved fish women. He had to believe this. If he loved them, they would love him. They would
want
to give him their hats. He massaged his temples and searched his past for any and all fish affection he could think of. He’d had a goldfish as a boy, that was something, wasn’t it? He’d always enjoyed films about people helping whales be free. As a teenager he’d practically
lived
on fish and chips.

“What are you doing?” asked Merle.

“I’m getting into character!” John answered through gritted teeth. “Okay, fine. Fine. Okay. Here I go.”

He breathed and stepped down the mucky bank.

The merrow women flinched, and one moved as if to dive into the water. But John walked with his arms wide, hands open, his face a beatific Get Well Soon card to the universe.

“What treasures!” he said, and beamed them a smile that could be seen from space. “What treasures have washed ashore! And here I thought one had to dive to find pearls.”

The merrows exchanged glances. None of them said anything in return, but neither did they swim away, even as John drew slowly closer. One smiled, shyly. A second even giggled. All of them began to fuss in some way with their hair, pushing it back behind their webbed ears or combing it with their clamshell fingernails.

“Ladies.” John went down on one knee in the mud and bowed his head. Then he raised it slightly, looked up at each of them with lifted brow, did that thing where his jaw muscles clenched just a little like he had to bite down to keep from crying for joy to the heavens and so forth. All the stuff he’d perfected the year he’d done the Australian soap opera. Now the merrows were all grinning, and one of them made sort of a dolphin noise.

“What … what is your name, landsman?” asked one of the merrows.

“I am John. I travel with my elderly and mute and also unfortunately simpleminded father, who rests not far off. And you are of course right to call me a landsman, though I long to explore the beauty of the deep waters of the lakes of the world.”

“
Aw
,” said another merrow.

He wasn’t using contractions all of a sudden, thought John. Why wasn’t he using contractions? “Is it beautiful, beneath the waves? Tell me, please, so that I may describe it to my brainless and often gassy father.”

“Hey!” came a faint shout from the trees. The merrows craned their necks to look until John did sort of a puckery thing with his lips and got them to refocus. So they told him about the inky blue beauty of their home, the easy rhythms of the water weeds and grasses, the corals and sponges that had tumbled in centuries ago, afire with magic they’d absorbed from the Gloria Wall. They told him of the sea monster in Scotland that never left its cave because it didn’t believe in itself. They described the silver schools of fish that moved like one body and arranged themselves, just twice a year, into arcane symbols that none could decipher. They told him which fish they thought were stuck up and which ones could be really popular if they weren’t always camouflaging themselves all the time.

John listened patiently, nodding, hoping one of the merrows would get around to suggesting what he wanted, all on her own. And indeed, eventually one said, “You know, I have a spare cap in my grotto. I could make a gift of it to you—then you could see these splendors with your own eyes!” She gasped as if she’d surprised herself.

John pretended to really perk up at this. Could he really? One of the merrows with both cap and cape pointed out that
she
really only needed one or the other, so she could give John the hat right off her head. A small squabble erupted over who would give him what. In the midst of this, he sighed heavily and turned all their heads.

“What is it?” said a merrow. “What ails you?”

“Oh … just … any experience beneath the waves would be a hollow one if I could not share it with my halfwit father, who is not long for this world.”

So it was quickly decided that John would be given not one but
two
caps, and also an enchanted comb made from a conch shell. When pressed, the merrow who’d given the comb admitted that it wasn’t so much
magic
as it was merely the only thing she’d had on her person at the moment, but John thanked her extravagantly anyway. Then he brought Merle out (“Oh, he’s just as you described,” said one merrow), and they took up places by the water.

“Where’s Finchbriton?” whispered John.

“Zippered up inside my bag.”

“Are these bags waterproof?”

“’Bout to find out. But he’s in the ziplock with the flare gun.”

“We’d better hurry, then.”

John blew kisses to the merrows, which they made a great show of pretending to catch in their webbed hands and then devour, noisily. It was disturbing.

The men put on their caps. “So what do we do, exactly?” asked John.

“Okay, I think … I think this door, if there is a door, will be right in the middle of the lake,” said Merle. “So I think we have to, like, dive in, and if we
think
about the middle of the bottom of the lake, then I think the caps will take us there. And then we find the door, and I think we have to
think
about where we want it to take us, and then we open it and
bam
! We’re there.”

“Do you know what word I noticed a lot of in that plan?”

“Relax. What do people say in your movies? ‘It’ll work. It
has
to.’ Plans always work after the character says that.”

“Do we have to hold our breath with the caps on?”

“Better hold it just to be safe.”

“On three?”

One, two, three, and then they breathed, and dove.

CHAPTER 28

John’s head surfaced first, then Merle’s. Each gasped for air, then Merle scrambled up this new shore as quickly as his old joints would allow and unzipped his bag, then the ziplock. Finchbriton fluttered out, drowsily. He landed a few feet away and fluffed himself.

They looked at the marsh around them, the shroud of mist, the bandy-rooted and bare-limbed trees like the taut-skinned mummies of things that had tried to struggle free from the mire. Frogs chirped and croaked. The air smelled like rotten apples.

“Avalon,” said John. “Mick said this place was supposed to be nice.”

The plan with the caps had worked better than it had any right to. As soon as they’d hit water their bodies had been whisked downward, spiraling through a flurry of bubbles, to the bottom of the lake. The whole trip took all of two seconds, and that was fine—had it been slower, or had there been fewer bubbles, John and Merle might have been aware of all the colossal eels, or the one merrow who was as large as a submarine, or the fish with the pincushion teeth, or even the moment when their trajectory actually took them
through
the coils of a sea serpent and past its jagged jaws.

But they’d had no idea. They reached bottom, squinted about through the murk for an exit while entirely failing to notice the octoclops barreling down on them, swam over to a pearly door set into a tall stone amidst the weeds, and stepped through, thinking,
Avalon.

“Well,” said Merle, looking at Avalon now. “I haven’t been
here
in a long time. Not properly.”

They scuttled up to a felled tree and crouched in among the roots. John couldn’t help looking at most trees a little suspiciously ever since one had tried to kill him, so a dead specimen like this was sort of a comfort.

He wondered if it was the gloom of this place or merely the fact that the two of them were dripping swamp water that made Merle shiver just then.

“First time I came to Avalon was also the first time I met Nimue, actually,” the old man said as he twisted around to survey the island, the sweep of the hill dotted here and there by stones and caves. Dreary as it was, at least he could get his bearings. The place he’d visited in Somerset back on earth had barely looked anything like this. “It was one of Arthur’s early misadventures. He’d gotten himself wounded and his sword broken fighting this enormous knight named Pellinore.”

“This was before Arthur was king?”

“Nah, he was king already.”

“Why was he fighting Pellinore, then?” asked John.

“Oh, the usual. I don’t remember the specifics. A squire or a damsel rushes into the great hall of the king to tattle on some bad knight who’s knocking down other knights and taking their lunch money. So the king … does what? Tries him in court? ’Course not. One guy goes out to beat him up. Maybe kill him. No talking, no trying to reason with anyone. Just the juvenile belief that the guy who gets beaten somehow lost the argument. Whoever wins the fight is right, and whoever’s right wins the fight. I tried to point out that whoever wins the fight might just be lucky or do more push-ups than the other guy, but I never got a lot of traction with that.

“Anyway, the first guy Arthur sends to fight Pellinore doesn’t do so hot, so Arthur sneaks off to fight Pellinore himself. And does pretty well, but eventually he’s going to die if I don’t rush in and put Pellinore to sleep.”

“And no one ever thinks to send, like, a posse out?” asks John. “A proper police arrest?”

“Please. It was like high school with swords. All the cool kids, the rich kids, sitting at the big round cool kids’ table. Acting like the serfs don’t exist. Racing around, playing chicken with spears. Every one of them with some tragic, heroic opinion of himself. It was the adolescence of man.”

“Was it really as bad as all that?” said John. “Didn’t Arthur bring law and order to England or something?”

“Oh, sure, mostly. It was
much
worse before Arthur came along. Arthur practically invented chivalry. Honor, and protection of the weak. Each noble knight must be willing to lay down his life in service to those less fortunate than himself. Funny how they still managed to almost completely ignore all the farmers and poor people, though.”

On all the island there was only one footpath that looked well worn, and it led up to a vault of granite that protected a shaft into the hillside. Merle and John and Finchbriton scrambled closer and staked it out over the edge of a shelf of stones.

“So what does Pellinore and all this have to do with Nimue and Avalon?” whispered John.

“Well, I take Arthur away to heal up at an abbey, and remember, his sword is broken. So I know this is the time in the story where I take him to a particular lake and a particular lady offers him a new one.”

“Oh, right.”

They traveled, Arthur and Merlin, like pilgrims to the lake of Avalon. It looked much sweeter then, but no less mysterious. Mists still hung low and thick as carded wool, but these were often spun by sunlight into brightly colored tissue that robed the island like a fine mantle.

And in the water they saw a milk-white arm, around which was wrapped the band of a scabbard, and the hand of which held the finest sword ever forged by man or fairy.

Arthur inhaled sharply. “I would give my kingdom for such a sword,” he said.

“Jeez,” said Merle. “Keep your voice down. Somebody might hold you to that.”

“The sword Excalibur,” spoke someone new, and they found they’d been joined on the shore by a stunning young woman with hair like a moonless sky. It seemed to please her that this hair be still, but that her pallid gown sailed and slipped on a breeze that touched no other nearby thing. “Do you like it?”