Dragon Sword

DANGER BOY

Dragon Sword

Mark London Williams

Danger Boy: Dragon Sword

By Mark London Williams

Copyright 2001, 2004, 2011 Mark
London Williams

Smashwords Edition

First published by Tricycle Press in
2001

Candlewick Press Edition
2004

Cover by Michael Koelsch

For Dick and Deb, my first Bay Area
tour guides, with love.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

CHAPTER NINETEEN

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER
TWENTY-ONE

CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

Prologue

The Lake

The old king stands by the lake,
looking over it as for the last time, waiting.

Waiting for a woman. A woman who’s
never touched land.

After a moment, she appears from
under the water, calmly floating up, then hovering just over the
surface. The woman remains utterly serene, as if rising from a lake
then standing above it were scarcely remarkable. She seems very
patient, as though she could wait a long time to take tired kings
into her liquid embrace, take them into the lake with her when
their hearts are broken for the last time.

This king is very tired. He’s seen
too much war, too much bloodshed — and knows he’s caused a lot of
it.

When he was younger, he never
thought he’d wind up hurting like this. He thought everything would
be perfect.

The king is going to throw the
sword into the lake, let this water sprite have it, because this
sword, it seems to him now, is the root cause of all his
misery.

He remembers pulling it from the
rock when he was younger; he remembers thinking it would make him
invincible.

That was a lie. It only made him
king. Now, no more lies. Just water. And silence.

He holds the sword above his head,
ready to fling it into what he thinks will be its final resting
place.

“
Arthur.”

It’s Merlin’s voice. The old wizard
is always speaking at moments like this, breaking the king’s
concentration, never quite taking anything seriously
enough.

This time Merlin’s pointing. Out at
the water. The serenity is even draining from the Lady of the
Lake’s face. There’s a swirl of foam and bubbles next to her, and
something unexpected. An intruder.

It was just supposed to be the king
and Merlin here, alone with the water sprite, to dispose of the
sword. The sword and a whole lot of bad memories.

But there’s someone else. Someone
who’s kind of . . . fading in. Thrashing about in the water,
gasping for air, trying to swim.

Is it another wizard, here to
challenge Merlin? Or perhaps a spirit, the wandering ghost of some
man killed by the king in a forgotten war?

The king can’t tell. But Merlin
doesn’t seem worried. He seems, in fact, slightly
amused.

But then, Merlin always seems
amused, no matter how bad the situation.

The small caps and breakers in the
lake are shredded apart by the frantic splashing as the intruder
buzzes through the water like a small, agitated shark.

As the trespasser draws near, the
king lowers his sword and lets it rest in the mud by his
leggings.

It’s a boy coming to them. Out of
the water. A boy.

Soon to be a man, but not quite.
About twelve years old.

Wearing jeans and a baseball cap —
though the king wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to call
them.

“
Hello,” the boy finally
gasps.

“
Well met,” the king says. “Or,
perhaps, not so well. Merlin, is this one of yours?”

The boy looks from one man to the
other, then back at the king. “Arthur?” The boy speaks with the
strangest accent the king has ever heard.

But the conversation is
interrupted. The water starts bubbling and churning again. And
another boy begins fading into view.

Chapter One

Eli: One Man’s Family

December 24, 1941 C.E.

“
Mom?”

I’m standing in front of a big
hotel up on a hill in San Francisco. The Fairmont. The sign matches
the name on the tattered piece of paper in my hand. I’ve just
walked across the city. It’s cold and it’s night and it’s Christmas
and the United States has just plunged into a world war.

And my mother stands there
shivering, with tears running down her face.

“
Mom?”

I don’t know what else to say right
now. I’m kind of stuck at “Mom,” which itself is a word, a name, I
haven’t said out loud for a long time. Because there hasn’t been
anyone I could say it to.

Well, I guess it’s not really a
name. It’s more a title. Her name is Margarite. Margarite Sands.
She’s my mother, and she disappeared in an explosion in the year
2018. An explosion that threw her backward in time.

Of course, I’ve come backward in
time, too. To find her and bring her back. Back to my dad. To her
own world.

“
Eli? Is it you?” At first she
reaches out like she’s going to touch my face. Then her hand just
stops there, in midair, frozen. Like maybe I’m a ghost, or a
mirage. A Christmas ghost.

But a ghost from her past or
future? Even I can’t quite figure it out.

It takes another moment for her
fingers to reach my face. She brushes my cheek, then takes her hand
away, satisfied that I’m still standing here.

“
It’s me, Mom.”

She’s quiet again, all bundled up
in her coat — a coat I’ve never seen before.

She’s older than last time I saw
her, too. She has a scarf around her face, so it’s hard to tell
what the difference is — maybe the expression in her
eyes.

She’s been away from me longer than
I have from her. On my long walk over here, I saw the holiday
decorations, and a couple of people wished me “Merry Christmas.” I
finally checked a newspaper. It’s December 24, 1941.

My mom has been back here since at
least 1937. So practically five years have passed for her. She’s
five years older, and I’m not.

Getting tangled up in time —
traveling from one time to another — does funny things like
that.

“
How did you find me?”

“
I was about to go inside when I
saw you getting off that cable car.”

“
No, I mean how did you
find
me
? Back here. In”— she has to think about it for a split
second —“1941?”

I hold up the paper. It’s Fairmont
stationery, with the word
help
written on it in her hand-
writing. It appeared inside the time sphere in my dad’s
lab.

My dad, Sandusky Sands, is a
physicist. So’s my mom. One of their experiments about slowing down
time got out of control, and a lab blast hurled her back… to here.
To right before World War II. Except it’s not “before” anymore.
Europe’s already at war, and now the U.S. and Japan are,
too.

After Mom vanished, Dad and I left
our home in Princeton, New Jersey, and moved out West. He’d
inherited an old winery, close to San Francisco, in the Valley of
the Moon. About fifty miles north. And a million miles away. Dad is
still living in 2019.

He tried to stop all his research
then, shut the whole thing down, but he was basically forced to
continue by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency,
and one of the guys who runs it, Mr. Howe.

Howe made sure that all the
equipment Dad would need to keep doing his experiments was sent
west, too. Dad realized the work on time spheres was going to go on
with him or without him. And without him, it would be a lot less
safe — for whomever else Howe got to do the work, and for the rest
of the world.

Of course, Dad had already lost
Mom. And then I got unstuck in time myself. And he doesn’t want to
lose me, too. But he hasn’t. He won’t. I’m coming back.

“
I can move around in time, too,
Mom. I can even control it now. A little bit.” My hand touches the
small metal disk in my pocket. It’s a chrono-compass Dad’s been
working on. Between that and my supercharged baseball cap, I’m a
regular one-man time-ship. I can cross the Fifth Dimension to go to
different points in history. Though it takes a toll on your body.
For me, I’m always left a little woozy.

“
Oh, Eli.” Mom’s sounding a lot
more sad than happy. “It can’t really be controlled. And you
shouldn’t be here now.”

“
You mean on Christmas
Eve?”

“
I mean during World War Two. For
America, it started two weeks ago. Officially. Right after Japan
bombed Pearl Harbor. Hey,”— she leans over and touches my forehead,
though this time it’s like she knows I won’t disappear —“you’re
sweating.”

“
Yeah, I’m —” I want to tell her
it’s the effects of the time travel, but she’s already worrying
like a mom. “I had to walk a long way to get here.”

“
But it’s forty degrees out. You
should be shivering, not sweating.” Well, she’s sounding like a
mom, too. Then she finally gives me an all-out hug and kiss. “I
can’t believe you’re here.”

“
Are you glad?” She hasn’t said
she’s happy to see me yet.

“
I don’t know.” The hug winds down,
and she’s looking at me again, getting all concerned.

She doesn’t know?
Aren’t
mothers always supposed to be glad to see their children, no matter
what? No matter how dangerous things are?

Or are parents willing to be sad,
to be in pain, if it means their kids are safe somewhere? Is that
what it means to
be
a parent?

“
Is your father here?”

I’m about to tell her,
See?
It’ll be all right, he’s waiting for us,
that the whole idea of
my coming back was to bring her home with me — when the air is
filled with the loud wailing of what sounds like a million ships
blasting their horns out at sea. Or maybe thousands of those
old-fashioned gas-powered cars, like you see in history vids, all
honking at once.

But these aren’t just horns. It’s a
more…
panicked
kind of sound.

“
Air-raid siren,” Mom says. “Come
on.”

She takes me by the hand and pulls
me into the hotel. In the lobby, people are scurrying around, some
of them holding their ears, but no one is diving under tables or
anything.

“
Are we about to get bombed?” I
yell over the noise.

She shakes her head and pulls me
through the crowd. Farther across the lobby, there’s a large
Christmas tree with tinsel wrapped around it but no lights. A big
poster is propped up in front of it with a picture of Santa Claus
arm in arm with Uncle Sam:

PUT COAL IN DER FUEHRER’S
STOCKING!

BUY WAR BONDS!

I wonder who “der Fuehrer” is. Mom
motions for me to keep following her across the lobby. We pass a
ballroom and I glance in, then stop: There seems to be some kind of
play happening onstage. Or at least there had been, until the
sirens brought everything to a halt. There’s a small orchestra, and
the whole room’s decked out with holiday decorations. Leading the
band is a little man with fuzzy white hair — except they’re not
playing right now, and his baton seems frozen in the air. Onstage,
actors in tuxedos and evening gowns are all gathered around ...
what? Metal poles of some sort, with small cages on top.