Dragon Sword (19 page)

“
Would like first to take science
trinkets, memory objects, and ancient-history knacks from an old
friend I
snkkt!
never knew. You, King,” Clyne says to
Arthur, “knew him well. His name was Ungarth.”

“
A fierce beast. And a deadly
opponent for many.”

“
A witness. A lastling. He had no
one to share reports with. And so left one here
t-t-ttt!
on
the wall.”

Clyne proceeds to tell Ungarth’s
story as he moves along the sides of the cave, pointing at the
pictures and symbols. When he finishes, Arthur seems a little
shaken.

“
So much of what I thought I
knew…was wrong,” he says quietly.

“
I tried to tell you,” Merlin
says.

“
Be quiet, wizard!” King Arthur
snaps, then turns to Clyne. “And to you, I would like to make my
amends to Ungarth. I can no longer ask his forgiveness
directly.”

“
That mistake-mend is not mine to
grant. But
tew-ptt!
I forgive you. Time journeys are unknown
to you, rectifying is out of reach. So head forward now
kt-chw!
with a rephrased heart.”

“
Thank you,” Arthur replies. “If
you just said what I think you did.”

“
If you and Ungarth could have just
sn-kww!
played
k-kt!
Cacklaw instead of trying to
kill each other, the wall report would read more kindly,” Clyne
says. Then he begins to gather things from around the
cave.

Thea and I move to help him.
“Appreciated, friends, but this
snkt!
is something I need to
do singly. I believe he would have wanted
klkt!
a Saurish
witness. And I am the closest thing to clanfolk his memory will
have.”

As I wait with Thea, I have a
“clanfolk” question for her. “Thea, when you had us tell about our
families…You’ve never mentioned your father.”

She nods, while watching Clyne move
slowly and carefully through Ungarth’s things. “And perhaps now I
never will.”

“
Why?”

“
I don’t know who he is. Mother
said I couldn’t know until I was older.”

“
Why was that?”

From nodding, she changes to
shaking her head. “That’s one of the secrets they killed when they
took her. The answer is somewhere back in Alexandria. Waiting for
me, perhaps. But I doubt I shall ever return. The fire took the
city I knew.” Before I can ask anything else, she continues. “And
you, Eli, how come you wouldn’t tell the bully who your mother
is?”

“
Because I think her real name is a
war secret now. I didn’t want him to know it.”

“
It’s not just the bully who shares
a fate with us.”

“
What do you mean?”

“
It’s Arthur and Ungarth, too. Time
and history have broken all our families. All of us, except perhaps
him
.”

She points across the cave to
Merlin. I don’t know how he could have heard us, but he’s nodding
with a smiley expression like he’s been part of the conversation
all along. Thea suddenly walks over to Clyne and starts gathering
things with him. He looks at her. Not mad, just curious about what
she’s up to.

“
It’s all right,” she says to him.
“Ungarth won’t mind. I am the last of my kind, too.”

Chapter
Twenty-four

Eli: Time Boom

Somewhere in Old England &
Dates Unknown

“
What’s the word again?”

“
Sentient
.”

“
But doesn’t that mean it can
think?”

“
I’ve only been using it a short
while, but yes, the vessel seems to be…if not quite making its own
decisions, then augmenting mine.”

“
Doing stuff you didn’t tell it to
do?”

“
Yes.”

“
Well, do you
trust
the
ship?”

“
I certainly trust K’lion’s people.
They built it.”

“
But do you trust the
ship?”

Thea doesn’t get to answer that
question. We’ve loaded up all the items from Ungarth’s cave into
the Saurian time-craft, and Clyne has just loaded Rolf. We’re
saying our goodbyes to Merlin and Arthur.

“
I still have something of yours,”
Merlin pulls my Seals cap out of his sleeve. I’m glad to see it’s
managed to become perfectly dry in the wizard’s robes. I feel a bit
doofusy for losing track of it, but then, I did have a gun pressed
to my head.

I start to reach for the hat but
realize that most of the Thickskin has come off. And I’d rather
ride in the ship with Thea and Clyne.

“
Thea, could you hang on to it,
please?” I ask. “I don’t have any covering for it right
now.”

She shrugs, then puts it on her own
head. “My friend,” she explains to Merlin, “has a symbiosis with
this strange floppy helmet.”

“
It’s a cap,” I remind
her.

“
The cap serves as a key,” she
continues, “to unmoor him in time.”

“
That’s always an option,” I tell
her. “If the ship spooks you, you and Clyne could hang on to my
legs.”

“
I will trust the ship for a bit
longer. Besides, we have the prisoner.”

“
Too bad, Thea. I was hoping we
could moor you here for a while.” It’s Merlin again. He’s nodding
the same way he did in the cave, with that
keeping-secrets-around-me-is-useless expression. “I would say,
lass, you could learn a lot. But I suspect you could offer just as
much.”

Thea still isn’t sure where she
should go. Her real home, she says again, is gone.

“
But your father could still be in
Alexandria,” I remind her.

“
He could be. He could be anywhere
else on Earth. He could be dead. And I’m not ready for the
heartbreak of a fruitless search, Eli. Not now.”

She doesn’t want to come back with
me, because every time she visits 2019, she gets shot at. And she
doesn’t want to spend her life explaining herself to Mr. Howe and
his DARPA goons. I ask about Clyne’s planet.

“
I will return to Saurius Prime
someday, because that’s where the remnants of the Alexandrian
library are. But though K’lion’s people are generous, that’s not
quite home, either.”

Arthur comes out of the ship after
an impromptu tour from Clyne. “Amazing, Merlin. You should see it.
I should have you conjure one for me — imagine the crusading we
could do!”

“
First, sire, you’ve a home to
rebuild.”

“
Aye. And a sword to get
reacquainted with.” He raises Excalibur once more, which he’s been
doing a lot since we left the cave.

“
Are you going to find your knights
again?” I ask.

“
Or let other knights find me. I do
not know. ’Tis a different world from when we sat at the Round
Table. I will rebuild the castle and see what happens next. But for
now, I shall politely refuse to fade away.”

And then I think:
But isn’t that
what happened? Didn’t King Arthur just fade away? Did we change
things by making him want to stick around? And if we just changed
things, is it for the better?

My dad mentioned a theory once that
for every fork in the road, for every situation with more than one
possible outcome — which is most of them —there’s a new and
parallel world created. A different one for each possibility. And
each possibility after that. Which makes for an infinite number of
forks in the road, and worlds to hold them.

First there’s Mom, talking about
how World War II was working itself out differently from the way it
went the last time — and now this: King Arthur acting like he
practically expects the cartoon Laddy to come riding up at any
moment so that his royal adventures can continue.

I didn’t want to keep making so
many different worlds that I couldn’t find my way back to my real
home. Or that Mom and Dad would always have to stay
apart.

“
All is ready now for our
swirly-bump voyage!” Clyne declares, emerging from the craft. He
was referring to our plan to drop Rolf off somewhere in 1941, maybe
with the U.S. or British Army. Then I would go back to Dad, in
2019. He must be pretty worried about me. Depending on when we
touch back, I’ve been gone either a short time or a long time. I
never know till I get home.

Thea finally decides to return to
Saurius Prime with Clyne, at least for a while. “But perhaps when
your castle is fixed, it could use a library,” she says to Arthur
and Merlin.

“
Perhaps it could, m’lady. Perhaps
it could.” The king bows to us, and Merlin nods.

“
My binding spell should be good on
your captive for some time yet,” the wizard adds. “But I am not
entirely sure how sudden
chronological
changes affect it.
Your ship’s arrival shook him loose before. Be careful of sudden
disruptions. I’ll look forward to hearing about your journey next
time.” And then he bows, too.

Next time?

Stepping into the ship, I see how
different it is from the “school model” Clyne had before. The body
of the craft itself seems almost…liquid — walls and floors have
shaped themselves into seats for all three of us.

Rolf is on a low bunk in the back.
Part of the wall had oozed out to make restraints around
him.

I take a seat and settle in. It
makes itself snug around me. Thea is the pilot: She moves her hand
over what must be a control panel — though really there are hardly
any buttons or switches — and an area around it starts to
glow.

“
We need something to guide it back
to that time of war,” Thea says. “To give the ship a scent, so to
speak.”

“
Well,” I say as I look around,
“what about Rolf’s uniform? It’s the one he stole at Fort
Point.”

“
Bring a piece up here. This seems
to be where the vessel’s…brains are. Though perhaps it’s all
becoming a single intelligence.”

I try to tear a corner off Rolf’s
jacket, but it’s too thick. “We need something sharp.”

Rolf has been unusually quiet —
considering how much he likes to brag. Merlin’s spell didn’t freeze
his mouth, exactly, just reduced his voice to a whisper. But I’m
close enough for him to try it out.

“
We have weapons more terrible than
this,” he rasps. “This war is just beginning.”

“
This ship isn’t a
weapon.”

Then he laughs. A croaky
whisper-laugh, which gives me the creeps. “You always want
everything to be so
nice
, Roy Rogers! Existence isn’t
nice
. It is
fierce
. But you know that. You’re not the
good little cowboy you pretend to be. I see it in you. The dragon.
You have it, too.”

“
I do
not
!”

“
Don’t listen to him,” Thea tells
me.

“
Leave his word-salad alone,” Clyne
adds.

“
You hear me, don’t you, Roy
Rogers? You know the truth. You would do what I do to survive. To
prevail.”

I can feel the anger inside me
again. But I’m not like him. People who
are
like him always
want to believe everyone else is the same way.

“
Just shut up,” I spit.

Then I see the knife.

It’s jutting out from the ship
wall, like the bunk, or the seats. The Saurian craft has
manufactured it and appears to be…
handing
it to
me.

But why? Why did it make a
knife?

I snap it loose and use it to cut
off a piece of Rolf’s uniform. Is that why I have it? For a simple
task? Or was the ship sensing something else?

In me?

No.

That’s not who I am. No matter what
Rolf says. No matter what corny secret name Mr. Howe gives me. I’m
just a twelve-year-old who wants to be home playing
Barnstormers.

Right?

I hand the piece of cloth to Thea,
who puts it on the control panel, which…absorbs it. She closes her
eyes. “Find it,” she whispers.

And I can tell by the feeling in my
stomach that we’ve just burst into the Fifth Dimension.

Different parts of the ship swirl
into translucent portholes outside, and I see the wildly vibrant
colors streaking by in long lines — except for the ones that seem
to explode in little pinwheels. Between the bursts of color, utter,
utter blackness: the true opposite of light.

And then the sensations that come
with it: a cross between giddiness and itchiness, memories seeming
more alive than they ever have — almost as if they’re dancing in
front of you, like a portable Comnet screen.

Clyne, this time, just seems to be
admiring the ship. “Gennt has once again stretched the ectoplasm of
the possible!” he says, running his claws along the interior. Then
he stops to consider. “But
tk!
I wonder if we’ll be tested
on any of this.”

Thea still has her eyes closed, and
she’s still wearing my cap. It occurs to me that this ship, for
her, is like a giant version of the Seals hat to me. The two halves
of a time-traveling whole. Maybe not yet, but if the ship keeps
thinking and changing like she says, could it grow to become part
of her? What if she starts to need it for more than just
travel?