Sleepless Knights (27 page)

 

I stood on the edge of the collapsed cliff, the immense vortex churning at my feet. I reckoned the time to be well past midnight, perhaps even approaching dawn, but the colour of the sky was now so unnatural it was hard to say with any degree of accuracy. Neither was my trusty pocket watch of any use; its face bruised and broken, damage undoubtedly sustained during my many recent exertions. My hands were wet, and I noticed for the first time that they were covered with blood. More to stop their incessant shaking than anything else, I wiped them on my shirt, thinking that the stains would be a devil to get out. The spectral forms within the vortex swirling up out of the Otherworld resembled clothes in a giant washing machine. This small image of normality calmed me down enough to check again for a pulse in the motionless body at my feet. Nothing. My hands started shaking again, and this time I clasped them tightly together, sending a sharp tang of blood up to my nostrils.

I tried to think of something else I could have done. Something that I could still do. But what? What could I do for any of them anymore? More to the point, what did I even
want
to do for them anymore?
Perhaps the Grail
, I kept thinking,
perhaps the Grail
. Then, remembering where the Grail had gone, I dismissed it from my mind. But there it
stubbornly remained, printed across my thoughts as indelibly as the bloody stains on my shirt.

Time was running out. What was I thinking — time
had
run out. Even now, back in the stadium, the last of the Master's life-blood was draining from his body, and only one person could save him. Even now, the gap between this world and the next yawned fully open, and only one person could stop the destructive forces his own return had unleashed. But Merlin was nowhere to be seen.

I stared into the swirling abyss of the portal. For the moment it was calm and quiet, as if it were drawing one last long breath before disgorging the last of its contents into the world. When we had first opened it, the magical vortex had possessed all the wild unpredictability of a tornado. Now, however, although awesome in circumference, it nestled against the remains of the cliff, a domesticated apocalypse challenging you to think of it as the end of all things.

Then I saw him. Standing on the shore below me, at the base of the breach where the rift disappeared underground. Cloaked and hooded and beckoning. Very well, then. I picked up the body in my arms and stumbled down the crumbling remains of the cliff to where the wizard Merlin waited.

 

Immediately following the triumph of Sir Lancelot's troops with ‘Operation: Hostile Takedown,' I had returned to Camelot. It was my hope that the Master would have witnessed the victory himself on television, or at least been told the news by Megan and her colleagues. By now I was highly concerned to see him, it being several hours since I had left him in their care. So I teleported first to Lower Camelot, the better to arrive in the Royal Tower unannounced.

Materialising in my old quarters, I was surprised to find myself in a room full of people. Several soldiers were hacking chunks of stone out of the wall and passing them to men and women in white coats, who sat in front of a vast array of test tubes, microscopes and computers. One of them looked up abruptly at the sudden arrival of a stranger in their midst. “Who are you?” she said. “Where's your pass?” A soldier dropped the stone he was carrying and reached for his revolver, which I took as a cue to try my luck elsewhere. The Lower Great Hall was the first place to enter my mind, and that is where I went.

The place in which I arrived bore little resemblance to everything I had previously known. Huge chunks of the roof and its covering of floorstones had been removed between the crossbeams, giving strange jigsaw shaped views of the Great Hall one floor above me. My intricate winch and pulley
system was being dismantled; the sturdy ropes of a thousand conveyances hacked down, iron counterweights whose ballast had delivered dishes to many a feast passed along a line of soldiers and heaped carelessly in a corner. I wondered why they had not used my water-powered conveyor belt for this purpose, until I saw water seeping from where the pipe network had been wrenched out of the wall. Everywhere, people in military garb bustled around me, heedless of my presence, their sole purpose apparently to destroy every last trace of my subterranean invention. Steel ladders lined the empty lift shafts, and via one of these I climbed upwards, parting the tattered remnants of a tapestry and stepping into the Great Hall.

Here it was the same story as below. The north wall had been entirely knocked down, as had the room behind it, which we had once called the Green Room. The space ahead of me stretched out into the open air and as far as the courtyard, the ground becoming steadily more impassable the closer I got to the Royal Tower. Radar dishes, machinery and power generators blocked my way. Men and women scurried about, speaking incomprehensible words into their headsets. Thick cables snaked to and fro in such profusion it was a miracle nobody tripped over them. Nobody but myself, I should say, for with my very next step I caught my foot under one of these electrical vines and went sprawling to my knees.

I was about to teleport up to the Royal Chambers when Megan appeared in front of me. So swift and sudden was her arrival that it was almost as if she had an amulet of her own.

“Megan, thank goodness I have found you,” I said, getting to my feet. “What on earth is going on here?”

“What do you mean?” she said.

“The dismantling of Lower Camelot. Had I known it would result in so much disarray, I would never have allowed you access in such numbers.”

“Correct me if I'm wrong, but this time two days ago, none of this —” she circled her hand airily “— existed.”

“Well, no, not as such —”

“And as far as everybody was aware, none of you existed, either.”

“Indeed, but —”

“Then what did you expect? The world has been turned upside down, and for all they know, it's about to end.” She smiled a smile as black as a raven's wing. “People want explanations. And I for one think they deserve them.”

“Yes, well. Put like that, I suppose I can understand,” I said. I understood nothing of the sort, but her words were having a curious effect on me, which I tried to ignore by addressing the purpose of my return. “I take it you know of Sir Lancelot's success in quelling the dragon menace?” I said.

“Yes.”

“Then the Master also knows of it?”

“No.”

“May I ask why?”

“He's got other things to deal with.”

“In that case, I would like to inform him of it; as well as speaking to him about other matters.”

“Not possible,” she said.

“Excuse me?”

“I told you. He's busy.”

“Busy in what respect?”

“He's about to be interviewed,” said Megan.

“I see. Well, I suppose that is a positive move, but I would still like to talk with him. I only require a moment or two.”

“His interview is with the military. The reason King Arthur's not allowed to see anyone at the moment is because he's under arrest.”

“Under what charge?” I said.

“Charges. There are lots of them. But to save time, let's group them under the general heading of ‘threat to national security.' ”

“But, this is preposterous!”

“No, this is the
Official Secrets Act
.”

“I do not follow you.”

“ ‘I do not follow you,' ” she mimicked, in a self-pitying whine. “Don't worry. You will, soon enough.” There was that smile again. Megan walked back to the Royal Tower, where two guards flanked the only entrance from ground level, blocking the door with rifles that parted as she approached. “Oh, and by the way,” she added, turning back to me, “if you're thinking of scurrying in through any of your pathetic secret passages, don't bother. They're either guarded or blocked off.” The rifles crossed again behind her.

I was, to put it mildly, incensed, more determined than ever to reach the Master, and to get to him before she did. But when I touched the amulet, to my surprise, nothing happened. I touched it again. Still nothing. The confounded magical item had chosen the very worst moment to break! When I started to think of the Master, it was the same as when I had tried to teleport to Sir Perceval and the Grail, or attempted to picture Merlin. His form was shrouded in a thick mist, with only the vaguest visible outline. The more I tried, the deeper the fog became, billowing out and threatening to fill every corner of my mind. The mist dissipated as soon as I stopped trying, leaving me to consider clearer thoughts.

Chief among them was the realisation that the walls of Camelot had fallen. And I was the one who had let the invaders in. But a modicum of hope remained. There was every chance the marauders had passed over an element of the architecture easily overlooked; even by eyes as thoroughly prying as theirs. Indeed, once upon a time, I had overlooked it myself.

I closed my eyes and thought of laundry.

†

The laundry room was the only place that existed on a level beneath Lower Camelot. This ‘Lower Lower Camelot,' if you like, was constructed as something of a hasty afterthought — a salutary lesson in the potential pitfalls of castle planning. For it was only after the last stone of Lower Camelot had been laid that I realised I had made absolutely no provision for the collection and cleaning of dirty washing. But a fortuitous solution presented itself. Beneath my own quarters, directly below the Master's Royal Tower, was a small natural cave, a discovery which had been the cause of much consternation when laying the castle foundations. It would have been a very costly exercise to fill in all that space, so after much deliberation I had decided merely to seal it off, trusting my chief builder's assertion that there was enough foundation work already in place to ensure a solid structure above.

In the event, this cave provided the perfect location for a laundry room. It was central. It was clean and dry. And, with only a minor diversion of the underground stream, it had its own water supply. So it was that, when the Royal Tower was constructed, I included a small chute running up through a chimney-sized gap in the wall. Other similar chutes were positioned at regular intervals throughout the highest points of Upper Camelot. These corresponded to collection points in the Lower levels, where staff would gather the laundry and deposit it into the main chute through an access hatch in its side. The final destination of all soiled garments was a large walk-in earthenware pot in the middle of the laundry room, the size and shape of a small hut, where they awaited the weekly arrival of wash day.

As efficient as this was, however, it was only ever meant to be a one way system, as I now realised, lighting a wall-mounted torch with a match and peering up the long cobwebbed shaft. A test with the amulet confirmed what I strongly suspected: the malfunction concerning the Master formed a barrier around the whole of the Royal Tower. But three factors were in my favour. The first was a draught of air coming down the shaft, hinting that the laundry chute had escaped the invaders' attention and remained unblocked. The second was that by climbing up and balancing on the rim of the central pot, I could reach into the opening of the chute above and pull myself up inside. The third was that, by a combined effort of wedging my feet against the wall and using gaps in the masonry as foot-and-hand-holds, I could slowly but surely make my way up to the very top of the chute, which came out into a false-bottomed laundry chest in the Master's room. This I now proceeded to do, stone by awkward stone.

 

If the climb was all discomfort, it was luxury compared to the cramped conditions awaiting me above. I pushed up the bottom panel of the laundry chest and pulled myself through, closing it behind me, and arranging my limbs into as pleasant a position as possible without making any noise. This was not easy. Crouched on my haunches inside that small space, my every movement generated a symphony of sound, from banging my head on the wooden lid, to the creaking that each shift of my buckled legs produced from the floor panel below. At any moment I expected the lid to be thrown back, exposing me on my knees like a shamefaced penitent.

But as my ears grew more accustomed, I realised that any noises I made within would be lost in the general hubbub without. The Royal Chamber reverberated to a multitude of voices, muffled, as though I were hearing them from under water. I raised myself up from a low crouch into a half-stoop and pushed my head slowly but firmly against the lid, creating a slim letterbox view of the room outside.

It was as if someone had taken all the chaos occurring in the rest of Camelot and attempted to cram it into one room. The Master's four-poster bed had been overturned and shoved up against the wall, kept in place by a row of soldiers. Where the dressing table used to stand, a bank of television monitors had been erected, twelve of them stacked
three screens high, all of them, for the moment, blank. Small cameras on brackets were bolted or hammered into the walls. Slightly bigger cameras were in the hands of people arguing over the best position in which to stand and point them. Enormous lamps of the kind used on a theatre stage were set up high on poles and filled the room with a harsh unnatural light, as if to catch in their pitiless beam anything that the all-seeing cameras might have missed. And every remaining inch was filled with the swaggering members of this curious coalition of the media and the military.

Together with the cumbersome tools of their trade, these people obscured from my view the place at which all this industry was directed — the middle of the wall opposite my hiding place. There was currently no sign of Megan herself, but I was in little doubt that the Master, whatever his current state, was the focus of attention. I had arrived just in time, as this burst of frantic activity turned out to be a last minute rush before the event that Megan had ominously referred to as the Master's interview. The television screens I could see to my left flickered into life. I suddenly saw the Master, and wished with all my heart that I had not.