That Way Lies Camelot (38 page)

Sandy knotted bony hands together. He gazed in admiration at the young man, whom he knew would go on from this clearing, to win his place at Arthur's Round Table and be one of the chosen few who would glimpse the Holy Grail. Drinking in details for sheer delight, Sandy stared: at the fine, shiny dark hair, unblemished in health; at the unstained innocence of the face. He looked at the hands, palms soft and unmarked; at muscles too delicate to have done much more than hold books.

The hero worship in his look became marred by dawning doubt. 'He's a wimp.'

The little man said nothing.

Sandy's study encompassed the wrists that lay lax in the moss, unmarred by even a briar scrape. Troubled sorely, he swung around and glared in accusation at the little man. 'You lied. That can't be Perceval. He doesn't at all look like the sort who would go for hard rides and bloody fighting.'

And Lynn, understanding a thing, held her breath, while the little brown man answered him reasonably.

'You're part right, my boy. But I never lie. That's Perceval, there, and you've spoken the heart of the problem, his and yours. For within the next hour, your two fates must resolve. You will be greeting God's angels, and he will wake up to discover his "angels" are earthly clay in the form of tough-mannered, battle-trained knights.'

'Oh!' Sandy stepped back, his soul laid bare by longing, if
only
we could change places!'

'Said is done!' cried the little man, and he clapped his hands with a crack that shattered the stillness.

Sandy vanished.

Birds started up from the trees, and the young man in his armor of sticks sat up, a look of raw startlement on his face. He raised his arms, stared at his palms as if flesh, bone and nerve were appendages that belonged to a stranger. Then he looked wildly about until his gaze found and locked on the little man. 'You've done it!'

And he smiled as though all the world had been reborn between his two hands.

'So I have.' The little man laughed and pointed westward through the forest. 'That way lies Camelot, young Perceval. Fare you well, on all your quests, until the last, until the day you sight the Grail.'

Lynn came back to herself, with Grail's tongue dragging and dragging across her cheek. She sat in soggy leaf mould, one shoulder braced against a stump whose cleft was now empty.

She shivered once, violently; in distaste she pushed off the dog. For once, Grail gave over his affections with deference to the person being mauled. He backed off, sat, and looked at her. His tail whacked up a storm of forest detritus. His expression looked inordinately pleased.

Lynn shivered again. Chilled by uncanny experience, and also by her soaked shoe and pants cuff, she looked about, as if expecting the woods to be somehow momentously different.

They were not.

May sunlight slashed the trunks of the birch trees like knife cuts limned in gold; the catbird's mate sang at her nesting, and two squirrels ran scolding in a territorial squabble through the bursting leafy crowns overhead.

It did not seem a day for miniature men and bright wishes. Neither did it seem any more appropriate a time for a twelve-year-old boy to lie dying.

Lynn cursed. Whatever had befallen her, be it illness, hallucination, or stark raving madness, she had an obligation, now that Grail was found. She must hurry on to the hospital to lend her support to Ann.

That moment, ridiculously, she recalled she'd neglected to bring a leash. Grail seemed to need none, creature of obscure contradictions that he was. For the first time in his miserable life, he came when called. Apparently content for once to follow, he frisked at Lynn's heels all the way back to the house. More surprising, he stepped meekly into his pen at her bidding; and once there, lay down, nose on tail, to fall asleep. He looked like an old string mop, stiff-curled as if dried in ocher paint.

Lynn left him. Inside the house, her intent bent exclusively on the logistics entailed in joining Ann quickly at the hospital. Shoes, one muddy, one damp; dirty jeans, oil-stained anorak; all flew off her into a heap. She wanted a shower, but settled with splashing cold water on her face. Too pressed to fuss over details, she snatched khaki slacks, a silk blouse, and a tailored jacket from the closet. She had dress for success down to reflex, and her thoughts she held firmly to practicality, until the first cog slipped in her regimen.

She realized she'd left the shoes that went best
with the jacket in the city. H
er desperate self-control fled.

Frowning, frantic 'not to think, and still barefoot, she dug her makeup case out of the bathroom and parked in front of the mirror. Trivia refused its role; would not keep her preoccupied. She froze through a moment of silent struggle; to focus on anything and everything onerously ordinary, that she not be overset to disturbance over what had or had not occurred out in the wood.

Tiny men, and brown thoughts; she was as much in denial of Sandy's straits as webbed about in the peculiar insanity Grail had lured her to tread. Dangerous ground. Better to debate her choice of lipstick.

She rummaged through her cosmetics and selected a shade of cover-up to conceal the nick on her cheek. Then she glanced up at the mirror. And stopped dead.

Where her own features should have looked out at her, she saw instead a different view. Ann, seated in her untidy cardigan with her back bowed and her face in her hands, beside a bed in a hospital room.

'No!' Lynn shoved her knuckles against her mouth in denial, even as memory of the little man's protest mocked her.
If you're the blundering sort who sets no stock by dreams, it's the Sight you'll get, to witness my part in the bargain. But sorrow you'll find, and weeping too, when you long to be quit of the gift afterwards!

The ache in her died to a whisper. 'No.' But the deathbed view of her nephew bound her senses, as vitally real as if she were present at her sister's shoulder.

No recrimination, no fear, no sense of disorientation or disbelief could tear her attention from the body, supine under white sheets. The pastel hospital gown betrayed by its lack of wrinkles how far removed from life and movement lay the consciousness that delineated Sandy.

Lynn choked a breath through her tightened throat, then stopped, even breathing suspended.

For the motionless boy on the bed sighed slightly and opened his eyes.

They shone, blue and enormous in the subdued, artificial lighting of the hospital. Dark as marks in charcoal, his brows sketched a puzzled frown. Too weak and emaciated to do more, he regarded the sterile white walls, the plastic pitchers, the raised side rails, and the IV line dangling at his shoulder as if he had never in his life known such sights.

He looked as if witness to marvels.

Lynn caught her breath in a gasp. She knew like a blow,
that this was not Sandy, looking out through the eyes of his face.
She stood, frozen and trapped before the vision of a perfect stranger residing in Sandy's failing flesh.

The boy noticed Ann at that moment. Perhaps he heard her stifled weeping, or was drawn by her forlorn posture as she convulsed in silenced grief. He raised the hand not
b
urdened with needles, dragged limp fingers across the sheet, and gave her a brushing touch.

Ann started up as if shot. 'Sandy?'

He blinked as she caught his wrist. 'My God, my God,' she cried in wonder and jagged-edged joy.

He looked at her. The familiarity of the gesture tore at Lynn's heart for the fact that he had no cowlicks left to tumble brown hair across his eyes. .

Because of that, she and Ann both saw: the boy's hollowed features were lit from within by a burning, unearthly rapture. 'Lady,' he whispered in an accent that sounded gallant and antique. 'You must not weep for me. It is promised. I go on to God's glory, to meet His most beautiful angels.'

The fingers in Ann's chilled hand tightened one last time, and the spirit, lightly held, left the flesh.

* * *

Lynn came back to herself, gripping the sink too tightly. Wild-eyed, her own face stared back from the mirror. The pinprick cut showed livid against her pallor, and her chest ached as,
in tears, she recovered herself with a cry.

A strange, exalted exhilaration possessed her, snapped at once by sharp grief at the jangling intrusion of the telephone.

She stumbled out to reach the hallway extension.

'Lynn?' said Ann's voice as she answered. 'It's over. He's gone, just this minute.' She paused for a wondering breath. 'You wouldn't think it, but it happened beautifully. He woke up to tell me ...'

Words failed her, and Lynn couldn't bear it. 'He's gone to meet the angels.'

Startled, still drifty with shock, Ann came back in surprise. 'Lynnie, how could you know?'

Lynn crouched, weak-kneed, and steadied herself on an
e
lbow that ground with real pain against the baseboard. 'Never mind,' she answered, it doesn't matter.'

But it did; the uncanny proofs remained with her. Into old age, the fey man's gift of Sight never left her; and Grail never wandered again.