The Broken Sword (39 page)

"So were you," Arthur said, placing the cup in Zack's hands. He held his fingers over Zack's as its power coursed through them both.

"Oh," Zack whispered. Tears filled his eyes as the wound in his chest closed and healed without a mark. "The Grail. It's
real
. The magic was real."

Kate arrived with the paramedics, who could find not even a scratch on Zack's body. "You always believed," she said, sobbing into his arms. "I thought you were a fool for believing, but you were the only one who saw the truth."

Zack stood up, the precious Grail cradled in his hands. He held it out to Arthur.

"I think you should keep it," the boy said.

Merlin's eyebrows rose in consternation. "Arthur—"

"This will be the beginning of my work," he said. He turned back to Zack. "You'll know what to do with it better than I would."

"But... but…" Zack looked at the object in his hands. "The
Grail
... "

Arthur closed Zack's hands around it. "Be strong," he said softly, repeating Beatrice's words to him. "Do good. Bring honor to your soul."

"Honor... yes. Yes, I'll try. I promise you, I'll try."

Hal came up behind the boy. "I think we'd better get out of here," he said. Down the street, the reporters were scrambling to their feet, racing to get their equipment. At his signal, the knights mounted their motorcycles.

"Wait!" Taliesin loped over. "Where in blazes are you going?"

"Somewhere on Long Island," Hal said. "We've got to take these bikes back. They were sort of... borrowed."

Arthur slipped his hand in Beatrice's. "And then we've got to get Bea home." He smiled shyly at her. "Unless you'd like to stay with us."

She pressed her lips together. "Arthur, you're the best friend I've ever had. My whole life has changed since I've known you, and I'd love to ride with you and your friends..." She blinked away tears. "But I think Mr. Taliesin needs me," she whispered in his ear.

"The old man? He doesn't need anyone. He's a... well..."

"I know,” she said gently. “He's probably the only one of his kind alive. Can you imagine how lonely he must be?"

Arthur stared at the ground. "I never thought about that. I suppose I could stay—"

"You know you can't," she said. "But I can." She kissed his cheek. He blushed furiously. "I'll miss you, Arthur."

"You'll see me again."

"Yes, I'm sure I will." She turned to Taliesin with a happy sigh. "It's settled, then. I'll stay with the old man."

"Old man?"
Taliesin repeated, bristling. "Allow me to inform you, Beatrice—"

"I'm sorry. I meant elderly. That sounds more polite, don't you think? Oh, we'll have lots of adventures together!"

"We'll have nothing of the sort. Hal, tell this person—"

"I'll make cookies for you and see that you don't forget things, and you can teach me how to walk through fences, the way you did when we first came to New York. Do you suppose if I concentrated very hard, I could learn to walk through rock?"

"I'll take her back to England," Taliesin said, rolling his eyes heavenward. "Immediately."

Arthur smiled. "Would you do one more thing for me?"

"Of course, Majesty."

"Take the sword."

"The sword?" Taliesin asked incredulously. "But—"

"Please. I'm only thirteen years old. Which is why I'm asking you to take Excalibur back where it belongs." Arthur placed the sword flat across his forearm and offered it to Taliesin.

"I should have known it couldn't be destroyed," the old man said, accepting it.

Hal shouted over the din of the revving motorcycles. “Maybe not, but the cops'll grab it if you let them.” He saluted the old men, then motioned for Arthur to climb on the Harley behind him. “Let's go, kid,” he said.

Half a block away, the news vans were rolling through the tangle of emergency vehicles. Alongside them ran a flock of reporters, their microphones already extended.

Beatrice wriggled with excitement. "I think they want to interview us!" she exclaimed. "Goodness, where shall we begin? With Arthur, I suppose. Only how does one explain to Americans that they have a king? Particularly since he's still in the eighth grade... Oh, dear, are you feeling all right, Mr. Taliesin?"

The old man sucked in his breath and covered the girl's mouth with both hands. Then, just as the reporters reached them, the two of them faded like an old photograph and then disappeared into thin air.

"Did you get that?" one of the journalists screamed. "Is the tape rolling?"

"I told you, damn it, nothing's working. That wind shorted out all the electronics."

"What about them? Talk to the guys on the motorcycles. They must have seen it."

"The kid's there, too. Hey, you!"

Hal jumped on the gas. With a roar, the twelve knights tore down the street, leaving the press and the police and the fire fighters to sort things out for themselves.

"Where'd Taliesin go?" Arthur shouted over the noise of the engines when they stopped for a traffic light.

Hal gave him a telling look. "Wherever he wants."

The boy grinned. The old man would find them in his own time. Meanwhile, he and Hal would have their hands full looking after the knights.

They were such good men, Arthur thought. Kay, Gawain, Bedwyr sitting tall in the saddle of his mount, Lugh with his spiked helmet, Fairhands the standard bearer, who had tied a red-and-white neckerchief he'd found along the side of the road to the sissy pole behind his seat, Tristan, Agravaine, Dry Lips, crafty Curoi MacDaire... Good men, valiant and true, the Companions of the Round Table at last restored to their former glory.

But it was Launcelot he had missed the most. Launcelot, who had thrown away his life after leaving Camelot because he had not been able to bear the shame of having abandoned his King. Arthur had deserved to lose him, of course—even then, the King had understood that with perfect clarity—but Launcelot had never forgiven himself. He had waited through sixteen centuries to atone for what he perceived to have been a great sin.

Now, at last, he would have his chance. He would stay with Arthur to the end of his days, and they would both be better for it.

When the light changed, he nodded to Launcelot to take the lead. The knight obeyed, snaking through the crush of traffic and speeding past the other knights to turn onto the big avenue leading north, out of the city. North, toward forests and vineyards and the wild sea, where a man could find all manner of marvels.

The motorcycles raced into the wind. It was all good country out there.

M
erlin sat beside the
stone in the thicket. He was worn out. It had taken some very tricky magic to get Excalibur into the boulder. People always assumed such things were easy for a wizard, but they weren't, he thought crankily. Magic was damned hard.

He laughed out loud.
People assumed!
Why, it was just like the old days, when everyone he encountered feared that he would turn them into toads. Since the incident in New York, he had become quite famous. His picture—hideously unflattering, unfortunately, as it showed him lying unconscious on Arthur's lap, with the knights on their knees around them—had appeared in nearly every magazine and newspaper in print. Evidently it was the only photograph available, as most of the photographers' equipment had been destroyed during the windstorm.

Pundits on the subject of wizardry, and there were apparently a number of them, wrote all manner of opinions about his spectacular disappearance, ranging from outraged cries of fakery to treacly tracts of adoration.

But that was nothing compared with what they were saying about Arthur. His speech about the future of the world had gone viral on the Internet. And no one could forget the sight of the boy handing over the great sword—a sword that had seemed to appear out of nowhere after the black cloud and the madman who created it disappeared—to Taliesin.

A few had even guessed Excalibur's location. That was why it had taken Merlin so long to get around to bringing it back. For weeks after Arthur's dazzling introduction to the world through television, fanatics of all stripes had come snooping around Cadbury Tor—and every other place that claimed to be the site of Camelot, if what he read was true—looking for the sword in the stone. Taliesin wondered what these silly people would do if they found it. Would they bring tanks and demolition balls to try to break it up again? Or did they believe that somehow one of them would actually manage to pull it out, to take Arthur's place?

Human beings, he decided, were quite ridiculous.

It took the fools a long time to go back to their own business. One particularly persistent woman came every day for several months, much of the time encumbered by plaster casts on her limbs. Merlin was beginning to think she would pitch a tent on the Tor and take up permanent residence with an intravenous drip to sustain her, but at last even she decided to look elsewhere for her heart's desire.

Finally, after nearly a year, the wizard was able to bury Excalibur firmly and seamlessly inside a solid granite boulder that was taller and wider than most men. Then he placed some other good-sized rocks around it and covered the whole business with an acre of brush and thorn.

Soon the curious would forget entirely about the sword, and perhaps about the boy-king in whose hands it had magically appeared. Sensational though the events of that midsummer night in New York City had been, they paled beside the lurid artifice that made up the daily fare of modern man. These were not the Middle Ages. People nowadays were accustomed to the bizarre. Every supermarket carried a variety of chronicles detailing encounters with alien beings and sightings of popular musicians ostensibly risen from the dead.

Arthur's work would not be easy.

But it had begun. Zack married Kate, and together they had scraped together enough money for a new Center. The facility, located on ninety acres of rambling grassland in upstate New York, had already become a mecca of healing and spiritual renewal for people of all religions from all over the world.

When Taliesin last spoke with Zack, more than five thousand people were coming each day to drink the curative water from a spring beside the Center's main building. Wisely, Zack had encased the cup in concrete and then submerged it at the deepest part of the spring, beneath the building itself, so that no one—not even himself—would be tempted to use it for his own purposes. The water was available to all without charge. For this alone, Taliesin had come to regard Zack as even more of a rarity than either himself or Arthur.

"They'll learn," Zack had said. "It'll just take people a while to accept the idea that not everyone wants to cheat them or hurt them."

"There are still some nasty sorts around," the old man had suggested.

"Oh, I know that," Zack said, laughing. "But I'll take my chances."

Yes, he would. Arthur had chosen wisely.

In keeping with the all-encompassing nature of his enterprise, Zack had not insisted on calling his new creation the Center for Cosmic Consciousness. Instead, it was named the Rasheesh Shanipati Center, for the brilliant physician whose groundbreaking work on the continued existence of the soul after death was changing mankind's entire concept of existence.

Beatrice Reed, the patient whose brain waves served as the springboard for Shanipati's studies, was not found after her flight from the hospital. Indeed, after six months of diligent effort, the Reed family solicitors were obliged to step down their search for the missing heiress and begin the years-long wait before Beatrice could be declared legally dead and her considerable property turned over to the British government.

"There!" Beatrice announced, emerging from the boulder that encased Excalibur. "The sword looks lovely."

Taliesin gasped. "How many times do I have to tell you not to do that?" he shouted. "One day you're going to give me a heart attack!"

"I'm terribly sorry," she said, genuinely penitent, as she always was. "I just enjoy it so. Would you like some fudge?" She reached into the pocket of her jeans and pulled out a flattened chocolate smear covered with grass and dirt, encased by a leaf.

He stared at it, appalled. "I think not," he said.

The girl was quite impossible. He should have taken her straight home, as he'd intended from the beginning. She was very well off, and would have been sent to a reputable boarding school while her solicitors managed her fortune. True, with no family, she would have had no visitors and nowhere to go on holidays, and, after what she'd been through, no one to confide in... rather like himself...

He groaned as she helped him to his feet. "Arthritis,” he groused.

“Is it very bad?” Beatrice asked, concerned.

“I suppose I ought to be used to it by now," he said with a sigh. "After all, it's been bothering me since before the turn of the sixth century."

With the girl gently guiding him, the Merlin limped out of the thicket, bending and stretching his knee to get the kinks out. Ah, well, he thought, that's what comes of being reborn when one is already nearly eighty years old.

The Innocent had done that, brought him into that long sleep when he had been prepared to die. She had done it twice, in fact. He doubted that his last encounter with her in the fog had been by accident.

He had not seen her since. Perhaps he would never see her again, not until he was finally permitted to enter the Summer Country.

If he could even find her then.

With a sigh, he led the way across the grassy, rock-strewn plain where Camelot had once stood. Camelot, the place where Arthur's dream was born, where knights jousted and ladies danced and everything was possible.

"He will build the dream again," the Merlin said aloud.

Yes, little bard. You shall build it together. All of you.

"Look!" Beatrice called, pointing toward the ragged tip of Cadbury Tor. "A wolf!" She clasped her hands together. "A wolf with eyes like moonlight."

He scanned the horizon, his breath catching, his heart thumping like a boy's. "Wait here for me," he told Beatrice, loping off toward the bluff, his arms waving wildly over his head. "Innocent! I'm here!"

Of course you are, dear. That's why I've come.

"Is it Arthur? Is he—"

He's fine. He'll be a splendid young man the next time you see him.

"That long?" He jogged to a stop. "Why? Is there something you'd like me to do?"

There may be.
High on the Tor, the wolf cocked its head.
We have company.
Beatrice ran up to him, red-cheeked and out of breath. "It talks," she panted, her eyes sparking with wonder. "The wolf can talk."

"What are you doing here? I told you to..." His eyebrows shot up. "You heard her?"

An apt pupil,
the Innocent said.

"Hardly." The old man's gaze slid toward Beatrice. "She carries sweets in her pocket."

And she can walk through rock.

"Well, yes. She learned that rather quickly."

More quickly than you, I'd say.

The eyebrows formed a hard wedge.

Now, now. I'm only saying it took you a long time to learn that first lesson.

"First? That was only the first of my lessons?" he sputtered. "But I'm a wizard! The... the Merlin..."

And so you thought you knew all the magic you'd ever need?
The tinkling voice laughed gaily.

"But I'm almost eighty years old." He glanced at Beatrice. "She's twelve."

"Almost thirteen," the girl said, popping the fudge into her mouth.

"Oh, go away." He sank down onto the grass. Beatrice sat beside him and leaned her head on his shoulder. He moved away. "First lesson indeed. Bah."

The wolf sauntered down the hill toward them.
Well?

"Well what?"

Would you like to learn the second lesson?

Both their heads snapped up. "Oh, yes!" They said together, scrambling to their feet.

Then follow me, children.

 

THE END

 

 

Thank you for purchasing THE BROKEN SWORD! Keep reading for an excerpt from THE THIRD MAGIC.