The Mona Lisa Sacrifice (12 page)

So things were going pretty much as I expected they would.

I was sitting at Morgana’s table, bound in iron shackles, as the party went on around me. I could have freed myself easily enough—hell, I could have just left before the crowd pulled out the chains and piled on me—but I hadn’t learned what I’d come for yet.

Morgana shook her head at me as she drank wine.

“I can’t decide if you’re brave or foolish, Cross,” she said.

“Are you
still
holding a grudge?” I asked. “That was centuries ago.”

She arched an eyebrow at me. “To which incident are you referring?” she asked.

All right, that was a fair comment. Morgana and I had met again after our initial encounter. A number of times. But each meeting ended more or less the same way, so what was the point in bringing them all up?

“I think it’s time we let bygones be bygones,” I said. “Let’s start over.”

The faerie at the table laughed, which prompted the crowd in the room to laugh even louder. Even Morgana smiled a little.

“That would perhaps make sense if time in my realm was the same as time in yours,” she said. “But it is not.”

“Really?” I said. “I didn’t know that.” Honestly. I didn’t know that.

“I remember our first meeting like it was yesterday,” she said. “Because to me it was.”

I winced at that. Maybe I should have come up with a Plan C.

Morgana finished off her wine and held out the empty glass. A man stepped out of the crowd with a bottle and refilled her glass. When he stepped back into the people surrounding us, I lost sight of him. Neat trick, that.

“We should crucify him again,” one of the men at the table said. He was chewing on a haunch of meat, but it wasn’t any meat I recognized. He cocked his head in an impossible way that reminded me of Puck, but I couldn’t be certain it was him. “On the original cross,” he added. “I know where it is.”

“I’m not sure that would be penalty enough for what he’s done,” Morgana said. “Especially now that he has trespassed into my realm.”

I bowed my head to her. “I would have gladly avoided your majesty the rest of my life, and then some,” I said. “But I am on a quest and in need of your majesty’s assistance.”

The men all sat up a little at that and stared at me with wide eyes. The faerie loved quests. A quest gave them all sorts of opportunity to create mischief because a quest meant there was chaos somewhere in the land. And the faerie loved chaos. They were drawn to it like, well, like I was drawn to angels. That’s why they loved the age of the knights so much. I guess there wasn’t much for them to do these days.

Morgana, however, was less than impressed.

“Oh, of course you’re on a quest,” she said. “Show me a mortal man who isn’t on a quest and I’ll show you a man who’s in the grave. And even that’s not enough to stop you sometimes.”

I shrugged. “I can’t help my nature,” I said. “Any more than you can help yours.”

“This quest, does it involve horses?” the one with the haunch of meat asked, licking his lips clean. Yes, definitely Puck.

Morgana slapped him in the side of the head and he dropped the meat underneath the table. He frowned and ducked down to pick it up again. Who knew what mischief he was up to while down there?

“Let me guess,” Morgana said. “It involves Judas.”

“What in history doesn’t involve Judas?” I said.

“Why don’t you give him up?” she said. “Your life would be so much . . . simpler without him.”

“Never again,” I said. I’d learned my lesson that way, and it had cost me more than I ever could have imagined. Even if I was willing to give up Judas, he would never give me up. Not until he was dead.

“Never is ours, Cross,” she said. “Not yours.” She sipped her wine, and it left a crimson shine on her lips. I wanted to kiss it off. I shook my head to snap out of it.

“At any rate, it doesn’t matter,” she said. “There’s no questing for you as long as you’re a captive of the court. Now, what should we do with you?”

The faerie all talked at once, eager to offer their suggestions of ways to torment me.

“Turn him into a stag we can hunt with knives.”

“Make him dance until he wears his feet to the bone.”

“Switch him with the babe of an ogre.”

Morgana sighed. “I grow weary of those diversions,” she said.

Puck popped back up with a grin on his face. “Let him go.”

The others all looked at him.

“What do you mean?” Morgana asked.

“Let him go and render him none of the aid he seeks,” Puck said. “And then watch him fail.”

The others mulled that over.

“It’s not bad,” one of them said.

“But how will we watch?” one of the others asked. “Through a sprite?”

“But what if he doesn’t fail?” another asked. “Where’s the fun in that?”

“You can do what you like with me,” I said. “As long as you tell me one thing.”

“You are hardly in a position to make demands,” Morgana pointed out.

“Aren’t I?” I asked and turned all of their wine into water. I threw in a gesture with my shackled hands to make it more dramatic.

“Paaagghhh!” Puck said, spitting out the mouthful of drink he’d just taken.

Morgana rolled her eyes and motioned the man with the wine out of the crowd once more.

“Use your magic in my court again and you’ll pine for the comforts of your mortal hell,” she said.

“I want to know about Mona Lisa,” I said. “The real one, not the painting.”

Morgana shook her head and I was momentarily entranced by the curls in her hair, the way they caught the light.

“She’s long gone from us,” Morgana said. “We sacrificed her to the human queen as tribute.” She smiled. “I was expecting to receive something truly prized in return, but I have to admit I didn’t think it would be you.”

I mulled over that word.
Sacrifice
. Exactly what kind of relationship did the queens have? Well, no matter. There were other issues at hand.

“I take it you didn’t steal her back then?” I asked.

The music took a discordant note as the band members faltered and everyone glanced our way. I guess they were more sensitive to Morgana’s moods than I was. The other faerie pushed themselves away from the table a little. Puck was grinning that odd little grin of his. No doubt ready to spring upon me at her command.

But she chose to spare me, either out of nostalgia for old times or a desire to inflict a worse fate upon me.

“Remember where you are,” she told me. “We
choose
to live in peace through the tributes. We are not forced into it by your kind. We would not take back a gift freely given.”

“I meant no insult,” I said. “But I had to ask.”

“Aye, I suppose you did,” she said, and all was right with the music once more. Morgana twirled a lock of her hair with a finger. Damn, that was distracting.

“What’s your interest in the gorgon?” she asked. “Are you seeking to violate her too?”

So I told the story, skipping all the usual self-incriminating parts. Not that this group would have been one to judge. They had real skeletons in their closets. Animated, talking skeletons. But sometimes it’s good to keep a few things to yourself.

“An angel,” Morgana said when I was done. “That is intriguing.”

“They’re usually more infuriating than intriguing,” I said. “But I’m not here to talk about them. I’m here to find out about Mona Lisa. Tell me about her and I promise I’ll let you do what you will with me.”

I meant that promise. I supposed I owed her, in some form or another.

But she just looked at me for a moment and then got to her feet. “Dance with me,” she said, and the shackles fell from my wrists and ankles.

The band switched to some rollicking number I didn’t recognize and couples emerged out of the crowd to do their thing in the centre of the room. We joined them, as the others at the table began to clap their hands and shout to the music. I wasn’t sure what she was playing at, but I went along with it. When in the court of the faerie queen . . .

We danced a dance I’d never known before. It was a mixture of old formalized moves, little bits and pieces from the French, the British, even the Persians, from when such things were in style. But we combined it with the abandon of the Irish, the joy of the drunk. I didn’t know any of it but it came to me naturally in this place. And she smiled her fiery smile at me.

“Mona Lisa was given in tribute to us,” she told me as we whirled about. “Just as we gave her in tribute to someone else.”

“Who gave her to you?”

She spun close to me and wrapped her arms around my neck. “Who do you think?” she breathed. And then she moved away again.

I hadn’t thought about where Mona Lisa had been before the faerie got their hands on her. So I did that now, as we danced. And the obvious cut in and waltzed with me for a moment.

“Da Vinci?” I said.

Morgana clapped her hands at me, and everyone around us clapped too.

“He sacrificed her to us and so we gave him the dreams he wanted,” she said. “We sacrificed her to the human queen and now here you are.”

The musicians onstage were howling into their microphones now, unintelligible words. The pace of the dance picked up. I was sweating. I tried to work things out, but I was having trouble thinking.

“What was Da Vinci doing with her?” I asked.

She raised an eyebrow at me, and I noted everyone else on the dance floor doing the same to their partners.

“That’s no concern of ours,” she said. “You know Da Vinci.”

Fair enough. He was a special case. A mortal, but not like the rest of them. He was the only one to have found a way to immortality, for instance. For all the good it did him.

“All right then,” I said. “So who took her from the human queen?”

Morgana disappeared into the mass of writhing bodies and then popped out a second later halfway across the dance floor. She had a fresh glass of wine in her hand now.

“Ah, that’s the answer you really seek, isn’t it?” she said. Her voice came from the mouths of all the dancers around me. “But the question is what you’re willing to pay for it.”

“Whatever you want,” I said.

She disappeared again and then put her hands over my eyes from behind me. “Well, I do fancy your soul,” she said. And she nibbled on my ear and then bit, hard enough to draw blood and make me curse. The music and clapping and dancing all increased as she licked the blood away, until the room whirled around me and I thought I was going to pass out.

But she held me up with hands on my head as strong as iron bars. “You took her,” she told me. “You and your kind took her. Just like you’ve taken everything else. And now I’ve taken you.”

She released me and it was as if she really had taken everything inside me. I didn’t even have the strength to stand. I fell to the floor, slamming my head against the back of a chair as I went down. I lay there and watched blood from my cut trickle through a crack in the floorboards. I felt that old hollowness return, only this time it was worse than anything it had ever been. Worse than if I were drained of grace. Worse even than when I’d first awoken as myself. I howled at the emptiness inside me, tried to curl up around to make it go away.

Then one of the dancers helped me to my knees. A woman with black rings on all of her fingers. She wiped the blood from my face with a napkin. And then a man pressed another ale into my hands. He wore a black ring on his ring finger. I finished the ale in one long swallow but it didn’t help. Neither did the next one, or the one after that.

But I got drunk. So drunk I just joined the dance and laughed the night away with the rest of them, all of them wearing black rings that marked them as something, but I didn’t know what. I climbed on stage and picked up one of the guitars leaning against the wall. It had been years since I’d held a guitar, but the music came back to me like I’d been playing in this place my entire life. I jammed with the band just like the time I jammed with Hendrix in that night club in New Orleans. And then I stumbled off the stage and fell into Morgana’s arms. Her skin burned like ice. We were face to face, so close I could feel her breath on my lips.

“I told you I would make you mine someday,” she said. “And so I have.”

I tried to push myself away from her but I was too weak, and she laughed at me. I knew there was something I needed to do, something I needed to ask her, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

“Not even Arthur could save you now,” she said. Then she threw me into the crowd and I didn’t remember anything anymore.

Arthur.

I rode the land with Arthur and his knights, in search of the dragon. In search of the Holy Grail. We fought everybody and everything we encountered. With Arthur leading us, we could not be defeated. Or rather, with Excalibur leading us. For the blade seemed to give Arthur a strength like grace when we were in battle. When we drove the Saxons into the sea, he threw men from him one-handed and cut through the armour of others like they were wearing cloth. When we slew the werewolves in their dens he cut the beasts in two with a single sweep of that blade. When the rest of us dropped to our knees in exhaustion in the battle against the hill giants, he fought on like a man possessed. I suspected he
was
a man possessed—by that blade. But when we weren’t in battle he just lay in his tent, emerging only to eat a little and occasionally drink some of the wine or ale we’d taken from the dead. Excalibur always in his hand.

At night, around the campfires, I asked the others about Arthur. They all whispered different stories about his past. He was an ancient and immortal Celtic hero. He was a dead king who had somehow escaped the afterlife. He was a faerie changeling who’d been raised among humans. He was a simple farmer until he’d been cursed by a god for taking his name in vain. And so on. No one knew which story, if any, was true, because Arthur didn’t answer questions about himself.

They’d all come to him in different ways. They were all lost souls like me.

Lionel had been part of an order of religious knights that had gone to the holy land to recover lost artefacts. He was the only one who had returned. He’d just cast his weapons and armour into the sea when Arthur had ridden up to him on the beach and told him there was a greater cause than even God himself he could swear his faith to. Camelot.

Percival was the bastard son of a knight who was raised by his mother alone in the woods. When he was old enough to lift a sword, he sought out his father and killed him. His father’s men imprisoned him in a dungeon and tortured him for years, until Arthur broke down the door to his cell one day, Excalibur bloody in his hand. Arthur told Percival he’d been drawn to his screams, and then told him of a city where there were no dungeons, no torturers. Camelot.

Galahad had been entombed in an underground chamber for centuries, the victim of a druid who’d become smitten with the woman Galahad loved, until Arthur had freed him. Arthur said there were no dark magics in Camelot.

And so on. They were all men who had nothing else now. Nothing but Arthur. And his dream of Camelot.

When it came time to reveal my past to the others around the campfire, I just stared into the flames and said nothing. How to tell them the name I’d given them was a sham, the latest in a long history of lies? I wore identities like clothes in those days, trying on new lives and then casting them aside when they got too worn or dirty for my taste. I no longer searched for the man I’d been before I’d woken up in the body of Christ. I had lived too many lives since then. I knew who I had become, if not who I had been. A man not even Arthur could redeem. I remained silent because it was better than telling them the truth about me. And they let me be, because the dream of Camelot waited for them in their beds.

As it waited for me.

The dream was real. We shared it as we slept around those dying campfires. And Camelot was as wondrous a place as Gawain had described to me in that roadside tavern.

Crystal spires that disappeared into the clouds. Men on flying horses soaring between them. Fountains of crystal-clear water in the streets lined with perfectly shaped stones. Merchants with stalls full of wonders from around the world—wonders even I had not seen before. The women were all beautiful, the men all handsome, the steeds all noble. It was the perfect city. The first night I dreamed it, I woke weeping. I couldn’t wait to fall asleep again, to revisit it.

But in the morning it always faded away, and we woke cursing our fate on the cold ground beside our dead fires.

When I asked Gawain what the dream meant over breakfast one day, he shook his head.

“Once it meant the future to us,” he said. “It was the dream Arthur shared with us of the kingdom he meant to build. But no more. It can never be anything but a dream now.”

“What changed?” I asked.

“Excalibur,” he said, spitting on the ground and glaring at Arthur’s tent.

“What of it?” I asked.

“The blade has stolen his soul,” Gawain said. “It cares nothing for Camelot. It only cares for blood. And so it leads us from battle to battle and won’t let us rest. There’s not enough blood in the world to satisfy it. We destroy the world instead of building a new one. Camelot can never be anything but a dream while Arthur wields Excalibur.”

His words made me think of Judas again. Not only the civilizations he had ruined over the ages, but also my own quest to find him. For while I was no longer obsessed with finding out who I once may have been, I was still driven by the need to find out
why
I’d woken up in Christ’s body. I needed to understand what Judas had done, to understand the purpose of my very existence. I needed to find a reason to the madness.

“So get rid of the sword,” I suggested. “I’ll take it off your hands.” Perhaps it would help me in the hunt for Judas. And if not, I knew a few kings with actual kingdoms who’d pay a pretty price for a weapon like that.

Gawain shook his head and looked down at the ground.

“It is not so easy,” he said. “The sword is his until he dies. That is the promise Merlin made to Arthur when he gave him the blade. But it is also the curse he laid upon Arthur. We just didn’t know it at the time. He cannot be rid of the sword.”

“Who is Merlin?” I asked.

“A magicker,” Percival said, pausing as he walked by to relieve himself in the woods. “He came to us when we were burying Cador after the battle with those damned dwarves. He told Arthur he had a weapon so powerful that none of the knights need ever die again. A fang of the dragon, forged into a sword by one of the old gods, back in one of the ages before the new gods stole the world away from them.” He shook his head. “Better we had all died than taken Excalibur from him, as we did. It is no gift.”

“Well, then we should find this Merlin character and force him to take the sword back,” I said. I had to admit the dream of Camelot appealed to me. I wouldn’t have minded seeing it become real. “And it sounds like he might know where this dragon is that we’re seeking.”

Gawain and Percival looked at each other but said nothing.

“What is it?” I asked.

“I will see Merlin again,” Arthur said, limping out of his tent. “He promised me as much. He said he would take Excalibur back from me the day I died.” And now it was Percival’s turn to spit on the ground.

“This sounds like a real deal with the devil you’ve made,” I said.

Arthur shook his head. “Even the devil would keep his distance from Excalibur,” he said. A fish splashed in the stream, and the sword turned in his hand toward it.

I shrugged. “Well, there’s an easy solution to all of this,” I said. And now they all looked at me. I swear even Excalibur pointed my way.

“Let’s kill Arthur,” I said. And then, in case they misunderstood me, I explained my plan.

So we broke camp and rode for several days, to Stonehenge. Back then, it wasn’t a safe, sterile tourist zone like it’s become now. It was a dangerous, wild area with strange creatures found nowhere else in the world. It was one of those places where there really was magic in the world, before those things that used magic were killed off or learned to hide themselves.

It was also a graveyard. It was where kings and knights were buried. And before them warriors and chieftains. If there were any brave enough to take their bodies there and bury them anyway. That was a quest unto itself in those days. But nothing was foolish enough to attack us as we rode there. I guess it was apparent that we were a band of desperate men who had nothing to lose. Or maybe all the things that were hidden in the mist out there could sense Excalibur.

We reached Stonehenge in the early evening, and by the time we’d set up camp amid those rocks, night had fallen. We set up a large fire in the centre of the circle and huddled around it for warmth. The cold of the night pressed in on us anyway, and the mist crept right up to the edge of the stones.

We built a funeral pyre and laid out Arthur on it, Excalibur clasped to chest. The sword kept shifting this way and that, like it was struggling to reach one or another of us. Perhaps all of us.

We piled wood under the pyre but didn’t light it. Instead, we honoured Arthur. We took turns telling the others what a great man he had been.

Gawain told the tale of how Arthur had rescued him from the Green Knight, a man cursed to forever re-enact his own murder in a forgotten castle deep in a forgotten land. Gawain had wandered into the castle while hunting and become trapped, and forced to take part in the drama. He played the part of the murderer, cutting off the Green Knight’s head night after night with an axe, and being slain by the beheaded knight in return, only to wake from the dead the following day in a bed in the castle to repeat the same thing. Until Arthur had walked into the middle of one of the murder feasts and lopped off the head of the knight with Excalibur, slaying him once and for all.

Tristan told the tale of how Arthur had rescued him from the ghost of Isolde, his past lover, who followed him around the land and rode him at night like a banshee. Arthur had sat by Tristan’s side as he slept, and when Isolde came drifting out of the woods he’d touched that blade to her. In the morning there was nothing but a pile of bones on the ground, and she bothered Tristan no more.

Galahad told the tale of how Arthur had helped him hunt down the druid that had entombed him, who had hidden himself among the forest animals by taking their shapes. The druid had tried to flee as a deer but Galahad’s arrow had brought it down. When the druid transformed into a bear as Galahad approached, Arthur had touched his blade to the beast and drawn all the magic out of it, until it was just a man again.

And around the circle we went, until everyone had told a tale but me. I was silent once again, for Arthur had not yet saved me. I looked around the stones and out into the night pressing in on us, but no one stepped out of the darkness. Merlin, if he was out there, was not fooled.

Arthur had the same idea. He sighed and climbed down from his pyre. “It’s no use,” he said. “The magicker no doubt can sense that I’m still alive.” And the others swore and broke out their flagons of mead.

“You likely tell the truth,” I said. “But we have one hope left.” And I drew my sword and ran him through.

Excalibur reacted almost instantly, hurling his arm up to parry the blow. But I was expecting the sword to do something, so I’d thrown some grace into my strike to speed it along. By the time Excalibur hit my sword to knock it aside, I’d already buried the business end in Arthur.

He didn’t cry out, but Excalibur did. It screamed, which I found interesting. I’ve heard swords make plenty of noises before, but never that. And then Arthur’s men screamed and drew their own swords.

Arthur stared at me, and then slumped to his knees. He planted Excalibur point first in the ground and slumped against the blade. And that’s where he died.

“Say your last rites, betrayer,” Gawain said, his blade against my throat, “for we will not say them for you.”

“Let’s just all calm down and wait a minute,” I said.

“Wait for what?” Percival said, approaching me with a look of murder in his eyes that I’d seen too many times in my lives.

“I believe he wants you to wait for me,” a new voice said. It belonged to an old man who walked into our camp out of the mist, wearing black robes and leaning on a staff as black as Excalibur. His face was scarred with a hundred different burns, and where he should have had hair he had tattoos of strange symbols I’d never seen before.

“Merlin!” the others spat and drew back from him. I sighed and relaxed a little. I hadn’t been able to come up with a backup plan in case this hadn’t worked, so I was glad to see him.

Merlin shuffled over to Arthur and stared down at him, then grunted. “So, he is finally dead,” he said.

“He will not be the only one to die this night,” Galahad said, coming over to Percival’s side with his weapon drawn.

“And who has done the terrible deed?” Merlin asked, looking at me. And I knew I had him when he kept on looking.

I put my sword to his throat. I ignored Gawain’s sword, which was still at my throat. It was that kind of scene.

“Where is the dragon?” I asked him.

“Now, what would
you
want with the dragon?” he asked. The way he said it made it sound like he was talking only to me, and not the others.

“The dragon has the Grail,” I said. “We would have the Grail.”

He smiled a little. “The Grail holds no answers for you,” he said.

“The dragon,” I said, prodding him with the sword.

He studied me a few seconds longer, then shrugged a little.

“The dragon hides in the impossible places,” he said. “If you want to meet it, then you must find a way to draw it into the world of the real.”

“And how do we do that, magicker?” Percival demanded.

Merlin cast a glance at him.

“You must offer it something equally impossible,” he said. “Something it will covet.”

“Like me,” I said. Merlin looked back at me but didn’t say anything. His expression was all the answer I needed though.

So I ran him through too.

None of the others tried to stop me, not that they could have anyway. They just stared in confusion.

No blood came from Merlin’s wound, only dust. And when he cried out in pain, more dust spilled from his mouth.

“I am not the dragon, fool!” he said.

“No,” I said. “You are Judas.”

He just stared at me for a moment, more dust trickling out of the corner of his mouth. Then he chuckled. “How did you know?” he asked in that voice made of a thousand voices.

I tried not to let my relief show. I hadn’t actually been certain. This could have been awkward.