Lucifer's Crown (50 page)

Reg brandished the sledgehammer but didn't seem to know what to do with it—this wasn't what Robin told him would happen. Lydia edged around behind Robin, clutching the box to her bosom, her red mouth still smiling. Maggie and Thomas reached toward Ellen but only managed to shove each other aside.

Again Ellen turned the knife on herself. Okay, so she was blaming the right person this time. She ripped her jacket—there was blood on her shirt—no, it was the cut on her neck opened up—Mick, Rose, and Maggie closed in but she threatened them all, the knife flashing in every direction. Tears glistened on her sallow cheeks.

"Ellen,” said Thomas, opening his arms, “the grace of God is with you. He wants you to live, and heal."

Sean danced back and forth like a prizefighter. “Ellen, let me help!"

"How touching,” snarled Robin. “But all the likes of her can understand is strength.” Stepping forward, he seized Ellen's forearm. She jerked and then dangled from his grasp like a rag doll, her breath sobbing.

Time stopped. Mick, Rose, and Sean stood petrified in attitudes of alarm. Thomas offered his embrace. The air shone in faint whorls of light. Maggie imagined Michelangelo's white-bearded God leaning forward, fingertip extended, ready to intervene in history, but His door was locked because the gatekeepers were scuffling.

Robin was turning Ellen's hand, the hand that held the knife so tightly its knuckles stood out hard and white. He was turning the knife back toward her chest—she'd already tried to stab herself, he was only helping her out—funny, she seemed to have changed her mind and was pushing him away.

Thomas extended his hand, trying to deflect the knife.
Don't
, Maggie screamed silently, but her body wouldn't move.

The infernal green glow of Robin's eyes swerved toward her. In them Maggie saw the future, how her warning, her push, saved Thomas from the descending knife. So what if it condemned Ellen to death, that was like putting a dumb animal to sleep, no great loss.

Together she and Thomas walked out of the cathedral. The events in the crypt faded into memory and vanished, because they'd made new memories to take their place. The world might be hopelessly dark, but they had each other, soul-mates. Nothing and no one else mattered.

Maggie's entire body spasmed. Thomas loved her, yes. It was a measure of his integrity that he'd told her the truth. But the larger truth was that he'd chosen God. The only way she could be unfaithful to him was by taking away his choice, now, at this moment.

She looked up into Thomas's face as she'd looked into it the night of her confession. She surrendered her love to his radiant true self, and stopped even trying to move.
God help me
!

Robin's gaze released her. He pushed the knife in Ellen's hand toward her own chest. She struggled, but he was strong. Thomas leaped forward, arms spread, his embrace encompassing not only Ellen, pitiful sinful humanity, but Robert the Devil himself, who was, after all, a poor excuse for a man.

Robin's hand holding Ellen's drove the blade into Thomas's chest. He gasped, his face going stark white. Maggie heard her own voice cry out in pain.

Rose emitted a strangled scream. Robin dropped Ellen. Ellen dropped the knife. Picking it up, Maggie seized Thomas's arm. He touched the wound and looked at the blood smearing his fingertips, for once at a loss for words.

Someone was swearing. Mick? No, he was struck dumb. It was Reg or maybe Mountjoy, who still sat in the chair above the bundle of irate cat ... No. It was Robin, his voice tearing into ragged ribbons. “You stupid cow! You've gone and done the one thing he wanted!"

"I never,” Ellen wheezed, “I never..."

Sean waded in, pulling her back against his chest. “Fitzroy, you're full of crap. You did it, not her. We all saw you."

Maggie held the hot, hard little blade in her free hand. Beneath her other hand Thomas's arm, his mortal flesh, was perfectly steady. He stood straight and tall as ever despite the rip in his sweater and the blood spreading outward from it. She balanced on her own knife blade between hope and horror, telling herself that the knife was a little one, that it had bounced off one of his ribs and caused only a flesh wound. That maybe the shedding of his blood would be enough.

The choir fell silent. Thomas raised his hand with its red fingertips. Making the sign of the Cross over Ellen's head he said, “May the blessing of Almighty God, the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, descend upon you and bring you peace."

Sniffing hideously, Ellen looked up. Something flickered in her eyes, some reflection of the light in Thomas's face, of the light winking and glimmering in the chapel. Far, far above, one ancient bell began to toll the passing of the old millennium and the beginning of the new. With a baleful backwards glare, Sean dragged Ellen several paces away.

Thomas tucked his handkerchief into his sweater as a makeshift bandage. He squeezed Maggie's hand and removed it from his arm. He nodded reassuringly at Mick and Rose and their taut faces eased. He turned toward Lydia. “It's gone midnight. I'll have the Cup now, Mrs. Soulis."

She clutched the box to her chest. The bell tolled. Each note trembled in the air, in the stone vaults, in the earth beneath.

"You, Mountjoy,” said Robin, his voice dripping contempt. “Reg, Lydia, stop your gawping, get a move on."

Rose and Mick started forward. Mountjoy leaped up to face them. His foot crushed the cat's tail. Yowling, she catapulted from beneath the chair, made a warp-speed figure eight between Lydia's pumps and her son's wingtips and disappeared into the depths of the crypt.

Lydia lost her balance and fell. Reg dropped the sledgehammer, which rang against the stone floor in leaden echo of the tolling bell, and grabbed for the box. So did Rose. The lid clattered to the floor.

Rose had it! Mountjoy jumped toward her and stopped, staring cross-eyed at Mick's
sgian dubh
a foot from his face.

Each stroke of the great bell drove the old millennium deeper into the past. Maggie felt each note in her skull, in her spine, in Thomas's body beside her. He was praying, his hands raised, his lips moving, Latin cadences and Gaelic measures repeating the rhythm of the bell.

If Robin had shouted, “Why am I surrounded by incompetent fools?” Maggie would have answered. But he saved his breath. His lips cramping into a scowl, he started forward, Reg at his heels. Lydia struggled to her feet.

Maggie looked from the self-righteous frowns closing in on them to the knife in her hand, sticky with Thomas's blood. Mick swung toward Robin, his knife raised. Robin raised his arm, shielding himself from the relic that had burned him at Holystone.

Mountjoy dived to the side, trying to outflank Mick. Reg moved at the same instant, around the other way. Maggie jumped forward—too late, they'd knocked the box from Rose's hands—Mountjoy and Reg, Maggie and Rose juggled the box until it clattered to the floor and Rose was left holding the reliquary, a dazzling glow shining through her slender fingers.

Vicious, obscene words spewing from his lips, Robin struck. The crack of his open hand against Rose's face was shockingly loud. She stumbled sideways. The reliquary opened and the Cup flew from her hands.

"Amen,” Thomas said.

No one moved as the Cup flew into the air, weightlessly, a feather on the breath of God. It hung, trembling to the repeated notes of the bell, and began to fall.
How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning star ...
No, the Cup was the brightest star of all time, the star of Bethlehem, shedding a glorious radiance across every upturned face, just and unjust alike.

The lid of the reliquary descended one way, and the base another, each lighting against an opposite horn of the Stone. And the Cup itself, a shallow clear glass vessel, landed gently as a dove in Thomas's outstretched, bloodstained hand.

Gracefully he went to his knees and placed the Cup on the Book. Its light penetrated vellum and stone both. The glimmer in the air coalesced around the three relics, so that they began to glow in colors that made the rainbow look drab.

Robin was shaking his hand—his palm was a nasty red. “Damn you all! Are there none amongst you who will rid me of this troublesome priest?"

No takers. If anything, Mountjoy and the Soulises were shrinking back.
Oh you of little faith
, Maggie thought. But then, fanaticism wasn't faith.

The bell stopped tolling and the last note hung shivering in mid air, sending waves of sound forward into the future. Maggie wasn't breathing. No one was breathing. They were caught between one breath and the next, between one second and the next, between one millennium and the next. The millennium, which meant everything because they chose it to mean everything. She knelt beside Thomas, beside the Holy Grail and its supernal glow. Mick and Rose, too, went to their knees.

Robin shuddered in paroxysms of fury, cursing Thomas, cursing Mary, cursing Christ, cursing God himself, his voice harsh and ugly. Suddenly he was wearing a Norman tunic and his master's crown. It was too big for him, tilting lopsidedly across his forehead. Tiny flames licked along its rim, illuminating the empty setting.

Mountjoy's face registered nothing. Reg's eyes bulged. Lydia slumped down on chair and hid her face with her hands. Thomas reached out. “Kneel beside me, Robin. Kneel before your Creator, and together we'll confess our faults. Accept the infinite variety of his creation, and be healed."

"No!” Robin snarled. “Never!"

"Then, by your own words, you choose oblivion."

"No!” But Robin's cry unraveled, thinner and thinner, and broke on a growl of unrepentant rage. He fell. Crouching on all fours, his body was engulfed by the folds of the tunic, which flickered green and gold and then faded to gray.

All three relics were one. They glowed from within, brighter and brighter, so that Thomas's shadow, and Rose's and Mick's and her own, Maggie supposed, stretched across the floor.

Sean and Ellen were watching, their eyes shining in the multi-colored glow flowing out from the Grail and along the floor, so that each flagstone was outlined in light. It flowed up the pillars like the warmth of spring rising up the veins and leaves of trees.

The great bells of Canterbury began to peal, cascades of notes pouring down like spring rain. The voices of the choir were lifted in joy. “
Magnificat anima mea Dominum, et exultavit spiritus meus in Deo salutari meo ...
” Maggie heard the words, the music, with her heart rather than her ears. “My soul doth magnify the Lord, and my spirit hath rejoiced in God my savior."

Beside her Thomas murmured, “He hath scattered the proud in the imagination of their hearts, he hath put down the mighty from their seat and exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he hath sent empty away."

The floor, the columns, the arches of the ceiling were made of light, bright transparent gauze, not stone. All shadows were gone. All light and dark were as one. For all Maggie knew the brilliance was shooting out of the tops of the three towers like Roman candles, and yet the choir kept singing and the organ kept playing. But the victory didn't have to be proclaimed from the rooftops.

Robin's crouching shape bulged and twisted and was suddenly swept into the air, caught up by another shape formed of nothing but light. Maggie gasped—an archangel, ancient of days, so bright and beautiful she shaded her eyes with her hand. Michael? Gabriel? Or Lucifer, in the image of what he lost when he refused the grace of God?

The shape that was Robin shrank, twisted, and darkened. Above him the great wings shriveled and the hands withered away. He fell from the heights of heaven. When his body hit the glowing stones of the floor it shattered into bits of ash and charcoal, emitting a sulfurous stink.

Each burned bit winked out with a tiny snap and a curl of smoke. Only the crown remained, rolling across the floor until it clanged against the base of Our Lady's altar. Maggie's eyes were watering—from the brilliance, the emotion, both—but she swore Mary and child moved, looking down sorrowfully at the loss beyond redemption of a human soul.

"Did you see that?” whispered Rose.

"Oh aye,” Mick returned. “That I did."

Mountjoy sank down onto his haunches. Reg collapsed at his mother's feet, his stunned face sagging to his chest. Still Lydia refused to look.

Thomas knelt quietly, one tear, a drop of light, hanging on his cheek. The crown spun on the floor before him, its empty setting upward. Maggie stared as it, too, glowed white-hot. It sagged out of shape, melted, and as liquid light flowed in between the stones of the floor and disappeared.

She blinked. The light was gone. The floor and the pillars and the vaulted ceiling were returned to—well, no, not ordinary stone. The Stone and the Cup, too, had disappeared. Back to Tobar nan Bride, probably, and Glastonbury Tor. Or perhaps they'd been drawn back into the Dreamtime, there to be made new for a new age, so that the Story could go on.

Maggie looked around. She and Thomas, Mick and Rose knelt in front of Our Lady's altar, the Lindisfarne Gospels sitting on the floor before them. A quick breeze turned its heavy pages and then stilled. The future was still before them, as it had been since the depths of time.

Maggie was holding Ellen's—Calum's—little knife. Mick was tucking his, the original, into its sheath. The olive wood box lay crushed beside the empty crates. Reg Soulis was a pile of misery on the floor. Mountjoy moaned softly. Lydia Soulis rocked slowly back and forth, her hands fists against her face. “It was all a trick. It didn't happen. Robin said it, I believe it, and that's that.” Ellen clutched Sean. He looked like he'd been hit by a truck, but he held onto her.

The choir ended the hymn but the organ kept on playing and the bells kept on pealing. How many more of Robin's followers had seen the light and rejected it? Maggie wondered. How many would go on gnawing the dry bones of their prejudices, afraid to look beyond their own egos?

Mick and Rose levered each other up. With a wary glance at Ellen he returned his
sgian dubh
to his waistband.