Sleepless Knights (28 page)

He sat in a wooden chair, secured by means of ropes tied around his waist, pinioning his arms behind his back. I knew this because one of the cameras offered a view from directly behind him; just one of the dozens of angles from which he was being observed. One zoomed close enough to show the individual drops of sweat on his brow, multiplying like germs under a microscope. Another showed only his eyes, pupils shrunk to pinheads against the lights' unforgiving glare. He breathed in and out, and the sound of it filled the room, amplified by an invisible microphone. In front of the Master were several anonymous military figures, and among their number stood Megan. By some tacit agreement she was in
charge of the entire enterprise, as if she outranked even the most highly decorated generals in the room.

“Why don't you start by telling us about the Eternal Quest, Arthur?” she said.

The Master looked up, as if hearing his name called from a far-off place. For a moment his eyes flickered at the corners, a tiny gesture writ large on screen. Then he spoke, his voice no higher than a whisper.

“You know nothing of the Eternal Quest,” he said, and lowered his head again. Megan laughed at this, and the room joined her in a wave of sycophantic giggling, as if the Master had made some witty attempt to break the ice.

“I think you'll find that we know everything. Are we ready?” she asked a technician at the control desk.

The man nodded. “They've just gone live.”

“Then show him,” said Megan. The screens changed, the images of the Master all replaced by the same picture revealing the room at the stadium in Cardiff, where Sir Gawain had made his call to arms. And it showed an interviewer, sat opposite a man in late middle-age.

Sir Lancelot took every question the interviewer threw at him without flinching. But Megan was right.

They knew everything.

Contrary to orders, Sir Kay had kept on writing his
Chronicles
; a story I thought he had destroyed long ago, for I had watched him do so with my own eyes. The authorities had found it in his study, which they had searched after discovering the body of the intruder in his garden. Countless manuscripts, pages upon pages, all telling the same story. A story of books written and books burned. A story of kingdoms lost and treasures found, and what it meant to find them. A story of a hidden glade in a forest; of a road taken, and a road not taken. Our story.

As with the earlier press conference, I was struck again by what Sir Lancelot did not say. He did not speak of decisions being made out of necessity, in pursuit of a higher cause; decisions that called for sacrifice in the name of a greater good. He did not speak of the things we could not go back for, however much we might have wanted to; for to go back would mean sacrificing something far greater. He did not speak of the cost of following a noble dream, of dedicating everything you have to a working life in the service of such a quest. No. Sir Lancelot merely nodded his head, confirming everything that the interviewer said with a weary sense of resignation.

“But if all this is true,” said the interrogator, “why did you do it? Why go along with something you didn't agree with?”

Sir Lancelot shrugged. “For love,” he said.

And then Sir Lancelot told another story. A story I had always believed belonged to the world of hints and allegations, whispers and rumours. A story I would have denied unto death before believing it to be true. Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere as lovers. Behind the Master's back, while all of Camelot laughed and smirked and revelled in the squalid detail, like pigs wallowing in mud. Sir Lancelot finished his story with another shrug, as if that gesture were a closing quotation mark.

With that, the interview ended and the monitor screens in the Royal Chamber returned to the Master. Sitting up straight now, a fire in his eyes that I had not seen for over a thousand years.

“To think,” said Megan. “All this for love.”

“What did you say?” said the Master, looking at Megan properly for the first time.

“Was the Eternal Quest for her, Arthur? Is that why you did it? For Guinevere? A funny kind of love, don't you think? One that condemns the beloved to death.”

In one movement the Master tore free of his bonds. He snatched an assault rifle from a soldier and fired around the room in a wild burst. The monitors exploded in a shower of sparks. Everywhere, people ran or dived for cover. The captors drew their pistols, but the Master grabbed Megan before she could move, pulling his arm around her neck and holding the gun to her head.

“Take me to Lancelot,” he said.

“Take me…

“to him…

“now.”

Time ground to a standstill. But on this occasion, I was ready for the anomaly, wishing for it with every atom of my being. I was so deeply grateful when it occurred that I almost burst into tears. It was not too late! I could do something! I willed my cramped legs into life and stood up in the laundry chest.

Everything in the Royal Chamber had stopped in a tableau of pure pandemonium. I started to step out of the chest, uttering a prayer of thanks that the invisible force had chosen this moment to manifest again. But when I looked up I realised that this time, I was not the source of it.

Megan clapped her hands in languorous applause and removed herself from the Master's frozen embrace. “In the nick of time, the trusty butler appears to save the day.” She flicked her hand at me as if batting away a fly. My leg jerked back into the chest like a puppet under her control. When I tried to move it again, I found myself completely rooted to the spot.

“Morgan Le Fay,” I said.

“You might have known?”

“Yes. Well I might.”

“But you didn't, did you? And now it's too late.”

The screens flickered on again to show various shots of evacuated Cardiff. The city centre stood empty beneath a black sky. The only movement came from the main road, where hundreds of dirty white bumps pushed up through the asphalt like carbuncular cauliflowers. On another monitor a group of civilians, a ragtag band of fifty or so men presumably enlisted by Sir Gawain, nervously patrolled the streets, perhaps searching for their leader, who did not seem to be among their number. As they marched past a row of shops, the garden of skulls grew ever riper ahead of them, domed heads and empty eyes protruding through the cracked tarmac.

“The dead will rise,” I said.

“The
damned
dead. Those who died with their minds mired in pain and frustration. Bring them to life, and they form an army who seek only to destroy everything they find. A useful tool.”

“To bring about the end of the world?”

“Probably. To tell you the truth, I don't really care. As long as I destroy
him
.” She walked back to where the Master was frozen in his escape bid. “The final humiliation of my dear half-brother. All debts repaid in full, and with interest. His father's debt, for killing my father. His own debt, for the audacity of taking the Grail. I will see him broken. I will see everything he stands for in ruin. The legend of Arthur reduced to a laughing stock.” She cast him a long look of utter disgust and then turned back to me, her revulsion undiminished. “Of course, he's done a pretty good job of that already. But I shall enjoy watching him and Lancelot tear each other limb-from-limb.” She ducked under the Master's stationary arm and placed the muzzle of the gun back against her head. “Goodbye.”

She clicked her fingers and the room came back to life again. The snap of her fingers resonated with a dry splintering
sound under my feet. The bottom of the chest gave way and I dropped down into the darkness of the laundry chute, pitching backwards and then upside down, banging my head as I fell. Thick cobwebs slapped past my face, and something else, something round and hard — the amulet, falling from my neck before I could catch hold of it. Most of the air was knocked out of me as I rebounded from side-to-side in the narrow blackness. In vain I reached out for any kind of holdfast, receiving sharp jabs of pain as the rough stone planed my hands and knees, causing me to gasp out the last of the air in my lungs.

The darkness became dappled with bright specks of colour, and I knew I had only a few seconds before losing consciousness. One of the colours, in all that dark rushing confusion, seemed to be the size and shape of the amulet, a falling orb that glistered amber. I pulled my arms up tight to my chest. I placed my hands together, as if in prayer. Then I stretched them out above my head like a high-diver. With the last of my strength I reached out, my hand closing around the orb, my last thought of row upon row of sprouting skulls. The narrow chute opened out into the wide space of the laundry room, and the hard earthen floor rose up to meet my plummeting form.

 

I landed on my back. Hard and fast, like a carcass slapped down on a butcher's block. A light wind caressed my face, and I realised that I was not in the laundry room. I had teleported, to quote Morgan, ‘in the nick of time.' But where was I? My last thought had been of the skulls protruding from the ground. That was it; the amulet had returned me to Cardiff.

As I lay there I was struck by a wave of physical pain, of an intensity I had not experienced since my long-ago mortal years. Perhaps this was the absence of the Grail, starting to take its toll? Or perhaps there was simply a limit to the amount of punishment even an immortal body could take. Scarcely an inch of me was un-afflicted by one hurt or another. However, I reasoned that I could bear my burden of bruises long enough to find Sir Gawain and his men and alert them to the invasion of the dead. Or to come to their aid, if such a warning proved to be too late.

Concerning Sir Lancelot and the impending arrival of Morgan and the Master, my thoughts were in a state of jumbled anguish. Everything I had just seen and heard reasserted itself in my mind, like a nightmare from which one believes one has awoken, only to feel the bogeyman's dread tap on one's shoulder. I felt naked and fully exposed to
the world, as if I had been divested not merely of my clothing but of my very flesh, stripped down to my bare bones.

Very much, in fact, like the skull that suddenly loomed into view above me like a gibbous moon in the dark sky. The face was upside down, held in place by a skeletal spine, and it fixed me with its hollow-socket stare. As strange as it may sound, this gaunt apparition seemed like the only one who understood how it felt to be me at that precise moment. The skeleton smiled at me. I was about to return his goodwill when I realised, of course, that it was nothing of the sort; merely the permanent rictus grin of the dead.

In a flash he jabbed a sword of jagged black down towards my heart. Such was my state of utter desolation that I had a good mind to just lie there and receive it. Instead, I rolled to the left and jumped to my feet, inches beyond the range of his second swipe. Now that I was up, I saw that only the head, arms and torso of my attacker were visible. Everything below waist level was in the process of emerging, slowly but surely, but as yet still stuck in the ground. I persuaded him against taking a third swipe at me with a well-aimed kick to the cranium. The skull flew off the neck with a loud crack. It bounced on the ground behind him, rolled around in a semi-circle and sprang straight back up onto the neck joint, as if attached by an invisible cord of elastic. The skeleton shook his head, flexed his shoulders, and returned to his assault with renewed vigour.

I took a step backwards and felt a tearing in my left trouser leg. Looking down, I saw another skeleton, similarly half-emerged and just within range. He was one of a great horde that stretched up the road as far as I could see, all straining towards me and slicing frantically at the air. I turned back to my original attacker. He was the nearest of a large group that sprouted up in front of the pedestrianised shopping area, and I realised that I had teleported to the
main road that circled the city centre. Ahead of me on the black horizon stood the stadium and, somewhere in the city's streets, Sir Gawain and his men. Behind me, on the other side of the road, a bus had been abandoned at its stop, cast adrift in a skeletal sea. Thunder rumbled and heavy drops of rain began to fall. My first attacker had now emerged to his pelvic bone. Once again he bestowed upon me his grim grin of the grave.

This time, I smiled back.

†

One might expect a skull to be smooth and slippery, ill-suited to providing the kind of purchase required underfoot, should circumstances force one to use it as a stepping stone. In reality they provide a gratifying amount of traction, their surface pitted and knobbled, just the thing for gaining a foothold when one's progress is imbued with the kind of haste that only comes from having an army of skeletons whirling swords at one's legs. It was by no means a perfect causeway, however, as I discovered when, thrown off step by a particularly vicious swipe, I lost my balance and found myself on my hands and knees, surrounded by five torsos keen to take full advantage of my slip. Two swords whistled towards either side of my neck. I threw myself down flat, as three more swords clashed above me. I was up on my feet as soon as they all withdrew their blades. Their eagerness to skewer me was to my advantage, for their second strike was even more uncoordinated than the first. By jumping up and dodging the blades, I was able to use the mesh of criss-crossed swords as a spring board and resume my skull-stepping progress to the abandoned bus. I dived inside the open doors, black blades scything at my heels.

Several swords hit the front window, thrown in fury at my brazen route through their midst. Well, my next move would do nothing to alleviate their outrage. The bus key had been left in the ignition. I turned it, and the engine spluttered into life. At the sound of the bus, the skeletons directly ahead of me pushed at the ground in a desperate attempt to lever out their legs. The vehicle juddered as I ground it into gear and pressed my foot down hard on the accelerator.