Susan Squires - [Da Vinci Time Travel] (38 page)

She blinked her eyes open. Gawain was staring at her. How long had she been in that trance of memory? His eyes were filled with heat. She could feel the energy, the
life,
pouring off him. He pushed himself up. The blanket fell to his waist. The terrible wounds on his body so recent had . . .  disappeared. He still had the scars and the tattoos she’d come to known, but it was as though he had not been wounded recently.

“You remember.” There was apparently no doubt in his mind. Maybe it was the songs she’d been singing. “I’m glad. It’s good to know where you came from.”

She nodded. It was as though she’d been half and now she was whole. She knew her mother. She remembered growing up. Even knowing Mordred was her father was part of the puzzle. She
knew
who she was. That made her feel alive, too. The pull toward Gawain was suddenly virulent, almost like she was sick. He sure wasn’t. He was pulsing with vitality. More than that. Even under the blanket she could see his erection. “That salve sure . . . works.”

He glanced down. “Sorry about that. Part of the cure, I think. Too bad he was away when you broke your leg that time. He could have saved you a lot of pain. He . . . he was pretty busy back then, trying to make a difference. He . . . he sometimes couldn’t make room for us.” Gawain cleared his throat. “Not that I needed him. My training took up a lot of time.”

But Gawain still made time to see to her. She really
had
known him forever. No wonder she could fall so deeply in love with him in such short order. And he had known her. As a pesky and troublesome girl. She sighed. Yet another reason he would never be madly in love with her.

Merlin pushed through the door with an armload of clothes at that moment. “Dress, Son. We’d better get down to that machine before you change something else.”

He meant before anything else could go wrong. Diana stepped outside. Gawain would want a private leave-taking with his father.

Gawain dressed briskly, wondering what he could say to his father. He finally settled on, “Thanks for saving the day.”

“Diana found young Gawain in the dungeon and fought a guard to get him free. You staved off Mordred and his minions, regardless of the cost, to allow me time to perform a cesarean on her mother. I just evened the odds. I didn’t save you. We all did our bit.”

Gawain wished his smile wasn’t so rueful. “Some bits were bigger than others.” He couldn’t change that he was not the magician his father was. Gawain felt his smile turn soft as he thought of Diana. “She sure is something, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” his father said. “She is a remarkable woman.” He pressed his lips together. Gawain pulled the shirt his father had brought over his head. “Will . . . will you be glad to get back to the time from which you have come?” his father asked almost cautiously.

“Absolutely. Don’t get me wrong. This time is where I grew up. It always will be. But it’s no place for Diana. She’s used to the comforts and ways of the future now.” He reached for the breeches. “And I can protect her better there.”

“She hopes you will let her be your friend when you return.”

Gawain looked up. He could never read his father’s expressions. Merlin sometimes seemed like a different species altogether. Now, if Gawain had to guess, his father almost looked . . . anxious. That was ridiculous. Merlin, the greatest practitioner of magic the world had ever known, couldn’t be anxious. “I’ll protect her until the day I die,” Gawain said simply. “Since friendship is what she wants, I’ll be her friend.”

“Ah,” his father said as Gawain pulled on his boots. He looked up to find his father biting his lip.

“What?” Since when had he gotten courage enough to question his father?

“She . . . she thinks she isn’t pretty enough for you.”

Gawain drew his brows together. That was nonsense. “When did she say that?”

His father looked really anxious now. “I shouldn’t have said anything. Forget it.”

Gawain didn’t want his father to know how raw his heart was, or how much he wanted Diana. What would he do if she wanted “recreational sex” with her friend again? Could his heart bear it? Could he refuse her? He dragged his mind away from those thoughts. But what he landed on was no better. “Do you see your own future?” He’d never had the courage to ask.

“Yes.” The response from his father was flat, and all the more emotional for that.

“Your own death?”

Merlin nodded. And Gawain had to know. When he and Dilly had been cast forward in time by his father’s magic, the last image, burned on Gawain’s brain, was of Merlin gasping for breath, weak because he’d sacrificed all his power to thrust them forward fifteen hundred years.

Merlin must have seen it in his son’s eyes: the doubt, the guilt. He smiled softly. “It was worth it. Like Diana’s mother, I continue through you.”

Not good enough!
Gawain’s mourning turned to anger, anger that had only one target: himself. He was only a fraction of his father, a poor copy with the text blurred and faint, like a document from the twenty-first century that had been Xeroxed once too often. Gawain closed his face down. It was the last failure, that in saving him and Dilly his father had died.

Gawain stood at the edge of the river ford with Diana and his father. They had not run into the children who were themselves. Gareth and Agravain had watched them go but dared not cross Merlin to intervene. It had been easy. Not that the journey had been fun. Merlin seemed to be brooding. Gawain trudged the muddy road carrying a metaphorical load, if not a real one. What was he supposed to do when he got back to the twenty-first century? His father had only said he’d know what it was. But he didn’t.

“This is as far as I go,” his father said. “The rest of the journey is up to you two.” He smiled fondly at Diana, kissing her cheek, then clasped Gawain in the only real embrace he could ever remember receiving from his father. “Thank you so much, both of you.”

Gawain saw his amazement echoed on Diana’s face. “You’re thanking
us
? It’s we who are in your debt.” Gawain and Diana would take Merlin’s life before the tale was through.

Merlin shook his head. “No. I have been granted the rare privilege of seeing my mistakes in time to change them.” He took Diana’s hand and held it to his lips. “I will name the baby Diana and tell her, tell
you
how beautiful you are and how good and true, every day, so you
will never doubt it.” Gawain saw Diana’s eyes fill. His father turned to him. “And you . . . you I must show that being a good man does not mean having magic or being perfect. We all make mistakes. We have all failed. But we can still be valued and valuable.” He looked down, as if gathering his courage. “I never told you. I have other children.”

“What?” Gawain had . . . half brothers or sisters?

“When I was young,” Merlin continued, gazing off across the river, “I worshiped the magic. I would mate with those who had some shred of power themselves, thinking to create progeny with more magic even than I had. I sought out sorceresses, priestesses of the old gods. But I was not interested in the children themselves, or their mothers. I kept track of them only to see whether they had my powers. None did, at least to any degree that I could see. So I abandoned them. They never knew me as their father. I was not so different from Mordred, to my shame.”

Gawain had always thought his father distant but not so . . . heartless. He . . . he didn’t know what to say. He would have liked to know those children.

“Most were hundreds of years ago.” Merlin looked down at his hands. Gawain saw Diana’s eyes widen. He’d never known his father was so old, either. “I took you in only because your mother died. Her name was Nimue, the last of my liaisons. At first I didn’t care about you, only about the magic that might be yours. But you won me over. You became more important to me than whatever magic you might have, more important than Camelot, or even Arthur. And yet I must never have made time to tell you how much I valued you just as you were, without even a shred of magic apparent to me. I never helped you cope with having a wizard as a father. You have given me a chance to change that . . . both of you. And for that I’m grateful.”

Gawain felt his eyes fill in a very unmanly way.

“Can you forgive me, boy?” His father’s voice was almost a whisper.

Gawain wanted to say there was nothing to forgive, but that wasn’t true. He wanted to tell his father that he felt as though he had been set free by those words. He wanted to grieve for the death he would cause. But he had no words for any of that, so he just took his father in his arms and held him fiercely to his chest.

It was his father who finally held Gawain away and turned to Diana. “I am afraid to interfere in the flow of time and destiny,” Merlin said, glancing back and forth between the two of them. “We have learned how dangerous that is. You both must do what you must do on your own to achieve what I have seen in my rain barrel of the future. But perhaps I can tell you this. Magic does call to magic. And somewhere in the future, the bits of magic left in the world will gather together like rivulets to make a mighty river that will change everything. You are important. You are
both
important, not just you, Diana. You are both strong. And you already know what to do. Now go. More delay jeopardizes all.”

He turned and walked away. A sparkling halo grew about his form. He was consumed by it. He had disappeared before he had taken five steps.

Gawain turned to Diana. “Does he mean the machine will go back without us?”

“My God.” Diana looked horrified.

He swept her up in his arms and headed into the river.

When they got to where they had left the machine, Diana knew Merlin had been right. Even in the dim light of the crescent moon, high above the trees, she could see the machine was fading. She raced to it, knelt, and turned it on, flipping switches frantically. It solidified under her
hands. It wasn’t too late. “Get over here,” she called to Gawain. “Take me by the waist.” If she was separated from Gawain by fifteen hundred years and couldn’t get back to him, she might just commit suicide.

The machine began to fade again. His arms snaked around her.
Thank God.
“Think of March in San Francisco,” she said. “I’ll pull the lever.” She reached for it, grabbing the great diamond. But before she could pull, the machine faded out. She felt them being sucked along with it. The feeling of being torn through space and time ripped through her body before she lost consciousness.

Diana woke to a familiar smell of concrete and metal and . . . dirt. She was on the earthen floor of the basement under the Rotunda of the Palace of Fine Arts. And she could not breathe a sigh of relief because she was under a heavy weight.

The heavy weight gave a groan.

Gawain pushed himself off her. “Are you okay?”

He was speaking modern English. She began to laugh with relief until she could hardly control herself and then the tears started pouring down her cheeks and she couldn’t properly tell whether she was laughing or crying.

He held her to his chest and made soothing sounds: “You’re okay. You’re okay.”

When she had gotten her breath she looked up and he smoothed her hair back and ran his thumbs over her cheeks in the dark to wipe away her tears. “Shall we go see what’s out there?”

The world. Had the world changed back? Or had it turned into some dreadful third option based on some unknown action they’d taken? She nodded. “Let’s go.”

They worked their way out to the door marked:
Danger.
Gawain’s scabbard clanked against the metal girders. The sword in that scabbard was Excalibur. What did that
mean? As they passed the wave exhibits and the gift store, she heard Clancy whistling from somewhere in the back, probably by the optical exhibits. He was whistling “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” She looked up to Gawain. He nodded and moved silently toward the glass entry doors, taking her hand. Their car was still at the very farthest end of the parking lot. They ran together to the Range Rover.

“Where to?” Gawain slung his scabbard into the back and slid into the driver’s seat beside her.

“Chinatown,” she said.

Gawain parked the car illegally in a red zone on Post, and they ran up the street toward the Dragon Gate. People were everywhere even this late at night and the crowd was a cultural mélange. There was an Asian family. Diana began to grin.

The Dragon Gate loomed above them. The green ceramic tile of the little roof, the gold of the shiny dragons rampant facing each other, the two stone Chinese-style lions—it had all never seemed more beautiful. On each side the stores selling Asian antiques and carved ivory, both called Michael’s, were back where they should be. And the lit red lanterns swung gaily across the crowded one-way street. Not an onion tower in sight.

Diana giggled and Gawain grinned for all he was worth. He gathered her into his arms.

“Let’s go home,” he said.

All the way down to the Mission District they pointed out new evidence that things were back to the way they had been. The public buildings at the Civic Center stood stoically in their original varied styles of architecture. The Hispanic character of the Mission District was familiar rather than ominous. A crowd celebrating something gathered outside the Indian restaurant.

They tooled over to Dolores Heights and around to the Oakwood Apartments. Diana made a beeline for the shower and felt better when she was clean. She skimmed the condensation from the mirror. Not a bad reflection. She had her mother’s heart-shaped face and eyes. What she needed was a new haircut—something short and sassy. She changed her fifth-century linen shift for her chenille bathrobe. When she opened the closet to put the shift in the little hamper there, she noticed that the clothes hanging there were really
vin ordinaire.
They didn’t really fit with her self-image. She’d have to save for a shopping spree. Shoes. What she really needed was a great pair of “fuck me” shoes.

Gawain had opened a bottle of white wine and poured her a glass. He handed it to her and disappeared to take a shower. Excalibur’s scabbard was propped on the corner of the couch. The sword seemed to exude vitality. When Gawain came out of the bathroom he was barefoot, wearing only jeans, and his hair was wet. Lord. He outdid the best of the firefighters on calendars. Even March 2008. And she once had thought no one could outdo that guy. They sat on the couch and clinked glasses.