The Broken Sword (15 page)

"We're here," Hal said when they approached the E-Z Trail Discount Truck & RV rental agency. Bedwyr was looking with disdain at the small wagons that dotted the front of the establishment, as well as the automobiles of its employees. It was, Hal realized, the hurt pride of a young man who had lost a hard-won position of honor. Bedwyr had been Master of Horse for the Round Table. Now he was nothing more than a common foot soldier.

"I don't suppose you'd like to look at one up close," he said.

Bedwyr turned his back.

After arranging for the rental, Hal drove the truck around front and swung the passenger door open. “Get in."

Bedwyr blinked at the truck. "'Tis of greater girth than the others," he said, unable to conceal the admiration in his voice as he stepped up into the cabin.

"It's a big mother, all right." Hal let out the clutch and they rolled into traffic.

"Zounds! We are moving more swiftly than the very wind!" Bedwyr clutched the dashboard.

Hal laughed. "Just wait," he said, downshifting as he veered onto the open road. "Turn that crank. It'll open the window."

Bedwyr leaned into the rushing wind, whooping in exultation. "This machine is faster than even Launcelot's stallion!" he screamed, flinging his arms over his head.

"It's faster than six hundred horses pulling at the same time."

The young man pulled his head back into the cab, his hair wild, a red glow in his cheeks. "Six hundred horses! And as gentle a ride as a baby's cradle."

Hal turned on the air-conditioning. "You're going to love this," he said.

Bedwyr was awestruck by the suddenly cool breeze. "It changes the weather, too."

Hal turned on the radio. They were blasted with a chorus of Steppenwolf singing "Born to be Wild." Bedwyr gasped, shrinking back into his seat and staring at the glowing numbers on the dial.

"Sorry," Hal said. He turned down the volume and switched on a station playing sedate chamber music.

"No." Bedwyr pushed Hal's fingers aside and adjusted the dial back to "Born to be Wild." "It is warrior music," he said reverently, closing his eyes and shaking his head to the beat.

Hal smiled as he turned onto a country lane with a vista clear of traffic. "Want to drive?"

Bedwyr looked at him in amazement. "I?" he asked quietly. "You would permit me this?"

"You're Master of Horse, aren't you?"

"I…" His lip trembled. "Aye, Galahad. That I am."

Hal stopped the vehicle. "Just do what I tell you. And call me Hal."

They screeched to a halt a half hour later to the strains of Aerosmith exhorting the battalion to "Dream On."

"What wonder is this?" Fairhands asked as Bedwyr leaped out the driver's side with a swing of his blond hair.

"This is our new transport," he said, opening the hood with a flourish. "It has the power of six hundred horses."

Fairhands touched the engine, then withdrew his hand with a yelp. "Tis fiercely hot," he said.

"The inner place of it is for the Master of Horse alone," Bedwyr said loftily. "And for Sir Galahad, of course," he demurred. "Hal," he added with a smile.

B
y nightfall the entire
clanging, cursing company reached London. They tumbled out the back of the E-Z Trail, stiff from squatting in the cargo area throughout the jostling ride.

"Power of a hundred horses. Pah!" Dry Lips spat, hobbling over to Hal. "'Twas like riding in a barrel."

"Find us an alehouse, Galahad, and be quick about it!" Hal groaned as one of the men pointed enthusiastically to a sign bearing the picture of a coat of arms.

"Hey, come back, all of you!" he shouted as the knights stampeded past him and darted into the street to the accompaniment of blaring horns and cursing drivers.

"It's no use stopping them," Curoi MacDaire said with a grin. He looked around. "So this is Londinium. It looks a sight more habitable than it did."

"You've been here before?" Hal asked.

"Aye. Many a time, and I've got the scars from cutthroats to prove it."

"That bad, huh?"

"All the cities left by the Romans turned into cesspools, so they did. Nothing but thieves and murderers in them." MacDaire cocked his head. "Good for a spot of fun, though, if you knew where to look."

Hal laughed. "Go on into the pub," he said. "Have the Companions wait for me there. Oh. Here's some money." He handed the Irishman a fistful of notes. "If the bill comes to more than that, I'll pay the balance when I get back."

"Saying your good-byes to a ladyfriend?" MacDaire gave Hal a lewd wink.

"No such luck, I'm afraid. I've got to find a way to get passports for all you guys."

"Passports?"

"Documents that allow people to travel to other countries."

"Letters of safe conduct." MacDaire nodded sagely. "But you haven't got the King to sign them. That's the problem."

"What? Oh. Yeah. Something like that."
Plus the fact that none of these jokers actually exists,
Hal thought glumly. The British passport office was going to love that.

The hood of the truck popped open. In front of it, Bedwyr stood with the owner's manual in his hands, comparing the engine with a diagram at the front of the book. "What is the purpose of sparkplugs?" he demanded.

Hal closed the hood. "Take him with you," he told MacDaire.

"P
assports?" Antonia repeated.
"For eleven men?"

"Eleven men with no proof of citizenship in any country," her husband Franco said, chuckling.

"I thought there might be a problem with that." Hal turned back to Antonia. "So I wanted to know what you did at the passport office when people came in without proper documentation. People who don't legally exist." "Ah, yes," Antonia said. "There are many from my village who can boast neither a driver's license nor a birth certificate. They have lived in the old way."

"That's exactly the case. How would people like that get passports?"

Antonia shook her head. "They would not," she said softly. "Unfortunately, all governments are quite insistent on correct documentation. In my office, we have even had to turn away grandmothers who wished to visit distant relatives because they could not produce any papers. It is quite sad."

"Are these eleven men ancient ones also, my friend?" Franco asked.

Hal cleared his throat. "Well, they're older than they look. That is, they're in good shape. For how old they are," Hal fumbled. "They're athletes."

"A team of some sort?" Franco asked.

"A team? Oh, right." Hal brightened.

"What is their sport?"

Hal's face went blank. "Er..." His eyes fastened on a photograph on the wall showing the hills of central Portugal. "Skiing. They're a ski team. I'm training them for the Olympics."

"How wonderful, Hal!" Antonia's face broke into a warm smile. "I had thought you to be a lonely man with no connections."

"Well, this… came up suddenly."

"Skiing," Franco mused. "An odd sport for the English. Their country has no mountains."

Hal coughed. "That's why I have to get them to the United States. To practice."

"Ah." Antonia frowned. "And not one of them has ever worked, or voted, or been in military service?"

"Nope." Hal said, rising. "They just ski." It was clear that this was not working. "Well, thanks for your time. I've got to get going."

"I am sorry we could not be of more help to you," Antonia said.

"Please," Franco said, pressing his business card into Hal's palm. "Come to my store. Select a jogging suit. I will not rest until we can repay our debt to you."

"Sure. Thanks," Hal said.

A
t the pub, the
knights had taken over the bar, shouting noisily and throwing back pints of Guinness as fast as the barman could serve them.

"That's him," Dry Lips shouted, wiping a foam moustache off his mouth. The barman moved toward Hal, crooking his finger at him sternly.

"Beg your pardon, sir, but these men say you'll be paying for their drink. I should tell you there's been quite a bit of it."

Hal looked around. "Where's MacDaire?" he demanded.

Bedwyr wiped the foam off his mouth. "He told me to come in on my own. Said he had business to attend to."

"What the hell kind of business would he have in London?"

Bedwyr shrugged.

"Another tankard this way, if you please!" Dry Lips shouted, thumping his glass on the bar.

The barman narrowed his eyes. "I gave one of the guys the money to pay the tab," Hal said. The barman set his jaw. "Oh, forget it." Hal doled out a hundred pounds. "Will that cover it?"

"For the moment," the barman said. "What'll you have?"

"A gun. To shoot myself."

"Beg your pardon?"

"Nothing. I don't want anything." He turned around and leaned backward against the bar. He had no idea where to begin looking for MacDaire. Like the rest of the knights, the Irishman was as innocent of the world as a newborn baby, and a lot more likely to get into trouble.

"I'll be back," he told the barman, laying out another hundred pounds as a deposit on the next hour's refreshments. He had almost reached the door when MacDaire walked in.

"Hail, brother!" he called out heartily, slapping Hal on the back. "I'll wager you'll be glad to see me."

"Where in hell have you been?"

"Why, I was off being of service to you, methinks." He smiled slyly. "Were you able to get our letters of safe conduct?"

"That's nothing you have to be concerned with."

"Well, did you?"

"No," Hal said miserably.

"Then my time wasn't wasted." He reached into his tunic and extracted a brown envelope. "Fine paper they make here," he said, rubbing his fingers along the flap. Then he opened it. Inside were a pile of British passports. "Fine work, wouldn't you say?"

"What?" Hal blinked once, then closed the flap quickly. "How did you get these?" he whispered.

MacDaire chortled. "We're in Londinium, lad! The place may have changed summat, but there's still no shortage of rotters who'll supply a man with whatever he wants for a price."

Hal flipped through the pages of one of the passports. They were blank. "These are illegal," he hissed. "We could be put in jail for just having these, let alone using them."

"Then again, we might get away with it." MacDaire winked.

"Oh, brother." Hal pictured all twelve of them with numbers across their chests.

"We've got to find the King," MacDaire reminded him softly. "That's what this is all about, isn't it?" The Irishman put his arm around Hal. "Galahad, me boy, you're a good fellow. I know you were picked by no less than the ancient gods themselves to find the Grail because of your pure heart. But when your path takes you smack in the middle of a tree, you can take the time to cut it down, or you can just go around it. Which do you think will take you where you've got to go faster?"

Hal looked at him, thinking.

"Aye," MacDaire said softly. "And methinks the old gods wouldn't mind, either. After all, it was them put the tree in your way in the first place, to see if you can think on your feet."

He patted Hal's back. "By the way, the swine that sold these to me wants more gelt. Says he'll fill in the missing parts as soon as we bring him pictures and five thousand pounds. 'Five thousand,' says I, 'why, ye must be a thief!' And he laughs. Wouldn't come down in price, though. So I figures we'll take Lugh along to persuade the gentleman to be more reasonable."

"No... no, we'll pay him." Hal peered again at the illegal passports. "I just hope your gods keep us ahead of the cops."

T
hree days later, outfitted
by Antonia's husband, Franco, who received a whopping commission for selling most of the merchandise in his store, the unofficial Ski Team of Great Britain boarded a British Airways jet en route to New York.

T
aliesin and his two
wards spent nearly two weeks in the hold of the cargo ship where they had gone to seek refuge from the killer on the docks in Tangier.

The life of stowaways was not the hardship they had expected, since the old man quickly found a way onto the poopdeck, and Arthur and Beatrice both turned out to be excellent burglars. Within a few days they had all the blankets they needed, more food than they could eat and, since the discovery of a box of candles in the ship's galley, did not have to live in total darkness.

"I've got you now," Beatrice said, moving a chess piece made out of candle wax on a board drawn with charcoal on the floor.

"Are you sure you want to move your queen there?" Arthur asked.

"Oh, is that the queen? I thought it was the bishop's pawn." She picked up the piece and examined it in the candlelight. It melted in her fingers. "Oh, dear, I've killed her," she said, giggling.

Arthur smiled. "That's okay. She was a drip, anyway."

Beatrice laughed, and the flame from the candle between them cast its light on her face, making her skin look like velvet.

"Shall I make another?" she asked.

"Maybe we should play checkers." Arthur made a fist and squashed his rook into a flat disk.

"What a smashing idea!"

Arthur groaned.

"Shh." She pointed to Taliesin, who was snoring in a makeshift hammock some ten feet away. "The poor dear must be awfully tired. This is the first I've seen him sleep since we left…" Her eyes registered the memory of that terrible day. "... Marrakesh..." Suddenly all the fun that had bubbled out of her during their game seemed to dry up. "Well, then," she said, trying to ignore the pain she felt. "Would you rather be red or black?"

"I know how you feel," he said. "I do."

"Yes, I know you do," she whispered. "Hal was all you had, just like my Grams."

He looked away.

"The difference is, Hal's going to come back."

"No, he isn't," Arthur hissed. "You don't have to say things like that to make me feel better. I'm not a little kid." He rolled over in his bedding.

"Oh, Arthur, I wasn't patronizing you. Please believe me.”

"Then why'd you say it?" Through his anger, a glimmer of hope appeared in his eyes. "Did Taliesin tell you?" If the old man said Hal was alive, then he was. Taliesin knew everything.

"No."

"Oh," Arthur said, disappointed.

"But I know it."

"Okay," he said, trying to smile.

"I know you don't believe me. I'm not putting it into words very well." She searched his face. "It's just that sometimes I get a feeling of... of watching something happen, although I can't see it with my eyes. It's as though a puzzle is coming together. Hal is a piece of the puzzle, and so is Mr. Taliesin. But you're the most important piece of all, Arthur. Everything that's coming is because of you."

Arthur swallowed. He knew what Beatrice was talking about, even if she herself did not. He knew who he was, what he was. He knew why Hal and the old man had come into his life.

What he didn't know was what he was supposed to do about it.

"What's coming?" he asked, desperately wanting to hear the answer.

"A beginning," she said. She touched her fingers to his cheek. "You're going to do something wonderful."

"Like what?"

She shrugged. "You'll have to decide that, I imagine." Beatrice got gracefully to her feet. "I want to give you something." She went over to her bedroll, then came back carrying an object in her two hands. It was the cup. "This was meant for you. I'm sure of that."

He held it. "You wouldn't be giving me this if you knew what it can do."

"Oh, I know. It will keep you alive forever."

Arthur shook his head, then offered it back to her. "I don't think I want that."

"Keep it anyway, Arthur. It's part of the puzzle."

The candle guttered. "Oh, man," he said. "Where'd we put the matches?"

"I'll get them for you if you want, but I'm going to bed."

"Oh. Never mind, then."

He heard Beatrice walking confidently through the darkness, using the senses she had depended on long before she gained her sight. Arthur curled up in his blanket, picturing her face in the firelight, then went to sleep.

W
hen Taliesin awakened in
the middle of the night, she was squatting near his hammock, her face on a level with his.

"Good heavens, child, you startled me!" he said, swinging his legs to the floor. He stood up and lit a candle which he had placed on one of the wooden crates in the hold. Beatrice didn't move. "Is something on your mind?"

"Mona," she whispered. "I've been thinking of Mona."

The old man felt a shiver. "How do you know about that?"

"Do you remember?" The girl stared straight ahead, her eyes open but focused far away, past Taliesin's face, to a place deep within his private memories. Those memories were from more than a thousand years ago, but they still burned in his mind, intense and immediate.

"Yes, I remember," he said quietly. "It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen. Perhaps the most beautiful place on earth."

"You were little more than a boy when you came, a joker and a balladeer."

Taliesin stiffened. "You could not know that!"

She smiled, an impish grin that make the old man's heart skip.

"Who are you?" he demanded.

The girl did not answer.
Her eyes,
the old man thought. If he had not known that Beatrice was sighted, he would have believed she was still blind.

H
e had been a bard.

That was the only way he could think of to make a living away from the court after King Ambrosius died. Out of love for his youngest and brightest child, the king had given young Taliesin the title of Prince and a place in the castle—a gift which had proven to be a curse rather than a blessing.

As a bastard, Taliesin Was viewed as a threat by Ambrosius' eldest son, Uther, even though three other legitimate heirs stood between Taliesin and the rulership of Ambrosius' chiefdom. Perhaps it was the open affection the king had always shown this child of his old age, whose mother had brought him a happiness unlike any he had known with his queen while she was alive; or it might have been Taliesin's particular gifts—his gentleness, his prescient sensitivity, his stunning capacity for learning—that singled him out as a target for Uther's hatred. For whatever reason, Uther had always made it clear that his much younger half-brother would not be welcome in the court after Ambrosius was gone. As the old King's strength began to fail, Taliesin began to notice Uther watching him through narrowed eyes, as if he half expected his father to name the unwanted child, rather than Uther himself, as his successor.

Not that Taliesin ever harbored pretensions toward the throne. He was a scholar by nature, not at all inclined toward leading men into battle or engaging in the niggling demands of statecraft. His position in his father's court had allowed him the opportunity to explore the world of the mind through the voluminous scrolls left by the Romans and the rarer and subtler texts of the mystical Irish writers. Too, he studied the properties of herbs and spirit-healing from the wise women who lived in the countryside, the anatomy of the human body from the surgeons who accompanied soldiers into battle, and music from the traveling entertainers who stopped by King Ambrosius' stronghold during times of peace.

This was what he loved most. During the evenings when the bards came to bring news of neighboring chiefdoms or sing the ancient histories of Wales, Taliesin would sit motionless for hours, his eyes smarting from the smoke of the torch fires, as he committed each line to memory.

He taught himself to write in his native language, using the simple Roman alphabet to sound out the complex Welsh words in order to remember the hundreds of songs extolling the heroic exploits of brave Welsh warriors and wicked kings (they were all wicked, except for Ambrosius, he noted, assuming the bards changed the names of the villains and heroes with each castle they visited). And he taught himself to play instruments—a harp he constructed from a piece of pine and strings of squirrel gut, several flutes and drums, and a long, shallow basin in which strings resonated against hammered bells.

These were all he took with him when he left the castle after Uther tried to kill him.

The attempt on his life had not been unexpected; when Uther took time out from his new duties to go for a morning ride in the mountains with a fifteen-year-old boy whose company he had never sought before, Taliesin knew that he would end up either running for his life or losing it.

As it turned out, Uther's lack of interest in his imagined rival was what saved Taliesin. Believing the thin, unathletic boy to be frail and unaccustomed to the outdoors, he led his young bastard half-brother to the wilds of Gwynedd, in the western part of the kingdom, where the hills were rugged and the snow fell early, and the howling of wolves pierced the silence of the long nights. There, in the evening fog that confused the most experienced huntsmen, Uther sent Taliesin into a valley to investigate what he said might be a wild boar in a thicket. When the boy returned to the rise where he had left Uther, the crown prince was gone.

With a sigh of relief, Taliesin dismounted and led his horse to a nearby stream to drink. So this was all it was to be, he thought, making a sign of gratitude to Mithras, the god whose stream this was. Disdainful of actually murdering him, Uther had simply left Taliesin to die of exposure or wolves.

Neither was a real possibility. Taliesin knew the west intimately. He had traveled often to these parts to consult with the wise ones—the mid wives and herb-healers who journeyed here for the rare flowers and grasses that made up their apothecaries, the hermits who chose to live in the west because of its loneliness and harsh beauty, and the druids who passed through one by one, always solitary, on their way from the island of Mona which was the beating heart of their community.

For the druids, the few inhabitants of the area came two or three times a week to set food beneath the worn stone shrines to Mithras at the sources of the mountain streams. The druids were always being called by some king or other to cast spells for victory in battle or for a queen's delivery of a strong boy-child. Sometimes those calls were heeded, sometimes not. No one except the Innocent, the druids' term for the first among their number, told these magicians where to practice their art, and not even the Innocent could order the results.

Consequently, the local herders and fishermen felt a strong combination of fear and divine protection from the wizards of Mona who passed through their bleak land on the way to castles or religious enclaves in more hospitable climates to the south and east. To ensure their goodwill, the precious and scarce food was set out even in the foulest weather to feed the magicians or their gods or, more often, the wolves which, according to the druids, were also a part of All That Is.

Armed with this knowledge, Taliesin spent the night in a cave near the Mithras shrine, well fed and protected from predators by a fire created with tinder and flint left conveniently nearby, and considered the urgency of his departure from his father's court.

During that night, he heard music from the druids' island of Mona. It was a chant of sorts, the ancient and wild music of the earth itself. He had heard people speak of it before, this office that took place at the quietest hour of the night, but he had not come close to imagining the music. Sometimes it was harsh, as forbidding as the countryside from which it originated; then, later, the sound grew serene as angels' wings, with the lilting high voices of women encasing the low baritone cry of the druid men.

He heard it again the next morning, at dawn, when the fog settled thickly into the valleys like pools of milk. The Salutation to the Sun, sung in ancient syllables no longer recognizable as Welsh, drifting in patches like puffs of wind across the water and the cold mountain air.

Mona
, he thought, staring out into the fog toward the source of the song. Every word spoken or sung there was magic. The island was the great repository of truth, of all the knowledge in the world worth keeping. It was not stored in books, as were the histories and poetry of the Irish. The barbarian Vikings had plundered Ireland's sacred places and used those precious parchment tomes to start their cooking fires. No, the wisdom of Mona was not trusted to written symbols that might be destroyed in a moment or misinterpreted through centuries. It was kept, intact and perfect, in the minds of all its druids. Each gray-hooded disciple, young or old, male or female, devoted his life to absorbing Mona's knowledge until he was himself that knowledge, a living embodiment of the power of All That Is.

Taliesin closed his eyes to better hear the music. The druids were not of the world. Their discipline took them out of the sphere of men to become part of a greater whole, their wizardry the magic of the universe. Mona was where he belonged, where he wished to be more than any place else on earth.

With an inrush of air, he ran to untie his horse. He would go there now, straightaway, and ask to be admitted as a student or a menial. Mentally he went over his qualifications: He could read and write; that would be an asset to the community. He was already self-trained in the use of herbs and medicines. His knowledge would be laughable compared with that of the disciples at Mona, but at least he was not completely ignorant. And he was stronger than he looked. Yes, he would…

Just before the crest of the hill where his horse waited, Taliesin stopped with a gasp. A wolf had walked unseen out of the fog and now stood directly in front of him, its long shape barring his way, its head turned to face him.

The animal was old, he could see that from its grizzled white muzzle, but it was not lame or ill. Oddly, it exhibited no sign of fear at seeing him. Its fangs were not bared, and its ears were not slanted back; nor had its body assumed the crouched position of attack. Then, with a sudden ray of sunlight that shot over the horizon, Taliesin noticed something else about the wolf.