The Broken Sword Read online

  Bedwyr leaped up on a nearby table. "And I'll not have the King's horses insulted!" He drew his own sword.

  The pink-faced men smiled indulgently. "Quite good replicas," the first twin said, addressing Gawain. "Are you here for some sort of festival? We have so many of them, my brother and I can hardly keep track."

  "That's it," Hal said, seizing the opportunity. "They're actors. Just trying to get into their roles. You know how it is." He chuckled feebly.

  "Lugh!" MacDaire called as the dirty giant hurled himself toward the twins. He managed to land on both of them at once, knocking them to the floor like two large bowling pins.

  "What in..." one of them protested as they tried to right themselves. "This is most..."

  "For the love of God Almighty, keep your bloody head down!" MacDaire shouted. A split second later, Lugh's mace whistled through the air and embedded itself into the doorjamb with a thunk.

  Both twins screamed at once. The other patrons ducked under the tables.

  MacDaire looked at the mace, then at the grinning man who had thrown it. "This isn't the time or the place for that, Lugh," he said patiently. Lugh's face fell.

  Kay burst into hearty laughter, and the others joined in, slapping Lugh on the back. His spirits revived. "How think you, boys?" Kay boomed, aiming his spear at the two terrified men on the floor. "Ought we finish them off now?"

  The knights responded by banging the hilts of their swords on the tabletops until the walls shook. All but Gawain, who rolled his eyes, put away his weapon, and went back to his beer. And the barman, who lay prostrate behind the bar. And Hal, who struggled vainly to push his way toward the hapless twins. "Get them out of here!" he shouted to the Irishman.

  At that moment Lugh, showing all three of his brown teeth in a display of gleeful anticipation, emerged from the crowd like a bull from its pen to remove his mace from the doorframe with one mighty, timber-splitting pull.

  "Methinks you chaps might do well to be on your way now," MacDaire whispered to the twins with a wink.

  The two men scrambled to their feet and threw themselves outside with the speed of Olympic sprinters. Lugh lumbered after them, swinging the mace as he walked. The twins screamed again. Finally Hal, who had at last broken through the knights, leaped skyward and grabbed the handle of the mace. The movement caught Lugh off balance, and the weapon dropped heavily to the ground. The twins took the opportunity to dash, shrieking, down the street.

  "What do you think you're doing?" Hal shouted, throwing his arms up in the air. "You could have killed them with that thing! This isn't the fifth century anymore, you know. Nowadays—"

  Lugh interrupted his tirade with a weirdly yodeling battle cry that originated in the pit of his massive abdomen and reverberated through his cavernous open mouth. Hal had never heard a sound like that before. It made the spittle dry up in his throat.

  "Okay, okay," he said, backing up. "We'll talk. We can work this out. No big deal. I see where you're coming from, and..."

  Lugh repeated his statement, this time accompanied by a galloping lunge, his hairy arms on a level with Hal's neck.

  Without thinking, Hal grabbed the giant by the wrist and elbow and flipped Lugh over his head. The knight landed on the gravel of the parking lot in a cloud of dust.

  They were beginning to draw a crowd, including the ancient drunk from the meadow. "He'll kill you for sure now," the beggar chortled, sitting on a bench in front of the pub and taking a long pull from a pint bottle of gin. The other knights, now assembled outside the doorway, agreed enthusiastically.

  Hal tried to swallow, without success. As Lugh propped himself up on his elbows, Hal danced backward, his hands loose and ready. The big man shook his mop of wild black hair, checked the stability of one of his teeth, then threw back his head and laughed.

  "It's happy I am to see you again, Galahad," he said sweetly. He extended his arm to Hal. Hesitantly Hal took it and pulled the big man to his feet. As the rest of the knights gathered around them in goodwill, Lugh embraced Hal in a powerful bear hug that squeezed every last molecule of air out of Hal's lungs.

  "You guys had better clear out of here before the cops come," Hal said.

  "Cops?" Lugh asked.

  "The police." Lugh's face was blank. "The authorities. The law." He looked at the others, who stared at him uncomprehendingly. "Look, those two guys you terrorized are going to complain to whoever's in charge in this town."

  "But we're the King's men," Dry Lips said.

  "It doesn't matter. If those guys say you bothered them, someone will come and take you all to jail."

  Dry Lips knitted his eyebrows threateningly. "They can try."

  "Perfect," Kay said, laughing. "We'll be needing a morning drill anyway."

  "Come on, guys," Hal said in exasperation. "Just go, okay? I'll join you after I pay the bill."

  One by one the knights mounted their steeds and ambled off toward the meadow. As Hal was walking back into the pub, the old drunk on the bench snorted and spat. "Didn't give us much of a show," he said.

  "Go haunt a house."

  The bill for the food and drink, combined with the barman's estimate of the damage done to the door, came to nearly four hundred pounds. After laying out the money for food, gas, and hotel rooms en route to Tangier, his and Antonia's expenses on the motor trip to England, and the rental car from London to Dorset County, the thousand dollars that Taliesin had miraculously produced in Ait Haddus had dwindled to nearly nothing.

  He counted out all the money he had left. Eight pounds. Barely enough for a train ticket back to London. For one.

  Well, why shouldn't he go, he argued with himself. He didn't owe the Companions anything. He wasn't the one who'd wrecked the damn sword. For all he cared, they could go play in the cemetery with the other ghosts.

  Now, that's a fine way to talk about men who've fed you and welcomed you to their fire.

  Men. Hal felt ashamed remembering Taliesin's words. The knights weren't ghosts anymore. They were men, strong men who could break doors with iron-studded weapons, but who would not be able to survive a single day in the twentieth century on their own.

  Inadvertently or not, Hal had opened the door to bring them into this world, and they were his responsibility now. He would just have to face the fact that he was stuck in the village of Wilson-on-Hamble with eleven half-civilized men and no money. Never mind the train ticket; eight pounds wasn't enough to provide Lugh with an afternoon snack.

  With a sigh, he slapped the notes onto the bar. "For your trouble," he said.

  "Thank you, guv." The barman picked it up with a smile. "This village hasn't seen so much excitement in a long while. The Swithingtons'll be telling the tale to their dying day."

  "Swithington? Is that the name of the two guys we almost killed?"

  The barman nodded. "Twins. They own an antiques shop on Front Street. Very posh. Come down from London a few years ago."

  "Do you think they'll call the police?"

  The barman smiled and began washing out some glasses. "I'll put it this way, Cap'n. If I was you, I'd cancel whatever festival your actors are signed up for and move on. Get my drift? Just a suggestion."

  Hal considered his future as a fugitive, skulking indefinitely through the English countryside with a bunch of men whose idea of fun was to kill strangers in bars. It was a grim thought.

  With them to take care of, he would probably never find Arthur.

  "Thanks," he said to the barman.

  "Righto."

  Outside, the old drunk was still sitting on the bench in front of the pub's window. Inside the window was a poster for Gilbey's gin showing a bottle suspended over a city skyline at night, its flowing contents a river of liquid silver on which jungle beasts wearing festive hats stampeded toward the high-rise buildings below. Gilbey's, it read, For the Discriminating Party Animal. The addition of the filthy old man guzzling Gilbey's product in front of the poster gave the ad a new dimension.

  "I could use anot
her tenner," the beggar said. He stuck his tongue inside the neck of the empty gin bottle and tilted it hopefully. The position of the bottle matched the one in the poster exactly.

  "You and me both," Hal said, then froze in his tracks.

  "What is it?" the old man said, feeling the top of his head. "It's not a spider, is it? Don't like spiders."

  Hal pushed him aside abstractedly to get a better look at the poster. "Manhattan," he whispered. "The city in the sky."

  "I quit drinking once, and spiders came a-crawling all over me," the beggar said. "Took it as a sign that the Lord didn't mean for me to live dry."

  "And this is the bench he was sitting on. A stone bench."

  "Figured if God wanted me to keep on drinking, who was I to say Him nay?"

  Hal looked at him suddenly, frowning. "What?"

  "I said God wants me to keep drinking," the old man said with conviction. "So I'd like a tenner to go about the Lord's business."

  With a grunt of irritation, Hal reached into his pocket for the small change left over from the bar bill and handed it over to the old man. "Go for it, champ," he said, and jogged back toward the meadow.

  Arthur was in New York. Hal knew that, knew it as well as if Taliesin had telephoned him from Grand Central Terminal.

  He also knew that he had to get eleven men who hadn't existed before yesterday across an ocean.

  Chapter Thirteen

  When Hal arrived back at the meadow, Launcelot was currying his horse with a handful of dry grass.

  "I know where Arthur is," he told the knight.

  Launcelot's eyes immediately locked into his own. "The city in the sky?"

  "New York."

  The knight furrowed his brow. "York?"

  "New York. It's not in England. Somehow we've got to get over there, but I don't know how," Hal said dispiritedly.

  Launcelot caught Gawain's eye and beckoned him over. Gawain strolled over carrying the leather and chain mail helmet he was oiling. He cocked his head at Hal in question.

  The two of them must not speak fifty words a year, Hal thought. "I've figured out where Taliesin—er, the Merlin—was telling me to find Arthur, only I don't know how we're going to get there."

  "York," Launcelot elaborated. "A new one."

  "How far from the old one?" Gawain asked, squinting.

  "About two thousand miles, across the Atlantic Ocean. A big sea."

  "Two thousand!" Launcelot and Gawain exchanged glances. Then Gawain whistled for the others to come over. With his chin, he gestured again for Hal to explain their predicament to the others.

  "We'd be needing a boat, then," Kay said. He surveyed the trees around them. "It'd take time, but I suppose we could build one."

  "The Atlantic's too wide and rough for any boat we could make," Hal said. "We'll have to buy tickets... pay passage to get over. But we don't have any money."

  "Money?"

  "Currency. Coin, I guess you'd call it. We need coin, plenty of it. And we don't have any."

  "Speak for yourself, son," Dry Lips said. He unfastened a pouch at his waist and poured out a pile of bright gold coins. Hal picked one up. It bore on its face a likeness of a man's head adorned with leaves. The inscription was in Latin.

  "This is a Roman coin," Hal said in wonder.

  "Aye, but it's still gold," Dry Lips said. "The filthy scoundrels left something behind, at least. Well, come along, the rest of you." He gestured impatiently to the others. "I'll not be the sole benefactor of this expedition."

  While Hal picked up one coin and then another, the others dumped their money onto the pile. Some of the older knights carried substantial sums, although none as great as Dry Lips', while the younger members could only offer a few.

  "This says Caligula," Hal said, picking up a shiny piece on which the stamping still looked fresh.

  "The names don't matter," MacDaire explained. "It's the weight, Galahad. The weight's what counts. I'd say there's a goodly sum there."

  "Enough for a boat, I'll wager," Kay said.

  Hal sifted through the coins. "This has got to be worth…" He looked up blankly, his heart skipping. "The twins."

  "Who?"

  "Those guys you almost killed. They're antique dealers."

  "Don't be worrying about them, lad," Dry Lips said confidently. "Those two couldn't wring a chicken's neck between them."

  "No, I mean… Never mind." Hal scooped up the coins. "Is there something I can carry these in? They weigh a ton."

  Bedwyr, the Master of Horse, picked up a pair of leather saddlebags and emptied their contents. "How's this?" he asked.

  "Great. That is…" Hal looked over at the grazing horses, remembering the bone-jolting ride of the night before.

  Bedwyr placed a blanket and a small curl of leather over the back of a chestnut stallion.

  "Is that a saddle?" Hal asked.

  The young man blinked. "It is," he said politely.

  Hal tried to mount, but succeeded only in pulling off the saddle. He attempted the maneuver again, with the same result. The third time, he sat on the ground, fuming. "Aren't there supposed to be ropes or something holding the thing on?" he asked.

  Bedwyr struggled to keep a smile from spreading across his face. "Have you not ridden for a while, then, Galahad?"

  "A few lifetimes," Hal said grumpily.

  In the end, it took four men and thirty minutes to mount Hal and his booty. In addition to the coins, the knights had also reluctantly parted with their armor, although they never quite believed that they would not be permitted to cross the ocean in it.

  "I'll ride with you, if you like," Bedwyr offered delicately. "With this much coin, you may be waylaid by bandits."

  "Or gravity," Hal muttered.

  The Swithingtons' shop was a crowded mélange of fragile and lovely items arranged artistically among vases filled with fresh flowers.

  "God's blood, it's a treasure house," Bedwyr said, looking through the window. "I'll wager some of that belongs to the King in taxes." He reached for his sword. Hal grabbed his hand and forced the weapon back into its scabbard.

  "I think you'd better wait out here," he said flatly. "To guard the horses." He took the saddlebags. "And please... don't kill anyone," he pleaded. "Just stand there, okay?"

  "Aye, that's what I'll do," Bedwyr said affably.

  "Good."

  "Unless I encounter evil or misdeeds. It's the vow, you understand."

  "The vow?"

  "The Companions' vow. We took it when we joined the Round Table."

  "Oh, that vow," Hal said. He went into the shop, whispering a prayer that no one would indulge in evil or misdeeds within a two-block radius of Bedwyr for the next few minutes.

  One of the twins was dusting a Russian samovar when Hal walked in, accompanied by a tinkling of tiny silver bells. The shopkeeper looked up with a smile, which transformed immediately into a mask of terror.

  "Cedric!" he shrieked.

  The other twin rushed in. "Good heavens, Sidney, what's—"

  "They're back! This is one of them!" Sidney pointed an accusing finger at Hal, then at the window, where a young blond man in a Dutch-boy haircut stood holding the reins of two horses. "And there's another!"

  "Ring the police," Sidney commanded as he rummaged through a drawer in a cherrywood rolltop desk. "Tell them... Damn it to hell, where is that gun?"

  "Look, fellas..." Hal began.

  "Here it is." Unsteadily, Sidney brandished an Arostegui dueling pistol. "Now don't try anything foolish, young man."

  "I'm not going to hurt you," Hal said, backing up. "I only came to show some—"

  "Stop!" Cedric threw down the phone as Hal crashed into a table filled with gladiola and silver Victoriana. A Delft ginger jar which had held the flowers shattered on impact. The other pieces remained intact until Hal landed on them. The saddlebags flew out of his hands and spilled their contents among the debris.

  "My crumber," Cedric moaned, moving toward the wreckage with outstretched a
rms.

  "Move aside!" his brother snapped, darting about the room to get a clear shot of Hal.

  Cedric picked up what looked like a tiny silver dust pan, now flattened. "I don't suppose it matters to people like you that this was used in the royal household," he shrilled, poking it under Hal's nose. The handle popped off. Cedric closed his eyes in despair.

  "Get out of the way, I said!" the other twin complained. "The way you're writhing about, I'm as likely to shoot you as him."

  "For God's sake, Sidney!" Cedric said indignantly. "That thing hasn't been fired in a hundred years. Think of the porcelain." He rummaged around the mess on the floor for the crumber handle. "Just call the... what's this?" He picked up a coin.

  "It's part of what I came to show you," Hal said.

  "A First Century Nero!" Cedric's voice was hoarse with passion.

  "A what?" Sidney laid the gun atop a walnut lap desk and fell to his hands and knees. "Good God," he said. "A hundred-sesterce gold piece."

  "Who's on it?" his brother asked, grabbing for the coin like a child. Sidney snatched it away. "Can't tell," he said, holding it to the light.

  "Claudius!" Cedric exclaimed as he picked up another. Then his eyes slid slowly toward Hal. "Did you say this was part of what you were offering?" he asked softly.

  Hal nodded. "That's what I said. Would you like to see the rest?"

  The twins looked at one another, then nodded in unison. Hal waved to Bedwyr standing outside, and the young knight brought in the parcels from the horses.

  "This one nearly filleted me," Cedric said, recognizing Bedwyr as he tossed the armor in a heap on the floor. "Oh, my stars! A Boudiccan helmet!"

  "Do you want them or not?" Hal asked.

  "Yes," both men chanted in unison.

  An hour later, Hal and Bedwyr were riding back to the meadow with a cashier's check in place of the gold coins.

  "The two of them seemed in better spirits at the end than when they first saw you," Bedwyr said.

  "Dropped all the charges against us." He patted the cashier's check in his pocket. "And they got the money out of their own savings. This all worked out great."