The Broken Sword Read online

  And Arthur? Was he dead, too? During his last moments on the dock, Hal had been the only thing between Arthur and the killer.

  But they had the cup. Yes! Arthur still had the cup, and Taliesin was with him. The old man would look after Arthur until Hal found them. Suddenly he wanted very much to live.

  "Help!" he yelled, disappointed that he sounded so feeble. His voice had seemed loud only a moment ago.

  Or was it an hour…

  His last conscious memory was the sound of the trawler's engine starting up again.

  The castle was filled with ghosts.

  In the Great Hall, Hal sat among them at the Round Table, uncomfortable in the big chair. They watched him, these long-dead men dressed in chain mail and leather, their eyes attentive. The chair had stood empty for sixteen hundred years, while one of their number had gone into the world, born and reborn, again and again, looking for their lost king.

  Then, as they watched, a swirl of moondust encircled the Siege Perilous and the visitor who sat upon it. Hal gasped as light frozen from a time that had passed into legend a millennium before burst into life and gathered around him.

  "Galahad,'' one of the knights whispered. He was Launcelot, first among the Companions and father to the young knight who had been chosen for this special, earthly quest. Launcelot had recognized him even though his son now bore a different face and a new body.

  "Galahad!" the others affirmed, their voices deafening in the cobwebby silence. They raised their swords to him.

  "But I'm not..." Hal protested. “You don't know..."

  But they drowned him out, calling the name again and again because they remembered, as he himself did not, that the name was his own, and that he had indeed, after sixteen centuries of searching, found the King.

  Water gushed out of his mouth. Hal came to, coughing, his eyes streaming. He gulped a mouthful of air, convinced with half his mind that it would kill him, but unable to resist.

  It tasted of fish. It gurgled in his lungs and he coughed again, so hard that it drew his shoulders up off the hard surface where he lay, then thumped him back down again.

  Someone had covered him with a blanket. Hal could not yet feel its warmth, but his arms registered the prickliness of the wool. A stranger's face moved in front of him, very close. The man’s skin was lined and brown from a lifetime in the sun, with two deep creases between the palest of blue eyes. He spoke in the strange language Hal had heard on the sea, then turned his head to repeat it to a group of men who had gathered behind him. Slowly they came into focus, each of them frowning down at Hal.

  "O Borracho?" the man asked. Hal shook his head. The man said something else, waited in vain for a response, then sighed.

  "Americane," one of the men behind him said, holding up Hal's wallet. The man with the blue eyes stood up stiffly and examined it, glancing at the wad of hundred-dollar bills inside, riffling through the documents attesting to Hal's existence: a New York driver's license, an out-of-date voter registration card, the business card from his last place of employment—a garage in Marrakesh specializing in European cars—and a torn piece of old newspaper. "Arold," the blue-eyed man read, trying to sound out the name on the driver's license. "Arold Wocks… Wuzzi..." Shaking his head, he handed the wallet somberly to Hal.

  "Woczniak," Hal said. "Thank you." His throat still burned from salt water. Blinking hard to keep his thoughts in focus, he fished half the bills from his wallet and offered them to the man. "Hey, thanks for helping me out," he said, struggling to rise. "I'd like to…"

  The man with the blue eyes shook his finger at the money, then gently pushed Hal backward so that he was leaning against the cabin wall. He adjusted the blanket around him and made a gesture for Hal to rest. Then he turned away and shouted at the others.

  Hal watched for a few minutes while some of the men gathered up thousands of sardines from the deck of the boat and tossed them into a hole in the floor and others untangled the big nets, readying them to cast once again into the sea. The blanket and the sun overhead were beginning to warm him. The gentle motion of the boat was lulling and comfortable.

  He did not know when he fell asleep, but when he awoke, the sun was nearing its zenith and the boat heading toward land. It was not Tangier. The houses of the small village along the shore were not Moroccan, and the people he saw at the dock were white. He had gone to the other shore, then. To Spain? But the language was not Spanish. The musical tongue spoken by the men on the fishing boat sounded, to Hal's untrained ear, like an admixture of French and German.

  After unloading the trawler's catch into a van filled with ice and lined with plastic shower curtains, the man with the blue eyes helped him to his feet and led him off the boat.

  On the dock, a man cooking eels on a smoky grill waved to them. The sailor with Hal waved back, then gestured expansively at the collection of crumbling stone and plaster houses on the cobblestone street above them. "Santa Amelia," he said lovingly, leading Hal up some rickety wooden steps. "Portugal."

  "Portugal?" Hal repeated. "I can't be in Portugal."

  He looked up and down the road. Behind the sardine van, which was heading into the inland hills, walked a mule led by two children. Two boxy women wearing cotton dresses and ankle socks smoked cigarettes beneath a weather-beaten poster with the symbol of the Communist hammer and sickle on it. "American Embassy?" he asked.

  The fisherman held up a finger and nodded, the universal symbol for "wait." Then he took him by the arm and led him up the street. "Olazabal," he said, thumping his chest.

  "Olazabal? That's your name?"

  The fisherman nodded. "Juan Marco Olazabal." His lips curved into something almost resembling a smile on his taut, sculpted-stone features, then thrust his chin at Hal. "Arold," he added.

  "Hal. Call me Hal."

  "Hall. Okay."

  Olazabal's house was on the village's main street. Made of stone, it was immaculately whitewashed, with a garden in back. The fisherman threw open the front door with a bang and a shout. His wife, stirring a pot of some fragrant stew over a woodburning stove, smiled shyly, wiped her hands on the stained apron she was wearing, and came to take his hat. She bowed politely to Hal, then immediately placed two wooden bowls filled with clams and sausages in red broth on the table, along with a basket of crusty bread and a bottle of pale wine, which she poured into coffee cups. Olazabal wiped his hands on a rag and sat down, gesturing toward Hal's bowl.

  "Ameijoas," he boomed, smiling.

  Hal tasted it and thought he would die of happiness. As he ate, he realized that it had been his first meal in more than two days.

  "Bom?" Olazabal asked.

  Hal nodded. "Bom," he repeated. "Very good."

  With a roar of good humor, the Portuguese slapped him on the back so hard that the piece of bread in Hal's mouth flew across the table. Then he laughed some more.

  By the time dinner was over, Hal could barely sit upright. "I have to get to the Embassy," he said breathlessly. "I floated over to Portugal without a passport, and I've got to get back."

  "Passaporte. Si," Olazabal repeated, holding his finger up again. "Ah." His stone features broke into a gap-toothed smile as the wooden door creaked open and a young woman walked in.

  "Antonia!" he shouted.

  "Papa," she answered breathlessly, removing a scarf from her head. "Mama." She nodded at Hal, but no one introduced him. Both Olazabal and his wife shouted a torrent of remarks, gesticulating freely toward their unexpected guest. As they spoke, she looked over at Hal, her expression alternately friendly and appalled.

  "My father says he found you in the ocean," she said, sitting down at the table across from him.

  "You speak English."

  "Yes. I work in Faro, a short distance. Many English come there. Also Americans. How did you come to be in the ocean so many miles away?"

  "I fell in. Off a dock in... Tangier."

  "Tangier! But you should not have lived!"

  "You're not the only on
e who feels that way," Hal said.

  "No, my English is not perfect. I meant it is very far to Tangier. A long distance to stay in the ocean." She smiled. "Do you have family in Tangier?"

  Family. Arthur was as close as Hal had ever come to having a family. Arthur and, he had once hoped, Emily. Were either of them still alive?

  He couldn't think about that, he told himself. It would do no good. He would have to assume they were, that Emily had gotten out of the hotel, and that Taliesin had taken Arthur and Beatrice out of the city to a place of safety.

  The question was, where?

  Antonia was still smiling sweetly, waiting for Hal to answer her question. "Uh... no," he said. "I was just passing through."

  "Then perhaps you were meant to come here. To help someone."

  Her gaze could have bored holes through him. She was looking at him so intently that he was tempted to check over his shoulder, but suppressed the urge. "Yeah, maybe so," he said, trying to be agreeable.

  Olazabal said something lengthy and mellifluous, accompanied by a variety of gestures. When he was through, Antonia nodded. "My father insists that you spend the night here, but I will take you to my place of work in the morning, if your health is good."

  It seemed like an odd invitation. "Well..."

  "I work in the passport office. You have lost your papers, yes?"

  "Oh. Yes. Well, just my passport. I've still got my driver's license and things like that."

  "Then it will not be a problem." She patted his hand. "You wish to go back to Tangier, yes?"

  "Yes," Hal said. "Thanks."

  Tangier was as good a place as any to start looking for Arthur.

  But first he would find the bastard who had thrown him off the dock. Whoever he was, he knew about the cup, and would go after Arthur until he got it.

  The cup, the damned cup! Hal almost hoped Taliesin would just leave it for the man to find. But he wouldn't do that. The old man knew even better than Hal what would happen if the cup fell into the hands of someone like the man on the dock. It was a vessel of dreams and wonder, too precious and too dangerous to be set loose in the world.

  He sighed. He wished he'd never set eyes on the thing.

  During the evening, the small house was filled with neighbors coming to get a look at the strange visitor who had been fished out of the sea like a sardine, but shortly their fascination for him diminished. The men played a pokerlike card game called mus, and the women gossiped in whispers, standing or seated on stools around an old woman draped in black like a nun. She was apparently the local wise woman who, according to Antonia, dispensed advice on every subject from giving birth to winning at cards. Occasionally one of the men would excuse himself from the mus table to consult with her as well.

  "Dona Theresa is a bruxa," Antonia said. "A witch. They wish for her to tell them how to win at the cards."

  "What happens if they lose?" Hal asked.

  Antonia shrugged. "Perhaps she will give them better advice next time."

  At the end of the evening everyone bowed graciously and clasped Hal's hand. Some embraced him; others made a point of rubbing his back or chest or hair.

  "I feel like the family dog," Hal said after the guests left.

  "They were waiting all evening to do that," Antonia told him. "To touch a man who has been saved by a miracle is great good luck."

  Olazabal offered Antonia's bedroom to Hal for the night, but Hal insisted on sleeping on the divan in the parlor. It was made of wood, but Mrs. Olazabal covered it with thick wool blankets so that it was reasonably comfortable, although too narrow to accommodate Hal's body. He squirmed, shifting from one side to the other, trying to keep his limbs from going numb, for most of the night. At last he got up and moved the mass of blankets onto the floor beside the fire and sat there, poking the embers with a stick.

  "I see you also cannot sleep." Antonia pulled a tattered robe closer over her nightgown and sat down beside him.

  Hal looked into the fire, remembering his dream on the ship, in which he had sat in a place of honor with the ghost-knights of the Round Table. It had not really been a dream, he knew, but a memory of another life.

  The first time he experienced the dream, three years before, he had been awake. Even so, he had dismissed it. The idea of his having lived before had been too outlandish for Hal to believe. But little by little, he had been shown the truth.

  He had once been privileged to serve a great king who, rather than compromise his soul, had refused the cup of immortality. Yet there had been a prophecy that Arthur of Britain would come again, and so his knights waited at their Round Table, their spirits thin as air, while one of their number, whose name had been Galahad, returned to the world of men to wait for his king's return.

  "Galahad!" the knights called, their voices an echo of the far distant past, inaudible to any ears but Galahad's own, while moondust swirled around him in the Siege Perilous of the ancient hall at Camelot.

  Hal looked up with a start. Antonia was staring at him. "Am I disturbing your private thoughts?"

  "No, nothing like that. I was just..." He shrugged.

  "Excuse me if I seem to pry," she said tentatively. "But you said you have no family in Tangier."

  "That's right," Hal said.

  "Then your business is there?"

  Hal shook his head.

  "Your home?" she asked.

  He held up his palms. "Hotel room."

  "I am sorry," Antonia said quietly. She looked around the shabby room. "A home is important. Family, children, parents..." A tear coursed down her cheek.

  "Hey, it's okay," Hal said. "I've gotten used to it."

  "Yes, yes." She brushed the tear away. "I apologize. I have not been good company for you," she said huskily, and rose. "We go early to the passport office. Then you can go back to Tangier."

  "Right," he mumbled. Back to Tangier. To kill a man.

  For the cup.

  Again.

  Two hours later they were in Antonia's ancient lime-green Fiat.

  Her tears had sprung up again as they ate breakfast. Antonia hugged her parents fiercely at the door, then began to sob loudly as she started up the car. A fresh torrent of noisy sobs burst out of the woman as they crested a hill overlooking the seacoast village they had left. Hal thought the Portuguese had to be the most emotional people he'd ever met.

  "Is there something bothering you, Antonia?" he asked politely.

  She blew her nose. "My home, my home," she wailed.

  He looked behind them. "Just how far is it to the passport office?" .

  "Twelve kilometers." She honked noisily into her handkerchief.

  "Twelve..." He stifled a laugh. "Not to be nosy, but do you go through this every day?" Antonia answered with a fresh wail. Hal decided not to press her on the subject.

  She seemed to calm down somewhat over the next couple of miles, until the Fiat's engine sputtered and died in the middle of a flock of geese.

  "My car!" she moaned. "Not my car!" Her voice had a hysterical edge to it.

  Hal leaped out. Anyone who reacted to leaving for work in the morning the way Antonia did might well go off the deep end over a stalled engine. "Relax," he said. "I'll have a look at it. I'm a mechanic."

  He opened the hood. Steam shot up in a cloud. When it cleared, Antonia was standing beside him.

  "It's no big deal," Hal said. "Leaky radiator, that's all. It'll start up again in a couple of minutes. We can get a patch for it at the next town."

  "You say you are a car mechanic?" she asked.

  "At your service."

  "Deo gracias," she murmured, closing her eyes rapturously and making the sign of the cross.

  "Uh... yeah."

  Antonia's eyes were brimming again. Hal bent over the engine with feigned interest before she decided to kiss his feet and declare a miracle.

  "It is a miracle," she said.

  Hal wiped his forehead. "Antonia, it's a cracked radiator, not the Shroud of Turin, okay?"
r />   "Dona Theresa—the bruxa—said that someone would come to help me. That is you, Senhor Hal."

  "And if it weren't me, it'd be the next guy who drove by. Anybody could do this, believe me."

  "No, the miracle is not with my car," she said. "Dona Theresa was speaking about my plan. You have come to help me with my plan."

  "Your plan to get to work?"

  "No. I have already quit my job. Today I will travel to England."

  He looked up from the engine. "What?"

  "And I will remain there." Her eyes began to well with tears.

  Hal replaced the radiator cap quickly. "Maybe you'd better tell me while we're on the road. Mind if I drive?"

  She blew her nose and shook her head. Gratefully Hal led her to the passenger seat and hopped behind the wheel. The Fiat started up immediately. After a few minutes he spotted a sign that said Faro 8 k. He gunned the engine. He figured that the faster he drove, the less time he would have to spend listening to Antonia cry. "Okay, go ahead," he said, pushing the car to its limit. "Did you tell your parents you're moving out?"

  She shook her head. "That is what makes it all so sad. But there is no other way. You see, I am married. But secretly. Papa does not know."

  "Does he know the guy? I mean, your husband?"

  "He hates Franco." Antonia hiccupped loudly. "He used to love him. Franco was like his own son. He grew up on the fishing boats with my father. It was my father himself who announced our engagement. But Franco could not remain a fisherman. He is a thinker, Franco." She tapped her forehead with meaning. "A scholar. One day he will be a great man."

  "What did he do?" Hal asked. "To make your father hate him?"

  "He went to accounting school."

  "Ah," Hal said.

  "In the Algarve. The English sector. For a man from my village, this is like treason. We have hated the English for centuries. But it was an Englishman, not a Portuguese, who offered Franco a chance to do bookkeeping for his business. When Franco did well, the Englishman lent him the money to go to school," she said hotly. "Yet still my father will not forgive Franco for leaving the village. He says his daughter would never be given to an Englishman's slave in marriage." She wept into her hands.