She smiled. "Not for years. Grams didn't like it."
"Then we'll go. And don't worry. I won't let anything happen to you."
"Is something going on that I should know about?" the old man asked. "Good heavens, where's the cup? You didn't have it with you at dinner."
"I put it in the flower pot by the window," Arthur said. "I figured it would be safe there, and I wouldn't have to explain to people why I had it hanging from my belt."
Taliesin walked to the window and picked up the plastic flowers. In the base of the pot was the cup. The old man was replacing the flowers when he stopped suddenly and turned around. "You oughtn't have left it here," he said.
"Why, is the cup gone?" Arthur jumped up and hurried to the window. "No, it's right where I left it, see?"
"That is not the point," Taliesin said angrily. "You were responsible for it, and you..." He sighed. "Oh, be off with you," he said, shooing them away. "I shall be glad to spend an evening without your adolescent voices dinning in my ears."
"Should we go to Zack's room?"
"Immediately, if you please. And Beatrice, you are not to discuss the event that occurred in the kitchen, understood?"
Beatrice nodded uncertainly. "Of course, Mr. Taliesin," she said. "But why? It seemed harmless enough."
The old man did not answer for a moment. "Because you have a gift," he said at last. "And there are those in the world who will hate you for it."
"The dark magicians," Beatrice breathed. "Yes, I've felt them. Here, in this place." Slowly she walked toward the fireplace and stood facing it. When she spoke again her voice was hoarse and cracked, the voice of an old woman. "One of our own shall kill the gods."
"Bea!" Arthur shouted, but she was already oblivious to his presence.
As soon as the Innocent saw the baby her heart was filled with fear, for she saw the mark of the gods upon its face.
It was a boy, the son of the young bard and the druid priestess who had been selected to represent the Earth goddess during the festival of Beltane. It was a handsome child, with chestnut-colored hair and long fingers. The women who attended his mother cooed with delight as the infant wailed for nourishment. As they laid him upon his mother's breast, the Innocent saw that the child's aura was black, as dark as the void of space between the stars. The void was in his eyes, too, ancient eyes filled with misery. This, she knew, was the embodiment of the gods themselves who knew it was their time to die, and would commit the act upon themselves through this child.
And what of us, she thought. Must we die, too, your priests and priestesses to whom you have given the gifts of Sight and prophecy? Will all our knowledge be lost?
But it had not been a question, not really, and she did not wait for an answer because she knew it already. The gods would die, and they would take her and all her kind with them, and the time of magic would pass from the world.
"Bea!" The boy grabbed her shoulders and shook her gently. "Bea, it's Arthur!"
She blinked, startled. "No, I won't talk about the love bombs. I don't know how it happened, anyway." She looked from Arthur to Taliesin. "I had another lapse, didn't I?" she asked quietly.
Taliesin nodded.
"They're happening more often. It's as if I'm losing hold of who I am. Sometimes I think I may disappear altogether." She tried to smile, but her fear was evident. "I wish I knew what to do."
"Go have some ice cream," the old man said gently.
As soon as they were gone, Taliesin took the cup out of the flowerpot and held it up to the light.
It was perfect, he thought. The shape, the color, even the weight. Only its aura was missing. Only its magic. He’d known immediately that it was a fake. And he had sensed the presence of danger, just as Beatrice had.
From the fireplace.
He walked over to it and knelt, his hands extended over the cold grate. He shivered. There was something wrong here, something that the girl had noticed from the beginning.
He wished he had listened to her then. He had believed, like Zack, that Beatrice’s extraordinary sensitivity was perceiving the atmosphere of a disbanded witches' coven. But what he felt now went far beyond witches. On the far side of this wall was a force so unnatural that it terrified him.
Still on his knees, the old man backed away. He was sweating. Hurry, Hal, he pleaded.
At least the children were gone. He had a little time. The question was, did he possess enough magic to fight whatever was behind the wall?
He breathed deeply, filling himself with energy, becoming still. First the stillness, he told himself. First...
Too late, old man, a voice said inside his mind as the brickwork of the fireplace burst apart and Taliesin felt the sting of a needle shooting into his heart.
Chapter Twenty-One
Kate sat in a bathtub filled with lilac-scented bubbles. She had brought a book to read—her eyeglasses were perched on the end of her nose—but she couldn't concentrate on the words. All she could think about was the old man's chest. His clothes had been covered with blood, yet there hadn't been a mark on his skin.
Just like her father.
And just like her father, the old man had possessed a cup. She had seen it with her own eyes before the Englishman hid it.
A battered thing without a handle, made of a greenish metal. You know, what it looked like more than anything else was a nut dish. That was how her father had described it.
A nut dish. It was no wonder that no one in the government believed William Marshall.
He'd started raving about the nut dish in the ambulance on the way to the hospital in Tangier, and had never stopped. During his four-day debriefing, he had insisted that he had been healed by a nut dish, even after a psychiatrist explained to the former President that he'd probably never been shot at all, that he had doubtless been sprayed by blood from a bystander and had collapsed from a minor heart attack brought on by shock.
He had been so adamant about the miraculous nut dish that the State Department had been left with no choice but to force Marshall to sign a statement promising never to reveal any aspect of the aborted peace mission to Morocco, so that his insanity would at least be kept from the press. Still, word got around in the Foreign Service, and "nut dish" jokes circulated around Washington's hipper dinner parties for some time, usually in reference to aging politicians who had lost their edge.
Nevertheless, there were some who did not discount Marshall's story.
Of the four Secret Service agents with him in Tangier, two had been reassigned to duties in remote outposts in Asia. The other two—those who had seen the bullets thud into the former President's chest—were granted early retirement with honors in exchange for a lifelong pledge of secrecy.
The physician who read the results of Marshall's MRI after the nut dish incident also departed government service following a severe reprimand by the hospital's board of directors for losing Marshall's test results and lab work. The images from the MRI, CAT scan, and blood analysis purported to belong to William Marshall were clearly from a much younger man, the board contended. Not only had these tests shown no damage to Marshall's heart, but a healthier heart than the statesman had possessed before he went to Morocco.
No legal action, however, was taken against the doctor, who returned to a thriving private practice in Georgetown. Because of Marshall's deteriorating mental condition, the tests were not repeated.
A Moroccan paramedic, who was a Christian, told his priest that he had heard what he had thought to be the American President's last words: "The cup..." The priest had been moved to tears by Marshall's devotion to God.
"This man of peace believed that in the cup of communion was a miracle, a miracle that would save his life," Father Idris said during his homily that Sunday in Marrakesh. "And in a way, it did."
A couple in the congregation exchanged glances. They had just returned from England, where they had watched a television program titled "Camelot: Legend or History?" on which a sixteen-year-old farm boy nam
ed Tom Rodgers had related a vision he'd had— "plain as the nose on me face"—of knights in armor riding out of a castle that grew out of the mist to attend a wizard and a young boy holding a magnificent sword.
"There was a great battle took place, with the knights and them knocking one another about, all over a cup. It was a special cup what heals wounds, and the wizard wanted the boy to have it. But the boy didn't want no part of it, so he didn't, and he made the wizard get rid of it. So in the end it was the wizard called over a great flock of birds, he did, and they carried off the cup for parts unknown."
A well known British psychic, who had also watched the program, dashed off a quick note to a colleague, an American astrologer who had made headlines several years before when it was discovered that the then-First Lady had consulted her about her travel plans.
The astrologer, whose numerous clients included the wives of several Washington dignitaries, related the psychic's message about the TV show to a woman who had attended the first dinner party at which the nut dish incident had been revealed. The woman's husband, who had also heard the remark, was a prominent cardiologist who had recently been told that the tests he had performed on William C. Marshall were inaccurate because they had shown no damage to the patient's heart.
He and his wife had not laughed at the nut dish incident.
Neither had the astrologer.
Nor the couple in the Catholic Church in Marrakesh. Nor the Moroccan paramedic.
Nor the British psychic, whose transatlantic note had read: I think the Holy Grail may have surfaced at last.
Another person had seen the British television program. As Emily Blessing sat in her small London apartment, her leg and hand encased in plaster casts, she watched an English country boy tell the world about a boy he had seen three years ago in a meadow. A boy with a magic cup.
Had Arthur been in the hotel in Tangier? she asked herself for the millionth time. Had Arthur died then? Had Hal?
Six people. Only six people between herself and everything that made life worth living.
She switched off the television and sat motionless in the darkness.
"Six people," she whispered.
"It's the Grail, sir. You touched the Holy Grail."
Kate had suffered a moment of intense embarrassment when Zack uttered these words. Her father had been President of the United States. He was a nominal Episcopalian, and a practicing pragmatist. He did not believe in ghosts, angels, or the Easter bunny, and certainly not in the Holy Grail.
"I'm telling you the truth," Zack went on earnestly. "There's a lot of talk about it these days. People have—"
"Zack," Kate interrupted with a warning glance. "I think Dad's pretty busy just now."
"You think that nut dish was the Holy Grail?" Marshall asked, tight-lipped. "As in Jesus Christ and King Arthur?"
Kate sighed. She should never have let Zack come with her. But he had been there when the evening news showed footage of Marshall stumbling backward into the stall, his shirt covered with blood. He had been there during the subsequent frantic telephone calls between Kate, her mother, and the State Department, which seemed not to want to give out any information other than the fact that Marshall was still alive. Zack had been there when Kate finally got word that her father was being flown to Walter Reed Hospital, and drove her there from New York in a rented car so that she would not have to face the trip alone.
Zack had always been there for her, ever since they both started at Columbia as freshmen, and that was why she let him come with her to her parents' house in Pennsylvania for her father's birthday celebration.
She had known that Zack would not make a terrific impression on her father. He was not the type of person William Marshall referred to as "good stock." That accolade was reserved for Poli-Sci majors from wealthy families with a long history of public service. Zack Diamond, a barber's son who had entered Columbia on scholarship at the age of twenty-four to become an English teacher, definitely would not qualify. His only saving grace, which Kate had made a point of telling her mother when she called to say she was coming, was that he had no romantic ties to Kate. She did not mention that Zack would have married her in a moment if she ever gave him any encouragement, which she did not.
Even so, she hadn't expected Zack to be quite so goofy. His prattlings about peace and love and the universal life force of the cosmos were fine over a joint and a bottle of wine, but she never thought he would bring up his New Age hippie wacko ideas here, in her parents' two-hundred-year-old house.
"Really, Zack," she said, "maybe we should—"
"Will you please be quiet!" her father demanded. "I want to know what the man thinks."
"You do?" The question had been involuntary. It just slipped out of her.
"Yes, I do," Marshall growled. "Every doctor, psychiatrist, military man, and politician I've talked to thinks I'm a lunatic. Maybe it's time I talked to a lunatic."
"Dad!"
Zack laughed. "Sounds like good reasoning to me."
"You believe me, do you?"
"That a cup mysteriously healed a gunshot wound? Yes, sir, I believe you."
"Why?"
"Because I believe in miracles," Zack said gently. "That's the main reason. The secondary reason is because there have been a lot of rumors lately about a magic cup."
"The Holy Grail."
"That's what they say. There's supposed to be a whole cult of people in the Middle East somewhere who claim to have seen it. And there's a kid in England who swears he saw a flock of birds carry it away." He shrugged. "Who knows? Maybe they dropped it on you."
"It would take a hell of a bird to fly from England to Morocco," Marshall said.
At that point Kate's mother had called them in for dinner and, to Kate's relief, the discussion about the nut dish had ended.
She hadn't known that in less than two weeks she would see a cup bring a dead man back to life.
She reached behind her in the bathtub and pulled out a dented metallic object with a greenish cast.
This cup.
She had taken it from the loaner apartment after its three occupants had gone to the dining room. Zack's key had fit the door perfectly.
It resembled a nut dish. It throbbed in her hands.
The Holy Grail, she thought, holding it up to the light.
Of course it wasn't the Grail. It wasn't possible.
Was it?
Kate lowered the cup into the water and sank further into the tub.
Zack would believe it. Of course. Zack believed everything. He was the best friend Kate ever had, but he was a fool. He had always believed in magic. "Good magic," he called it, as opposed to Black Magic.
As if Zack would know the difference.
"You can be in the middle of good magic and not even know it's happening," he told her after they'd gone to see Pulp Fiction at the big Loew's on Times Square. Kate had liked the movie. She found it funny, raunchy, and upbeat, despite its violence. Zack, however, had regarded the film as a milestone in his spiritual growth. He had been transported into a state of bliss.
"Don't you get it?" he shouted on the street, waving his arms wildly. "They were all agents of God, every one of them! Ordinary people—crummy people, even— who went in and out of each other's lives thinking they were following their own agendas. But what they were really doing was magic stuff, avenging, destroying, redeeming one another! It was like they were angels, even though they looked like street people. I think we're all like that, at least a little bit."
"Angels," Kate said.
"Agents of God."
An agent of God, Kate thought, wrapping a towel around her. Maybe that's what I am.
She heard the doorbell. "Go away!" she shouted out the bathroom.
"It's Zack. Feel like going for ice cream?"
"I'm in the tub."
"I can wait," Zack offered.
"No, thanks. I'm tired."
"Man, you should have stuck around. We were shooting love bombs—"
"I told you I was tired, Zack. Can you tell me about it tomorrow?"
"Sure, Kate. Hope I didn't disturb you. There was like this mental juice—''
"Tomorrow, okay?"
"Hey, no problem."
Why did he have to be such an ass?
"Oh, by the way, Aubrey called. He wants you to get back to him. Right away, he said." There was no answer. "Did you hear me, Kate?"
The towel had dropped to the floor. Kate stood naked, her fists clenched at her sides, trying to stem the flow of her tears.
"Kate?"
"Yeah. Okay, thanks," she called out finally.
"It wouldn't hurt if you played a little hard to get," he offered.
A little mirthless puff of air escaped from Kate's lips. Then she crumpled into a heap, sobbing.
No, she was not an agent of God.
She belonged to Aubrey Katsuleris, and he was the devil.
Chapter Twenty-Two
Aubrey. Dark, mysterious, handsome, fascinating, evil...
Evil, yes. She was sure of that now. Now that there was no way out.
Kate had met him in a course called Medieval Rites and Rituals—Columbia's highbrow offering to students who had been weaned on self-help books and consciousness expansion. Zack had talked her into taking it with him.
A European of indeterminate origin, Aubrey had apparently decided to take the course as a lark while spending a few months in New York. He already knew a great deal about rites and rituals, and his presence in the class transformed it from a dry series of lectures and textbook reading into something resembling a ritual itself.
Aubrey always wore black, and before the first month was out, everyone in the class took to dressing in black. He liked classical music, and soon the weekly Baroque Society concerts, which had never before been well attended, were playing to SRO audiences made up of students from the Medieval Rites and Rituals class.
It was not as if Aubrey organized these outings, or even persuaded anyone to follow his example. On the contrary, he rarely spoke about anything aside from the subject matter of the class. But people flocked around him nevertheless. They were drawn toward him like dust to a powerful electric current. Everyone wanted to be with him, to be like him, to follow him. Within a few weeks, even the professor relinquished his position of leadership in the class in deference to the brilliant young man who seemed to understand the very depths of ancient magic.
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