Tales of the Once and Future King

by Anthony Marchetta

  “What is that supposed to mean?” asked Maddie suspiciously. “And what do you mean by once more? This has happened before?”

  “Yes, it has. The Pendragon is known to appear in many different times and places, in many different forms. Some are... more mundane than others.”

  CHAPTER 12

  Raising King Arthur, by Mandy Nachampassack-Maloney

  “Carmina, Carmina, easy on the follow through with your supporting hand. You want to take Orland’s head off?” my stepfather yelled at me for the seventh time that day.

  “Can I take a lemonade break, please?” I asked, no longer trying to keep the whine I knew he hated out of my voice.

  He blew out some air, his lips pulled in a thin, straight line. He followed that with a deep breath. He had taught me this calming technique early in my training. While he had been aiming jabs at my padded waist I had been instructed to breathe deeply in and out, to “center myself with the blows.” I had thought he was insane. His dumb advice actually worked though. It usually did, against my preferences.

  “Show me shield formation successfully one time and we’ll be done for the evening,” he said, his voice mild, trying to bargain with me.

  I rolled my eyes. I should have been eating ice cream, finishing my homework, or riding my bike up and down the street, trying to put both feet on the handlebars. But no. I wasn’t. I was stuck in my suburban back yard, a wooden practice sword in my hand, a pillow rope tied around my waist, a cardboard shield strapped to my arm via a gorilla-glued leather belt. This was how I spent at least an hour every day after school.

  Because this is what you do when your stepfather is King Arthur. Or, I should say, this is what you do when your stepfather is Artie Dragoon, the weirdly backward and superstitious ex-Royal who believes that teaching my little half brother and me how to behave like valiant Knights is his sole mission since Camelot fell.

  “Super,” I huffed out at him between clenched teeth. I was covered in a layer of sweat, irritated I wasn’t able to secrete my cellphone in my pocket, and certain that neither Gawain or Galahad forced their families to train for a medieval war that would never come. I had an hour until soccer practice, and I was already bone tired. Not that I could say that to him. Oh no. The times I had he’d taken a knee before me and said in his serious voice, “Tired you may be, but the bravest of knights are the ones that find an inner strength when all others are depleted.” When I responded with, “Write that on a tee shirt and sell it to nobody,” Mom had grounded me for a week.

  I had learned to (mostly) keep my complaints to myself. Orland though, my six year old brother, thought all this training was right up there with Oreo shakes and the Hulk movie. Orland’s middle name is also Merlin. Poor kid. Orland Merlin Dragoon. Just rolls right off the tongue.

  I bent down, nearly crouching, so that Orland and I could lock shields and slowly approach Artie as if he were the enemy. I hefted my shield high, face level, while Orland lined his up right under mine, protecting us from navel to knee. Once we were close enough to Artie he began to bang against the shields with his wooden sword, checking the strength of our stance.

  “Now how would you attack from this position?” Artie asked, his voice dramatically booming.

  “Ha!” Orland yelled, quickly jabbing to his left while I mirrored him on the right. In a second we were back in our protective stance and, if Artie hadn’t been so quick on his feet, he would have been skewered between our two blades. Instead he used his training sword to parry Orland and his shield to knock me back.

  “Not bad,” Artie said quietly, “but next time move faster. Never stay exposed for longer than absolutely necessary.”

  Orland moved forward to have his dad ruffle his hair. I stalked off toward the house. I had just enough time to have that lemonade, stuff some chips in my face, and get ready for practice. In essence, just enough time to get both feet firmly in the real world.

  Fast forward to Mom and me in the minivan, my cleats untied, her weird retro music playing softly from the speakers. Did people really jam to this once? I can’t imagine standing at a concert with friends and looking at each other screaming, “This is crazy!!!” to Brandi’s The Boy is Mine.

  “Mom, seriously, you’ve got to do something about him. This training… I’m getting too old for it,” I said, using this rare alone time to broach the topic.

  “He just wants you to be a good person,” Mom said as she bopped along to her music.

  “A good person who can kill people with historical weapons?” I asked, rolling my eyes. Seriously!

  “A person that can defend herself if necessary. A good person that could defend other people if you had to. More than that—the kind of woman who can be strong and humble and capable all at the same time,” Mom said as she took a right into the school’s parking lot.

  “Mom, you’re kind of a hippie,” I said, slinging my backpack over my shoulder and scooping my water bottle into the side pocket.

  “Not a hippie! I’m not old enough to be a hippie! I prefer web-generation feminist!”

  “Okay, Mom, okay,” I said.

  I saw Jenny and Darcy already on the field, helping to set up the orange cones that Coach used for every imaginable drill. I threw my stuff onto the sideline and went to join them.

  “Carmina!” Jenny greeted me as if we hadn’t had most of our classes together during the school day.

  “Jenny!” I shouted back, matching her enthusiasm.

  She put a load of cones in my arms and pointed at the goal.

  “Four cones about a foot apart. We’re practicing dribbling and shooting with our left feet tonight,” she said, blowing her bangs out of her face. They were too long, and in school she usually had them pinned back. At practice the clips would just fall out of her sweaty hair so she didn’t bother. I felt like she’d been growing those suckers out since kindergarten.

  I walked over to the goal, dropping cones as I went. Darcy, her own armload placed at half field, came up to me in her slothlike lope. It was hard to believe that Darcy could ever do anything fast. Her movements were so mellow, and even her voice was hesitant. Not that she was shy or complacent. She just never seemed to be rushed. That was until game time. She could become the fastest player on the field by turning on the jets. Coach had started calling her ‘Mazarati’ last year and it had stuck. Half of our small town middle school referred to her as ‘Maz’. On every other day but game day, this was an ironic nickname. We told her she was more like Maz Kanata from Star Wars. Usually at that point I got punched in the arm.

  “Jenny and I thought the three of us should have a sleepover this weekend. We could stream a season of Pretty Little Liars and freak ourselves out,” she said, even her smile coming slowly to the surface.

  “Cool, I’ll ask Mom. Your house or Jenny’s?” I asked, knowing Mom would want every little detail.

  “How ‘bout yours?” she said coolly, too coolly. She knew I never had people over to my house.

  It hadn’t always been like this. Before, Jenny and Darcy and nearly all the kids in my class had been over to my house at one time or another. I had birthday parties under plastic screen tents, sleepovers where some friends and I camped out on the trampoline. I used to love when our neighbors would ride their bikes or skateboards over to the house and wait for the ice cream truck to come around on Saturday afternoon. We were all usually too cool to actually get ice cream until one person caved and the rest followed quickly after.

  Then Mom brought Artie home. She told me, her eyes all shiny like I’d never seen before, “This is a very special person.” I could tell right away that she liked him. I could tell, as well, that he liked her. He referred to her as, “a woman of great quality,” and “as queenly a specimen as there had ever been.”

  Mom told me the basics. Artie was divorced. His wife, a well-known governor, had ended the marriage under somewhat unfair conditions. Artie as well as all of his friends were booted from his homeland, never to see their longed-for c
ountry again. Even she, his ex, eventually was forced to leave as the country fell into chaos and ruin.

  Artie, Mom said, was a refugee. It was our responsibility to be kind to him. He didn’t know our ways. He was almost childlike.

  He had quirks. He was deathly terrified of the television and felt that it was almost certainly a vessel which trapped people’s souls. Sometimes, when I went into the basement to watch it and he happened to come downstairs he would suck in a sharp breath and say something along the lines of, “those poor sinners, to never know they’ve been caught by such witchery.”

  He spoke in another language habitually. Often, when startled, he would put out his hand in this odd gesture and exclaim, “Wend hence, monst’r! Protecteth mine own heart.” Mom said that this wasn’t actually a foreign tongue. I didn’t believe her.

  It took him a long, long time to come to terms with Mom and me wearing pants. I don’t just mean that in the broad sense, either. When we literally wore pants, like jeans, he would avert his eyes. “Good heavens!” he cried the first time he saw me in shorts, “her legs, her legs are naked! Clothe yourself!” “Mom!” I had shouted, somehow suddenly embarrassed that my knees were out. Mom had made that calming gesture with her hands, the one where she lays them flat and slowly motions downward. I’m pretty sure it’s a universal mom move. “It’s all right,” she had said like she was talking to a baby, “I’ll explain.”

  When he had finally come to accept that he now lived in a world where women did things except cook dinner and sing lullabies he had insisted on total equality and fairness. If I was equal than I’d have to be equally strong, equally brave, equally battle-tested. In other words, I’d have to take equal part in the craziness. Mom had loved this. I had not so much. Being treated like a simpering princess had its perks until he had tried to talk Mom out of letting me play sports. “Too rough for such a flower,” he had said. I didn’t like it when he vacillated to the other extreme, either. “Men open doors for girls,” I had tried to explain once when I stepped aside to let him get a door. “Do only men’s hands have the secret key to opening these portals?” he had asked. “Well, no,” I had stammered. “Then, if you are able, get the door please,” he had responded, never missing a beat. This is what it was like with him. Rules were rules. There were few, if any, exceptions. Truth was golden. Strength was paramount. Integrity was the only option.

  I couldn’t do anything to change Artie. All I could do was make sure my friends knew only the smallest bit about the weirdness that was my life at home.

  “No one’s coming to my house,” I said, giving Darcy my best exasperated look.

  “Your stepdad must be something else, Carmina. He kill someone or something?” she asked, teasing me.

  “Entire armies of people. He’s a real assassin,” I replied, my face deadpan.

  She smiled at me and my dramatics. “We’ll do it at my house, then,” she decided.

  “Deal,” I agreed as Coach called us in to start practice.

  So that Friday, after school and after clearing it with Mom earlier in the week, I was walking Orland home where I would drop off my book bag, pick up my overnight bag, and hightail it to Darcy’s house a few blocks away. We had plans to eat pizza, to watch movies that made us sit too close to each other whilst huddled around a bowl of popcorn and m&ms, and to play 1 on 1 soccer in the backyard while the third person acted as referee. Whenever it was me I’d call nitpicky fouls and the game would end with everyone on the “field” getting lifetime bans from the sport. I was looking forward to it.

  Orland was talking and talking as he hopped along beside me. He was always like this after school. It was like he went immediately from his school day into a full theatrical monologue about his school day. He had to relive every moment in words, telling me who said what, who reacted this way or that, and how the teacher responded. I knew the name of his every classmate, the color of their hair, and it felt like their favorite foods, colors, and the name of their pets. Orland had started talking early; I remember him jabbering when he was one and a half, and had never stopped.

  However, as we turned the corner into the alley that would take us to our street, he became silent. This, more than his yammering, caught my attention. I looked up from my sneakers, my hands still holding the straps of my backpack, and saw what had silenced Orland. Five bigger kids, high schoolers maybe, were formed in an uneven circle around another kid. I recognized him right away. It was Samuel, the Plinkinsons’ son.

  Samuel, even though he was a pretty big kid himself, wasn’t like other kids. He got distracted by sounds a lot and, while he loved the whistling of the train, the sound of a cellphone ringing or someone humming really bothered him. He was a flight risk at school since, when he heard those noises, he had a habit of running out of the building. He had an adult, I think she was called a para, with him all the time during the school day. She was nice. Her name was Katie. Anytime Katie saw one of us kids go out of our way to help Samuel, even if it was just lowering our voices when we were around him, she would sneak a few skittles into our hands.

  I think she did this because it broke her heart when people were mean to Samuel. And there were people who intentionally irritated him. Sometimes, while passing him in the hall, kids would start humming just quietly enough for an adult not to notice. In gym once Samuel had all the clothes taken from his locker. After he had his shirt off, when he noticed his street clothes were missing, someone else took his gym shirt. Samuel was forced to walk out into the main gym without his top to tell a teacher what happened. People laughed at his unexpected peep show. No one ever came forward to say who had taken Samuel’s things. After that, Samuel had been absent the rest of the week. Most of us felt really sorry for Samuel. Most of us.

  It looked like these kids belonged in that other group.

  One of them started humming off key. Samuel put his hands over his ears and tried to run away. Another kid pushed Samuel back into the middle of the circle. A different one stepped forward and held Samuel’s hands down, away from his head. Samuel started to cry and bent his head down to his shoulder, trying to cover up one of his ears. The humming continued.

  Orland didn’t know Samuel. Samuel was much older than Orland, and he didn’t have any siblings Orland’s age. All Orland saw was five kids who were picking on another. He saw Samuel was crying. That was enough.

  Orland ran up to the scene with a squeaky, “Hey! Stop it!” One of the kids reached over and pushed Orland onto his butt. The rest of his flunkies laughed.

  “C’mon Orland,” I said, holding out my hand for my little brother.

  He got up, brushed off his backside, and gave me a pleading look. His eyes were all round and shining, his lips formed in a perfectly straight, perfectly disapproving line. He drew his eyebrows together over the stubborn nose he’d gotten from his father, and I knew it was a lost cause. He was going to push the issue whether or not I was willing to step in to help, which immediately meant I was going to step in to help.

  He might have a super long, super weird name but nobody hurts my brother. And nobody should hurt Samuel. I sighed.

  I approached the group. “Samuel,” I said in my best let’s stay calm voice, “go home now. It’s okay.” Samuel took a step and one of kids tried to stop his exit. I sidestepped quickly into the circle, next to Samuel, and blocked the kid’s hand. When he moved his other hand to hit me I brought my leg up and kicked him in the chest, not hard but enough to push him back. Samuel took this opportunity to run, never looking back.

  “All right,” I said, “let’s go home now, Orland.” My little brother started to approach, but one of the kids, his face angry, grabbed me from behind.

  “What do you think you’re doing?” he asked, though his words were more colorful than that.

  “Who do you think you are?” the kid I had kicked asked, also in unrepeatable language.

  I wasn’t going to answer. I just wanted to get my brother home and get on with my life. We had interve
ned for Samuel. That was enough to make Artie happy. I reached up to take the kid’s hand off of my shirt when another one lunged for Orland. Orland danced away, quick on his feet, and grabbed a long stick from the ground. He held it up in defensive position. The group of kids laughed at him.

  “Let my sister go,” he said, trying to make his voice commanding.

  When the kid wrapped his hand tighter in my shirt, hurting me, my brother jumped forward, whacking the kid upside the head. I moved out of his grasp as he crumpled, and I knew that the whack with the stick stung more than hurt. All the other kids rushed my brother, and I followed them a step behind.

  I hadn’t felt real fear like that maybe ever before. He was an irritating pest, but he was my brother. I had held him when he was little, all wrapped up in the hospital’s striped blankets. I had fought with him for stealing my things and hiding them in his dresser drawers. I knew, whenever my iPod went missing, that was the first place I needed to look. When it stormed at night sometimes he still ran into my room and laid on the floor next to my bed. I was afraid these kids, so mean, would hurt him. He was brave and wonderful and mine. I needed to protect him.

  By hitting them in the back of the knees I took two of the attackers down. I rushed forward to where my brother was and grabbed the stick out of his hand. I stood in front of him as the other two boys came at us. I poked one hard between the ribs, enough to bruise, and took my eye off the other one. It was a mistake I paid for. He hit me soundly on the side of my head, his blow more of a haymaker than a legitimate punch. I fought the urge to flail wildly and instead breathed with and through the pain. I struck him with the stick, returning his haymaker with a home run swing. And the same time my brother crawled through my legs and pulled the kid’s legs out from under him. He fell back into his two friends who had pulled themselves up off the pavement and were getting ready to rejoin the fight.