Orion and King Arthur

by Ben Bova

  Raising one hand, Gotha said, “Tonight we feast. Then I will send my reply to your High King.”

  I wanted to heave a sigh of relief, but I knew that Gotha and his fighting men would take that as a sign of weakness, so I said merely, “You are as wise as you are brave, my lord.”

  4

  As dusk fell across the village, Gotha’s hall filled with warriors. Scurrying servants had set up long tables and benches for feasting. A huge fire blazed in a stone-lined pit at the far end of the hall, its smoke rising through a hole in the roof, much as the fire pit of Priam’s palace in ancient Troy.

  Gotha sat at the head of the hall, in the center of the longest table, sloshing beer out of a golden cup that was decorated with elaborate Celtic designs. Spoils of battle, I realized. The chair to Gotha’s right was empty; I wondered why. Had someone failed to show up? Was Gotha waiting for an important guest?

  I was led by a servant to a place on the bench at one end of the wooden table. The assembled warriors were dressed in fine tunics and grasped cups and mugs in their strong hands. Servants kept pouring beer for them, while a pair of what looked to me like elks turned slowly on the roasting spit over the cook fire.

  Food was piled upon the tables in abundance, everything from pigeons to savory melons, but the warriors paid hardly any attention. They were too busy swilling beer, and getting more uproarious by the moment. I noticed that none of them bore weapons, except for the half-dozen men standing directly behind Gotha’s throne. Guards of honor, I thought.

  Behind them, in the shadows by the wall, stood the staves with the mounted heads of those three warriors. A reminder, I thought, from Gotha to his men: losers don’t live long in this tribe.

  The men were getting rowdy, sloshing beer on one another and roaring with laughter. I was splashed more than once, but I stayed at my place on the bench, trying to behave as a messenger from the High King rather than one of these drunken Saxon louts.

  At length, though, Gotha raised one hand and the hall quickly fell silent. All the warriors sitting on the long benches looked expectantly toward their chief.

  Gotha peered down the length of the table and said in a loud, commanding voice, “Orion! Messenger from the High King. What are you doing down there? Come, sit here beside me.” And he indicated the empty chair next to his own.

  I rose slowly, made a polite little bow, and replied, “Thank you, my lord. You are most gracious.”

  The hall was absolutely silent as I made my way along the table to the chair beside Gotha’s. I could feel the eyes of more than a hundred flaxen-haired warriors watching me.

  I arrived at the chair and made another little bow to Gotha. “With your permission, my lord.”

  “Of course, of course,” he said, with a toothy smile. “Sit down here, as befits a messenger from the High King.”

  The instant I sat, his six guards grasped my arms and pinned me to the chair. Gotha slipped a long knife from beside his plate and rose to his feet as I struggled uselessly against the strong arms holding me down.

  “The reply I send to your High King,” Gotha said, loudly enough for everyone in the hall to hear him, “will be your head!”

  The Saxon warriors cheered lustily and Gotha came at me with the knife. Someone grabbed me by the hair and yanked my head back. He was going to kill me, and this time Aten had no intention of bring me back from death. I could hear the mocking laughter of the Golden One in my mind.

  Gotha pressed the sharp edge of the knife against my throat. I felt it cutting into my flesh and knew I had to translate myself out of this placetime—or die the final death.

  Closing my eyes as the Saxon’s blade cut deeper into me, I willed myself to the eternal city of the Creators. I had translated myself through spacetime to that nexus before, I would do it again.

  I could hear Gotha’s sadistic laughter, feel his knife slicing my throat. Then suddenly all sensation ended. I was suspended in the continuum, frozen in cryogenic cold and utter darkness.

  I had no eyes with which to see. I had no body to feel pain or joy or love. There was nothing except my consciousness, the central awareness of my own being.

  Vainly I tried to translate myself through the continuum to the Creators’ city of monuments. I could not reach it, and I realized that Aten was blocking me, keeping me away from it.

  Was this the final death? An eternity of nothingness? Oblivion?

  And then, like a faint tendril of hope, I felt the warm touch of Anya’s presence. But it was weak, delicate as a butterfly’s fragile wings, feeble as the last whisper of a dying man.

  “I can’t help you, my love,” she said to me in my mind, her voice filled with despair. “There’s nothing I can do to save you.”

  Interlude

  I felt warm summer sunshine on my face. Opening my eyes, I saw that I was sitting on a grassy lawn in a wooden framed slingback chair, wearing a sky-blue uniform of cotton twill. Several other men in similar uniforms were sitting in a motley set of chairs scattered across the grass.

  The sun was just above the distant wooded hills, shining in my face. Lifting a hand to shade my eyes, I saw a half-dozen airplanes parked on the grass, sharp nosed, looking vaguely like sharks. Hurricanes, I somehow knew.

  A phone rang. Turning in my chair, I saw that the ringing was coming from a small wooden building, little more than a shack.

  A red-faced man stuck his head out the shack’s only window and bellowed, “‘A’ flight! Scramble!”

  The men sitting around me leaped to their feet and sprinted toward the fighter planes. As I struggled out of the sling-chair, a broad-shouldered man with gold-flecked brown eyes and a short brown beard grabbed my arm and helped me to my feet.

  “Come along, Irishman,” he snapped. “Up and at ’em!”

  Arthur? I wondered. Here, in this placetime? But he looked older, harder, grimmer.

  Hardly knowing what I was doing, I raced alongside him toward the planes. He veered off and I puffed to a halt alongside one of the Hurricanes. I saw a pair of small black crosses painted beneath the rim of the cockpit. Then my eyes went wide as I saw the name painted in flowing script across the nose: Athena.

  A pair of ground crew men were standing on the plane’s wings by the open cockpit, beckoning to me. Engines were coughing to life all around me. Athena, I thought, as I sprinted to the fighter. Even though Anya could do nothing to help me escape the final death in Gotha’s timbered hall, my plane was dedicated to her.

  By instinct I clambered up onto the wing and squeezed into the fighter’s cramped cockpit. I recognized a parachute pack on the seat. As I plumped down on it, one of the crewmen flipped its straps over my shoulders while I automatically pulled up the thigh straps and clicked them into place.

  “Christ, Irish, you’re goin’ t’be the last one out,” the second crewman yelled in my ear as he handed me a soft fabric helmet.

  “Better late than never,” I muttered. Like an automaton I whipped through the preflight checklist and started the plane’s engine. It was called a Merlin, which made me smile. It came to life with an explosive roar and a burst of gray smoke from its exhaust manifolds.

  In less than a minute I was bouncing along the grassy field, the earphones in my helmet crackling with voices and frantic instructions. Most of the flight was already in the air; I saw the plane ahead of me leave the ground and pull up its wheels.

  While I pushed the throttle forward and my Hurricane lifted into the blue summer sky, I realized I was in England in the summer of A.D. 1940, by the Christian calendar. Britain was at war against Nazi Germany, facing invasion once again. I was known in this time and place as John O’Ryan, a volunteer from the Irish Free State flying with RAF Fighter Command in the Battle of Britain.

  Arthur’s Britain was nearly fifteen centuries distant, but I had escaped the final death that Aten had planned for me. Without Anya’s help. Without the aid of any of the Creators. I had translated myself across the worldlines on my own!

  Onc
e I had cranked up the plane’s landing gear and fastened my oxygen mask over my face I concentrated on getting into my assigned position: tail-end Charlie on a vee of three planes. Our flight of nine Hurricanes flew in a vee of vees. I somehow knew that the pilots called the three-plane formations “vics.”

  “Dorniers at angels twenty-two,” I heard the flight controller’s calm female voice in my earphones, “heading for Hornchurch.”

  The formation of Hurricanes angled off to the right, leaving me struggling to catch up with them.

  “Close up, you bloody Irishman! You’ll be a sitting duck for the bastards!” Arthur’s voice, harsh and demanding.

  I felt the invisible hand of gravity pushing me down into my seat as I edged the throttle higher and tried to catch up with the rest of my flight.

  “I see them! Twelve—no, fourteen flying pencils, two o’clock high.”

  The Dornier bombers were slim as spears, painted glossy black with German crosses in white on their sides and the crooked swastika against a blood-red stripe on their tails.

  “Climb above them.”

  “Watch out for their fighters.”

  “Looks clear so far.”

  “Keep a sharp eye. They’re up there someplace, waiting for us.”

  Our flight curved up and above the Dorniers, which were flying in a long, shallow dive that made their speed almost as high as our own. But almost wasn’t good enough.

  “Tally-ho!” came Arthur’s voice as he peeled off and dove at the bombers.

  My job, as tail-end Charlie, was to watch out for enemy fighters and protect the two other men in my vic. I twisted around in the narrow cockpit, trying to look in all directions at once. It was difficult to see behind me, almost impossible. The sun was beaming brightly back there, and—

  A pair of sleek deadly Messerschmitts swooped out of the sun’s glare, guns twinkling as they roared past me.

  “Break left!” I screamed into the microphone built into my oxygen mask. But it was already too late. One of the Hurricanes was smoking badly, slipping off into a spiraling death dive. The other snapped into a left turn and I tried desperately to stay with him.

  The Messerschmitts were faster than our Hurricanes and could turn more tightly. Another pair of them perched on my tail; heavy caliber machine gun bullets started to rip chunks out of my wings, my fuselage. I could feel slugs slamming into the armor plate behind my seat.

  “Where’re the bloody Spits?” Arthur’s voice yelled in my earphones. Fighter Command’s top squadrons were equipped with Spitfires, planes that could equal the best fighters the Germans had, faster and more maneuverable than our Hurricanes.

  My shot-up plane was buffeting badly and losing altitude; pieces of the wings’ fabric covering were tearing off. I was trying to make myself as small as possible, hunching behind the seat’s protective armor plate. The Messerschmitts roared past me, going after Arthur, my flight leader.

  There was nothing I could do to help him; I could barely keep my crate in the air. But then a pair of Dorniers slid right in front of me. They almost seemed to be gliding, compared to the swooping charge of the Messerschmitts.

  I saw the rear gun on the nearer bomber twinkling; the gunner was firing at me. I rolled my battered Hurricane to the right as I came up on him. The Dornier’s fuselage filled my gunsight ring, I was so close.

  I pressed my thumb on the red firing button on my control yoke. The Hurricane seemed to stop in midair as the eight machine guns in my wings hammered away.

  At first nothing seemed to happen, but then the Dornier abruptly slid off to the left, angled down sharply, and dove steeply toward the ground. Its left wing crumpled and folded back.

  And just that abruptly I was alone in the air, flying inverted, hanging by the shoulder straps of my seat harness. I straightened out, realizing I had lost a lot of altitude. Looking up, I saw swirling contrails tracing fine white arcs against the blue summer sky. My plane was buffeting badly and its engine was stuttering, coughing.

  I knew I couldn’t be far from my home field, but all I could see below me were the checkered green fields of East Anglia sliding past. Dimly I recalled that the land below me was the shire of Essex, a corruption of the term East Saxons, just as neighboring Sussex had once been the territory of the South Saxons.

  There were trees down there. Lots of big, ancient trees lifting their leafy arms as if they wanted to pull me down. My Hurricane was wobbling, sinking fast. I barely cleared a row of oaks and there before my happily surprised eyes was our airfield. It was nothing more than a grassy meadow with a few unserviceable planes parked at the far end and a cluster of small wooden buildings near another row of trees, but it looked beautiful to me.

  Someone fired a white flare, the warning that my landing gear was not deployed. I pumped hard on the lever and hoped that the wheels came down and locked in place. No more flares; the wheels must be down.

  I worried that the faltering engine might quit altogether before I touched down, so I came straight in, no circling of the field, no downwind leg. The Hurricane bounced once on the grass; when it touched down again the left wheel collapsed and I was thrown into a grinding, lurching slide across the field. It sounded like a junkyard being dragged across a pasture. One of the propeller’s blades snapped off and banged into my windscreen, cracking the bulletproof glass.

  The Hurricane finally scraped to a stop, resting on its badly twisted left wing. I tugged frantically at the canopy. It refused to slide back, its frame bent by that errant propeller blade. I smelled aviation fuel and knew that the plane could burst into flames at any instant.

  With all the strength in me I grabbed the canopy latch with both my gloved hands and, planting both booted feet on the shattered control panel, pulled as hard as I could. The canopy yielded at last and slid back. I struggled out of the cockpit and jumped to the ground.

  A dozen ground crew men were running toward me.

  “Get down, you idiots!” I screamed at them. “She’s going to blow up!”

  They hit the ground and I slammed down in their midst, twisting around to look back at my crashed Hurricane. For eternally long moments we lay there on our bellies, waiting for the Hurricane to burst into flames. Nothing happened. The plane simply lay there, battered and ravaged with bullet holes, the hot metal of its engine ticking slowly.

  No explosion. No fire. The ground crew men began to chuckle and whisper to one another.

  “Y’think it’s all right to get up now, sir?” asked one of them, smirking at me.

  I rose slowly to my feet, feeling decidedly embarrassed.

  But that was nothing compared to the scorn that Arthur heaped on me once he landed and called me into his spare little office in the wooden frame building that housed our squadron headquarters.

  “You stupid Irish oaf,” he snarled. “You got Collingswood killed and damned near me along with him!”

  His gold-flecked eyes were blazing with anger—and something else, I realized. It wasn’t fear. I realized that Arthur was brimming with cold, unreasoning hatred. This war in the air was making him an old, hate-filled man, despite his youthful years.

  “Sir,” I began, “they came out of the sun—”

  “Of course they came out of the sun! How many times have we tried to drill it into you: ‘Beware the Hun in the sun!’ Your job was to watch out for them and give us warning—in time to keep our necks from being broken!”

  He went on for what seemed like an hour, blaming me for the death of his wingman, for all the deaths our group had suffered, for the war and all the evils that it had brought to Britain’s shores.

  “At least I got a Dornier,” I muttered.

  “And cracked up your own ship,” he snapped.

  I stood there seething. He sat behind his wooden desk, the marks of his oxygen mask creasing his cheeks, his brown beard frayed, his hair disheveled. He looked up at me with utter weariness, and a disdain that was little short of contempt.

  “Get out of here,” he sai
d at last. “Get out of my sight.”

  I saluted halfheartedly, turned, and left him to himself. I closed his office door very softly.

  The orderly sitting at the small desk just outside the door looked up at me, a glum expression on his round, jowly face. He was a sergeant who had served in the First World War, twenty-some years earlier.

  “Don’t take it too hard, O’Ryan,” he said to me, softly, as if afraid the commander would hear him through the closed door. “Old Artie’s got a lot of pressure on his shoulders, y’know.”

  I nodded, too angry to speak, afraid I’d say something I’d regret.

  “Collingswood’s hit him pretty hard,” he went on. “They were schoolmates, y’know.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “You’re not the only one he’s screamed at,” the orderly said, with a sad, patient look. “He’s done so much yellin’ and squallin’ these days that th’ boys are startin’ to call him King Arthur.”

  “King Arthur was a better man than that,” I said, and I walked out of the wooden shack, into the afternoon sunshine.

  The rest of the pilots were sitting in the chairs scattered across the grass, some dozing, some trying to read magazines, some just staring blankly at infinity, at an endless succession of flying, fighting, killing, dying.

  I found the sling-chair and lowered myself into it.

  “Tough morning,” said the young pilot sitting in a straight-backed wooden chair next to me.

  “Yes,” I said wearily.

  “I hear you got a Jerry.”

  “One of the Dorniers.”

  “Good for you.”

  “Think they’ll be back today?”

  “Probably. Better get some rest while you can.” His young face eased into an old man’s weary smile. “Before Jerry comes over for his matinee appearance.”

  I smiled back at him and closed my eyes. In an instant I was asleep. But it was not sleep. I wanted to return to Arthur, when he was High King of all the Britons. I had no intention of remaining separated from him.

  I had fled Gotha’s death trap, but now I had to return to Arthur. Aten still wanted him killed. I still vowed to protect him.