Selections

by Theodore Sturgeon

  The mist was a sea which had turned the hills into a wind-borne archipelago. There had been sun up here for two hours, but the valleys were still submerged, asleep. Guinn breathed the good air and let his gaze reach and reach into the indeterminate area where mist and sky met. Eight days of this had brought a great peace and purpose to him, and for forty-eight hours now he had even forgotten that he was out of cigarettes.

  The goats were company and a modicum of trouble, anchoring him to a duty. The sky and the stars and the sun and rain were things he could drift in, but the goats never let him lose himself. It was a good place to be, a good way to be.

  And the books…

  “…There was a man spawned by the powers of darkness, born of a virgin, destined to be the antichrist. And the virgin Blaise told her confessor, who believed when others would not, and baptized the child, taking him from the control of his dark father…”

  “…asleep under a rock in Barenton in Brittany amongst the Hawthornes. And when the rain fails them, then do the peasants call to him, and strike the rock, and he calls down succor for the thirsty land.”

  (What was it he had heard about Barenton? Oh yes; when that Morgan girl had first come in: “Reckon it’ll rain tomorrow?” and she had said, not in Barenton.” And he had asked, “Where’s Barenton?” and she had said “Sorry. Classical reference. There’s a Hawthorne hush there.”)

  “…a precious stone is brought to earth by angels, and committed to the guardianship of a line of kings. It is self-acting and food-providing, and the light issuing from it extinguishes the light of candles. No man may die within eight days of beholding it, and the weeping maiden who bears it retains perennial youth…”

  (So if there’s a drought at Barenton, he’s no longer under the stone…)

  He went back into the cave to read some more. Lovely, lovely stuff, those legends. What had turned him from them?

  (The echoes in his mind, the jeering kids at school. The smug young substitute teacher who had labeled his desk after an absence “The Siege Perilous”—the old name given the empty place at a great table when a knight was out searching for the…for the…)

  Before noon he heard the scuttle of hooves and the sharp snort of the big billy called Bucko.

  He ran outside. Bucko was on the high bluff behind the cave. Guinn scrambled up the rocks. “Easy, Bucko,” he said. Bucko turned to him and back toward the forest, his great head high, his heavy horns curving down and back so that the tips all but touched his massive shoulders.

  Guinn stood up and peered. He could see nothing, hear nothing—wait; there was a sound. A distant groan, a complex sound.

  It was the whining of a car in low gear, traveling rough ground so that the driver’s foot bounced on the accelerator.

  The sound came closer. Guinn automatically reached for his armpit and cursed. His gun was in the cave with his clothes. He hadn’t had them on in four days; why bother? The goats didn’t mind…

  He turned to go down when a brilliant flash caught his eye—the sun on chrome. Then he knew that by the time he gained the cave again the car would be in the clearing. Strangers or friends—fine. He could put something on and come out to greet them. But if this visitor were no stranger, and no friend…

  He’d take his chances out here in the open.

  The car pulled into the clearing. Guinn knelt behind the gray peak of rock that jutted up like a chimney, and froze. From the ground he would look like another conformation of the rocks silhouetted against the bright sky.

  The car door opened. It was a Nash sedan. Garry was driving. He got out and walked straight away from the car for perhaps ten feet when, at a low growl from the car, he stopped. He stood still, trembling. Even from that distance Guinn could see the sweat standing out on his forehead.

  The rear door opened. Lynn got out. Her face was chalky, and her red-gold hair was vivid against it. She was staring straight ahead, and her eyes were as round as an auger-hole.

  Behind her came Mordi, crouching, watchful. He kept an automatic steadily on the girl. Guinn could hear his voice clearly as it grated, echoed among the rocks.

  “All right, cottonhead. Peek inside. If he’s there, call him out.”

  Garry stood still, and the torment on his face was indescribable.

  The automatic barked, and a slug whined twice in a crazy double ricochet. Garry whirled. Lynn snatched at her skirt, whimpering. She fingered a bullet hole in her skirt, low on her hip. “No!” she cried to Garry. “It didn’t touch me!”

  “The next one will,” promised Mordi faithfully. “Go on, cottonhead.”

  Garry stalked forward like a zombie. Mordi closed with Lynn, putting the muzzle of his gun against her back. They followed.

  Garry stooped and disappeared in the cave. He was out in a moment. “He isn’t there.”

  “He’s been there,” said Mordi.

  “No.”

  “You’re a liar.” He shoved Lynn so hard with the gun that she stumbled. Mordi stood back until she was on her feet again. Then he snapped, “Inside, Sister!” He pushed her roughly into the opening. “You,” he said to Garry, “stand right where you are, where I can see you. One step any way, and I start shooting.” He ducked into the cave.

  Guinn was suddenly conscious of pain in his hands, and he took them off the rock. One fingernail was broken and bleeding. He looked down. Garry was standing stiff and trembling in the clearing in front of the cave-mouth. Guinn thought of leaping down from the rock, landing on Garry, bearing him away from the cave-mouth, and then realized that it wasn’t Garry that Mordi would start shooting at.

  He looked around frantically.

  There was a movement in the wood.

  Someone, palefaced, slender, stood in the shadows. Clad in a mottled green cloak, she was all but invisible. When his eyes rested on her face, it relaxed visibly, as if she had been standing in an agony of tension, waiting for him to see her.

  “Morgan!”

  (The memory flitted through his tortured mind. ‘“What’s your first name?” “Morgan.” “All right, if you don’t want to tell me.”)

  “Morgan…” he breathed. “Morgan le Fay…”

  She nodded. She raised something in her hands—a three-foot clump of evergreen with yellow-green flowers, a cluster of white berries…

  (“…and when the missal shall be found upon the oak, then shall the Druid sever it with a golden knife. And sacrifice shall be made, the living blood feeding the roots of the tree…”)

  She stepped out into the clearing at the side of the outcropping, and with one clean sweep of her arm, she threw the mistletoe.

  Guinn stood, stretched, and caught it. Two fierce thoughts collided in his mind. The first was that this was no time for kissing games; he’d a damn sight rather had an automatic rifle than this shrubbery. The other sprang from the remembered passage in Percival’s old book: “…when the missal shall be found upon the oak, then shall the Druid…”

  Druid. The Druid.

  Percival had muttered, through his tattered tongue, something about the Druid. The one Guinn was to find. The one who had a golden knife, who had said “When you admit you know me, you shall seek me out.”

  His name! What in time was his name?

  The hawthorne bush…under a flat stone in Barenton, in Brittany, he sleeps…But there is a drought in Brittany. He sleeps no longer.

  Percival’s bloody wreck of a mouth floated before his eyes. “Am-ghozhiush…”

  “Amgro—Ambrozhi—Ambrosius. Merlin Ambrosius!”

  In his mind, he screamed it, over and over.

  Hollowly, Mordi’s voice boomed out below. “You lying bastard! He was here! His clothes, his gun—I’ll teach you to lie to me!”

  The automatic roared once and again. Coming from the cave, it sounded like artillery. Garry put his arms out, and on his face was an expression of delighted amazement that distorted itself into a tormented, rubbery grimace. “But, Lynn,” he said softly. He looked down at his chest, and
suddenly there were two bright splotches on his shirt. Chin on chest, he vomited blood on the splotches and toppled.

  A horrible garble of sound came from the cave—Mordi’s roar of laughter and Lynn’s terrible shriek. She bolted out into the open. Mordi was after, on her in two bounds. He twisted one arm behind her until she fell to her knees, then struck her on the back of the neck with his splinted forearm. She collapsed without a sound.

  Guinn uttered a low growl—precisely the sound made by a furious mastiff. He tensed and sprang—

  And he couldn’t move.

  He looked up.

  Standing beside him, with one gigantic arm extended and an expression of perfect calm on his dark face, stood the Druid—the man he had seen cut the mistletoe from the oak tree.

  “You called me,” he said. His tones rang, but somehow Guinn knew he couldn’t be heard by Mordi.

  “Let me go,” said Guinn between his teeth. “Damn you to hell, let me go!”

  The Druid was not touching him, but there was no question of the fact that the paralysis came from that extended arm. “Stand up,” said the giant.

  Slowly, Guinn stood up. “Let me go,” he said again. “Garry’s dying!”

  “He will die if you do not do as I say,” said the giant.

  Guinn gritted his teeth and, as if moving in a heavy fluid, turned and glanced down. Mordi was working over Garry, lifting him, dragging him. He could hear Garry’s bubbling breath and weak coughs. Peering down, Guinn saw him prop the dying man in a sitting position at the cave-mouth, facing in.

  “A lung job,” gasped Mordi. “You’ll go slowly, buster. Which is good. There’s something I’ll want you to watch.”

  He went out into the clearing and picked up Lynn’s limp form—both wrists in one hand, a twist under her so that she was draped over his right shoulder. He half carried, half dragged her into the cave. There was the sound of tearing cloth. “We’ll get this out of the way, hey, smarty?”

  Garry tried to speak, but blood choked him.

  Guinn whimpered in frustration as the invisible power drew at him, turned him around to face the great, calm, kindly face of the Druid.

  “Your Quest,” said Merlin Ambrosius. “There is nothing more important than your Quest. End your search and you shall have your heart’s desire.”

  The calm power flowed into him from that huge face. Suddenly, without effort, he understood. He understood it all, from all its beginnings to its incredible present to all possible endings. He put up his hands and closed his eyes.

  There was a flow from the Druid to his whole being, and an answering flow up through the rocks from the core of the earth itself. There was an emanation from everything that lived around him—the trees, the grass, the silent goats that stared up at him as once oxen stared up at a Star. Butterflies sank to the earth and were still, and all the birds were with him, silently striving.

  In his empty hands he felt a weight. He pulled his mind together and threw it all into a mighty effort; and his thumbs curled over something carven, and there was a high center of gravity there, so that he must balance what he held.

  Then he knew it was done, and that out of himself and the earth and all things which had ever lived, the Search he had made all his life (most of it unwittingly) was over. He and his substance had been the assembly point for the thing which had left its mysterious mark on all histories and all myths.

  He opened his eyes, and was not dazzled by its light, though it was far brighter than that of the high sun.

  It was a chalice, apparently filled with wine. It was infinitely graceful, and each curve and carven line had a basic meaning.

  There was a clinking and a rustle, and a weight on his shoulders, and a mighty, comforting burden around his waist. He found himself clad in golden chain-mail, marvelously made. It was covered by a long white silken surplice, and it blazed in the light of the unbelievable stone set in the cup.

  “Will you yield it to me?” asked Merlin. His great dark eyes were full of years and hunger and…and supplication. There was no power in him to take this cup.

  Guinn turned, looked down. Garry sagged against the rocks.

  But Guinn was free now. He leaped. He had one brief glimpse of Merlin’s pleading hands, and then he struck the ground jarringly.

  “Mordred!” he cried in a great voice. “Come out!”

  The answer was a shot that roared from the open throat of the cave. Guinn saw, to his amazement, a .45 slug appear in midair three inches away from the cup he still held, and, flattening, fall to the ground.

  Mordi had apparently fired before he looked, for he now came out of the cave. His clothes were disheveled and his dark face was flushed. “Well, well. If it isn’t the pure boy himself, all dressed up for Sunday. All right—give it here.”

  From the corner of his eye, Guinn saw Morgan moving forward, like a stalking cat.

  “Throw down that gun,” said Guinn.

  Mordi laughed. He raised the gun and sighted it carefully at Guinn’s forehead, and pulled the trigger.

  The gun bucked in his hand.

  He stared at it, unbelievingly. It was melting. It was falling together like a water-filled balloon with a fast leak. It flowed and dripped down and ran between his fingers. There was no heat. It simply melted.

  He looked up, saw Morgan. She had a strange, luminous smile on her face, and was looking up at the peak of the rock. Mordi looked up too.

  Merlin stood there, his arms folded. “Would you kill the bearer of the Grail?”

  Mordi cursed. He shook his fist at the giant and bellowed: “I, Mordred pen Dragon, of the true line of the Kings of pen Dragon, Guardians of the Grail, I am your master, Merlin Ambrosius, and you are committed to my service. I command you to deliver it to me!”

  Morgan gasped. Guinn, startled, looked at her. “It’s true, it’s true,” she keened. Tears streamed down her face.

  “Quickly,” she said. She ran to him. “Give me the Grail. You can’t kill while you hold it.” He hesitated only a fraction of a second, and then thrust it into her hands. Her face matched the Grail’s radiance as she took it.

  Mordi made a lunge for her, but she skipped back out of the way, and that was when Guinn’s fist hit him. It bowled him right off his feet and up against the rock.

  Guinn leaped on him. Mordi, with his back to the rock, lashed out with both feet and caught Guinn on his mailed chest. Guinn went flying backwards, to land in a tangle of surplice and chain, with his heavy two-handed sword twined into the heap. Mordi leaped on him, kicked at his head. Guinn ducked, and the heel of Mordi’s shoe cut a long crease in his scalp. Guinn rolled over, got his feet under him and tossed the surplice back out of the way. He advanced on Mordi.

  “Merlin, your protection!” screamed Mordi.

  “To my sorrow,” said the giant, and his voice was like the theme of a dirge. He threw up his hands.

  Guinn loosed a straight right that had all the power of his blood, bones and hatred behind it.

  And it was as if there were a wall of plexiglass between him and Mordi. The fist bounced off nothingness, and the diverted blow threw Guinn down on one knee. His arm tingled to the shoulder. He bobbed to his feet and circled, warily. He rushed, and was again warded off.

  “Now this,” said Mordi, “is real fun.” He dropped his hands. “Come in again, brother bastard. Did I ever tell you how many guys tried to be your father?”

  From the cave-mouth, Garry coughed, and from the sound of it, it would be about his last. Morgan, carrying the Grail, darted to him, pulled his head back, thrust the glowing chalice in front of his glazing eyes. Over her shoulder she cried, “Your sword! Use your sword!”

  The sword, to Guinn, was no more than a nuisance. He hadn’t had time to look at the buckle nor to fumble with it, or he would have shucked it off to get it out of the way. But so far Morgan had been right. He backed off and drew the sword. Merlin and Morgan, having seen such things done before with skill, must have been appalled. Guinn had to ru
n it out of the scabbard hand under hand down the blade before he could get it all the way out.

  He got his hands on the long hilt, and the weapon seemed to take on a life of its own. Mordi staggered back a pace or two and raised his arms.

  “Merlin—protect me!”

  The glittering blade went up, back, and to one side, and came forward in a screaming arc.

  “Protect me—”

  “Against Excalibur? ” said the giant, his great voice shaking with laughter. And then the blade struck Mordi’s neck and passed through it as if it had been a puff of smoke.

  The body stood upright for fully two seconds, a pulsing fountain of blood replacing the head. Then it fell. The head rolled over twice and stopped at Guinn’s feet, the eyelids batting flirtatiously, the tongue running in and out like that of a rude little boy.

  Merlin came down from the crest. Guinn did not see him do it. It was as if he had disappeared from the top and reappeared at the bottom. Perhaps that was the case.

  From his robe he produced a silver chain. He held out a hand to Morgan, and she came to him, walking mechanically, and stopped before him with her head down.

  “On the day the Grail passes from the guardianship of the pen Dragons,” Merlin intoned, “Morgan le Fay, called the Wild, shall be chained and given into slavery.”

  He cast one end of the chain to Morgan’s slender wrist. It nestled there as if drawn by some magnetism, and by some marvel that Guinn did not understand, formed what appeared to be a broad silver link about her wrist.