Children of the Knight

by Michael J. Bowler

  Lance fought the broadsword back into its place on the rack, watching curiously as the knight removed his gauntlets and laid them on an ancient-looking table. He then slipped the helm and face guard up over his head, revealing his face for the first time. His appearance surprised Lance, for he was a young man, probably not even thirty, with long brown hair cascading past his shoulders and a small, well-trimmed beard and moustache. Lance gazed at him openmouthed, his hand still on the hilt of the sword.

  “You be younger than I thought. How old are you, anyways?”

  The knight smiled, a pleasant, reassuring sort of smile. “Much older than I look, I’m afraid.”

  Lance spread his arms wide at the myriad weapons with an enormous grin breaching his normally stoic young face. “This place is bitchin’, man! What’s all this stuff for?

  “A crusade, young Lance. Wouldst thou learn the use of these weapons?”

  Lance’s face lit up as he grabbed for a smaller sword and cut the air with it.

  “Hell yeah, but—” His smile dropped, his face clouding with suspicion. “Why me?”

  “Methinks, young Lance, that thou doth require nourishment. There be much we must speak of this night if thou art to understand.”

  Lance grabbed one of the knives and held it in front of him for protection, sword in one hand, knife in the other. “Why me?” he repeated, hoping the hardness of his tone effectively masked the relentless pounding of his heart.

  The young man sighed heavily. “’Twere not by chance thou and I met this night, my boy, but by design.”

  “Huh? You gotta start speakin’ real English or Spanish or something cuz I don’t know what yer saying!”

  “It was decreed that thou and I should meet this night, for I didst see thee in a vision, young Lance, a vision for the future.”

  Lance lowered the weapons, but kept them at the ready. “Who the hell are you anyways?”

  The young man unsheathed his own large, gleaming sword, gazed regally down at the boy, gripped the ornately jeweled hilt, and raised the sword aloft.

  “I am Arthur, once and future King of Great Britain, and this be Excalibur. Yours is a time and place of immense need, and thus, as ’twas foretold centuries past, have I returned to right the wrongs that plague thy homeland. Amidst the squalor and barbarism of this city, I shalt rebuild my Round Table and change the course of history. And thou, young Lance, shalt be my First Knight. Art thou game?”

  Lance’s lower jaw dropped open, and his wide green eyes bulged with amazement. For the first time in his life he understood the meaning of the word “dumbstruck.”

  “Huh?” was all he could muster.

  Arthur merely grinned in response.

  MARK TWAIN High School, usually just called MTS for short, or what was currently left of it, sat on the corner of Birch Ave and Tercero Blvd in the city of Hawthorne. It was a neighborhood high school, serving kids from Lennox and Hawthorne and occasionally neighboring Lawndale.

  The school, at present, was undergoing major reconstruction and had thus become even more chaotic than usual. The entire Tercero side was inaccessible due to new office building construction, so everyone had to enter and exit the campus from Birch Ave. The school had always been unorganized, but the construction crews with their daily chorus of hammering and sawing and pounding and ripping added a whole new level to the usual unruly atmosphere of the place.

  Students, mostly Latino, pushed and bustled and flirted and texted their way between classes, darting in and around and under yellow caution tape strung about the place like a senior prank gone viral. Lance zipped in and out of the crowd and stopped briefly at the side of sixteen-year-old Enrique. He paused long enough to whisper something in the other boy’s ear before Enrique nodded in understanding and moved off. Lance ducked beneath the caution tape to bob up alongside fifteen-year-old Luis and hurriedly followed him around Building Eleven toward the parking lot by the pool.

  Jenny McMullen, blonde and attractive, intelligent, but not brilliant, in her late-twenties, had been teaching English at MTS for seven years now, ever since she’d gotten her credential from Cal State Dominguez Hills. She’d been a literature undergrad and had always wanted to teach English since she’d been in high school herself. But the difference, she’d discovered, between the private school she’d attended and the public school where she now worked, was literally night and day. None of her credentialing classes had prepared her for the level of apathy she’d encountered amongst the students, or the level of disorganization from the school board on down.

  It seemed like every decision was made in a vacuum, without thought or recourse as to how those decisions would affect the kids. She knew too well the overreaching power of the unions, both certificated and classified, and had come to recognize that the needs of the students were not foremost in either of their agendas. Still, weren’t they all here to educate the kids, to bring them to a better place than where they’d found them? Even this construction was an enigma. They managed to get money for rebuilding the entire school, but there wasn’t any to reduce class size or buy newer computers or new software or books or supplies or even athletic uniforms. The kids had to raise their own money to pay for a uniform, for crying out loud!

  Ever since she’d begun teaching at MTS, all Jenny ever heard from the top was how they had to shove every kid into college. But she knew full well—because she actually talked with the kids—that many of them didn’t want to go to college. They wanted a good trade, a good skill so they could raise a family, but most didn’t want or need a standard bachelor’s degree. And yet that seemed to be their only choice here. Electives were few and far between and even some of those were half-assed anyway. Jenny had been teaching for seven years, and yet the system was already burning her out.

  Her freshman English class, as all of her classes, bulged at the seams with forty-two rambunctious, often ill-mannered and completely uninterested ninth graders. Knowing the neighborhood kids fairly well by now—reading was disdained, but they liked photos and visuals a lot—Jenny had adorned her classroom with pictures of famous writers and poets, like Shakespeare and Byron. She’d posted school and classroom rules, not that it did much good. Teachers at this school were left pretty much to their own devices when it came to discipline. There was a dean, but unless a kid committed murder on camera, suspensions were kept to a minimum. Wouldn’t want to lose that ADA money, would we?

  Jenny also loved movies, and knew the kids liked them too, so she’d displayed numerous posters of popular films, mostly recent ones the kids would know. On display were several movie posters depicting King Arthur, most too old for her students to have ever seen except maybe on television. Jenny loved Arthurian legends and stories and attempted to incorporate them whenever possible—not much these days with the rigid curriculum and fixation on the state standardized testing. She’d also put up pictures of castles and a large map of medieval Britain.

  At the moment, she had her back to the class as she quickly wrote page numbers on the whiteboard. As she turned back to the class, she observed Lance Sepulveda whispering to another boy seated beside him. Ah, Lance, she sighed inwardly. Probably the smartest kid in the class, when he chose to show up, that is.

  “Ahem. Lance, something you’d like to share with the rest of us?” she asked with a raise of her well-groomed eyebrows.

  Lance looked at her, a bit startled, but immediately regained his aplomb. He smiled sweetly. “No, Ms. McMullen.”

  He suddenly noticed two cute girls sitting a few rows over giggling and smiling his way. He blushed and quickly looked down at his graffitied desk in red-faced embarrassment.

  The bell screeched and signaled a mad scramble for the door. Jenny quickly shouted, “Leave your papers on my desk!”

  The two girls sighed and brushed up against Lance on their way out. He refused to look up until they were gone.

  Pushing and shoving their way loudly toward the door, the students tossed their papers haphazardly atop Jen
ny’s desk as they whizzed on past.

  “Neatly!” Jenny added, knowing it was fruitless. Within seconds, the room had emptied, and the papers were a shambles. Lance hung back, skateboard in hand, as always, and paused to straighten the pile, much to her amazement.

  “Thank you, Lance,” she said, gratefully. “It’s nice to see you in school today.”

  She’d taken a liking to the boy immediately, with his sharp wit and keen intellect. And what a beautiful boy, she’d often thought. His hair was silkier than hers! And those green eyes were striking. She’d seen many a girl this year trying to get close to him, but he seemed to shy away from all the kids. She’d occasionally see him during lunch chatting with one of the other skaters, but more often than not he’d be sitting by himself staring off into space. She didn’t know what was troubling him, but she liked him enough to want to find out. However, his attendance was spotty, and he so seldom spoke up in class that it was hard to get to know him. She’d tried calling home, but could never seem to get hold of a parent or guardian at any of the numbers in the school’s computer database.

  “Ms. McMullen, do you know anything about King Arthur?” Those green eyes were open and expectant.

  Jenny’s eyebrows shot up in surprise, and she smiled wryly. “Look around you, Lance, then take a guess.”

  Lance looked around at the posters and photos of castles as though seeing them for the first time. In fact, he never had paid much attention. But he’d always had a good feeling about the pretty young maestra and felt she might be the only one around here he could trust. To a point, anyway.

  Jenny pushed a strand of light-blonde hair back from her face. “If you showed up to class more often, you’d know that Arthurian stories are among my favorites.”

  Lance heard her, but her sarcasm didn’t even register. His gaze remained riveted to one of the King Arthur movie posters, transfixed by the artist’s rendering of Arthur. Pushing his flowing hair back away from his eyes, he shook his head.

  “He don’t look like that.”

  That caught Jenny off guard. “Who?”

  Lance sighed heavily. “No one. Is he real, King Arthur?” He couldn’t take his eyes off that poster.

  “He was, yes,” Jenny replied evenly, slipping into her “teacher” voice. “But where facts end and legend begins no one really knows.”

  Lance pulled his gaze from the poster and looked the pretty young woman in the eye. He was easily as tall as she. “Did he ever die?”

  Jenny was truly mystified. Why the sudden fascination with King Arthur? And those eyes looked so intense, so uncertain. “Well,” she went on, “he was supposedly wounded at the Battle of Salisbury Plain, and then taken to a mystical place called Avalon. There he was to wait out the years, to return one day when Britain needed him most.”

  Lance looked at her in confusion. “What’s ‘Britain’?”

  Jenny pointed to her map of Britain. “England, Lance. You know, the country?”

  Lance shook his head in confusion. None of this added up. “But this ain’t England.”

  Jenny laughed nervously. The boy wasn’t just asking random questions. She knew his style well enough. Something was going on. “Now I’m totally lost. What are we talking about here?”

  Lance stopped then, realizing he’d probably said too much already. “Nothing. Just something I saw on TV. Gotta go, Ms. McMullen.”

  He glanced one final time at the King Arthur poster, then turned and hurried to the door, as Jenny’s fourth period students pushed past him aggressively. One burly boy leered and sneered, “Oh look, Pretty Boy’s back!”

  “Eat shit and die,” Lance muttered as he shoved his way out the door, leaving Jenny gazing after him in consternation. These kids!

  LANCE had not only agreed to Arthur’s plan, but had also accepted the job of teacher to this strange man who seemed to know little or nothing about twenty-first century Los Angeles. Hell, he’d never even seen a cell phone! The whole plan sounded nutty, yeah, but there was something so unusual about Arthur, something so rare that Lance felt, against all his street-born instincts, compelled to trust him. Arthur was genuinely sincere. And that was a quality Lance had never known in anyone, except maybe Ms. McMullen. Could they actually accomplish what Arthur had proposed? Lance wanted to believe they could, and in believing, finally become someone important in this sorry world. Someone worthy. Right now, he was nothing, and nothing was all he’d ever been.

  He told his skater friend’s mom he had somewhere else to stay, and moved underground with Arthur. He had a decent bedroll to sleep on and plenty of empty tunnels to sleep in. Arthur never got too close, though Lance remained wary, nonetheless. His instincts told him Arthur was not to be feared, and yet caution always won out, and he remained ever on the alert.

  Arthur didn’t have money, but he did have jewels and gold and other fancy stuff he’d called “the crown jewels,” so over the next few days Lance had shown him places where he could sell this stuff. Lance had a cell phone his skater friend gave him to use, and he’d tried to teach Arthur about using the Internet to sell things, but the man was mystified by the technology, so that option was out. Besides, the guy didn’t even know what a credit card was!

  In any case, they seemed to be making enough money through jewelers and pawnshops to get by, and that’s all Lance had ever done anyway. There was enough money to buy food for the two of them, and after a few nights Lance had gotten accustomed to living underground with the rats and the dank smells and the drip, drip, drip of water. Hell, he’d lived worse than this before. He did manage to convince Arthur to buy battery-powered lanterns to use within the storm drains instead of the nasty-smelling torches that stung his nose and burned his eyes, and the king readily agreed.

  They also purchased a first aid kit, nonperishable food, and a waterless toilet for use within the tunnels, even though Lance was accustomed to just using the bathrooms at school or at the skate park. But he figured the toilet would be handy to have for emergencies. As for Llamrei, Lance told Arthur to make sure she “did her thing” outside or they’d never get the smell out of those tunnels. And those tunnels smelled bad enough already!

  Arthur recounted stories of “the old days,” which, if Lance believed him, happened hundreds of years ago. Hundreds of years? Lance knew the guy had to be making that part up, yet he loved the stories, nonetheless. Most importantly, Arthur taught him how to wield a sword, how to rapidly string a bow and fire the arrow before his intended target—usually a rat—even knew it was being stalked. In a matter of days, Lance already felt his upper-body strength increasing, his quickness and agility improving, his hand-eye coordination vastly better.

  He was usually sore as hell, but he still got up most days and hopped the Metro to school as Arthur had instructed. The word had to be spread, after all. His conversation with Ms. McMullen had confused him because her version of the story didn’t seem to fit all the aspects of this Arthur. But rather than challenge the man, Lance did what he always did best—kept his eyes open, his guard up, and his taut young body ready for flight at a moment’s notice.

  After the first few days of training and gathering supplies, Arthur wished to see as much of Los Angeles as possible, to learn “the lay of the land,” as he’d put it. So each night the two of them toured various parts of the vastness of LA, with Lance acting as teacher and guide. Sometimes they rode Llamrei if the neighborhood was quiet enough and they could keep to the shadows. At other times, they rode the Metrolink train or hopped onto a city bus.

  Arthur, at first, balked at riding these “astonishing inventions,” as he’d called them, preferring the safety of horseback or his own feet planted firmly on the ground. When Lance finally convinced him that the city was too vast to see by horseback or by walking, only then did Arthur gingerly agree. After his initial trepidation wore off, he delighted in the speed of the train and even the ease of using the bus system.

  “Such inventions ’twere not even dreamed of in my time, Lanc
e,” he remarked as the Metrolink train sped through the night. His eyes roamed everywhere, at the dark windows, the other passengers, the advertisements papering the interior walls of their train car. “Methinks even Merlin had not foreseen such marvels.”

  Despite Lance’s admonition that Arthur’s medieval-style clothing would make them stick out “like sore thumbs,” Arthur insisted on standard attire for these excursions: heavy leather pants, knee-high leather boots, and a billowy long-sleeved tunic. He’d wanted to carry Excalibur with him at all times, but Lance assured him they’d be arrested for carrying a weapon before they got five blocks.

  “Hell,” he told Arthur, “I could get busted for carrying my little-ass pocketknife on the street, even though I could get killed without it. This city sucks!”

  Arthur frowned at Lance’s use of language, not entirely understanding the boy’s modern slang, but sensing just by the words and tone that his speech was not appropriate for a knight. Ah well, he thought, the boy shalt learn. And, in point of fact, Lance had been incorrect—almost no one even noticed Arthur’s odd attire when they were out and about, except maybe some businessman-types aboard the Metrolink. This was Los Angeles, after all.

  On one particular night, Arthur and Lance cantered through a bleak, ghetto area on Llamrei’s back. The storm drain system allowed them easy entrance and egress to and from many of the more troubled neighborhoods in the city. Lance had begun adopting a clothing style similar to Arthur’s. The man seemed to possess an endless store of clothing of varying sizes, but all of a type worn in his own time, the time of knights and squires.

  He’d told Lance he didn’t exactly know how all these things, including the weapons, had ended up with him in this present time, but he knew why they had appeared, and that was what mattered. Lance wouldn’t wear the leather boots. He lived and would probably die a skater and always wore his skating shoes, in part because he’d often bring his board and skate alongside Arthur when they were walking. But he’d taken a liking to the billowy tunics and baggy leather pants, and the leather overcoats kept him very warm at night.