by Unknown
Arthur kept his reservations to himself: no sense in discouraging Claire. They were the only walkers on the island and he threw his hand over the idyllic expanse of green. “All right … say you’re Thomas Malory standing on one of these banks. You want to heave a sword into something that all the world looks like a lake. Do you aim for the middle so it’s hardest to find, or near one of the banks so it’s easier to retrieve?”
Claire put her hands on her hips and looked through her sunglasses. “I’d compromise: far enough from the bank so a fisherman wouldn’t notice the glint of metal but not all the way to the deepest part. He did want it to be found one day by the right person.”
Arthur nodded. “I’ll buy that. Hopefully he was as smart as you.”
#
The evening was turning cool. The wedding reception was to begin at seven-thirty and sunset would be in an hour. That afternoon Claire had bought a long, gauzy dress and a shawl. Arthur made do with the sport coat he’d packed. After seeing no one checking invitations, they mingled with a knot of arriving guests and made their way to the tent where they helped themselves to hors d’oeuvres and glasses of wine. They quickly decided that the safest maneuver was to keep floating away from the tables and stick by the dance floor and thereby never once had to claim to be Jason’s friends from school who were so very happy for him and Roz.
Claire declared that Arthur was a pretty good dancer for an English chemist and he countered that she was pas mal for a French physicist. During a slow dance he held her tightly, feeling her breasts against his chest.
“It’s a good night to start a quest,” she whispered in his ear.
He pointed at the dais. The father of the bride was standing up and motioning to the band.
“That’s the bloke we should be careful about. He’s paying for our food and drink tonight.”
They stood on the sidelines while speeches were made and cakes were cut and first dances were taken and then when it was quite dark they slipped away to the car park. Opening the trunk, Arthur retrieved a duffel bag and slung it over his shoulder.
A glowing half moon provided just enough light for them to wend their way across the lawns and onto the island footbridge without a flashlight. From the island the band sounded dreamy and far away, and had it not been for the task at hand Arthur would have desired to pull her down onto the cool grass. Instead he unpacked his metal detector, powered it up, and set its sensitivity for a large, deep object. No time to waste on coins or the odd piece of lost jewelry.
Excalibur or bust.
Mindful of Claire’s opinion that Thomas Malory would have tossed the object not too close and not too far from the bank, he stashed the duffel bag by a tree, donned the earphones and began a pattern of concentric circles around the island. He started at the footbridge and headed clockwise until they returned to the starting point. On each circuit he did a full sweep to his left, followed by a complete sweep to his right, about a six-foot swath, before taking another long pace. It was close to 10 P.M. when they began. Though they walked together, it was a solitary pursuit. He listened for just the right tone; she looked at the moon and stars and listened to the band and distant laughter.
The first circuit took an hour. Arthur removed his headphones.
“You okay? Want my jacket?”
“I’m fine.” There was no wind and if anything the air was warmer than when they started. “Have you heard anything?”
“The good news is we haven’t been slowed down by garbage hits. The bad news is we haven’t had any hits.”
“That’s okay. Sounds like a good signal-to-noise ratio.”
He’d almost forgotten that the beautiful woman following along in a filmy dress was a scientist.
“At this rate it might take all night.”
“I don’t mind. It’s lovely out here.”
An hour passed, then two more, and suddenly the music stopped. The wedding party was over. There were drunken shouts from the car park and the tent eventually went dark. The night sky clouded over, the wind picked up a bit and Arthur insisted Claire take his jacket. Once the caterers and event staff were done for the night the abbey went completely dark too and only then did Arthur feel comfortable breaking out a flashlight. With headphones off and the countryside empty they could both hear the river’s gentle flow. On the next circuit Claire shined a beam past him, illuminating the way. He figured they would be making their final tight circuit around the center of the island in some five hours’ time.
“Okay, let’s do another circuit,” he said.
#
Two men sat inside a dark vehicle parked at the abbey car park. Griggs had a night vision scope that he kept trained on the two glowing ghostlike figures a long distance away.
“Walking in bloody circles,” he muttered.
The other man checked his glowing watch. “Looks like we’re going to be here all night.” Hengst was former SASS, the South African intelligence agency. He was younger than Griggs.
“You should be kissing my ass that I took you off gatehouse duty.”
Hengst puckered up. “Pull your trousers down and let me have at it. This is more my line.”
“Lot of surveillance work in the SASS?”
“Bread and butter.”
Griggs reached over to the backseat and tugged a tactical bag onto his lap. He unzipped it and pulled out a compact sniper rifle.
“Let’s have a look,” Hengst said.
Griggs passed it to him and the young man gave it a practiced once-over.
“Like it?” Griggs asked.
“Sweet. What is it?”
“American. Desert Tactical SRS. Twenty-two-inch barrel, eleven pounds, titanium suppressor, Moro Vision sniper scope with night sights, Barska laser.”
“What’s it chambered in?”
“Three thirty-eight Lapua Magnum.”
“Fuck. Elephant gun. What’d it cost?”
“Fully kitted? Six thousand.”
“Harp let you buy that?”
“Absolutely.”
“I want one too.”
“You don’t need one to sit in his gatehouse.”
Griggs took it back and removed the lens covers on the scope. He opened the car window halfway to allow him to point and rest the barrel and adjusted his aim until Arthur’s head filled the optics.
“Target acquired.”
“What’s the distance?”
“About two thousand feet, maybe eighteen hundred. No wind. I could make the shot nine times out of ten.”
“Harp would have your scalp.”
“Fuck the little shit.”
“Nice way to talk about a bloke who bought you a six-thousand-quid toy.”
Griggs came to a boil fast. “Malory didn’t see Harp’s face that night and he didn’t see yours. There’s only one way to make sure he never fucks me over.”
“Orders are orders, eh, mate?”
“I don’t give a shit about goddamn orders. It’s my neck on the block.”
“What’s so important about the Grail anyway?” Hengst asked, lighting a cigarette.
“Harp won’t talk about it but the Swiss bloke I worked for was chattier, another physicist, also rich as hell. He and Harp belong to some kind of Grail group. He told me the Grail had certain—what was the word he used?—properties they wanted to control.”
“Control for what?”
“He never said.”
Hengst took a hard drag. “These rich bastards have too much bloody time on their hands.”
#
Arthur began another rotation and on his third sweep to the left he thought he heard something. It wasn’t so much a recognizable tone than the sense that there was a sound. It reminded him of getting his hearing tested as a child by an audiologist who kept dropping the decibels until he could make out only a ghost of a tone.
He swept right and there was nothing. Back again left and there was the same faint perception. He took a half pace forward and repeated the sweeps: somet
hing, perhaps, to the left; nothing to the right. The instrument’s display screen showed nothing on the Target ID cursor. Progressing a half step at a time, Arthur crept forward until the indistinct tone, if that what it was, disappeared.
He pulled off his headphones.
“Anything?” she asked.
“Maybe yes, maybe no. Something really faint but nothing on the display.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Go with my gut. I’m going to dig a little. Stay here, I’ll get the shovels.”
They were at the end of the island closest to the abbey about fifty feet from the nearest bank. Arthur returned with his duffel bag and pulled out a spade.
He began slicing through the lawn at the first spot where there’d been the hint of a tone, careful to preserve the sod for re-laying. Under the beam of Claire’s flashlight he cleared out a meter square and dug it down a couple of feet. The soil was moist and firm and his steel cut through it cleanly. When he was done he lit the screen of his metal detector and put the scanning head into the hole.
There was a clearer tone and the detector registered a fairly durable signal in the nonferrous range. Gold. Silver. Bronze. Good metals.
He kept digging and as the hole progressed he had to widen it half a meter in all directions to make the digging easier. The deeper he got the louder the tone. It was now a strong single midtone with a reading of 70 on the discrimination scale. There was one object down there either of gold, silver, or bronze. He dug faster despite his aching rib. Dawn wouldn’t wait.
Two meters down the soil was getting wet and hard to handle and Arthur wished he had made the trench longer and wider. The walls seemed unstable and there were small cave-ins. There was no time to fix the problem. Climbing out of the trench without a ladder was going to be tricky. Come time to exit, Claire would have to shovel dirt back in to give him enough height to pull himself out.
The sky was losing some of its inkiness. He worked faster, pain be damned. Claire used the other shovel to keep the growing pile of refuse from sliding back into the trench. Both she and Arthur were smeared with dirt and muddy to the ankles.
The tone in his ears was almost painful.
He called for his trowel and when Claire handed it down he dropped to his knees and began scooping away at the slop.
Something caught the trowel blade and a dark object rose from the mud. Later he would tell Claire it reminded him of an arm rising from the mire, like that of the Lady of the Lake, who was said to have caught Excalibur and carried it down to its watery resting place.
He couldn't make out what he had. It was metal, a little over a foot long.
“Give me your light,” he called out, trying to rein in his excitement. “I think there’s a water bottle in the duffel bag. Drop that down too.”
He held the flashlight under his chin and doused the piece of metal with water, cleaning it as best he could with his fingers. There was a glint of silver.
It was unmistakable. It was the hilt of a sword with a guard, a grip, and a pommel. There was no blade, just a rough nubbin of corrosion at the base of the guard.
“Is it?” Claire called down.
“It is,” he said. “By God, it is.”
She began sending earth back down and he built himself an escape ramp. Once free of the hole, he wrapped the hilt in her shawl and began back-filling the trench as fast as he could. The sky was getting pink and he feared that early morning dog walkers might descend on them. As he labored away, Claire packed everything but the spade in his hands into the duffel bag and took them back to the car park to wait for him, unaware that two men were hunkered down low in one of the few other parked cars.
Dripping with sweat, Arthur stamped on the soil to firm it up and placed the pieced-together sod. As dawn broke he inspected his work: it didn’t look pretty but didn’t flash neon either. In the distance he saw a man with two dogs coming his way. He thought better of carrying a spade past the fellow so he tossed it into the river, pleased with the symmetry of the gesture.
#
At the hotel they showered together but didn’t make love, both too eager to clean the sword. Wrapped in a bath towel, Arthur brushed his teeth then used his toothbrush to scrub the hilt under the tap.
The silver looked as fresh and proud as the day it was fashioned. The heavy guard was a good ten inches long, five inches on both sides of the blade. If the blade had still been there the sword would have resembled a cross. And as Arthur scrubbed the silver guard, letters emerged under the bristles.
Claire leaned in. Her towel slipped off but she made no attempt to cover herself. Together they mouthed the words phonetically.
“Eni Tirro Euric Nemeto Ouxselo Brunka Kanta Cristus Ke Wereo Gral.”
“What language is this?” she asked.
“I’ve no idea. But this word is the one we wanted to see: Gral. This inscription is about the Grail!”
He stood to face her and smiled at her nakedness. Then he was seized by an urge he didn’t quite understand. He curled the fingers of his right hand around the grip, and when he raised the hilt high over his head triumphantly Claire took a step forward and pulled away his towel.
19
Britannia, A.D. 498
Arthwyr of Maleore, King of the Britons, Lord of the Isle of the Mighty, tested the heft of his new sword and sliced the air appreciatively with his powerful right arm. The blade was the finest Damascus steel forged by Cedwyn of Camlan, the greatest swords maker in the realm. The hilt was fashioned by Morien of Glastonbury, the ablest silversmith in Britannia. The sword felt at once heavy and light and with that paradox Arthwyr could tell its balance was perfect. His last weapon had shattered against a Saxon axhead and though he had been wielding a fine borrowed blade, he felt bereft without his own.
In a rush of exultation he raised the new sword high over his head.
He was the champion of the battle of Mynydd Baddon, where thousands of Angle, Saxon, and Jute invaders had been slaughtered by his warriors. For the first time in memory Briton was largely free of foreign rapists and pillagers. His father, Uther Pendragon, had been beloved by the people; but Arthwyr had risen to another level. He was Godlike.
He was in his throne room in his fortress castle built on a high flat-topped hill in Gwynedd. It was summer and he was dressed lightly in a sleeveless cloth tunic, leggings, and boots. The wide leather belt, cinched tight around his slim waist, accentuated a powerful torso. His hair was long and flowing, the color of molten gold, and he wore his beard close-cropped as his father had done, kept short by a manservant adept with a flint blade. He was not yet fifty and had accomplished everything in life he had ever strived for, save one.
“Will you give it a name?” The question came from his queen, leaning languidly on her padded throne chair, a smaller version of Arthwyr’s own. Gwenhwyfar was such a wisp of a woman, it was deemed a miracle by her ladies that she had been able to pass children through her narrow hips. Her hair was as dark as Arthwyr’s was light, and Arthwyr always told her that their hues reflected their dispositions. Hers was gloomy, of the night, whereas his was of the day, filled with optimism.
“I will call it Caledfwlch,” he said. “That which cleaves stone. For if it can cleave stone it will cleave a man with ease.”
“Do you never grow weary of killing?” she asked. Her cupbearer, a young girl, hovered by her side and filled the goblet Gwenhwyfar held in her thin outstretched hand. The queen wore two white ribbons in her hair to mark her mourning of the knight, Llych Llenlleawg.
“My lady, I will never tire of killing heathens, invaders and nonbelievers. It is the duty of a Christian king to protect his subjects and defend Christ.”
“You have driven out the invaders. Will you now follow them back to their own lands? Can we not live in peace for a time?”
Arthwyr saw his younger son, Cyngen Maleore, playing by the hearth with one of his cousins. The boy was only three, a miracle child, if ever there was, born late in life to a king
and his queen. His other son, Gwydre, was a full eighteen years older and he would certainly be king one day, though it comforted Arthwyr no end to have Cyngen in reserve. A warrior king always favored reserves. The king called Cyngen over to show him the sword and laughed when the boy could not lift its tip off the ground. Arthwyr dismissed the towheaded lad, handed the sword to his page, took his place by the queen’s side and held out his hand. She knew to touch it.
“For your sake I will stay at court for a time,” he said. “But my knights are hot-blooded young men who are not so easily shut in a pen. They will seek adventure and I will not stand in their way. But remember this, good lady, that peace is as permanent as a footprint in the sand. War will come again. It always does.”
Gwenhwyfar sighed and drank more wine.
A swarthy man emerged from shadows behind the thrones. He was severe in his countenance, bald as a hen’s egg, with a small rectangular Pharaonic beard that harkened back to his birthplace, in Egypt. His black tunic scraped the floor. He came forward just far enough for the king to be able to see he was in attendance then stopped, clasping his hands expectantly.
“What say you, Myrddin?” Arthwyr asked.
Myrddin answered, his accent exotic. “The hall is filled with supplicants, my lord. Now that your enemies have been driven from your realm, your people have turned their heads to dowry disputes and such matters as who is the rightful owner of this ox or that hog.”
Arthwyr asked the same exasperated question he always did. “And why must a king decide these matters?”
“If not you, then whom?” Myrddin replied. “But before we begin the audience, one of your knights wishes to see you and ask that you grant him his desire.”
