His eyes widening, Barry sputtered, “Now…now come on, your Highness! That’s going to be—”
“Expensive? Difficult? I’ve no doubt. But it has to be done nevertheless. If this concept is intended to fill the gap for my inability to go to every man, woman, and child who needs the help of the Grail…then the least you can do is everything possible to distribute the drink to those who need it most.”
“Sire, I’m still not certain this is the wisest course,” Percival said worriedly.
“Percival, I…”
“Here you go.” It was the waitress, putting the burgers in front of everyone as briskly as she could. But when she got to Arthur, she placed his down carefully in front of him and Arthur noticed she wasn’t taking her eyes off him.
“Is there a problem?” Arthur asked.
She hesitated, and then said, “My mother…she’s got arthritis so bad, she can barely stand. And I thought, maybe…”
Gwen moaned, and Barry tried to shoo her off, but Arthur put up a hand that instantly silenced both of them. He stared into the waitress’s eyes for a moment, then said to her, “Bring me a pitcher of water and a glass.”
Not comprehending, the waitress nevertheless scrambled to do as Arthur had instructed her. “The Grail, Percival,” Arthur said.
As always, when given a direct order, Percival offered no resistance. He handed the Grail over to Arthur. When the waitress returned, Arthur took the pitcher of water, poured half a glass of water into the Grail as she watched with wide eyes, then transferred the contents from the Grail into the glass. He then tilted the pitcher and filled the remaining half of the glass with the normal water from the pitcher.
“Take this to her and have her drink it in its entirety,” Arthur said, picking up the glass with the water mixture in it. “I am going to return here in exactly one week so that you can report to me your mother’s condition. You are to tell no one that I am returning. If you do, and I see people waiting here for me, you will never see me again. Is that understood?” She nodded. “I want to hear you say that you understand.”
“I understand, sir.”
“Good.”
“What’s…” She looked at the glass of water almost reverently. “What’s going to happen when she drinks this?”
“Honestly? I haven’t the faintest idea,” he admitted. “I have to make that clear to you. We are dealing with strange, mystic forces, and I cannot absolutely guarantee that your mother will end up better off than she is. For that matter, she may end up worse. I mean, I doubt that she will drink of this water and erupt into flames…but anything is possible…”
She took the water from him and murmured something in Spanish that Arthur took to be some manner of prayer. “She’s going to be fine. She’s going to be cured. I know it.”
“How do you know?”
“I have faith. God would not have brought you to me, to this time, to this place, for no reason. There has to be a reason.”
“What if there’s not?” Percival asked. “What if things happen simply because they happen, for no rhyme or reason.”
The waitress shook her head. “I couldn’t live in a world like that.”
“If that’s the way it is,” said Percival, “then you’re living in it whether you want to or not.”
“But that’s not the way the world is.”
“That’s circular logic…”
“Percival,” Arthur said softly, and shook his head.
Percival sighed, then said, “Good luck with your mother.”
“Thank you.” She handed them a piece of paper. “Here.”
Arthur picked it up and looked at it. “It’s the check.”
“Yeah.”
Arthur looked at the others, then laughed. “You’d think that curing a woman’s mother would be enough to get a free meal.”
Barry reached over, picked up the check, and said confidently, “I’ve got it. Think of it as an advance on all the business we’re going to do together.” He handed a business card to Arthur. “Here’s the deal: You take your time. Think about it. In a week’s time, you’ll check back with this young lady. And at that point, you’ll call me and tell me whether we’re good to go or not. Just to show you you can trust me, I’m not even going to ask you for a sample of Grail water for my lab boys to start working on.”
“I doubt your lab boys would find anything useful,” said Percival. “There’s no test for the ineffable.”
It was the mostly silent Sal who spoke up. “If there is, we’ll find one.”
The comment concerned Arthur, but then he saw the hopeful look in the waitress’s eye and decided to let it pass.
V
ERY LITTLE WAS
said or discussed in the castle for the next week. Arthur became more and more absorbed in watching the various TV screens scattered throughout the castle. Despite the fact that he’d been gone for months now, he was still a hot topic of conversation. “Arthur Sightings” were a regular feature in all the news shows. Tonight reports had come in from Cairo, Guam, Chicago, Brazil, and New York City. That last report was a woman who swore that she’d seen Arthur, the first lady, and several others emerging from a run-down diner. Arthur grimaced. They’d been walking back from the diner, and when that infernal little yapping dog had started trying to chew on Excalibur hanging invisibly at his side, he’d known it was going to result in trouble. In for a penny, in for a pound: He should have just yanked out his sword and sliced the little mongrel in half. But that wouldn’t have solved anything and just left evidence of his having been there. And the dog would have been a goner. No amount of water from the Holy Grail would put a bisected canine back together.
He watched reports of prayer meetings. He saw people gathering, dressed in medieval garb, holding up replicas of the Holy Grail. Every Renaissance Fair in the United States was having Arthur-oriented gatherings. He saw people actively praying that he would show up, Grail in hand, ready to dispense aid to the sick and suffering.
Nor could the newspeople get their fill of covering outraged men (and women) of the cloth who were complaining about the growing interest in Arthurism (as it was being called) and the growing number of people calling themselves Arthurians. No one could demonstrably prove that the Arthurians consisted of disaffected Christians or even Jews (although the Muslims seemed to be finding the entire thing tremendously amusing). From speaking to them, it seemed that most Arthurians consisted of people who had grown bored or fed up with most mainstream religions and saw Arthurism as offering something solid, practical, realistic, and down-to-earth. No praying to unseen deities. No worshipping a God that dispensed death through hurricanes, tornadoes, or tsunamis, and was content to let the good suffer and the wicked thrive. No, in Arthurism, there was simply a good and devoted head honcho with proven leadership qualities, capable of defending those who believed in him and performing indisputable miracles. As one Arthurian put it, “It’s like getting into Christianity on the ground floor. It’s like being there when it all first started. A thousand years from now, we’ll be looked on as the lucky devils who basked in the presence of the true savior of humanity.”
This, naturally, was the attitude that led to anger and protest from the representatives of various organized churches. Arthur sat and watched in frustration, shaking his head as everyone from Cardinal Ruehl on down spoke against him, calling him everything from a charlatan to a scam artist to the leading candidate as the Antichrist. The Pope had remained reserved and detached from the furor, settling only for saying (through spokespeople) that he was “disappointed” in the course of action that former President Penn was pursuing, and suggesting that perhaps he had never been quite right since his wife was fired upon by terrorists.
To make matters worse, every Arthurian gathering of any size could almost be guaranteed to find itself plagued by protesters who took exception to such get-togethers and considered them blasphemous. Thus far none of them had broken out into violence, as interviewed protesters would simply explain that they were concerned about the immortal souls of these poor benighted (no pun intended) individuals, and they were trying to put them back on the proper path before it was too late. Still, as far as Arthur was concerned, it was only a matter of time before violence did indeed rear its head. He felt, yet again, that growing sense of helplessness, expanding to such proportions that he wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand it.
On one occasion, he became aware that Gwen was watching over his shoulder. She winced as an archbishop excoriated Arthur and his undoubtedly evil intent, and Arthur said, “You shouldn’t be watching this.”
“You’re my husband. How could I not?”
“They’re bastards, the lot of them.”
“No, they’re not.” She walked up behind him and rested both her hands on his shoulders. “They’re scared.”
“Scared of what? Of becoming irrelevant? Useless? Scared that people will flock away from them and to me?”
“There’s some of that, sure,” she agreed. “But have you ever considered that maybe they’re just scared of the notion of being wrong? I mean, they’ve pinned their entire lives, careers, faith…their belief in what will happen to them when they die…all on Jesus. And you come along and say, No, Jesus wasn’t divine, he just happened to acquire godlike abilities through drinking from this cup. If you challenge his divinity, you challenge the very center of their belief system.”
“Well…maybe you were right. Maybe the two aren’t mutually exclusive. Jesus could have been the Son of God, and his father led him to the Holy Grail so he could have abilities on Earth that would impress his followers.”
“Yes, and I hear that evolution and creationism can also exist side by side,” said Gwen, “so that should put that argument to bed once and for all, right?”
He laughed softly. “Yes, I hear tell that that dispute has been long ago dispensed with.”
She watched the news unfolding on television, and commented, “It looks like there’s going to be an Arthurian gathering in Central Park. Don’t suppose you’d want to stick your nose in, say ‘hi,’ right?”
“That would be the height of folly, Gwen, and you know it.”
“Probably. But that’s never stopped me before.”
“Nor I.” He rubbed his eyes, suddenly feeling very tired. “I wish Merlin were here. He’d know what to do.”
“Maybe. Or maybe he’d just tell you it’s all your decision…which, by the way, it is.”
“Yes, well…let’s see what happens with the young lady at the diner. And then…we’ll take it from there.”
W
HEN A WEEK
had passed, Arthur decided to head over himself to the diner to meet up with the waitress. As far as he was concerned, it was simple math: One person was going to have an easier time of remaining unobserved than two or three.
The fact that it was a Sunday wasn’t lost on him. He passed various churches where services were being held, and he thought for a moment about going in and presenting himself. But he decided that it really would be a rather unseemly action for him to undertake. It was bad enough that people on TV were accusing him of being in league with the forces of Satan. He didn’t need some pastor or minister on a pulpit waggling an accusing finger at him, and shouting,
“Begone, creature of evil!”
It was bewildering to him that all this had developed simply out of his desire to help people and tell the truth. Then again…look at what Jesus had gone through.
There you go again! You’re not him! You’re not some god, or even son of same, to be worshipped.
Then again, maybe Jesus told himself the same thing, and look how that turned out.
Yes! Just look at how it turned out!
He mentally shook off the inner dialogue like a cocker spaniel shedding water and approached the diner. He briefly felt a flash of concern. What if the waitress had ignored his express wishes and summoned the media? He might walk in there to a bevy of flashbulbs and a hundred questions being hurled at him at once. Well, he just had to trust that she had done as he instructed.
He stepped in and spotted her instantly. She’d been waiting for him. The place was deserted, just as it had been a week previously, except for the waitress…and one other person. The waitress was seated at a booth opposite someone, and when Arthur entered, she gasped and pointed. The other person turned and Arthur saw it was an older woman. Not just any older woman, but the spitting image of the waitress twenty, thirty years from now. Obviously it was her mother.
The waitress’s mother was immediately on her feet, and she was speaking in rapid Spanish. Now he was wishing he’d brought Percival with him, who was fluent in the language.
But the specifics of what she was saying were less important than the generalities of what she was doing. She was rapidly moving her hands and fingers, her arms, stretching out her legs in one direction, then the other. The waitress then chose to pitch in by saying, “My mother is demonstrating how the arthritis has cleared up, almost overnight. Before it was practically crippling her, so that her hands were little more than claws. And now she uses them with no problem. She says she thought she was going to have to move to Arizona or some such awful place to ever have this degree of freedom again. She is saying that you have released her from the curse of her own body. That you are a miracle worker, and she will thank you in her prayers for the rest of her life.”
The older woman nodded, then reached out toward Arthur. Her hand froze a few inches away from him, and she looked at him nervously, as if afraid to make contact. “It’s all right,” he assured her, and reached out to take her hand between the two of his. She gasped at the contact, and tears began to stream down her face. She said more of the same that she’d been saying before, and then she threw caution aside and wrapped both her arms around him, holding him tightly.
“Thank you,” she whispered. “Thank you, thank you.”
He awkwardly patted her on the back. “You’re…most welcome, I assure you. And thank you for being a willing test case…”
That was when Arthur started hearing sirens. Police cars were speeding toward the area, the red lights atop their cars blazing red and their sirens cranked up to maximum. Prying the mother off himself as he would a banana peel, he stepped out onto the sidewalk and watched as the police cars barreled into the nearest entrance for Central Park.
Naturally what occurred to him was that Gwen or Percival or both had gone out looking for him, and something terrible had happened. Quickly he called, “I have to go. Sorry,” and sprinted off without waiting for the waitress inside to translate what he’d said for the benefit of her mother.
As he ran through Central Park, he found that the sirens were confusing him, particularly insofar as the direction from which they were coming. They were in a park, granted, but there were buildings lining the perimeter of it, and he was getting echoes and rebounds that made it difficult for him to know exactly where the police were. Every instinct was telling him that he should retire back to the castle, to play it safe. But he was Arthur, King of the Britons, wielder of Excalibur. He was sick to death of playing it safe. It was a bad fit for him, like an ill-made jacket.
Then he started to hear voices. People shouting…a lot of people. Chants and profanities, and from the sounds of it it was one group hurling imprecations at another group. He wended his way through the trees and found himself standing on the edge of a large field. Off to his right was a baseball diamond that was, at the moment, unoccupied. All the people present were more toward the middle of the field, engaged in exactly the activity he had thought he was going to see.
It was a mob, a huge one. Several hundred people at least, by Arthur’s estimation, and maybe more. A sizable portion of them were wearing medieval garb, and they were in direct, head-to-head confrontation with other people shouting, bellowing, carrying signs that denounced Arthur and everything he stood for. More police were arriving with every passing moment, trying to get between the two infuriated camps. It was clear to Arthur what had happened. There had been a get-together, a prayer meeting, whatever one would want to call it. And it had been transformed into a demonstration, and perhaps even violence, when aggrieved protesters had shown up to voice their fury over the perceived slighting of their lord.
“The amount of violence that’s been done in the name of the Prince of Peace,” Arthur muttered, shaking his head.
“Shocking, isn’t it.”
Arthur started from the voice speaking in a droll manner from practically at his shoulder. His hand went reflexively for Excalibur even as he turned and realized that it was Percival standing there, and he relaxed with an exhalation of air. “Damn your eyes, you could make
some
noise when you approach. How did you get out of the castle?”
“I pushed the door open,” he said reasonably. “Gwen’s waiting just inside to push it open for me if I couldn’t find you and needed to get back in.”
“Why are you here?”
“Gwen was getting nervous over your lengthy absence, so I went looking for you on her behalf. I heard the sounds of trouble and figured you’d be nearby, if not the central cause for it.”
“Apparently, I’m both.”
“And you’re going to do something about it, aren’t you.”
Arthur glanced around at the last and greatest of his knights with a raised eyebrow. “Is that a challenge, Sir Percival?”
“No, your Highness. Just a prediction, knowing you as I do. Candidly, I’d much rather we head back to the castle. You throw yourself into the midst of this, and I don’t stop you, your lady wife is going to want to smack me upside the head.”
“And yet you seem disinclined to stop me.”
Percival shrugged. “Honestly, sire? Men like you and I…we’re not built for standing aside and doing nothing. If we’re not in the midst of the fray, we’re just not happy. And I think you deserve happiness as much as the next fellow. Besides”—and Percival grinned lopsidedly—“your wife hits like a girl, so I think I can take it.”
The roar of the crowd seemed to increase. Despite the police officers’ best efforts, punches were being thrown and connecting. The two groups were surging toward each other, and any minute now, things were going to get seriously ugly.
Arthur put out his hand, and said firmly, “Percival…” He didn’t need to complete the sentence as Percival handed him the Holy Grail.
Without hesitation, Arthur started out toward the area of the empty baseball diamond. He remembered that when Excalibur and the Holy Grail—then in the form of its sword—had come together in combat, the impact that the two had made had been formidable, to say the least. Now it was, of course, in the shape of a cup, and Arthur had no intention of smacking it around with Excalibur. Nevertheless, he had the feeling that the mere act of the two coming in contact with one another might be sufficient to gain the mob’s attention.