Orion and King Arthur (31 page)

“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 said 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.

If I could translate myself across the continuum back to Arthur’s time and place.

BOOK III

The Death of Arthur

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Castle Tintagel

1

Once again I found myself in utter darkness, disembodied, translating across spacetime. Cold, abyssal cold, with not even a star to break the darkness.

And alone. Totally alone. I sensed no other presence, neither Aten nor Anya nor any of the Creators. I was translating myself across the centuries, striving to get back to Britain in Arthur’s time. By myself.
Without the help of any of the Creators.

I heard the raucous screech of a gull. Opening my eyes, I climbed slowly to my feet and saw that I was standing on a green, grass-topped bluff at the edge of the sea. Far below me the ocean crashed on gray rocks. Overhead, puffy white clouds sailed past on a gusting summer wind.

I was dressed as I had been at Arthur’s castle of Cadbury, in chain mail
with a plain tunic draped over it. Boots, but without spurs. A Celtic longsword was belted to my hip, but I had neither shield nor helmet. I felt the comforting presence of the dagger Odysseos had given me at Troy, long ages ago, strapped to my thigh beneath my tunic.

Across an inlet of the sea rose a rock-bound island, topped with a formidable-looking castle. No, not an island, I realized. It
was actually a cape, connected to the mainland by a narrow stem of land.

This must be Tintagel, I told myself. King Mark’s castle by the sea, in Cornwall. Why am I here, I asked myself, instead of at Cadbury, with Arthur?

On the mainland side of that neck an army was encamped. I could see field tents scattered across the grass, grubby and soiled. They had been there for months, it seemed to
me. Some of them were so large they reminded me of the imperial tents of the Mongol khans, where I had met Ogatai, High Khan of the Mongols, son of the magnificent Genghis Khan. Ogatai had befriended me, took me hunting with him. In return, I had murdered him, as Aten had commanded me to. I had saved Europe from Mongol conquest; I had saved my friend Ogatai from the long agony of cancer.

Shaking
my head to clear my mind of those memories, I realized that the encamped army must be besieging Tintagel. I studied the castle for a while and saw how truly redoubtable it was. Built of stone, Tintagel sat atop a high, steep hill in the middle of the semi-island. The only access to its high walls was along a narrow road that twisted up the hill laboriously, then ran along the length of the castle’s
protective wall.

Attackers would have to come up along that road, vulnerable to fire from the wall. And the road was so narrow that only a few men-at-arms could approach the castle’s main gate at a time. A handful of men could defend Tintagel against an army, I realized.

Looking back to the camp of the besiegers, I saw large flags planted in front of the biggest tents, each of them bearing the
stylized red dragon of the Pendragon clan. Arthur was here! That was why I had materialized here; I willed myself to be near Arthur, and he was at Tintagel, not Cadbury.

But why was Arthur, High King of the Britons, not making war on the barbarian invaders of the island? Why was he besieging a fellow Celt, King Mark of Cornwall, here at Mark’s castle of Tintagel?

2

I walked down along the bluff’s
edge and into the camp of Arthur’s army. Instead of attacking high-walled Tintagel, Arthur was apparently content to try to starve King Mark into submission. Discipline was lax. The young men-at-arms lolled before their grimy tents, some honing their weapons, many of them simply sprawling in the sun. Serving wenches were plentiful, their clothes filthy. Disease would soon strike this camp,
I knew.

No one challenged me as I walked through the outlying tents, heading toward those banners bearing their red dragons. But there was a trio of armed men standing guard as I approached Arthur’s tent, leaning nonchalantly on their spears. Their tunics looked grimy, as if they hadn’t been washed in weeks.

“Where d’you think you’re going?” their leader challenged me.

“I am King Arthur’s squire,”
I said.

“Squire? I never saw you around here before.” He was a tough-looking veteran, his right cheek marked with a livid scar that left a white line across his beard. His eyes were narrowed with suspicion. He bore the red dragon emblem on his tunic.

“I’ve been away,” I said, truthfully. “On a mission for the High King. Arthur will be glad to see me.”

“Maybe he will and maybe he won’t.” The
guard was clearly puzzled, unsure of what he should do. His two companions came up and stood on either side of him, gripping their long spears tightly. They were younger than he, mere lads.

“Take me to Sir Bors, then,” I said. “He’ll recognize me.”

“Bors?” the guard exclaimed. “Old Bors has been dead these five years and more.”

Five years? How long have I been away from Arthur?

“Sir Kay?”
I asked. “Gawain?”