That Way Lies Camelot (37 page)

With that, the little fellow deflated, plumped himself down, and set his elbows on his knees and his chin in cupped palms, to ponder the gravity of his dilemma.

The boisterous Grail had against all his nature grown still, and Lynn seized the moment to take stock. She unlocked her hand from the dog's neck, reawakened to discomforts both mental and physical. One pant leg was icily soaked. She had sticks and leaves in her hair, an astonishing departure. But these upsets paled to insignificance before the fact that she could exchange conversation and bargain with a creature that by rights belonged in the province of fairy tales.

After the briefest cogitation, she concluded that her nerves were too worn from the strain of dealing with Sandy's illness. That was enough to wrestle without battling further with a situation that confounded logic. Either the creature in the stump was a pixie or a leprechaun, or something else of that ilk; or else she was irrevocably crazy.

The truth in the verdict was unlikely to help Sandy, either way.

The next instant the matter resolved itself. With no warning, and a blinding quick movement, the little man shot to his feet and bolted for the opening in the stump.

Illusions didn't bid for escape. Lynn ducked to block off the cleft, and collided shoulder to shoulder with Grail's snarling lunge to achieve the same end.

The combined effect startled the little man back with his hands palm out in supplication. 'Mercy! It's crushed by your blundering about, you'll have me. And unfairly, too I might add, since I've figured a chance for the boy to have what he's wishing.'

Grail whined doubtfully and rolled his eyes.

Unwilling to credit the mutt with intelligence, but touched by the self-same distrust, Lynn glared down at the little man. In vindication for bruised dignity and a growing sense of the ridiculous, she was determined to extract satisfaction, even if the next moment she woke up, rumpled in her bedclothes, to discover the whole event a silly dream. 'You tried to get away,' she accused.

The brown man sulked. 'What if I did?' He crammed chubby hands in the pockets of his waistcoat and started with agitation to pace. '
I'm
caught still, and trying desperate hard to remedy that unfortunate mistake!'

Grail snarled, as if the creature might be lying. In a blend of acerbity and sarcasm that was her way of fending off what could not in conscience be taken seriously, Lynn sighed. 'You don't look to me like a man keeping his half of a bargain.'

The little fellow winced, then looked affronted. His roving carried him over a blackened acorn cap and across the musty confines of the stump. Removed from Grail's muzzle enough to feel secure, he stopped and folded his arms, booted foot tapping, is it so? And what are you thinking? That meddling with a boy's dying, not to mention playing hob with a time frame that passes through legend, is easy? Wishes, which you human sorts almost
never
bother asking,
are grueling business
!
'

Sore from stooping, Lynn eased her knees by leaning a companionable arm across Grail's rawboned shoulder
-
blade. Noisome wet fur was no substitute for upholstery, but the touch of an ordinary animal had become a necessary comfort. She looked a great deal less disgruntled now than her captive, which brought the shrewdness of her management background to the immediate fore. If she was going to play the fool and talk extortion with a fey being inside a rotted stump, Sandy may as well have a crack at the benefits. 'Then, to go free, you'll have to show me some results.'

The tiny man sidled; a sly grin tipped up one corner of his mouth, and he stroked at his wiry fall of whiskers, it is hard work I'll be going off to then, lady. To fix your boy's wish, truth to tell. For that you'll be having to let me out.' He stepped in brash confidence toward the daylight that shone through the cleft.

Lynn's outraged
'What?' tangled with Grail's sudden snarl. The pelted muscle under her shoulder surged as the dog rammed headfirst and growling into the opening in the stump. A scuffle ensued. For a moment, the animal's bulk obscured sight of what transpired within.

Then Grail's tail whipped straight. His buttocks heaved and he backed up. Clenched in between rows of bared teeth, the little man swung from his waistcoat, his arms waving, his terrified shouts thin as a bird's cries over the growls of the dog. The stick whipped the air to and fro, shining like a little brass pin, and about as uselessly effective.

Lynn spared a momen
t for sympathy, mostly for the p
art that the little fellow was probably perishing of dog breath. Discounting his clothes, the rest of him was unmarked, however much his shrieks suggested otherwise.

'Put me down!' he screeched. 'Oh, lady, for pity, I can't be fixing wishes as a dog's snack. Surely it's wise enough you are, and merciful also, to be seeing that!'

Lynn set her jaw and said nothing.

Grail sat, lips peel
ed back and trembling above his
victim. The little man kicked in agitation. 'You need me to make arrangements, don't you? Well, true it is I can't
do that
sick with beast stink and prisoned inside a stump!'

'How do I know your word is good?' Touched to acerbity, Lynn sat down to set her head level with Grail's. She fingered the damp cuff of her jeans. 'Really, if you're going to be trusted, I should go along as observer, to be certain the terms of Sandy's wish are fully met.'

The man's arms fell to his sides with a faint slap. His whiskers drooped. He hung like a mouse from Grail's jaws, a forlorn morsel with a fat belly that strained at his rows of brass buttons. '
I'm
not lying. Spit on my luck if I am.'

Grail's brown eyes held level with Lynn's, imploring canine prudence, and oddly, knowingly, infused with a wisdom no dog she'd ever known had possessed. A queer chill shot through her. In a dark, unbreached corner of her mind, conviction grew, that the dog's purpose was and always had been
to find such a tiny man, and take him captive.

But of course in cold logic, that was ridiculous.

Pressed unbearably against the realities of a child's terminal disease, and faced by unspeakable suffering and now the bitter ending of Sandy's life, Lynn found reason a poor arbiter. Hope and superstition this moment seemed infinitely more kindly. Grave, supremely detached from the
o
ngoing cruelties at the hospital, she sighed. To the tiny man she said, 'That's not good enough.'

'Bother and fiddlesticks!' cried the man. Jostled by movement of the jaws that prisoned him, he rolled widened eyes in trepidation.

Grail looked befuddled, as if his nasal passages had sprouted an itch from too heady a scent of the supernatural. The little man observed this, growing alarmed. He evidently understood that in canines, heavy sneezes often ended with an unkindly whap of muzzle and teeth against the ground. 'I'll show you the results in a dream!' he hollered in sharpened anxiety, it's not so simple, you'll appreciate, with a wish involving more than one party, and one of them with scarcely an hour left to live. You're wasting time!'

'I think not.' Punched inside by reminder of Sandy's condition, and sorry for Ann, waiting alone and unsupported for an ending her
heart could not encompass, Lynn held hard to the last fragment of detachment still left to her. 'That's not good enough. Dreams can be manipulated, I must assume, or the. dog who holds your coattails would be satisfied. Grail hasn't seen fit to let you go.'

'You'd have me set the Sight on you!' howled the man. Dangling, he managed to look irked as he folded his arms across his chest. 'Well that's another wish!'

Lynn glowered levelly back. 'That's no wish, but proper surety.'

'Ah, it's hard, hard in the heart, that humans can be, you female sorts most of all.' The man waved a miniature fist. 'An unchancy business it is, always, dealing with modern-day mortals.' He unlimbered a wrist to wag a finger, cuff buttons flashing like pin heads. 'You folk muddle about wide awake, most times, with your dreams the most living part of you. Did you know as much, you'd fare better.' When this diatribe left Lynn without comment, the brown man fixed her with a glare that made her tingle. 'Well, it's not
my
part to adjust your mortal ills and your muckle mistaken thinking! Very well, miss. As you wish. If you're the blundering sort who sets no stock by dreams, it's the Sight you'll get, to witness my part in the bargain. But sorrow you'll find, and weeping too, when you long to be quit of the gift afterwards!'

This was delivered in vindication, not warning, for the little man raised his hand and flicked his fingers, as if to splat water in Lynn's face.

She saw no physical projectile. But something struck her forehead just below the hairline. A golden bloom rinsed her eyesight, a painless dazzle that flared and faded, and left her senses momentarily encapsulated. As if a bubble had been spun around her consciousness, she felt as if physically suspended.

She raised her head, gasped; the wood she knew was altogether gone. No skunk cabbage grew; no May apples. The ground was a living carpet of shining myrtle. She breathed a chillier, more fragrant air; the trees all about were old oaks, huge towering crowns shafted with midday sunlight. The ground fell away, toward a clearing floored in ivy and moss, and sheltered by water-channeled outcrops.

Little men that lurked in stumps were one thing.
This,
a forest setting more appropriate to a page of medieval romantic illustration, was too much.

Lynn opened her mouth to cry out.

'Be quiet, fool woman!' The little man rapped her fingers with his stick, which caused her a violent start. 'Wake him up, and you'll spoil Sandy's wish!'

Muddled, unable to re-orient herself, Lynn whispered, 'Wake who up?'

Apparently the little man and the mongrel dog had made their peace, for in course of a wild search, she located him, seated in his spit-dampened waistcoat, astride Grail's thick ruff. The brass-tipped stick now pointed toward something a ways off in the undergrowth.

Lynn peered through twining runners of ivy, and saw what looked like bits of basket woven out of sticks. Closer scrutiny revealed a young man, black-haired and high-browed, and barely past his boyhood. He appeared to be asleep. A cheek as innocent and clear-complexioned as a peach rested on uncallused knuckles. His limbs were well made, though delicately muscled, and over his simple tunic he wore what looked to be shoulder pads and breast plate all woven out of willow fronds and twigs.

'My God,' breathed Lynn.

The little man bristled. 'Not God!' He went on to snap in an undertone, 'Just the magic you've demanded of me, and no more.'

Lynn could not .quite stifle awe. 'Who is he?'

'Your Sandy will know.' The little man clapped his palms together in a silent explosion of fey power.

Lynn's hair bristled. A jolt hammered through her that rocked her awareness to its root. She blinked, shaken by its passage, and then stopped, slammed cold still, by the sight of Sandy standing barefoot in his hospital gown. He stepped forward and paused, eye to eye with the creature on Grail's back.

The tubes, the needles, the paraphernalia of medical science that inadequately sought to prolong his life had all gone. Bruises remained, under his eyes and on his arms and in the hollow of his shoulder; the stitchery left by weeks upon weeks of IV needles. He still looked sick and thin, all knobby white limbs and a neck that rose frail as a stem. His eyes shone sunken and huge, haunted yet by the shadows of his suffering.

'Sandy!' gasped Lynn.

But he did not look at her. The little brown man addressed him and his ears seemed sealed to other words.

'You'll be knowing who that is, lying there?' The stick twitched toward the sleeper, and a hand miraculously tiny twined in a fall of chestnut whiskers.

Languid as if sleepwalking, Sandy turned his head. He regarded the young man in his bed of ivy and moss, and a yearning transformed his face with life. Incandescent in delight, he almost laughed. 'Perceval!'

'You'll be knowing the legend, then,' prompted the fey man who had brought both together, the sleeping young man and a dying boy's spirit, to a woodland Lynn could not place in any ecosystem known to modern earth.

'Of course I know.' Sandy's excitement broke through his weakness, made his thin voice ring with derisive joy. 'Perceval was son to a rebel king, thrown down by King Arthur's justice. He was raised in isolation by his mother in a far off tower. She hoped he would become a priest, and escape the fate of his father, to die in battle. But when from a distance Perceval saw some knights riding, he was struck by the sun on their armor. He asked what sort of creatures they were, for their beauty left him in awe. His mother, afraid he would leave her to take up fighting and bloodshed, told him he had seen angels.'

'And so lost him,' the little man picked up, as Sandy's enraptured recitation trailed off. 'For young Perceval replied that there was no more worthy quest than to follow God's angels to heaven.' The little man cracked a smile filled with crafty sharp teeth and inclined his head toward the sleeper. 'Well, so you're seeing,' he confided to Sandy. 'Yon lies Perceval, who set off wearing armor he wove out of sticks, that he could be as like unto the saintly hosts as possible until his reunion with them should be fulfilled.'