Knight Life (13 page)

    
“Um,” Harold said, and patted down his pockets. “I, uh, I don't seem to have a pen.”

    
“Not to worry,” said Buddy. He patted all the pockets in his limply hanging poncho and then in his tattered pants. With a frown he checked the hair behind his ears and then his beard. It was from that unchecked growth of facial hair that he finally extracted a Bic pen and extended it to the couple.

    
“I'm going to be sick,” said Alice between clenched teeth. “I swear, God as my witness, I'm going to be sick.”

    
Not settling for looks this time, Harold muttered, “Shut up, Alice,” as he took the pen and signed the petition. “Maybe you would have preferred it if he had assaulted your virtue.”

    
Buddy and Alice exchanged glances. Neither seemed particularly enthused with the idea.

    
“Harold!” she said after a moment. “You're putting our address!”

    
“Yeah. So?”

    
“So ...” Her eyes narrowed as she inclined her head toward Buddy and, speaking in an urgently low voice in
hopes that Buddy couldn't hear her, she said, “What if he tries to—you know—come to the house?”

    
And then she jumped slightly as the obviously sharp-eared Buddy said, “Oh, I'd never do that.” Then he gave the matter some thought. “Unless you invited me.”

    
Harold tried to smile pleasantly. What he achieved was the look of a man passing a kidney stone, but he continued valiantly, “What a … what a marvelous idea. We have to do that, real soon.”

    
“When?”

    
“What?” Harold felt as if the ground was shifting beneath his feet.

    
“When do you want me to come over?” Buddy looked eagerly from one of them to the other.

    
“I'm … I'm not sure. It's going to be pretty hectic for us, too hectic to make social plans.”

    
“Oh.” Buddy looked crestfallen, but he brightened up. “Well, I'll give you a call, okay?” He smiled ingratiatingly.

    
“Okay,” said Harold gamely. “You bet.”

    
Harold quickly handed back the signed petition, and then they walked at double-time down the street. Buddy watched them go, and when they were almost out of earshot he screamed, “Are we talking dinner or just coffee and cake here?”

    
He shrugged when he got no response, and looked down proudly at his first signature. Only a few thousand more and he could knock off for the day. Then he reached into his beard and moaned. “Crud! The sons of bitches took my pen.” He shook his head in disillusionment. “You just can't trust anyone these days. There's freaks everywhere.”

P
ROFESSOR BERTRAM SOTHERBY
, noted geologist, was emerging from the depths of the New York University subway stop on the BMT when a shadowy
figure materialized in front of him. In one hand was a switchblade. In the other was a clipboard.

    
“Hello,” growled Elvis. “I'd like your support for Arthur Penn, who would like to run as an independent for mayor of New York City. Sign this or I'll cut your fucking heart out.”

    
Elvis collected 117 signatures. Before lunch. Without breaking a sweat.

U
P IN DUFFY
Square, in the heart of the Broadway theater district, Arthur Penn stood on a street corner near a Howard Johnson's, feeling extremely forlorn. About a block away, Gwen was likewise working on canvassing passersby.

    
A likely looking pair of elderly women approached him, and he started to say, in a very chatty and personable manner, “Hello, my name is Arthur Penn, and I would like your support in my candidacy for mayor ...” which was more or less the phrasing that Merlin had told him to use. But the two women picked up their pace and stared straight ahead. His voice trailed off as Arthur realized with a shock that they were not only ignoring him, but they were pointedly ignoring him. Then he thought that perhaps he was judging them too harshly, that maybe they simply had not heard him. The elderly were notorious for being hard of hearing. Yes, that may very well be it.

    
So the next time a youngish, businessman-looking sort approached him, he began his approach again of “Hello, my name is …” But again he got no further than stating his
raison d'être
before this chap, too, was out of earshot.

    
No. It was not possible. People of any age could never be so unspeakably rude as to ignore someone who was pointblank addressing them. Could they?

    
Arthur checked his appearance in the reflection in the display window of the Howard Johnson's. No, his suit was well cut and smart, his grooming immaculate. He
presented, to anyone who bothered to look, the perfect image of an educated and intelligent individual, not a threat or someone to be overlooked. It started to sink in to him that everything Merlin had said to him very early this morning, before he'd gone out canvassing, had been absolutely correct.

    
He exchanged a look down the block with Gwen, who was clearly feeling equally frustrated. She shrugged and gestured vaguely at the people bustling around them. For the first time he turned and saw, really saw, the raw, almost manic energy of the area around him. It was a nippy day, but the sun was shining brightly. It was twelve thirty, the height of the lunch hour. Furthermore, it was a Wednesday, which meant many people were out looking to pick up matinee show tickets. Arthur was not prepared for it, for the pulse of the humanity around him. Every blessed one of the passing people was in a hurry, as if they had an inner spring mechanism unwinding at an incredible rate.

    
It had not dawned on him at first that it had any direct bearing on him, but now he realized the error, the short-sightedness of his thinking. He couldn't expect people to stop in their tracks for him. He had to attempt to adapt himself to their speed. He had to be flexible, after all. The wise man—the civilized man—knew when to be firm and when to adapt. So he began to speak, faster and faster, and soon the words were tumbling one over the other, like cars piling high on a crashing locomotive.

    
“Hello my name is arthur pennandi would like your …” One syllable after another, indecipherable and incomprehensible, and the only result it had was to prompt people to move even faster than before—a feat he would not have previously thought possible. Some of them would cast glances at him that ranged from pitying to contemptuous to outright bewilderment.

    
Abruptly he stopped talking. His lips thinned and his brow clouded. He looked across the street and noticed that
there was a traffic island, a solitary oasis in the sea of cars that stretched as far as he could see in either direction. On the island there was a mob of people, all milling around in loosely formed lines. Reaching out, Arthur stopped the first passerby, a delivery boy carrying somebody's called-in lunch. There was a spreading wet spot on the bag, which indicated that whatever was inside was leaking, which meant that the boy was in a hurry. Arthur almost let him pass on that basis, but then realized that everyone in the damned city seemed to have a reason for hurrying, and he might as well stop the first person that seemed worthwhile. So he did, snagging the confused boy by the arm. Before the delivery boy could ask what was going on, Arthur was pointing to the crowd across the way and asking, “What is the purpose of that gathering?”

    
The delivery boy rallied. “Look, asshole, I'm runnin' late and I can't—uuuhhnnnff!” That final, startled gasp came as a result of Arthur grabbing a handful of the boy's windbreaker. Despite the fact that he and the teenager were the same height, Arthur effortlessly lifted him into the air. The boy's eyes bugged out, not from lack of breath so much as from pure astonishment. The lunch he was carrying was sitting inside a cardboard cover from a Hammermill paper box, and Arthur caught it as it slipped from his fingers. His gaze, however, did not waver from the startled young delivery chap. And at first, when he spoke, it was with a voice like thunder, for the one-time king of the Britons was not accustomed to being ignored, and couldn't say he liked it much. What he could say was, “I will be ignored no longer!”

    
He saw out the corner of his eye Gwen's reaction to what he was doing, and then he noticed the lack of color in the boy's face, and immediately his anger lessened as he mentally chided himself,
Is this what it has come to then, Pendragon? Threatening hapless errand boys?
Arthur felt something he had not experienced in years: shame. Certainly it was a feeling he'd known from his youth, with
even distressing regularity, as Merlin would teach young Wart lessons about all manner of things. And more often than not, those lessons were very deep and very profound and very painful. They were, he thought at the time, the worst time of his entire life. How he missed them.

    
He lowered the boy gently to the ground. “Art well, lad?”

    
“My ...” He gulped once, afraid to say the wrong thing and set his captor off again. “My name's not Art. But I'm okay, yeah.”

    
And now Gwen was at his side. “Arthur,” she said (initially having addressed him as “Mr. Penn” until he had insisted on the use of his first name) “are you all right?”

    
Arthur let out a sigh, but his anger was still quite evident. “I have been at this for much of the day, and the paltry few signatures that I have accrued—
blast their eyes!”
He smashed a fist against a nearby wall. The wall did not show any signs of yielding. Arthur's fist, on the other hand, had newly acquired bruises that would be there for days.

    
“That's not going to help,” she said urgently, taking his fist in her hands and examining it for signs of damage. The delivery boy had, by this point, scampered. But Arthur wasn't paying attention to that; he was too busy ranting. “That I should have to endure this just so that I can offer them my aid. The leadership I should be given by right I have to scrabble for ...”

    
“By right?” She laughed reflexively, but then saw the hurt in his eyes and said, a bit more gently this time, “Arthur ... in this life, nothing's given to you. Even the stuff you think you have a right to, sooner or later you wind up fighting for it.”

    
“I suppose,” he sighed.

    
“What was up with the boy just then?”

    
“Up? Oh ... I was just trying to determine the purpose of yon gath—of that gathering over there.”

    
“That's the TKTS line,” said Gwen, pronouncing each
letter individually. “People stand there on line and can buy tickets for half price to—”

    
Arthur had been doing a slow burn all day, and even as he was inwardly surprised at the vehemence of his reaction, he nevertheless exploded. “
That
they have time for? By Vortigern, they make time to await tickets for entertainment purposes and yet cannot spare half a minute on topics that could alter the face of this city ... of this nation!
Gods!
”

    
“Arthur!” said Gwen, but he was no longer paying attention to her. Without heeding the traffic around him, he stormed across the street. Cars screeching to a halt mere inches from him did not even catch his notice. Horns blasting didn't faze him. He reached the TKTS mob and elbowed his way through, earning shouts and curses from his would-be constituency. In an abstract way, he knew that he wasn't doing himself any favors by alienating those very people whose vote he was hoping to capture, but at that moment he was more interested in recapturing his own pride.

    
Arthur found himself at the base of a statue that was labeled Father Patrick Duffy. With quick, sure movements he scaled it, and moments later was shoulder-to-shoulder with the fighting priest from World War I. A few people glanced at him and then turned away. The rest ignored him completely.

    
At that point, he was almost accustomed to being ignored, which was a fine state of affairs for someone who—a mere millennia or so ago—had entire regiments of knights snapping to attention at his every passing comment. With one arm still wrapped around the statue, he reached across his body to his left hip. He felt it there: the pommel, and then the hilt of Excalibur. He had flatly refused to go out onto the street without the comfortable weight of the enchanted sword by his side. So Merlin had added a further enchantment, rendering the blade invisible as long as it remained in the scabbard.

    
Now, though, was not the time to keep his weapon concealed. Arthur pulled on the sword and it slid from the scabbard with ease. Excalibur sparkled in the sun, and Arthur thrilled to the weight, to the joy of it. No one was paying any attention to him, with the exception of Gwen, and she was momentarily distracted since she was busy trying to cross the street without being run over.

    
“My arm is whole again,” he whispered reverently. Then he swung the sword back, brought it around, and smacked the flat of the blade against the statue. The resulting clang was on par with a Chinese gong, and although it nearly deafened Arthur himself, it also served to get the attention of everyone within a block's radius.

    
“All right,” he shouted. With practiced smoothness he had already returned Excalibur to its sheath, returning it to invisibility as well. “I have had enough. Enough of this street corner posturing and mindless games. By the gods you will attend my words. Rip your minds for a few minutes from mindless frivolities and ant-like natterings! I am running for mayor of this city!” He saw their reactions and added, “Yes, that's what this is all about. I see it in your faces. This is why I want a moment of your precious time.”