I glanced around us. The fog was thinning at last, and the battle seemed to have ended. At least I could see no one
near, hear no sounds of battle, no shouts or screams or even moans of pain. Nothing but deadly silence. The very air had become absolutely still.
Arthur was sinking fast. His voice barely a whisper, he said to me, “I want you to take Excalibur, Orion. Return it to the Lady of the Lake, with my eternal thanks.”
“I will, sire.” Then the idea struck me. “And you with it.”
4
Grasping him carefully,
tenderly, I picked up Excalibur in one hand and then rose to my feet with Arthur in my arms. The pain from the knife wound in my back nearly made me collapse. But I fought it down and willed us to the distant lake far to the south where Anya had first appeared to him in her guise as the Lady of the Lake and given Arthur his Excalibur. One instant we were on the blood-soaked battlefield of Camlann,
wispy tendrils of fog clinging to us, the next we were at the shore of the lake, in the silver moonlight of a calm, warm evening.
And Anya was standing at the shore, the little wavelets lapping at the hem of her long white robe, her lustrous onyx hair garlanded with flowers. Her beautiful face was framed in moonlight, her lustrous eyes wide, startled.
“Orion!” She gaped at me. “How did you bring
me here?”
“I?” I asked, just as surprised as she looked. “I thought you came of your own power.”
Anya shook her head. “I was halfway across the galaxy, Orion. Now, suddenly, I’m here with you.”
“One of the other Creators…?” I wondered.
With a slow smile of understanding, she said, “No, Orion. It was you. You summoned me. You translated me across eons and light-years.”
I started to shake my
head. “I don’t possess that kind of power. Aten never built that capability into me.”
“You’ve learned how to do it, Orion. You’re gaining the powers of the Creators themselves.”
The realization stunned me. I stood there with the dying Arthur in my arms, staring at Anya, who smiled back at me knowingly. I am gaining the powers of the Creators themselves, I thought. Yet I felt no different than
before. But wait: the wound in my back was healed. I was no longer in pain; I felt strong, powerful.
A groan from Arthur snapped me back to my senses. Strong and powerful I may be, but Arthur was dying in my arms.
“I failed, Orion,” he said, his voice weak, faint. “I tried to bring them peace, tried to protect them from the barbarians, and it all came to naught.”
“Not so, sire,” I said, as
I laid him gently on the moonlit grass. “The Saxons and other invaders have turned to peaceful ways, because of you. You and your knights have brought peace and stability to Britain, while the rest of Europe has sunk into savagery and despair.”
“I killed my own son,” he sobbed.
Kneeling beside him, I said, “He gave you no alternative. He was intent on killing you and ending all you stood for.”
With a painful sigh, he said, “Modred has succeeded, then. All that I stood for is lost.”
“It’s not lost, Arthur. Britain will never sink into the barbarism that would have engulfed it if you had not lived. Over the coming years, the coming centuries, Britain will remain free, strong, a haven against the tides of barbarians that will sweep the continent.”
He almost smiled. “The Channel … our
moat defensive, to protect us against barbarian invasions.”
“Not merely the Channel, sire. That’s just a band of water. It will be the men on this side of the Channel, the men who remember Arthur and his knights of the Round Table, who remember that you fought for the right, to protect the weak, to keep human decency alive on this island.”
“It would be pretty if it were true,” he whispered.
“Believe it, sire. Britain will be a beacon of freedom and hope for ages to come. The memory of you and your knights will shine across the world.”
He actually did smile. And closed his eyes.
Anya touched my shoulder. “Let him rest, Orion. Let him die in peace.”
Getting to my feet, I looked down at Arthur. His face was covered with blood from his terrible wound, but it looked peaceful, content.
I placed Excalibur in his folded hands.
My eye caught a faint glimmering in among the trees that ringed the lake. As I watched, it grew into a bright golden glow and I knew that Aten, the self-styled Golden One, had come to join us.
Once, his presence would have paralyzed me, left me helpless with awe, unable to move a muscle. But no longer, not now.
He stepped out from the trees, a stunning
figure resplendent in a skintight uniform of metallic gold. He smiled coldly at Anya, then turned his gaze to me. I stood before him, unmoving, unmoved.
“Your work here is finished, Orion,” said the Golden One, glancing down at Arthur’s body.
“Not yet,” I said. “Not yet.”
5
Almost before I myself knew what I intended to do, Aten snarled at me, “You dare?”
“I dare,” I replied.
“I’ll destroy
you forever!”
Anya held up a restraining hand. “No, Aten. You can’t. Orion has learned far too much to buckle to your will.”
“You defy me, too?”
She gave him a serene smile. “Let Orion do what he wishes. In fact, I don’t think you can stop him. He’s almost our equal now.”
“Equal?” The Golden One sputtered with rage. “A creature, my equal?”
“You built him too well, Aten,” said Anya. “He is
learning how to be a god.”
“Never!”
“See for yourself,” Anya said. Then she turned to me. “Go ahead, Orion. Save Arthur if you can.”
I looked down at Arthur’s dying body. Closing my eyes and focusing all my energies, I translated him through time. In a swirl of centuries I sent Arthur through the spacetime vortex, across the continuum, to appear in Britain whenever he was needed.
In a wild
kaleidoscope of shifting time I was with him as we led townsmen who battled the brutal Viking invaders bringing fire and death to Britain in their longships.
I was part of Arthur’s crew in the fireboat as we sailed across the choppy waters of the Channel to defend Britain against the Spanish Armada.
On the deck of a man-of-war, slippery with crewmen’s blood, together we fired our cannon at the
French ships off Trafalgar, loaded, and fired again, as we desperately held Napoleon’s invasion forces at bay.
I flew alongside Arthur in the Battle of Britain as we few, we band of brothers, hurled our Hurricanes and Spitfires against the Nazis who were trying to invade and conquer Britain.
And I stood at the edge of the moonlit lake, facing the smiling Anya and the enraged Aten. Arthur’s body
was gone, translated through spacetime, leading his people whenever they were threatened with invasion.
“He isn’t dead,” I said to Aten. “He will never be dead, not as long as Britain needs him.”
Blazing with fury, Aten roared at me, “You fool! You ignorant, arrogant fool! Do you realize what you’ve done? Do you understand that every change you make in the continuum unravels the fabric of spacetime?
You’ve forced us to spend eternity trying to repair the damage you’ve caused!”
“So be it,” I replied. “You began the unraveling by your tinkering with the fate of the human race.”
“We
created
the human race!” Aten bellowed.
“And the human race evolved into us,” said Anya, coolly. She seemed almost amused.
Steaming, Aten swore, “I’ll destroy you, Orion. Once and for all, I’ll erase your existence.”
Anya shook her head. “I doubt that you have that power, Aten. Orion is too strong for you now.”
He glared at her. “We’ll see,” he snapped. And with that he disappeared as abruptly as a light switched off.
Anya stretched out her hand to me. “You’re in great danger, dearest. He’s a deadly enemy now.”
“You’re in danger, too,” I said, clasping her soft warm hand in mine.
She laughed lightly. “Both
of us, then. Together.”
Epilogue: Paradise
We lay side by side on our bellies in the high grass. We had been tracking the boar all morning. The sun burned hot above, but beneath the shade of the broad-leafed trees the air was cool with the breeze blowing in from the nearby sea.
Anya didn’t look much like a goddess. She wore an animal pelt, arms and legs bare, her lovely face smudged with dirt, her flowing onyx hair
wildly tangled.
She smiled at me, and her beauty shone through all the stains and smears of this existence. We were in Paradise, the broad, beautiful, game-filled forest that stretched across the northern rim of Africa. The basin that would one day be known as the Mediterranean Sea was filling from the enormous waterfall spilling in from the Atlantic Ocean where the Pillars of Hercules stood.
Every day the sea grew, bringing fresh rains to nourish the broad, green forest.
North of the filling basin the land that would become Europe was almost completely covered by a two-mile-thick ice sheet that stretched all the way to the North Pole. An Ice Age gripped much of the world, and the human race—scattered across Africa for the most part, in tiny bands of nomadic hunters—had yet to invent
agriculture or build villages.
Paradise. A hunting ground teeming with game and freedom. Anya and I were happy here. Who wouldn’t be? There were no chiefs here among the meager human tribes, no kings or vassals, no cities to confine us, no wars to bring slaughter and misery.
What would one day become the island of Britain was still attached to the mainland of Europe, buried beneath the glaciers
that would not melt for another thousand centuries.
Silently, Anya tapped me on the shoulder. I could not see the boar through the high grass, but I heard it snuffling. We were upwind of the beast, yet it still sounded wary, dangerous.
Inching along slowly on our bellies, we followed the boar’s grumbles. I moved slightly ahead of Anya. Like her, I was gripping a wooden spear in one hand, its
tip hardened by fire.
With the tip of the spear I slowly, carefully parted the tufts of grass obscuring my vision. There was the boar, rooting in the ground with its curved tusks, unaware of our presence and its impending death. It was a big animal, enough meat to feed our little band of hunters for many days. If we could kill it. If it didn’t kill us first.
Anya tapped my shoulder again and
made a circling motion with her free hand. I nodded, and she slithered off to my right as silently as a snake. I smiled at my huntress. In later ages she would be worshipped as Athena, warrior and giver of wisdom. In this era she was a Neolithic hunter, happy and free.
I worried that she might move too far in her ploy to attack the boar from two sides. If the breeze changed even a little the
beast would sniff us out and bolt away. Or charge at her with those powerful, sharp tusks.
And that is just what happened. Almost.
The boar’s head suddenly snapped up. It grunted, much like an old man suddenly disturbed in his slumber. My senses went into overdrive. I saw the boar’s muscles tense beneath its shaggy coat. If it charged at Anya while she was still inching along the ground, prone,
it could rip her apart before she could use her spear to defend herself.
I leaped to my feet and bellowed at the animal. It froze for an instant, then turned toward me, its narrow little eyes blinking. For a moment I thought it would scamper away, and our whole morning’s stalk would be wasted. Instead it bunched its muscles, lowered its head, and charged straight at me.
I gripped my spear in
both hands, ready to impale the beast when it got close enough. But then Anya burst out of the foliage to my right and nailed the animal through its ribs with her spear. The boar growled and twisted, yanking the spear from Anya’s hands. Slathering, spouting blood, it turned on her.
I raced forward and rammed my spear through its hindquarters, nailing it to the ground. It screeched horribly as
it thrashed about, trying to work itself loose. I held on to my spear, keeping the beast pinned.
Anya jumped lightly to the boar’s side, yanked her spear out, then jammed it in again at the base of the animal’s skull. It collapsed and went silent.
“Well done,” I said, puffing.
She laughed. “Well done yourself, Orion.”
By the time we finished quartering the carcass we were both grimy and splattered
with the boar’s blood and entrails. I grinned at her. Anya didn’t look like a goddess now—unless perhaps she was Artemis, goddess of the hunt.
As we toted the meat through the forest, back to the clearing where our band had made its little camp, Anya said happily, “We’ll feast tonight.”
“And tomorrow,” I said. “Several tomorrows.”
Her cheerful smile faded. “How many tomorrows do we have, Orion?”
I knew what she meant. “As many as we desire, dear one.”
But she shook her head sadly. “Aten is scheming to destroy you, darling. You know that.”
“Let him scheme. We can stay here in Paradise as long as we want to.”
“I wish that were true.”
“Why not?” I demanded.
She caught me with those infinite gray eyes of her. “Aten must be plotting with others of the Creators to eliminate you, erase
you from the continuum as if you never existed.”
“He can try,” I growled.
“He
is
trying! I can sense it.”
“We’re safe enough here.”
“For how long? A week? A year?”
Shaking my head, I admitted, “I still don’t understand how you can travel through time and yet still be bound by it.”
“The point is, Orion,” she said, very seriously, “that the longer we stay here in Paradise the longer Aten has
to plan your destruction.”
“Maybe I should destroy him, then.”
Her eyes widened. “Destroy a Creator?”
“He’d destroy me if he could. Why shouldn’t I fight back?”
“But … destroy a Creator?” The idea seemed to shock her.
I stopped and let the bloody chunk of the boar slide from my shoulders to the ground. “We’ve got to do something. You’re right about that.”
“What do you have in mind?” she
asked.
“I don’t know. Not yet.” I felt a weight far heavier than the boar settling on my shoulders. “But I’ve got to do something, don’t I?”