Perilous Times: A Novel

by Thomas D. Lee

Genres: Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Dystopian

Synopsis

An immortal Knight of the Round Table faces his greatest challenge yet—saving the politically polarized, rapidly warming world from itself—in this slyly funny contemporary take on Arthurian legend.

“A brilliant collision of ancient mysticism with modern madness.”—Robert Jackson Bennett, bestselling author of the Founders Trilogy

Legends don’t always live up to reality.

Being reborn as an immortal defender of the realm gets awfully tiring over the years—or at least that’s what Sir Kay’s thinking as he claws his way up from beneath the earth yet again.

Kay once rode alongside his brother, King Arthur, as a Knight of the Round Table. Since then, he has fought at Hastings and at Waterloo and in both World Wars. But now he finds himself in a strange new world where oceans have risen, the army’s been privatized, and half of Britain’s been sold to foreign powers. The dragon that’s running amok—that he can handle. The rest? He’s not so sure.

Mariam’s spent her life fighting what’s wrong with her country. But she’s just one ordinary person, up against a hopelessly broken system. So when she meets Kay, she dares to hope that the world has finally found the savior it needs.

Yet as the two travel through this bizarre and dangerous land, they discover that a magical plot of apocalyptic proportions is underway. And Kay’s too busy hunting dragons—and exchanging blows with his old enemy Lancelot—to figure out what to do about it. 

In perilous times like these, the realm doesn’t just need a knight. It needs a true leader. 

Luckily, Excalibur lies within reach. 

But who will be fit to wield it? 

With a cast that includes Merlin, Morgan le Fay, the Lady of the Lake, and King Arthur himself—all reimagined in joyous, wickedly subversive fashion—Perilous Times is an Arthurian retelling that looks forward as much as it looks back . . . and a rollicking, deadpan-funny, surprisingly touching fantasy adventure.

 

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Release date: May 23, 2023

Publisher: Ballantine Books

Print pages: 485

Sample

Chapter 1

Kay crawls up from under his hill, up through the claggy earth.

For the last thousand years, the land around his hill has been dry. Drainage and farming and modern miracles kept the water away. He remembers. Now the ground is waterlogged, as it was when he was first buried. Before the fens were drained. He starts to wonder why, but then he gets a worm in his eye, which is the sort of foul development that drives the thoughts from your head. He makes a small, disgusted sound and wipes the worm away.

This part’s always disagreeable, the brute scramble up toward daylight. He burrows through clay, grabs at roots, until the earth falls away and he’s looking up at a vaguely yellow sky. He gets his head out first, and then an elbow, before taking a break to catch his breath. The air doesn’t taste particularly good. The sun is baking down on his face. It must be midsummer.

He has another go at getting free. The earth’s pulling down on his legs, but the slippery mud slickens his chainmail and provides lubrication. Finally there’s an almighty squelch, and he feels the earth let go. His leg comes free. His hips get past the roots. When he’s out to his knees he almost slips, falls back into the strange hollow that he’s climbed out of, but he manages to stop himself. He gets his shins above ground, and then he’s up, kneeling in the sun, panting in the heat. Wearing a coat of mail and a green wool cloak, both rimed with muddy afterbirth. His dreadlocks are matted with earth.

Sure enough, his little burial hill is surrounded by bog. The waters have risen. This is how it was when he was buried, before the tree grew from his stomach.

He gulps down air, trying to fill his lungs, but the air feels heavier than it ought to feel. It doesn’t look like there’s anyone here to wake him up this time. In the old days there were bands of horsemen, sometimes even a king, in person, when the need was dire. Then it became army lorries, or circles of druids in white shifts, slightly surprised that their dancing had actually achieved something. More recently, a man in a raincoat, checking his wristwatch, with a flying machine roaring on the grass behind him. Nothing today. It must be one of the more organic ones, where the earth itself decides to shake his shoulder. Something shifting in the spirit of the realm. Or maybe the birds in the sky have held a parliament and voted to dig him up. He looks around. No sign of any birds, either.

“Bad, then,” he mutters, to nobody.

Kay drags himself to his feet. First thing to do is to find his sword and shield. They usually get regurgitated somewhere nearby, though there’s no exact science to it. He’s not sure that the earth fully underst

ands its obligations. The covenant with Merlin was fairly specific. Make this warrior whole again and surrender him back to the realm of the living, whenever Britain is in peril. Return him with his sword and shield and other tools of war, untarnished. When peril is bested, let him return to your bosom and sleep, until peril calls him forth again.

It couldn’t have been much clearer. But mud is mud. Mud struggles with written instructions. There were bound to be some misunderstandings.

There’s something new across the bog. He squints at it, because the sun is bright and reflecting off the metal parts. An ugly cluster of low buildings, with pipes running everywhere like a mass of serpents. In the center is a silver tower shaped like a bullet. A fortress? Bigger, though, than Arthur’s fortress at Caer Moelydd ever was.

“Didn’t used to be there,” he says to himself.

It seems like a good place to start, if he’s going to figure out why he’s back.

He heads downhill, the earth squishing underfoot. His sword might be in the bog somewhere, hilt protruding from the wet earth. Hopefully he’ll just stumble onto it. That’s usually how this works, the various ancient forces of the realm conspiring to make things easier for him. That was always one of the perks of being in Arthur’s warband. You’d blunder into the forest and you’d happen upon a talking raven who could tell you where to find what you were questing for. How else would idiots like Bors and Gawain have achieved anything, if they hadn’t had assistance from white hinds and river spirits, guiding them on their way? Not that they ever showed any gratitude.

Across the bog, the mess of buildings glistens. Strange that whoever built this thing built it so close to his old hill. But it’s no stranger than white hinds or talking ravens. Riding through the old forests, you could never shake the feeling that there was a quest around the corner, put there by some greater power, whether that power was the Christ King or the Saxon gods or some older goddess of the trees. Arthur never seemed to notice. It seemed natural to him that things of import should occur in his proximity. If anyone else noticed, they knew better than to mention it. Only Kay would bring it up occasionally and earn himself a scowl from Merlin or a jibe from Lancelot.

There’s a thought to make him angry. Lancelot on his white horse, sneering. Whispering in Arthur’s ear. Look, sire, a brown Nubian covered in brown filth, and no browner for it. It’s a good thought for fueling you through a bog. He imagines Lancelot in the distance, goading him. He imagines pulling Lancelot down from his horse and pun

ching him in the jaw. Drowning him in the mud. That’s a nice thought for getting you through a bog, too.

The mud isn’t so bad, at first. He wades through it with barely a grimace. It’s no worse than Agincourt, or the Somme. At least there’s no bullets flying, no hot shell fragments raining down or French coursers charging at him. The only problem is the mail, which weighs him down. And Christ, it’s a hot day. Summers never used to be this hot, he’s sure of it. It’s a day for resting in the shade, not wearing mail, or wading. If it gets any thicker he’ll be right back underground again, slowly choking, lungs filling with mud. And what would happen then? He’s died in forty different ways over the years, from Saxon spearheads and Byzantine fire and Japanese inhospitality, but he’s never drowned in mud before. That would be a new one to add to the list.

He can’t help but notice that there’s something odd about this mud. It has a slickness to it, a purple sheen, that reflects the sunlight more than mud really ought to. He’s up to his knees in it now. No sword yet. He casts his eyes around, throws up his hands in hopelessness.

“Nimue?” he asks. It’s worth a shot. “Bit of help, maybe?”

No answer. No pale arm shoots skyward from the oily waters, holding aloft a gleaming sword. That only works for Arthur’s Caliburn, apparently. Not common swords like his that soil themselves with blood now and again.

It’s made him careless, coming back from the dead. He’d never have walked blithely across a moor in the old days. Suicide. He’s used to being pampered now, cars and helicopters and warm beds whenever he’s above ground. He’s forgotten the basics. If he does drown here then it will be his own fault and no one else’s. No wonder Nimue isn’t helping. She’s probably got more important things to do in another lake somewhere. More important than helping errant knights find their bloody swords.

He’s thinking of wading back when a sound breaks out across the moor, a modern sound. There’s still a part of his mind that thinks of old-fashioned explanations first. It’s a beast that needs slaying, or else a signal horn. But no, it’s a klaxon, a warning siren. Coming from the mass of buildings. That piques his interest. If it sounds like peril, it’s probably peril. Onward, then. Through the heat.

After five minutes of trudging, he reaches a wire fence. Cruel razors coiled on top of it to make the passage even more unpleasant, and thorny bushes planted thickly on the other side. Slim chance of cutting through it all, without his sword. But there are some signs on the fence, which he reads out slowly, sounding out the words with dry lips. The first sign says, secure fracking facility. Some kind of fortified brothel? They didn’t have secure facilities for that sort of

thing, the last time he was up and about. Times change. The second sign is more interesting. It says, this site is protected by saxons. There’s red heraldry of a nasal helmet, which doesn’t look like any helmet that he ever saw on a Saxon head. In the corner of the notice are the words saxon pmc. protection you can rely on.

He is confused by this sign. How can there be Saxons guarding places again? Have they overthrown the Normans, finally? Have more Saxons come from Saxony, as invaders? Perhaps that’s it. Invaders have overrun Britain’s shores, and it’s his job to stop them. Classic peril. The sort of thing he used to be good at, a long time ago. Pushing Saxons back into the sea. If he finds Saxons in this place then he will kill them. Then maybe he can go back to sleep.

First, he must pass the fence. He has climbed the walls of Antioch and stormed the beaches of Normandy, so a wire fence shouldn’t pose much difficulty. Except he is slick with mud, and there are no footholds, and the whole process takes much longer than it ought to. He falls into the mud more than once, caking himself further. The razor wire cuts his hands and face, and would tear the flesh of his body too, if not for his mail. He gets caught halfway over, his cloak snagged and his mail hooked; hanging at a strange and painful angle, over the fence but unable to get down, no matter how hard he strains.

This is a fine situation. He imagines Bors and Gawain standing at the foot of the fence, laughing up at him. The klaxon is still blaring out over the marsh. But now he hears raised voices as well, people shouting from the silver tower and the ugly buildings.

And then he hears gunshots. Stuttering fire, like the guns he learned how to use in the last big war. They’ve probably built better and deadlier guns since then. He misses the days when Saxons only carried axes and round shields. Maybe a longbow, at worst. But he’s not picky. He’ll kill anything that needs killing if it means he can get back to his slumber afterward, undisturbed.

They’re not aiming at him, yet. Someone else here, then, some other reason for a gunfight. But it would still be prudent to get down off this fence. There’s some distance to the towers, with wet ground in between. Makes him think of Flanders, back in the first big terrible war with the Germans, when he used to sneak across the blighted fields and drop down into the foe’s trenches. Do some old-fashioned slaughter with sword and club and bayonet in the black of night. One time he got tangled on the way over and couldn’t get free. Was still there at dawn, exposed and helpless in the open. Had his throat blown open by a German sniper. He’s not keen to

let that happen again.

He reaches back with bloody hands to try and unsnag himself. His mail is caught in two or three places, the wire having hooked through the iron links, and it’s the devil to get it unhooked again. This is where Bors or Gawain would have got hopelessly stuck, thrashing and roaring until they were tangled even worse. They’d have to wait for some passing fay to take pity on them and help them down, make some terrible pact in exchange for their freedom. But he’s always had a bit more patience than them. He works with careful fingers.

The last link of mail can’t hold his whole weight by itself. It breaks, with a tiny clink, and suddenly he’s free. He drops five or six feet and lands in the bushes, banging his jaw on something hard and wooden.

There are faeries dancing in his eyes, for a moment. Angels singing in his ears. When he’s done groaning he turns over, clutching his face. Then he starts laughing to himself. He landed on his shield. It’s here waiting for him, laying facedown in the mud. The earth knew to put it in his path. That must mean he’s going in the right direction.

He picks it up and brushes the mud off it. The shield is solid oak and iron rimmed. It is painted with the face of Herne, the Horned God, a crude drawing that might be a tree or a stag’s head, depending on how you look at it. White, on a green field. In the center is an iron boss for breaking people’s noses. He lashes it to his forearm and feels better for it. Then he stands and heads toward the peril.

The earth is drier on this side of the fence. Soon he can walk, rather than wade. Then he begins to run. Around the silver tower and the ugly buildings there’s a great mass of pipes and tanks and walkways, none of which he understands the purpose of. The tower looms over everything, gleaming in the sun. He’s struck by the size of it. He always is, with these new things that people build. The gunfire is coming from within, so he ventures into the maze. Ducking under scaffolds, stepping over cables, moving warily between rows of machinery. It all hums with the movement of something, some fluid or energy. The air feels prickly, charged with strange potential. He has no sense of what this place is. A mine? A power mill? He doesn’t know why people would choose to come here and shoot at one another, but that’s the kind of detail he can figure out later. Maybe once the Saxons are dead.

He’s close to the fighting now. Beneath the wail of the siren and the patter of gunfire he can hear shouts, footfalls, the clatter of men running with war gear. But he can’t see anything yet. There is a metal stairca

se, the color of lemons, leading up over a row of tanks. He’s about to climb it when another three shots ring out. A bullet tears through the air above him, through the place where his breast would have been if he’d started climbing three seconds earlier. It leaves a dent in a tank behind him, and a question worms its way into his mind. Not a Bors or Gawain question, but a Merlin question. What is in these tanks? Does it marry well with bullets? He somehow doubts it.

This question is still in his mind when a small person dives down the staircase and lands in front of him. They land like somebody who throws themselves down staircases on a fairly regular basis and knows how to do it without breaking an ankle. Then they draw themselves up and stare at him, panting for breath.

They look like a woman, but that doesn’t stop them from being a Saxon. They are wearing black and khaki: thick boots and a heavy backpack. Head covered by a knitted hat in rainbow colors, with only holes for their mouth and eyes. They are not the eyes of someone who was expecting to run into a man in chainmail. They aren’t carrying a gun, as far as he can tell. More than anything, they look exhausted.

“All right,” he says. “You in peril?”

“What?” asks the woman.

She’s speaking English, the bastard horse-trading language that people have been speaking since the Normans arrived. It still sounds new and vulgar to him, ringing strangely in his ears, but Merlin’s magic makes it so that they can understand each other. Part of the covenant. The gift of tongues. Give him knowledge of the words that are spoken by the people in the realm, so that he will not be a stranger in his own land. He wouldn’t be much use otherwise, going around speaking old Brythonic, not knowing a bloody word that anyone was saying.

“Sort of seems like you’re in peril,” he says.

There’s another patter of gunshots, closer this time, up from where this woman came. More bullets slam against the tank behind them.

“Who the fuck are you?” asks the woman.

“Never mind that,” he says. “Go on, I’ll try and keep ’em busy.”

“I…” says the woman.

“Head for the tree on the hill, if you can,” says Kay.

She seems to think about this for a few moments, while she catches her breath. Then she nods and starts running, down the alleyway between the pipes. Toward the fence, he hopes.

Which leaves him at

the bottom of the yellow staircase. He can hear boots on metal, from somewhere up above. If he doesn’t move quickly, he’ll have some Saxon shooting down at him from the top of the stairs. Mustn’t stop and think too much about it.

He raises his shield, putting his shoulder into it, his head low, his body sideways. Then he creeps up the stairs. One step at a time.

There’s not much he can do with just his shield. Even his sword wouldn’t help enormously. Ancient warriors risen from the very ground with their arms untarnished are less useful than they used to be, when there are men doing wicked things with automatic rifles. If Merlin foresaw everything that would come to pass, why didn’t he account for guns? It was only about a hundred years ago that Kay learned how to use them, after five hundred of refusing to touch them. But he doesn’t have one now. His right hand feels strange being empty of a weapon, just clenching and unclenching at his side.

Over the tanks are metal walkways, branching off in different directions. He’s almost beneath the silver tower now. When he peers over the rim of his shield he can see movement at the other end of the walkway. Men carrying rifles, wearing strange war gear, sunglasses and camouflage vests that stand out against their surroundings. The wrong color for fighting in a place like this. He decides that these must be the Saxons. There are a lot of them. Almost too many. Why is this place important enough to merit this many guards? More useless questions. If they get past him, they’ll be down the stairs, in the alleyway, with a straight shot at the fleeing woman. That’s all that matters.

The Saxons must have seen him. A shield is not just for protection. It’s also for drawing attention. The face of Herne is painted white, and the iron boss will gleam in this bright sun. It’s not much of a plan, but it’s better than doing nothing. He plants the shield at the top of the stairs, driving the rim down between two bands of the metal walkway. Then he kneels behind it, lowering his head. Bracing himself.

A few inches of oak can’t stop a bullet. Not even a few inches of oak with the Horned God painted on the front. The greater part of its power in the old days was in scaring people, making them think twice about fighting someone who was under Herne’s protection. These modern Saxons won’t even know what the symbol means.

But it had other uses, as well. There were several warriors in Arthur’s court who wanted to cover all their bases. They didn’t want to put all their eggs in the heavenly basket of the Christ King. Merlin accommodated that. He led them into the woods at night. Passed around mushrooms for them to eat, powders for them to place under their tongues. He took them far from Caer Moelydd, to places that weren’t on any of his maps. He introduced them to the

fay folk, to the minor gods of the earth, to people with strange powers. And he did things to their arms and armor. Drew up magic from the ground and poured it into their shields, imbuing them with strange properties. Powered by the earth. There might be enough magic left in the ground for the old charms to still do their job.

But a lead bullet, chemically propelled, pays as much attention to old fay magic as it might pay to a veil of cobwebs. It punches through his shield and hits him in the right thigh, breaking straight through a ring of mail and carrying it into the wound.

He’s been shot before, but it’s never any less painful than it was the first time. He stumbles, he screams through his teeth, without opening his mouth. He almost falls backward down the stairs but steadies himself upon the planted shield. Dear Christ, it hurts, though.

The woman is getting farther away. That’s what matters. He’s keeping the Saxons distracted. All he needs to do is stay where he is.

He learned a few hundred years ago that sometimes the most useful thing he can do is to just let himself get killed. Merlin’s covenant with the earth didn’t grant him the strength of an ox, it didn’t make his flesh repellent to arrows or bullets. It just allows him to return from the dead. So death, for him, means less than it might do for others. And somebody has to be the first one over the walls, the first one through the breach, the first one out of the landing craft and up the beach. Should that be somebody who can only die once, whose family would miss them? Or should it be someone who can die a thousand times, whose wife and family died a long time ago? There’s no question, when you think of it like that.

Bullets are landing all around him now. Perhaps the magic has kicked in, and the bullets are curving away, flying off sideways at strange trajectories. Or perhaps the Saxons are just terrible shots. He can’t be certain, because he still can’t see them from behind his shield. Until one of them has the sense to get some height, climbing the stairs up to the silver tower and standing on a balcony. Kay sees him over the rim. The Saxon lowers himself to a crouch, bringing his rifle up to his shoulder like a good crossbowman, and taking careful aim down the length of the barrel. Kay feels as though they share a moment of understanding before the Saxon pulls the trigger.

---

—

Death feels like God snapping his fingers. It’s always the same. The old sorcery flies out of him like a raven bursting free of a pie, and the spell is broken

. His bones remember their age and turn accordingly to dust.

There is always the briefest of moments, while his skin is still curling into parchment, when he can feel the morbid wrongness of it. Like opening a musty tomb and seeing the shriveled thing inside of it and knowing that he is trespassing somewhere haunted. Except that the shriveled thing is him. He is a living fossil, and then he is nothing, grains of sand in the wind, a bad smell lost in the many bad smells of war.

Then it gets worse. This is his least favorite part of the whole process, where he isn’t sure where he is or what is happening. Nothing but darkness, and the sense of being bodiless but still falling through a space between worlds, between death and rebirth. He’s always worried that he’ll get stuck here forever if he isn’t careful. But he never lingers in the darkness for long. Half a moment, and he is mercifully drawn back into the world. In the earth again, in the mud beneath his tree. Not knowing quite how long it’s been.

There’s a period of uncertainty. Is he flesh again, or is he still putrid clay, a cludge of wet earth, recongealing? He opens his eyes, wriggles his fingers, feels his leg and shoulder remade, the bone and sinew knitted back together. Not painful, but peculiar. Then he climbs up out of the soil, scrambling, more quickly this time, elbowing his way toward the light. His mail is repaired. How can the earth remake a coat of mail? How can it remake him? Questions that don’t bear thinking about.

He gets his head and shoulders above the ground, again. It’s still a hot day. Whether it’s the same hot day is a different question. Decades might have passed.

But he can hear the sirens. He can still hear gunshots in the distance. When he climbs up further from the mud he can see that the fleeing woman has followed his advice. She’s wading toward him, across the bog.

“Oh, now you…” Kay says, to the earth. His shield is now lying helpfully at the base of the tree. His sword is buried in the roots, waiting for him to draw it out. Sometimes the earth has a sense of humor.

Once he’s out he straps his shield back onto his arm and wraps his hand around the hilt of his sword. It slides cleanly out from the tree, leaving a narrow slit behind. He uses his cloak to wipe the sap from the blade. It’s not a great kingly sword like Caliburn, with garnets cloisonned into the pommel; the blade is not emblazoned with the word of God; the cross guard isn’t inlaid with silver or fashioned like the True Cross. It’s just a well-balanced sword in the Roman style, good for spilling guts; a bit weighty in the hilt because he likes to be able to turn it round and break people’s collarb

ones with the blunt end of it. It’s served him well, over the centuries. There are swords to be wielded by kings and then there are swords to be wielded for kings, with which to do their dirty work. His is the latter.

The woman is close now, wading as quickly as she can. The Saxons are following her, tiny figures in the distance, moving slowly and uncertainly through the bog. But their rifles are still sputtering, and the air is live with the crack and sting of bullets.

“Come on!” he shouts.

She finds firm footing and hurries up the hill, collapsing back against it near the top. One of her boots has gone missing. She pulls off her hat to catch her breath more easily. She is young, angry, mostly bone and hollow, with skin almost as brown as his. Black hair plastered to her forehead. She looks him up and down with narrowed eyes.

“Yeah, me again,” he says.

“How…?” she asks, catching her breath.

“I get around,” he says. “You need any help?”

She shakes her head. Pulling her backpack around to one side and reaching into it, to pull something out. Kay doesn’t know what it is. A small device, a modern thing with buttons. Too big to be a cigarette lighter, too small to be a radio. Or is it? He doesn’t know what radios look like these days. There’s a kind of screen built into it, a little glowing box.

“I think I’m all right,” she says.

She presses a button on her little device, and something across the bog explodes.

Kay has seen castles crumble and warships explode on the ocean. He was riding with Fairfax when the church at Torrington was blown to ruins, and they were both carried clear from their saddles. He was at the Somme when the Lochnagar mine went up. None of it has quite prepared him for this explosion, which briefly rattles God’s creation and sends a plume of fire half a mile into the sky.

A hot wind picks him up and slams him into his own tree. Across the bog, the ugly pipes burst open. The storage tanks explode one after the other like thundering dominos, with angry orange blooms. And then the silver tower itself pitches sideways and erupts in fire. But this is a strange explosion. A rainbow fireball of blue and green and orange, which sends lightning coursing through the black smoke. Kay doesn’t have time to figure out what that might mean before the bog itself catches fire, a sheet of flame spreading outward with terrifying speed. Squinting into the inferno, Kay can just about make out some Saxons burning, like ants caught in a hearth.

The fire creeps all the way to the foot of their hill, spreading across the slickened wa

ter. It continues out toward the sea behind them, but it does not climb the hill and bother them. Old magic. Deep roots. His tree has been around for too long to be concerned by this sort of thing. Or so he hopes, anyway. It’s never had to fend off a fire like this before.

The woman’s eyes are wide and panicked. She is swearing to herself. “It wasn’t supposed to do that,” she says.

“What was it supposed to do?” he asks her.

But either she doesn’t hear him or she doesn’t want to answer. She buries her head in her hands, then brings her scarf up over her nose to guard against the fumes. Kay brings his cloak around to do the same. He puts his shield beside her, facedown, and perches on top of it. Keeping her company.

They sit together for a while, coughing and watching the bog burn, because there isn’t much else to be done until the fire dies down. When the woman looks up again, her eyes are red from smoke or tears or both.

“So, again,” she says. “Who are you?”

“My name’s Kay,” he replies. “What’s yours?”

“Mariam,” she says. “Why did you help me?”

“I help people who are in peril. You looked like you were in peril.”

She looks strangely at him. “Wasn’t anything I couldn’t handle.”

Kay nods his head at the inferno. “Clearly,” he says.

“Thanks anyway.”

The smoke is rising in a great black column from where the silver tower used to be. Lightning courses through it in sudden bursts, every now and again. Thunder echoes across the moor. The earth is still shaking. Kay gets the sense now that the tower was for digging or drilling. Burrowing deep into the bowels of Britain and bringing something up. His bowels would be quaking too, if something like this happened to them.

“Are you with the Army of Saint George, or something?” asks Mariam.

Kay shakes his head. “I don’t know what that is.”

“I was gonna say,” says Mariam. “You don’t look the type. Apart from the shield, and everything.”

“How do you mean?” he asks.

“Never seen a black knight before,” she replies.

“You’d be surprised how many people say that.”

Mariam is confused. “So, what are you? Are you up from Manchester? The communists? Who are you with?”

He doesn’t understand

the question. “I’m with you,” he says. “On a hill.”

“…Okay,” she says.

“Are there lots of people in peril, nowadays?” he asks.

She looks incredulous. “What, have you been living under a rock?”

“Under a hill,” he says, patting the earth.

Mariam is staring at him as if he is mad. He’s grown used to that, over the years. He’s had worse. He remembers how Queen Victoria looked at him the first time she saw him, saw his skin.

Lightning arcs through the smoke. Then there’s a new sound from across the bog. It sounds like a writhing beast again, something ancient and terrible. It’s probably another modern sound. Metal twisting, or gas burning. Something succumbing to the fire.

“Yeah,” says Mariam, eventually. “Yeah, there’s a lot of people in peril.”

“I see,” he says.

“Are you…going to try and help them?” she asks.

“Well, I’ll see what I can do,” he says. He smiles at her. Then he frowns.

There is something moving in the inferno. The smoke is twisting into something tangible. It’s a shape, it’s a thing, crawling. And Kay knows exactly what it is. He stands up and straps his shield back onto his forearm.

It’s been more than a thousand years since he saw a dragon.

It’s a big one too, an adult female, the kind that was always the hardest to kill; the kind that used to rule over bull dragons like queens surrounded by fools. It would take Arthur’s whole household to slay a dragon like that, all forty of his best warriors, with a thousand-strong levy of common fighting men, spearmen and archers, and all the war machines and incantations that Merlin could devise.

Or it would take Caliburn, Arthur’s sword, which could cut through anything. Caliburn, which has slept beneath the water for all this time, so that fools can’t get their hands upon its hilt. He hopes it can stay sleeping there for a little while longer.

The dragon doesn’t see them across the flaming bog. It coils itself on the ground, wreathed harmlessly in fire. It sniffs the air. It knows that something isn’t right in the realm. And before Kay can think about how he’s going to kill it, the dragon leaps upward, beating the smoke down with its wings. With a few good strokes it’s high in the air, trailing its long body behind it, rising on the column of heat from the burning tower. And then it’s gone, high above the smoke. Far too high for him to see where it is going.

“What the fuck was that?” asks Mariam, in a quiet voice.

“I think it’s the reason I’m back,” says Kay.

 

Chapter 2

Lancelot wanted to be buried next to Galehaut, on the Holy Island, off the coast of Brynaich. They talked about it more than once, in the old days. They liked the idea that their trees might grow together, bound into one great oak. Intertwined for all eternity.

That’s not what happened, in the end. You can’t always control where you get buried. He ended up in the tangled heart of Windsor forest, when it was bigger and wilder and less penetrable to interlopers. Now it’s a deer park, bare and manicured. His ancient oak stands alone, set apart from younger trees, overlooked by statues of dead kings.

It’s not ideal. But it’s an easy commute into central London.

He climbs upward, reluctantly. Lethargically. Only motivated by the off chance of a cigarette and some decent Scotch. Maybe he’ll have time to visit a day spa, this time. Get some sort of deep pore cleanse. Sleeping in the London soil does nothing for his complexion.

He wishes he could stay dead for longer stretches of time without anybody bothering him. Just a few centuries of being mud and not having to worry about anything. Small chance of that. There’s a filing cabinet somewhere in the city with dossiers on all of the secret places in the realm, all the buried dragons and sleeping knights. They know where to find him, when they want him to do something for them.

Marlowe’s already here, standing on the grass. Wearing his hat and his long gray raincoat, even in this hot weather. He updates his wardrobe once every hundred years or so. It used to be doublets and pantaloons. Then it became tailcoats and powdered wigs. Since the First World War it’s been brogues, briefcase, three-piece suit. Now he’s smoking a cigarette and checking his wristwatch. There’s some kind of newfangled flying machine waiting on the grass behind him.

Lancelot wipes the muck from his face and sighs from deep in his throat.

“Dear Christ,” he says. “What do you want now?”

“Woken up on the wrong side of the tree, have we?” asks Marlowe. “ ‘What power art thou, who from below, hast made me rise unwillingly and slow…’ ”

“Don’t start. What do you want?”

“England’s in peril.”

Lancelot levels a muddy finger across the park. “It’s not the Falklands again, is it? I should have thought I was perfectly clear about that last time. The Falklands aren’t part of England, and they never have been. They’re well outside my purview.”

Marlo

we smokes, patiently. “It’s not the Falklands.”

“What is it, then?”

“All in good time.”

“It had better be some serious bloody peril. That’s all I’m saying.”

Marlowe smiles thinly and walks toward him, offering him a cigarette. “Let’s get you into some fresh clothes. Then I’ll explain.”

Lancelot mumbles his thanks. He takes the cigarette and pinches it between his lips. Marlowe stands close and lights it for him, smelling of hair cream and something else as well. The faintest whiff of brimstone.

Marlowe enjoys a different kind of immortality, achieved by different means. No magic acorns or slumbering under trees. He sold his soul on the dotted line, joined an exclusive members’ club. Eternal life. But not eternal youth. He used to be gorgeous, in the old days. Marlowe the playwright, man about London, spying for the Crown. Getting into bar fights. Dabbling in the dark arts and rousing ancient warriors from their slumber. They used to have fun.

But now Marlowe is older and careworn, crushed under centuries of manila envelopes. He has the permanent aura of cheap tobacco and lunchtime pints. There’s still something haggardly endearing about him, though, like a hound that’s getting too old to hunt. The tired old spook. Last of a dying breed.

“All right,” says Lancelot. “Christ, I need a drink.”

“I thought you might.”

They walk toward the flying contraption, over the yellow grass. Lancelot can’t help but notice that the park is somewhat less verdant than it used to be. The trees look mostly dead. No indication of any deer. And it’s far too warm. Like Kenya or India, where he went in the time of Queen Victoria. Not like England at all.

Still, if England’s less cold and dreary than it used to be, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. He remembers in the old days when they planted apple trees on the Holy Island and the apples froze in the cold. Galehaut tried to eat them anyway. It might be warm enough to grow them now. Eat them by the handful, looking out to sea. Warm sun on his face.

The flying machine has something in common with the helicopters that he saw in the 1980s, the last time he was up. Except it’s smaller, clearer, more fragile. He gets the sense that it’s not meant for military use. Just a glass orb with two seats and four propeller arms.

“What precisely is this thing?” he asks.

“Oh,” says Marlowe, disparagingly. “They call them ‘quad-pods.’ Latest thing from Dubai. Think of it like a flying taxi.”

“Not a patch on my old Spitfire.”

“Times change, old boy.”

Once they’re sat down and strapped in, the canopy rolls shut and the rotors start spinning. Marlowe swipes a finger across the control pad until he finds the right destination, then taps on it twice. The quad-pod springs upward, blowing dead leaves away in the downdraft from its propellers, spiriting them high above Windsor. Then it turns and bears them toward London.

“It flies itself?” asks Lancelot.

“It does.”

“Disconcerting.”

“It’s perfectly safe.”

They suck on their cigarettes, filling the pod with smoke. Marlowe in his raincoat, Lancelot in his muddy chainmail. Neither willing to admit before the other that smoking in here might be a bad idea. Both trying not to cough. Until an alert pops up on the canopy: a female voice tells them, in Chinese and then in English, that no smoking is permitted. Marlowe loses the game of courage and stubs out his cigarette against the armrest of his chair. Lancelot takes a last drag on his before following suit.

“Ghastly machine,” says Lancelot.

“I know.”

They follow the old course of the Devil’s Highway, across the Thames. Then the city stretches out below them, far bigger than it used to be. Lancelot’s nose wrinkles. He has fond memories of Marlowe’s London. Thatched roofs and cobbled streets, theatres and alehouses. Back-alley encounters. Amorous evenings boating on the Thames. And then there was London in the last big war, with Galehaut, when they both came up to fight the Germans. Pubs and music halls and red double-decker buses. Matching scarves, in the cold months. Kissing secretly in dark air-raid shelters. The thought of that makes him smile. But beneath those Londons is the old Londinium, which he always hated. Festering and joyless. Tribes and gangs and Jutes and Saxons fighting over Roman ruins. Kay and Arthur crawled up from its gutters, which is more than enough reason to hold it in contempt.

“A lot’s changed since you were last up,” says Marlowe. “I’m not sure where to start. You might find that it’s a bit damper than it used to be.”

They start to lose altitude around Belgravia. The pod takes them lower, for its own inscrutable reasons. Giving them a better view of the streets below. Lancelot has to lean forward, frowning through the canopy, to t

ry and make sense of it all.

It looks more like Venice than London. The river has swelled its banks enormously, flooding Chiswick and Shepherd’s Bush. Half the city drowned with floodwater, glistening in the sun. The underground railways and the air-raid shelters must be lakes and rivers now, below the earth. The dark places where he kissed Galehaut in the last war. He can’t imagine what could have caused this, except the wrath of some angry sea god. But it wouldn’t surprise him in the slightest to learn that Britain had angered a sea god since the last time he was up and about. Nothing surprises him anymore. Not wars or revolutions or plagues or famines. He just comes up and does what Marlowe tells him to do, in the hope of going back to sleep as soon as possible. He’ll probably keep doing that until Judgment Day. If it hasn’t come already.

Even the dry parts of the city look pretty miserable. Hyde Park has been turned into some sort of camp, with rows and rows of white tents. The streets around it are cordoned off with barriers and roadblocks. Barbed wire and men with guns. From their little pod they can see crowds of people being pushed back. Clouds of smoke drifting on the breeze like mustard gas at the Somme. Smaller flying machines are buzzing like hornets, firing things down at the crowd. Getting things thrown up at them in return. Their quad-pod drifts overhead, too high to worry about stray bricks.

“All getting a bit fruity, is it?” Lancelot asks.

“That’s one way of putting it,” says Marlowe. “Hard to find room for everybody when the water’s this high. We’ve had to abandon Parliament, Whitehall. So government business is being done from the City, for the time being.”

“No change there, then.”

“We’re moving it all offshore fairly soon, but I won’t bore you with the details.”

Their pod gets away from the fighting, heading east, over the monstrous Thames again. Past Westminster Palace, which is drowned and crumbling in the floodwater. Lancelot frowns.

“We’re not going to the Department?”

“Ah, no,” says Marlowe. He clears his throat. “As I said, there have been one or two changes.”

“Such as?”

“Well, the whole sector’s been privatized. Musty old intelligence agencies broken up and sold to U.S. private equity firms. That sort of thing. The services previously provided by the Department are now rendered by a transatlantic corporation called GX5.”

“What does it stand for?”

Marlowe sniffs with a dark kind of mirth. “Why should it stand for anything, Lance?”

They draw closer to the banking district, which looks like an upended drawer of glass knives. Skyscrapers rising from the floodwater and piercing heaven, far larger and more hideous than anything he saw the last time he was up and about. Jagged, ugly things. They have skybridges built between them and pods like theirs buzzing back and forth. It must make things easier, in this new London, if you don’t have to go below sea level.

One of the larger buildings has a roof garden, green and artificial. Their pod touches down on the grass, just next to the tennis courts. Once the rotors have spun down, the canopy opens, and they climb out onto the roof.

“Hideous,” says Lancelot.

“Oh, it’s not that bad,” says Marlowe. “The bar’s this way.”

They walk over the fake grass, past the fake shrubs, to a penthouse bar that rises from the roof. Televisions showing an indeterminable sport. Old racquets and boat oars mounted on the walls. Nobody here apart from the bartender, cleaning glasses. He doesn’t seem fazed by the mud and chainmail. If there are government functions up here then the bartender has probably seen stranger things.

Marlowe puts down his briefcase and slides into one of the bar stools. “There’s a changing room, over there,” he says. “Take your time.”

---

—

Lancelot always tears off the mail and tunic as soon as he can, whenever he comes up. Would be much more convenient if the magic worked differently and the earth revised his wardrobe every now and again, as the centuries wore on. But Merlin didn’t think of that, did he? There was a man with no conception of fashion.

Now he dumps his old war gear in the corner of the shower room, a heavy heap of iron and linen that he won’t be needing again. Marlowe has arranged for a washbag and change of clothes to be left here for him. Soft white towels folded neatly on one of the benches. When he’s peeled the muddy hose and braies from his legs he strides into the shower and turns it on. Scouring the mud from his flesh. Washing it out of his hair. Scrubbing it from under his fingernails. Hot showers are one of the few pleasures in this endless nightmare.

Whisky, motorcycles, good bars with loud music. Italian coffee. Cashmere. Hotels with good soap. They make all the rest of it slightly more tole

rable. All the endless war and death and horror. He’d much rather be dead and consigned to oblivion, but he exempted himself from death a long time ago. If he blows his brains out, or drowns himself, or leaps off a tall building, he just ends up under his tree again. He’s tried it before, a few times.

If he does have to keep coming up, he’ll keep enjoying life’s little indulgences as often as he can.

When he feels passably human again, he strides out of the shower and stares at himself dripping in the washroom mirrors, admiring himself from different angles. ...