A Knyght Ther Was Part 5

When Mallory awoke, Rowena's head was resting on his chest, and she was breathing the soft and even breaths of untroubled sleep. Her hair, viewed thus closely, was not as dark as he had at first believed it to be. It was brown, really, rather than dark-brown. And astonishingly l.u.s.trous. Without thinking, he rested his hand lightly upon her head.

She stirred then, and sat up, rubbing her plum-blue eyes. For a moment she stared at him uncomprehendingly, then, "Prithee forgive me, fair sir," she said.

Mallory sat up, too. "Forgive you for what? Go open a couple of vacuum tins while I get into my armor--I'm going to bring this caper to a close."

"Thy ... thy strength has returned?"

"I never felt better in my life."

In the rec-hall he said, sitting down at the table before one of the two vacuum tins she had opened, "You never did ask me what happened."

"Ye will tell me of thy own will an ye wish me to know."

Mallory took a mouthful of simulsteak, chewed and swallowed. "Your Sir Launcelot turned out to be a phony, and pulled a rabbit out of his helmet the nature of which I'd better not try to describe to you."

Eyes round as plums, she regarded him across the table. "A ... a phony, fair sir?"

Mallory nodded. "That's a sort of felon paynim who plays golp."

"But with my own eyes I did see his armor, fair knight."

"That's right--you saw his armor. But you didn't see him. A certain character by the name of Perfidion was residing behind that hardware--not the good Sir Launcelot."

"Perfidion?"

Mallory grinned. "Sir Jason Perfidion--a knight errant ye wit not of.

But the tournament's not over yet, and this time _I've_ got the rabbit: he thinks I'm dead."

"He ... he left ye for dead, fair sir?"

"That he did, and if that little brain-buster of his had struck just one inch to the right, I'd have been just that." He shoved his empty vacuum tin away and stood up. "Excuse me a minute--I've got to visit the sorcerer's tower again."

In the control room, he took the _Yore_ back to 7:20 p.m. of the same day and re-materialized it half a mile farther down the valley.

Turning, he saw that Rowena had followed him and was watching him from the doorway. "Whereabouts may I find oats that I may feed thy horse, fair knight?" she asked.

"Easy Money doesn't eat. He--" Mallory paused astonished as two of the largest tears he had ever seen coalesced in her eyes and went tumbling down her cheeks. "Oh, it's not that he's sick," he rushed on. "It's just that horses like him don't require food to keep them going. Why, Easy Money's guaranteed for ... he'll live another thirty years."

The sun came up beyond the plum-blue horizons of her eyes. "It pleaseth me mickle to hear ye speak thus, fair knight. I ... I have great joy of him."

Back in the rec-hall, Mallory pulled on his gauntlets, reset his timepiece, and donned his helmet. The left audio-amplifier was shot, but otherwise the piece was in good condition--aside from the dent, of course. He encephalopathed Easy Money to his side, hung his shield around his neck, and mounted. "Hand me my spear, will you, Rowena?" he asked.

She did so. "Ye be a most n.o.ble knight indeed, fair sir," she said, "for to set so little store by thine own life in the service of a damosel the which is undeserving of thy deeds. I ... I would lever that ye forsook the Sangraal than that ye be fordone."

Her concern touched him, and he removed his helmet and leaned down and kissed her on the forehead. "Keep the home fires burning," he said; then, setting his helmet back in place, he activated the lock, rode across the mirage-moat, and set forth into the forest once again.

V

This time when he reached the crest of the ridge that separated the two valleys, Mallory took an azimuth on the towers of Carbonek, encephalo-fed the direction to Easy Money, and programmed the "animal"

to proceed in as straight a course as possible.

In the east, the moon was just beginning to rise; in the west, traces of the sunset lingered blood-red just above the horizon. On the highway below, a knight sitting astride a brown rohorse and bearing a white shield with a red cross in the center was riding toward Carbonek to challenge a twenty-second century "felon paynim" in imitation Age-of-Chivalry armor. In the valley Mallory had just left behind him there were two castles named _Yore_, and soon, a third would pop into existence and yet another Mallory come riding out. Mallory grinned. It was a little bit like playing chess.

The forest which Easy Money presently entered was parklike in places, and sometimes the trees thinned out into wide, moonlit meadows.

Crossing one of the meadows, Mallory saw the first star, and when at length Easy Money emerged on the highway, the heavens were decked out in typical midsummer panoply. The rohorse had followed its programming almost perfectly and had emerged at a point just south of the lane leading to the castle of Carbonek. All Mallory had to do was to encephalo-guide it farther down the highway to a point beyond the site of the forthcoming joust. While doing so, he kept well within the concealing shadows of the bordering oaks and beeches where the ground was soft and could give forth no telltale _clip-clop_ of hoofbeats.

His circ.u.mspection proved wise--as in one sense, of course, it already had--and when the false Sir Launcelot came riding by on his way to the castle and the chamber of the Sangraal, he was no more aware of Mallory III's presence by the roadside than he would presently be aware of Mallory II's presence in the shadows of the trees that bordered the lane.

Mallory III grinned again and brought Easy Money to a halt just beyond the next bend. "Wit ye well, Sir Jason, that thy hours be numbered,"

he said.

He remained seated in the saddle, feeling pretty good about the world. In no time at all, if his one-man ambuscade came off, he would be on his way back to the _Yore_, and thence to the twenty-second century and a haircut. Selling the Sangraal without the aid of a professional time-fence like Perfidion would be difficult, of course, but it could be done, and once it was done, he, Mallory, could take his place on Get-Rich-Quick Street with the best of them, and no questions would be asked. There was, to be sure, the problem of what to do about a certain damosel that hight Rowena, but he would face that when he came to it. Maybe he could drop her off a dozen years in the future in a region far enough removed from Carbonek to ensure her safety. He would see.

[Ill.u.s.tration]

At this point in his reflections he was jolted into alertness by the sound of approaching hoofbeats. A moment later he heard a second set of hoofbeats and knew that Mallory II had made his presence known.

Presently both sets crescendoed into staccato thunder as the two "knights" came pounding toward each other, and not long afterward there was a clank and a clatter as Mallory II went tumbling out of his saddle and into the roadside weeds. Finally the single set of hoofbeats took over again, and Mallory III saw a horse and rider coming around the bend in the highway. He braced himself.

Before making his play, he waited till horse and rider were directly opposite him; then he encephalopathed Easy Money to charge. "Sir Launcelot" managed to get his shield up in time, but the maneuver did him no good. Mallory's spearhead struck the shield dead center, and "Sir Launcelot" went sailing out of his saddle to land with an awesome clatter flat on his back on the highway. He did not get up.

Dismounting, Mallory removed the man's helmet. It was Perfidion all right. There was a large bruise on the side of his head and he was out cold, but he was still breathing. Next, Mallory looked for the Sangraal. Perfidion had concealed it somewhere, and apparently he had done the job well. Since the armor could not have accommodated an object of that size, the hiding place had to be somewhere on the body of his horse. The horse was standing quietly beside Easy Money in the middle of the highway. It was jet-black and its fetlock-length trappings were blue, threaded with silver; otherwise, the two steeds were identical. Mallory tumbled to the truth then, went over to where the black "horse" was standing, raised its trappings, found the tiny activator b.u.t.ton, and depressed it. The croup-hood rose up, and there in the secret compartment, wrapped in red samite, lay the cause of the mounting absentee-rate in King Arthur's court.

Always the skeptic, Mallory raised a corner of the samite in order to make certain that he was not being cheated. Instantly, a reflected ray of moonlight stabbed upward into his eyes, and for a moment he was blinded. Exorcising the thought that sneaked into his mind, he closed the croup-hood, rearranged the trappings, and returned to Perfidion's side. Dragging the armor-enc.u.mbered man over to the black rohorse and slinging him over the saddle was no easy matter, but Mallory managed; then he picked up Perfidion's helmet and spear and set the former on the pommel and wedged the latter in one of the stirrups. Finally he mounted Easy Money and, encephalopathing the black rohorse to follow, set out down the highway away from the castle of Carbonek.

Make-believe castles could fool the hadbeens, but they couldn't fool a professional. He spotted the phony towers of Perfidion's TSB rising above the trees before he had proceeded half a mile. After raising the "portcullis", he got the man down from the black rohorse, dragged him inside, and propped him against the rec-hall bar. Then he got the man's helmet and spear and laid them beside him. After considerable reflection, he went into the control room, set the time-dial for June 10, 1964, the s.p.a.ce-dial for a busy intersection in downtown Los Angeles, and punched out H-O-T-D-O-G S-T-A-N-D on the lumillusion panel. Satisfied, he went into the generator room and short-circuited the automatic throw-out unit so that when rematerialization took place, the generator would burn up. Finding a ball of heavy-duty twine, he returned to the control room, tied one end to the master switch, and began backing out of the TSB, unwinding the twine as he went.

In the rec-hall, he paused, and grinned down at the still-unconscious Perfidion. "It's a better break than you meant to give me, Jason," he said. "And don't worry--once you explain to the authorities what you're doing in a suit of sixth-century armor and how you happened to open a giant hot-dog stand in the middle of a traffic-clogged crossroads, you'll be all right. As a matter of fact, with your knowledge of things to come, you'll probably wind up a richer man than you are now--if the smog doesn't get you first." He stepped through the lock, jerked the twine, and the "castle" vanished into thin air.

Remounting Easy Money and encephalopathing the black rohorse to follow, he started back toward the _Yore_, taking a direct route through the forest. He was halfway to his destination and had just emerged into a wide meadow when he saw the knight with the white shield riding toward him in the bright moonlight. In the center of the shield there was a vivid blood-red cross.

When the knight saw Mallory, he brought his steed to a halt. Moonlight glimmered eerily on his shield, turned his helmet to silver. His armor seemed to emit an unearthly light--a light that was at once terrifying and transcendent. The hilt of his sword was as blood-red as the cross on his shield; so was the pommel of his spear. Here was righteousness incarnate. Here in the form of an armored man on horseback was the quintessence of the Age of Chivalry--not the Age of Chivalry as exemplified by the vain and boasting n.o.bles who had const.i.tuted nine-tenths of the knight-errantry profession and who had used the quest of the Holy Grail as an excuse to seek after mead and maidens, but the Age of Chivalry as it might have been if the ideal behind it had been shared by the many instead of by the few; the Age of Chivalry, in short, as it had come down to posterity through the pages of Malory's _Le Morte d'Arthur_.

At length the knight spoke: "I hight Sir Galahad of the Table Round."

Reluctantly, Mallory encephalopathed his two rohorses to halt, and said the only thing he had left to say: "I hight Sir Thomas of the castle _Yore_."

"By whose leave bear ye likenesses of the red arms and the white shield whereon shines the red cross the which was put there by Joseph of Arimathea whilst he lay dying in his deadly bed?"

Mallory did not answer.

There was silence. Then, "I would joust with ye," Sir Galahad said.

There it was, laid right on the line. The challenge--

The death sentence.

Nonsense! Mallory told himself. He's nothing but a nineteen-year old kid. With your rohorse and your superior weapons you can unseat him in two seconds flat, and once he's down, that glorified junk pile he's wearing will glue him to the ground so fast he won't be able to lift a finger!

Aloud, he said, "Have at me then!"