Perilous Times by Thomas D. Lee

Author:Thomas D. Lee [Lee, Thomas D.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2023-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

22

Lancelot crawls up from the earth with more urgency than usual, knowing that he has a purpose to fulfill, although he can’t quite remember yet what the purpose is. His brain is still mostly mud. It’s like waking up from a dream in which he had something important to do. When he’s finally kneeling in the open, breathing raggedly, mired in filth, the purpose is still unclear. It takes a few moments for it all to come back to him.

“Shit,” he says, to himself.

Windsor Park is warm and empty. The air is dry, and the grass is brownish yellow. He drags himself to his feet, weighed down by his mail. He always gets reborn from the earth with his mail, even if he wasn’t wearing it when he died. But he never comes back with anything that he was carrying. His cassette player. Or his revolver. Lawrence’s revolver, from the war. Now it’s lying at the bottom of a canal in Manchester. He can’t imagine the next time he’ll be up there. Will he travel up and trawl through the whole canal looking for it, just for the sake of sentiment? Probably not. Well, there’s something else he’s lost.

He can’t call Marlowe. But Marlowe usually seems to know when he’s up and about. Marlowe seems to know everything. It’s one of his more infuriating qualities. He’ll probably be along in a little while, whenever it suits him.

So, instead of doing anything else useful, he sits down under his tree to wait, trying to get some of the mud out of his hair.

It takes him a few minutes to realize that there isn’t any birdsong. Because there aren’t any birds. Just bronze kings on their horses and yellow grass dying on the ground beneath their plinths. The park is silent. It is empty. Nothing moves or makes a sound.

Lancelot rests the back of his head against the bark of his tree and stares up into the cloudless sky, wishing that he had something to drink. But he doesn’t. And when he gets sober for long enough, he always starts thinking dangerous thoughts. He balls his fist against the dry soil and pulls out a handful of dead grass.

He has always felt his heart swell when he thinks of Britain. Even in the old days, when it was a backwater, forgotten by Rome, carved up between warlords and Saxon chiefs. He had a strange pride in it, even then. When he rode up to the brow of a hill and watched the sun setting over a gorgeous green corner of the realm, he felt something powerful. A pride, completely unjustified, completely solid in his breast, in some notion of what the realm was and what it stood for. It might be the only notion that he’s ever felt any loyalty to, other than the notion of love.

He felt it in him whenever they defeated the Saxons, in the old days. Even if nobody else around him seemed to feel it. He felt it smothered and contorted during the last few years of Arthur’s reign.

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