Knight Life by Peter David Read Free Book Online Page A

amount of fanciful reimagining of her was going to change that simple fact. Instead he returned his attention to his environment.
    Â Â Â Â  Arthur’s pores opened, his senses expanding to drink in the greenery around him. This was something to which he had an easier time relating. This wood-and-leaf forest was something that came far more naturally to him than the brick, steel, and concrete forest that loomed all around, hemming in the park at all sides. This brought back pleasant memories of home …
    Â Â Â Â  Home? What was home to him now? He had no friends, no loved ones. No family. Only descendants, and even they were completely screwed up. Held in high esteem by the modern British, Arthur had in his day actually fought against the ancestors of the modern-day Englishman. But a lot could be forgiven and forgotten in over a dozen centuries, he decided.
    Â Â Â Â  Camelot long gone, lost in the mist of time and memories. Guinevere gone, Lancelot gone, all … all gone. But he had survived, only he …
    Â Â Â Â  Or … was he falsely assuming? Were they genuinely gone? None of the others had been locked away in an enchanted cave all this time, of course, as he had been … or had they?
    Â Â Â Â  But no, that was impossible. Only Arthur and Merlin had survived, and Merlin would certainly have told Arthur if any of his latter-day companions were still with them.
    Â Â Â Â  Wouldn’t he?
    Â Â Â Â  It was hard to be certain with Merlin. He was, after all, a wizard, and wizards were renowned for keeping key points of information to themselves. They were not the most trustworthy of individuals … and the fact that Arthur was depending so heavily on such a being made him exceedingly uncomfortable.
    Â Â Â Â  So lost in thought was Arthur as he made his way through the park that he failed to notice the two men lurking in the bushes.
    Â Â Â Â  But they most certainly noticed him.
    T HEY WERE EXACTLY the reason that most people didn’t walk around in Central Park at night. Calling them “men” might have been a bit too generous a term. With their wild manes of black hair and their equally scraggly beards, they were of an indeterminate age. They each gave off a fairly pungent odor but, because they had hung with each other for as long as they had—since the 1960s, when they’d first met at an antiwar rally, gotten stoned, and fried just enough brain cells to remain in a permanent haze—neither of them came close to noticing it. Both of them bone skinny, they acquired their wardrobe through the simple expedient of crawling into the narrow chutes of the Goodwill boxes and scavenging clothes from them. Their fingernails were permanently dirty, although, curiously, their teeth were in perfect condition (since they were both big believers in flossing.) One had blue eyes, the other brown, which was pretty much the only way anyone could possibly have distinguished them. Indeed, on some days it was the only way they had of telling each other apart.
    Â Â Â Â  Much of what was real and what was not floated in and out for them, and there had only been a handful of things that they agreed upon that absolutely, truly existed. Artificial stimulants headed the list, followed by money. Then came superheroes—after all, in the whole world there had to be at least one, somewhere. And the fourth was rock and roll, which they were convinced would never die. Their own names long forgotten, they had adopted sobriquets that were in keeping with that philosophy.
    Â Â Â Â  The blue eyed, taller one, Buddy, stood slowly, disentanglinghis beard from the snarl of the branches. “There he goes,” he murmured. “You see him?”
    Â Â Â Â  Elvis nodded and chewed on the remains of a stale pretzel. He stood as well, coming just to Buddy’s shoulder. He wiped his large nose expansively with his shirtsleeve