The Metropolitans Page 18

  “Let’s go,” Joe said, starting for the entrance. Kiku followed him. Madge stood for a moment on the threshold, waiting for the feeling to pass.

  They were afraid, she heard the voice say in her head, and you took the fear away. That’s what a leader does. Which should have made her feel glad. Only the fear she had taken from her friends had lodged in her own stomach like a heavy cold stone dropped into a well.

  * * *

  “The museum closes in one hour,” the guard told them.

  “Oh, I just wanted to give my friends from out of town a quick look,” Madge said.

  “Yes,” Kiku said, “do you know where—”

  Madge elbowed Kiku in the ribs. “Where the little girls’ room is?” Madge asked. “I had so much tea at lunch, my teeth are floating.”

  The guard told them where the restrooms were, and they continued on up the steeply sloping ramp. “I was going to ask him where the Arthurian casket was,” Kiku whispered.

  “I know, but if we have to break a glass case getting it, do you want him to remember us asking for it?”

  “I guess not. But now we only have an hour to find the casket. We’d better split up.”

  “So you can read the chapter on your own again?” Madge snipped in spite of herself. It was the lump of fear lodged in her stomach talking. It was making her impatient and irritable. She didn’t like being afraid.

  “The museum doesn’t look very big,” Joe said, looking at a map he’d taken from the information desk. “We won’t be very far from each other. I’ll look up here in the chapels on the north side, and Kiku can look in the rooms on the south side. Madge can look in the Gothic Chapel and the galleries on the ground floor. We’ll meet back here in an hour. There won’t be time for anyone to read anything. All right?”

  “I guess,” Madge said, swallowing the sense of dread inside of her. She took a copy of the map and set out to find the Gothic Chapel. It figured that she would end up in a chapel after all the time she’d spent in the last year avoiding church.

  She walked through a gloomy hallway with tapestries on the wall and statues of lean-looking saints. It was cold and drafty. Sheesh, no wonder they all wore those long, heavy dresses back then and were always dancing and jousting. A body could freeze to death in these old castles.

  She turned from the gloomy hall into what looked like a square room on the map that was called the Cuxa Cloister and felt as if she’d stepped from winter into spring. Sunlight poured into the open well of the courtyard and turned the pink stone of the carved columns enclosing it a warm burnished rose. There were pots of poinsettias and Christmas lilies lining the colonnaded walkway and the paths that crossed the open space. She turned and looked back and saw that the door she’d come through was topped by an arch with strange creatures carved into the stone. There was a lion with a man’s head, and a chicken with a snake’s tail—she’d never seen anything like this at Our Lady of Perpetual Help in Brooklyn! But one of the creatures did look familiar. It was some kind of dragon with a tail that had a head at the end of it. She wasn’t sure where she’d seen it before, but it sure gave her the creeps.

  She turned away from the arch and walked into the open garden, tilting her face up to the sun, hoping it would melt the cold dread inside. She knew she should be hurrying downstairs to find the casket, but she couldn’t stand the idea of going back inside the cold, gloomy building. It felt like a tomb. She closed her eyes and breathed in the lily-scented air—

  And heard bells ringing.

  It couldn’t be three o’clock yet. And the bells weren’t ringing the hour. They were clanging as if signaling an alarm. Had Joe or Kiku gotten in trouble?

  She opened her eyes. She was still standing in the open courtyard, but instead of the spindly pots of lilies and poinsettias, the garden was at its full summer height, lush roses basking in the sun. A woman in a long heavy dress made of coarse brown cloth was crossing the courtyard, coming toward her. She had an aged but regal face framed by a white wimple—a nun. She looked, in fact, like Madge’s seventh-grade English teacher, Sister Agatha Dorothy (Sister Aggie Dot the girls all called her, but never to her face), who had told Madge she had a real flair for writing.

  What was Sister Aggie Dot doing here?

  “My lord,” she said when she was close enough to be heard over the clanging of the bells, “what news?”

  Madge, who was thinking the words Have you lost your marbles, Sister? said instead, “We are besieged. The Northmen are invading. I have come for the book.”

  “What good has come of the book, my lord? All the sacrifices we made and still the land is besieged and slipping into darkness.”

  Madge wanted to cry out and ask what they were both doing here and who the heck were the Northmen, and why did she keep calling her my lord like that tramp in the park had, but instead she found herself saying, “Perchance we held back the dark long enough that others in our names will take up the fight after us—and that is all any of us can do.”

  Sister Aggie Dot replied, “You’ll find the book in the chamber at the foot of the stairs, buried in my trunk. I will fend off the invaders while you secure it.” She drew a dagger from beneath her heavy dress and held it up. The sun struck it and seemed to set it on fire. “For Arthur,” she said. “Rex quondam, Rexque futurus. And for England!”

  The fire seemed to spark in her eyes and then she was rushing away. Madge heard shouts and the clang of steel from behind her, but she was hurrying across the cloister and running down stone steps and into a tiny room tucked beneath the stairs. The room was very plain—whitewashed walls, a low bench with a straw mattress, a wooden chest above which hung a silver dagger with a beautifully carved gold hilt adorned with a green stone.

  The dagger was so beautiful, Madge wanted to stare at it, but instead she found herself kneeling in front of a chest and opening it. She buried her hands in cloth—beautiful silk dresses embroidered with flowers and encrusted with jewels—throwing the precious cloth aside until her hands grazed something hard and smooth, something that felt like bone. She drew it out. The part inside of her that was still Madge thought it might be a skull, but the other part that wasn’t Madge was not surprised to pull out a box made of carved ivory. Both parts wanted to run her hands over the carved figures on the lid—two knights jousting, ladies on a castle rampart defending themselves from an army of knights who catapulted roses over the castle wall.

  The part that wasn’t her laughed and murmured, “If only the invaders at our walls were planning to bombard us with roses instead of flaming arrows.”

  Then she rose and took the dagger off the wall, fitted it into the belt around her waist—which she noticed now was thick and covered with a heavy leather tunic—and carried the box into a narrow stone chapel. Women in long plain dresses were kneeling on the floor, clasping their hands together, wailing, and looking up at the stained-glass window in the curved apse of the chapel. Madge walked past them to a raised platform in the apse on which stood a stone coffin. The carved figure of a knight in armor lay on top, his feet resting on a little crouched dog. She knelt in front of the tomb.

  Get up! Madge wanted to cry. There’s no time for praying! Run!

  She could hear shouts from above. Something struck the window, and it shattered into a million shards of jeweled light. A flaming arrow followed and struck one of the women. Madge could hear her screams and smell burning flesh. But instead of rising, Madge was scrabbling with her nails on the stone floor as if she was trying to bury herself. She managed finally to loosen one of the stones and push it aside. There was a small space underneath. She placed the ivory box inside and spoke—

  For God’s sake, no prayers. Get on your feet and fight! Madge screamed inside her head.

  “May the ones who take up our fight have better luck.”

  Then she stood up and turned, dagger drawn, to face the invaders.

&nb
sp; * * *

  Madge found herself standing in the stone chapel, facing not a horde of Viking invaders but an elderly couple in matching plaid raincoats and umbrellas.

  “Dearie, do you know where the restrooms are?” the woman said in a thick Brooklyn accent. “Irving and I have lost our way.”

  Madge shook her head, speechless, but pointed to the stairs. As she raised her arm, she saw she was holding the jeweled dagger from her dream. Where the heck did I get that? she wondered. She quickly stashed it in her coat pocket, hoping the old lady didn’t report her to the guards. But the old dame must’ve been blind as a bat, because she only thanked her and turned to help her husband up the stairs. Kiku and Joe came running down the stairs, edging past the old couple.

  “Have you found it?” Kiku asked. “We’ve looked everywhere upstairs. We’ve only got a few minutes left!”

  Madge opened her mouth to speak but found she couldn’t. She looked around the chapel. There were a number of stone tombs like the one she’d seen, but they weren’t the same. There were stained-glass windows in the apse, but they were all intact. There were no bells ringing, no fire, no invading hordes storming the walls. So why was her heart still racing? She turned away from Kiku and Joe and walked past them into the next room and directly to a glass case. There was the ivory box. It was the same one she’d held in her hands moments ago. She could still remember the feel of the cool ivory as she had placed it in the ground, and the sadness she’d felt at the sureness that she would never see it again. A foolish expensive trifle—but it was the only thing remaining of our old lives together.

  “That’s it,” Kiku said, “but the case is locked. What—”

  Madge reached in her pocket and drew out the gold dagger. Without thinking, she struck it against the case and shattered the glass. Kiku gasped. Someone shouted from the next gallery. Madge reached inside and grabbed the box, the feel of cool bone making her shiver all over. Joe was pulling her and Kiku out a door, into another cloister. There was a colonnaded walk around two sides of the square, but on the south and west sides, there was only a low stone wall. Madge could see the river over the west wall and trees on the other side of the south wall.

  “Not the river side,” she said running toward the south wall. “The longships will be coming from there.”

  “The wha—?” she heard Joe and Kiku saying. But she was already scaling the south wall, tucking the box under her coat for safety, and leaping into the bright clean air.

  24

  THE FLAGPOLE

  BY THE TIME Kiku and Joe reached the top of the wall, Madge was already running across the lawn and vanishing in a patch of trees.

  “We’d better follow her,” Joe said.

  “This is crazy,” Kiku answered, her heart racing as she looked down at the steep drop below them. “We’ll all be arrested.”

  “Not if they don’t catch us.” Joe grabbed her hand. The feel of his hand on hers made her forget the guards behind them and the steep drop in front of them. They had been here before, standing on a wall with danger behind them and danger in front of them. She glanced at Joe and saw, superimposed over the boy, the face and figure of the gallant Sir Lancelot. She knew he would do all in his power to protect her as she would do all in hers to protect him. She trusted him with her life. And so, gripping his hand, she jumped.

  As soon as they hit the grass, they ran for the trees. They went over the stone bridge, climbed a steep hill, and came out in a stone-enclosed circle. For a moment the stones seemed to tower over them, and Kiku thought to herself, We’ve crossed over—we’re back in Avalon. Kiku remembered how she had wandered into Faerie last night in the museum just as Morgaine had crossed over into the magical land in the third chapter. Had she unwittingly led Joe into the land of Faerie? But then the stones shrank to a low stone wall and instead of a tall standing stone in the center, there was a flagpole with an eagle carved into its base and the red, white, and blue American flag snapping in the wind. It stands for the same thing, Kiku thought, her eyes stinging. It’s what you’re supposed to fight for now.

  Madge was sitting on a bench, the ivory box in her lap. The sun turned her hair gold and her plain threadbare coat into a richly embroidered cloak. Then the red-gold head looked up, and she was just Madge again, biting her lip and looking embarrassed.

  “I thought you guys had ditched me,” she said. “I wouldn’t half blame you. I don’t know what came over me. Breaking that glass, stealing the box! What if the police catch us?”

  “That doesn’t matter,” Kiku said, sitting next to Madge. She knew they should keep moving, but Madge clearly needed a minute. “You only did what you had to, although I suppose you could have just taken the chapter out of the box. Do we even know it’s in there?”

  “I think it’s where she kept the book,” Madge said, her hands moving over the surface of the box. She was tracing the figure of a knight on horseback carrying a woman in his arms away from a besieged city.

  “She?” Joe asked.

  Kiku looked up at him. The features of Lancelot had fallen away, but she could still see the shadow of the man he would become. A man who would always protect those who were defenseless. Then she looked back at Madge. “Do you mean Guinevere?”

  Madge shook her head, her brow creased. Kiku had rarely seen her look confused about anything. She was always so sure of herself. “I think it was Guinevere who hid the book in the chapel, but then there was someone else who came for it when the castle was under siege. . . .”

  “I’ve seen that too,” Joe said. “I was on a castle rampart with Morgaine.”

  “I was there too,” Kiku said. “With you, Joe, only you were Lancelot. We jumped from the wall.” She shivered. “But I don’t know what happened to us after we jumped.” She remembered that fleeting image of the standing stones when they entered the flagpole circle. Had Lancelot and Morgaine gone to Avalon after Camelot fell?

  “In my vision I knew we were going to die,” Joe said. “And I knew . . .” He hesitated, looking from Kiku to Madge.

  “Go ahead,” Madge said, “tell us what you knew.”

  “I knew that’s what would happen to all the knights who heeded the call of the book.”

  “That’s why Dr. Bean didn’t want us to read the book,” Kiku said. “He knew the knights who heed the call of the book die. He didn’t want that to happen to a bunch of kids.”

  “Well, it’s too late for that,” Madge said, gripping the box with both hands.

  “Unless,” Kiku said, laying her hand on top of the box, “we stop here.”

  “What?” Joe asked, staring at her. “What do you mean?”

  “We haven’t read the last chapter yet. I-I think that the spell’s not complete until we do.” She thought back to what Moth had told her last night. “If we don’t read the last chapter, we may be able to evade the fate that has befallen all the others who’ve read the book. We won’t have to die.”

  “But,” Joe said, “then we won’t know where the attack is. Others will die.”

  “Yes,” Kiku said. “But we won’t. We could run away, leave the city. That’s our choice.” She looked from Joe to Madge. “Or you two could go and I could stay. I don’t mind doing it. I’ve already read the third chapter alone. I can read this one and decode the last message. Then you and Joe may be all right.”

  “No!” Joe cried. “That’s not fair. It has to be all of us.”

  “It’s already not all of us,” Kiku said. “Walt’s not here.”

  “We’re not going to lose anyone else!” Madge cried, then she opened the box and gasped. For a moment Kiku was afraid that the box was empty, but when she leaned over, she saw that the pages lay flat in the casket. The one on the top was covered by an illustration of a courtyard much like one of the cloisters they’d just seen at the museum. A woman in long, plain robes stood at the center of the garden. She faced a man
in a leather tunic with a crown on his head.

  “It’s too late,” Madge said. “We’re all a part of this now. We have to read it.”

  “We don’t have time right now,” Joe said. “Let’s skip to the last page and decode the message.”

  Joe shuffled the pages until he came to the last one and then took out the encoded message from his pocket. It was awkward for him to hold both on his lap, so he passed the chapter to Madge. Kiku handed him a pencil. She wished Walt were here. He always carried a notebook that Joe could have leaned on. That wasn’t the only reason she wished he were there. It felt wrong doing this with just the three of them.

  That didn’t stop you when you read the third chapter alone.

  “I’ve got it,” Joe said. “I’ve got the message.”

  “Read it,” Madge said.

  “It says . . .” The blood drained from Joe’s face.

  The bag contains all that you will need to commence the attack. Once you have introduced the poison into the system, millions will die, the prisoners in the tower first of all. All will know it is useless to fight us.

  Joe crumpled up the paper and threw it angrily on the ground.

  “But that doesn’t tell us where the attack is going to take place,” Kiku wailed. “What does it mean by system? And what prisoners in the tower? Dr. Bean and Miss Lake? My father? Where is this tower?”

  “Maybe we’d know more if we’d gotten the bag,” Madge said. She got up and paced to the edge of the stone circle and looked out over the rampart at the view of the city.

  Kiku got up and paced to her side. “What kind of systems are there?” she asked.

  “Transit systems?” Madge suggested. She’d left the box on the bench, but she was still holding the chapter pages. “Trains, subways . . .”

  “But how would you poison those?” Kiku asked. “No, it has to be something that would affect everyone.” She stared over the parapet at the city. Hundreds of apartment and office buildings, with round water towers on their roofs, punctuated the skyline like medieval towers. . . .