Dragon Sword Read online

  DANGER BOY

  Dragon Sword

  Mark London Williams

  Danger Boy: Dragon Sword

  By Mark London Williams

  Copyright 2001, 2004, 2011 Mark London Williams

  Smashwords Edition

  First published by Tricycle Press in 2001

  Candlewick Press Edition 2004

  Cover by Michael Koelsch

  For Dick and Deb, my first Bay Area tour guides, with love.

  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Prologue

  The Lake

  The old king stands by the lake, looking over it as for the last time, waiting.

  Waiting for a woman. A woman who’s never touched land.

  After a moment, she appears from under the water, calmly floating up, then hovering just over the surface. The woman remains utterly serene, as if rising from a lake then standing above it were scarcely remarkable. She seems very patient, as though she could wait a long time to take tired kings into her liquid embrace, take them into the lake with her when their hearts are broken for the last time.

  This king is very tired. He’s seen too much war, too much bloodshed — and knows he’s caused a lot of it.

  When he was younger, he never thought he’d wind up hurting like this. He thought everything would be perfect.

  The king is going to throw the sword into the lake, let this water sprite have it, because this sword, it seems to him now, is the root cause of all his misery.

  He remembers pulling it from the rock when he was younger; he remembers thinking it would make him invincible.

  That was a lie. It only made him king. Now, no more lies. Just water. And silence.

  He holds the sword above his head, ready to fling it into what he thinks will be its final resting place.

  “Arthur.”

  It’s Merlin’s voice. The old wizard is always speaking at moments like this, breaking the king’s concentration, never quite taking anything seriously enough.

  This time Merlin’s pointing. Out at the water. The serenity is even draining from the Lady of the Lake’s face. There’s a swirl of foam and bubbles next to her, and something unexpected. An intruder.

  It was just supposed to be the king and Merlin here, alone with the water sprite, to dispose of the sword. The sword and a whole lot of bad memories.

  But there’s someone else. Someone who’s kind of . . . fading in. Thrashing about in the water, gasping for air, trying to swim.

  Is it another wizard, here to challenge Merlin? Or perhaps a spirit, the wandering ghost of some man killed by the king in a forgotten war?

  The king can’t tell. But Merlin doesn’t seem worried. He seems, in fact, slightly amused.

  But then, Merlin always seems amused, no matter how bad the situation.

  The small caps and breakers in the lake are shredded apart by the frantic splashing as the intruder buzzes through the water like a small, agitated shark.

  As the trespasser draws near, the king lowers his sword and lets it rest in the mud by his leggings.

  It’s a boy coming to them. Out of the water. A boy.

  Soon to be a man, but not quite. About twelve years old.

  Wearing jeans and a baseball cap — though the king wouldn’t have the faintest idea what to call them.

  “Hello,” the boy finally gasps.

  “Well met,” the king says. “Or, perhaps, not so well. Merlin, is this one of yours?”

  The boy looks from one man to the other, then back at the king. “Arthur?” The boy speaks with the strangest accent the king has ever heard.

  But the conversation is interrupted. The water starts bubbling and churning again. And another boy begins fading into view.

  Chapter One

  Eli: One Man’s Family

  December 24, 1941 C.E.

  “Mom?”

  I’m standing in front of a big hotel up on a hill in San Francisco. The Fairmont. The sign matches the name on the tattered piece of paper in my hand. I’ve just walked across the city. It’s cold and it’s night and it’s Christmas and the United States has just plunged into a world war.

  And my mother stands there shivering, with tears running down her face.

  “Mom?”

  I don’t know what else to say right now. I’m kind of stuck at “Mom,” which itself is a word, a name, I haven’t said out loud for a long time. Because there hasn’t been anyone I could say it to.

  Well, I guess it’s not really a name. It’s more a title. Her name is Margarite. Margarite Sands. She’s my mother, and she disappeared in an explosion in the year 2018. An explosion that threw her backward in time.

  Of course, I’ve come backward in time, too. To find her and bring her back. Back to my dad. To her own world.

  “Eli? Is it you?” At first she reaches out like she’s going to touch my face. Then her hand just stops there, in midair, frozen. Like maybe I’m a ghost, or a mirage. A Christmas ghost.

  But a ghost from her past or future? Even I can’t quite figure it out.

  It takes another moment for her fingers to reach my face. She brushes my cheek, then takes her hand away, satisfied that I’m still standing here.

  “It’s me, Mom.”

  She’s quiet again, all bundled up in her coat — a coat I’ve never seen before.

  She’s older than last time I saw her, too. She has a scarf around her face, so it’s hard to tell what the difference is — maybe the expression in her eyes.

  She’s been away from me longer than I have from her. On my long walk over here, I saw the holiday decorations, and a couple of people wished me “Merry Christmas.” I finally checked a newspaper. It’s December 24, 1941.

  My mom has been back here since at least 1937. So practically five years have passed for her. She’s five years older, and I’m not.

  Getting tangled up in time — traveling from one time to another — does funny things like that.

  “How did you find me?”

  “I was about to go inside when I saw you getting off that cable car.”

  “No, I mean how did you find me? Back here. In”— she has to think about it for a split second —“1941?”

  I hold up the paper. It’s Fairmont stationery, with the word help written on it in her hand- writing. It appeared inside the time sphere in my dad’s lab.

  My dad, Sandusky Sands, is a physicist. So’s my mom. One of their experiments about slowing down time got out of control, and a lab blast hurled her back… to here. To right before World War II. Except it’s not “before” anymore. Europe’s already at war, and now the U.S. and Japan are, too.

  After Mom vanished, Dad and I left our home in Princeton, New Jersey, and moved out West. He’d inherited an old winery, close to San Francisco, in the Valley of the Moon. About fifty miles north. And a million miles away. Dad is still living in 2019.

  He tried to stop all his research then, shut the whole thing down, but he was basically forced to continue by DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research P
rojects Agency, and one of the guys who runs it, Mr. Howe.

  Howe made sure that all the equipment Dad would need to keep doing his experiments was sent west, too. Dad realized the work on time spheres was going to go on with him or without him. And without him, it would be a lot less safe — for whomever else Howe got to do the work, and for the rest of the world.

  Of course, Dad had already lost Mom. And then I got unstuck in time myself. And he doesn’t want to lose me, too. But he hasn’t. He won’t. I’m coming back.

  “I can move around in time, too, Mom. I can even control it now. A little bit.” My hand touches the small metal disk in my pocket. It’s a chrono-compass Dad’s been working on. Between that and my supercharged baseball cap, I’m a regular one-man time-ship. I can cross the Fifth Dimension to go to different points in history. Though it takes a toll on your body. For me, I’m always left a little woozy.

  “Oh, Eli.” Mom’s sounding a lot more sad than happy. “It can’t really be controlled. And you shouldn’t be here now.”

  “You mean on Christmas Eve?”

  “I mean during World War Two. For America, it started two weeks ago. Officially. Right after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor. Hey,”— she leans over and touches my forehead, though this time it’s like she knows I won’t disappear —“you’re sweating.”

  “Yeah, I’m —” I want to tell her it’s the effects of the time travel, but she’s already worrying like a mom. “I had to walk a long way to get here.”

  “But it’s forty degrees out. You should be shivering, not sweating.” Well, she’s sounding like a mom, too. Then she finally gives me an all-out hug and kiss. “I can’t believe you’re here.”

  “Are you glad?” She hasn’t said she’s happy to see me yet.

  “I don’t know.” The hug winds down, and she’s looking at me again, getting all concerned.

  She doesn’t know? Aren’t mothers always supposed to be glad to see their children, no matter what? No matter how dangerous things are?

  Or are parents willing to be sad, to be in pain, if it means their kids are safe somewhere? Is that what it means to be a parent?

  “Is your father here?”

  I’m about to tell her, See? It’ll be all right, he’s waiting for us, that the whole idea of my coming back was to bring her home with me — when the air is filled with the loud wailing of what sounds like a million ships blasting their horns out at sea. Or maybe thousands of those old-fashioned gas-powered cars, like you see in history vids, all honking at once.

  But these aren’t just horns. It’s a more…panicked kind of sound.

  “Air-raid siren,” Mom says. “Come on.”

  She takes me by the hand and pulls me into the hotel. In the lobby, people are scurrying around, some of them holding their ears, but no one is diving under tables or anything.

  “Are we about to get bombed?” I yell over the noise.

  She shakes her head and pulls me through the crowd. Farther across the lobby, there’s a large Christmas tree with tinsel wrapped around it but no lights. A big poster is propped up in front of it with a picture of Santa Claus arm in arm with Uncle Sam:

  PUT COAL IN DER FUEHRER’S STOCKING!

  BUY WAR BONDS!

  I wonder who “der Fuehrer” is. Mom motions for me to keep following her across the lobby. We pass a ballroom and I glance in, then stop: There seems to be some kind of play happening onstage. Or at least there had been, until the sirens brought everything to a halt. There’s a small orchestra, and the whole room’s decked out with holiday decorations. Leading the band is a little man with fuzzy white hair — except they’re not playing right now, and his baton seems frozen in the air. Onstage, actors in tuxedos and evening gowns are all gathered around ... what? Metal poles of some sort, with small cages on top.

  There’s a woman near the entrance dressed like a large elf, or Santa’s helper. She’s passing out small gifts from a big red bag. She doesn’t seem fazed by the air-raid sirens at all. She smiles and thrusts one of the objects into my hand. It’s a small mirror. Around the frame, there’s writing: “You are reflected in your friends, family, and times!” it exclaims. “One Man’s Family on NBC Radio.”

  Radio! That was like the audio part of a vid-screen, without any pictures. I bet those poles are for voice recording and they’re doing a show in there. I think.

  I want to ask Mom, but she points to her ears — it’s still too loud to talk — and motions toward a door. It opens to a staircase.

  It’s cold in the stairwell. After a few flights, I huff out another question. I’m full of them. But you would be, too, if you hadn’t seen your own mom in five years. Or even two. “Doesn’t the elevator work here?”

  “Too crowded,” she says. “We’re going up to my room.” We’re speaking to each other the way my friend Andy and I used to, when we’d keep the background music to a Barnstormers game turned up: Our conversations would be normal, except that we were nearly shouting at each other, in a casual way.

  “What about the sirens?” No one else seems terribly worried, but I’ve read about World War II. It was a horrible time almost every- where, and I don’t remember if San Francisco was ever bombed or not.

  “It’s just a drill. They announced it on the radio.”

  Like fire drills at school. You know ahead of time they’re coming. I always wondered if that destroyed the whole point of practicing — you’re not really responding like you’re supposed to, like you would if it were the real thing.

  We stop climbing when we get to the fifth floor, then walk down a carpeted hallway to room 532. She stops. There’s a wrapped present with her name on it in front of the door. She looks at it, shakes her head, and quickly picks it up, then takes out a key. It really is a key, not a card, and she uses it to open the door.

  As suddenly as they began, the sirens stop.

  “Home for the holidays,” Mom says, motioning for me to go in.

  I step inside. Her room is small but not too messy — there’s a bed in one corner, a desk, and a little kitchen area. But I don’t know how she cooks anything. There’s no oven, and no microwave fiberwrap to heat up food.

  There’s no Comnet screen anywhere, either; no rain alarms to warn about sudden storms, no bug sirens for stray bacteria and viruses — it’s like the old West.

  It is the old West.

  “Wow, Mom. So what do you do up here? Do you have one of those televisions?”

  “No.” She smiles and shakes her head. “I listen to the radio. I read and draw.”

  I show her the mirror. “Radio? You mean audio, right? Is that what they were doing downstairs? But don’t you have a Comnet —”

  “It’s that thing over there.” She points to a large, curved wooden cabinet with a kind of grill in front of it.

  She turns it on. Nothing happens.

  “It takes a minute to warm up.” She takes off her coat, scarf, and mittens. I’m just wearing an overshirt and jeans. Mom was right: I’m cold, in spite of the Fifth Dimension sweats.

  “Did you say you draw?” She never drew before. I guess she really is here all alone.

  “I’ve had time to learn some new things.” And then she looks at me. Long and hard. Even more intensely than the way she looked at me down on the street. It’s a look that I probably wouldn’t understand if I were still a little kid.

  It’s not just an “I’m your mom and I’ve missed you” look but something more. Not even one of those “God, how you’ve changed” looks that you get from other relatives. It’s both of those, and something else. I don’t know if I can describe it. I said it was intense, but there’s also that…regret is the word that adults would use. Like you want to take back something that you did, but you can’t. Like she might not get another chance to stare at me that way again.

  Except she will. Because I came here to bring her back to her home-time. Where she belongs.

  “Because it’s never an interruption when it comes to America’s safety!”
/>   I jump. A man has just started speaking in the back of the room.

  “That,” Mom says, “is the radio.”

  “So hurrah for the sirens and drills! And now, as the Fairmont’s own Samuel Gravlox Orchestra plays our show’s ‘Destiny Waltz’ theme, we return you to the elegant, wind-swept Sea Cliff area of San Francisco, for more heart-rending, day-to-day adventures of the Barbour clan in this holiday broadcast of …One Man’s Family!”

  “That’s what they were doing downstairs,” she tells me. “They’re broadcasting live from the hotel. One Man’s Family. It’s a huge hit. They’re doing shows from all over the city this week. They’re tying it in to selling war bonds.”

  “Wow. …So those big metal things were the microphones? For digitizing their voices?”

  “Well, they don’t digitize, but yes, those were microphones.”

  “So what are war bonds? And who’s ‘der Fuehrer’?”

  “Oh, Eli, honey.” That’s not what she wants to talk about. “Who sent you here? I know your father wouldn’t do it.”

  “No one sent me… It was my idea, and I came myself. I can move through time on my own.” I point to the Seals cap on my head. “With this.”

  “With a baseball cap?”

  “Dad says it all has to do with particles. With those WOMPERs. Those Wide Orbiting Mass Particle —”

  “Massless. Wide Orbital Massless Particle Reverser. That’s okay. I could never have remembered the whole thing either when I was . . .” Her eyes widen a little. “How old are you now? How long have I been gone, for you?”

  “I’m twelve now, Mom.” Now it’s my turn to feel sad.

  “Twelve. Well I guess I owe you a couple of happy birthdays.”

  I don’t know what to tell her. I don’t know if I’m supposed to say that it’s all right, that it’s not her fault. Or maybe she needs to tell me something. Neither of us speaks right away.

  “No, Eli. I couldn’t have said it at twelve, either. Of course, WOMPERs weren’t even discovered until I was in college.” She says it like she’s trying to tease me. The way she used to. I guess we’ll talk about the missed birthdays later.