Children of the Knight by Michael J. Bowler (e ink epub reader .txt) 📕

“Agreed. Up with you now. We have a long journey ahead.”

The knight reached down with a gauntleted hand. Lance eyed it for a long moment, then put away his pocketknife and reached up to do something he hadn’t done since he was six years old—he grasped the hand of a stranger.

With strength and ease, the knight hefted the boy up and onto the saddle behind him as though Lance weighed no more than a stuffed animal. He was caught off guard by the man’s physical power, and shook his head in admiration.

“Man, you’re strong!”

The knight glanced back over his shoulder at the wide-eyed boy behind him. “As will you be, Lance Sepulveda.”

The knight spurred his horse, and the large animal cantered softly down the alley, rounding the corner and disappearing into the dark streets of Lennox.

The knight, with Lance clinging tightly to his back, stopped at the edge of the Los Angeles River, and Lance gazed down into the dry, concrete riverbed. More of an aqueduct, the river seldom had much water coursing through it. The horse neighed approvingly.

“You weren’t messin’ with me about a long journey!” Lance exclaimed, sitting up to get a better view.

“Hold on,” the knight intoned as he flicked the reins, and the muscular white mare began her descent to the riverbed below. Lance felt tight with fear atop such a large animal, but somehow the presence of this strong, confident man eased his fear.

“Does, uh, does your horse have a name?” he asked, trying to quell the nervousness in his voice. This descent was steep, and he wanted nothing more than to plant his feet firmly on cement.

“She hath been given the name Llamrei, after my first mount of long ago,” the knight replied, his tone wistful.

Something about his melancholy tone silenced Lance. The mare reached bottom without even the slightest misstep and trotted along the riverbed, halting at an enormous entrance to the storm drain system, which wound underground throughout the Los Angeles basin. This cavernous maw looked large enough to drive a van through.

A metal grill guarded the entrance to the drain, but Lance noted that the aged lock had recently been broken. The knight reached out and grabbed one side of the grill, backing up his horse to ease it open. The metal screamed with disuse, and the sound sent chills down Lance’s back. The dark, gaping orifice threatened to envelope him, and his stomach pulled up into his throat.

“We, uh, we’re goin’ in there?” He fought to keep his quavering voice steady.

“Have no fear, young Lance.”

Lance bristled, his pride winning out. “I ain’t afraid! It just don’ look like no home to me.”

“It doth be mine at present.” The knight spurred Llamrei forward into the dark, forbidding tunnel, pulling shut the grill and sealing them within.

Lance squinted in the dark as the knight extended a gloved hand to grasp an old, weathered torch from a small alcove. With his other gloved hand, he dug into a leather pouch hanging from the saddle and extracted a pinch of some kind of powder, sprinkling it atop the torch. Flames sprang to flickering life, causing Lance to gasp with surprise as its warm glow cast weird reflections off the man’s armor. He gazed in wonder.

That looked like something out of a movie! Who is this guy anyway?

“A mere trick, my boy, taught to me long ago by M—by an old friend.”

The knight spurred his horse into the darkness of the tunnel. The man’s quick change of subject was not lost on Lance. What had he been planning to say? All his street instincts told him to leap down from the horse and hightail it out of there. None of this made any sense, not here, not in his city, not in his sorry life. And yet he didn’t jump. He didn’t run. There was something about the guy…. Growing up as he had, Lance had a good gut when it came to people. No, this guy wasn’t out to hurt him or kill him or….

Don’t even go there!

No, he decided as they trotted along the dank underbelly of the city, this guy would not hurt him. But if he didn’t want to hurt him, then what the hell did he want?

The two remained silent as Llamrei trotted along the damp and drafty storm drain. There were no sounds save the clop, clop, clopping of her hooves against the lichen-covered concrete. It surprised Lance that the horse seemed so comfortable underground. He always thought most animals, himself included, preferred above ground to below. She must be used to it, he surmised, which meant the guy was telling the truth. He really did live here.

Suddenly, Llamrei stopped. Lance had been so lost in his musings that he hadn’t realized they’d left the tunnel to enter an enormous chamber.

“We are here,” the knight announced, drawing Lance back into reality. As the man deftly dismounted, Lance’s eyes bulged wide with wonder at his surroundings.

The immensity of the underground chamber awed him. It appeared to be some sort of central hub from which a multitude of tunnels branched off, each swallowed up by darkness. Lit solely by the light of numerous torches imbedded within the concrete walls, Lance gazed in amazement at what appeared to be the central hall of an old castle, the kind he’d only ever seen in books. What the hell? There wasn’t such things in LA!

He observed bedrolls lining the walls and disappearing down each branching tunnel, old tables and chairs, wooden and rough-

hewn and not like any he’d ever seen. There was even a big-ass throne of some kind with huge arms and a really high back set against one wall, like right out of a frickin’ old movie! What the…? And then his eyes fell upon the weapons, and his face lit up with wonder. Spread out before him were racks upon wooden racks of weapons—swords of all shapes and sizes, shields, short-handled dirks, knives, longbows and short bows, and arrows and quivers.

Carefully, eyes pinned to the armory before him, he dropped slowly off the horse, allowing his skateboard and backpack to fall to the ground unnoticed. Heart beating with excitement, he stepped forward into this wonderland, gaping in astonishment at the sight before him. He slipped the hood down, allowing his long brown hair its freedom. He shook his head in awe.

“Wow!” was all he could think to say, hurrying to the nearest of the weapons racks and gingerly touching some of the swords. He gripped the leather- bound hilt of a large broadsword and struggled vainly to heft it over his head. The blade alone was almost five feet in length.

The knight turned to observe Lance grappling with the weight of the sword.

“Each be forged of solid iron, lad, and honed to a fine edge. One day soon, thou shalt be hefting the largest of them with ease.”

Lance fought the broadsword back into its place on the rack, watching curiously as the knight removed his gauntlets and laid them on an ancient-looking table. He then slipped the helm and face guard up over his head, revealing his face for the first time. His appearance surprised Lance, for he was a young man, probably not even thirty, with long brown hair cascading past his shoulders and a small, well-trimmed beard and moustache. Lance gazed at him open-mouthed, his hand still on the hilt of the sword.

“You’re younger than I thought. How old are you, anyways?”

The knight smiled, a pleasant, reassuring sort of smile. “Much older than I look, I’m afraid.”

Lance spread his arms wide at the myriad weapons with an enormous grin breaching his normally stoic young face. “This place is bitchin’, man! What’s all this stuff for?”

“A crusade, young Lance. Wouldst thou learn the use of these weapons?”

Lance’s face lit up as he grabbed for a smaller sword and cut the air with it. “Hell yeah, but—” His smile dropped, his face clouding with suspicion.

“Why me?”

“Methinks, young Lance, that you require nourishment. There be much we must speak of this night if you are to understand.”

Lance grabbed one of the knives and held it in front of him, sword in one hand, knife in the other. “Why me?” he repeated, hoping the hardness of his tone effectively masked the relentless pounding of his heart.

The young man studied him, but made not threatening moves. “T’were not by chance you and I met this night, but by design.”

“Huh? You gotta start speakin’ English or Spanish or something cause I don’t know what you’re saying!”

“It was decreed that you and I should meet, for I didst see thee in a vision, young Lance, a vision for the future.”

Lance lowered the weapons, but kept them at the ready. “Who the hell are you anyways?”

The young man unsheathed his own large, gleaming sword, gazed regally down at the boy, gripped the ornately jeweled hilt, and raised the sword aloft.

“I am Arthur, once and future King of Great Britain, and this be Excalibur. Yours is a time and place of immense need, and thus, as ’twas foretold centuries past, have I returned to right the wrongs that plague thy homeland. Amidst the squalor and barbarism of this city, I shall rebuild my Round Table and change the course of history. And thee, young Lance, shall be my First Knight. Are you game?”

Lance’s lower jaw dropped open, and his wide green eyes bulged with amazement. For the first time in his life he understood the meaning of the word “dumbstruck.”

“Huh?” was all he could muster.

Arthur grinned.

Mark Twain High School, usually just called MTS for short, or what was currently left of it, sat on the corner of Birch Ave and Tercero Blvd in the city of Hawthorne. It was a neighborhood high school, serving kids from Lennox and Hawthorne and occasionally neighboring Lawndale.

The school, at present, was undergoing major reconstruction and, to Lance’s eye, had become even more chaotic than usual. The entire Tercero side was inaccessible due to new office building construction, so everyone had to enter and exit the campus from Birch Ave. The school had always been unorganized, but the construction crews with their daily chorus of hammering and sawing and pounding and ripping added a whole new level to the usual unruly atmosphere of the place.

Lance knew he took a big chance coming to school because he’d run away from the group home that enrolled him, but the school had never found out he was a runaway. That group home was so lame, he figured they didn’t even bother un-enrolling him. And since Arthur had given him an assignment, Lance figured Mark Twain was as good a place as any to start recruiting.

Students, mostly Latino, pushed and bustled and flirted and texted their way between classes, darting in and around and under yellow caution tape strung about the place like a senior prank gone viral. Lance zipped in and out of the crowd and stopped briefly at the side of sixteen-year-old Enrique. He paused long enough to whisper something in the other boy’s ear before Enrique nodded in understanding and moved off. Lance ducked beneath the caution tape to bob up alongside fifteen-year-old Luis and hurriedly followed him around Building Eleven toward the parking lot by the pool.

Jenny McMullen, blonde and attractive, intelligent, but not brilliant, in her late-twenties, had been a literature undergrad and always wanted to teach English since she’d been in high school. But the difference, she’d discovered, between the private school she’d attended and the public school where