WAKE-UP CALL

Esther M. Friesner

“Wake-Up Call” was purchased by Gardner Dozois, and appeared in the December 1988 issue of Asimov’s, with an illustration by Judith Mitchell. (Esther M. Friesner’s “The Three Queens” appears elsewhere in this anthology; see there for biographical notes.)

In the very funny story that follows, Friesner shows us that when duty calls, it calls—no matter how long it takes, or how strange a voice it calls in…

“I know I heard something this time.” Vivian set down her cards and cocked her head towards the closed bedroom door just off the kitchen. She turned to the woman on her left. “Hadn’t you best take a peep in there, Fay?”

“Whuffo?” Fay’s reply was somewhat garbled by the cigarette dangling from her thickly lipsticked mouth. Vivian could not remember the last time she’d seen Fay without a smoking fag wiggling and bobbing when she spoke.

Across from Vivian, Gwen snickered nastily into her hand. “Always hearing things from in there, you are.” She tucked a wisp of bleached blonde hair back behind her ear and fanned her cards. “Last time it was a loose shutter. Time before, it was just the local brats wheeling their Guy about the parish in a rattly old pram, collecting for the bonfire. Time before that, a mouse’d got in.”

“Bloody shame, that.” Fay plucked a card from one position in her hand and slid it into another. “Council did halfway decent by us, they’d keep the vermin out.” An inch of ash dropped from her cigarette. Gwen edged away from it fastidiously.

“You might use a saucer if an ashtray’s too much to ask.” She brushed handfuls of invisible ashes from her beige linen sheath skirt and winced as the waistband cut into her growing midriff.

“Get stuffed,” Fay replied pleasantly.

“But I did hear something,” Vivian insisted. “I did.”

“One club,” said Fay.

“Two hearts,” Gwen countered.

The basin of water opposite Fay bubbled and seethed. An arm, clothed all in white samite, rose out of the enamelled depths and brandished a hand of cards. It laid these face down on the oilcloth-covered kitchen table, plunged back into the water, and came up again with gemmed rings sparkling brightly on thumb and forefinger.

“Lady bids two diamonds,” Fay muttered. The slim white hand at the end of that samite-clothed arm gave her the old thumbs-up. “Stupid cow,” Fay added.

This time the Lady’s hand used a different finger-sign to communicate her displeasure with her over-critical bridge partner.

“Pass,” Vivian said without thinking. She completely missed the venomous glance Gwen shot her. Her watery brown eyes, pink-rimmed and weak, kept darting towards the closed bedroom door. “Look, I really have to check. I simply can not play an intelligent rubber with these doubts preying on my mind.”

“Or any other time,” Gwen hissed for Fay’s benefit. Fay snorted prodigiously and stroked her sagging jowls, her attention still focused on her hand. She paid no heed when Vivian scraped her chair backwards and padded away from the table in her ratty Marks and Spencer scuffs.

She paid heed aplenty, though, when Vivian opened the bedroom door and screamed.

“He’s gone! He’s gone!” Vivian reeled against the doorjamb, clutching her seersucker wrap-dress tightly around her scrawny body. “I knew it!” she squealed at them all. “I told you the time was ripe for this happening, the country in the state it’s in and all—crime, devaluation, the Irish, all those peculiar foreigners just streaming in, worse than the Saxons ever were. Would you listen? Would any of you listen? ‘Oh, it’s just little Viv again,’ you all said. ‘Little Viv will have her fancies.’ Well, where’s the fancy in an empty bed’s what I’d like to know!” She straightened her shoulders and struck a self-righteous pose, one hand on the doorjamb, one still securing the neck of her wrapper.

Fay stood up and slowly laid her cards on the table, face down. “‘F this is another one of your hysteric attacks, Vivian, I’ll take you and stick you headfirst into the crotch of one of your own damned oak trees.”

“Crotch?” Gwen burst into a fit of dirty-schoolgirl giggles. She scraped one expensively manicured forefinger over the other. “Naughty, naughty. Such language for a royal lady!”

“Oh, stop your gob, you great simpering slug!” Fay was so provoked, she actually let the cigarette drop from her lips. It rolled across the oilcloth and smoldered among the fallen cards until the Lady of the Basin thoughtfully extinguished it with a splash.

Gwen pursed her lips, painstakingly outlined and lovingly tinted a most fashionable and unsuitable shade of maroon. Her over-plucked eyebrows rose. “You’re just jealous,” she said, “because I’m the only one around here who hasn’t let herself go to seed while we’ve been waiting.”

“No, just let yourself go down on your back for anything young as crawls out of a pub too tiddled to tell your proper age in a dim light!”

“Doesn’t anyone want to look after where he’s got to?” Vivian gazed from one enraged queen to the other, her weak eyes blinking madly.

“Bloody hell, why bother?” Fay picked up her chair and slammed it down on the linoleum for emphasis. “If it’s Time, we’ll hear of it soon enough. And if it’s just another false alarm…”

“Last time he was sleepwalking,” Gwen said, enjoying the distress her words caused little Viv. “You remember, don’t you, love? It was during the Battle of Britain. You kept on about how this was It, he couldn’t possibly stay asleep through a crisis this big, the country needed him, the New Age was coming and you were going to celebrate by going out and getting a marcel wave once the shouting died.” Her ungenerous mouth quirked up coldly at the corners. “I was the one found him down in the Underground—still asleep, mind—and brought him into the light of day again. Just as well. You’d’ve looked beastly with a marcel.” She patted her chignon. “I’ll be the one to know when he really does wake. A wife always knows.”

“A wife always knows sweet bugger-all,” Fay snarled. She shouldered her way past Vivian into the bedroom. The iron-headed single bed was empty, the jewel-encrusted coverlet in disarray on the floor. Briskly, Fay shook it out, her big, capable hands smoothing it back so that the black silk veiled the tell-tale bottom of the funeral barge stowed in segments beneath the bedstead. Then she went back to the kitchen table and lit herself another cigarette.

“That’s it?” Vivian’s gingery eyelashes looked pathetic when she fluttered them in disbelief like that. She had an unfortunate habit of plucking them out when beset by rude tradespeople in the market. “Fay, that’s all you’re going to do?”

“Don’t skirl your voice like that, Viv. It gives me the pip. Sweet loving Christ, what do you expect of me?”

Vivian waved her hands about helplessly. “I don’t know. Something … magical?”

“Jesus God, woman, if it’s magic you want, you’re able to work some yourself. You’re a fucking nymph, after all.” Fay glowered at Vivian, chin in hand, as the little woman showed no greater reaction than a blush at such foul language.

“Now, Fay …” Gwen’s voice was all treacly. “You know Viv hasn’t been able to use her magic ever since… you know.” Her goody-goody face, full of compassion and forbearance, just begged for a bashing. Fay’s fingers itched to do it.

“Shouldn’t’ve locked the old sod up in that damned tree, then, if she was going to go soft about it after!”

“I’ve tried.” Viv wove the neck-ties of her wrap around and over and through her knobbly fingers. She was going to turn teary any moment. “You know I have, Fay. The therapists I’ve been to, the doctors, the discussion groups, the self-help books from the States—!”

“And hardly any of it on the National Health. Can’t see why you don’t let him out again, then.”

“But I can’t do that! Honestly, not. I have made the effort, you know, but it’s no good. It’s as if all my powers were tied up in that tree with the dear old fella. You can’t imagine the guilt.”

“Ballocks,” said Fay. “Ballocks to you and your guilt, too.” She got up again and fetched a plate of cream buns from the pantry. “I’m going to watch telly. Stuff your bloody guilt, Viv, and make me a mug of tea. Maybe I’ll try scaring up a vision of our Arthur after Benny Hill’s done. ‘Til then, bugger off, the lot of you.” She chomped down hard on a round, sticky pastry.

“That is hardly the way to address us.” Gwen had caught the infirmity of self-righteousness from a presently sniveling Vivian. While the smaller woman went whimpering away to put the kettle on, the erstwhile Lady of Camelot held forth. “We are all queens in our own right. You were never this common in Cornwall. I shudder to think what the gentlemen of the press will make of you: The style of an underpaid char and the vocabulary of a Billingsgate porter. Ugh.”

“You do outrank Gwen and me, Fay,” Vivian mentioned timorously from stoveside. “I was never really a queen, unless you count poor, dear Merlin’s flatteries, and Gwen was only Queen of Camelot by marriage, but you—”

“Bugger you and Gwen and Camelot and Merlin and the gentlemen of the press while you’re at it! Queenship, bah! I bloody well wish I’d never heard of the fucking realm of Air and Darkness!” Morgan le Fay went quite scarlet with her diatribe and began to choke on a bite of cream bun. It devolved upon Gwen to hustle her into a chair, the Lady to reach up out of the basin and pound her on the back, and little Vivian to bustle over with a frosty glass of lemon squash.

They were so caught up in ministering to their own that they never heard the back door open, or the approaching jingle and creak of a chain-mail shirt over boiled leather armor. In fact, they didn’t even notice that Arthur had returned, until he plopped down heavily in one of the empty chairs.

Fay recovered quickly. “Where the hell have you been?”

Cool, imperturbable eyes the color of newly forged steel met her own. Arthur drew a breath, twiddled his fingers in the empty scabbard at his side, and thought better of saying anything. He seized a bun instead, and devoured it.

Gwen made a strong comeback from the shock of seeing him so suddenly with them. “Darling!” she trilled, opening her arms wide to receive her long-slumbering lord.

The basin waters churned themselves into a maelstrom as the Lady enthusiastically lifted Excalibur clear of the foam. Arthur made no move to embrace either his wife or his sword. He did not move at all, except for masticating the cream bun slowly and thoughtfully. The Lady held her pose for some time, then tilted the blade towards its whilom master in an inquiring, then an encouraging, then an insistent manner, brandishing it urgently. It was for naught.

“No go, eh, Artie?” Fay chuckled knowingly. She rose, and a glamour fell over her. Her eternal cigarette was gone, as was the dowdy housedress Gwen so deplored. Her still alluring figure was sheathed in crimson silk starred with pearls, and when she reached up to undo the dusting kerchief binding her hair, a cascade of raven curls tumbled to her feet. Her face no longer sagged, but shone with the soft radiance of a star.

“No.” His voice was harsh with long disuse.

“What’s the cock-up this time?”

“I wake; the dream still slumbers.” The King of the Britons wiped his crumb-decked beard with the back of his hand. “My people are deaf to the great call. They will not follow me. They hardly know me.”

Morgan le Fay clucked her tongue. “Comes of not enough central heating and too many boiled sweets, I’ll be bound. Never you mind, Artie. They’ll be ready for you some day.”

Arthur’s eyes blazed. “And when will that day come? Soon or late? Too late or never?”

“Now, pet, there’ll still be an England for you to rule when you do return. Trust old Morgan.” Fay put her arm around his shoulders. She had to go on tip-toe to do it, at which discovery she looked a bit surprised.

“He’s grown,” Viv said in that mouse-hush voice of hers.

“Legends will,” Fay remarked over one shoulder as she steered Arthur back into the bedroom. She shut the door behind them.

Viv had a fresh kettle on the boil when Fay emerged, alone. Her gown was rumpled and her hair in tousles. Gwen’s eyes narrowed.

“Just what were you doing with my Arthur?”

“A lot better than you, likely. How in bloody hell did you expect me to get that poor bastard back off to sleep? Warm milk? Nembutal? Another fucking mortal wound? Christ, I want a fag.” Morgan le Fay swept her hands over her bosom and was rewarded with the full resurgence of her frowsy tenue, dusting kerchief included. She extracted a pack of Players from the pocket of her housedress and lit up gratefully.

She flopped into a kitchen chair as Viv set a fresh mug of tea at her place. She slurped it with gusto while her companions observed her somberly.

“Didn’t they know who he was?” Vivian was the first to dare break the spell. “They saw him and they didn’t know?” Her weak eyes swam with sudden tears.

Fay shrugged. A damp, tragic silence fell over the kitchen. The others sat down at the table again. Gwen sighed deeply and repeatedly. Vivian absently plucked out one eyelash after another. Excalibur fell from the Lady’s hand and made a rubbery ringing sound when it hit the lino. Fay looked up from her tea to note that the Lady’s fingernails were all nibbled down to the quick and the cuticles were in woeful need of trimming.

“Never you mind, girls,” Fay said, attempting to lift their collective spirits. “Time’ll come some day, and we’ll be there to meet it. Chin up.” She glanced at the Lady. “Or whatever.”

Fay snapped her fingers and a ball of blue fire appeared in front of Vivian, delivered itself of a fresh pack of cards, and vanished. Viv gave a faint smile and broke the seal.

A bedspring groaned. Vivian froze.

“I heard something.”

“Oh, shut up, Viv—and deal the cards.”

*

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