Orion and King Arthur by Ben Bova

Then he hesitated.
    “I don’t know your name,” he said.
    “Lancelot, my lord.”
    Arthur smiled and tapped him on each shoulder with the blade, leaving two dark red smudges.
    “Rise, Sir Lancelot. And welcome to the company of knighthood.”
    Lancelot’s mouthhung open. He swallowed visibly before he could utter, “Bless you, my lord.”
    The other knights crowded around to congratulate the lad.
    But that night, as I unrolled my sleeping blanket in the shadows of Amesbury’s palisade, I thought I heard in the far-off echoes of my mind the Golden One laughing mockingly and saying, “The seed of destruction has been sown, Orion. Arthur’s days are numbered.”
    Not while I live, I answered silently. Then I lay down to sleep. But as soon as I closed my eyes I felt a wave of utter cold take hold of me and I was falling, falling through a black infinity.

 
    Interlude
    I opened my eyes and saw clouds scudding past in a windswept sky above me. I was lying on the hard wet planks of the deck of a ship that was heaving up and down sickeningly. I smelled the salt tang of the sea and the stench of vomit and human sweat. Our little cockleshell bobbed in the choppy waters of the Channel so hard that we were all soaked to the skin from the spray comingover the gunwales.
    “Up! Wake up!” a clear tenor voice called. “All hands to their stations!”
    Scrambling to my feet, I saw my crewmates staring across the water at the awesome procession of Spanish men-of-war heading through the Channel for Gravelines, on the Belgian shore.
    “There they are, lads,” said our skipper, pointing. “Take a good look at the Pope-kissing bastards.”
    He was young to bea ship’s captain, but then our ship was just an unarmed riverboat, wallowing in the swells of the heaving sea. As I looked around at the rest of us, I saw that they were all barely old enough to start their beards.
    How or why I was here I didn’t know. My last memory was of Arthur and his victory over Aelle and his Saxon host at Amesbury fort. Somehow I was now aboard a small English merchantman,part of a pitiful little squadron of ships that had been sent out to face the mighty Spanish Armada.
    Britain was again threatened with invasion, and there was our youthful skipper grinning defiantly at the enemy. He looked very much like the Arthur I had known from a thousand years earlier: broad of shoulder, handsome features with gold-flecked amber eyes and the beginnings of a light brown beard.
    It was near sunset. The sky was low and glowering red; a storm was brewing to the west out in the wild Atlantic. The Spanish fleet proceeded through the Channel in a stately line, big, square-backed galleons leading the way, followed by smaller galleys, their oars sweeping steadily, like rows of metronomes.
    “Some o’ them sweeps is Englishmen,” said the sailor next to me, his voice harder thanhis round, youthful face. “They caught me brother off Jamaica last year, chained ’im to the oars.”
    “Do you think he might be aboard one of those galleys?” I asked.
    The youngster nodded grimly. “Could be. But if he is, drownin’ in th’ Channel’s better’n years as a bloody galley slave.”
    “Quit the chatter and look lively now!” the skipper commanded. “Get about your business, men, and best be quickabout it!”
    Our little Minerva was to be a fireship. We were to set her ablaze and sail her into the Spanish ships when they tried to moor at Gravelines. The plan was to scatter the Armada so that Drake and Frobisher and the other Seahawks could deal with the big Spanish men-of-war individually.
    We set about hauling the tinder and firewood up from below deck, each of us casting uneasy glancesat the rowboats we would use to try to get away once we had lit the fires.
    It was a desperate plan. Although the ramshackle collection of British ships sailing out from harbors all along the Channel actually outnumbered the Armada, the Spanish fleet was far superior in firepower