Arthuriana

"I take it that things aren't going well with you and Maggie?" It was a statement more than a question really. Commander Lee Crane shot a sharp glare at this executive officer, but Chip Morton's bright head was bent over the plotting table, and he didn't see it.

"What makes you think that?" Just because his girlfriend, Maggie Firenze, had cancelled three of their last five dates; just because the two times they actually had gotten together, she'd dragged him to a symposium on Arthurian literature and lectured him on not reading enough… He read plenty; just not the things she wanted him to read. Then the coup-de-grace had been the gift she'd given him on the eve of this cruise: a set of medieval Arthurian texts that she had sternly insisted he read and study so they could discuss them when he got back. He didn't have time for that! He had a boat to run and the last thing he wanted was an English professor telling him what to read and when to read it!

"Oh, I don't know," Chip answered casually, as he finished marking their position. "Your goodbyes didn't look exactly… cordial."

Lee frowned. "Like I have time to wade through musty ancient texts about some king who may not ever have existed."

"He probably existed." Chip set his pencil down and looked up at last; there was an unmistakable twinkle in his blue eyes that belied his grave expression. "The Glastonbury monks even claimed to have found his grave in the reign of… Henry the Second, I believe."

Lee glared darkly until Chip smiled at him, then laughed and shook his head. "You introduced us. What in hell were you thinking?"

"That if I had to go to another symposium on Arthur I would cheerfully have committed hari-kari."

"So you threw your best friend to the wolves." Lee crossed his arms and gave the XO his best disciplinary stare.

Chip raised his hands in defense with a laugh. "Hey, I just introduced you two. Any wolf-throwing was strictly your idea!"

"Right. You couldn't have warned me?"

Chip refused to be contrite. "I tried, buddy. I told you Arthur was her first love and she'd never gotten over him."

Lee snorted derisively. "I thought you meant… an accountant from Hoboken or something! Not some long-dead, mostly mythical king!"

"So tell her you have no interest in Arthur whatsoever." Chip glanced at the log book Lieutenant O'Brien anxiously submitted and signed it. As the young officer went away, the XO noted the question in Lee's eyes. "I did."

Right… Lee shook his head, not wanting to contemplate what her reaction might have been, but curious all the same. "So… What did she do when you told her?"

Chip shrugged lightly, though the smile didn't really reach his eyes. "She informed me that she was glad she'd met me and that we would always be friends, but that she couldn't contemplate a meaningful relationship with a man who refused to take her interests seriously." He sighed. "Then I paid for dinner and took her home."

"After which you eventually introduced her to me," Lee muttered under his breath. "Thanks a lot, pal."

"Skipper! We've got turbulence…" Kowalski began, but was cut off as the boat shook violently. Lee grabbed for the edge of the plotting table as he lost his balance, but missed and fell backward, knowing with sickening certainty that his head was about to hit the periscope railing. A blinding flash of pain was followed by a blackness that swallowed him up…

When awareness returned, he was amazed at the lack of pain; he had expected to be swimming in it, with all the accompanying dizziness and nausea. Instead, he felt nothing, but this fact was far from reassuring. He began to wonder if he was dead and opened his eyes cautiously, afraid of what he would see. Relief forced his breath out in a huge sigh when he saw Chip bending over him… Until he noticed what the XO was wearing. "My God, Chip, is this some kind of joke?"

It certainly seemed to be. Chip wore a blue tunic trimmed in ermine, belted at the waist with a baldric that held a huge, fine, double-edged broadsword sheathed in a blue leather scabbard that was banded with silver. Also attached to the belt, a huge ring of iron keys jangled insistently with his every movement. He was bare-headed, and Lee was both shocked and mystified at the length of the man's fair hair. He had it pulled back in a severe braid that hung to his shoulder blades. But most shocking of all, the medieval dress was completed by linen hose… Hose? And soft leather half-boots. Draped over a nearby chair was a hooded cloak, also trimmed in ermine, that undoubtedly went with this decidedly strange fashion look. And if this was all some kind of weird joke, Chip looked less than pleased about the whole thing. "Have the king's wits gone begging?" he demanded sharply, and Lee's eyes widened at the broad Welsh accent. "Does he not know his own foster brother?" He snapped his fingers, and a child wearing a ridiculous page-boy haircut and a red and gold livery bounced toward them, holding an enormous gold chalice tightly in both hands. Chip took the thing with a curt nod of dismissal for the boy and handed the cup to Lee. "A drink, my lord. Perhaps it may restore your senses."

"Zounds!" Were it not for the nonsensical exclamation, Lee would have sworn the voice was the admiral's. He turned his head to look at the speaker, and his jaw dropped open in utter amazement. It was the admiral, but he must have lost his mind, for he wore a suit that looked as if it had last been worn by Blackbeard the pirate, a patch over one eye, and a huge hat adorned with a gigantic curling feather. To complete the ensemble, a parrot sat on his shoulder, and Lee would have thought it was stuffed if he hadn't seen its beady eyes move, following its master's every move. "Will ye be forever jabbering at the man? Given the chance, I'd make fair not to know ye either, being that ye have no good to say of anyone!"

Chip glared at him darkly. "An I interpret your speech correctly, Lancelot – and God knows, that's a chore! – I can only echo the sentiment and say that I wish you didn't know me. Or more to the point that I didn't know you," he said acidly, with a lack of respect that made Lee shut his mouth with a snap. He had never suspected Chip of such behavior! It would have to be dealt with immediately.

"Watch your tone, commander!"

The reaction he got to the stern rebuke was not the one Lee had expected. Chip gave him a cold, haughty stare if he thought Lee had gone mad; privately Lee wondered if the executive officer wasn't right. The admiral – on the other hand – let our a raucous shout of laughter echoed by the squawk of the parrot on his shoulder. "Bless ye, Arthur, that's the way! Why should ye acknowledge Kay when he's behaving like this?" He stopped, scratched his head, and laughed uproariously. "Course, he always behaves like this!"

The haughty stare was transferred to Nelson, chilly enough to freeze the admiral into a solid block of ice if such a thing were possible. "Keep a civil tongue in your head, you old pirate."

"As if ye ever did the same, ye landlubber!" The admiral drew and brandished a giant cutlass, but Chip stood his ground, unimpressed. Lee stared from one to the other blankly, confused and unsure what to do next. His friends were truly acting strangely: Chip looked like a fugitive from one of those Arthurian texts Maggie was so fond of, and the admiral… Realization burst upon him in a flash of inspiration. "Wait a minute! What did the admiral call you? Kay?"

"Admiral?" Chip snorted contemptuously. "You have exactly one ship in your so-called fleet, and it belongs to him. How can you call him an admiral?" He took the cup from Lee's slackening fingers and set it down on a nearby table with a click. "Of course, he called me Kay. What else should he call me? It is my name, as you very well know!"

Kay… It was impossible! Not Sir Kay… "But… Kay is a rude, snarp-tongued, uncouth…" He broke off, suddenly realizing that he'd gone too far.

"Logistically brilliant, mathematically gifted, courageous, and loyal knight," Chip – no… Kay – finished grimly, and Lee, who knew his counterpart too well, could see the hurt hidden at the back of his eyes. "Need I mention that I am also your foster brother?"

In a strange sort of way, it did make sense. In this strange world that Lee had fallen into, the closest analogy to Chip might just be Arthur's mythical foster brother, who functioned – in effect – as the executive officer of the kingdom. But somehow he didn't think that was quite the sort of insight Maggie intended him to have when he read the books…

"Yet rude and uncouth for all that." The admiral barked out more rough laughter. "Ye're riding for a fall, me fine gentleman, sure as me name is Lancelot!"

"God help us," Chip muttered and turned away as Sharkey – looking utterly ludicrous in medieval dress down to the hose – burst into the room.

"Uncle Arthur!" He panted, skidding to a halt mere inches from Chip's refined, disapproving glare. "A giant! It's carrying off the queen!"

"As if that's never happened before," Chip muttered sarcastically, but his words were lost in Nelson's reaction.

"Zounds! The scurvy knave! I'll teach that giant a lesson he'll not soon forget!" The admiral charged from the room like the knight he claimed to be. Sharkey trotted after him admiringly, but Chip was unimpressed.

"We'd better go see what's really going on, Arthur, before Lancelot makes the usual hash of things." He extended one graceful hand to help Lee up, but the captain bounced up without help, worrying about other more pressing issues.

"But why is Lancelot a pirate?" he asked out loud. That was the most bewildering thing about the whole situation. Yes, he knew that some of the admiral's less savory ancestors had been pirates, but what did that have to do with this? And then there was the whole question of how Lee had gotten here in the first place…

"How should I know?" Chip crossed the sumptuous medieval bedroom and struggled to open the huge solid oak door. "It's your dream."

The door creaked open slowly; Chip went through it, clearly expecting Lee to follow. The captain, however, stood rooted in surprise for precious seconds, wondering why he'd never considered the possibility that all this was a dream. An uproar outside finally penetrated his abstraction; he ran our of the room, accosted a page for directions, and at last found the courtyard, where men were shouting and waving swords around, while women were wringing their hands, screaming, and fainting. In the midst of all this commotion stood a man who was indeed a veritable giant. He stood easily thirty feet tall, and when Lee looked up at his face, a shudder of recognition slithered up his spine. But it wasn't… It couldn't possibly be… "Doc?"

Dr. Will Jamison grinned an evil grin such as Lee had never before seen on his face, and it was easy to see that he had grown to enormous size in order to clasp the Seaview in his gigantic arms. Tiny at his feet, the admiral was furiously dancing about, waving his cutlass dangerously; his eye patch had mysteriously shifted to the other eye, and the parrot had disappeared. Sharkey stood a prudent distance away, out of reach of the admiral's marauding cutlass, but Chip was much closer, clearly remonstrating with the angry, anachronistic pirate. Lee made his way through the crowd toward them. As he drew closer, he could hear the admiral's voice raised in a furious tirade. "Unhand her, ye landlubber! Such beauty is not for yer hands to soil!"

"Yes, I'm sure that will do the trick!" The tone of Chip's voice was disrespectful in the extreme. He ducked the sweep of Nelson's cutlass, grabbed the admiral's shoulders, and shook him like a rag doll. "Idiot! Why don't you ever do something useful? No, you must always be charging about like a brainless oaf, killing people by mistake, falling into wells, and trampling your fellow knights! What makes you think he's unhand the queen just because you tell him to?"

Lee reached them just as Nelson swung the cutlass again, forcing both him and Chip to duck. "Stop it both of you! Your squabbling isn't going to help anything!"

From above them, Doc's many-times-amplified voice boomed. "Arthur Pendragon! The Seaview is mine! I control her! Active duty is no longer an option! You're confined to Sick Bay for the rest of your life!"

Lee looked up at the giant, both surprised and angry. How dare Doc run off with Seaview as if she were so much scrap metal? This whole situation was utterly ludicrous! He took a menacing step toward his nemesis, when suddenly Maggie loomed in his path, dressed in the suit she'd worn to the Arthurian symposium, a pair of granny glasses perched incongruously on her beautiful nose. "Lee Crane, you idiot! Did you read a single word? You're getting everything all wrong! Wake up, right now!" She bopped him on the nose with a massive hardbound copy of Malory, knocking him to the ground. Both his hands went instinctively to his nose as his eyes watered with the pain. It took him a moment to realize that it wasn't his nose that hurt but the back of his head. After another moment, he figured out that the odd buzzing noise in his ears was the sound of hushed whispers all around him. Finally, he heard Chip's anxious voice – "Lee?" – followed immediately by the admiral's – "Lee? Be still, lad. Will's on the way."

"No…" Lee moaned and struggled to open his eyes. If Doc saw him, he'd be confined to Sick Bay for the rest of his life… He managed to slit his eyes open and look fearfully up at his friends.

But the admiral and Chip were both in uniform, and neither swords nor parrots were in sight. Mystified, Lee dragged himself to a sitting position, despite protests from both his friends. "Where's your eye patch? He asked the admiral weakly, glanced at Chip, and added, "And your braid?"

If anything, Chip looked more worried than ever, but the admiral laughed. "That must have been some dream, lad."

Dream… Of course it was a dream, brought on by Maggie's Arthurian fixation, and the accidental blow to his head. Relieved that he wasn't going insane after all, Lee smiled dizzily as Doc hurried down the spiral stairs. "Oh, it was, sir. It was…"