Our Man in Camelot (14 page)

“Because they’re too widely spread, for one thing. You can find Arthur’s Tombs all over the place, even outside the old boundaries of Britain—where the Picts were, for instance, in Scotland. What he was doing in Pictland, heaven only knows.”

“Gee, but I thought he lived in Tintagel,” said Shirley breathlessly. “The guide-book
said
so.”

“Yes… well, that’s what guide-books are good at,” said

Handforth-Jones. “But there isn’t a shred of proof—historical proof, that is. Geoffrey of Monmouth invented the Tintagel bit in the twelfth century.”

“In the
twelfth
—“ Shirley squeaked with outrage, as though for anyone to make up history so far back in history was dirty pool “—he just made it up?”

“Honey, I told you,” said Mosby, “Malory and Tennyson and the rest, they all made things up.”

“There are half-a-dozen places up and down the country where he’s alleged to be sleeping in a cave, waiting for the call to come and save us all,” said Handforth-Jones. “But if the last year or two haven’t been bad enough to wake him, I can’t imagine what will… Manufacturing Arthurian history has been practically a national industry for the last eight hundred years.”

“You don’t say?” Outrage had given place to disillusion in Shirley’s voice.

“I’m afraid so. But you shouldn’t find that very surprising, your people have been doing much the same for the Wild West—Billy the Kid and Jesse James and that lot—and that was practically within living memory. It’s much the same process at work.”

“But they were for real.”

“And King Arthur wasn’t?” Sir Thomas shook his head slowly at Shirley, smiling a curiously old-maidish smile. “Mrs Sheldon, you must understand the company you are keeping, and then allow for it. These two, in their own twisted ways were once among the very best students it has been my fortune—or misfortune—to teach.”

“He was a bright young don once upon a time,” said Audley, “though you wouldn’t think it to look at him now.”

“But over the years David has become a hopeless sceptic,” continued Sir Thomas, “and Tony is a professional devil’s advocate. They are exactly the wrong persons to be let loose on Arthurian history.”

“Oh, come off it, Tom,” said Handforth-Jones. “I read an article not long ago—no, it was a book, a perfectly respectable published book, or a respectable publisher anyway—in which some otherwise reputable professor claimed that if you fly over Glastonbury at a great height you can see various mystical signs on the ground—something to do with field-patterns and rivers and suchlike—that prove the existence of Arthur. All quite mad, but it’s all regarded very seriously by those who believe in such things. That’s the trouble with Arthur: I haven’t the faintest idea whether he existed or not, because there isn’t any proof. But he does make people who believe in him behave in the most extraordinary way. For all I know he did the Saxons a lot of harm. But I know he’s done even more harm to the study of his alleged period. And that’s
not
devil’s advocacy.”

The archaeologist’s tone was a degree less bantering now, though as unrancorous as Sir Thomas’s had been. Obviously the two men disagreed pretty fundamentally, but not bitterly because this wasn’t their particular speciality, so that no professional reputations were involved.

“But you believe in Arthur, Sir Thomas?” Mosby inquired.

“Believe?” The huge seamed face screwed up as though the word was being assessed for flavour. “Perhaps that would be too strong… You see, Tony’s quite right about the lack of evidence—and the place-names are extremely suspect. Many of them have been made up in comparatively recent times… some of the
arth
ones in Wales may simply mean ‘bear’, which has been distorted in much the same way as the ‘wolf’ names have been—Woodhill Gate in one of the side valleys off the Whitby Esk, for example… the locals pronounce it ‘Woodill’, which is a corruption from Woodale—it never did have a wood and it’s a valley not a hill. And if you turn up a pre-Ordnance Survey map, there it is:
Wolf-dale
.” He paused and then shrugged. “Or again, they may be related to shrine-names for the Celtic goddess Artio—“

High above and far away, the distant sound of aircraft engines rumbled. Not Pratt and Whitneys of the F-lll or the Phantom’s General Electrics, Mosby’s well-tuned ear told him, but the turbo-props of a big transport. Hercules, maybe…

Arth-names
and the Celtic goddess Artio… Christ! What was he doing here among English professors and Arth-names and monks dead fifteen-hundred years? What, conceivably, could they tell him about Major Davies’s Phantom shattered into obscene scrap metal in tlie emptiness high over the Irish Sea?

He closed his eyes, fighting to distinguish the real from the unreal, as the engine-rumble faded into silence.

“—and Chambers quoted the Rhys theory that Arthur and Mordred were Airem and Mider in the ancient Irish fairy tale.”

Goddamn
. Enough was enough, surely.

“Sure. But—“

“—But you think there’s something in it, all the same?” Audley bulldozed over him quickly.

“Yes, frankly I do. The trouble with Tony—at least when he’s not digging up his Roman villas—is that he sees half the truth very clearly and the other half not at all… That analogy with the old Wild West, for instance—it’s a good one as far as it goes. The old West, the Golden West where men were men and there was land for the taking. Where everything was simpler and more free.”

Shirley laughed. “I don’t think the West was really like that, Sir Thomas. I think it was pretty uncomfortable.”

“Oh, I’m sure it was. Freezing in winter and boiling in summer. Dysentery and smallpox. Starvation and Red Indians—I’m sure it was unpleasant. But there were no payments on the new car or worries about the children taking drugs… and it’s a natural human feeling to yearn for the good old days,
le temps perdu
. So the Welsh looked back to the days when they were the British—when they had the whole island, not a scroggy corner of it. And later on the English take over the legend—and even people on the continent. In fact the first Arthurian story-cycles are Breton and French; he inspires most of the orders of chivalry on the continent. And here there was Edward III’s Order of the Garter, and his Round Table at Winchester—his French Wars were essentially Arthurian Wars.”

“All of which proves absolutely nothing about Arthur,” said Handforth-Jones.

“Ah—but there you’re wrong. So much of it started with Geoffrey of Monmouth, and of course no one believed him—I didn’t for one. But then, you see, when Atkinson excavated Stonehenge in ‘52 and sent off stone chips from the blue sarsens there to the Geological Museum in Kensington they pinpointed the place the stones came from to within half a mile: a hundred and fifty miles as the crow flies, and on the other side of the Bristol Channel. That was the first thoroughly scientific study of Stonehenge, to my mind. And it just
happens
to fit in with another of Geoffrey of Monmouth’s stories—which no one had believed either.”

“You mean he was on the level?” said Mosby, caught again by the fascination of the Arthurian labyrinth despite himself.

“On the level?” Sir Thomas considered the Americanism with judicial gravity. “No, I wouldn’t go so far as that. I think Geoffrey was a literary man of his time, which means that he didn’t apply modern critical methods and that lack of evidence simply stimulated his imagination.”

“He made things up too, huh?” Shirley’s continuing disillusion with things British and English was still evident.

“I’m sure he did. And he was probably less scrupulous than most—he was looking for a good patron and a nice soft job somewhere so he wrote what the right people wanted to hear.”

“The right people?”

“Whoever was boss, same as today,” said Audley. “And there are still plenty of experts in that gentle art.”

“But that doesn’t mean everything he wrote was fiction,” Sir Thomas went on calmly. “He was a sort of early don, but he was brought up on the Welsh Marches. And he always claimed that he’d had access to what he called ‘a very ancient book in the British tongue’, remember.”

Mosby didn’t remember, but nodded wisely.

“Huh!” Handforth-Jones snorted. “Typical spurious mediaeval claim—doesn’t prove a thing. Evidence is what you want, and you simply haven’t got it.”

Audley laughed suddenly, as though it pleased him to see them strike sparks off one another. “But you do believe in Arthur, evidence or no evidence, don’t you, Tom?”

Sir Thomas faced him. “Well, quite frankly, I do. Or I believe that there was somebody—call him Arthur or not, and Nennius did call him Arthur a long time before Geoffrey of Monmouth—someone who came up with a stunning victory for the Britons, big enough to check the Anglo-Saxons for the whole of the first half of the sixth century—“ he gestured towards Handforth-Jones “—even Tony has to agree with that, it’s what the archaeologists say.”

“Ahah!” Audley pounced on the point. “Now you’ve got to watch yourself, Tony. The Devil’s quoting scripture at you.”

“I’m not arguing with facts,” Handforth-Jones shook his head, “I’m only arguing with conjecture. Damn it, you should understand that, David.”

Audley looked to Sir Thomas without answering that one.

“Do you dispute Mons Badonicus?” said Sir Thomas.

“No. That’s Gildas, which is fair evidence as far as it goes.”

“And where would you place it?”

“Nobody knows.”

Mosby understood at last why Audley had kept the debate moving as he had, and why his own flash of irritation had been so quickly capped. First he had ducked the question
What have you got
? by turning the debate on to Arthur; then he had let them argue their own way round to Badon, knowing that sooner or later they must come to it. So in the end they had seemed to come to it without his prompting.

“Nobody knows. But if you had to start looking, where would you look?” Sir Thomas waited for a reply, but Handforth-Jones wasn’t to be caught that easily. He shook his head and grinned knowingly at Mosby as if to indicate that he recognised the familiar signs of ambush, even though he didn’t know what form it would take.

“It’s a pointless question.”

“Oh, no. It’s a question with two points, and the first is that you don’t want to answer it.” Sir Thomas stabbed a finger at the archaeologist accusingly. “He doesn’t want to answer.

And I’ll tell you for why.” The switch from the first to third person indicated that the next observation was for everyone’s benefit—and that the trap had been sprung. “Because he’s already given the answer, only it was to a different question. That’s why.”

“Huh?” Shirley looked suitably mystified.

“ ‘West of Oxford, south of Gloucester, north of Winchester-Salisbury, east of Bath’,” quoted Audley. “Tom means you’d look for Badon in the same area as you’d look for Arthur. Give or take a few miles either way.”

Give or take—? Mosby struggled with his English geography. He had actually been to most of the towns mentioned, because none was more than an hour or two’s drive from USAF Wodden and all were tourist attractions, well supplied with cathedrals and colleges and other ancient buildings. But in retrospect he found it difficult to differentiate one from the other, beyond the vaguest impressions: tall spire for Salisbury, colleges for Oxford, Roman bath for Bath…

“Exactly.” Sir Thomas nodded emphatically. “If you plotted the possible Badon sites—Bedwyn in the Kennet valley and Liddington Hill near Baydon, and the rest of them… none of them need to be the one, but all the ones that fulfil the basic criteria—they all fall within the area Tony said someone like Arthur would have to defend.”

Mosby’s first elation at having an area drawn for the Badon hunt began to cool. It must measure anything from fifty to seventy miles a side—maybe as much as five thousand square miles.

Sir Thomas continued: “So what Tony is saying is that Badon was fought just where Arthur would have fought it, and just when Arthur would have fought it, only Arthur never existed, so someone else fought it… And all I’m saying is
why not Arthur
?”

He looked at Mosby expectantly.

“ ‘It’s true, or it ought to be; and more and better besides’,” quoted Mosby. The phrase had stuck in his mind.

“Ah, now that would be dear old Winston Churchill. A romantic, of course, but he could very often smell what he couldn’t see.”

“And not the only romantic,” murmured Handforth-Jones.

“Meaning me?” Sir Thomas looked at him sidelong. “Well, at my age I can afford to take that as a compliment. And there are times when my sense of smell sharpens too.” He smiled at Mosby. “So why not come out with a straight question, Dr Sheldon?”

The attack caught Mosby by surprise. “Sir?”

“A straight question. Something David is temperamentally incapable of asking. Or answering.”

Mosby frowned. “I don’t get you, Sir Thomas.”

“Tck, tck.” Sir Thomas clicked his tongue. “Now it’s you who is playing games.”

“I am?” Mosby looked at Audley for support. “Are we?”

“I didn’t say David was playing games,” said Sir Thomas quickly. “Indeed, that’s what makes this so interesting now: David may have his fun, but he doesn’t really play games any more.”

“Except the ‘great game’, of course,” Handforth-Jones amended. “But King Arthur’s a bit long in the tooth for that, thank heavens.”

Mosby couldn’t place the allusion accurately, but it didn’t take a genius to guess its meaning as Sir Thomas nodded his agreement: they knew damn well how Audley was employed.

“True, very true.” Sir Thomas eyed Audley speculatively for a moment before coming back to Mosby. “And it’s that which makes it the more interesting, I’m thinking.”

If only you knew, buster
, thought Mosby, some of his awe evaporating. The clever men at Oxford didn’t know quite all that was to be knowed after all.

“I still don’t get you,” he said.

“No? Well, perhaps we’re doing you an injustice again… but it does rather look as though David is about to poach on our scholarly preserves. And that does make us a little cautious, because the last time he did that there was a certain amount of trouble and strife as a consequence.”