Our Man in Camelot (7 page)

“And he doesn’t mention Arthur,” said Howard Morris. “Neither does—what’s his name—Gildas.”

“You got it in one.” Mosby nodded at him. “Arthur doesn’t get a mention for another hundred years nearly—about A.D. 800, at least not one that ties him in with the right things.”

“The right things?”

“Yeah. There’s some early mention of an Arthur of some sort in the far north—‘Artorius’ was an old Roman name. But it doesn’t look like our guy.” He searched through the pile again. “Nennius is what we want now—“

“Another monk?” asked Shirley.

“Bishop of Bangor in North Wales, but it amounts to the same thing. Only the clergy could read and write in those days… Here we are:
Historia Britonum
—‘History of the Britons’. Except it wasn’t a history.”

“What was it?”

“Just you wait and see…” He opened the book at its marker.

“Then Arthur fought against them with the kings of the Britons, but he was the war leader—‘them’ being the Saxons. Then he lists all the battles Arthur fought… one at the mouth of the river Glein, four beside the river Dobglas, the sixth beside the river Bassass, the seventh in the forest of Celidon—“

“I’ve never heard of any of them,” said Shirley.

“Nor has anyone else, seems. The next one was at Castle Guinnion—

when Arthur bore the image of the blessed Mary, ever virgin, on his shoulders, and through the strength of Our Lord Jesus Christ and the holy Mary, his maiden-mother, there was great slaughter of the heathen and they were put to flight—

—and the ninth was in the City of the Legion. That just might be either Chester or Caerleon. The tenth beside the river Tribuit; the eleventh on Agned Hill. And now we come to it—

The twelth battle was at Badon Hill, where Arthur slew 960 men in one charge, single-handed. And he was victor of all these battles.”

“Phew! Nine-hundred-and-sixty at one go!” exclaimed Shirley. “That even beats General Ellsworth.”

“Yeah, well let’s say it runs him close. But that sums up Nennius: a lot of folk-history and superstitious hot air, plus one or two facts. It could be all true and it could be all hooey.”

“Except Badon Hill,” said Schreiner from the depths of the armchair into which he had sunk.

“That’s right, exactly right. And Badon also turns up in the
Annales Cambriae
, which is a sort of calendar of important dates in Welsh history compiled by a bunch of monks in the eleventh century. It says in that for ‘Year 72’, which is somewhere about A.D. 500:
Battle of Badon, in which Arthur carried the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ on his shoulders for three days and three nights and the Britons were victorious.
”

“Sounds like they had it mixed up with one of Nennius’s battles,” said Shirley.

“Honey, when you start digging into the Dark Ages, and especially into Arthur, most everyone seems to have everything mixed up. But when you come down to it out of this lot—“ he waved his hand over the table “—apart from the serious modern history books, the only two worth a damn are Gildas and Bede. Gildas because he actually lived in the period, and Bede because he was way ahead of his time as a historian. All the rest is strictly ‘maybe’.”

“But what about the Knights of the Round Table and Lancelot—and Camelot?” said Schreiner. “Is that all pure invention then?”

“Not quite pure, but damn nearly, so far as I can make out. I haven’t read all the stuff—the further it gets away from the actual historical time, the more there is of it. Seems a lot was made up by a man named Geoffrey of Monmouth in the twelfth century—a lot of the traditional ‘King Arthur’ bits. It even had a political angle then, because the Kings of England wanted to keep up with the French kings—“

Harry Finsterwald stirred. “For God’s sake, we have to have the history of France too?”

Howard Morris started to speak, but Schreiner overrode him. “Until we know the exact specification of Operation Bear—and why Panin took the Novgorod Bede back to Dzerzhinsky Street with him—you’re damn right, Captain. The history of France and the history of Britain, and the history of ancient Peru, if need be. Plus how many archangels can dance on the point of a needle too.”

Mosby hurriedly revised his estimate of Schreiner: not just State Department Intelligence, but pure State Department. And not just State Department holding a watching brief if he was ready to slap down a CIA operative in the presence of UK Control—to do that required National Security Council authorisation for sure.

Another tiger?

Well, maybe he could find that out by giving the beast a gentle prod—

“I don’t know, maybe Harry’s right,” he said doubtfully. “It’s getting kind of way out, where we could end up.”

Schreiner looked at him sharply. “You let me be the judge of that, Captain Sheldon.”

“But—“

Howard Morris raised a finger. “Tell the man, Doc. Just tell him.”

That made Schreiner a tiger for sure, right down to the last whisker. And a tiger in a hurry, too.

“Okay. It’s like the English Joneses had to keep up with the French Joneses—the French had the Emperor Charlemagne as their royal ancestor. All the English had was a bunch of Norman pirates. But after Geoffrey of Monmouth had got through with Arthur they could trace themselves right back to Troy. And it made such a darn good story—the Arthurian part—that all the story-tellers of the time got into the act. So after that it just snowballed, all the way to Malory in the fifteenth century and Tennyson in the nineteenth—and Walt Disney and Broadway in the 20th. Plus any number of other guys—in fact Milton nearly wrote about King Arthur instead of Paradise Lost.”

“All of which was just invented?” persisted Schreiner.

“Well… not quite all. This is where the thing gets kind of—strange. Like there’s something deep down in it that’s
not
invented. A sort of racial folk-memory.”

“For example?”

“Okay, an example… Yes, well take the Knights of the Round Table, which is a load of crap. One guy added the knights and another added the Table, and they built the whole story up from that. Because mediaeval knights wanted to read about mediaeval knights… But if you actually go back to A.D. 500, that’s the time when the heavy cavalryman is the big new secret weapon. And just before the Romans got to hell out of Britain they set up a mobile strike command. So if you add those two facts together, you’ve just maybe got something that isn’t a load of crap. No knights rescuing damsels in distress and slaying dragons, but a disciplined cavalry force… the Saxons fought on foot, remember, so they’d have been at a disadvantage… And no ‘King’ Arthur, but just a first-rate cavalry commander—“

“A war leader,” said Shirley.

For a moment Mosby thought she was making fun of his brand-new academic pretensions. But when he looked into her eyes there was nothing to confirm the suspicion; rather, she seemed on the edge of being interested.

He nodded cautiously. “A war leader, yes.”

“Very good,” Schreiner made no attempt to hide his approval. “That fits very well.”

“Fits very well with what?”

“Never mind. It’ll keep. So where does Badon Hill figure in this folk-memory?”

Mosby rubbed his chin, the hastily-acquired facts suddenly blurring in his memory. He was so used to Shirley cutting him down to size that she had diminished him now without even intending to, reducing him to what he knew himself to be: an instant expert whose shallow understanding was impressive only in the company of those more ignorant than himself. Up against Audley it would be very different.

“It doesn’t really figure at all,” he said finally.

“But you said there was such a place?”

“Sure I did. There was. In fact if there’s one sure fact in the whole thing it’s Badon Hill.”

“Because Gildas and Bede say so?”

“Gildas and Bede and everyone who matter: somebody gave the Saxons the biggest hiding of their lives about A.D. 500. Even the modern archaeologists check it out, because Saxon burials inland stop dead about that time and don’t really start up again for half a century or more—two, maybe three generations. So it must have been a
great
battle.”

Merriwether unwound gracefully. “Then how come most people never heard of it, Doc? I read some British history once. Long time ago, but I remember the battles—Hastings, Agincourt, Waterloo, Trafalgar and such. But no Badon Hill.”

“Because the Britons threw it away, is why. If they’d carried on the good work they could have finished the Anglo-Saxons for good—the Britons were better organised, the Saxons were just savages. It was like—like if the Red Indians had tried to invade the United States in about 1800… So the Britons had them licked but they squabbled among themselves, like Gildas said, and blew the deal. If they hadn’t then there’d have been no England—and no English. It’d all have been Britain, all speaking Welsh or something like it. In fact we’d be speaking Welsh at this moment.”

Merriwether laughed. “Man—you’ve made your point. If it’d got me speaking Welsh it must have been some battle!”

“You’re darn right. One of the all-time big ones: Saratoga, Gettysburg, Midway, Waterloo—Badon. But as it is, we don’t even know where it is.”

Schreiner frowned at him. “No clues at all?”

“No real clues. It was a hill and it was a siege of some sort. So perhaps a hill-fort, or an isolated hill. But nothing for certain. There’s a gloss in one Gildas manuscript, where some old monk wrote in extra words—“

“Which manuscript?” asked Schreiner quickly.

“I don’t know—not the Novgorod one, anyway.” Mosby searched through the books again. “Here we are—it’s a footnote in
Arthur of Britain
…

usque ad annum obsessionis Badonici montis qui prope Sabrinum hostium habetur…

those last five words only appear in the Cambridge manuscript, seems.”

“Meaning?”

Harry Finsterwald made a tiny, half-strangled sound.

“I’ve got it translated here somewhere… ‘up until the year of the siege of the hosts at Badon Hill which took place near Sabrinum’.”

“And I take it there’s no such place as Sabrinum?” said Shirley.

“There’s a Sabrina, actually, honey—Roman name for the river Severn. But nobody rates the gloss worth a damn. They usually don’t even list it among the possible places. They reckon it dates from later mediaeval times.”

He tossed the book back on to the table, watching Schreiner out of the corner of his eye as he did so. It all added up, but then at the foot of the column there was something wrong with the final figure: ultimately this interest in Arthur and Badon and the Novgorod Bede had to be simply a cover for something else, for the KGB and the CIA both. And yet Schreiner’s concern for the historical details was curiously intense, as though it mattered to him what Mosby himself felt about it… the way he’d been allowed to run off at the mouth about it, when Harry Finsterwald had been slapped down…

He shrugged. “All of which means there’s no way of finding Badon. And even if there was you’d have one hell of a job selling me the idea that the KGB gives a damn either way.”

Schreiner cocked his head belligerently. “But I don’t have to sell you anything, Sheldon. I just have to tell you.”

Tiger, tiger! thought Mosby. The State Department really was calling the shots on this one.

“Okay. So just tell me.”

“I intend to. Because there isn’t going to be any foul-up on this operation.” Schreiner looked round him coolly. “This isn’t a goddamn banana republic where you can throw your weight about. So once we know the shape of things we’re going to handle them diplomatically, with no brawling on the side between you and the KGB…And you—“ he pointed at Mosby “—are going to do just exactly what you’re told to do. No matter how crazy you may think it is.”

“Uh-huh?” Mosby yawned. “Like playing pat-a-cake with David Audley?”

“Or even with King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table?” said Shirley.

Schreiner turned towards her. “That just happens to be exactly right, Mrs Sheldon. As of now you’re going to forget you ever heard of the KGB—because as of now your cover story is your actual mission. You and your… husband are assigned to locate the map reference of Badon Hill, England. Just that.”

“Just that?” Shirley flicked a glance at Mosby. “Which according to my… husband… isn’t possible.”

Schreiner smiled. “’Improbable’ was what he finally settled for, I thought. And with David Audley to help you I’d rate your chances better than even—especially as you have an advantage no one else has ever had before you.”

“Which is?”

“Which is that sooner or later—and it had better be sooner—you will pick up Major Davies’s trail.”

“And where’s that going to get us?” said Shirley.

Calvin Merriwether stirred. “Just so you follow it, ma’am—it’s going to get you all the way to Badon Hill,” he said.

MOSBY STUDIED CALVIN MERRIWETHER
’
S
dark, intelligent face for a moment. This time there was no trace of humour in it.

“So he really was on to Badon Hill.”

“I told you so, Doc.” Harry Finsterwald had lost a little of his stuffing, but his voice still had an edge to it.

“I thought that was just part of the cover story, Harry. I didn’t actually buy it.”

“Well, you better buy it now, man. Because it’s true,” Merriwether said. “He thought—“

“Thought?” Mosby pounced on the word. “You don’t have any evidence?”

“Evidence? We know what he bought, if that’s evidence. All the books you’ve been reading so carefully. And we got what he said, if that’s evidence—“

“Said to whom?”

Merriwether raised a long-fingered hand. “Just wait and let me finish, don’t get over-heated, Doc. He talked to his bookseller, the man he got all his books from. Hunted all over for him, the bookseller did—far as the Russian Embassy, to find out about the Novgorod Bede. Not that they told him anything, but he sure tried. ‘Cause Davies was just about the best customer he had, so it made good sense.”

Mosby looked at Howard Morris. “The bookseller’s on the level?”

“The bookseller’s straight down the line,” Merriwether’s hand cut through the air. “We’ve checked him out every way, and he’s one hundred per cent pure. Part from the fact that if he wasn’t he wouldn’t have given us so much so easy.”