The Excalibur Codex (39 page)

Jamie didn’t hide his puzzlement. ‘In the book, you link Trimontium and Arthur with the Romans, does that mean you think
he
was a Roman? I thought the Arthurian legends all had their origins in Wales or Cornwall and Arthur was the archetypal Briton, fending off the Saxons.’

The writer didn’t take offence. ‘Every legend is the product of centuries,’ he smiled, ‘sometimes millennia, of stories passed on by word of mouth, and occasionally, away back in the mists of time, those stories are born from a kernel of truth.’ He shook his head gravely. ‘I’ve never said Arthur was Roman, only that he may have been a Roman officer, which isn’t quite the same thing. You can’t see it from here, but on top of the northernmost hill is an Iron Age township; the remains of literally hundreds of mud and wattle houses. These were the sacred hills of a tribe called the Votadini, and it appears that the Votadini were what we call “clients” of Rome; a sort of buffer state between the Empire and the wild tribes of the north. To the north-east of the hills is a platform above the river and the Romans built a fort
there, first in Agricola’s time, and then later reused and refurbished it over almost two centuries—’

An almighty rush of sound drowned out the author’s words and Jamie ducked, fearing they were under some kind of attack. Moffat didn’t even blink. When he looked up, a warplane, flying unfeasibly low, was just disappearing over the shoulder of the hills.

The author smiled. ‘It’s not just the Romans who used the mountains as a signpost. You get a lot of low flying round here and the RAF – or NATO – lads like to use it as a reference point for turns during their exercises. It takes a bit of getting used to, as you’ve just found out.’ He laughed. ‘Anyway, sometimes Trimontium was garrisoned, sometimes abandoned, depending on the political mood of the day. But the Romans still ruled here, through their patrols from the Wall, diplomacy and the strength of their surrogates, the Votadini. We know from the historical sources that the Votadini were horse warriors – they were the same Gododdin who rode to Catraeth
though none was Arthur –
and the Romans often recruited native horse as auxiliary cavalry and valued them greatly. I think it entirely possible that Arthur was a war chief of the Votadini, possibly a
prefect,
a local commander of auxiliary horse, and as the Romans withdrew behind the Wall in the third or fourth centuries he and his men stemmed the tide of invasion from the north. He became a warrior commemorated in song and story, and his name rang through the ages as a testament of valour.’

Moffat’s final words sent a shiver of almost superstitious awe through Jamie, but they also begged a question. ‘But how …? ’

The writer smiled. ‘You’re still sceptical, and you have every right to be. You mentioned that the Arthur legend had its genesis in Wales, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say
in Welsh
. Would it surprise you that the Votadini spoke a variant of Celtic that became Welsh? Or that the Saxon invasions of later centuries drove them west and then south away from their spiritual homelands and this place of secrets? The Men of the North were eventually absorbed into the
Cymri,
who became the Welsh. They took with them their songs and their stories, their legends – and their heroes. Perhaps Arthur is a combination of many of them, but this,’ his long arm reached out to encompass the rolling hills around them, ‘is where it began.’

As he said the words, Jamie looked at the brooding triple peaks and felt another shiver. ‘It feels as if this is a land soaked in blood …’

The other man laughed. ‘Aye, if you had time, the stories I could tell …’

‘What do they call this place?’

‘It’s known as Scott’s View.’

‘After the wizard, Michael Scott.’

Moffat shook his head. ‘No, you’re wrong. It was named for another Scott who lived just downriver from here a couple of hundred years ago. Sir Walter Scott.’

‘Sir Walter Scott.’ It had all come together for Jamie in that single moment. The cryptic reference in the codex to
the gift of the Lady in the Lake
. The shelf of books in Harold Webster’s library. The statue in Central Park. Helena Webster had sat with him on the steps below Robert Burns, but they’d been looking directly across the Mall to the grave figure of Scott. When Webster had tortured Wolfram Sievers’ assistant in Nortstein Castle, he hadn’t only given up the swords, but their origins: the castles, museums and houses they’d been stolen from. Helena Webster had laid it on a plate, but he’d missed it.
You’re a clever guy, Jamie Saintclair. You’ll work it out
. What did she know?

‘There’s a roundabout half a mile past the new hospital,’ Moffat had said. ‘Abbotsford House is just down the road from there. You can’t miss it. Pillared entrance on your right-hand side and a big house with grey chimneys.’

He took it slowly down the narrow road, allowing the headlights to pick out the detail of the trees and ditches that lined the winding Tarmac. His first instinct had been to get to the house to pre-empt any move by Steele and whoever he had with him, but this was the start of the tourist season. He needed privacy for what he planned. Abbotsford closed for visitors at five-thirty p.m. So, at the writer’s suggestion, he’d driven into the little town of Melrose for a coffee. And waited for darkness.

It was a different game now, so he left the mobile phone off. Instinct, intuition, call it what you like, but he
knew
the two sinister 4x4s he’d watched passing through Jedburgh were something to do with this. Whether it was Steele or not only mattered because it would be good to know whether he was the hunter or the hunted. If it was the sword collector there was only one answer. Adam Steele looked on his adversaries as prey whether it was on a pheasant drive, in the boardroom or on a fencing mat. It would be foolish to give him the advantage of knowing how close he was.

Excalibur. When this had started it had all been about Arthur’s sword, or so it seemed. Now he wasn’t so sure. Yet in the final reckoning it might be the bargaining chip that meant the difference between life and death, so he would find Excalibur if he could. Every instinct told him that if it existed, the sword was here.

Scott was a hoarder,
Moffat had said.
Scott has hundreds of weapons in his collection. Rob Roy’s claymore. Swords from Waterloo. Pistols and muskets
from Culloden. Relics of Napoleon and Bonnie Prince Charlie
.

The sword Wulf Ziegler had stolen in 1937 had belonged to a warrior king in the twilight years after the Romans had left Britain, but it was not
Excalibur
. Yet that in itself was significant, because it was evidence of an unseen hand protecting the
true
sword. It had been left as a substitute by someone who knew that, some day, people were going to come looking for the real thing. If nothing else, that told Jamie Excalibur was close.

When he rounded the next bend a substantial wall of lichen-dotted grey stone replaced the trees and bushes. A sign with a gilt arrow appeared in the twin beams pointing to the Abbotsford visitors’ entrance, but the gate was closed. He drove on, keeping the same pace and scanning his surroundings for any hint of danger. Up ahead on the right lay a derelict single-storey lodge or gatehouse and he guessed this was the original entrance to Sir Walter Scott’s estate, leading to some sort of driveway through the trees to the house. Moffat had told him that the only permanent presence in the building out of visiting hours was an elderly housekeeper and her husband who lived in the accommodation wing. So why, as he passed the gatehouse, did he imagine he saw the faint gleam of black paint belonging to a car parked in the shadow of the building?

Because they were here.

He drove on for almost a mile before he found somewhere to turn and studied the very basic plan of the
house and gardens in the brochure he’d picked up in Jedburgh. He was to the west of the house now, and a band of woodland screened this side of the estate. On the plus side, it would mask his approach, but the trees in the car’s headlights were ancient hardwoods and that meant a forest floor strewn with rotten branches like a natural minefield. It might take him hours to work his way to the house. He didn’t have the time and he couldn’t risk a broken ankle. Which more or less made the decision for him. He retraced the route back to the entrance, again bypassing the lodge house, and continued until he reached the visitor car park. Steele was no fool. He had worked out the location of the house from the Ziegler codex and got there ahead of Jamie. But he thought Jamie had the computer and the skills to find the true sword, so the team waiting in the shadow of the lodge house weren’t to stop him getting in, they were to stop him getting back out again.

What Steele didn’t know was that the computer was with Abbie’s parents and that Jamie intended it to stay there. His original plan had been simply to walk up to the door of the private apartments and knock, relying on the famous Jamie Saintclair charm to talk his way in. Then, when Steel arrived, events would take their course to the inevitable point when the good guys won the day. With Steele waiting for him that was no longer an option. He needed to know how many they were and exactly who was where in the house. Certainly more than four, or what was the point of coming in two cars? Excalibur
and the computer were the main attractions, although he suspected Steele had a strong secondary motive: to see the inconvenient and annoyingly persistent Jamie Saintclair safely dead and buried. Silence was golden, and there wasn’t anything more silent than a dead man.

As quietly as he was able, he opened the boot of the car and retrieved his rucksack. It contained a Sig-Sauer P226, weapon of choice of the British Special Air Service. He weighed the gun in his hand. This was the target shooting variant and a relic of his pistol competition days. That didn’t make it any less deadly, only more accurate. He checked the fifteen-round magazine and clicked it home. Jamie wasn’t planning to shoot anybody, but he reckoned that Adam Steele would expect him to be armed, and he didn’t want to do anything that might make the businessman suspicious.

Shrugging the rucksack onto his shoulders, he jogged across the Tarmac to the other side of the road. The visitors’ entrance was locked, but the six-foot wall didn’t pose much of an obstacle to someone fit and able-bodied. He heaved himself up and slipped over onto the walkway behind, crouching in the darkness for a few moments to be certain of his surroundings. Ahead of him a path sloped away into the gloom, hemmed in on one side by an impenetrable beech hedge and on the other by a high wooden fence. While he assumed that none of this would have been here when Wulf Ziegler made his one and only visit in 1937, this was still the most likely route the German would have come. Jamie advanced cautiously
down the path until it ran parallel to a high stone wall. He debated whether to climb it, but remembered the lines in the codex –
We followed the walls until we came to a gate, which took the work of only a few moments to open
. What was good enough for Wulf Ziegler was good enough for Jamie Saintclair and he reached the gate a few seconds later. He unshouldered the rucksack, removed an eighteen-inch crowbar and forced the narrow end into the gap beside the Yale lock. One sharp tug and it opened with a crack – he flinched at the sound, and decided that Ziegler’s solution had probably been a little more elegant, but the effect was the same. On the far side of the cropped lawn he saw Abbotsford House properly for the first time, silhouetted against the night sky. Someone was home, because a subdued light glowed from windows in the centre of the building, but the gable facing him was in darkness. He had a feeling he’d need a jemmy more than the gun in the next few minutes, so he re-stowed the Sig-Sauer and carried the crowbar in his right fist. It must have been a hundred yards from the gate to the side of the house and he felt terribly vulnerable as he made his way furtively to the centre, adrenalin coursing through him and every sense pitched to an intensity he’d seldom experienced.

A tall shadow appeared in front of him and he ignored it, remembering Ziegler’s encounter with the statue of the boy. But as it passed to his left the shadow moved inexplicably, separating into two distinct forms. One of them wrapped its arms around him with an
enormous strength that punched the breath from his lungs. Instinctively he rammed his head backwards and felt the jar of bone on bone and a crunch as something less solid gave way under the impact. Still there was no lessening in the pressure on his ribs and chest, but his assailant’s hold was high enough on the forearms that he could move his hands and he stabbed backwards with the crowbar into the other man’s ribs. By luck it was the pointed end that connected. It wasn’t sharp enough or the blow powerful enough to penetrate the flesh, but the man behind must have thought he’d been stabbed. He reeled away with a cry and the respite allowed Jamie to wheel and bring the crowbar round in a scything blow that took him across the jaw and cheek. The impact was solid enough to jar Jamie’s wrist and the other man dropped like a stone.

Jamie stood for a few moments, his whole body shaking and on the verge of shutdown. He knew that if he didn’t move quickly he might not have the nerve to continue, but somehow he couldn’t get his feet to obey his brain.

A scream of mortal agony tore apart the fabric of the night. It was a woman’s scream and it acted like an iron nail being run down the inside of his skull.

His first instinct was to sprint towards the source of the sound, but he knew he couldn’t afford to leave a threat to his escape route. He dropped to one knee to check the man he’d hit and found a faint pulse. His attacker was bleeding from the nose and mouth, and
it felt as if his jaw was broken. When he touched the side of his head he felt a distinct dent in the temple that didn’t bode well for an early recovery.

Plan B had been to make some kind of covert entry through the private quarters, but the scream and its implications meant he had no time for the recce he’d banked on. It also brought the Sig-Sauer back into play. He ran towards the front of the house. What he’d thought was a continuous wall on the far side of the lawn fortunately turned out to be a series of open arches and he could see a gravel parking area beyond. He scrambled through one of the arches and stood with his back against the base of a hexagonal tower at the corner of the building. A second scream made his spine creep. It came from the far side of the car park, somewhere in the private area. He took a step forward and froze as a light came on in the window next to him. Instinctively, he dropped to the ground and squirmed slowly across the gravel. When he reached the far side he heard voices coming from a rectangle of light that marked an open door. With his heart in his mouth he made his way across the intervening ground and stood with his back to the wall, just to one side of the light. All he had to tell him what waited inside the door was a single male voice.