Our Man in Camelot

by Anthony Price

  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.

  IV

  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.”

  “Right,” said Finsterwald. “And apart from the fact that he’s 78 years old.”

  “So what did he give you?”

  Merriwether glanced at Howard Morris. “Okay I tell Doc, then?”

  Mosby frowned. “What the hell? Shirley and I are supposed to have been friends of Davies, according to the cover story.”

  “Which ‘ud make you about the only friends he had,” said Merriwether. “Only person we can trace he ever spoke to was the bookseller. He was a real loner.”

  Morris nodded. “Go ahead, Cal. Not that there’s much of it.”

  “Well, there is and there isn’t according to how you look at it… but seems he first went to Barkham’s four-five months back—Barkham being the bookseller. Old-fashioned firm. Talk to you about books as soon as sell you one, and rather you bought nothing than something you wouldn’t like.” Merriwether smiled reminiscently. “Took him quite a time deciding I was a fit and proper customer for him to do business with—I had to sweet-talk him round.”

  Shirley laughed. “What did you buy?”

  “What did I buy?” Merriwether pointed to the table, grinning. “Most of those books your husband’s been reading, that’s what I bought. I told Barkham I was a friend of his Major Davies, who’d been posted back to the States suddenly and I’d come to settle his bill—“

  “Yes?”

  Merriwether held up a small black tape-recorder. “You want to hear the real thing?” He glanced towards Morris. “We got time?”

  “When’s Audley coming here?” Morris asked Mosby.

  “Not till nine. We got all the time in the world.”

  “But we haven’t… Keep it short, Cal.”

  “’Tisn’t long anyway. But I’ll give you the bit that counts…”

  “—thirty-eight pence, Sir. Thank you—“

  Sharp ‘ting’ and slither of cash drawer.

  Clink.

  “—and sixty-two pence change… fifty—“

  Clink.

  “—and ten and two… and your receipt, sir—“

  Merriwether cut off the tape. “Not quite far enough. You don’t want to hear about how interested I am in ancient history. I’ll just run it some more.”

  “He owed only thirty-eight pence?” asked Shirley.

  “Always paid cash money except the last time. Which was lucky for us, we’d never have got on to Barkham otherwise. Here we go—“

  “—depends where your particular interest lies, sir. There is the formal history of the period, as represented by Collingwood and Myres, and by Stenton for example… and what might be termed the Arthurian history, by—ah—by those who take his historical existence for granted… which is a literature in itself.”

  Dry chuckle.

  “Some might say more literature than history, a good deal of it… Malory and Spenser, for example, and the early French writers… But I don’t think they would be your taste, sir… very specialised… And there’s the modern literature of fiction—Miss Sutcliffe’s Sword at Sunset and T. H. White’s The Sword in the Stone are the superior representatives of that, I would say.”

  “Isn’t that a kid’s book—The Sword in the Stone!”

  “Indeed it is, sir. And Miss Sutcliffe’s book is also popular with the younger readers. But they are both a great deal more—ah—adult than much of the fiction their elders ask me for—“

  “Get that,” said Merriwether. “They ask for, but they don’t receive, not from old Jim Barkham they don’t. He’d sooner sell canned beans than books he doesn’t like.”

  “—may find them rewarding.”

  “I don’t seem to remember Major Davies talking about them.”

  “Ah, no sir. The Major is strictly inclined towards the history. He is acquainted with the literature… indeed, he is remarkably well-acquainted with it. But history is his first love, I would agree.”

  “Mine too, Mr Barkham. I was thinking of starting with, say, Bede?”

  “Bede? Well, that really would be starting at the beginning… I take it you do not read Latin?”

  “I’m afraid not. They didn’t teach that at my school.”

  “Nor do they teach it at many of our English schools now, I fear, sir… They maintain there is no call for it—a very short-sighted view, but there it is… However, there is Mr Sherley-Price’s translation in the Penguin Classics, which is both excellent and inexpensive—a rare conjunction these days.”

  “You don’t have a Novgorod Bede by any chance?”

  Pause, then the same dry chuckle, this time more prolonged—

  “I can see you’ve been talking to the Major, sir—Mr—?”

  “Merriwether, Mr Barkham. I understood you were getting him a copy, huh?”

  “Oh, no sir. I think you must have misunderstood him there, Mr Merriwether. Indeed, I’m now tolerably certain that no translation or facsimile has ever been made of the Novgorod manuscript… and I don’t expect there ever will be now.”

  “Why not?”

  “Well, frankly, I don’t think the Russians are much interested in such things these days. The man at their embassy to whom I spoke—although he was alleged to be concerned with cultural matters—was singularly unforthcoming at first.”

  Pause.

  “At first?” Merriwether’s voice was casual. “You mean he came back to you?”

  “That is correct. Yesterday in fact, and he was most discouraging… though I suppose we should be grateful that he followed up my enquiry in the first place, which I did not expect him to do.”

  “So what did he say?”

  “Yes… well, it appears that many of the manuscripts from the old monastery there were severely damaged in a German air raid, and—though now I’m reading between the lines of what he said, as it were—and no attempt was made to repair any of them until quite recently. Which means, of course, that many of them will have been allowed to decay irreparably, because you cannot leave a damaged parchment to its own devices for thirty years and expect it to improve… it is unpardonably careless of them, really…”

  “Uh-huh?”Merriwether’s voice was distant now rather than casual.

  “Well, now it seems they have at last got round to it, and repairs are in progress. Which means, of course, that the manuscript will be totally unavailable for study for months, possibly years. Restoration is a very slow process, Mr Merriwether.�
��

  “Yeah, I guess it must be… So I’m not going to be atfle to write the Major that you’ve had any success, huh? We’re never going to know what was in it?”

  “Oh, no, Mr Merriwether, that’s not quite true. There is Bishop Harper’s description of it, don’t forget that.”

  “Bishop Harper?”

  Pause.

  “There now! I was forgetting that I haven’t seen the Major for a fortnight or so… And I didn’t even learn about the good Bishop until this Monday, after I had written to him.”

  Pause.

  “Uh-huh?”

  “He was Suffragan Bishop of Walthamstow in the later 1850s and far ahead of his time in ecumenical matters, so it would seem. At any rate, he was particularly concerned to re-establish relations with the Russian Orthodox Church after the Crimean War… the war with the charge of the Light Brigade, Mr Merriwether… and he travelled extensively in Russia during the late 1850s and 1860s, visiting many of the monasteries there, including that at Nijni Novgorod. So he was very probably the first Englishman to see the Novgorod Bede since it was sent with the English missionaries to Germany in the eighth century… Did you know that the early English Christians played a notable part—one might even say a heroic part, since so many of them were martyred— in the conversion of the heathen Germans?”

  Pause.

  “Can’t say that I did, no.” Merriwether’s voice was now not so much distant as hollow.

  “Not many people do know, it’s true. Yet it was one of the most glorious periods in our whole history. Bede wasn’t unique, he was one of a generation of great English churchmen… But there it is: the manuscript probably went to a German monastery like Fulda, and thence to somewhere like Wismar or Stralsund on the Baltic, and from there in a Hanseatic ship to the lands of the Teutonic Knights who were invading Russia in the middle of the Middle Ages—the ‘Drang nach Osten’, Mr Merriwether:

  Russian, Russian,

  Wake yourself up!

  The German is coming,

  The uninvited guest—

  “That’s not a 20th century poem, it was written in the fourteenth century… and so to some German-Lithuanian monastery, at least according to Bishop Harper’s theory— somewhere like Dorpat—where it was captured by a Prince of Novgorod. And from Novgorod finally to Nijni Novgorod, five hundred miles further east and fifteen-hundred miles from Jarrow, where it was written. Always travelling with the missionaries of God, English and German and finally Russian —isn’t that fascinating, eh? Only to be threatened in the 20th century by another ‘Drang nach Osten’—Hitler’s bombers! There’s the pattern of European history for you—twelve hundred years of it. And now two American gentlemen like the Major and yourself want to find out about it—even more remarkable!”