“Why not?” asked Mosby.
“Not his cup of tea.” Handforth-Jones wagged a finger at Audley. “I remember what you said about the South Cadbury excavation, the one that Sunday paper called ‘The Camelot Dig’… It was in this very room—and you said to call it that almost qualified for prosecution under the Trade Descriptions Act.”
Audley shrugged. “A man can always change his mind.”
“Not you, David, not you,” said Margaret.
“I’m always open to conversion, Maggie. You’re not being fair.”
“Fair?” Margaret echoed the word derisively. “Why, you’re the most unconvertible man I know—the original Doubting
Thomas. ‘Show me the marks of the nails’ ought to be your family motto.”
Mosby sensed, rather than actually saw, Sir Thomas stiffen.
“Ye-ess… the marks of the nails,” Sir Thomas repeated the phrase slowly to himself. “If I taught you anything years ago it was to be sceptical, and that was a lesson you learnt almost too well… Which does raise an alternative possibility. And a much more interesting one, don’t you think, Tony?”
Handforth-Jones met the glance. “An alternative?” His eye in turn switched first to Audley, then to Mosby, then back to Audley again. It was like watching a chemical reaction. “Yes, I take your point. It could be a case of ‘What has it got in its pocketses?’ And that would be much more interesting. More logical, too.”
“Are we playing some sort of game?” asked Shirley.
“They’re always playing games of one sort or another,” said Margaret. “What sort of game are you playing now, darling?”
“A logic game. David was down in Devon finishing off the great work on William Marshall. Not to be disturbed by his friends—right?”
“Right,” agreed Sir Thomas. “And David, as we all know, is likely to be exceedingly scornful of the Arthurian interpretation of early sixth century history—right?”
“And Dr Sheldon is exactly what he says he is.”
“So the peace and quiet of Devon is abandoned—“
“And William Marshall is abandoned—“
“And little Cathy is off-loaded on her grandma?” Margaret joined the game tentatively. “Would that be significant?”
“It would,” agreed Sir Thomas. “It signifies business, not pleasure. Not—“ he looked at Audley narrowly “—official business, because Faith is along for the ride, but business all the same.”
“Arthurian business,” said Handforth-Jones. “Because—“
“Because Dr Sheldon is what he says he is.”
“And a man can always change his mind.”
They were both grinning now, increasingly sure of themselves.
“A man who insists on seeing the marks of the nails. Only now he wants to know the latest score on Arthur: who’s writing, who’s digging.” Sir Thomas paused.
“Pure as driven snow,” murmured Handforth-Jones.
“Pure indeed… What have you got, David?”
Handforth-Jones nodded towards Mosby. “Or what has Dr Sheldon got. Something to change David’s mind, perhaps?”
“And that would have to be… quite something, I rather think,” agreed Sir Thomas. “What have you got, the pair of you? The Holy Grail?”
So the infallible Audley could miscalculate too, thought Mosby, taking a quick nervous look at the man. Or, if he hadn’t miscalculated the extent of their powers of addition, he’d underrated their ability to sum him up. The only reassuring sign was that at least he didn’t look much disconcerted at the way they played their little games.
“Christ, but we’re sharp this afternoon!” Audley acknowledged the look with a nod. “It’s exactly as Mr Toad said—The Clever men at Oxford know all that is to be Knowed’.”
“Not all, not quite,” admitted Sir Thomas modestly. “But we do know you, David, we do know you. So what have you dug up now?”
‘”Dug up’?”
“Figuratively speaking. I know you don’t soil your hands with work in the field.”
Mosby breathed an inward sigh of relief.
“Except that it would have to be dug up,” said Handforth-Jones. “Nobody’s going to turn up an Arthurian text now.”
“Are people digging any Arthurian sites?” asked Audley.
“Not that I know of. There’s some early Anglo-Saxon work going on, of course. There usually is.”
“On an Arthurian site?”
“All depends what you mean by Arthurian.”
“What do you mean?”
“God knows.” The archaeologist shrugged. “Not my field, as you know jolly well… But say, late fifth century, early sixth for argument’s sake.”
Mosby felt it was time he joined the fray. “Where would you look for an Arthurian site?”
Handforth-Jones regarded him silently for a moment, as though adjusting himself to a damn-fool question within the limitations of good manners. “If I did…” There were volumes in that if “… I suppose it’ud be anywhere west of Oxford, south of Gloucester, east of Bath and north of Winchester and Salisbury.” “Why there?”
Handforth-Jones worked some more at the adjustment. “Why there? Well, I suppose that would be the sort of area someone like Arthur would have to defend. The Anglo-Saxons started off in Kent and East Anglia—and they were already in the Middle Thames, of course. That’s where the early burial evidence is. And then they were coming up from the south, from Sussex and Hampshire, in the early sixth century, and north-east from Cambridgeshire.”
“But someone stopped them.”
Handforth-Jones pursed his lips. “Yes… well that’s the theory, and there is some evidence, I agree. But when they did finally break through in the second half of the sixth century, this is where they did it—battle of Dyrham, near Bath, in 577. The Britons were finished then: the West Country and Wales were split in two… So I see your Arthur as fighting somewhere in these parts, yes.”
Audley gave a grunt. “But the Arthurian place-name evidence doesn’t exactly fit that, does it.”
“It doesn’t fit anything. If place-names are anything to go by he must have been a superman. Place-names aren’t worth a damn, if you ask me—“
“They have their uses, Tony,” said Sir Thomas.
“Not for Arthur, they don’t.”
“Why not for Arthur?” asked Mosby.
“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 irri
tation 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.
Our Man in Camelot Page 11