Our man in Camelot

'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 Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

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 Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

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