Our man in Camelot

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.

Anthony Price - Our man in camelot

'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 irritation 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.'