Finding Camlann (10 page)

Another thought occurs to Donald as he makes his way along the now-deserted path that leads beyond the car park and out across the fields. In his press release, Paul Healey made a point of citing Geoffrey’s reference to the fifth-century burial of ‘leaders and princes’ at Stonehenge. His intended subtext, though he did not state it explicitly, was that Devil’s Barrow might be the very tomb alluded to by Geoffrey. It is not impossible, after all, that Geoffrey’s tale of mass interment is also, like the Merlin story, a throwback to some far-distant historical event. But to pluck a name at random from popular mythology, to suggest that Arthur was one of those buried war-leaders, as Healey appears to have done, this is a purely self-indulgent flight of fancy.

No more than a hundred yards ahead, close to the path of the great ritual avenue that once led all the way from the River Avon to the massive heel-stone of Stonehenge, is a group of battered caravans that together serve as the headquarters for the Devil’s Barrow archaeological project. A large square patch of ground now covered by tarpaulins indicates the extent of the excavation.

Paul Healey is waiting at the door of the first caravan. Donald’s immediate and surprising reaction is to Ceac

‘Sorry about the posh togs,’ Healey says, catching Donald’s dubious glance. The Merseyside in his voice is stronger than it was on television. ‘I had the ITV crowd here this morning.’

‘I’m sorry about Lucy,’ Donald says, reminded of the painful BBC interview.

‘Not your problem any more, son. And to be honest, it was that stuck-up git Miles Johnson who bothered me more. He was captivated by your Lucy—she had him eating out of the palm of her hand.’

The squally rain returns in force, obliging Healey to catch at the door before it slams shut. ‘Come on in out of this,’ he says. ‘There’s something I want to show you.’

The interior of the caravan, though predictably cramped and cluttered, seems mysteriously larger than its external dimensions would allow. There is a stale smell of coffee and sweat and fried eggs. Donald stoops to avoid the low ceiling, follows Paul Healey to the tartan-covered bench seat at the far end. Something about the configuration of the seats and the table, combined with the gusts of wind rocking the entire structure on its moorings, reminds him poignantly of a childhood holiday on a hillside in Scotland.

‘Don’t mind the mess,’ Healey says, alluding to the profusion of paperwork and beer cans and crisp bags strewn along the seat. ‘Just push all that stuff along to the end, there’s a good lad.’

Despite feeling entirely at home in such surroundings, and thoroughly disarmed by the familiarity of his host, Donald is anxious not to lose the initiative in this conversation. ‘I wanted to ask you something, Paul.’

Healey’s smile is a little more guarded. ‘Go on, then.’

‘I was wondering why you let that press release go out. You must have known how much trouble it would cause.’

‘How so?’

‘Because you can’t uncover a burial that dates from the fifth century
AD
, or so you say, with the remains of a great warrior and his queen as the main attraction, and then just happen to throw in a reference to the Age of Arthur. It was bound to create a media circus.’

Paul Healey regards him curiously for a moment. ‘I’ve not said anything definitive at all, not yet, anyway. We’ve not even had the dating analysis back from King’s.’

For the first time, Donald begins to understand what is really going on. Paul Healey is enjoying his moment of fame; he is in no hurry to see the scientific evidence, in case it brings the whole edifice crashing down. ‘Just as long as you don’t start believing your own propaganda. King Arthur and his queen dug up in a Wiltshire field?’

Healey’s gaze is steady. ‘I’ve not said that now, have I? And anyway, why should you care so much?’

Donald smiles now, remembering that Paul Healey has always kept a perceptive eye on the competition. ‘Thanks to you and Lucy, my publishers want me to write about the discovery of the Holy Grail. But never mind that. You said you had something to show me?’

Healey pushes a battered file across the tabletop. ȁ Clettio8;Take a look,’ he says. ‘These came in this morning.’

Inside is a series of exquisite black-and-white drawings of a tall cup with gently curving sides. ‘The magical chalice?’ Donald says.

‘The very same. Do you remember, there were some images engraved around the top, but we couldn’t really tell what they were? We did some cleaning up and a proper microscopic analysis, and this is the reconstruction we came up with.’

The artist’s rendering shows the chalice from four different directions. Each picture shows a striking iconic representation of an animal just below the rim of the cup. ‘These are incredible images,’ Donald says. ‘Serpent, stag, boar, and crow?’

‘Raven, I’d say.’

Looking more closely, Donald notices a curious detail, that the creature in the first drawing has not one fearsome set of jaws, but three. ‘And is it a white serpent, or a red one?’

‘We were hoping for a nice Celtic red for the dragon.’ Healey grins at him, conspiratorial now. ‘But the ochre pigments don’t hold up as well as some of the others—the colour must have washed away a long time ago.’

Back at the Amesbury dig, the afternoon brings no revelations beyond the occasional pottery sherd and a substantial haul of Georgian red clay bricks. Driving home a few hours later, Donald turns over and over in his mind the exquisite images that Paul Healey showed him, the beautiful symbolic depictions of creatures from some other time and place. He has every expectation that Healey will use this new discovery to support his own analysis of the Devil’s Barrow archaeology. Perhaps he will try to claim that this is the classic art of the Celtic world, one of the finest examples we have yet seen. The stag is the ancient symbol of male strength and fertility, as represented by the pagan god Cernunnos. The raven is the common representation of the goddess of war and death; she is the harbinger of doom and destruction who hovers over the fray, foretelling the outcome of the battle. As for the dragon, this is the enduring symbol of the Celtic peoples, known at least since the time of the Roman occupation of Britain. At Devil’s Barrow, Healey will say, we have found the remains of a warrior elite, of men who fell defending their king and queen in the time of the great British struggle to resist the Saxon incursions: in the time of the great war leader known as Arthur.

And yet it is all hopelessly wrong. Every hypothesis advanced by Paul Healey must now be viewed as tendentious at best. So far, he has no convincing verification of his dates, only the evidence of coins tossed into a pit. It is possible, as Lucy will certainly claim, that the animistic motifs preserved on the rim of the chalice have their origins in a far more ancient world than that of dark-age Britain. The totemic imagery undoubtedly lends weight to her idea that the chalice had a greater ritual significance, that it was something much more than a simple drinking vessel. The artistry of the chalice could even support her theory of a pre-Celtic date for the remains found buried at Devil’s Barrow, giving life to her vision of a glorious, peaceful, matriarchal Old Europe in which war had not yet been invented. As to which of their two interpretations is the more improbable, Donald cannot quite decide.

Outside the car, the shadowed farmland of north Wiltshire slips by, tail-lights winking on and off ahead as the road curves and dips through the rolling countryside. Donald switches on the portable radio on the passenger seat, tunes in to an oboe concerto by Albinoni that seems to lend a melancholy, dream-like flow to hi Cke on the s thoughts. Though he has no way to describe the sensation in scientific terms, he cannot escape a perception of larger forces at play, of vast expanses of human time, of his own insignificance to the story. It is not altogether a c
omfortable feeling.

A road sign for Malmesbury makes him think of Julia. In her own way, she is as beautiful and unorthodox and certainly as clever as Lucy. Not that it matters, anyway. She is happily married, unapproachable, unattainable; someone he might have hoped to have known at a better time, in a better place, in another life. This is what he tells himself as he drives on through the twilight into a darker rural hinterland.

Whispers

D
ONALD FINDS HIMSELF
quarantined by Mrs. Violet Frayne, Caradoc Bowen’s long-serving and augustly indifferent secretary, in the chilly, narrow space that acts as an ante-chamber to the professor’s rooms at Jesus College. While he waits, he occupies himself with a thin blue monograph he has brought with him from home, Bowen’s
Notes on the Welsh Rising
, given to him in his postgraduate days by John Evans at Bangor. More than forty years old, it is still the most compelling description of Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r’s rebellion he has read. The author is perhaps a little too poetical, a little free and easy with his historical detail, but he captures the tragic intensity of those years in a way that other, more fastidious writers have failed to do. His Glyn D
ŵ
r is a brilliant, intense creation, a worthy inheritor of his people’s hopes and dreams of Arthur’s return.

Donald skims through the pages, reminding himself of the outlines of this Shakespearean tale of hubris and tragedy. He reads more closely as Bowen arrives at his final scene, in which he offers his own interpretation of the laying to rest of Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r.

It is a bleak enough place, and a bleak enough day now descending into twilight, the slate-coloured sky emptied even of the soaring carrion-birds as the wind swirls up from the valley and cuts across the high plateau. In the shelter of a long grassy mound near the edge of the cliff, a dozen men marked fresh with the scars of battle stand shoulder to shoulder around their leader’s mortal remains laid out on the ground beneath an ancient twisted lime tree. These mourners are chanting not a Latin mass, but a song in the Welsh language, a fitting requiem for the passing of Owain Glyn D
ŵ
r. None standing there would say that their leader had truly departed: for it was told by the
brudwr
, the prophetic poets of that time, that Owain, like Arthur, did not die, but went to sleep in the otherworld, that he might return in his people’s hour of need.

Donald’s contemplation of this passage is interrupted by Mrs. Frayne’s brisk instruction to enter the professor’s study. He opens the door with a creaking of hinges, walks through into a substantial and imposing space imbued with a faded, damp austerity that stands in striking contrast to the bright autumn day outside. The sixteenth-century stonework, the plain wooden furniture and sparsely adorned walls, all lend a vaguely ecclesiastical air to the room. This ascetic quality is barely alleviated by the modest trappings of academic life: ranks of leather-bound volumes on the shelves, a large old-fashioned blackboard presently oc F I h tracupied by an indecipherable text, an ancient electric kettle and a grimy cluster of cups and saucers beside a small sink in the corner.

The elderly man behind the desk does not look up at first, continues scribbling on a thick sheet of writing paper that keeps curling up from the bottom. He smooths it out again and again, each time with a small muted exhalation of breath, though he does not allow this inconvenience to interrupt the uncompromising flow of his tiny, ornate script across the page. He is hunched down low to his work, presenting to the world a pale, bony forehead incised with deep lines, most of them parallel to the brows, some cutting across at a steep angle with rows of oblique little crossroads at the joins. The mane of white hair tumbling from his scalp seems to catch the tempo of his work, oscillating gently as he writes.

Finding himself ignored, and the only other chair occupied by a tall stack of encyclopedia volumes, Donald walks over to the window, looks out across the quad towards the gothic façade of Jesus College Chapel. The old glass in the panes is thick and uneven, distorting the bright rectangular view, detaching it slightly from reality. Down below, undergraduates in groups of two and three make their way untidily around the edge of the grass and on towards the main gate. Donald tries to discern some spark of above-average ability in these future Nobel prize-winners, poets laureate, pillars of British government; then remembers himself at a similar age, lanky and a little foolish, bursting with knowledge but with no sense of how the world was supposed to work.

The minutes begin to stretch uncomfortably. Donald turns away from the window, begins an unobtrusive examination of the nearest bookshelf. There in the top row he finds the Welsh poets of the past six hundred years, from Iolo Goch to R. S. Thomas and Albert Evans-Jones. It is tempting to take down a book and look inside, but this seems too great a presumption. His eye is drawn instead to a large map of central Wales that occupies the wall next to the dormant fireplace. It is one of the early Ordnance Survey sheets, issued in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. The heavy, portentous shading of the more extreme relief depicts a mountainous country almost uninhabited save for the small towns and villages clustered sparsely in the valleys.

‘Perhaps you are familiar with that part of Wales?’ Donald turns to find that Caradoc Bowen has set down his pen at last and is looking up at him. The professor’s expression is difficult to read through his old-fashioned spectacles, thick round lenses whose disturbing effect is to emphasise the intensity of his bird-like stare; though the imagined fierceness is perhaps, after all, nothing more than a distant amiability, his eyes not so much penetrating in their gaze as merely old and tired. ‘Those particular lands, which once formed the
cantref
of Maelienydd, have been held in hegemony by the Anglo-Norman aristocracy since the eleventh century.’ Bowen’s voice, which is surprisingly strong for so slight a frame, carries a trace of Gwynedd or Ceredigion worn smooth by his many decades at Oxford.

‘It’s a fine old map,’ Donald says, wishing straight away that he might have found some less facile comment.

‘It is indeed a fine map of a once-glorious country that has seen only ruin and destruction at the hands of the noble Englishman. Do you not agree?’

This time, Donald pauses before answering, gives a more careful consideration to his response. ‘Wales is a glorious country still, in my opinion, if not what it once was.’

Bowen seems to look at him more closely now, as if noticing him properly for the first time. Krstto a2018;But now I am afraid you have distracted me, and I have entirely forgotten my manners. Caradoc Bowen, at your service.’ The professor speaks these words with a genuine feeling, but stiffly, as if they have not been much used in recent years. Rising with a surprising vigour from his chair, he offers a firm handshake, dry as dust. ‘I trust that I have not made you feel unwelcome. Do by all means sit down, if you prefer. You need only eject the
Britannica
from his perch. Just move him up here to the corner of the desk, if you would be so kind.’

‘Yes, of course.’ As Donald begins self-consciously lifting the volumes off the chair in twos and threes, Bowen offers an unexpected running commentary.

‘This, as you may have noticed, is the ninth edition, published from 1875 to 1889 under the editorship of T. S. Baynes and William Robertson Smith. I must say it’s no longer so useful as it once was, though it does contain some of the finest scholarship to be found anywhere in the world.’ Bowen takes one of the volumes in hand, turns almost deferentially through the pages. ‘Swinburne wrote in here of Keats that “the rawest and the rankest rubbish of his fitful spring is bound up in one sheaf with the ripest ears, flung into one basket with the richest fruits of his sudden and splendid summer.” That is to say, even the most talented person makes mistakes in his youth, and, I might add, they invariably contaminate everything he does thereafter.’

Donald removes the last of the volumes, sits down amidst a creaking of old tenon joints and a cloud of fine dust that settles gently on to his trouser-legs.

‘There, that’s a little more civilised,’ Bowen says. ‘Now, may I offer you some tea?’

‘I don’t want to take up too much of your time. We spoke on the phone yesterday—’

‘Quite so, you’re the archaeologist. Are you by chance an Oxford man?’

‘Yes, I was an undergraduate at St. John’s.’

The professor makes a small disparaging gesture with his hand. ‘And you have some education beyond those narrow confines, I trust?’

‘I studied for my doctorate at Bangor, under John Evans.’

‘I am glad to hear it. Evans is no fool, and neither does he suffer them.’ Bowen is on his feet again, busying himself with the tea things. ‘Will Darjeeling suit? Or do you prefer Earl Grey in the afternoon?’

‘Darjeeling would be perfect.’

In due course, the professor hands Donald a chipped, heavily stained mug decorated with a painting of St. David’s Cathedral. ‘What is your particular archaeological speciality, may I ask?’

Something in Bowen’s demeanour makes this feel like an invitation to confess to a crime. ‘My main area of professional interest is the archaeology of sub-Roman Britain,’ Donald says, formulating his answer with special care. ‘I have worked most recently on the correspondences between the archaeology of that period and the mythological traditions that have arisen from it.’

The professor gives a short, sharp laugh. ‘Well, that is a refreshingly ambitious topic to choose. Good luck to you, young man.
Audaces fortuna iuvat
.’

Donald decides to risk a further qualification. ‘More specifically, I’m writing a book on the origins of the concept of the warrior Arthur in the Celtic trad Ke Ck aition.’

Bowen takes off his glasses, lays them down significantly on the desk. ‘As to the origins of Arthur,’ he says, leaning back in his chair with his hands clasped behind his head, bony elbows drawn forward next to his ears, ‘I am not at all sure I can help you. Whether he is real or imaginary, he is an irreducible mystery, and surely intends to remain so. Perhaps that is what you had better write in this book of yours.’

The thought occurs to Donald, as he absorbs this presumably dismissive response, that Caradoc Bowen is very much unaccustomed to having his opinions directly challenged. ‘I agree with you to some extent,’ he says. ‘But surely there are some things that are known, or might possibly be known, about Arthur? For example, there is a chain of tradition and transmission that led to the recording of the twelve Arthurian battles in the
Historia Brittonum
, even if we choose not to interpret that text in a literal way.’

‘In point of fact,’ Bowen says, as if responding to some quite different question, ‘I don’t much believe in searching for indelible truths about people or things, in history or anywhere else.’ He has a curious habit when he speaks, seeming to look away into some intermediate distance. ‘Though I admit that there is a paradox in the case of written texts. In one sense they are the most fragile of creations, they may burn or crumble to dust, while in their essence, as arrangements of words and ideas, they are utterly imperishable.’

‘And so there is an indelible part, after all,’ Donald says, determined to hold his own against the professor’s circuitous, idiosyncratic logic. ‘If I look at a copy of some original text, I can at least be sure that the ideas the author meant to capture have been preserved, even if the original has been lost or destroyed.’

Bowen puts his glasses back on, refocuses his piercing gaze. ‘No, I’m afraid that won’t do at all. One cannot simply look at words that were written centuries ago and expect to find some Cartesian essence, some core of truth untainted by the author’s world-view, his milieu, the literary, religious, social, and moral culture of the age in which he lived. I want to get past what is in the historian’s head. His brain is like a distorting lens, and I want to see the object, not the image. No, that’s not quite the right metaphor. Let me see.’

The professor gets up from his desk and walks over to the window, stands there for a while in silence, then begins pacing to and fro. ‘Yes, that’s better. Imagine a game of Chinese Whispers played across the centuries. Our distinguished authors sit in a circle, each separated by, say, three hundred years. Gildas starts things off by leaning over to whisper in Bede’s ear. Bede, in turn, cups his hand and stretches over to William of Malmesbury, who is squeezed in uncomfortably close to his rivals, Geoffrey of Monmouth and Henry of Huntingdon. William listens carefully to Bede, but Geoffrey and Henry hear only parts of the message, and must fill the rest in for themselves. Walter of Oxford, who is sitting outside the circle, taps Geoffrey on the shoulder and whispers something in his other ear. But Geoffrey fails to pass on this new information to his close colleagues, instead hurrying around to deliver a murmured soliloquy to his French pen-friend, Chrétien de Troyes, who is meanwhile struggling to comprehend the mutterings of an elusive Welshman named Bleheris. The resulting information traverses Robert de Boron, Layamon, Thomas Malory. By the time Arthur’s story reaches our modern ears, it is garbled beyond recognition.’

‘A Kfy"oyend where do you see yourself in this great circle of historians?’ Donald says, risking a faint irony.

‘Me? I am sorry to say that I find no place at all for myself. I am condemned to the far periphery, to a distant orbit reserved for poets and magicians.’ For the first time, Caradoc Bowen smiles. ‘But you must forgive me. I have become carried away with my clever metaphor. My point is simply this. When we are speaking of the writing of history, the laws of human nature must apply. As soon as pen hits paper, quill hits vellum, distortion begins to pour undiluted on to the page.’

This is too good an opening for Donald to miss. ‘Talking of which, I was wondering, Professor, whether you happened to read the press release from Downing College concerning the discoveries at Devil’s Barrow?’

‘Yes, and is it not an excellent case in point?’ Bowen looks at Donald with what seems a genuine approval. ‘Do I take it that you have as little patience as I for the absurd posturing we have seen from the Cambridge team? To say nothing of our American colleague, Dr. Lucinda Trevelyan of St. Anne’s College. It is a fine Cornish name to be despoiled by such nonsense as we hear from her lips.’