Page 63 of The Quest for Excalibur
I swallowed. If I steered Arthur away from this, from Badon, would Camlann never happen? Would my husband die in his bed one day, an old man, with me an old woman by his side? Or would the Saxon take-over of Britain, that loomed inevitable over everything we did, happen that much quicker? Would the arrival of the English, my people, be accelerated? Tears squeezed from the corners of my eyes and trickled down my cheeks.
Did he see them fall?
“Tell me what you know,” he said, his voice commanding and firm.
“I think this is Badon coming.” My voice came out in a whisper, hissing through the heavy night air.
Silently, he stared at me for a minute that stretched to an eternity. At last, he spoke. “How do you know?”
I swallowed. “I-I don’tknowhow I know.”
His eyes bored into mine, drawing my secrets out. “Go on.”
“I told you about the list.” I paused, marshalling my jumbled thoughts. “The twelfth battle is Badon. Sometimes called Mount Badon. Historians think it was perhaps on a hill, a siege.”
He shook his head. “I don’t fight siege warfare. Never have.”
“I know. We shouldn’t take their word for it. They all have different theories. Not one of them knows where it truly was, or how it was fought.”
“And you?” His eyes narrowed. “You think you do?”
I nodded. “My father had a theory. He took me to where he thought it took place when I was a child. Showed me the lie of the land. Explained why it could most likely have been there. Why he was convinced it had been.”
His eyes flashed. “Where? Tell me, and we’ll know where those Saxons are heading.”
*
My father standsbefore me on a windy hilltop, silhouetted against a patchy sky. Clouds race high above us as I stand on all that remains of the ramparts of Liddington Castle, an Iron Age fortress on the ancient Ridgeway track. His long gray hair blows out behind him, and his lined face contorts with fanaticism. “See here, Gwennie?” He has to shout above the wind. “Come up here and you’ll be able to. Give me your hand.”
I take the proffered hand, and he hauls me on my still short legs to stand by his side, staring eastward. The land undulates, chalk downs stretching away almost to the Berkshire town of Newbury, while the fat gray snake of the M4 motorway thunders in the distance. Nose to tail lorries, drivers rushing through their lives at constant breakneck speed.
Here on the downs, the sense of otherworldliness presses in all around me. The soughing of the wind in the distant trees, the call of windblown larks high above our heads, the muffled chirruping of insects in the long grass. The twenty-first century feels far away, and we might be in any time.
“Look,” he says, pointing a gnarled finger. “See that brow?’
I nod, the wind snatching my voice.
“That little road you can see follows the Ermin Way almost exactly. A new road set on an ancient thoroughfare. That’s the road up from Silchester, once called Calleva Attrebatum, to Cirencester, which was Roman Corinium. Only, in the Dark Ages they were Caer Celemion and Caer Ceri.”
I nod, fascinated as always by the stories he can weave and bring to life. “From here a lookout would see anyone coming along that road, wouldn’t they?” I ask.
He beams with pride. “Quite right. Most perceptive. And this is the road that would have brought the invading Saxon army up from the Thames valley. They’d have used the old Roman roads every bit as much as the British kings. The lands were largely undrained and pretty boggy in places, not conducive to easy passage. The Roman network had already picked out the best routes to travel– why would invaders have come by any other route? Most battles for a good thousand years after the Romans left were beside Roman roads.”
I nod again, proud myself to be privy to his theories, chest swelling with importance. My brother, Artie, has shown no interest in my father’s work, but the mystery of it fascinates me.
“And just beyond that brow,” my father says, with the air of a conjuror about to take a rabbit out of his hat, “lies a village actually called Baydon. Coincidence, or what?” He gestures around himself at the circle of the grass-covered defensive bank. “And believe it or not, this place, Liddington Castle, was once called Badbury Castle.” He beams. “What other proof could anyone want that this, or somewhere close by, was the site of the famous Battle of Badon? Where Arthur defeated the Saxons under Aelle once and for all.”
*
Silence fell betweenArthur and me as what I’d had to tell him sunk in. His grip on my shoulders slackened and he let his hands drop. “And you think your father was right?” he asked, after a moment.
I nodded. “I do. I think I was put here for a purpose. I know you say you don’t believe that prophecy, and that I said I didn’t as well. But, come on. How much have I helped? Directed you to the battles you needed to be fighting?”
His brow furrowed, giving him a look of his unlovely brother for just an instant. “You think they’ll be marching along the road from Caer Celemion, from the valley of the Tamesis?”
I nodded. I was doing a lot of nodding. “I do.”
He shrugged.
