The Excalibur Codex

XXXVIII

‘Can I help you?’

Jamie looked up from the leather-bound volume and returned the woman’s smile. She was about fifty and reminded him of his mother; narrow, intense features and wavy silver-blond hair swept back from her forehead. It was just after eleven and Corbridge library had only been open for about five minutes. He sensed she was uneasy about a stranger’s presence at this time of the day and felt he had to explain. ‘I’m just trying to find out a few things about the local area.’

The smile lost a little of its sparkle. ‘You’ll be here for the Wall.’ Her voice told him most people came here for the Wall and not much else. ‘Well, if there’s anything else just let me know.’

‘There might be one thing.’ He explained about the small town with the spectacular ruin.

The riddle piqued her interest. ‘That doesn’t sound much like Corbridge. The only ruins we have here are a few Roman foundations and a couple of pillars. They’re just outside the village: interesting, but nobody could describe them as spectacular. Hexham, along the way a bit, has an abbey. It’s old, but it’s no ruin.’

He thanked her and continued his research as she returned to her desk, staying for an hour until he ran out of patience with ancient tomes full of descriptions of local country houses, none of which remotely resembled the one described by Wulf Ziegler. As he was leaving the library a thought struck him. ‘It’s just a long shot, but would there be any hills around here with a very distinctive silhouette?’

‘Plenty of hills round here, but none that you’d say were that distinctive.’ She shook her head ruefully. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not being much use to you.’

He smiled his thanks. ‘It was worth a try … One last question. Would you know if there was some sort of army training camp around here during the war?’

‘Och, the army’s been using Otterburn since Pontius Pilate was a bairn.’ The grizzled character at the bar of the Otterburn Arms had a distinctive accent that seemed to have little need for the letter r, so the words came out as ‘Otta’bu’un’ and ‘bai’n’. He supped gravely on the pint Jamie had bought him. ‘They took the place ova’ before the First War, all sixty thousand ugly acres of it. Seen more bombs, shells and bullets than the Somme, a’ reckon.’

‘Would there have been tanks here before the Second World War?’

‘No tanks now.’ He shook his head. ‘The muckle things they have these days is too heavy for the soft peat. But before the war they had these wee light boogas that could barely stop a bullet. There’d have been plenty of them.’

Jamie’s anticipation had been growing since he left Corbridge and saw the long, low shadow of the Cheviot Hills in the distance. The librarian had laughed. ‘That would be Otterburn Camp. It was here during the war and it still is. It’s about twenty miles up the road. You’ll see it away to your right, beyond the village.’

He left the old man with a second pint. As he drove north from Otterburn, the ground began to rise and soon he was among bleak hills clad in heather and rough grass that exactly fitted Wulf Ziegler’s description, where seldom a tree grew. The road wound up a long cleft in the hillside before the sky opened up and he found himself at the top of a rise with the whole country laid out before him like a rumpled plaid carpet of grey, brown and green. He slowed and pulled into a layby by a big boulder bearing a sign that announced he was WELCOME TO SCOTLAND and got out of the car into the bite of a chill wind. With his heart in his throat he studied the great swathe of patchwork, captivated by the shadows of individual clouds that scudded across the land from right to left. Finally he understood. Wulf Ziegler’s target hadn’t been in the north of England. It was the south of Scotland. At first he didn’t see it amongst the jumble of humps and hillocks stretching far to the north. Then, in the middle distance, there it was. Ziegler’s signal post. Three hills standing shoulder to shoulder like warriors in a shield wall. A silhouette that was unique and utterly distinctive. He returned to the car with a feeling of growing awe and a sense that fate was leading him inexorably towards a prize beyond his comprehension.

A few miles ahead the road dropped into a winding river valley with cliffs of layered red sandstone occasionally peeping from the trees. Eventually the valley opened out and on the far side of a long green meadow lay the next marker — a small town with an impressive ruin. The town was Jedburgh, and the spectacular ruin the remains of some great abbey with a square tower a hundred and fifty feet high. Intrigued, he turned off the main road and drove across a bridge towards the town centre. The way took him over the top of a rise, with the soaring walls of the abbey to his left. As he topped the rise he glanced casually to his right and his blood froze as two black 4X4s passed by in convoy on the main road below. Was he starting at shadows? He looked at the mobile on the passenger seat to make sure it was still switched off and broke into a cold sweat at the thought that he’d planned to turn it on after Otterburn. Coincidence? Adam Steele was no fool, he could follow the trail as easily as Jamie. The question was how much he knew? If Steele had the location of the small schloss there wasn’t a lot Jamie could do about it. But it might cause danger to people he hadn’t even met. Reluctantly, he resisted the temptation to follow the cars. Instead, he drew into a car park opposite the abbey that backed onto a low flat building advertising itself as a tourist information centre. Since information was precisely what he was looking for, he decided to take a look inside.

The walls were lined with posters and shelves filled with colourful guidebooks, fluffy knitwear and endless tartan scarves. A long counter took up most of one side of the interior and the floor was scattered with stands filled with more books, fliers for local businesses and maps.

He rummaged through a selection of Ordnance Survey maps on one of the stands and chose a large-scale chart for the approximate area of the hills he’d seen. As he approached the counter to pay, a display of books by local writers caught his attention. Several had the same name on the spine. One in particular made the breath catch in his throat. It couldn’t be a coincidence that he’d last seen it in Hal Webster’s library. On instinct, he added it to the map and took it to the sales assistant.

‘This book looks very interesting. I was wondering if the author lived around here?’

The girl nodded. ‘I believe he does, though I’m not exactly sure where, sir.’ Oddly, her accent was entirely different from those on the far side of the imaginary border ten miles to the south. ‘But you’ll find him in the telephone directory.’

‘Where can I get one?’

She smiled and reached below the counter. ‘We don’t do this for all our customers, but seeing as it’s you …’

‘It was good of you to meet me at such short notice.’

The older man nodded graciously. ‘I was intrigued by your interest in Arthur. The subject is a passion of mine, as you’ll know from The Lost Kingdoms.’ He indicated the book Jamie was carrying. ‘And also that you wanted to meet somewhere off the beaten track with this particular vista.’ He waved a hand that encompassed the three hills looming on the far side of the Tweed Valley. Alistair Moffat was tall, but with the slight stoop tall men take on when they’re not entirely comfortable with their height. Balding, with a neatly trimmed, fast greying beard, and shrewd, deep-set eyes in a face scattered with humour lines, there was something almost Pickwickian about the writer. The two men had arrived a few minutes earlier from opposite directions on the narrow minor road and parked side by side in the little car park overlooking the River Tweed. Moffat continued: ‘The legends say these hills were a single mountain until the wizard Michael Scott, who hailed from these parts, split them into three.’ He smiled as he regaled the unlikely myth. ‘The truth is a wee bit more prosaic, the Eildons are probably the product of volcanic activity. Mind you, Scott was the very man for splitting mountains. He was an alchemist and sorcerer, a figure of awe and fear who had mixed with the greatest thinkers of the time. The problem with the story is that he lived in the twelfth century — he was an astrologer to Frederick the Second in his court at Padua — and the Romans called these hills Trimontium at least a thousand years earlier.’ His grey eyes took on a self-mocking twinkle. ‘The clue is in the name.’

Jamie didn’t hide his puzzlement. ‘In the book, you link Trimontium and Arthur with the Romans, does that mean you think he was a Roman? I thought the Arthurian legends all had their origins in Wales or Cornwall and Arthur was the archetypal Briton, fending off the Saxons.’

The writer didn’t take offence. ‘Every legend is the product of centuries,’ he smiled, ‘sometimes millennia, of stories passed on by word of mouth, and occasionally, away back in the mists of time, those stories are born from a kernel of truth.’ He shook his head gravely. ‘I’ve never said Arthur was Roman, only that he may have been a Roman officer, which isn’t quite the same thing. You can’t see it from here, but on top of the northernmost hill is an Iron Age township; the remains of literally hundreds of mud and wattle houses. These were the sacred hills of a tribe called the Votadini, and it appears that the Votadini were what we call “clients” of Rome; a sort of buffer state between the Empire and the wild tribes of the north. To the north-east of the hills is a platform above the river and the Romans built a fort there, first in Agricola’s time, and then later reused and refurbished it over almost two centuries—’

An almighty rush of sound drowned out the author’s words and Jamie ducked, fearing they were under some kind of attack. Moffat didn’t even blink. When he looked up, a warplane, flying unfeasibly low, was just disappearing over the shoulder of the hills.

The author smiled. ‘It’s not just the Romans who used the mountains as a signpost. You get a lot of low flying round here and the RAF — or NATO — lads like to use it as a reference point for turns during their exercises. It takes a bit of getting used to, as you’ve just found out.’ He laughed. ‘Anyway, sometimes Trimontium was garrisoned, sometimes abandoned, depending on the political mood of the day. But the Romans still ruled here, through their patrols from the Wall, diplomacy and the strength of their surrogates, the Votadini. We know from the historical sources that the Votadini were horse warriors — they were the same Gododdin who rode to Catraeth though none was Arthur — and the Romans often recruited native horse as auxiliary cavalry and valued them greatly. I think it entirely possible that Arthur was a war chief of the Votadini, possibly a prefect, a local commander of auxiliary horse, and as the Romans withdrew behind the Wall in the third or fourth centuries he and his men stemmed the tide of invasion from the north. He became a warrior commemorated in song and story, and his name rang through the ages as a testament of valour.’

Moffat’s final words sent a shiver of almost superstitious awe through Jamie, but they also begged a question. ‘But how …? ’

The writer smiled. ‘You’re still sceptical, and you have every right to be. You mentioned that the Arthur legend had its genesis in Wales, but perhaps it would be more accurate to say in Welsh. Would it surprise you that the Votadini spoke a variant of Celtic that became Welsh? Or that the Saxon invasions of later centuries drove them west and then south away from their spiritual homelands and this place of secrets? The Men of the North were eventually absorbed into the Cymri, who became the Welsh. They took with them their songs and their stories, their legends — and their heroes. Perhaps Arthur is a combination of many of them, but this,’ his long arm reached out to encompass the rolling hills around them, ‘is where it began.’

As he said the words, Jamie looked at the brooding triple peaks and felt another shiver. ‘It feels as if this is a land soaked in blood …’

The other man laughed. ‘Aye, if you had time, the stories I could tell …’

‘What do they call this place?’

‘It’s known as Scott’s View.’

‘After the wizard, Michael Scott.’

Moffat shook his head. ‘No, you’re wrong. It was named for another Scott who lived just downriver from here a couple of hundred years ago. Sir Walter Scott.’