I had a long chat with Dad,' said Quintin, 'and he told me how he first came to start this project.' Quintin stopped to gather his breath and gazed out towards Poole Bay and the distant cliffs of Dorset as Miranda approached from a perusal of the remains of a Bronze Age round barrow near where they had been standing, on the summit of Headon Heath in the far west of the Isle of Wight. She made a scrunching noise over flint gravel and turned to look in the same direction as Quintin. The sun made a spectacular display on the sea as it burst through a cloud.
'It was an old Victorian book of Arthurian legends I know,' she called back, shielding her eyes from the glare. 'I had a long chat with your father as well, while you were down with your grandmother at the co-op.' She shifted her foot on the awkward slope, just caught herself and regained her balance. 'He said he knew that the Victorians had been very reluctant to look at it with an open mind, but that the constant repetition of a certain theme in these old Medieval stories struck him very strongly. But a lot of the most interesting publications at the time were reprints of old Victorian works and nothing modern seemed to have made anything of this constant repetition of instances of disguise, even when they highlighted the mythological nature of even the earliest tales of Arthur, so he thought there was mileage in looking at the old Medieval stories afresh.'
'But he wrote Weird Tales from the Middle Ages before he did a single translation from Middle English,' said Quintin. 'And it was reading Chrétien de Troyes' twelfth century Arthurian romances, translated from Old French, while he was night-portering at Pillingshurst Priory, that got him really hooked! He told me that it is amazing what the ghosts of dead poets can do in the early hours of the morning for pointing out the obvious! And it did seem obvious to him. The Knight of the Cart for instance.'
'Yes, I bet it was spooky there, in the middle of the night, with the ghost of a famous English poet looking over your shoulder,' agreed Miranda.
'And Icelandic sagas as well,' said Quintin. 'Dad had read the saga of Thorstein Mansion-Might...'
'Who!' laughed Miranda as she skipped past Quintin down a gravel gully, sending a cascade of stones ahead of her.
'Thorstein Mansion-Might!' called Quintin, after her. 'A massive Norwegian viking! And it struck Dad as peculiar that when Thorstein receives a broomstick from the occupant of a barrow, just like the one up there, and flys upon it down into a river and into a land that is obviously a land of the dead, 'cos what else would it be when you reach it from a burial mound, it struck him as curious that the people there can be killed. He thought it was weird that people in an afterlife can be killed by Thorstein. And it got him thinking even more about where these stories came from.'
'Yes, he told me it all stared to mount up for him,' agreed Miranda. 'And the more he looked, the more interesting it got. And it was only quite late on that he found it stated catagorically, in the Poetic Edda, the collection of ancient Norse verse copied down in thirteenth century Iceland, what people in Europe once believed. But by then it came as no surprise to him at all! And neither did it when he read about all the brilliant scholarship that had already shown that the ancient Welsh tales of Arthur describe a mythological hero and not a warrior who defeated Saxons. That's what he told me. And he thinks it's a really good idea that we are bringing in many more Icelandic sagas and ancient Athenian plays and the work of Plato and Homer and British Iron Age metalworking and Bronze Age Minoan art and all sorts of other things that he didn't look at. All to show that a belief in reincarnation is in the very European soil upon which we stand.' She sent another cascade of flint gravel rolling down the slope as she turned back to face Quintin. 'So come on!' she cried, throwing Quintin a broomstick. Let's search for the real King Arthur! Let's go on a journey beneath England. Look! There is London Clay in the cliffs of Alum Bay! Lets follow it to its source! Where shall we go? Rotherhithe? Baker Street?'
'You choose!' cried Quintin, and they launched themselves from the hillside, flew in a graceful arc over the Solent, skimmed over the yachts at Lymington, swept over the heathland and woodland of the New Forest, over Hampshire farmland, the North Downs of Surrey and plunged into a ventilation shaft and down towards a virtual underground railway beneath...
