The Excalibur Codex by James Douglas Page A

the writer, a poet called Aneirin, says of one of them ‘he was no Arthur’. This was supposedly written in the sixth century, but there must have been a parallel oral tradition. There’s no mention of a sword in the poem, yet it appears a couple of hundred years later as Caledfwlch, which apparently means “notched by battle”, and the man who wields it is called Arthur.’
    Adam Steele nodded, and Jamie realized he was only telling the businessman what he already knew. He paused, pondering where to take the story next. Gault had the look of someone who’d walked into the wrong meeting and his bored eyes wandered restlessly over thepaintings of the banker’s uniformly stern, bewigged ancestors lining the wood-panelled walls. Charlotte sat hunched over her notebook with a frown of intense concentration.
    ‘The twelfth-century chronicler Geoffrey of Mon-mouth, who may or may not have been Welsh, latinized the name of the sword to Caliburnus in his Historia Regum Britanniae, a hotchpotch of tales from the island’s settlement by descendants of the Trojans, through the Roman invasions to Arthur and beyond. He claimed the book was a translation of an earlier British work, but it’s more likely to have been put together from Welsh poems, Bede’s earlier history, the writings of a Northumbrian monk called Gildas, and his own fertile imagination. When it was published he was accused of making up the sections that mentioned Arthur …’ From the bay window came the faint sound of a siren somewhere down towards Piccadilly and Jamie faltered, his mind immediately jumping to the chaos of lights and sirens on the TV the day Abbie died.
    ‘You all right, Jamie old boy?’ Steele asked eventually.
    Jamie blinked and his vision cleared. ‘Sorry, just got a little lost.’ He licked his lips and discovered that they were the texture of sandpaper. ‘Anyway, a couple of hundred years later the Historia must have been picked up by an impoverished knight called Thomas Malory, because an embellished version of the Arthur sections of Geoffrey appear in a book called Le Morte d’Arthur, apparently written while the author was in jail, only now Arthur’ssword is called Excalibur. The Sword in the Stone first appears in a French poem that is actually about Merlin, who as far as we can tell doesn’t appear in the early sources and shouldn’t have anything to do with Arthur at all. That poem is also the source of the Grail legends and the Lady in the Lake. Le Morte d’Arthur picked up and embellished both these stories and is the basis for every unlikely myth, legend and work of fiction that follows.’ Now all their eyes were on him and he met their gaze with a rueful smile. ‘Everybody wants a piece of the Arthur action. He’s linked to most of Wales, Tintagel in Cornwall, Glastonbury, and anywhere that begins with Cam in England, as well as a couple of places in France. There’s even a historian who claims Arthur is Scottish, but they claim that about most things, I find.’
    In the long silence that followed Jamie could hear the sound of some ancient clock ticking the seconds away. Adam Steele took his time before venturing an opinion. ‘Yet Wulf Ziegler believes he stole a sword later identified as Excalibur for Reinhard Heydrich, who wasn’t a man prone to mistakes?’
    ‘True,’ Jamie conceded. ‘But Heydrich was a man known to indulge in smoke and mirrors from time to time.’
    Steele pursed his lips as if he’d sucked on a lemon. This wasn’t what he wanted to hear. ‘My instinct is that Ziegler is telling the truth as he saw it. You’d agree?’ Jamie nodded, he’d made his point. They both knewthat even if the sword was genuine and it had been where Ziegler’s informant claimed in 1941, there was no guarantee they’d be able to track down its present whereabouts. A lot of things had vanished during the Second World War and stayed vanished. If it existed, the chances were that it was in a steel box at the