Free The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman Page A

eyes. She was right. The Queen had oft-times spoken of making my situation more formal, but nothing ever happened. Noincome, no title, not even the offer of a new rectorate. Men had been awarded knighthoods or peerages and estates for smaller services than my work on navigation, while I was yet a commoner.
    But, then, who honours a conjurer?
    I should not feel bitter. What was a title worth? It made you known to the world in ways I care nought for, only wanting to be left alone to get on with my work. Although, yes, I agree that it would have been pleasant not to have to worry about money.
    ‘Please thank the Secretary for his concern for me,’ my mother said, ‘but assure him that I shall be quite secure here.’
    ‘You don’t think that. You said—’
    ‘I’ve never lived
entirely
without servants. Indeed, I’d thought you’d be married by now, and there’d be another woman here to—’
    ‘Mother—’
    ‘Still… perchance the very fact that you are
not
here… will make the difference.’
    ‘Yes,’ I said softly. ‘Maybe it will.’
    The candlelight flickered like soft lightning on my coloured charts of the planets, glimmed in my hourglass, brought the eyes of the owl to life. I felt like a man hanging onto a stunted tree bent over an abyss. No firm situation, no wife, no siblings. No family but my poor mother, who only wished for me to be a normal man, and respected as such.
    ‘Don’t stay up too late,’ my mother said. ‘You’re not
so
young any more.’

     
    The cats. Maybe the rustling in the shelves had been the cats, who liked to prowl the library when I was working here.
    Or maybe it was the matter of Arthur, calling to me. I sighed, put away my cosmology and reopened the collected manuscripts of Giraldus Cambrensis.
    Gerald of Wales, a respectable chronicler who had travelled widely in these islands and attempted accurate descriptions of what he found there. You might almost have thought that Gerald was present himself when the discovery was made of the bones of Arthur at Glastonbury in 1191, such was the detail.
The thigh bone, when put next to the tallest man present, as the abbot shewed us, and placed on the ground by his foot, reached three inches above his knee. And the skull was of a great, indeed prodigious capacity, to the extent that the space betwixt the brows and betwixt the eyes was a palm’s breadth. But in the skull there were ten or more wounds which had all healed into scars, with the exception of one which had made a great cleft and seemed to have been the sole cause of death.
    Gerald probably was not there when the bones were uncovered, but it seemed unlikely that he could have invented any of this. It was a report. The bones had been shown to him. The bones were real. But whose?
    If, perchance, I was able to bring some of them back here, to examine them closely, it would be possible to determine something of their antiquity.
    I read of the inscription upon the cross which had been found above the remains.
    Hic iacet sepultus inclitus Rex Arturius in Insula Avalonia.
    Here lies buried the renowned King Arthur in the Isle of Avalon.
    Succinct enough, but a little too perfect. I had seen it suggested that the description ‘King’ Arthur had not been in use at the time of the burial. It was also in Latin, when it would surely have been more convincing in old Welsh.
    The cross might, however, have been put into the earth long after the burial, to mark the place rather than as a memorial. It was possible. Anything was possible.
    For, truly, I did not want this to have been a deception. Knowing, all the same, that I could not turn away from any evidence of fabrication.
    Unless commanded to?
    Dear God, what a wasps’ nest this was. I turned to
The History of Kings of Britain
by the less-reliable Geoffrey of Monmouth and the account of Arthur’s final battle with his treacherous nephew, Mordred.Geoffrey claims this happened in Cornwall, with much mortality on both sides.
    After