Free Iron Chamber of Memory by John C. Wright Page A

Maidens
Old and Forgotten Woes
    When Hal and Manfred met next, it was at a pub called the Old Granary in Dorset. They sat on a balcony with the River Frome chuckling and sliding on below, and beyond was the green view of the Purbeck Hills. Hal drank the Tanglefoot ale, brewed by a family of brewers who had been in business longer than his home country. Manfred drank the Kronenbourg Lager.
    At first they spoke seriously, as friends do, about their progress and obstacles with their dissertations, but as the ale flowed freely and the afternoon progressed, the talk turned to more frivolous and exotic topics.
    Hal looked at Manfred over the rim of his ale cup. Manfred was thirty years old, with a square brow hanging over deepset eyes. This gave his face an aspect of brooding and scowling which receded when he smiled, but never entirely vanished. His cheek bones were high and definite, his nose like the beak of a hawk. His jaw jutted, his lips were thick and red as those of an Assyrian. His hair was so dark as to seem almost blue. At all hours, even when he had just shaved with a close razor, his chin and jawline was shadowed with the hint of dark, coarse hair. He did not have the height of Hal, nor his wide shoulders, but he was thick through the chest, as stout as an old oak barrel, and his neck and arms were surprisingly muscular.
    “I am surprised you drink a German brew, you being a lord now, and such,” said Hal with an easy grin. “Surely love of Queen and Country demands otherwise? Surely there is some law from the time of Henry the Second, or something, demanding true Englishmen drink only their own true England beer?”
    Manfred, as always, seemed to be glowering under his close-knit brows, but a slight smile touched his lip. “This lager is from France, and in the time of Henry the Second, we ruled France, or part of her. Brewed by a German family, of course. Trust the Huns with hops, the Gauls with grapes. Everything fine and good among the English came from the Continent. This was a haunt of giants before Brutus came, you know, and Caesar saw nothing but savages painted blue, Picts and cannibals, and druids burning slaves alive in wicker men on the moor. England is like a dark house of forgotten things, with basement, cellar, bunker and dungeon leading down to ever darker things no one remembers. Sometimes it is a mercy to forget.”
    “That is a glum attitude!” protested Hal.
    “So says the Yank, whose country is hardly old enough to wipe its own bum. You Yanks still berate and bewail the bad deeds of yesterday, your one and only civil war, your slave-trade, driving off the Indians. When were those deeds done? Mere moments ago. We have had nine civil wars or more, and our slave trade since the time of John Hawkins swelled to encompass the world entire! Christendom was shipwrecked on this stony-hearted island in 1536, split in two, never to be whole again. All the subsequent wars in Europe spring from that, for without Henry and good queen Bess, the Reformation would have been suppressed like every other heresy before it. Without the divide between Catholic and Protestant kings, perhaps one contender would have eventually led the Holy Roman Empire from the Pillars of Hercules to the Ural Mountains, and world wars never been invented. Earlier, the troubles of Ireland started in 1192. Earlier still, Arthur in 518 fought the battle of Badon Hill, where he slew eightscore men singlehandedly: and the grief of that still haunts the Badbury Rings, through green turf covers the Roman stones. What are the ills of your measly two hundred years compared to that?”
    “Haunts as in
haunting
?”
    “Of course. The locals say the shades of Arthur and his knights appear there on moonless nights, fighting ghostly foes. In 1970 the spectral armies drove away an archeological expedition, who fled in panic from the clamor of an unseen battle in the air. And a ghost of a knight with a hideously scarred face was seen at night