Finding Camlann (32 page)

The thought that stays with Donald as tiredness finally overtakes him is this. Far more than simply drawing on a similar tradition or a common source, the book of Cyndeyrn, the damaged parchment section of manuscript TF 97B now held safely in the Bodleian library, is one and the same as Geoffrey’s ancient book in the British language. It is the archaeological discovery of a lifetime.

‘Be Thine Despair . . .’

C
OMING DOWNSTAIRS EARLY
on this foggy Wednesday morning, Julia feels a true lightness of spirit, a sense of opportunity in the new day. She throws the kitchen windows wide open to let in the cool autumnal air, then picks up the phone and dials the number for Dyffryn Farm. It is still not quite dawn, but she can be sure that her mother will be up and about.

‘Are you all right, my love? I was worried about you, driving all that way alone.’

‘I’ve driven a car on my own before,’ Julia says, smiling. Her mother’s proprietorial tone is as comforting to her now as it would have been irksome when she was seventeen.

‘Well, I’m glad you called. I wanted to let you know, Hugh came over here yesterday evening.’

Julia’s equanimity is dashed away to nothing. ‘What did he have to say?’

‘Not very much, honestly. I think he just wanted to check in on me, make sure everything was all right. He told me he was planning to drive back to Oxford first thing this morning. You haven’t seen him, I suppose?’

The question leaves a sharp splinter of anxiety. Julia glances reflexively out of the window to the front of the house. ‘No, I haven’t seen him.’

‘I don’t know everything that’s happened between you, my dear, but you do need to speak to him.’

‘He knows where to find me, if he wants to talk.’

There is a real exasperation now in Cath Llewellyn’s voice. ‘Call me back, would you, when you’ve had a chance to think about it properly?’

After she hangs up, Julia can only think of getting out of the house. She grabs her coat from the hook by the door, picks up her coat and gloves, runs out of the back door and down through the cool misty garden to the shed, wheels her bicycle out through the garden gate and rides off towards the Woodstock Road and onwards to the offices of Oxford University Press.

It is comforting to see the familiar face of Colin, the security guard, eyeing her with a curious, kindly smile as she walks through the door. ‘Up with the larks today, Miss Llewellyn? It’s good to have you back.’

It is not yet eight o’clock, and the office is almost empty. As Julia’s colleagues begin to drift in, she finds herself quietly fending off the sympathy of those who feel obliged to come and talk to her, to find the right words to express their regret at her father’s death. Perhaps they also know about Bowen’s accident, though she has no idea how far that news has travelled; certainly no one mentions it to her. She feels a vague sense of dishonesty as she gives simplified, inadequate answers to their well-intentioned enquiries.

Going through her backlog of post, she finds a thick envelope from the Bodleian, photocopies or other materials she has requested from the library. She sets it to one side, unopened. There is a large stack of word-slips that have come in while she has been away. To distract herself, she begins browsing desultorily through them, but the earnestness of the OED’s readers, usually a source of amusement and appreciation, is jarring to her today. She cannot find the proper degree of enthusiasm for the challenges of etymology and form, the nuances of definition and derivation; the meaning of
oppugn
versus that of
depreve
, the variant legal and grammatical usages of
elide
.

Just as her attention begins to wander, her eye falls on a copy she has made of the Song of Lailoken, marked up with her detailed linguistic annotations. The poem brings back unwanted images from Three Devil Falls, the sound of Bowen’s voice shouting above the noise of the cascade, but still she feels drawn to pick it up. Speaking some of the verses back to herself in the original Welsh, she finds that they flow along with a pleasing kind of mellifluous intensity.

Cyntaf yn nheml y ffurfafen, cylch cywrain cewri

Safai ein gelyn yn syberw ar ei charreg echryslon

Belak-neskato ei henw, triniwr angau

Yn tywallt gwaed gw
ŷ
r a laddwypanp width="d deirgwaith

I dorri syched y sarff wen, deirgwaith sychedig

Nen-ddiafol a ddug gylch y cewri o’r gorllewin pell

I wneuthur yma’r lladdfan gysegredig.

Arthur a roes fywyd i’n gwroldeb

Ymladdodd â’i dau amddiffynnwr, Araket a Madarakt

Mân-dduwiau paentiedig ar y ddaear, ni thyciodd eu nerth ddim

Y cyntaf a deimlodd lafn Arthur, dihangodd yr ail o’r maes

Yna ein ceimiad a lamodd yn uchel a bwrw’r hudoles ddu i lawr

A’i rhwygo o’i heisteddfan erch.

Sylw ni roddais i sgrechfeydd ei holaf anadl

Einioes driphlyg a addawodd im, ac angau triphlyg

Fy nhranc y gwenwyn ar ei thafod.

It is only the outlandish names in the poem,
Belak-neskato
and
Araket
and
Madarakt
, that stick harshly in her throat, as if they belong to some distant, alien tongue. She underlines them boldly in red pencil.

There is a quiet tapping, and she looks up to see her friend Otto Zeiss standing next to her desk. ‘Good day, Julia,’ he says, in his precise, Viennese way. ‘I am glad to see you back, but now it seems you are already very deeply embedded into some problem or other.’

‘Your timing is uncanny as always, Otto,’ she says, smiling, as she hands the poem to him. ‘I can’t think of a better person to help me. I would like you to tell me, if you can, what kind of words these are, and in what kind of a language.’

Otto sits on the edge of her desk while he skims the text. ‘This is very interesting indeed,’ he says, smoothing a hand over his bald scalp. ‘So far, I have no idea about it at all, but I will see what I can find out.’

An hour later, Julia is staring out of the window at a one-legged robin hunting for worms on the rain-dampened paving slabs. She tries to put herself inside its tiny head, to imagine its sharply delimited view of the world, the process of avian cognition that sends the signals to make it hop, peck, flutter, hop. She wills it to take to its wings and fly, but to no avail. The unsheltered sky holds no attractions to rival this glistening concrete expanse populated by defenceless, wriggling invertebrates there for the taking.

‘You are finding something remarkable to look at outside?’ Otto is back there at her desk. ‘Well, my brain has only room for one remarkable thing at once, and so you must tell me about it later. For now, I have been thinking about your interesting poem, and perhaps I have found a kind of answer to your question. If you would like to hear it, I will try to explain.’

Julia pulls up a second chair, ushers him into it. ‘Tell me,’ she says.

‘So, we start with the strange name
Belak-neskato
. Evidently its origins are not to be found in Welsh, nor in any language that is familiar to me. Something in its construction made me think first of those languages that are not of Indo-European origin, as is well known in the case of Basque and certain relatives and precursors. Most paleolinguists would agree that the Basque tongue, which is still widely spoken in the border regions of Spain and France, is the only surviving language of western Europe that is derived from the original languages of the Paleolithic. You are familiar with that story, of course.

‘Unfortunately, this took me straight away beyond my area of expertise, but a check against the standard Basque dictionaries offered some interesting clues, and so I went to my bookshelves and dug a little deeper, to an extinct language called Aquitanian which is a precursor to Basque. A number of inscriptions in Aquitanian dating from classical times have been translated by reference to their Basque equivalents. From this limited lexicon, two particular correspondences seem to have some possible relevance. I have written them down for you here.’

With evident relish, Otto unfolds a sheet of paper from his pocket and lays it down on the desk.

Aquitanian
belex
,
-belex
,
-bel(e)s
= Basque
beltz
,
bele
= black, crow, raven

Aquitanian
nescato
= Basque
neska
= girl, young woman

‘From this, we are perhaps permitted to conjecture that the construction
Belak-neskato
is an ancestral form of the Aquitanian
Belex-nescato
, which could be translated as “black-woman” or perhaps rather the more symbolic “raven-woman”. As to this lady’s protectors,
Araket
and
Madarakt
, I have so far found no linguistic clues at all, beyond the plausible assumption that they are rendered in the same ancient language.’

‘What if I asked you to make an educated guess, Otto?’

He smiles at her now. ‘Yes, I was hoping you would ask. If I were to make a hypothesis based on the context in which the words are used, I should say that they refer also to totemic creatures, companions to our raven-woman. Perhaps these are the names of other totems that we find commonly in the Basque mythologies, symbols of strength and courage such as the boar and the stag. As to how these errant words ended up in the middle of a medieval Welsh text, I could not possibly say.’

Julia waits until Otto has wandered dreamily back to his desk on the other side of the office before dialling Donald’s number. He picks up the phone straight away. ‘Julia, I’m glad you called—’

‘Listen, there’s something I wanted to ask you, about the poem.’ Suddenly she is talking to him in an excited rush, about Otto Zeiss and Basque and Aquitanian, animal totems from the distant past. ‘How can it be, Donald? How could such a language ever have been spoken in Britain?’

He is calmer, more measured. ‘It’s perhaps not as unlikely as it sounds,’ he says. ‘Most archaeologists agree that the island of Britain was repopulated after the last ice age, perhaps ten thousand years ago, by peoples who travelled up the western coasts of Europe from the glacial refuge of north-eastern Iberia. They would have spoken a language that was an ancestor to modern Basque. It was possibly the main language spoken in Britain before the arrival of Celtic speakers in the early centuries of the first millennium
BC
.’

‘Can you make some sense of it, though? How these words got into the poem?’

There is a silence now on the line. ‘Not quite,’ Donald says at last, ‘though I do perhaps have an idea. I’ll see you later on, OK? We have a lot to talk about.’

THE CHAPEL-1" wi OF
Jesus College is a narrow, chilly space that seems to sap away what little warmth there is in the late autumn air. Its bold Victorian pavement of marble, alabaster, and glazed encaustic tiles sweeps through a broad gothic arch to the chancel and the vivid stained glass of the east window. Next to the altar, the young college chaplain, earnest and clean-cut, waits patiently as the late arrivals find their seats. Donald sits there quietly surveying the congregation, trying hard not to shiver in the sepulchral cold. He exchanges a glance with Margaret Rackham, who has a bench to herself at the front beneath the chancel arch, then casts his eye along the triple ranks of upright wooden pews on either side. Along with a few people of Caradoc Bowen’s own generation, frail and inscrutable old men who have the look of former spies and civil servants, there are many familiar faces from the current Oxbridge establishment, incumbent professors of poetry and history side by side with younger aspiring dons for whom Bowen was of interest mostly as an immovable object blocking their upward path through the scholarly hierarchy.

There is a touch on Donald’s shoulder from behind, a whisper in his ear. ‘I was hoping I might find you here.’ It is an unmistakable American voice. He turns his head, catches Lucy’s knowing smile. ‘I have something to show you,’ she says. ‘I’ll see you outside afterwards, OK?’

The chaplain clears his throat, looks meaningfully from left to right, gathering their attention, waits for the hush to fall; then launches into a short, surprising oration, his delivery slowed and softened by the expanded syllables of the south Welsh coast. ‘Caradoc Bowen was not a religious man. Not, at least, in the sense that one typically uses the term in my profession. Those of you who knew him will no doubt believe as I do that he would not thank me for sharing with you the traditional pieties of occasions such as this.’ There is a faint murmuring now from the pews: of agreement, or perhaps of modest indignation. ‘Professor Bowen was above all a remarkable scholar, an unparalleled authority on the bardic traditions of the Celtic peoples and their influence on wider British and European history, prehistory, and culture. He wrote widely on the medieval poetry of Wales and the role of mythology in shaping the national character and political fate of that country. In his younger days, he was a noted oratorical poet, and indeed I trust I do not overstep the mark in suggesting that, had he been born into another age, we might have seen Caradoc Bowen in the company of the greatest Welsh bards, Aneirin and Taliesin, Iolo Goch and Siôn Cent, whose work he so much admired. And so, with the late professor’s bold poetic spirit very much in mind, I am honoured to introduce to you the distinguished Bodley’s Librarian, who will give a brief eulogy on behalf of the university.’