Finding Camlann by Sean Pidgeon Page B

careful not to say too much. ‘There was an old battle-poem—Professor Bowen gave a talk on it once, a long time ago. I was hoping to track down the original.’
    Julia is made to feel the full weight of disbelief in the long, contemplative look the librarian gives her. ‘I do wonder if there’s something you’re not telling me, my dear. Be that as it may, I believe I know precisely what you are looking for. Give me just a moment, would you?’
    The Bodley’s Librarian turns to her card catalogue, throwing up faint clouds of old library dust as she opens and closes the small wooden drawers. Some minutes pass as she follows an apparently complex bibliographic trail. Eventually, a faded manila file emerges from a massive filing cabinet. ‘Why don’t you start with this?’ she says. ‘Meanwhile, I’ll see about having the original brought up for you to look at. Won’t be a tick.’ To Julia’s surprise, rather than pick up the telephone, she gets up from her desk and walks briskly out of her office, closing the door firmly behind her.
    The room falls into a near-silence filled with the resonant ticking of a carriage clock, previously unnoticed on a corner shelf. Julia opens the file, takes out a hand-written letter and its original envelope bearing a postmark from nearly fifty years in the past.
My dear Margaret,
I write to you today from Ty Faenor House, where I find that my amiable host, Sir Charles Mortimer, has inherited his due share of the antiquarian sensibility that has run so strongly in his family for the past three hundred years. Sir Charles has allowed me to remain as his guest for a week longer than I had planned, with the happy result that my research in the medieval manuscript collection held in the library here has at last borne sudden and unexpected fruit in the shape of a previously unknown manuscript dating from the fifteenth century.
I do not propose to dwell here on the manner of its discovery, save to say that it was experienced as something closer to fate than to happenstance. I had been searching for early sources relating to my main subject of study, the poet Siôn Cent, when my eye was drawn inexorably, as it seemed, to an outwardly unremarkable volume in a plain monastic binding of the kind often produced in the Welsh scriptoria. Upon taking this volume down from the shelf, I was disappointed to find the earliest parchment folios, twelve quires of eight leaves each, destroyed beyond repair or restoration by a penicillium mould whose inexorable progression had erased all immediate evidence of the title, authorship, and provenance of the manuscript. The later pages had fortunately for the most part been spared, and there I was able to read a series of previously unknown poems written unmistakably in his customary meter of cywydd deuair hirion by the bard whom I have come to know almost as a companion and friend, Master Siôn Cent. This was precisely what I had been seeking, the earliest poems of Siôn Cent whose work had previously been known onlargen knowy from the austere religious pieces composed in his later years at Kentchurch Court.
Though this was perhaps a sufficient revelation in itself, there was more to follow. It was almost that I heard a siren voice in my head, urging me to turn the leaf , turn the leaf , until I came upon a remarkable text presented under a title, the Song of Lailoken, that will not be entirely unfamiliar to you from your knowledge of the Welsh mythical canon (Lailoken, as you may recall, was the original Welsh model for the prophet Merlin), though the lines written beneath it most assuredly will.
One other observation may be of interest. At the head of the first folio of this poem, our bard adds a short and stirring preamble, informing us as follows: ‘I relate here the true story of Arthur’s return, that all Welshmen may know of him, and his rise to glory, and his fall to earth, and that hidden place where he entered the gates of the otherworld. Let none