Camelot

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Camelot

The Attic of Nanas

The King is dead

The Far Away Toilet

The Dragons of Camelot

The quest begins

Romeo Crick

To the distant corners

How to make babies the dragon way

Morgan le Fey

Sir Barkworth's journey

Queen Igraine

Lord Pleat of Perivale's journey to Wales

Learning to fly

Sir Lamorak's journey

The Great Roundish Table

Sir Bedivere's journey to The West

And then there were twenty-three

Meanwhile

The King is, um, not the King

Finally

Postscript 1 Living happily ever after

Postscript 2 Living happily ever after

Post-postscript

Footnotes

The Floods Series

The Dragons 2: Excalibur

Long ago in a faraway land, nearly halfway between somewhere over the rainbow and 23 Paradise Street, Arcadia, was a magical land called Avalon.

And at the heart of Avalon was a magical castle called Camelot.

And at the heart of Camelot lived a mighty King called Uther-Pendragon.
¹

Camelot was a fabulous place, so fabulous indeed that it was almost impossible to believe it really existed and wasn't just a wonderful dream.

Even the greatest stories written about it did not do it justice. It was the ultimate castle, more magnificent and vast than the next ten best castles added together. It wasn't just staggeringly gorgeous, it was staggeringly big too. It didn't have one room for each day of the year, it had eleven and a half.

The moat that surrounded the castle wasn't so much a wide strip of water as a vast lake. There were islands in the moat, over three hundred of them,
each with their own story to tell.
²

To reach the castle itself you had to cross seven of the islands, which were linked to each other by a narrow stone bridge only wide enough to allow horses to cross them in single file. On the seventh island there was a gatehouse. To cross the final stretch of water the gatehouse keeper would send a carrier pigeon across to the castle with a Request of Access. Once this had been granted – and it was by no means guaranteed that it would be – a team of sixteen enormous horses would walk slowly across the great courtyard in the centre of the castle, feeding out the two great chains that lowered the final link, a drawbridge of ancient timbers that were rumoured to have come from the hull of Noah's Ark itself.

So going to Camelot was not a journey for the faint of heart. Nor was it meant to be. The journey across the moat could take weeks, depending on who it was you wanted to visit, and the mood of the Overseer of Requests of Access, who had a very bad-tempered wife. If his wife, Irongirder, had
been particularly horrible to him that day, then the Overseer could take ages to process the forms. There were times when the island where the gatehouse stood was so overcrowded that people were falling into the water at a rate of about one per minute. This was something that seldom ended well because of the olms.
³

In Camelot's moat, the olms grow big enough to swallow a horse, which they often do. The largest and oldest olm, Krakatoa, had lived in the moat since the ancient days, which ended about half an hour before time began. Olms do not eat knights. They just suck off their armour and cover them with slime that is slimier than any slime you have ever seen and smells dreadful. Knights this has happened to are sent to the Downwind Islands at the far end of the moat until the smell wears off, which can take years.
⁴

Because it was so difficult to reach, Camelot did not have a lot of visitors. It hadn't always been this way. Originally, the moat had been like every other moat, a narrow strip of deep, murky water full of ferocious crocodiles, mind-numbingly vicious bacteria and tiny snails that crawled into any part of a human body that had a hole in it. This was how all moats were and how most still are to this day. But despite all the life-threatening stuff, there were still people who made it across to the castle. So the King of Avalon at the time, Great-grandfather Pendragon, asked Merlin, the castle's resident wizard, to fix it. That is how the moat became a lake, the tiny snails grew razor-sharp spikes on their shells and the mind-numbingly vicious bacteria evolved into the clerical staff that created all the forms you had to fill out before you could even set foot on the first of the seven islands.

But Camelot was so exquisitely beautiful that, by comparison, even the Blue Bird of Paradise looked as ugly as a bald eighty-seven-year-old hippopotamus with cracked skin and one ear. The castle's reputation spread throughout the land and lots of other places
too. People would travel for days simply to stand on the edge of the moat and admire Camelot's legendary gorgeousness. As they gazed across calm waters where swallows dipped and swans glided majestically by, they would be overwhelmed by a feeling of wonderful tranquility. Unfortunately, the trouble with feelings of wonderful tranquility is that they make people light-headed, and the trouble with being light-headed is that you lose your balance, and the trouble with losing your balance when you are standing on the edge of Camelot's moat is falling in. This is why the olms of Camelot are so huge. They get a lot of food.

Rich children have privileges that ordinary kids like you do not. Obviously Arthur, being the son of Uther-Pendragon, King of Avalon, had all sorts of privileges that common people couldn't even dream of. One of these privileges was having a nanny.

Arthur's nanny was called Nana Agnys.

Nannies are a privilege that some people might not see as one. Some people might even think that only seeing your real mother for five minutes at six o'clock every evening except on weekends was a bad thing.

Arthur was not one of those people.

His mother, Queen Igraine
⁵
– or at least, the lady that Nana Agnys said was Arthur's mother – was a distant, unfeeling woman who smelled of dead roses and rhubarb. Every evening at six o'clock Nana Agnys took young Arthur down to the castle dining hall to see her. And five minutes later she took him back up to the nursery.

Queen Igraine greeted her son with the same expression she might have had if she had just
discovered she had trodden in something a puppy had left behind. Both mother and son looked forward to five past six with great anticipation. It was actually the only thing that Igraine and Arthur had in common.

These five-minute meetings were the only contact Arthur ever had with his parents. The King didn't even know that Camelot had a nursery, never mind where it was, and the Queen thought the nursery was two old patches of mud by the castle walls where the cook grew beetroots.

‘Tell me again, Nana,' Arthur always asked as Nana Agnys led him back upstairs, ‘who is that lady?'

‘She is your mother,' Nana Agnys always replied, ‘and the big hairy man at the other end of the table is your father, the King.'

‘And that stuff they were eating that smelled so wonderful?' Arthur asked as he tucked into his nightly bowl of gruel and goat's hoof.

‘That is meat, my dear.'

‘And those lovely shiny white things the meat was on, Nana, what are they?'

‘Plates.'

‘Gosh. When I am King shall I get meat to eat?'

‘Of course, my dear,' Nana Agnys replied. ‘When you are King you will be able to eat anything you want.'

‘Gosh, and when I am King, shall I eat my meat off a shiny white plate and use the pointy metal things?'

‘Knives and forks. Of course you shall,' said Nana Agnys, patting the boy affectionately on his head.

‘Gosh, and when I am King, shall I still have to go and see that lady, um, er…'

‘Your mother.'

‘Yes, her. Shall I still have to go and see her every night at six o'clock except weekends?'

‘Not if you don't want to, my dear.'

‘I shan't want to, thank you,' said Arthur. ‘In fact, I think I shall want to banish her to that little castle on the grey island at the far side of the lake that makes your eyes water.'

‘You mean…?'

‘Yes, Nana, I shall banish her to the Island of Onions.'

‘I think you mean the Island of Shallot, my treasure,' said Nana Agnys.

‘Whatever, Nana,' said Arthur. ‘When I am King, I shall rename it the Island of Vegetables, and then there will be no more confusion.'

‘Clever boy.'

Arthur licked the last of his gruel from the rough wooden bowl, picked the splinters out of his tongue, picked gravel that had been caught in the goat's hoof out of his teeth, handed the hoof to Nana Agnys to wash ready to add to his gruel the next night, and then said, ‘And how shall I become King again, Nana?'

‘You shall become King when your father dies,' said Nana Agnys.

‘Do you think that might be soon, Nana, for I should so like to eat meat from a plate?'

‘No, my child, your father is in fine health.'

‘But his hair is grey and he looks terribly old.'

‘Only to a child as young as you, my dear. Your father is in his prime and will rule over us for many years to come.'

As the nightly-except-weekends five-minute visits to his parents' dinner table mounted up, the intoxicating smell of roast venison and roast pheasant and roast lamb and roast swan sank deeper and deeper into Arthur's brain, until it was with him every waking minute of every day, including weekends.

Then, when Arthur was eleven years old, he was summoned to his parents' table, not at six o'clock in the evening, but at breakfast time on Christmas Day.

This had never happened before and it did not mean that his parents were planning something that normal parents would do, like give him a hug and a nice present. He was summoned because Merlin had suggested to the King that doing so might show the people that he was a good and kind father. The King, although confused, had agreed. There was no hug and no present, just the same flat questions he got every evening. The only difference was that instead of asking him how his day had been, his mother asked
him how his night had been. Then Nana Agnys took him away again.

But there had been one other thing that was different.

Something so powerful that it surpassed everything else. Suddenly the smell of roast venison, pheasant, lamb and swan all sank into second place. Because the air had been filled with a certain kind of magic. Such a powerful magic that it would change the course of history.

Bacon.

The scent of crispy bacon was the final piece of the jigsaw that told Arthur what he must do.

‘Daddy must become dead,' he whispered into the darkness, revealing the hint of nastiness that was actually his true nature, but that had been hidden by the fact that he was a blond-haired, sweet-faced eleven-year-old boy who had to eat gruel every night.

Nanas are different from other people. They are a strange race of old ladies who are born old. Not for them the joys and miseries of being a child, growing up, falling in and out of love. They are born exactly as they will be for the rest of their lives. No one knows where they come from, not even the nanas themselves. They are created only to be nanas.

When a rich lady has a baby, she very quickly realises that she simply doesn't have enough time any more to go shopping to buy all the important things she will need for the coming season's round of parties and balls, and get her hair done, and attend coffee mornings every day. When this happens, her husband buys her a nana. These are not to be confused with what poor people refer to as nanas. No, these are not grandmothers. These are proper nanas and only posh rich people can get them. There is a secret phone number for the Nana Shop that rich people are born with, tattooed inside their left nostril.

No number up the nose = no nana.

Those lucky enough to have the number call up and the next morning a brand-new old nana is delivered to their door, instantly relieving them of
smelly nappies, sore bottoms, baby spew and endless embarrassing questions about where babies come from.

Apart from those rare children who actually think spending time with their parents is quite nice, everyone is much happier when their nana arrives.

Mummies can do even more shopping, Pilates and being pampered.

Daddies can do, well, actually, daddies can carry on doing exactly the same as they were doing before the little sprog
⁶
arrived.

And the newborn child has someone to love and care for them twenty-four hours a day including weekends, because it is a well-known scientific fact that nanas never sleep and know what you are doing ALL the time, which is OK when you are very little but not so great when you are a teenager. Nanas are there until the very second their charge gets married and, in some cases, the young Prince Arthur in particular, they are there forever.

Furthermore, the top-notch nanas, such as those looking after princes and princesses, only look
after one child. When the child they are looking after gets married, they retire. There is no such thing as a second-hand nana.
⁷
Of course, the old nanas are not turned out to fend for themselves or made into sausages like they still are in some parts of Eastern Europe. No, they are looked after for the rest of their lives.

So it is at Camelot. High up under the roof of the great west wing is the Attic of a Thousand Nanas.
⁸
Room after room of little old ladies sitting by small open fires knitting lumpy cardigans and smiling vacantly at cups of cold tea.

But their innocent-looking knitting and tea-drinking hides a dark secret.

Nanas never sleep.

So when Arthur whispered into the darkness, ‘Daddy must become dead,' Nana Agnys heard him.

Nana Agnys knew that her beloved charge was too dumb to find his way out of a wet paper bag, and without her help it would be many, many years
before he would become King.

The thought of being the King's nana filled her with great excitement. The King's nana was the Top Nana. All other nanas were beneath the King's nana and had to do whatever she asked. The King's nana had first choice of all the knitting patterns. She got to sit at the top table, could kick the servants, and even make fun of Fremsley the Royal Whippet.

She decided she would speak to someone who would speak to someone who probably knew someone who could find someone who wouldn't ask any awkward questions… and something would be done.