The Necessary Arthur Page 2

  “Annoying old bat,” muttered Tamara to herself, thinking of Blaise. She rubbed the burn on her neck and thought she ought to get home and put something on it. But all the leaping about had taken its toll, not to mention the lateness of the hour. She’d worked a full day at the dig before coming up to the Sheepstones, and she was exhausted.

  “Fuck it,” she whispered, and fell asleep against the stone.

  * * *

  Tamara woke just before the sun came up. She felt groggy and sore, and there was a light dew on her face. Her mouth and throat were dry, as if she had a hangover, and her right ear hurt. It took her a few seconds to work out she’d fallen asleep at the Sheepstones. In fact, leaning against one. She remembered watching the sunset, and had a vague recollection of chatting to someone — a walker, or a farmer — and then falling asleep, but nothing else.

  Except the dream. A very detailed dream, that she now took several minutes to cement in her memory. It concerned a party of post-Roman Britons, maybe sixth century. They were filling six very large pottery urns with treasure. They sealed the lids of the urns with wooden stoppers and a great deal of wax, and then buried them on the shores of a small lake or lough south of Hadrian’s Wall, intending to come back and retrieve the treasure later. But she knew from the strange flip-forward and back nature of the dream that they were all killed, the last one years later on the shores of some icy, possibly Nordic country. The lough’s shoreline changed, water encroached over the spot, and the treasure was completely lost.

  But the men who buried the treasure had taken note of the shape of the lough, the skyline of the hills to the north and the position of the sun in relation to the hills. Tamara, as a disembodied observer, had followed along. She could superimpose the sixth century landscape over the modern one, which was not so different.

  She knew the lough, though the water level had ebbed back in the modern age. Tamara frowned deeply. It was such a vivid dream. She knew the exact place, it would be about thirty feet from the shore of the lough now, a hop and a skip from the Stanegate, once a Roman road. The treasure was astounding, both in terms of archaeological and monetary value. Hundreds of wooden cards, written on in ink, records of some kind; silver vessels, including a highly decorated drinking cup; votive plaques; thousands of coins, both gold and silver; jewellery of all kinds; and numerous weapons, including many very fine swords, with jewelled pommels.

  But it was only a dream. Or was it her archaeology-sodden subconscious speaking to her? Had she noticed something there when driving past one day, something that had lodged in her mind that had only just now worked far enough to the surface to provoke a dream?

  Groaning, Tamara got to her feet and at that point discovered her clothes were pitted with tiny holes, and one of the stones nearby was inexplicably pitch black. She stared at the holes, then groaned over to the stone and touched it. The black came off in crumbly pieces; it was like picking at a burnt sausage from a barbeque. She looked around, forehead severely furrowed. The ferns around the stones were broken and pushed down, and there were ashes everywhere, as if someone had flown over in a cropduster full of fireplace leavings and unloaded it all.

  Her neck hurt too. Tamara used the camera on her phone to take a look. There was a burn there, a thick red line about as long and wide as her finger. And there was a weird heavy chopstick thrust through the belt of her Barbour shorts …

  “What the fuck?” whispered Tamara to herself. Something very strange had happened here. She felt an incredibly strong urge to simply get away, and gave in to it. Dropping the chopstick, she set off down the path through the ferns, initially at a restrained walk, which turned into a run and then an all-out sprint to get to the Land Rover and a quick drive home to her studio apartment in Westgate Road, only resisting the temptation to speed where she knew there was a camera.

  It wasn’t until almost lunchtime that she felt relatively calm. A shower, another three hours’ sleep, and a huge brunch had done its work. It was Saturday, so she didn’t have to go into the university, and while there would be volunteers at the current dig, she wasn’t rostered on to be there supervising.

  The dream of the treasure burial stayed with her. At two o’clock she studied Google maps and other satellite images, searched ADS and other databases to see whether anything of archaeological interest had been found there, and discovered a total lack of any LiDAR coverage of that particular area.

  At three o’clock, she couldn’t resist any longer. She drove back out along the A69 towards Hexham, then on to the Stanegate, following it until she spotted Grindon Lough and pulled over. The site in her dream was near the eastern shore.

  But there was nothing there to suggest any reason to dig. It was just undistinguished, marshy ground. The lough had definitely receded, probably in relatively recent times, but there was nothing to indicate this spot was any different to any other, or worth the time and expense of investigation.

  Tamara went back home and called her supervisor, Professor Rob Collins, despite him being on holiday at his brother’s house in upstate New York. The first minute was taken up with insisting she hadn’t crashed the Land Rover nor done anything to any other departmental assets, but he was not much comforted by her urgent request for permission, and even worse, for him to begin the necessary paperwork for a dig at Grindon Lough, on no basis whatsoever except for what she called a ‘hunch’, as she chose not to refer to her dream.

  “We simply haven’t got the budget,” he said. “Look, if you can get the money from somewhere, a grant or … or I don’t know … run a Patreon or something…”

  “I think it’s urgent,” said Tamara. She frowned, because this was a new thought. “Heavy rain might raise the level of the lough again, make it much more difficult. It’s been a dry summer so far…”

  “OK,” said Rob. “We’re about to go to dinner … uh … why not grab the gear from the department tomorrow and do a geophysical survey, say three or four grids of twenty-by-twenty metres size with both resistivity and magnetometry? That’ll only take a day or two and make a big difference with any grant applications.”

  “Right,” said Tamara slowly. Any delay felt like it was too long. “I’ll do that.”

  “Let me know how you go. Of course, if you can get any money from anywhere, I’ll back it, help you with the approvals and so on. But you’ll have to do most of the paperwork.”

  “Yeah,” said Tamara. “Thanks, Rob.”

  The call was barely disconnected before Tamara started going through her own and everyone else’s lists of potential providers of grants or funding. Most of this was just crossing out ones that were already tapped out, or would take months if not years to respond.

  But at nine o’clock, long after she should have stopped for dinner, Tamara found one of her archaeologist friends on Facebook referring to a grant she’d received to conduct a speculative dig of a potential late Roman villa in central Turkey, from a source Tamara had never heard of: the Albert Levinson Jr Panomnisoft Foundation.

  Tamara went down the Google rabbit hole and discovered Albert Levinson Jr had been an entrepreneurial software developer, an American turned into a dedicated Englishman like T. S. Eliot. He founded the (almost only) British software success story Panomnisoft. He had also been a keen amateur archaeologist, probably of the annoying and potentially damaging kind from the sound of it.

  When Albert Jr died in 2005, his daughter Alberta Levinson took over and greatly expanded the business. While Panomnisoft itself meant little to Tamara, she recognised many of its subsidiaries, which extended across numerous different industries and were often household names. The application process for one of the Albert Levinson Jr grants was to send an email to AlbertGrant@panomnisoft.com attaching key details that took up no more than a page, and Alberta — who was many times a billionaire — would decide herself. The success rate, freely given, was one in ten thousand applications …

  The email was sent at 4am, and Tamara collapsed into bed, failing to note tha
t the strange single chopstick she had thrown away at the Sheepstones was now on top of a pile of overflowing books badly balanced on her windowsill, the foundation being Thud! and the topmost book Bring up the Bodies, the wand nicely illuminated by the moon shining through the glass.

  Tamara spent the next few days on the geophysical survey, being strangely unsurprised to see substantial pits with very high magnetic readings, typical of results from other known hoard sites. Even better, the resistivity readings revealed flares, or hotspots, in the same positions as the pits. She forwarded these results to Professor Collins, who was much more excited, and to Albert grant email, resulting in a basic acknowledgment of the additional information.

  The grant was approved four days later, the paperwork for the dig completed a mere twenty-one days after that, and within three days of commencing the preliminary work, the first urn was found, containing even more fabulous and important treasures than Tamara had seen in her dream. Her reputation instantly rose into the stratosphere, her work and the constant demands by the media grew even more all-consuming, so much so she totally forgot about the whole weird business with the Sheepstones and all that, and after a while she even managed to push aside the fact that it was a dream that had led her to what the Daily Mail Online shriekingly described as “the biggest archeological find since Carter stepped into Tutankhamen’s tomb.”

  * * *

  Five months later, Tamara woke up just after dawn on the morning of what was supposedly going to be one of the most important days of her life and knew that this was definitely true, but not for the reason she’d been expecting when she went to sleep.

  This was because a silver-haired woman in a brilliant white suit was sitting on the end of the bed, rather like a cat that has snuck in during the night and found the best place for itself which also happened to be the most annoying for its host. She was holding a Ventolin inhaler and looking cross.

  All of a sudden, Tamara remembered meeting Blaise before.

  “Fuck!”

  “Well you might say that. Every now and then the Knowledge doesn’t take hold properly,” said Blaise. “Which has totally set back our side, I can tell you. I really regret not choosing China over Britain, because their Monkey has already teamed up with Tripitaka and it’s going swimmingly, whereas — stop that!”

  Tamara froze in the act of picking up a very large and badly written historical reference book she’d been planning to read in bed and never did, but seemed exactly the right thing to hurl at this unwanted intruder.

  “Put it down,” instructed Blaise. “Very good. Now hold still while I apply the Knowledge to your other ear. Maybe it’ll find a way into your thick head from that side.”

  Tamara struggled against the command but could not move. She remembered everything now, or as much as she’d been told, and if she’d been able to move a muscle she would have screamed in anticipation of the awful pain. But she couldn’t. The next thing she knew her head ached as if from the worst hangover, the sun through the window indicated that dawn was an hour past, and the Knowledge had indeed found a way into her brain.

  Blaise was still sitting on the end of the bed, reading a glossy magazine that wasn’t in any language Tamara had ever seen and had a picture of something like a giant purple slug on the cover, posing to show off a utility belt. Or a slug corset or something.

  “I hope it worked this time,” said Blaise. She didn’t sound very confident. “Right. I’ll be off. Remember, future of the world and all that.”

  “I have to steal Alberta Levinson’s baby?” protested Tamara. An enormous quantity of constantly updating and shifting information was roiling about inside her head, most of it hard to pin down. But this one fact kept coming back to the surface. “I could get life in prison!”

  “Unlikely,” replied Blaise. “You’d have to be alive. They won’t let you get away with that.”

  “But she’s only just been born,” continued Tamara. “What kind of person steals a three-week-old baby from her mum?”

  “A Merlin kind of person, I’m hoping,” said Blaise. “If it makes you feel any better, it was a surrogate birth. Alberta only supplied the egg.”

  “Of course it doesn’t make me feel any better!” snapped Tamara.

  “She hasn’t even given the baby a name yet,” said Blaise.

  “So what!”

  “Well, maternal attachment seems lacking—”

  “I won’t do it,” said Tamara.

  “What a disappointment you are,” said Blaise. “Best Merlin candidate, forsooth! Well, They will finish you off anyway and I suppose in your dying moments — They are never that quick, They like a bit of torture and so on — you can revel in the fact that you could have saved the world and didn’t, and all because you wouldn’t steal a baby who needs to be stolen so she can grow up to be the Necessary Arthur. The Chosen One. The Hero who mostly fixes everything up.”

  Tamara looked at her mulishly. She could feel the Knowledge inside her head but it was fragmented, hard to grasp. Some things were easier to fix on than others, and it did indeed seem that the world was doomed if They won, and she herself would be an automatic forfeit, which meant death, as soon as the second round of the Game began. So steal a baby now or have slightly less than seven years to live and then die horribly …

  “Who started this whole stupid game thing—”

  But she was talking to empty air. Blaise had disappeared.

  “Shit,” muttered Tamara. She sat on the end of her bed with her head in her hands and wondered what the hell she was going to do. This was supposed to be the most momentous day of her life because in four hours’ time there was going to be the biggest media blabfest the university had ever had, at the so-called “Grindon Hoard” site, where Alberta Levinson was going to announce a massive donation to build a dedicated museum and visitor centre, and Tamara was going to become an associate professor, vaulting above her peers.

  Except that probably wasn’t going to happen now. Because she was supposed to go and steal the benefactor’s baby …

  Tamara picked up the Wand. She suddenly understood that one of the things it could do was remotely control any computer, access any system, change data, and so on. With the obligatory warning that They might notice.

  She pointed it at her MacBook and looked at how much the other graduate tutors at the university were paid. It worked instantly, secure pages flashing up in an instant, as if her broadband connection was suddenly a thousand times faster. Then she looked at her bank account, added a thousand and one pounds to her current account, and there it was …

  “Shit,” whispered Tamara. Everything was suddenly very concrete. “I suppose I do have to kidnap the baby.”

  She started with the information she could have got anyway, and then very delicately searched out a few key details that weren’t available via any public search. After fifteen minutes, a plan began to form. Or not exactly a plan, more of a sort of cloudy gathering of the bits and pieces that somehow might go together into a plan. A pretty crappy plan, but it didn’t seem likely any other kind might arise.

  Tamara quickly discovered the workaholic Alberta Levinson, her three-week-old as yet unnamed baby daughter (so Blaise had told the truth about that), two nannies, two executive assistants, and five bodyguards had flown from London to Newcastle very early that morning on her Gulfstream G550 jet, transferred to an AgustaWestland AW139 Pininfarina Edition helicopter despite the fact it would be quicker to drive, and had gone on to a country house hotel called Avaunt Castle that was completely booked out for Levinson’s party, at a mere £20,000 a day. The hotel was only five miles from the Grindon site.

  According to the email between Levinson’s assistant and the head of security which Tamara had just read (which she had the Wand make look like a Russian hacker prying) the baby, the nannies and two bodyguards were to stay at the hotel while Alberta, the assistants and the other three bodyguards went to the site for the media event.

  “So,” Tamara s
aid to herself. “The media event is at eleven thirty. It’s nine fifteen. I have to secretly get to Avaunt Castle, steal the baby but somehow so no one notices straight away, take her … somewhere safe … get back here, go to the media event, pretend nothing’s happened.”

  She got out her field notebook and pen and almost wrote a list, beginning with “1. Get into Avaunt Castle” before stopping herself writing anything potentially incriminating. She put the pen aside and took up the Wand again, thinking about its capabilities. Frustratingly, the Knowledge still didn’t seem to be working properly. She could feel information but couldn’t access it, kind of like seeing the titles of books she could never open.

  One thing was clear, while the Wand was an incredibly powerful device, using it risked attracting Their attention, particularly if it was to do with any connected technology, like the Internet, or phones. On the plus side, if They used their similar devices, Tamara would also be able to feel their presence.

  “I know what you’re getting for Christmas,” she muttered to herself, and laughed, a very little bit. Clearly, the main lesson was that whatever … well, magic … she could do without … the safer it would be.

  Yes said the Wand, in her mind.

  Tamara jumped.

  “I didn’t … well, I suppose I did know you could talk,” she said. “I mean I do now … but I didn’t a second ago … this Knowledge thing doesn’t seem to be working properly.”

  It seems not. There’s too much information to actually fit in your brain at any one time, the Knowledge is a quantum-entangled interface to a much larger data repository located in an interstitial dimension. When you need to know something, it should be there. But it has not initialized in your head properly.