Perilous Times

fingernails. Hot showers are one of the few pleasures in this endless nightmare. Whisky, motorcycles, good bars with loud music. Italian coffee. Cashmere. Hotels with good soap. They make all the rest of it slightly more tolerable.

The woman is getting further away. That’s what matters. He’s keeping the Saxons distracted. All he needs to do is stay where he is. He learnt a few hundred years ago that sometimes the most useful thing he can do is to just let himself get killed. Merlin’s covenant with the earth didn’t grant him the strength of an ox, it didn’t make his flesh repe

‘Okay. Were you, like, at the Battle of Hastings, or whatever?’ He swallows. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I was.’ ‘What was that like?’ He remembers. In with the common fyrd, as usual. Holding the shield-wall together. He thought they’d won, marching down into the valley after the fleeing Normans. But then the Normans came back.

Lancelot smiles. The trick with killing dragons is to find a chink in the armour. A loose scale to work your sword under. Get some leverage and prize it up. Colonel Nashorn has plenty of loose scales.

His dream stays with him. It was easier to deal with the memories when he knew that he served a purpose. He used to tell himself that he was coming back for a reason. It made everything an ounce more tolerable. He used to tell himself that he was part of Merlin’s plan. Well, he was – just not in the way that he thought. None of what he did was part

There’s not much he can do with just his shield. Even his sword wouldn’t help enormously. Ancient warriors risen from the very ground with their arms untarnished are less useful than they used to be, when there are men doing wicked things with automatic rifles. If Merlin foresaw everything that would come to pass, why didn’t he account for guns? It

The vaults at Wessex Place used to be a repository of sorts. Artefacts of Empire, ransacked from across the world, or from other worlds altogether. Most of the articles have been sold to private collectors. The spear of Longinus. The keys to Xanadu and Shambala. Old display cases stand empty and undusted. There are a handful of legendary swords lef

He gets his shins above ground, and then he’s up, kneeling in the sun, panting in the heat. Wearing a coat of mail and a green wool cloak, both rimed with muddy afterbirth. His dreadlocks are matted with earth.

He heads downhill, the earth squishing underfoot. His sword might be in the bog somewhere, hilt protruding from the wet earth. Hopefully he’ll just stumble onto it. That’s usually how this works, the various ancient forces of the realm conspiring to make things easier for him. That was always one of the perks of being in Arthur’s warband. You’d blu