Bringing Arthur back

The second coming of Arthur brought out the best in me. People began to recognise that I was a born leader. “Born to organise,” said Julie’s brother when he introduced me to the Creative Anachronists. “He may be a runt but he’s a clever runt, and he knows absolutely all there is to know about King Arthur.” I smiled and pretended to ignore the insult. Let them wait until I brought back Arthur, and then he’d sing another tune. Yelp another yelp, instead of yapping at me. Truth was, I needed the Creative Anachronists to help bring back Arthur, or at least I thought I did. They were the ones with the mediaeval armour, and the expertise at cooking up mediaeval feasts, and the clothes, and the shoes with long curved toes, and the tent. I didn’t want Arthur to feel terrified when he arrived. A day or two of creative anachronism should settle him down nicely before he had to face electric lights and toilets and cars. It wasn’t long before I discovered my mistake. These muscleheads knew nothing about Arthur beyond knights in shining armour and maidens waving at them from the balcony at spic-and-span tournaments. No horse-droppings for them. No horses, in fact, and that was actually a bonus for me. No-one is sure if Arthur actually knew about using horses in battle. I didn’t want my Arthur hiding under the table from a horse. The real problem with the Creative Anachronists was that they played fast and loose with time. Their armour came from a mishmash of centuries. They all wore clothes better than any mediaeval king could have dreamed of, cotton, lycra, stretch velvet. Zips. Bras and elasticated knickers, I dare say, not that I ever saw their underwear. And they all wanted to play at being kings and princesses and champions of the realm. Where were the milkmaids and the kitchen boys, the midwives and foresters and village idiots and army followers? I did not want my Arthur to find himself in the middle of a host of the highest nobility, speaking a language that he could not understand. That was the point where I fell out with Julie. I’d met her at the Old English class at university, the first girl I’d ever really talked to, after the embarrassment of asking her out for a cup of coffee had finally been overcome. By me, that is. Julie never seemed at all keen on cups of coffee with me after that first time, after she’d listened to me tell her about Old English and Church Latin and how to do the assignment. After that, she kept telling me she was too busy for coffee at the university, and at the Creative Anachronists she was always excusing herself to go off and enchant the crowd. Enchant-a-crowd Julie, I began to call her, though never to her face. Anyway, it was over an assignment in Old English that we met, and when she discovered that I was fluent in Latin and majoring in mediaeval history she couldn’t wait to introduce me to her brother, the president of the Creative Anachronists. That’s how I came to join them. “A born organiser,” he said, and right away at that first meeting they had me down for secretary and treasurer and chief organiser of the next tournament.