Finding Camlann by Sean Pidgeon

across the room at her friend Otto Zeiss. Otto is a rounded, jovial man of about sixty, a specialist on Indo-European languages who moonlights at the OED three days per week. For now, she is glad to see from the glazed expression on his face that he is off on some far-away train of eastern thought, travelling through an exotic world of Sanskrit and Tocharian B.
    Stacked neatly on Julia’s chair is a new batch of word-slips sent in by the dictionary’s network of readers around the globe. These tiny bibliographic infusions are its lifeblood, its arterial connection to fourteen centuries of English literature. It is easy and calming work to go through them, and Julia is glad of it this morning. First she organises the slips alphabetically, then scans them for obvious ambiguities that will need to be resolved later, and finally begins the much slower and more painstaking process of cross-referencing to the dictionary itself. From time to time she sets aside a usage that particularly catches her attention, to be shared later with colleagues.
Belomancy . 1646 SIR T. BROWNE Pseud. Ep. 272 A like way of Belomancy or Divination by Arrowes hath beene in request.
     
Snippets . 1664 BUTLER Hud. II. iii. 824 Witches Simpling, and on Gibbets Cutting from Malefactors snippets.
Sorryish . 1793 A. SEWARD Lett. (1811) III. 330 You would be sorryish to hear, that poor Moll Cobb is gone to her long home.
     
    In this way, word by word, the morning hours tick comfortably by. Just before noon, her telephone rings, a familiar voice on the line. ‘Julia? This is Donald Gladstone. I hope you don’t mind—’
    ‘Of course I don’t mind.’ Her reply is more terse than she intended, though this has the useful effect of disguising just how glad she is that he has called. ‘What’s new in the world of archaeology?’
    ‘The usual stuff, I t sal stufsuppose—holes being dug, reports being written and filed away.’
    Julia has a vision of Donald buried somewhere deep in an underground maze, surrounded by great towers of worthy paperwork ready to collapse on top of him. ‘How romantic you make it sound.’
    ‘I don’t mind it at all, really. But listen,’ Donald says, more animated now, ‘I was just reading something that made me think of you, and how you challenged all my narrow-minded English assumptions on our walk up Solsbury Hill. I was wondering if we might meet up somewhere to continue that conversation.’
    ‘I’d like that,’ Julia says, the words coming too easily. She forces herself to stop and think. If it is the wrong thing to do, it should be harder to say yes. ‘Do you mind if I ring you back tomorrow? We can make a proper plan then.’
    At lunchtime, she declines Otto’s offer of a sandwich in the canteen, keeps on working for an hour or more. By mid-afternoon, there is a dull throbbing pain in her right temple. Thinking to clear her head, she steps outside into fitful autumn sunshine with gusts of winds swirling up the yellowed leaves from the sycamore trees in the park across the road. She turns to the right on Walton Street, cuts through to St. Giles, then makes her way down into the medieval heart of Oxford. The streets are filled with a busy traffic of dour-faced pedestrians, students on rattling bicycles, a legion of raucous buses. High above, the declining autumn sun catching the uppermost ramparts of the old college buildings bathes them in a soft, rose-coloured light.
    Julia crosses Broad Street to the music shop on the corner, wonders about going inside, instead continues along Turl Street to the neo-gothic archway and heavy wooden gates that mark the entrance to Jesus College. It is years since she has been here, but the porter seems to recognise her, waves her cheerfully through as if she last came this way the day before yesterday.
    It was here in the springtime of her first year at Oxford that she sat down next to Hugh Mortimer at a seminar on medieval Welsh poetry given by Hugh’s academic mentor,