“I don’t. Pritkin doesn’t talk about it.”
“But surely you’ve read the stories.”
“The stories?”
“Le Morte d’Arthur, Historia Regum Britanniae, Chrétien de Troyes, and all that. Got half of it wrong, with writers more interested in a good tale than the truth. Camelot.” He snorted. “When that name didn’t even exist until the thirteen hundreds—”
“Rosier.”
“—which is when they wrote all that twaddle about the Round Table. Ha! It was a table of land where the Romans had a theater. Arthur used it for ‘discussions’ with his nobles, which usually degenerated into great shouting matches, so I suppose the acoustics came in handy, after all—”
“Rosier.”
“—and don’t even get me started on the grail, what a load of horse—”
“Rosier!” He looked at me. “What part did they get right?”
He blinked. “A surprising amount, actually, considering the tales were passed down orally for hundreds of—” He saw my expression and stopped. “Arthur, for one. More or less.”
“His name wasn’t really Arthur,” I said, thinking about something Pritkin had said.
“Of course it was. Well, one of them. People had all sorts of names back then. Roman names, Celtic names, titles, nicknames . . . but most people called him Arthur. And why not? Great bear of a man he turned out to be.”
“Golden bear,” I said, remembering the name’s translation.
Rosier nodded. “And they weren’t talking about a cuddly teddy. I saw that ridiculous Camelot on Broadway, and the mincing wuss they made out of Arthur—absurd! The only damn thing they got right was the hair color! The real man was a leader: decisive, ruthless, sharp as a tack—not an idiot led around by the nose by his adulterous wife! Why remember him at all if that’s the hash you’re going to make of—”
“And Pritkin? Did the legends get him right, too?” Because they didn’t seem to fit the man I knew.
Well, okay, some of them did. The over-the-top magic, the endless curiosity, and the put-upon grumpiness were all familiar enough. Plus the whole half-incubus-wizard-born-in-medieval-Wales-serving-a-king-named-Arthur thing. But other things . . . sometimes it had felt like I was reading about another person entirely.
Like the Merlin of legend hadn’t just switched names, but personalities over the years.
“Stop interrupting,” Rosier told me.
“Well, if you’d get to the point—”
“Which I would do, and faster, if you weren’t constantly intruding to pepper me with questions. Did no one ever tell you that’s rude?”
I sat back.
“All right,” Rosier said. “It’s story time.”
Chapter Sixteen
“There once was a king,” Rosier said. “His name was Uther.”
“Uther?” That sounded vaguely familiar.
“Well, not really. His name was Ambrosius Aurelianus, a Roman name for a Romanized Celt, but nobody called him that. It was Arthur’s given name, too, by the way; he was named after the old man. They were both descended from yet another Ambrosius, who was a cavalry officer under the Romans before they left Britain. Caused historians no end of trouble, it has, all those Ambrosiuses—”
“Rosier.”
“But Uther was the name his men gave him on the battlefield, meaning terrible or fearsome, and it stuck. And it fit. More so than the title he invented for himself: Riothamus, ‘king of all the Britons.’” Rosier rolled his eyes. “War chief is more like it, of a ragtag group trying to hold Britain together after the legions pulled out. Half his ‘subjects’ were at war with him at any given time, and the other half certainly didn’t consider him—” He stopped, seeing my face.
“There once was a king,” he said dryly. “His name was Uther.”
“Okay.”