Reign of Evil

First she ran it through a filter to remove the graininess of it. The question was what language was it. Was it Welsh? It had the tonal structure. Or was it Middle or Old English? In her mind the words lacked some of the hard notes of those languages, so she searched for translation engines. She found several, three of which were commercially available and two from universities. The university engines required a log-in, so she pushed them to the side and concentrated on the commercial engines. Two of them were text-to-text translations and would do her no good, but the third looked promising.

She dropped the file into the search engine and watched the hourglass spin. After thirty seconds, the screen flashed and text spit out beneath the drop box. Sheer gibberish. Or almost gibberish. She recognized a few words like “men” and “sword” and “head.” Farther down she saw the word “Arthur.” Was it the same as King Arthur?

She felt a rush of excitement. If this was about King Arthur, perhaps it could help the teams. Maybe this was more than an effort to keep awake after all. She copied the text into a Word document and saved it.

She checked out the two university links. One was for Wales and the other for Oxford. It would take some time to hack into the membership directories and find a suitable name and password to use. So which one? Although Oxford held prestige, it seemed obvious that any serious study into the Welsh language would be occurring at the University of Wales.

She spent the next hour hacking into the system. Genie came over and asked what she was doing. She told him and he went away uninterested. But then he returned sometime later with some hot tea and an orange scone. She devoured the pastry and sipped the tea. Then half an hour later she was in. It wasn’t long before she found the internal links to the language engines. To her surprise, there were four of them: Primitive Welsh, Old Welsh, Early Welsh, and Modern Welsh. A quick check online told her that “Primitive Welsh” referred to the language spoken from roughly AD 300 to 800. “Old Welsh” referred to the language spoken from roughly AD 800 to 1200. “Early Welsh” referred to the language spoken from AD 1200 to 1800. Modern Welsh was the current incarnation of the lyrical language.

All this was good, but it did nothing to help her, especially since these were text-based search engines. She searched the directory trees but could find no place to drop an audio file. Which only made sense, especially since there was probably no one except for a few eccentric literature professors who could speak Primitive or Old Welsh.

What to do?

She opened the Word document and stared once more at the gibberish. What if it wasn’t all gibberish? What if it was some version of Welsh the engine couldn’t translate, but it still recognized it as Welsh and rendered it in the language?

She selected the oldest engine first—Primitive Welsh—thinking that if there was a King Arthur link then it would be here. She copied the text, then dropped it into the translation engine drop box, then clicked on the TRANSLATE button.

After a few moments, it spit out the text, revealing a more succinct translation, but still with words she didn’t understand. There were several whole phrases that appeared:

In Llongborth I saw the rage of slaughter

and

In Llongborth, I saw the clash of swords

and

In Llongborth I saw spurs

and

In Llongborth I saw the weapons

and

In Llongborth I saw Arthur’s
Heroes who cut with steel.
The Emperor, ruler of our labour.

She sat back, pleased with herself. She knew she was close. The remaining question was what was Llongborth. Since it didn’t translate, it was definitely a place. She decided to Google “Llongborth.” She had immediate hits. She selected the first one from Brittania.com, which explained that “Llongborth” was present in an Old Welsh epic poem and is believed to be the modern location for Portsmouth. She read the passage again.

In Llongborth I saw Arthur’s
Heroes who cut with steel.
The Emperor, ruler of our labour.

This poem referred specifically to Arthur and identified him as Emperor. Conducting an additional search for the Battle of Llongborth, she learned it was believed to have occurred circa AD 510 and was reputed to have involved King Gerren of Dumnonia, who was killed in the battle, and Prince Rivod of Brittany, who murdered his brother King Maelew and usurped the Briton throne. She could find no mention of Arthur.

She returned to the Britannia site and scrolled through and discovered the poem in full, which began: