Between Carbonek and Byzantium - The Reign of Constantine IV

At the end of the Grail Quest, so many astonishing things happened - King Pelles was healed of his wound, Galahad was taken up into Heaven, and the waters of life flowed bounteously through what had once been the Wasteland. Of the remaining Grail Winners, Bors returned to Artorus' capital, Venta Belgarum, while Perceval married Pelles' daughter Blanchefleur, the Grail Maiden, and lived alongside her at Carbonek Castle, the home of the Grail.

When Pelles died, Perceval became King in his place, with Blanchefleur as his Queen. In time, they brought a son into the world - Lohengrin, the 'Swan King' - who continued the holy line of Carbonek after Perceval and his wife were themselves carried up into God's presence.

That happened twelve years after the Battle of Camlann and the spiriting away of Artorus into Avalon. In the decade leading up to that calamitous day, as the Companions of the Purple tore both the realm and each other apart, Bors would often return to Carbonek to pray before the Grail and ask God to protect and safeguard the land. He knew how grievous Britain's fall would be, for the country was more than a mere kingdom now. After the Battle of Mons Badonicus, the army had made Artorus Caesar Augustus in the West, the first Imperator since the deposition of Romulus Augustulus thirty years before. In the mind of Artorus, Britain now was the Roman Empire. The onus was on him and his people, he felt, to fill the Imperial gap left by Rome.

Bors, in his trips to Carbonek, prayed for divine intervention to keep this continuation of Empire intact. But in this he was disappointed. Kneeling before the Grail, with Perceval beside him as of old, the only voice he heard was a calm and gentle whisper, counselling patience and advising him that the time for fighting and striving was over and that the time for serious prayer and the long-term preservation of everything good and beautiful was at hand. So with Medraut dead and Artorus vanished and the civil war ended, the last living Companions - Lanslod, Bedwyr, Bors, and Hector - retired to Glastonbury Abbey where they professed monastic vows, remaining there in silent contemplation until the end of their days.

Then Constantine, Duke of Cornwall, was crowned High King and Emperor in Londinium. He had never sat at the Round Table and had never been a Companion. He had been a competent and capable ruler of his duchy, a loyal and dependable sub-king, as it were. The Council saw him as a safe pair of hands and, what is more, one of the few men left with a blood connection to the ancient Royal Line. His great-grandfather had been brother to old King Constantine, the father of Ambrosius and Uther Pendragon, and the grand-father of Artorus.

Right from the start, however, the weight of high office felt to Constantine like too hard a burden to bear. Though he reigned for forty years, he never quite conquered this sense of inhibition - this consciousness of his own smallness - as if he was following on from men who had been more than human, like he was fashioned from some kind of dull bronze or tin compared to their vibrant, lusty gold.

He lacked the charisma and force of personality needed to prevent the British tribal chieftains from quarrelling and falling out with each other. But the memory of Artorus' power and might kept the Angles, Saxons and Jutes penned inside their enclaves along the eastern coast. For now, at least. It would be a good while, Constantine knew, before they dared to challenge the British dragon again, but he was painfully aware that when they finally did so, they would find only a paper-thin resistance barring their way.

Britain needed strengthening and something had to be done, but what exactly Constantine did not know. He thought of Carbonek first, for he had known Perceval well and also his father, Gerren the Fleet Owner. But the problem was that Carbonek was not a place to be found on the maps. One got there by grace alone, and so far Constantine had not been given that grace. So no matter how far and fast he rode and how much he prayed and pleaded for admittance, that strange and secret kingdom refused to open its gates for him.

So he turned his attention to another project - the Quest for the head of Bran the Blessed. For long ago the head of that ancient, venerable king had been buried at his own instruction beneath the White Tower in Londinium. He had promised his followers that as long as it remained there Britain would be safe from invasion. But Artorus, in his pride and hybris, had it dug up, insisting that he and he alone should have the honour of defending the country. But now Artorus was gone and so was the head and no-one, no matter how many people Constantine asked, knew where it was. Once again his plans were thwarted. 

So he took a ship to Byzantium and met there with Justinian, Emperor of the East. Constantine was received with warmth and honour, and the two men prayed together in an all-night vigil under the dome of the Church of the Holy Wisdom. Afterwards, Justinian told Constantine that the Holy Spirit had asked him to build a tunnel running beneath both land and sea, from one end of Europe to another, with just two entrances, one in Byzantium and one in Britain.

Constantine was greatly cheered by this. He assumed that the tunnel would ensure a regular supply of arms and men from Byzantium to Britain. Then Justinian confessed that the Spirit had instructed him to seal both entrances up as soon as the tunnel was completed. They will open again, he was told, at the end of the age when East and West will finally be reunited after a long period of darkness and obscurity for the Empire and her servants. 

His hopes dashed again, Constantine reluctantly agreed. The workmen who fashioned the tunnel were sworn into secrecy, and - though many rumours abound - only a handful of people living today know where the entrances are, both in Istanbul (as Byzantium is now called) and in Britain.

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Constantine had now been Emperor for twenty years and he saw very clearly the extent of his failure to bring outside aid to Britain - be it divine, mythical, or human. It had taken him two decades to learn the wisdom Bors had been granted in just two minutes at Carbonek. But it was the same insight - that civilisations rise and fall and that it was no good artificially bolstering or boosting what had already run its course. The inner impulse that had animated Artorus' Britain had lost its force and motive power, and there was nothing that Constantine or anyone else could do to resuscitate it. He started to see that what he needed to do was shift his focus onto that which was essential and unshakeable, the permanent truths and realities that lie beyond the rise and fall of empires and kingdoms. 

Recognising that he was unable to prevent the bulk of the country from ultimately being overrun, Constantine spent his time sowing the seeds of what he hoped one day would be a full-scale national revival - spiritual, political, cultural and social. He ordered copies to be made of books and manuscripts and had them stored in secret caves in the mountains of Wales. Many of these underground libraries, it is widely believed, remain yet to be discovered. He also established a number of monasteries and convents in remote places, and these would go on to play a crucial role in the eventual conversion of the Germanic tribes to Christianity.

In the week before Constantine died, when he was already on his deathbed, the Angles of Deira made an incursion from the east which took them almost as far as the walls of Eboracum. Yet Constantine died a calm and happy man. Twenty years of failure followed by twenty years of prayer and preparation had given him a wider perspective than many of his more panic-stricken contemporaries. It is said that on the last night of his life Blanchefleur herself came to him in a vision and that he was given the supreme grace of looking into and drinking from the Grail. The next morning, his hands and arms shaking, he took off the Imperial Crown - the famous Roman Circlet - and placed it on the head of his eldest son, Anastasius. Both father and son knew that the Royal Line would now have to go into hiding, and no-one knows what became of Anastasius and his children if he had any. But tales are told that this high lineage has been passed down in secret from generation to generation even till now, and that one day, at the hour of Britain's direst need, the Emperor will reveal himself at the very spot where the Byzantine tunnel emerges onto British soil. With his right hand, so the story goes, he will hold aloft the head of Bran the Blessed and with his left he will unseal the opening, and the help that Constantine worked so hard to obtain will bring salvation to his country at the last.

A steady rain was falling on the afternoon that Constantine IV died, and the sky was as grey as slate. But when he breathed his last, the rain ceased abruptly, the clouds parted a touch, and a shaft of sunlight lit up the branches of the great Royal Oak that stood in the Palace grounds. And all the people marvelled and gave thanks to God for the sign they had witnessed and for the life and reign of their High King and Emperor.