Thoughts of volcanoes triggered another whisper at the back of his memory, something important he couldn't quite put his finger on. Something important to British history, linked oddly with Arthurian lore, and he couldn't remember now what it was. Stirling frowned, while Ancelotis puzzled over the tantalizing glimpses into the future resident in Stirling's memories. Ancelotis knew virtually nothing about volcanoes, outside of their connection with ancient Greek and Roman myth, things like Vulcan at his forge deep in the heart of Mt. Etna or Pliny the Younger's eyewitness account of Vesuvius, the day it erupted to bury Pompeii and Herculaneum. Why was he remembering a connection between volcanos and Arthurian legend?
Well, if Stirling couldn't figure that out, what did he know about volcanoes in general? They tended to cluster along the edges of tectonic plates grinding past or diving under one another—he knew that much at least—and they appeared along the midoceanic ridges, as well, which were tectonic plates pulling apart, stirring up a froth of magma from the mantle, which spewed up periodically in spectacular volcanic eruptions. The mid-Atlantic ridge had produced Iceland and the mid-Pacific ridge had produced a whole necklace of volcanic islands, like Hawaii in the northern hemisphere and Easter Island in the southern hemisphere.
The rim of the Pacific Ocean had been dubbed the Ring of Fire, with volcanoes from the western shores of South America and the grand volcanoes of Chile and Peru, north to the Pacific Northwest of North America and volcanoes like Mt. St. Helens, across to Japan with its highly active volcanoes and earthquakes, south past China and down into Indonesia, where the world-famous nineteenth-century blast from Krakatoa had blown an entire island into oblivion.
That particular eruption had been heard halfway across the Pacific by the admiral of the British fleet stationed in India, who'd thought the fleet was under attack by naval guns. The explosion which had destroyed most of the island had also blasted so much rock and dust into the atmosphere, there had been a literal "volcanic winter" that year—a whole year with no summer, with dark skies and snow on the ground even in temperate and warm southern zones, and crop failures turning productive agricultural belts into wastelands—
Stirling gasped.
The wasteland!
One of the most powerful, recurring images of Arthurian lore. A land so blighted, nothing could grow, a land so sick, crops died, cattle died, and people starved to death as the land failed to produce life—a condition blamed, mythically, on the impotence and injury of the king. The wasteland was part of the Arthurian Grail lore, with the cup of Christ healing the formerly pagan king's deep physical, psychic, and spiritual wounds—and with the healing of the king came the healing of the land. He'd seen the twentieth-century movie, Excalibur, with its extraordinary sequence of the land bursting into blossom once more, one of the most beautiful movie images ever filmed.
And that image jolted loose Stirling's memory, the newspaper article he'd read on the train, heading for Edinburgh and the time-travel lab. Krakatoa hadn't blown up just once. There'd been a previous eruption—in the sixth century a.d. One that made the nineteenth-century explosion look like a champagne cork popping loose. Stirling narrowed his eyes, trying to recall exactly what that article had said. So far as he could remember, the Pacific volcano had blown itself to spectacular bits somewhere between the year 536 and 539 a.d., creating worldwide ecological devastation so severe, crops had failed and ecosystems had crashed for more than ten years. A whole decade of world-spanning wasteland. Crop failures had triggered mass migrations of people across the face of the whole earth and wars of bloody genocide had been fought over land that was still producing even marginal amounts of food.
The article had mentioned something about Irish lake fortresses. Two whole villages built on stilts in the centers of lakes as war between clans and island-wide starvation made such watery retreats the only safe places for people to live, subsisting on fish caught through the floors of the lake-straddling villages. And there was a connection, too, with the beginning of the plague years.
Something about temperature changes causing plague to spread into zones that had previously been immune, carried by traders from Constantinople as far as Britain. Plague had wiped out such an immense percentage of Britain's population that the Saxons, Angles, and Jutes—who had not been trading with Constantinople and therefore had not been weakened by the disease—had essentially waltzed in and taken over from a people nearly dead of hunger and epidemics.
There was a terrifying parallel between the end of "King Arthur's" golden years, a reign of thirty-nine to forty years after his twelfth victory at Badon Hill, and the timing of that volcanic explosion, somewhere between a.d. 536 and a.d. 539. Even with Artorius victorious at Caer-Badonicus, the Britons were doomed to lose the war to the Saxons, all because one volcanic explosion on the other side of the planet would destroy their crops, their cattle, and their strength as a unified people.
It was a vision so horrifying, Stirling found it impossible not to try and save these people from it, or at least to cushion the blow poised to fall thirty-nine years from now.
Stirling's abrupt desire to try a deliberate alteration to history far greater than the damage already wrought by Lailoken and Cedric Banning was a physical ache inside him. Dared he risk it? And what could he possibly do, even if he did decide to interfere as Banning had done? Ancelotis—stunned, amazed, and appalled by turns at Stirling's memories, suppositions, and foreknowledge that spilled like sea-foam into their shared awareness—whispered, Stirling, if these things be true, and I misdoubt them not, then we must act to save our people. And we must act quickly—but how is one man or even a handful of men to prevent something like an island blowing itself apart?
Huh, Stirling grunted. You can't. There's nothing in this world—or out of it, for that matter—that can stop a volcano from doing whatever it wants, whenever it pleases. The only thing you can do is get out of its way.
True, Ancelotis growled, but if you know a disaster is coming, you can at least prepare for it. Look at what Egypt managed, with no more warning than Joseph's interpretation of the pharaoh's dream. Seven lean cows devouring seven fat cows, seven blighted stalks of grain devouring seven fat ones. With warning, they built granaries and saved the people from starvation. Ancelotis' eyes widened slightly. Ye Gods. The Grail! A circular cup of life. If a man were to build circular cups to hold the abundance of the next thirty-nine years...
It was a beautifully simple plan.
And in the later versions of Arthurian myth, Lancelot had wandered the land as a religious hermit, doing penance for his disastrous adultery with Guinevere. What if Lancelot wandered the land, instead, as an organizer of strategic supplies, using religion and the parable of Joseph and the seven years of famine as a "sign from God" that the people of Britain were meant to lay aside foodstuffs against future emergency? Stirling realized with a chill that it would probably work. And it would probably change history irrevocably.