There was a boy who lived on the Welsh borderlands. He loved to walk the country high above the roads and farms, where the grass was rough and rocks grew everywhere.
The boy had a dog named Flash and together they explored every place they could get to. One day when they had walked long on a bony ridge, a storm came down on them and wrapped them in a driving rain and shreds of tattered cloud. The boy had a rain coat but it was no protection. He scrambled down from the crest of the ridge to try to find shelter in the tumbled rocks below. Before he had gone far he saw a blighted hawthorne tree cowering away from the wind, its stunted branches seeming to both point and beckon. The boy followed the hawthorne tree's directions and found a dark gap in the rocks in front of him. Two rocks together, a dark entrance barely big enough to crawl through. The boy and his dog crept into the dark hole and found themselves in a narrow tunnel. Very dark. But in the darkness a faint light glimmered.
The boy crept fearfully through the tunnel that seemed to have been used by badgers. The dog followed, growling quietly. As he crept forward he felt the ground give way beneath him. Quickly he scrambled back, accidentally kneeling on the dog's left front paw. The dog yowled indignantly, but the boy scarcely heard. He was looking down into a cave lit by guttering candles. Below him, seated at a table, about fifty men and women looked up at him in wonder.
They smelled funny.
Like animals.
``Good evening,'' said the boy. He had very good manners. The people were beginning to stand up. They were drawing their swords and glaring up at him.
``I was just looking for shelter,'' the boy said. As he said it the ground gave way and he fell through and landed on the table, Flash with him. Flash immediately began dining on a dish of wild greens and rabbit bones.
Perhaps it was the boy's yellow plastic raincoat that disconcerted them. They stared at him in silence. The women were beautiful, he noted. Thin and pale with bruised looking grey eyes. Malnourished perhaps, but they carried swords and looked ready to use them. The boy looked round the table, looking for a leader, a spokesman, but none stood out, none spoke up. The boy did not dare get off the table.
Was this Camelot? Or a bunch of illegals from Albania?
``I'm very sorry to have disturbed you,'' he said, ``I was just walking with my dog, his name is Flash. I am Arthur...''
He rambled on, afraid to stop. A woman made room on a stool for him to sit. Gratefully he got off the table and sat down. The woman offered him a lump of something hard and grainy - bread perhaps. She showed him how to dip it in some kind of beerish drink and suck noisily. He could not understand a word she said.
They spoke to him seriously, one after another, and sometimes he thought he caught a word, but all meaning was lost. An old man looked him deep in the eye and said a few words over and over. He did not understand.
Then they lifted him and pushed him back through the hole he had fallen through, with Flash following.
The boy crawled out into the storm and struggled home against the wind.
Who were those people?
What were they trying to tell him?