Pendragon

“Some really decisive historical arguments.” Prof. John Colarusso (Anthropology, Linguistics, Languages; McMaster University)

Ambrosius Aurelianus is a historically attested fifth century A.D. Christian Romano-British soldier. His regiment is one of few defending his Celtic homeland against pagan Anglo-Saxon pirates. In the year 485, Anglo-Saxons murder his wife and parents, while raiding local farms. Ambrosius then goes on a quest, galvanising the remaining British troops to hunt down all Anglo-Saxon tribes threatening his fellow Britons. He is accompanied by his younger brother, Victor (Uther in Celtic), who worries Ambrosius has a death wish to rejoin his wife in the next world. However, Ambrosius finds love again with Geneva, a woman serving in another cavalry regiment. Descended from the original 5,500 Sarmatians brought to Britain 300 years earlier, they retain the tradition of women fighting alongside men, like their ‘Amazonian’ ancestors. This regiment’s founding commander in Britain was: Lucius Artorius Castus!

Mike Weatherley grew up in the county of Kent (whose Latin name was Cantium), which was the first part of Roman Britain conquered by invading Anglo-Saxons in the late-fifth century A.D. Born in the Chinese year of the dragon, he always felt an affinity with those mythical creatures, as well as being fascinated with the legends of the mysterious ‘Arthur’, the British hero who fought those first Anglo-Saxons. Despite a career as a scientist, Mike always harboured the dream of writing a definitive version of Arthur’s story. How appropriate that his fifteen years of research on the subject reveal just how closely intertwined the worlds of the historical Arthur and dragons actually were. Having reached his solution to this mystery, Mike hopes his novel has given back to the British people their greatest cultural icon, who was previously stolen from history by writers of medieval fiction and Norman propaganda.