Freya’s arm was in the air. Her heart was pounding partly with anxiety and partly with anger. “Wouldn’t it be more reasonable to assume that those accounts are objectively true? Seeing as no other accounts disagree with them?”

Dr. Fowler shrugged. Interruptions were rare in this type of lecture, but she was professional enough to take it in her stride. “There may be certain grains of truth within the various accounts, but were you to read them closely-as I’m sure your tutor will insist you do-then the appallingly fabricated fantasies within them will show quite apparently.

“Now, this Brut,” Fowler continued, “was a hero of Troy-”

“I’m sorry,” Freya said amid a swell of groans from those around her. “We know that Britain must have been settled at some point. Why is it unreasonable to believe the tales which state that it was a group of exiled soldiers-veterans of the Trojan wars- and their families?”

“I thought I was scheduled to give this lecture,” the professor replied. The other students in the auditorium chuckled pointedly. “I’ll gladly change places with you-I did quite a lot of this during my doctoral thesis so it’s old hat to me.”

“But why not take the account at face value?”

“Because it’s completely unverifiable-fanciful even. Why-”

“Just because something cannot be proven true doesn’t mean it isn’t true-even if its claim to truth is unlikely. In fact, it’s more likely that an improbable truth would be recorded than a probable one.” This provoked more groans, and more than one request to “shut up.”

“But, reasonably, it is unlikely that an account of settlement could have survived two and a half thousand years to be recorded by an obscure Welsh monk.”

“If there were an accurate relation of settlement,” Freya said, her voice rising, “how else would you expect it to be recorded? Besides, the fact that there are many other surviving, corroborating, independent reports-”