“Sam goes over to the bag and tips out the contents onto the table. Instead of all his diamonds, rubies, and such, there’s just a pouchful of old dried-up horse droppings. Sam tries to tell the tale again, but his wife has lost patience with him and makes him sleep that night in the forge.”

“Women are unreasonable like that,” said a man at the next table.

“The next day,” Addison continued peevishly, “Sam goes back into the forest to look for the cave but he can’t find it. He finds a cliff face that he thinks is the same place, but it is just a blank wall of stone. He keeps hunting around and finds a few caves but none of them go back very far.

“He’s gone back every day since, sometimes in the morning, sometimes in the night, but he has never found the chambers of the sleeping knights again.”

Addison Fletcher had finished his tale and marked it by taking a long drink of his ale. “So now,” he said, wiping his moustache. “What do you say to that?”

“I’ve heard it before, told just that way,” said one man from the back of the crowd.

Addison’s face brightened. “Yeah?”

“Yeah, only it wasn’t just an old man in red, it was Merlin himself!” Addison’s face fell. “And it wasn’t just any knights the blacksmith saw, but the Knights of the Round Table. Waitin’ for judgment, they were.”

“When I was on tour in the Freincs’ lands,” said a grizzled man at the next table, “I heard a man tell it as with Charlemagne who needed a golden spear. But he was sleeping under this famous mountain, like.”

“Lies, that is. It’s dragons that live in mountains.”

“But what about my-” Addison tried to break in.

“Nay, ye daft bugger, they lie on top o’ them,” argued the war veteran. “They fly about above the clouds in the day and sleep atop a mountain of nights.”