Book 1: The Quest of the Holy Grail (working title, need a real title)
Near the end of the Quest of the Holy Grail, King Arthur sends a quartet of his subjects, under the guise of a diplomatic mission to Rome, to investigate a legend he came across years before during his pilgrimage to the Holy Land. That story, told in a book reported to be the secret history of Joseph of Arimathea, recounted how Joseph fled Jerusalem with the Holy Grail and instead of going west towards Rome and his imperial enemies, he went south along the Nile to Midia, a kingdom founded by Nathan, a son of David, near the headwaters of the Nile. From there, St. Joseph proceeded across to Africa and thence to Britain to found the abbey at Glastonbury. Arthur believed that Joseph may have left the Grail in Midia and concocted the legend of bringing it to Britain in order to safeguard the Grail and its true location. The four on the mission are: Sir Yvain, a knight who was too young to be called to the Grail Quest at its inception, but one perhaps worthy to achieve it; Sir Dagonet, publicly Arthur's fool, but in reality a key operative in Arthur's secret intelligence organization, the Order of Aurelius; Lady Vivian, a Lady of the Lake and daughter of Nineve and Merlin; and Lady Alyne, a nun well-versed in ancient languages and literature and adept in the arts of alchemy.

They sail from Britain accompanied by Sir Grimmace, a member of Mordred's diplomatic service and ostensibly the leader of the mission to Rome. After stops along the pilgrimage route through Brittany and Gaul, they cross to Carthage from the Mediterranean coast, intending to go from there to Alexandria, Jerusalem, and finally to Rome. Arthur publicly declared that the mission was intended to reestablish contacts between his kingdom and the holy sites along the pilgrimage route, ending with a reconciliation with the emperor at Rome. On the passage to Carthage, Sir Dagonet, following secret instructions from Arthur, kills Modred's spy Sir Grimmace, explains the true nature of the expedition to the rest of the party, fakes a ship wreck, and sails for the west coast of Africa to follow Sir Joseph's map to Midia.

Shortly after landing, they observe the Dum Dum -- the ritual hunting dance of the Mangani, or great apes. Skirting the exhausted apes, who collapse at the end of their orgiastic frenzy, they are ambushed by Gozan, an African native who has been raised by the Mangani, as Tarzan would be centuries later. Before anyone is seriously injured, Vivian recognizes Gozan's language as one she learned from Merlin, her father, who traveled extensively in his youth. Gozan agrees to lead the party east as he was planning to explore in that direction to investigate a legend he has heard about a city of whites who have been interbreeding with the Mangani in their area. Led by Gozan, they come to the edge of a large settlement, where they accidentally kill a cow while hunting for game. While butchering the cow, they are discovered and taken into custody by a party of minotaurs, who charge them with the murder of a close cousin of their king.

The minotaur city, Minopolis, had been settled several centuries earlier by a band of minotaurs, raised by Minos of Crete to be an invincible army. For several years prior to the coming of Theseus and the slaying of the original minotaur, King Minos had bred his monster with both human and bovine mates. Shortly after Theseus' escape, Minos met his death in a steam bath designed by Daedalus. As part of the peace treaty between Crete and Athens, the minotaur tribe was to be loaded on to a ship and sunk far out at sea. A few of the minotaurs discovered the scheme and forced the human navigator to sail the ship to Egypt, where they expected to be welcomed as the children of Hathor, the cow goddess who gives birth to the sun each morning. But the Egyptians had at one time sent their children every year to their deaths in the labyrinth as tribute to Minos, and so drove the hated minotaurs, symbol of their past subservience to Crete, into the desert. Eventually they wandered into the interior and settled in a ruined outpost of Opar, thought to be a lost colony of Atlantis. Here they lived, intermarrying with Africans taken in war. And their cattle.

In punishment for their crime, the Britons and Gozan are sentenced to die in the arena as bull dancers, an element of Cretan heritage preserved by the minotaurs. After a series of engagements, in which Dagonet invents bullfighting using a cape, they escape from Minopolis. Gozan goes his way, off to discover Opar, forging Tarzan's trail to the lost city centuries ahead of the ape man.

Several days' march to the East, they come upon another set of Oparian ruins that marks the end of their map. In these ruins lives Piscatorus, Latin for fisherman, a Roman soldier who served under Julius Caesar, nearly 500 years before. Piscatorus was a common soldier in an expedition sent by Caesar to rediscover the lost colonies of Atlantis and the last survivor of a battle between his legion and the remnants of the Atlantean colony. Severely wounded in the foot and nearly lame, Piscatorus found a temple with a fountain whose waters flowed into a stone bowl, placed there centuries earlier by the Atlanteans, the continual drinking of which kept him in a state of stasis, neither aging nor healing. Dagonet and the rest are unsure whether to continue, as their map only leads this far, and because Vivian asserts that Piscatorus and the carved stone bowl may represent the mythic origins of the Fisher King and the Grail, following the Celtic tradition of the Grail as a cauldron of rebirth. Piscatorus denies all knowledge of the Fisher King and the Grail and their Christian origins, having never heard of Christianity, since he left Rome long before the birth of Christ. After spotting some hieroglyphs carved into the wall of the temple, Alyne matches them with a passage from Joseph's history, which indicates that he passed through this area on his journey. They find the underground river that supplied the waters of the fountain and that the saint had taken in his journey from Midia.

Traveling the slow-flowing underground river, they come out in Midia, a city hidden by a ring of mountains. St. Joseph escorted ______ , Mary's niece, to Midia so that she could marry David, the descendent of David's son Nathan who founded the lost city. They married and bore _______, again uniting the two great houses of the Jews, as Mary had done when she married Herod's son ______ and gave birth to Jesus (explained in detail by Robert Graves in King Jesus). The history of the second child, the second coming of the messiah, is explained to the Britons who also learn that Joseph did take the Grail to Britain. The Midians have lived in peace for half a millenium, impervioius to death by age or disease due to an elixer later discovered by Tarzan, practicing a pure Christianity based on Christ's two commandments: Love thy God and Love thy Neighbor. Their mission ended, the Britons find their way to the Nile and thence to Rome. At Rome they are greeted with the news that Arthur is dead and Camelot fallen. There is also a message from Arthur, delivered by the secret Order of Aurelius, "Go West."

Book 2: The Search for Excalibur (working title, need a real title)
Alyne and Vivian decipher Arthur's message, "Go West," to mean that they should follow him to his resting place, traditionally thought to be Avalon. But as a Lady of the Lake, Vivian knows that Arthur would not refer to Avalon, the axis mundi, or world navel, as "west" because it's a world "center." Through agents of the Order of Aurelius, they find Barinthus, the pilot who took Arthur to his resting place across the sea to the west. Barinthus also led the famous St. Brendan to his "fair isle," which in fact was the American continent. Barinthus is dying, but he is able to provide them with sea maps and directions, which the quartet follows, eventually landing on the American shore. There they find a rune stone carved by Morgan directing them to Arthur's location.

At the close of the Battle of Camlan, Arthur had lain dying. Morgan and Bedevere helped him into Barinthus' boat and they set off for Turtle Island, leaving Bedevere behind to set up a false grave for Arthur on the Isle of Man, otherwise known as Avalon. Morgan had foreseen the fall of Corbenic in the year 800 as the final victory of the Anglo Saxons over the British Isles and so knew that Arthur's sleep would have to be elsewhere. Bedevere's son, also named Arthur, was supposed to accompany them as sword-bearer, but he has been murdered and replaced by Mordred's son Morgos, who so closely resembles Bedevere's son that no one notices the switch in all the haste to leave. Arthur's wound largely heals on the voyage, but he is still dying slowly, kept alive only by Morgan's magic and the life-maintaining properties of Excalibur's scabbard.

During their first night on the American shore, Morgos steals off with Excalibur, leaving Arthur with a false copy of the sword forged years earlier by Mordred. Morgos makes his way south to the kingdom of the Olmecs in Mexico and plants the sword into a stone, knowing that Arthur is the only one who can withdraw it and that, in his weakened and dying state, he will never survive the journey. Mordred planned this separation of king and sword because he foresaw his own death and resurrection and Arthur's return as king in Avalon centuries later and sought to prevent that return by denying Arthur his sword, following the proverb: "The king without a sword, the land without a king."

Unaware, at first, of the theft of Excalibur and unable to wait for Morgos' return, Morgan takes Arthur to the land of the mound builders near the Ohio River and establishes him in a temnos, or magic circle, built by the Native Americans there. It will keep him alive until Excalibur is returned to him. She heads west, leaving a message about where she is heading for Vivian and the others, whom she knows to be following. The four Britons locate Arthur, but he does not know where Morgos has taken the sword. Vivian uses egeomancy to locate Excalibur, as the sword has been stuck into a stone resting on a ley point, the meeting point of several ley-lines, which are the "channels" the Earth's energy flows in. The Earth's ley-energy prevents any but Arthur from drawing it forth. To make it possible for Yvain, Arthur's closest relative of the four, to draw the sword from the stone, the king shaves his head and has Vivian knit the hair into a glove for Yvain to wear, incorporating magic knots and charms into the weaving. To further ensure that the young knight will be able to withdraw the sword, Arthur cuts off his own right pinkie and forces Yvain to do the same, thus ensuring that part of Arthur's hand will be in the glove for the drawing. The quartet follows the leylines south, traveling on the Ohio and Mississippi rivers.

They arrive in Olmeca to find the Olmecs being ruled by a vampire, who has come from Egypt and set himself up as a divine king. This vampire, ________, committed the ultimate sin of killing the vampire who made him. He fled Egypt and the vengence of his vampire kin on a cargo ship bound for the land of the Olmecs, with whom the Egyptians had traded for many years and who are, in fact, the true Atlanteans, but not the founders of the Oparian colonies, which have a separate origin. Using his supernatural powers to establish himself as a god and king, ________ instituted the blood rituals that were later adopted by the Mayans and Aztecs. He has also transformed Morgos into a vampire to aid him in his rule of the Olmecs. The quartet arrives and eventually helps the Olmecs to kill _____ and Morgos and to free themselves from this foreign rule. They return Excalibur to Arthur, who is then entombed in a mound, and set off on the trail of Morgan Le Fey.

Book 3: The Golden Apple of Troy (working title, need a real title)
Following Morgan's trail, the quartet makes its way to the land of the Anasazi Indians. Morgan has gone there to be buried sleeping in the Anasazi caves so that she can rise again when Arthur and Mordred return. Morgan is very weak, having been wounded by the Jibbenainosay, the "spirit who walks." The Jibbenainosay is a British spirit of evil conjured by Mordred to ensure the death of Arthur and Morgan. It took over the body of a knight of Avalon and followed Arthur's funeral barge to America. It tracked them to the mound builders, but could not enter Arthur's temnos and could not take possession of any Native Americans, and so the Jibbenainosay began to kill Indians, hoping to deprive Arthur of all aid and support. Quickly discovered by the mound builders, the Jibbenainosay was driven away and it went in search of Morgan, whom it found and wounded before she could set up a temnos. The Anasazi protected her and the Jibbenainosay entered into total war with them. The quartet arrives and helps the Anasazi to eradicate the Jibbenainosay, who now has to wait for another Briton to arrive on the continent before he can have corporal existence again.

Following the defeat of the Jibbenainosay, Morgan sets the quartet on the trail of the Golden Apple of Troy, the last bit of unfinsihed business from the Trojan War. The Golden Apple is an Apple of Discord originally thrown by Eris, the spirit of strife, at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis, parents of Achilles, because she alone of all the gods had not been invited. The Apple led to the Trojan War because Paris awarded it to Aphrodite when she promised him the world's most beautiful woman, Helen, in exchange for awarding it to her as the most beautiful goddess. When Paris took his lovely reward, with the help of a love arrow from Eros' bow, Helen's husband Menelaus followed the lovers to Troy and began the decades-long siege. After the fall of Troy, a Greek warrior, ________, took the Apple from its temple in Troy and fled south, eventually entering Pellucidar, the world inside the hollow Earth.

Morgan charged the quartet to return the Apple to its rightful owners, the Trojans, who are the anscestors of the Britons through Pryam's son Brut, the founder of Britain. Morgan knows that the crime of the theft of the Apple has to be avenged to let the ghosts of Troy rest.

They sail down the coast to Antarctica, where they find an entrance to Pellucidar. The Apple has caused a war between two great powers of Pellucidar that has gone on since its arrival, shortly after the Trojan War some 1700 years before. The four Britons steal the apple and help to settle the war. While sailing for Troy, a storm wrecks their ship off the coast of Australia. The aborigines, the Real People, will not help them to build a boat nor allow them any materials. The four have lessons to learn and need to walk across Australia with the Real People. Gradually the Britons abandon their possessions, with the exception of the Golden Apple and the copy of Excalibur Yvain has been wielding. Each learns a lesson about him or herself: Yvain to give up leadership and to trust others' decision-making; Dagonet to give up all his hidden tools and tricks; Vivian that her magic lies within herself and not solely within the goddess she relies on; and Alyne learns to lead. Once across Australia they build a ship with the help of the Real People and sail for Troy. They find that the waves of invasions that followed the fall of Troy have left no Trojans to receive their heritage.

With no place to return the Apple, they decide to take it to safety in Midia, since they are relatively close to the lost kingdom. Midia is almost empty when the arrive, with only a few guardians left. The population has been systematically destroyed by a vampire werewolf, Evingolis, who had been serving the emporer as a minstrel and overheard Dagonet's report on the outcome of their Grail quest in the city of Midia to the Order of Aurelius' Pendragon in Rome. Evingolis is ancient, having been born a werewolf and later transformed into a vampire while in his human form. The idea of drinking rich immortal blood excited Evingolis and he arrived in Midia just in front of his wolf pack, which he pretended to be escaping. He posed as a minstrel and began to suck the city dry. At first the Midians thought that the deaths were attributable to wolf attacks, to which they put up a good defense. By the time they realized their error and discovered the true culprit, few Midians were left and Evingolis took to hiding and hunting down the survivors. The besieging wolves killed off the few who attempted to leave the city to get help, their immortality elixer preventing death only by disease or age, not injury or accident.

At first the wolves and Evingolis hunt the quartet and the remaining Midians, but gradually the tide turns and Evingolis is tricked into following one of the few remaining Midians, doused in the intoxicating menstral blood-scent of the virginal Alyne, into an airtight tomb, which they seal with alchemy and magic. Midia is now nearly a ghost town and not a safe place to leave the Apple, so they travel to Rome and thence to the shattered Britain to help put the pieces back together and deposit the apple in Merlin's tomb.

Sir Dagonet: Son of Sir Dynaden, Arthur's satirist. Dagonet is Arthur's fool and jester but this is just a cover for his real activities as a secret agent, a dragon, in the Order of Aurelius, Arthur's secret intelligence service. For years he has cleaned up Arthur's dirty business and engaged in covert activities, including assassination and overthrowing Arthur's enemies. He frequently saves knights while in disguise, either as Kay, or in blank armor, so the rescued knights think that they've been saved by Lancelot. He keeps all sorts of weapons, lock picks, pins, and poison hidden on his person, braided into his hair, etc. He is tall and thin with a knife-edged face. Very good with his throwing knives and a bow, but a mean swordsman too. Not afraid to fight dirty, use poison, or set traps for his enemies. Puts forward a carefree and clever face, but is deadly serious about the king's business. About 28 years old, he's been working as a dragon since his early teens.

Lady Vivian: Daughter of Nineve and Merlin. She was conceived on Merlin's last night before his sleep. Nineve kept her pregnancy hidden by gaining weight and keeping Vivian in the womb by dint of magic and drugs for three years. She makes contradictory claims about who her father is, and will claim anyone as a father if it furthers a point she is making. Her eyes change color, an after-effect of the pregnancy drugs taken by Nineve. She learned a great deal of magic in the womb directly from Nineve and also spent three years in Merlin's cave coaxing all sorts of lore from Merlin's sleeping brain. She is good with geomancy, bad with weather magic, and very good at speaking with the dead. Arthur sent her on the mission because of her magical abilities and her overall knowledge of hidden things. Tall and redheaded, like a British battle-queen. About 24 years old.

Lady Alyne: Daughter of Lamorak and granddaughter of Sir Pellinore. She is a nun, a scholar of ancient and contemporary languages, and a student of alchemy. She has been raised in a nunnery, but was generally left to pursue her studies by herself because of a large grant of land her grandfather gave to the church. Arthur sends her on the mission because of her knowledge of languages and history. She often acts as an interpreter for the group when dealing with peoples of the Mediterranean, Near East, and Northern Africa. She is rather small and elfin looking, dark-haired. She is not given to physical confrontation, but voracious about knowledge. About 21 years old.