We'd zoomed in on the map as far as we could, looked at it with all the different layer options and Arthur was still sure. A random hill in the middle of a random part of Glastonbury apparently had a bunch of treasure in it somewhere.

"So... shall we drive out there tomorrow?" Arthur asked, looking pleased with himself. I didn't reply at first, not sure what to make of the map I was holding and the confidence he displayed.

"You're sure we'll find it?" I asked. "It could easily have already been discovered and dug up in the years since."

Arthur nodded. "It could have been, but I highly doubt it. Merlin had them all protected for me. It would have been very hard to do. It's not lying out in the open. It's in chests and containers inside a stone vault."

"Vault?" I asked, getting even more nervous. In my understanding vaults were not easy things to get into and you didn't always want to.

"Yes. But don't worry, as long as I go in first it will be entirely fine."

The whole thing was absurd, but the following day was Saturday and I had nowhere better to be. I might be being taken for a ride, but there was only one way to know for sure.

"All right. We'll go to find it. But if you find this treasure, you really do need to help and we will need to establish some boundaries. I can only lose so much work time and get you out of trouble so often." I sat back and considered it as he nodded excitedly and started drawing on the map. Another feature he had found because apparently it was essential.

As we'd done on our first night in the same place, we put the TV on after that so Arthur could learn more and watch movies about history or himself. I told him, once again, not to take it too seriously when it was a movie. That they were often changed and adjusted to suit the narrative the maker wanted to focus on.

He simply nodded and absorbed himself in movies for a while, often not watching the whole thing if it diverged too much from the truth and getting very excited when a film got something mostly right. It didn't last long, however, before he went back to the news channel and began asking me to explain what was going on in various parts of the world.

As he started to understand that there were various countries and we were getting news for all of them, Arthur grew more and more worried.

"Are we at war with all these countries or am I going to be charged with keeping them at bay as our king?"

"No. Not at all. Many of them, if not all of them are at peace with us right now."

"And France? Rome?"

"Well, France we're sort of at peace with and Rome doesn't exist as a nation now."

"What happened to it?" Arthur asked, making it very clear, yet again that he had a lot to learn and would easily be taken advantage of in the real world.

"Egypt. I think." I frowned, not actually sure of the answer.

Arthur reached for the books, looking through one in particular. I wasn't sure what to do while he read, so I flicked through the channels and tried to settle on some news or something that would take my mind off what was going on in my own flat. I didn't like to watch a lot of news, not appreciating the doom and gloom focus, but right now it seemed far more sane than entertaining the idea that I was helping a man over two millennia old.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

There was a segment on Russia, the country still waging war on eastern Europe. It hadn't given up despite its losses and lately it had even managed to find new steam from somewhere. No one knew quite what was fueling it any more, some people suspecting China had got involved, but no one sure and able to say for certain.

Putin had just declared that he would be stepping up his liberation of the people in two more areas when Arthur looked up.

"Can you pause that and go back?" Arthur said.

I reached for the remote and paused the TV, wondering what had bothered him. He was staring at the screen, his knuckles white where he gripped the book.

"What is it?" I asked, not sure what he wanted to go back to and sure that he's break the book and I'd never see my deposit again if I didn't get him to relax. I handed him the remote, as much to make him let go as to let him find whatever had caught his eye.

As he took the controls, I very gently took the book off him. It was one of the older history books and I could see that he had been reading about the rise and fall of several civilisations. Anything that might help him catch up on what was going on with Rome and anyone else he remembered that weren't around now.

He rewound the news until he had an image of Putin up on the screen.

"It can't be..." he said. "That's... I've seen that face before."

Arthur was quick to get up and go to one of the stacks of books further out of reach. These were the ones more on magic and all sorts of strange things that had happened in the past and he flicked through one of them on historical figures who were believed to wield some sort of power.

I watched, not sure where he was going with this. Putin wasn't young, but I doubted he was in a magic book that looked as if it was at least a hundred years old.

After a couple of minutes Arthur stopped on a page and held it up to me. "This," he said. "I knew I'd seen this guy before. I recognize him too. Looks a lot like a magician that I ran into a long time ago. I had to fight off several invaders while I protected England."

"That's not Rasputin," I said, reading the caption under the photo. "Rasputin died a long time ago. They shot him, wrapped him in a carpet and dumped him in the river. Or something like that anyway."

Arthur looked at me as if I was speaking gibberish and I wasn't the one making any sense.

"Putin may have a similar name, but they're not the same person." I wasn't sure if Arthur was really hearing me, his eyes glazing over as he looked thoughtful.

"No, it's the same person. Rasputin probably couldn't be killed." Arthur shrugged, as if this was normal information.

It struck me how accurate that was given what I knew of the man. The history books all said that there were rumours he couldn't be killed and I had assumed it was all hearsay and he was just very good at saving himself or something.

I looked between the picture in the book of Rasputin and the face up on the screen and Arthur had a point. They looked incredibly alike. If I hadn't thought it impossible, I could have been persuaded they were the same person at different stages of life. But Rasputin looked older, not the younger. At least in the pictures we were comparing.

"This could be why I'm back," Arthur said. "Has he been doing anything to harm this country?"

My instinct was to shake my head, but I stopped myself from doing so right away. Of course he had been harming a lot of countries. He was driving prices up all over the place and making it hard to trade. And there was no telling what was happening to his people. Eventually I nodded.

"I need to know everything there is to know about both of them," he said, suddenly a lot more animated.

Although I considered going back to the library and getting him some more books, instead I opted to open up my tablet and let him use that. It took me a while to show him how it worked, but he quickly grasped the technology.

Leaving him to it, I opted to go to bed after that. We were going to have a big day ahead of us if we were going to go to Glastonbury in the morning as well. I would need sleep and he was going to need to direct me and explain to me exactly what was going on.