The Bones of Avalon (21 page)

When I clambered to the top of the hill a few yards behind Mistress Borrow, it was like arriving upon a cloud in the sky. And when I stood close to the tower…

‘Do you not feel it relates more to the air than to the earth?’ she said.

‘Yes. Maybe.’

A needle to pierce the heavens and draw down lightning. Illumination.

I looked down, dizzied. Despite a thin mist, the views on offer were unexpected. Not only a vista of the town and the abbey like to a close-sewn crop betwixt the other hills, but of the flatlands to the west, all the way to the grey sea – the level country veined with narrow channels of water, swollen here and there into pools and lakes, and you could feel that it still belonged to the sea and might yet be reclaimed, becoming a true island again. For this, I realised now, was surely the very heart of what remained of the Isle of Avalon.

Merlin’s lair and known to Arthur. An excitement trickled into my spine, like a spring through rocks, and my head was as light as down-feathers. There was a momentary kindling of illumination and then –
dear Christ –
all my senses were crowding together, dropping as one into the bottom of my gut, where lies the lower mind, the arousal becoming a slow-swelling alarm as all the land fell into a tilt, a vast platter of greens and greys and browns and…

…I found me on my back on the turf, with the tower racing away from me towards a bright hole in the clouds.

‘God!’

Rising up on my elbows, all leaden-headed, dazed and ashamed that such a short climb should have so sapped my strength that I should fall into a womanly faint.

The lightness of her feet over the springy turf as she came to stand above me, arms folded. That cross-toothed smile and a barely veiled merriment in the green eyes.

‘Be not alarmed, Dr John, you’re hardly the first to lose his balance up here.’

Holding out a slender hand to me, but I wouldn’t take it and struggled unaided to my feet and still felt unsteady, cold sweat on my forehead. On the top of a high mountain, it becomes harder to breathe, but this was a mere tump. I was shaken and more than a little afeared that I might be coming down with Dudley’s fever.

‘It’s my fault,’ she said. ‘I should have warned you. As I said, this sometimes—’

‘Not to you,’ I said. ‘Evidently.’

‘No indeed,’ a man’s voice said. ‘How swiftly the devil’s claws reach out to his children…’

I turned.

He had his back to the tower.

His tone was soft and unhurried and weighted with a drawling
ennui
that spoke more of parts of London or Cambridge than this wild place.

‘Throw a witch into a pond and she’s said to float,’ he observed mildly. ‘Expose a witch to the seething air around Satan’s altar and she’ll gather all the floating imps to her rancid tits.’

T
HE MIST
… I hadn’t noticed how much it had thickened, enclouding the tower and writhing like a living thing around three figures, as if they had arisen with the mist or were formed out of it. Two of them in monks’ habit, hands hidden in conjoined sleeves.

Mistress Borrow addressed the third, a secular man, as tall as me, strong-built and limber as a larch tree, his witch taunt still smeared across the chilled air.

‘And since when’ – facing him, pale-cheeked but not, I thought, with fear – ‘since when has this land been yours, Sir Edmund? Some desperate deal with the Bishop of Wells?’

No response. His hair and beard were as one, close-barbered from the top of his skull to the edge of his full jawline. He wore a dark green doublet and black hose above boots of good leather. Wide belt, a sheathed sword hanging from it.

‘The Bishop of Wells,’ I observed, ‘would seem to be in no position to make deals.’

‘And who would you be, fellow?’

I’d expected a deep, roughened voice, but his was high and clipped. I held my ground. While my dark attire was hardly at the height of fashion, it must be evident that I was not of the peasantry.

‘Dr John,’ I said. ‘Of the Queen’s Commission on Antiquities.’

This intelligence was received, I’d concede, with no conspicuous awe.

‘Here on instruction of the Privy Council,’ I said mildly, as if by rote. ‘If you wish to inspect my papers of authority, I have them at the George Inn.’

Well, as you know, I was never good at this. Moving closer to these men to signify that I was not intimidated, I was still unsteady. Aware of
the turf lifting with each step and praying that I should not be cast down again by some unaccountable slippage of the air.

‘And
your
name?’ I said.

‘Fyche. Sir Edmund. Of Meadwell. Owner of this ground.’ A vague gesture toward his monkish companions. ‘Brother Michael, Brother Stephen.’

A greybeard and a thin-faced youth. Connections forming: last night Sir Peter Carew had spoken of a former monk from the abbey using an inheritance to develop a farm and then establishing there a college for the education of the sons of gentlemen.

‘Dr John, if you’ – Mistress Borrow was pointing down the hill towards a wind-bent fence – ‘if you care to consult the records, you’ll find that the estate owned by Sir Edmund stops
there.
’

‘However,’ Fyche said politely, ‘the way you came, you
would
have to cross my land to get here.’

‘Fie!’
Her back arching like a cat’s. ‘’Tis a right of way!’

‘I’ll have its ownership ascertained when I return to London,’ I said briskly. ‘However, as an officer of the Queen’s Commission I can take, with impunity, whichever route be most expedient for the furtherance of my business, which—’

‘Yes,’ Fyche said. ‘Tell us, please, about your particular business.’

His accent was of the west, yet educated. A survivor, Carew had said. Close up, I could see white specks in his beard. His skin was weathered but still taut. He was maybe five and forty years.

I explained that I was charged with a new listing of ancient structures and notation of their surviving contents and prevailing condition.

Fyche’s head tilted.

‘Like Leland?’

A loaded question.

‘Somewhat like Leland,’ I said. ‘But not, of course, with the same masters. What I mean is… no-one here need fear treachery.’

Fyche smiled. The curious mist wove yellowy wreaths around his boots.

‘And how would you know, Doctor? Did
Leland
realise his purpose when he took his list to London?’

‘I don’t know. Leland died.’

‘Having first gone mad, I’m told. However –’ Fyche raised a thumb to the broken tower – ‘as you can see, this church, despite its dominant situation and its dedication to the Archangel Michael, is ruined beyond easy repair. Does the Queen’s Commission have an answer to that?’

If it did, I couldn’t think of one.

‘Obviously,’ I said, ‘the continued need for a church up here would have to be weighed against other causes. For example… with the Church of the Baptist in the town, would there be much call now for continued worship up here?’

The mist stung my eyes. Fyche’s smile was looking worn.

‘Well,’ he said, ‘it certainly goes on.’

‘What does?’

‘Worship,’ Fyche said.

I looked up at the tower, mist oozing from the crack in its side, a jagged tear as if it had been knifed.

‘The witch can tell you,’ Fyche said. ‘If she’s a mind to.’

Instinctively, I turned my head to Mistress Borrow.

Only to see her moving away towards the path winding down, her black cloak pulled around her, its hood up. She didn’t look back, and I felt an uncertainty within me and an unaccountable sense of coldness, longing… and loss.

I spun angrily back at Sir Edmund Fyche, but he’d already turned away.

‘Come with me, Dr John,’ he said, ‘if you have the time.’

Up to the very apex of the Glastonbury Tor. Through an archway into the tower itself. Which was, as it had seemed from afar, as Mistress Borrow had said, all but hollow, a vast chimney. Cracked flags and broken stones around our boots, Fyche kicking at one.

‘Defiled,’ he said.

Far above us, the white sky was stretched like a soiled bedsheet beyond a rotting cross of old timbers.

‘I’m told an earthquake did this,’ I said.

Fyche bent and picked up a dead rook by a black wing.

‘When a church is abandoned,’ he said, ‘it festers like a corpse. And attracts maggots.’

I said nothing, but recalled Mistress Borrow:
Sometimes it seems that this place is become like to a wound left open, where there’s gangrene and rot. A mortifying of the flesh.

‘A mess of them,’ Fyche said. ‘Squirming and roiling. A sickness. Can you not smell it?’

In truth, all I could smell was a Bible man’s soapy odour. Fyche tossed the wretched bird back into the rubble.

‘As a Justice of the Peace, I’m tasked with breaking up all ungodly assemblies. Whether dealing with the instigators myself or handing them over to the Church courts.’

I nodded, wary now. Although the extent of their powers seemed to vary from town to town, a local JP was never someone to be lightly dismissed. He would have firm connections in this county while, with Dudley ill and Carew gone to Devonshire, I had none.

Yet it would not be good to be seen to back down before this man or to appear less than confident in my own authority.

‘This talk of witchcraft… Sir Edmund, Mistress Borrow is simply the physician summoned to treat my colleague – abed with a fever. Nothing she’s done so far suggests devilry.’

He made no response to this, strode back to the archway. I followed him out of the tower, across the springy turf until he stopped on the eastern flank of the tor where the air was clearer. Woodland lay below us dark-haloed by a curling of smoke from tall chimneys.

‘Foul rites,’ Fyche said. ‘Lewd practices.’

‘I see.’

And thought that I did, as he spun at me.

‘No. You do
not
see. You don’t see the fires in the midnight, you don’t look up and see the maggot-people chattering and squealing to the moon. Nor walk up here the next day to find new-born babes in the grass with their throats cut in sacrifice.’

‘You’re serious?’

I didn’t believe it, of course, thought it a Bible-man’s bullshit. But a Bible man who was also a JP… you did not just walk away.

‘Why was a church built here?’ Fyche said. ‘Hardly an obvious spot. No community here.’

‘Just a hill.’

‘A hill. Exactly. And before the church, right where we’re standing… were stones. High stones. Raised by low men.’

‘You mean Druid stones?’

‘Heathen stones.’

I nodded, feeling the trickle of an old spring in my spine.

‘Paganism,’ Fyche said. ‘Witchery.’

Looking down at the turf, as if something black and noxious might be seen oozing to its surface.

‘Fools say the King of the Faerie, Gwyn ap Nudd, has his chambers here, under our feet. Hence the church’s dedication to St Michael, the warrior angel, to drive out old superstition.’

‘Sadly, no defence against an earthquake,’ Dr John said in his prosaic, list-maker’s way.

While Dr Dee thought,
What does this truly mean?
Dr Dee, who knew too much to dismiss heathenism as primitivism, aware that these men, these Druids, in their ways, knew more then than we do now about the forces within the land. Or at least
experienced
more through natural magic, natural science. For these
low men
, whether they knew it or not, lived in the days when Pythagoras heard the music of the planets.

‘Earthquake?’ Fyche smiled sourly. ‘That was Gwyn ap Nudd shaking the hill in his rage. That’s what the peasants’ll tell you. And in their fear, they’ll make obeisance to him, lest their hovels collapse around them. Encouraged, always, by the witches, who yet come creeping to the tor in the belief that something here empowers them.’

I looked down the hillside with its veil of mist. No sign now of Mistress Borrow. Something tugged in my breast. I wrapped my arms around myself, wanting to be away from here, from this man, to ponder on how this place might yet empower
me.