by Robert Irwin
‘While I was in Ferrara I had read in the sorcerer’s manual known as Picatrix that man is the measure of all things,’ says Tiptoft, ‘For his head resembles the heavens in their roundness and his two eyes are like the sun and the moon, while his nostrils are the two winds in miniature and his ears signify the orient and the occident. From my reading of Picatrix I was led by easy steps to study the more ancient art of constructing occult pentacles, since it is from this which the magic circles of the swordsman derive. A man who is possessed of the right names and sigils can draw up a pentacle that will defend him from all sorts of spiritual assault. Standing within it, the conjuror can safely call demons to appear before him. So I made myself master of the Pentacle of the Clavicle with its four defending angels, Vehiel, Gashiel, Vaol and Shoel. Then it came to me that I might use this pentacle to summon up demons to spar with me, for I had spent so much time over my books in Ferrara that I was somewhat out of practice as a fighter.’
‘It is my belief that demons have no form of their own and therefore they summon up for their use the semblances of dead men. Consequently demons are usually mistaken for ghosts, though the truth is there are no such things as ghosts, but only demonic impostors who pretend to bring messages from the other world and messages from Hell are never worthy of credence.’
Tiptoft sighed as he remembered his first duel in Rome with one of these ‘ghosts’.
‘It was a warm summer night and the air was soft and carried the scent of quinces and oleander. On my way to my duel I had passed barefoot friars celebrating vespers in a ruined temple and I could still hear their singing as I began my conjuration. I had chosen to draw my pentacle on gravel in a spot close to the Baths of Diocletian, for this place was secluded by cypress trees and oleander. Within the Pentacle of the Clavicle I marked out the traverses of the swordsman and I placed candles at the points where the chords touched the circumference of the greater circle. Only a few moments passed before a figure emerged from the trees. My antagonist pretended to be an Englishman called Robert Elphick who had been killed in a brawl in a Roman taverna a few years earlier.’
‘Intimidation is an important part of duelling and pseudo-Elphick hoped to scare me as he rushed upon me with his gashed and bloody head and his banshee howls. But I laughed and howled back at him, for I knew myself to be secure within my pentacle. We fenced for over an hour during which the apparition sustained many cuts and punctures, while I remained invulnerable as long as I kept stepping along the traverses of the smaller circle. At last I dismissed my deathly partner with a few words of exorcism. I was very content to be so well exercised and entertained and the boredom from which I mostly suffer had abated for that night at least. In the weeks that followed I made frequent use of the Pentacle of the Clavicle and I delighted in always having a sparring partner at my beck and call. Sometimes it was Elphick, but there were other riff-raff from the cemeteries of Rome who occasionally made their appearance. I was so happy then. God, I wish I were back in Rome, for I much prefer the company of demons to northerners…’
As he speaks, Tiptoft moves along the lines in the sand and strikes postures. Hitherto the two of them had been alone on the bleak seashore, but now Anthony points to a dark figure who has emerged from the grey mist further up the sands. He is carrying a sword and seems to be hurrying towards them, though he struggles against a fierce wind which has suddenly blown up. Tiptoft hastily kicks at the gravel in order to scuff out the pentacle and then he leads Anthony back to his pavilion.
Once inside the tent Tiptoft gabbles as he tells Anthony that he must learn to read on horseback, so that no time for learning is wasted. Also Anthony must learn Italian so that he may read Dante. And Tiptoft is enthusiastic about the new science of punctuation. The introduction of slash marks to bracket groups of words and the use of the point and double point to indicate breathing pauses will make it so much easier to read rapidly and understand what one has read. Indentation in manuscripts is the other great thing. We can see that the world is changing.
‘I am heart and soul for what is young and new!’ declares Tiptoft.
Anthony does not pay much attention to what is being said, for he is thinking about Tiptoft’s encounter with dead men in Rome. Surely it is fiction. But why? What is the point of such a fantastic tale? Is it told to cause fear?
Now Tiptoft gestures to the trunks full of books and boasts that they represent only a small selection of his library. He longs to be back in London with the rest of his books and his instruments. Of his instruments, he is particularly fond of the Duke of Exeter’s Daughter, so called because it was devised by Thomas Holland, the Duke of Exeter, in the last century. That man was surely a genius and Tiptoft goes into considerable detail concerning the instrument’s iron frame and wooden rollers and ratchets. He also speaks briefly of the pilliwinks which he uses for crushing hands.
‘I use these devices as another would play upon a musical instrument. Now fast and now slow. I find that it takes some sensitivity to get the right sounds out of the creature on the rack and I am ever careful to listen out for false notes. I tell my prisoners not to be dismayed, for, if rightly thought about, the whole world is a prison and I am the usher who will show them the way out. What hope for us is there in the world, short of death?’
‘Christ saves.’ Though Anthony’s response is one of conventional piety, Tiptoft pauses to think about it.
‘But does he? Can he? I am fearful and have doubts. When I was on pilgrimage to the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, I saw a man crucified by the Turks. It was a slave’s death. Nails through the hands and feet… that is not such a great thing. It is not enough pain. Can mankind really have been saved by the Incarnation and the Sacrifice? I do not think that we can have been redeemed by the Crucifixion, if I can make my prisoners suffer more than Christ suffered. And I can. There is a sickly thing… I am vowed to the service of the God that has failed.’
Now Tiptoft is most unhappy. He flaps his hands as if to bat away the evil thought. Then, he looks hard at Anthony,
‘But I have heard that, after the Battle of Palm Sunday, you were freed from your mortal body and earthly pain for three days. Then on the third day you rose again like Christ. What was it like to be dead?’
Anthony is about to reply that it was very peaceful in the nameless castle, but abruptly he changes his mind and he speaks slowly, as if reluctant to describe what he has seen, ‘I saw the spirits of the dead driven about in a fearful hurricane and others battered by a perpetual rain and yet others forced to push great boulders in front of them. I saw men and women clawed at by winged demons. There were people trapped in red-hot sepulchres and there were some who had been turned into trees that writhed about…’
‘Enough! I have heard enough. Hell is just as I have read about in books… Lord Scales, will you pray with me?’
They kneel together in silent prayer before the crucifix and Tiptoft’s face streams with tears.
Then he wordlessly hands Anthony some books that he must read. But Tiptoft has lost the desire for any further conversation, except that he asks after the health of Anthony’s mother and, hearing that it is good, hopes that it will remain so. People have to be careful about their health and their mothers. As Anthony, once mounted, looks back, he sees a man with a sword waiting outside Tiptoft’s pavilion.
On his arrival back at Alnwick Anthony finds a letter waiting for him. It is from the Chronicler of Crowland. Anthony had written to him asking him why he was so obsessed with recording battles. Now he gets his reply. The Chronicler sees his job as being to detect God’s will as it is revealed in the outcome of battles. Battles are like ordeals by fire or by water, in which the guilty are found out and the virtuous vindicated. God speaks to us and shapes our history through battles. Anthony, reading this, doubts that God’s purpose is revealed through battles, since the first battle of St Albans was a victory for York and so was Blore Heath, but York was defeated at Ludford. But then York won at Northampton, only to be defea
ted at Wakefield. Then the Yorkist cause is triumphant at Mortimer’s Cross and Towton. Why cannot God make his mind up as to which cause he is supporting? As it is, the divinely-decreed destiny of the kingdom is a zigzag.
The Chronicler also reports that the Abbot has found a new problem to wrestle with, for he has now interested himself in Nimrod, the world’s first tyrant, and Nimrod’s project to build a tower which would reach the heavens. Once again the Abbot has used his mathematical skills to demonstrate that, even without divine intervention, the Tower of Babel was doomed to fail, since in order to reach the sphere of moon, 178,672 miles above the Earth, 374,731,250,000,000,000 bricks would have been needed for the Tower’s construction and this would have overbalanced the Earth, since the Tower would be heavier than Purgatory in the southern hemisphere.
The following day Anthony wrote to Ripley:
‘I give you salutation and ask for your blessing. Yesterday I had a strange adventure…
I was walking along the coast north of Alnwick when I saw her. From a distance and in the fading light I took the huddled black shape for a seal, but the rocky outcrop over the sea was far too high for a seal to have clambered onto and, when I got closer, I saw that it was a woman dressed in black. When she looked back and saw me approaching, she gestured that I should join her and sit with her and look down on the sea from the rock. I did so. Now that I was close, I could see that she had bright green eyes and red hair which she kept brushing away from her eyes. She began speaking without any preamble, “When I was young, I dwelt with the sea people under the curve of the wave. We used to sport in the great breaking rollers and move to and from the shore according to the pulse of the sea. The sound of water drawing back over shingle was like my breathing. Sometimes we used to lie in the shallows and watch the land people and wonder how they did. Though I believe we had our origins in the deep sea, we grew up close to the shore where we rode the breaking waves. I was happy with the sea people, but there came the day when they said I had grown too big and that I must join the land people and they pushed and pulled me ashore. So I walked onto dry land and learnt its ways. Several times I returned to the sea and at first the sea people would talk and play with me, but eventually they shunned me and I found myself swimming alone in a dark green sea that was so dark that it was almost black – as it is now. When we are grown to adulthood we forget this sort of thing. Now come stand with me and I will show you something.”
We both rose and she pointed to dark shapes some distance away in the sea.
“Seals,” I said, for that is what I thought they were.
“No, those are the sea people. Would it not be pleasant to join them?”
She moved closer to me and embraced me. I thought that this was affectionate, but her embrace was strong and in the next moment she hurled herself and me with her into the sea. Underwater she clung to me and we fought one another as the undertow carried us away from the rock. It was only when I had got one of my hands free and stabbed it in the direction of her face and got my finger in her eye that her grip slackened and I freed myself from the embrace of the she-demon. I rose to the surface, but the tide was so strong that I was carried half a mile along the coastline before I could step out onto a spit of land.’
Ripley, having received this, writes back that it was good to be reminded of the sea people, but what he really needs is the story of the gerfalcon and what strange and marvellous feats Anthony had performed before he rescued it from the guardianship of the dead. The actual bird, which was purchased in Lapland, has arrived and is kept in a safe and secret place outside London, until Anthony shall be back in the south and ready to present it to the King. Though Anthony is as slow a writer as he is a reader, he thinks that he will have no great difficulty in concocting a strange adventure, for he has spent his childhood listening to his mother Jacquetta’s flood of stories concerning errant knights, enchanted princesses, sinister heretics, mysteriously deserted castles, warlocks, elves and speaking statues. He has grown up more familiar with a magical world than he is with the real one.
Made-up stories about royal battles and errant knights customarily have exciting endings in which, after much danger, there is either great triumph or horrid despair. However, there is no exciting ending to the sieges in the north. Bamburgh and Dunstanburgh are starved into submission and the Duke of Somerset surrenders to the King’s mercy, while Alnwick is abandoned by its defenders. So this part of the war is ended and at last Anthony is suffered to return to the south. Now he urgently needs to find some adventure that may end with his recapture of a gerfalcon.
Chapter Six: Corbenic
After our taking of the castle of Alnwick, I was sent south with the first detachment of discharged troops. Early on the second morning and some way north of Newcastle I became impatient with the slow progress of the marching men and I pressed my horse to a canter and rode ahead, planning to wait for them further up the road, but as I rode on, a thick fog descended and I thought it better to advance no further. So I dismounted and waited for them to join me. I waited a long time but I neither heard nor saw anything of my troop. The shapes of ancient mossy trees were dimly visible in the dense fog and I only heard the occasional sound of melting snow falling from the branches. I had then no recourse but to follow the path I was on and travel in the direction which I judged to be south. I longed to be out of these bleak northern lands where once monstrous worms roamed and perhaps, for all I knew, they still did. Surely my route would eventually take me to a habitation where I would get better guidance. Yet the path was long and grew ever narrower as I rode on. I was almost asleep in the saddle when my horse halted and I saw that our way was blocked and overgrown with briers. Seeing this, I dismounted and set to hacking at the briers, though I was sick with dread, for now it was clear to me that this path would never lead me to any human settlement.
But then, as I wielded my sword in the undergrowth, I heard voices lamenting. Though I was fearful, I was also curious to know the cause of this grief. Having cut my way through the worst of the bushes, I led my horse forward by the bridle and shortly I came to a castle. The place was familiar to me, though I could not give it a name. Its curtain wall was partly collapsed and the outer gate swung back and forth in the rising wind. When I reached the inner gate, that of the keep, I blew upon my horn, but no one answered. I dismounted and pushed the door open and entered upon a scene of dereliction. There I was surprised to see four men squatting beside a bonfire in the middle of the great hall and I realised that it was their weeping and groaning that I had heard as I approached the castle. They looked grimly up at me and fell silent. Then I saw at the far end of the hall a crowned King seated on a throne on a dais. I thought that his eyes, which glittered in the dim light, gazed angrily at me. However, he did not move and it was one of the men beside the fire who rose and shuffled towards me.
I told him how I was on my way back from the northern sieges and had become lost. I requested lodging for the night and stabling for my horse and finally I asked the name of this place.
‘Now you ask a question!’ the man replied. He was bearded and he wore a white surcoat on which a red cross was displayed. He continued, ‘But all that you may ask shall be answered.’
The men who stayed beside the fire also wore the red-cross surcoat. Another of these now rose and went out to attend to my horse.
‘We see that you are very cold, so now come join us by our fire.’
As I did so, I noted that they were warming themselves by burning worn tapestries and broken bits of furniture. I started to declare my name and rank, but immediately they silenced me.
‘We know who you are. Anthony Woodville, you were present in this castle on the Palm Sunday on which the last procession of the Holy Grail took place. Then we had hoped that you would ask a question. What is the Grail? What purpose does the Grail serve? What caused the three dolorous wounds from which the Maimed King suffered? Any question would have sufficed, but nothing could happen unless a question wa
s asked.’
At this, I looked across to the King on his throne and saw that he still gazed furiously upon me. Indeed his eyes, which caught the reflection from the fire, seemed to burn with hatred.
One of the men beside the fire continued, ‘You did not ask a question and since you did not ask one, there was no story and, since there was and is no story, the procession of the Grail is no more. You, who were our last hope, have returned too late. What purpose did the Grail serve? It served itself. Know that the Grail was a hidden thing which needed to be sought after and known, but men knew it not and, after the passing of Arthur, it was no longer sought for. Consequently it is forever withdrawn from the world and its glory is departed. We who have guarded it have waited too long and so now the Matter of Britain is finished.’
‘Who are you?’
‘We were members of the Order of the Knights Templar. It is an order of great antiquity and it was a grandmaster of our order who received from Joseph of Arimathea the chalice in which Christ’s blood had been collected. Our knights brought the chalice back from overseas and have guarded it here ever since. Later, some hundred and fifty years ago in the reign of King Edward II, our order was denounced for heresy and so vehemently defamed that we could not purge ourselves. Consequently our order was suppressed and our preceptories and manors were confiscated. Yet some of the order went into hiding and, though we died long ago, we have remained in the service of the Maimed King and we have all drunk from the Grail and it was this which has sustained us. But we do not know what our end shall be now that the Grail has been withdrawn and our King is dead.’
‘But your King is not dead! I see him over there staring at me.’
I was angry at what I judged to be their deceit or delusion. One of the Templars sought to detain me, but I brushed his hand away and marched towards the enthroned King. The Templar shambled behind me and feebly pleaded with me not to disturb their late lord. It was only when I reached the foot of the dais that I saw that the King was indeed dead. Propped up on his throne, he was a mummified thing and, though the eyes still glittered, I could now see that the sockets had been filled with quicksilver. Moreover, his body was imperfectly preserved for the wounds that he had sustained when alive continued to rot and I reeled back from the stench of putrefaction.