The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  ‘Would it not be possible’ – Nel Borrow held the flask before the candles, and the liquid turned to amber – ‘that the senses, through the action of the herbs, might be awakened to the spiritual?’

  The liquid was lit red-gold. Her eyes were amber green. The admonishing rain was coming hard now at the window as she lifted the paper betwixt her fingers and funnelled powder into the little wooden cup. Adding a little water and pouring more into the crystal goblet.

  Could the pathway to divinity be glimpsed through the bottom of a goblet? Or the road to hellfire…

  And what, oh my God, was to be be glimpsed behind those lustrous green eyes?

  What followed had a certain sense of the Mass, in which I still strongly, if quietly, believe, for it surely is an ancient, alchemical formula for the highest transformation.

  She handed me the goblet.

  ‘This is from the Blood Well. And this… is for you to hold.’

  A stone. A pale brown pebble, as if from a riverbed, near the size of a hen’s egg. It felt cool in my hand.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘I found it inside the tower on the tor.’ With the knife, she was cutting the apple in half. ‘It will ground you.’

  I nodded, kept the stone in my hand as I raised the goblet to my lips.

  She said, ‘Wait…’

  When I put the vessel down, some of the fluid was spilled across the boardtop.

  ‘You’re afraid,’ she said. ‘Your hand’s trembling.’

  ‘It’s the cold.’

  ‘’Tis not good to do this when you’re afraid.’ She took my hand; I shuddered at the warmth and energy in her fingers. ‘John… I think… I feel that you don’t need to do this. You, of all people, must know that there are other ways. Think about it.’

  ‘Am I not the man who thinks too much?’

  She said, ‘What have you not told me?’

  I wanted so much to turn over my hand to grip hers, but her face was so solemn. Instead, I drew a hard, slow breath, bad memories hauled in on a long, frayed rope.

  ‘I have dreams,’ I whispered. ‘Recurring dreams.’

  Didn’t go on. Didn’t tell her about the dreams of fire, my arms and legs as blackened twigs. I felt apart from myself now, but maybe not in the way she’d spoken of. Recalling how, watching the parade of townsfolk before the Baptist’s Church the other day, I’d imagined them in a play, their bodies feigning ordinary life, while their real lives were happening on some other level. Now I felt I was to become part of that play. Was given the means to enter that other reality.

  ‘Listen…’ She leaned forward. ‘There are other ways. We’ll work together on the other ways.’

  She reached out for the goblet, but I snatched it up and turned away and drank down the liquid, all of it.

  The thunder was dying, now, but maybe the storm had only just begun.

  XXX

  Like to the Sun

  I went to sit on the edge of the bed, and we talked. Or she did. I only sat and listened to the soft, sad music of her voice as she spoke of her father and how, after her mother’s execution, he’d thrown himself into his work, riding out each night to care for the sick, spending no more waking minutes than he needed in the bed where his wife would lie no more.

  The tragedy of it was so extreme and there was such physical pain in my heart that I began to weep into my hands.

  ‘Damn,’ Nel Borrow murmured. ‘What do you do to lose the cares of the day, Dr John?’

  ‘Cares?’ Wiped my eyes on my sleeve, dragging out a smile. ‘There are no cares if I’m working. Did your mother have cares when she was tending her garden?’

  ‘She had -’ a wistful smile – ‘two hundred kinds of herbs. They took a lot of care. If life were only work and we were allowed to do it unmolested…’

  ‘Then there’d be no sorrow, for some of us.’

  And no joy either, my mother would snap back, she who understood not the heady pleasures of scholarship.

  ‘Felt so safe in her garden,’ Nel said. ‘Open to the land all the way to the sea, and the tor rising on the other side and the soaring golden pinnacles of the abbey. It was a paradise. Avalon.’

  I thought of my own garden in the sky, its constellations laid out like arrangements of flowers in a fine elusive symmetry that awoke in me a yearning deeper than the night.

  ‘You still maintain her garden?’

  ‘Well… best I can. Fewer than half as many herbs now. When the abbey was alive, she’d have help. Even the abbot… the abbot came and went and they’d go for long walks through the fields and along the marshland, by the river, gathering plants…’

  As she talked, I could see the shining river as in summer, the strips of water shimmering on the edges of the fields, blue-white mist rising like the ghost of the long-departed sea.

  ‘…and also Master Leland, for a while.’

  I looked up.

  ‘ John Leland? John Leland the antiquarian?’

  I began pinching my lower thigh to confirm that I was not yet taken into some other sphere.

  ‘And maker of charts. Recorder of topography.’

  ‘John Leland worked with your mother and the abbot?’

  ‘Not with the abbot. I think the abbot was wary of him. He came sometimes and walked with my mother. Poor Master Leland.’

  She sighed, and the sigh became a tapestry of shadows drawn around her. Her body was outlined with quiet light against the umber shades of the woods in the tapestry, and I had to turn my eyes away. Knowing nothing of Leland’s interest in herbs. Only old manuscripts and the arrangement of the land.

  ‘So this was not on Leland’s first visit to the town.’

  ‘He came back.’

  ‘I know. After the Dissolution.’

  Dissolution. The word bubbling out of me, a pelucid stream over pebbles. I bent and let it ripple over my fingers.

  ‘I’ve a memory of Master Leland coming to our house. Can still see his beardless face, all bony like a Roman statue. I remember him shouting, “You don’t understand, I’m my own man now.” He kept saying that.’

  ‘What did he mean? Was he in his right mind? Because-’

  ‘How would I know? I was young.’

  Still young.

  I gazed into the core of the candlefire, where small, tight flames were coalescing into a single body of light like to a full and golden moon, and I felt my heart swelling in my breast like a blood-red poppy close to exploding from its bud.

  But stop. Dear God. Think.

  I looked up, which seemed to take a very long time.

  ‘You know that, in the end, John Leland went mad?’ Feeling my body begin to list I put out a hand to the nearest bedpost. ‘It was said that his mind was overloaded with the magnitude of his obsession… his task of chronicling the topography of the whole country?’

  ‘All I know is my father mistrusted him. Said his first visit was to collect treasure, and his second was to collect… the place itself.’

  The stone moved in my hand.

  ‘My father says that on that last visit he went in search of former monks from the abbey. He went looking for them.’

  ‘Leland?’

  I opened my hand and the stone was still.

  ‘But they’d have nothing to do with him. Blaming him, in part, for the killing of Abbot Whiting.’

  ‘What did he want from the monks?’

  This question seemed at the crux of it. What did the monks know? I reached out for an answer, the stock of the apple tree hard against my shoulder.

  ‘I know not. Nor what he wanted from my mother. All the treasure was long gone.’

  I looked for her expression, but her face was in complete darkness, for she’d moved deeper into the circle of trees and bushes, away from the probing moon.

  The stone in my hand was squirming and pulsing like a toad.

  Long gone.

  I crooked an arm around the tree at my side and saw the cold majesty of the tor rising before me out o
f the thick, brown mist with the sky aswirl around its tower. And now it was no longer night but not full day either, a darkness overhead, a dark beating, and I looked up to see the air all full of cawking crows, and a man labouring towards me down the hill, swaying slightly, side to side.

  ‘When did Leland…?’

  The words beaten away into the air by the wings of the crows all around me, and I turned away and covered my head with my arms. But the crows swooped and pecked at my hands, ripping the flesh from the backs of them and sought my eyes, and I was crying out and fell on my face on the damp earth and lay there for a long time.

  Hours passing, me smeared upon the richness of the soil, born of dead matter, new life out of decay. Thinking on this for many long hours, all the fecund beauty of it, until I felt the silence growing around me, a black pressing that, with time, I could not ignore and, turning, with great apprehension, upon my back, I saw, above me, Martin Lythgoe.

  Gazing down upon me, a look of bafflement on his face and his hands linked at his abdomen to receive the shining intestines slithering out of him in a soup of blood.

  Tried to turn away and couldn’t. Couldn’t move.

  Knowing now, for sure, that it was me. That I’d killed him. Sending him away to his death. Murdering him just as sure as Cate Borrow had killed the boy in Somerton… twin souls, the witch and the conjuror. In seeking knowledge, we court the night.

  Guilt.

  And did, by means of sorcery, attempt to kill or grievously harm Her Majesty…

  Struggling to breathe.

  ‘Still,’ she said. ‘Be still, John.’

  Take him.

  Taking my hands as I’m bound from behind. My back to the post and the rusted iron hoop around my chest and the air’s tainted now with the grey smoke of foreboding, and now comes the smell of old dry straw and the excited crackle of bone-dry twigs at first kindling.

  Heresy.

  A sudden rush of acrid gases to the throat, and I can’t breathe, nor hardly cough, for there’s only smoke, all about me now, and I try to cry out, but the air is full of choking gas and the crickle-crackle of the twigs and the chitter-chatter of the gathering crowd.

  Fine line, Dr John.

  A rush and a fizz as the straw catches light. A little sizzling.

  The s-word, John, the s-word.

  Here’s Bishop Bonner in monk’s habit with that plump and full-toothed grin. Observing, with a giggle, the ignition of clothing, points of savage heat and piercing agony, now, in the skin, and a slow funnelling of smoke from my sleeves.

  Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul acquire divinity?

  His laughter’s a peal of discordant bells, and there’s a smell on the air of roasting pork, rich and succulent.

  By prayer…

  Whispered through the hiss of spitting fat.

  …and suffering.

  Bonner’s beam outshines the fire as I look down at my hands, and one hand’s gone charcoal black, the skin all shrivelled and the fingers crisped and flaking away.

  And I’m screaming hard against the roaring in my ears, the molten wax, but there’s no release for the scream, for my cheeks are full of gas, and there’s a core of heat behind the eyes, a boiling in the sockets and then, of a sudden, the sparks have found my hair, making there a small forest fire, and then there’s a great whooooop…

  …the feral ecstacy of the crowd in that glorious moment of hell’s halo: a conjuror’s head all raging with the madness of fire.

  And the head’s become a ball of light. Like to the sun.

  Like to the sun.

  XXXI

  Haze

  When I was dead, it was raining.

  Soft, coloured rain, iridescent against the charcoal sky.

  A distant singing, all soft and melodious, and the air laden with the vague scent of apples.

  I tell you these things, knowing not how many hours had passed, for time was not the same. Nothing was the same and, though I knew I was dead, I knew also that it was not over for me.

  Walking through water, now.

  Clear, soft water that was flashing over the grass and cascading down the hill. Water like music.

  Me walking barefoot, the grass slick between my toes. Led by the hand, feet in the soft flowing land, down towards the nest of apple trees, and I could smell the breeze around them, the scent of apples and the ferment of cider, and all the juices of late summer.

  And the tor rising on the other side and the soaring golden pinnacles of the abbey.

  Walking through an old orchard, and the twigs of the apple trees were scraping at my bared skin.

  And then, with no awareness of a journey, I was in the sky.

  Not in my body but as a spirit made of finest air, and I was walking in the garden of the firmament, stars around my hands, whole worlds that I could hold, yet did not wish to hold, wished only to exist with them in peace and a sense of eternal wonder. And for a split instant, I almost knew His mind.

  Seemed to be here for many hours, but it might have been mere seconds before I was falling back in vague dismay… back to a place that was close to our world yet not of it. Where I saw the land again – the Glastonbury land – veined with clear water.

  Then saw through the skin of fields and woods and hills, to the innards of the island, all the inner chambers and vessels linked by the flow of water underground, a low and rumbling power, the engine of the earth, held together by the bones of the hills and all the bones of the saints which lay here, the bones of Avalon…

  …and I drew back and all the shapes of the land were moving. I saw creatures there, made of the earth… a lion and a dove… fishes that swam in grass. And the earth went atilt, and the creatures formed a great circle all around me.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m flying,’ I said.

  ‘Come,’ she said. ‘This may be too much too soon.’

  When the vision faded to a pastel blur and the body’s weight returned, I felt a stab of sorrow. But then I heard the old soft singing, a flow of molten gold, and saw the abbey from above, laid out below the tor like to a golden body.

  A paradise. Avalon.

  And I heard these words, soft-spoken but quite clear:

  The whole magistery depends upon the Sun and the Moon. The Sun is its father and the Moon is its mother, and we know truly that the red earth is nourished by the rays of the Moon and the Sun.

  The sun was in me. My head burned with gasses like to the orb of the sun. And the moon…

  …the moon was awaiting the sun.

  I was walking towards the summit of the tor.

  What can you see?

  The sky.

  And…?

  The tower.

  Go to it. Put your hands upon its nearest corner at chest height.

  Opening my hands, and the stone which had lain there was gone. A connecting. A shiver through the arms and into the breast, and I sprang away but did not fall this time.

  Did not fall.

  Knowing that the stone which had been in my hand had been absorbed back into the high standing stone whose spirit lived inside the tower upon the tor. And tower and stone both lived in me, when I walked back down the hill, lured by the the wappling of the water in the Blood Well at its foot. Rolling and sliding down the hill, my apparel left strewn out behind, and she was waiting and wore no cloak, nor over-dress, nor shift, and was but a haze in the soft air.

  Soft. The softness of the grass where we lay. The softness of lips and breasts, the yielding of flesh, the rising of the tower, all the energy entering into it as I rolled over and felt the opening of the well-head in the thicket and then the tower sliding deep into the well. And, oh God, a tongue ’twixt criss-cross teeth, greenlit eyes in bright water, a fluid white light, the light of a thousand candles, a river of white light flowing through me.

  And then, later, the sunrise in the heart.

  And I will travel to Avalon, to the fairest of all maidens……and she shall make all my wounds sound
and make me whole.

  PART FOUR

  Superstition requires credulity, just as true religion requires faith. Deep-rooted credulity is so powerful that it may even, in false beliefs, be thought to perform miracles. For if anyone believes most firmly that his religion is true, even if it is in fact false, he raises his spirit by reason of that very credulity until it becomes like the spirits who are the leaders and princes of that religion and seems to perform things which are not perceived by those in a normal and rational state.

  Cornelius Agrippa (1486-1535),

  De Occulta Philosophia.

  XXXII

  The Word

  When I awoke before dawn, it was as if I’d slept for whole days. Or rather as if I’d been away for days. And I felt…

  …felt my body was a strange place. Stretching out in the bed, I could feel all of it at once, from the soles of its feet to the weight of its skull and, betwixt them, the slow pulse of the unbound heart. And I felt…

  Whole. I felt whole. Entire. Complete. Felt the heaviness of the sun in me, its holy rays opening me up into an aching, languid release, and I rolled over, reaching out an arm for her.

  Nothing. Absence.

  When the arm closed on cold air, I was in terror, my eyes falling open like a trapdoor into darkness. I sat up and took in the empty chair, the empty board. The empty bed. I was alone in the half-light.

  Gone. Performed her alchemy and gone. I was thrown into panic: had it been a dream, a night excursion of the soul? I fell back, an aching void in me.

  Then, as my face slipped between the pillows, the scent of her came to me, her body’s wild-animal musk, and my breath caught in my throat.

  God. God, God, God…

  Rolled out of bed and found myself naked, the cold dawn seizing my flesh. Yet, for the first time, welcoming its bite. I stood and pulsed and tingled as if all the stars were lit within me. Had other men felt this? Did all men feel this, after…?

  After what, the condition of the bed and its emanations left little doubt. Thankful, tearful, I went back and laid upon it, burying my face in the scent of her, and when I closed my eyes the dust rose again, a ripple of images of moon and water, earth and…