The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  …fire. Even the fire was good.

  Jesu!

  I came off the bed again, moved slowly to the window. Touching it. The strangeness of glass. The miracle of seeing out from within.

  Of course, there must have been more to it. More than the potion, although that clearly had opened doors between my inner being and something that was out there. But, in some way, she ’d made that happen in the way it had, and there was a word for this.

  The lower panes were jewelled with red and blue and orange, a pool of water on the sill reflecting these colours and more, and my eyes were drawn into it and I must have lost several minutes and…

  Oh, yes, the word.

  It had ever been with us, ever misunderstood, feared and rendered demonic by the churchmen – those same churchmen who preach that we should ever be open to higher influence.

  I saw the wet roofs shining red. Raised my eyes to the first sunlight running like syrup along the ramparts of an old night cloud. Felt a trembling of my whole being. And uttered the word, breathing it softly into the coppery fire of the nascent day.

  The word was magic.

  I knelt, then, and prayed.

  ‘You all right, Dr John? You look…’

  Cowdray in his sackcloth apron at the bottom of the stairs, all grey stubble and troubled eyes.

  ‘Thank you, I’m well,’ I said.

  Hearing my own voice for, it seemed, the first time. It sounded frail, immature, a boy’s voice.

  ‘None of us slept much last night, mind,’ Cowdray said. ‘Worst storm of the winter, by some way.’

  No, I wanted to tell him. This was the best of storms. Yet I knew there was much that was wrong. Moving down the stairs still feeling as if I walked in a body of light, yet knowing that even the rich magic of it must needs be contained before it hardened into a kind of madness.

  ‘Have you seen Nel Borrow?’

  This name like a sacred name to me now, some angelic invocation.

  ‘No.’ Cowdray’s face had gone empty. ‘Not this past day.’

  Of course, he had seen her, having offered her his attic room, but his caution was commendable, and I asked him nothing further. She would have slipped away while it was yet dark, without disturbing anyone. It was what she did: slipped away.

  But I’d find her again. Needing her with me, more than ever. And the finding of her was a quest beyond all other quests, for she was Circe and Medea and Morgan le Fay and… I saw her in vivid image, looking down on me between two tall trees at the entrance to a track leading to the Blood Well.

  And is learning acquired only from books?

  Wondering, from Cowdray’s slightly alarmed look, if the wild scent of her was around me like a swirling mist.

  ‘…of God,’ he was saying.

  ‘Mercy?’

  ‘A storm like this is seldom seen this time of year. People are saying it was the rage of God against the mire of sin and heathenism in this town.’

  ‘Who’s saying that?’

  He smiled grimly, made no answer.

  ‘Master Roberts is asking for you.’

  ‘He’s about?’

  ‘He’s been about over an hour,’ Cowdray said. ‘He bids you join him in the abbey. In the outhouse behind the abbot’s kitchen, where the… where the body lies. Your man’s cadaver.’

  Always a dark shadow in front of the light.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘I’ll prepare your breakfast, meanwhile. Not a patient man, is he, Master Roberts?’

  The hut seemed to have been a relic of the abbey’s occupation by the Flemish weavers in Edward’s reign. Its shutters had been nailed tight, its roof patched with straw. I approached it lightly enough through the fresh, chilled morn. But when I reached its open door my euphoria was broken by the foul, piercing stench of corrupting flesh.

  And it was this that brought back all that had come before the excursion. Those candlelit revelations.

  What happened to your servant… terrible almost beyond belief… but all this talk of devil magic, sacrifice…

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  Dudley, in the doorway, in his drab clerk’s apparel, more gaunt than ever I’d seen him.

  ‘I slept late,’ I told him. ‘The storm…’

  ‘Kept all of us awake. Except for this poor bastard.’

  His eyes were burning dully, not now with the fever but with a driven rage, as if some cold engine worked within him. He stepped outside, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and moustache, grains of sweat still agleam on his forehead.

  ‘Go in. Go and look.’

  ‘Robbie, I’ve seen all I can bear to see. What’s the use?

  ‘No!’ His features sharpening, jaw tensed. It was like he’d come out of a long sleep, was smitten with urgency, real life flung in his face. ‘Look again, I pray you. Closely. You know about these things, you’ve studied anatomy.’

  ‘I’ve studied books on anatomy-’

  Books, books, books…

  ‘John, listen to me. You were quick to deny this was ritual sacrifice. Well, if not that, then what? What’s his body have to tell us?’

  ‘Robbie, I doubt you’re even well enough to be-’

  ‘The hell with me. Go the fuck in.’

  I nodded. Stepping unwillingly inside the hut, breathing through my mouth.

  It was, in truth, no bloodier than a butcher’s shop, but the sight of remains such as these will always bring me to the brink of despair. Hard not to feel that the spirit itself has not been forever extinguished and, after all I’d seen this past night, what a grievous loss that would be.

  The body of Martin Lythgoe lay upon a board made from two mangers. It was dull and did not glisten. The candle had been knocked away from the mouth and lay beside the body, no longer spectral and nothing of the tor about it now. Merely a squalid insult to life and humanity.

  ‘What can I…?’ I was near to tears, shaking my head in despair at my uselessness. ‘What can I tell you, Robbie… more than you can see for yourself?’

  The right arm bridged the yawning chasm of the chest, and inside its elbow was lodged the crushed and shrivelled orb of Martin’s heart. I remembered the phantasm of him I’d seen through the dust, trying to hold it all in, and he hadn’t spoken then, and he wasn’t speaking now.

  The left arm dangled over the side of the board, and Dudley lifted it, supporting the hand, free by now from rigor mortis.

  ‘What do you make of this?’

  I bent over, with some reluctance, holding my breath.

  ‘Oh.’

  Wouldn’t normally have noticed it. You’d see the invaded chest, the ripped-out heart, and would turn away sickened before you’d mark the small but meaningful smitterings of dried blood on the fingertips, the blackened, broken nails.

  ‘The middle finger, John. The way the nail’s been all but torn away. See?’

  ‘Done as he fought back?’ I squatted down on the greasy straw on the floor, took up the cold, marbling hand at eye-level. ‘Or maybe it suggests the body was moved after death?’

  ‘Either of those is possible,’ Dudley said. ‘But I think it’s something worse. Look again. Closer.’

  ‘What’s this…?’

  Brown flakes which had fallen into my palm. Seemed unlikely to be dried blood.

  ‘Rust.’ Dudley knelt beside me. ‘It’s from an old iron nail. See it?’

  ‘Where… Oh, Jesu-’

  The length of it was wedged hard under the split and blackened fingernail, all the way to its root, where the point stuck out. I let the hand fall, in horror, wincing.

  ‘Hammered in,’ Dudley said. ‘Under his nail, until the head of it broke off.’

  ‘Then this is…?’

  ‘Torture,’ Dudley said. ‘Before he died, this poor bloody man was tortured.’

  I came weakly to my feet, trying to think of another explanation and could not.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why are men usually tortured?’


  ‘To make them confess to…’

  ‘Uh huh.’ Dudley shaking his head. ‘To make them talk.’

  ‘About what? What would he know? He was a stranger here. He only came because of…’

  ‘Us. He came with us. He knew who we were and why we were here.’

  ‘And is that to kill for?’

  Dudley looked at me as if I were a child, while the eyes of Martin Lythgoe, cold as pebbles, gazed forever into the cobwebbed dark.

  ‘We need a witness to this,’ Dudley said. ‘Is Carew here yet? Or where’s… that other fellow?’

  ‘Fyche.’

  Shows this picture of himself as a Godly man in combat with the forces of Satan, and at the core, I’ll swear… that’s where you’ll find the real evil.

  ‘We don’t talk to Fyche,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure we even talk to Carew.’

  Dudley looked at me with narrowed eyes.

  ‘Take my word,’ I said.

  ‘All right. Fetch Cowdray, then.’

  ‘No… That is… there’s someone more qualified.’

  Clawing aside cobwebs hanging thick as ship’s rigging and stumbling to the doorway for air.

  XXXIII

  A Man’s Path

  An element of self-interest. I’ll admit that. Matthew Borrow, a medical man and surgeon, would be the best witness to confirm what had been done to Martin Lythgoe. But he might also know where his daughter was to be found.

  I ran.

  Nel: my body still shivering with soft and slippery memories of hers.

  And anxiety.

  The sky was brightening, near cloudless, as I moved fast and hard away from the abbey, splashing through streets still pooled and roiled with red mud from the storm. Part of me wanting to go on running, between the two church towers at either end of the town, out into the wettened fields towards the sun.

  Until I became aware that something was wrong, and slowed.

  The air was colder and refreshed from the storm yet, past eight, noone save me appeared to be out in it.

  I stopped and looked around: stone houses, wattle houses, the smoke of awakened fires. It was as if I saw the town for the first time, how sporadic and ill-structured it was now the abbey lay in ruins. A dead planet with no sun, all the energy gone to the tor.

  Gone back to the tor. And the tor, while it could be serene and hazed with a kind of holiness… that holiness, that magic, had not the formality and discipline of the abbey. It was the magic of chaos.

  Of a sudden, a cold vision was upon me. For a moment, it was as though I were seeing Glastonbury as it were seen by Sir Edmund Fyche. Feeling what he felt. A sense of loss. A vacuum filled now with a sense of rage.

  It came to me that I was watched, and I spun. Began to mark dull faces in doorways and windows and the furtive parting of shutters.

  A mute fear.

  News travels apace in a small town, as does sound. As if by instinct, I fled into the back streets and the alleys. By the time I reached the street under the solid new church of St Benignus, I could hear the voices unravelling like shrill ribbons. And then ‘Stop them!’

  The woman’s scream bringing me up sharp, flattened against a flimsy wall of bared wattle, peering with caution around its corner. The air down here was murked with smoke from morning fires. Figures dancing in it, agitated like puppets, under the new church tower.

  ‘Stay back!’ A voice like a scourge. ‘Next one moves goes with us.’

  Edging to the end of the wall, choking back a cough, I saw a score of people: goodwives and children and old men lining the street, as if for a parade.

  In the road, I saw two men holding a third, an older man struggling vainly against them. As I watched, a man in a leather jerkin arose from behind, on the steps of a house, and appeared to strike him several times with a short stick, and he crumpled to the cobbles, as if his strings were cut.

  ‘ Jes – Stop!’

  The beaten man, once down, tried to roll away. It was Dr Borrow. A foot seemed aimed at his exposed head. Me screaming, starting forward.

  ‘Stop this! Stop it now, you bastards, in the Queen’s name!’

  A silence. The boot frozen in the air.

  ‘Stay out of it.’ Broken teeth framed in greying beard. ‘Whoever the fuck you are.’

  A glimpse of blade half pulled from the leather jerkin. Much attention on me now, squirmings in the smoke, and I saw that there were five of them, and I was in deepest shit for the townsfolk knew me not and would make no move to save me.

  ‘We’re the law, fellow,’ the leather man said. ‘You don’t even think to fool with us.’

  Found myself standing alone in the road and shrugging.

  ‘And I’m Dr John, of the Queen’s Commission. Rode here with Sir Peter Carew. If this man’s sorely hurt, I’ll see it comes back on you. All of you. You understand?’

  Watching out of the side of an eye as Matthew Borrow dragged himself away.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Let him go.’

  My voice low, but it seemed to carry. I felt an unaccustomed calm in me. I stared at the man in the leather, able, somehow, to hold the silence for long moments before I spoke again.

  ‘You’ll walk away now, all of you. Or you’ll be back before you know it, to your old life of stale crusts and petty thieving.’

  Maybe it was the tone – a tone I hardly knew – but he very nearly did step back, his eyes swivelling, as if I’d made a move on him. Then he shook his head.

  ‘’Tis your word, friend. Your word against mine – and his -’ thumb jerked toward his companions. ‘And his.’

  ‘You count for nothing,’ I said quietly. ‘Any of you. You’re no more than a hired mob. Expendable.’

  I doubt he understood the word, and although my face was unshaven, my apparel in disarray, he’d marked an element of threat and a confidence that even I could not explain. He sneered, but his eyes would no longer meet mine. At length, he sniffed, pushing the blade back into his jerkin, while I stood and waited and felt… felt apart from me. The dust rising. It was as if I stood in the air, looking down on this scene and all the poor houses and rubbish-strewn yards.

  ‘Piss off,’ I said. ‘Before I think to remember your faces.’

  The man in leathers signalled briefly to his companions and made to push roughly past me, and I didn’t move and caught his shoulder hard with mine, which was painful, but I felt a curious elation as he stumbled.

  Resisting the urge to rub my shoulder, I watched his hands as he straightened up, but the dagger didn’t reappear. Looking straight ahead, oblivious of him, I saw a young man watching me, as if puzzled and, for a moment, I was also puzzled for I’d seen him before, though not in jerkin and hose.

  Two women, one of them Joan Tyrre, were helping Matthew Borrow up the steps to his house, but he clearly had no wish to go in. He was looking up the street past the church, his right arm hanging like an empty scabbard.

  I went to him.

  ‘Dr Borrow, what in God’s name was this about?’

  He began to cough. The woman with Joan Tyrre turned to me.

  ‘They was outside at dawn, sir, banging on the door, demanding to search the premises.’

  ‘Bazzards,’ Joan said.

  ‘Take him inside, Joan,’ the woman said. ‘Do what you can, I’ll be with you now, Matthew.’ Her accent was of Wales, the south. She turned to me. ‘I live across, by there. Vicar’s wife. I saw them go in. Had him up against the wall they did, before the door was full open.’

  ‘But they know him. He probably healed their-’

  ‘No,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘They don’t know him. These are not men of Glaston. The people here don’t know any of them.’

  No surprise. Some men would travel miles to join a hue and cry, just for the chase and the violence of it and what they might steal, who they might rape.

  ‘The town’s overrun with them, it is,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘They was in the taverns last night through the storm. Dozens of them.’


  ‘Bazzards,’ Joan said.

  ‘Dozens?’ I followed the vicar’s wife down into the street. ‘What did they want here?’

  She looked at me, with uncertainty. A stout woman, fawn-coloured hair under the coif.

  ‘It weren’t no normal night, Master. My husband, the vicar, he’s been at the altar since first light, praying for forgiveness. The weight of sin lies heavy on us all.’

  ‘Joe Monger,’ I said, ‘will vouch for me. What did they want here, Mistress?’

  ‘They got what they wanted,’ she said. ‘But ’twasn’t enough. Well, they knowed he wouldn’t take it quietly, and when he come running out after her, they laid about him. ’Twasn’t his fault she was bred from his loins.’

  ‘Beg-’

  ‘Why she came back I’ll never know.’

  ‘Who?’ It was as if cracks were forming in the sky; I almost seized her by the shoulders. ‘Tell me.’

  ‘They must’ve been watching the house, all night, all I can think.’

  The sky began to fall.

  She said, ‘You didn’t see them take her?’

  ‘Christ…’

  She stared at me, appalled at my profanity and I wanted to shake her, shake out all the false piety which had replaced thought and reason.

  ‘Tell me!’

  My whole head felt to be alight, and I think she saw the madness in my eyes and backed away. I saw the young man again, watching us, and realised it was Brother Stephen, the younger of the two monks who’d been with Fyche when first I’d met him, on the tor.

  The vicar’s wife pushed straying hair back under her coif.

  ‘Said she- Well, we heard her, we all did. Shouting down the stairs as how she’d go quietly if they left her father alone. ’Course, soon as they had her out of sight…’

  I turned to look up the street, the gathering of people dispersing now. Felt my mouth moving but it could shape no words.

  ‘En’t fair for a man to get beaten for the sins of his daughter,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘Is it?’

  I stared at her.

  ‘Sins?’

  ‘She never said they was wrong when they read out the charge to her face. When they said she was a witch and a murderer, she never said they was wrong. Folks here, they’ve seen this coming – a young woman who thinks she can walk a man’s path when she should be married and keeping a man’s home.’