The Bones of Avalon

by Ormond House

  Of course, even in Glastonbury, she was still thought a little mad, this bird-boned woman building her rude shelter on the tor. The difference being that these people, who had grown up with divers kinds of madness, at least found her harmless. Notably Cate Borrow, who’d taken her in and then found her work with an old woman of some means, who’d died not long afterwards, leaving Joan a little money, enough to get by for a while without recourse to a misuse of her abilities.

  But when it ran out, Joan, encouraged as ever by the voices in her head, had turned again to the faerie. And to the tor, where lived the king of the Faerie. And, having heard at the market about the dust of vision, she’d gone, as Joe Monger had told me, back to Cate Borrow.

  ‘Why else was I come here, look, if not summoned by the Lord Gwyn?’

  Joan cackling, then springing up for another taste of her stew. When she sat down again, I made no attempt to hurry her. Oft-times, unusual talents are to be found among those cast out by society. When I was at Cambridge, one of my bolder tutors took me to a hovel in the fens, there to consult with a wild-eyed old man said to be possessed of the ability to summon the spirit of Hereward the Wake and speak with his voice in the old Saxon. The hovel stank to heaven, and the man was clearly deranged in his mind… yet I heard him speak in a younger man’s voice and knew enough of Anglo-Saxon to translate his words of glee at ever evading the Normans by becoming near invisible in the marshes.

  And so to the tor at All Hallows.

  ‘What happened?’ I said softly. ‘Can you tell me?’

  ‘Dunno.’ Her eye glancing away at a strange angle. ‘Dunno.’

  I said, ‘Joe Monger spoke of me, did he?’

  You’ze a good man. I feels that.

  ‘Nothin’ happened, Master,’ Joan said. ‘You gettin’ it? Nothin’.’

  I tried again.

  ‘The farmer… Moulder? He told the court at Cate’s trial that you’d been howling to the moon. Something like that. This was before Cate said she was alone, and Moulder told the court that the others must therefore have been spirits.’

  ‘’Twas me and her, was all,’ Joan said. ‘We never done no howlin’. We was quiet. Quiet as the dead. Her showed me how to sit, look.’

  ‘What about the potion?’

  ‘Potion, Master?’

  ‘The potion of the dust of vision.’

  ‘Never gived it me. You gettin’ this?’ Joan’s eye all over the place now. ‘Her never fuckin’ gived it me.’

  ‘Then what…?’

  ‘Us sat an’ talked, look. Sat an’ talked till dawn. Like I en’t never talked before and never since.’

  ‘What about?’

  ‘The faerie. The voices. Her says to me the voices wasn’t the faerie. Her says the voices was just voices. Her says the Lord Gwyn and his kind wasn’t for tellin’ nothin’ to the likes o’ me. Her says if I needed someone to talk to I oughter talk to the Lord Merlin, who dealed with the faerie all his life.’

  ‘What did you think to that?’

  ‘Din’t know whadda think. Up there by the ole tower, ’twas real quiet, it being All Hallows. Her showed me how to sit. Her said all the stars was out, but I couldn’t see none of ’em. My eye… real bad by then. Only made it to the top holdin’ on to Mistress Cate’s arm, couldn’t even see the path. But we’s sittin’ there, and her’s tellin’ me ’bout what the Lord Merlin seen – all the folks and the creatures in the stars.’

  ‘The creatures…? Oh, the constellations.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. Go on.’

  ‘Her just talked, and I seen ’em in my head. The ole voices… I could still hear the voices, but they was a long way away. I felt real peaceful, look, and all I remember after that was the dawn a-comin’ up, and the mist, look, a big white mist, thick as you like, all round the hill, and when we looks down we can’t see nothin’ but white, and it’s like we’re on…’

  ‘An island? The way it used to be.’

  I was with her, dear God, I was there.

  ‘But the sky’s all bright like gold over us, what I could see of it through the weepin’. Oh, I wept ’an wept, Master Lunnonman. All the tears that come out o’ my one eye, ’twas like the Blood Well in full flow. Never wept like that, not even when I was a babby, and Mistress Cate, she got her arms round me, and I’m broke up, broke into bits. And then her says, “Look… look, Joan”.’

  Joan half risen from her chair, looking down at the fire.

  ‘All the mist was a driftin’ away, and her’s goin’, “See, Joan, see the fishes, see the eagle. See the stars ”.’

  ‘Looking down?’

  I felt the building turning about me like a great millwheel, a grinding of the mind.

  ‘And did you? Did you, Joan?’

  Joan Tyrre gazed up at the smoke spiralling up the hole in the ceiling.

  ‘No, Master,’ she said. ‘But I d’zee most everythin’ else.’

  I could scarce restrain myself from running out, down the street, back to the George, to seize Leland’s notebook.

  Out of the mouths of mad women and children.

  There’s a hound… and a bird, with tail fanned?

  Yes, and even noblemen. My God!

  ‘Wazzat?’ Joan had sprung up again, scuttling across to the door and flinging it open. ‘Come out! Come outer there, you evil bazzard!’

  I was up and at the door. Benlow stood there in the middle of the outer stable, the chickens flying up, Benlow’s hands up to protect his face as Joan threw something at him.

  ‘Spyin’ again!’ Joan screamed. ‘You fuckin’ shitlicker. Out!’

  Benlow had retreated to the doorway, straw sticking to his green and yellow slashed doublet.

  ‘I been waiting for you to come back to me, my Lord. I can help you, see, I can help you find what you want.’

  ‘He’s a lyin’ bazzard,’ Joan said. ‘You don’t want nothin’ to do with him.’

  ‘I can help you.’ Benlow’s voice was hoarse. ‘I know who you are, and I can help you.’

  ‘Out! Get your sorry arse out of my house!’

  There was a wafting in the air, and I saw that Joan Tyrre gripped a rusting sickle. Took another slash at Benlow and he ducked out of the door.

  ‘I mean it, my lord. You come see me.’

  When he was gone, Joan turned back to me, in the doorway, the sickle held to her chest.

  ‘You stay away of him, Master. Snitchin’ bazzard, he is. Anybody lower in this town than me, then surely ’tis he. Stay away.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, ‘I probably will.’

  A mistake. Though how could I have known it, all alight as I was then, with vision?

  Quelling my excitement for a while, for I’d come here for information.

  ‘Cate Borrow,’ I said.

  ‘Gived me my eye back, look.’

  I nodded.

  ‘Her and the Lord Merlin. Sees all now, this eye. Him’s better’n two eyes.’ Joan’s good eye glittering in the gloom. ‘A holy saint, that woman. Gived me my eye back, lost her own life. A holy martyr!’

  ‘And never gave you the dust.’

  ‘No need for it. Had her own magic.’

  ‘What did Matthew Borrow say?’

  ‘The doctor? Her said not to tell him.’

  ‘But he’d know anyway, if he was there. Would he not?’

  ‘Doctor weren’t there.’

  ‘But Joe Monger said- did not the three of you go up?’

  ‘Doctor weren’t there. Just us two and the Lord Merlin.’

  ‘Mistress Tyrre,’ I said. ‘What did Nel know of this? Does she know you were not given the dust of vision? Has she known from the beginning?’

  ‘Mistress Cate, her said to tell nobody. So I never did. Not till the storm come, and I knew ’twas all changed.’

  ‘The storm? The storm of last week?’

  ‘Her come to me.’

  ‘Nel… she came?’

  Joan Tyrre will take me in. It’s no more t
han a hovel, but better than a dungeon.

  I’d thought, the way things had turned out, that she’d gone at once to her father’s house, but Joan told me now that she hadn’t left here till close to dawn.

  ‘How was she? How was her mood?’

  ‘Mood? Oh, happy. For all they was lookin’ for her, her was happy as I’ve seen her since her was a young ’un. We sat and we talked for two hour or more…’

  ‘And you told her about the tor.’

  ‘Her said why wasn’t I out a trailin’ ole Gwyn, and I telled her ’bout Merlin and Mistress Cate.’ Joan laughed. ‘Her thought when I said Merlin I muster meant the doctor.’

  ‘And did you tell her… about Merlin’s secret?’

  She looked at me, her head cocked on one side.

  ‘Merlin’s treasure,’ I said. ‘The vision of heaven.’

  But she had no understanding of what I meant.

  I patted her arm.

  ‘Thank you,’ I said. ‘Thank you, Joan.’

  She beamed.

  ‘’Twill come, Master! Never fear.’

  ‘Um…?’

  ‘You be a late starter, but you’ll make up for that, look. You’ll marry…’ She began counting on her fingers. ‘Once… twice… thrice? Holy Lord, thrice it is! And the third – listen to me now – the third will be the finest match of all, and you know some’ing?’ She leaned forward, her exposed eye seeming to gather all the light in the place. ‘Her en’t barely born yetawhile. En’t barely born! Fine young flesh! Think on that, Master Lunnonman.’

  XLVI

  The Vision of Heaven

  The distant sea was lit the dull metallic grey of a discarded breastplate upon a battlefield, and all the land… was it changed forever?

  And me?

  I’d not slept for over a day, eaten not even communion bread. And now something was set out before me that I was not sure I could believe. Either I was at the heart of a great delusion or at my life’s turning point.

  Dudley and I standing atop the tor. I was in no doubt that Fyche could see us, and cared not a toss if he did.

  ‘I see the fishes,’ Dudley said. ‘ Do I see the fishes? Whereas the eagle… made more sense in the notebook.’

  ‘It’s also described as a Phoenix, in some way representing Aquarius the water-carrier. Follow the lines of the hills, how they curve. Not so much the carrier as the vessel.’

  He couldn’t see it. Neither, in truth, could I, though already it burned in my soul. To know the truth we’d have to be higher, far higher. Flying like…eagles.

  I’m flying.

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

  The vision of heaven. Glimpsed when I was made of air and walked in my night garden, tending the stars with my hands. In the moments when I felt I almost knew His mind. Had I? Had that happened, or was it a false memory?

  ‘John?’

  ‘Mercy,’ I said.

  There were few men of his status likely to be more receptive than Dudley to this intelligence, yet I wished to heaven that it were she who was with me now. She who, on hearing that stormy night what Joan Tyrre had to say, would surely have understood, forged the links. And then, heedless of the dangers, would have gone to her father, slipping through the dawn streets to ask what he knew of the great secret… Matthew Borrow, atheist, practical man who, if he knew at all, had thought so little of it that he’d buried it with his wife, considering it more trouble that it was worth. Merlin’s secret. Buried.

  Not any more.

  We sat down on the edge of the tor’s small plateau, maybe where Joan Tyrre had sat with Cate Borrow, and I could scarce keep a limb still. If I truly had been a conjurer, then I might have summoned the spirit of mad John Leland to join us. But at least I had his notebook. At least I knew his mind.

  And so began to talk of Arthur, said by some to be descended from Brutus the Trojan, first King of Britain. Arthur had been Leland’s passion. Everywhere he went on his itinerary he’d discover more of his hero’s footprints, memorably proclaiming that the earthworks around the hill at Cadbury – not a long ride from here – made it, unquestionably, the site of Arthur’s Camelot.

  ‘So we can see why he spent so much time in Somersetshire,’ I said, ‘and why he returned here after the fall of the abbey. It was all about Arthur. ’

  ‘Arthur’s bones, perchance?’

  ‘Nothing so prosaic. This town stands for the magic side of Arthur. Here’s the place to which he was carried by barge, by fey women, either to die or to lie until his country hath need of him. And this – where we’re sitting – was where lived his magician. Merlin. Who came before Arthur and gave to him, in particular, the round table. Do you begin to see now?’

  ‘In truth,’ Dudley said, ‘no.’

  ‘Nel Borrow said her mother knew nothing of the Holy Grail but had once said that some of Arthur’s round table was still to be found here. Clearly, this must have become part of local legend, because Benlow the bone-man offered to sell me a piece of it.’

  I reached into a bare patch of earth and scratched up some soil, holding it out on the palm of my hand.

  ‘In truth, this is a piece of it.’

  Bringing out the hide-bound notebook, then, opening it up and turning it on end, so that a drawing of what had appeared to be a serpent now looked more like a swan with open beak.

  ‘These are the creatures of the stars… the signs of the Zodiac – Pisces, Aquarius, Libra… I could draw them all in my sleep. Yes, they look different here – the shapes are not as recent astronomers have drawn them. Which is why it took me so long to work it out. These may be much older versions.’

  ‘On the… ground?’

  ‘The signs of the Zodiac created upon the land… giant signs, in a circle which appears to be ten miles or more across. Marked out in physical features of the landscape – in the shape of hills and the paths of rivers and roads, fields, hedgerows. This… is the great secret of Glastonbury, passed on by Merlin the Druid, guarded by the monks.’

  ‘But who-?’

  ‘ I don’t know. The ancient people. The old Britons. Maybe the people who were here when Pythagorus was alive. Or earlier… when Hermes Trismegistus walked the earth. The very builders of the landscape… perchance with the help of the cosmos itself-’

  ‘Calm yourself, John, you’ll have a seizure.’

  ‘Mercy.’ I swallowed, leaning over with hands on knees, could barely breathe. ‘A… a celestial mirror. The earth here – the holiest earth. Dear God, it’s wondrous.’

  ‘If it’s right, my friend,’ Dudley said. ‘If it’s there. It’s just I don’t see how they could have done it. If it’s not possible for anyone to see it fully, even from the highest ground…’

  ‘You also,’ I reminded him, ‘found it impossible to see how one man might chart the land, the shapes of hills, the shape of the coastline. The point is… if it were possible to stand in one place and see the whole circle, it would be no secret. Its power lies in the knowledge of its existence… how it lives in the mind. As above, so below.’

  Of course, it would not be so obvious now as it might have been in centuries past. Hills would be eroded, rivers grown wider, some dried up.

  ‘But if it would’ve meant altering the paths made by roads,’ Dudley said, ‘and maybe changing the direction of rivers and streams… then too many people would have to know the secret, and it wouldn’t be a secret and we’d all know of it.’

  I shook my head.

  ‘Not so. Who owned all this land, or most of it? The abbey. Who decreed how it should be maintained? Who decided where roads might go, how the flat lands might best be drained… The abbot. The farmers and builders would do as the abbot decreed.’

  ‘So you’re saying this was the secret Abbot Whiting would not reveal?’

  I shrugged.

  ‘Jesu,’ Dudley said.

  ‘It was also, I’d guess, the secret that drove Leland out of his mind. Did it not bring together the two most important
things in this man’s life – the charting of the country…?’

  ‘And Arthur.’ Dudley came to his feet. ‘By the Lord God, John, what have we stumbled upon?’

  ‘We didn’t stumble upon it. We had to dig for it.’

  I looked down at the notebook, these rough sketches: the design of insanity? For all I knew I was on the same path as Leland, destined for the Bedlam.

  ‘Let’s look at this chronologically. We don’t know when it was made, but we must assume it was before the time of Christ.’

  ‘So no abbey…’

  ‘Hell, Robbie, it explains the reason for the abbey. If this was a wonder of the ancient world, an island of the stars, then surely it justifies the story of the Saviour being brought here as a child. There would’ve been a college here, where the knowledge was held and passed on by the Druids.’

  ‘Merlin?’

  ‘Merlin indeed, whoever he was. In all probability, a Druid. Someone best qualified to reveal to Arthur, when he came of age, the great celestial secret… in other words, presenting to him the round table.’

  ‘But did Arthur come before or after Christ? I mean, in Malory-’

  ‘Malory wrote stories, not history. It matters not a toss which came first, the Zodiac fits either version. Arthur comes to die in the most sacred place in all England, Christ is brought here to learn the mysteries of astrology. Joseph of Arimathea founds the abbey to guard and maintain the great Zodiac.’

  ‘But then the abbey falls…’

  ‘Which is where the darkness comes down. If we assume that the secret of the Zodiac was held only by the abbot and maybe one or two of his most trusted monks… were these the two executed with him?’

  ‘Here.’ Dudley glancing over a shoulder. ‘Here where we sit.’

  I could not but sense the agony of Abbot Whiting. Dragged up here upon a hurdle. Hanged. Cut down when not yet dead to be gutted and quartered. I looked at Dudley, saw the tightening of the muscles of his face, knew he was thinking not only of Whiting but of Martin Lythgoe.

  Neither of whom were at peace.