The Crystal Skull

by Manda Scott

  And so she did, slowly, by the light of the three candles, kneeling in the ash and smoke of his mother’s ruined farmhouse, starting at the first entry.

  ‘Twenty-sixth of December, in the year of Our Lord one thousand five hundred and eighty-eight, thirtieth in the reign of our most Soveriegne Lady, Queen Elizabeth, Monarch of England, France and Ireland.

  I, Barnabas Tythe, have this day become Master of Bede’s Colledge, Cambridge, most honoured position of owr lande. To my grate shame, my first act in this post was a lie.

  May God and my colledge forgive me, for I have performed a funeral for a living man. Cedric Owen is not dead.’

  27

  Lodgings, Trinity Street, Cambridge, 27 December 1588

  WRITTEN THIS 26TH day of December, in the year of our Lord, 1588. To Sir Francis Walsingham, from Sir Barnabas Tythe, Master of Bede’s College, Cambridge, greetings.

  It is with great regret that I inform you of the deaths, not only of your loyal servant Sir Robert Maplethorpe, but also of the traitor Cedric Owen.

  He did indeed come to my lodgings for succour as you had suggested. I went forthwith with all haste to the Master of my college to ask his assistance in taking him prisoner. Professor Maplethorpe came with armed men, intent on taking him alive, but in such we failed; he fought with a ferocity unknown to us, and had clearly been most succinctly tutored. The man who killed him has been punished for his recklessness, but not by our hand – he died of his wounds even as Owen lay bleeding his last.

  The Spaniard of whom you wrote was wounded. His body has since been dredged from the Cam and burned. On the order of the college authorities, of whom I am now Master, Owen’s corpse has been consigned to the paupers’ graves beyond the crossroads at Madingley. I searched it myself and found not one whit about it to tell us of his purpose, or even to confirm his identity, but I found in his saddle bags an item – herewith enclosed for your perusal – of quite exceptional workmanship in what I believe to be gold.

  Owen was a traitor and died fighting her majesty’s loyal servants, and thus all of his property belongs now to the Crown. I send you this now, in earnest understanding that you will know how best to deal with it.

  I would ask, however, that for the sake of the college, Cedric Owen be known to the future as a good man. It would sit ill with us to have nurtured a traitor, however unwittingly. I would not give our enemies ammunition to use against us in future centuries.

  I await your further instructions on all matters.

  I remain, sir, your most humble and loyal servant before God,

  Professor Barnabas Tythe, Master-elect of Bede’s College, Cambridge.

  * * *

  ‘Are you sure you want to give it to him?’

  The solid gold funeral mask lay on the folds of Cedric Owen’s good riding cloak. Barnabas Tythe’s fingers strayed across the clustered diamonds. He said, ‘Walsingham does not expect it, surely, nor does he need it. I could write the letter again and say that your saddle bags were empty save for a few gold coins from New Spain.’

  From his chair by the fire, Cedric Owen shook his head. ‘It is a gamble, admittedly. But if he thinks there is more, he may chase down the means of our arrival from Sluis, which would go ill with a certain Dutch smuggler flying under the flag of Portugal. I owe Jan de Groot enough already without drawing down Walsingham’s pursuivants on his head.’

  Owen spoke thinly; the bandage circling his brow successfully kept his brains from curdling, but in the two days since his injury he had found that if he gave rein to the full texture of his voice the pain in his head became unbearable.

  He said, ‘The mask will buy Walsingham a great deal of information. My hope is that he puts his remaining energies into spending the revenues it generates, not into hunting for more. How goes his health? I had heard it was not good.’

  Tythe shrugged expansively. ‘He is dying, but then so are we all. The only consolation for those who continue to suffer under his ministration is that Sir Francis is living in constant pain from stones in his kidneys and his faith will not permit him to seek a swift and painless ending by his own hand. Those of us who wish to can see it as God’s punishment on him for his evil.’

  Tythe was thinly fragile, still nursing a terror that the truth of the Christmas Day massacre might yet be exposed.

  In the chaotic aftermath of the fight outside the college, Tythe had certainly believed Owen to be dead. Fernandez de Aguilar, whose own wounds were fortunately superficial, had been alone in believing otherwise, but had not let his care for his friend overtake the necessities of the moment. He it had been who had pulped the face of Maplethorpe’s second henchman with his own cudgel, and then handed the weapon to Barnabas Tythe, ordering him to make the last three strokes that there might be some blood on his hands and hose, ‘for verisimilitude’ as the Spaniard had said.

  De Aguilar, further, had so arranged the bodies that anyone else with an eye for a fight might see how Owen, the master-swordsman, had slain Maplethorpe and one of his henchmen before losing his own sword to a cudgel. How, immediately thereafter, the traitor had taken a like weapon from the ground, allowing him to defeat the last of Maplethorpe’s men, before Barnabas Tythe, hero of the hour, had taken his knife and finally killed him.

  The good fortune of it was that the third man did bear some passing resemblance to Owen, and a few cracks with a cudgel made any close inspection unlikely. They moved swiftly to clothe him in Owen’s cloak and boots, and for the rest, the ever-stronger flurries of snow had covered the battle site, concealing any inconsistencies that might have given the lie to their tale.

  De Aguilar, then, had carried Owen to safety, sending Barnabas Tythe to convey the two parts of good news to his fellow scholars: that they were free of Maplethorpe at last, and that Cedric Owen, enemy of Walsingham, and so of the state, had been slain.

  For the greater part of Christmas Day, while Barnabas Tythe had cemented his authority on the college that he loved, Fernandez de Aguilar had set aside his popinjay’s clothes and the gold at his ear and wrapped a bandage about his own leg before tending to the unconscious Owen.

  For a man with only one arm and no medical training to speak of, he had bound the broken ribs and skull with a dexterity that Tythe envied when finally the old man returned, stamping the snow from his boots, to tell of his unopposed election as Master and the successful passing off of Maplethorpe’s thug as Cedric Owen.

  In this they had been lucky; the seasonal festivities were well under way, the choir was making ready in Bede’s College chapel and the men of the college council had better things to do than to stand in the mortuary examining bodies on the day of Christ’s Mass.

  Maplethorpe they looked at, covering their faces against the charnel-house stench. It was a duty to the dead man, and, more, a need that they could each relay afterwards the precision of the sword thrust to his chest that had killed him, and the same also to the manservant who had died immediately after. More than that they did not deign to do; the other bodies lay deeper in the oozing dark where the bracketed torches on both sides of the door barely reached.

  It was possible to see the battered face of the swordsman Cedric Owen, and to wonder at the rich stuff of his cloak, but not a man among them wished to soil his boots to study the traitor or the man he had beaten to death in closer detail. When Tythe himself, the only physician present, had hinted that there was a risk of infection from the ill humours of the dead, they were all too grateful for his offer to arrange for their appropriate burials.

  That had left the issue of Maplethorpe’s remaining henchman, who appeared to be missing, there being only two other bodies besides Cedric Owen and Maplethorpe himself. A rumour arose that shortly before his death Maplethorpe had confided to his Vice Master that the wretch was a suspect in the matter of some missing silver, and it was quickly accepted that he had seized the opportunity to flee with his ill-gotten treasure. For the preservation of the college’s good name, no hue and cry was raised. As f
or Owen’s accomplice, Tythe had taken it upon himself to have his personal servants dredge the Cam, and when they returned with a body – a not unlikely outcome, and one that Tythe had banked on – had identified it himself as the Spaniard who had accompanied Owen. The Master’s sword could not be found but that was of no great moment.

  The twelve men of the council had given vent to a collective sigh of relief at an ugly matter neatly closed, agreed a memorial to the memory of a ‘much beloved and sadly missed’ Master and unanimously voted the bloodstained hero, Barnabas Tythe, as their new Master.

  That he kept neither henchmen nor a ferociously sober college was not their first consideration in his appointment, but both factors acted greatly in his favour. They raised their glasses in a toast to his new position, granted him the professorship he should have had long before and waded home through the still-falling snow in time to take their families to the Christmas morning Service of Thanks Giving in Bede’s College chapel. The priest, roused early from bed, was able to pen a few moving lines about the dearly departed that would serve also for the funeral.

  ‘What do we do now?’ asked the new Master of Bede’s of his guests.

  ‘We wait,’ said Owen. ‘We eat, we keep silent when men pass in the street below your windows and we hope most fervently that we are both fit to mount a horse and ride by the time the snow stops falling. How much of the goose is left?’

  Tythe grimaced. ‘Enough for three good meals and a broth for your friend. Her majesty may command that we eat goose in honour of the Armada’s defeat, but she is not the one who must continue to eat it for a four-night after the first meal until she wishes death and dissolution on every goose and gander in Christendom.’

  ‘Maybe she does, maybe that’s why she commanded we eat them at Christmas; so that the land might be devoid of goose and she will never be forced to eat it again. Did you know they were importing them from the Netherlands, that her majesty’s loyal subjects might not go hungry for lack of goose?’

  ‘Nothing would surprise me,’ Tythe said sourly.

  It occurred to him that his question had not been answered and, further, that this happened a lot when he spoke to Owen. ‘And if we were not using time in the discussion of poultry, how better might we use it? I, for instance, must begin the daily diary that is required of me as the new Master of Bede’s which will see me hang if I write the truth and it is discovered. What are you going to do when the snow stops falling?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  It came as a hard admission from Cedric Owen. He leaned back, looping his fingers over the curve of his knee, and directed his attention to the wavering ice-shadows on the hearth where sat his blue heart-stone.

  Presently, he said, ‘I have certain tasks to perform in this life, the first of which was to go to the New World, find the secrets of the stone and record them in such a way that only one truly wedded to the stone might find them. By the magics of the jaguar-people, Fernandez and I have together done just that; we have left in hiding in Harwich a set of volumes which will marry past to future and sometime soon we must find a safe place to hide them.’

  ‘I think—’ Tythe began.

  ‘Not here, my friend; we would not so presume on your hospitality.’ Owen made a fist, closing the possibility. ‘We will concern ourselves therewith in due course, but first, and more onerously, we must remain alive long enough to find a certain very old place, somewhere that was sacred to our forebears long before the time of Christ. To my shame, and very great distress, I know not where to look. I had hoped that the stone might direct me, but it has not done so. Without its further aid, we are rudderless ships in a storm.’

  ‘How will you recognize that which you seek?’

  ‘I have dreamed it. The first time was thirty years ago, but the dream has remained with me since.’ A flop of hair fell over Owen’s eyes, the stifled end of a move to rise. ‘It is a wild place, in a flat wooded plain with a circle of standing stones and the wind howling around. In the dreams, I see the black silhouettes of leafless trees bent against a storm and lightning in the sky, but that could be a hundred places from the southernmost coast of Cornwall to the far north of Northumberland. We cannot search them all.’

  Tythe pressed his fingers to his lips. A memory danced somewhere just out of reach, insubstantial as fog, elusive as summer trout. He was trying to see its form and substance when he became aware of the blue stone that sat so crisply on his hearth and shed its light into the room. In the space of two breaths, there was a change in the texture of the flowing blues – their boundaries had spread out to reach him.

  Barnabas Tythe watched this alchemy and felt the hairs rise along his forearms. He saw Cedric Owen’s head turn uncertainly, as might a hound’s that hears a distant echo of its master’s whistle, and then saw the whole man jerk back a little in the chair as if the whistle had come again, so close as to be deafening.

  Tythe fancied he heard something; a faint tune that played at the borders of his imaginings and was not of any instrument or voice that he had ever heard.

  Owen said, ‘Barnabas? What is it that you have forgotten?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tythe said. ‘There’s something … somebody … but I can’t remember who or—’

  It seemed to him that the blue stone turned so that its fire-lit eyes were focused directly on his. Held by that unworldly gaze, his thoughts scattered as clouds before a storm, leaving a clear blue sky where before had always been cobwebs and clutter. The stone-song became a summoning. A gateway opened and the elusive memory stepped up to meet him, sharp and clear and bright.

  Into the song-filled silence, he said, ‘I have a cousin, recently bereaved, who lives in a farmhouse near Oxford. We have not met in person since the death of Queen Mary, but we correspond twice a year on family matters. The relationship is through my mother’s side, but before the late king destroyed the monasteries my cousin’s father was retained at the rate of one gold piece per year by the late Richard Whiting, the Abbot of Glastonbury, may God rest his burned and broken soul, to maintain the ancient byways and sacred paths of the ancestors that pass through the abbey and assorted other churches and monasteries. The Catholic Church was not as ignorant of these things as the Puritans prefer to be, and my cousin’s father was the one amongst them who understood the old ways best.’

  Owen’s eyes were large as an owl’s. They fed on Tythe’s face. ‘Would your cousin’s father help us?’

  ‘If he is yet alive. He will be ninety-three in June, so it may be that he has died. If he still lives, there is no other man who knows more of the standing stone circles and the dragon-ways of England than he.’

  Tythe stood up briskly, relieved at one stroke both of the stone’s song and the burden of his guests.

  Cheerily, he said, ‘If you would travel thither, I will give you a letter of introduction to my cousin that should smooth your way. You can leave as soon as the snow stops, preferably tonight. If you and de Aguilar can ride well enough to allow you good speed, you will reach Oxford before ever my letter to Walsingham reaches London.’

  28

  Lower Hayworth Farm, Oxfordshire, 30 December 1588

  ENGLAND LAY IN a wash of melting snow. Trees dripped steadily on to grey, slush-ridden pathways. Horses stumbled and slipped on patches of hidden ice. Even at noon, it was dark as dusk; travelling at night had proved impossibly dangerous and Owen relied for secrecy on the fact that no one ventured abroad without exceptional reason.

  They came to the farmhouse in the early evening, as true night was falling. It was a newly built, prosperous-looking place, of good timber, stone and thatch in the latest design. Behind them, the countryside lay mired in grey fog. In a kennel nearby, a pair of bloodhounds belled musically. A mastiff snarled and snapped, but not yet at them.

  Ahead, a pathway of level stone led to a gate and through it to an oak door that looked built to repel an army. Smoke rose in dark ribbons from the chimney stacks and the smell of roasting meat perf
umed the damp air.

  Cedric Owen dismounted, with some difficulty. He was wet to the skin and shivering. Beside him, de Aguilar sat blue-lipped on his horse. He kept his cloak pulled tight, as much to hide his missing arm as for what warmth it might ever have given him. He held Robert Maplethorpe’s stout, plain blade in his hand.

  ‘Knock,’ he said. ‘We have nothing to lose. If Tythe’s cousin turns us down and we sleep out of doors another night, we will both die.’ He essayed a feeble grin. ‘The warmth of hell would be a blessing after this. Do you suppose there is a cold hell reserved for those who died in wintertime?’

  ‘We haven’t come this far to die,’ Owen said, and tried to believe it. He raised the handle of his dagger and rapped it against the new wood of Barnabas Tythe’s cousin’s farmhouse door.

  He was too cold to move fast, and too blinded by the wet hair that streaked across his face to see the club that angled down at his head in time to avoid it. He heard de Aguilar shout hoarsely in Spanish and heard the scrabble of a wrenched horse on the slushy path and was trying to frame an appropriate reaction when his brains fell to water and his knees ceased to hold him up.

  He was not awake enough to be aware of the slight hands that caught him as he fell, or the shocked, delicately moulded face that stared into his own.

  The warmth in his feet was Owen’s first sense on waking, the unutterable luxury of dryness and tingling heat when he had ridden the last three days believing he would never again feel anything but cold and wet.

  He lay a while, restricting his attention to his nether regions in an effort to avoid the bruising pain in his cranium or the waxing and waning of his consciousness.