‘Because in your anger you are without pity. You abused love in order to take revenge.’
I knew exactly what he meant. I denied fiercely that any so-called magic was concerned in the slaughter of Odolaga’s black shepherd and his sheep, except perhaps in the hypnosis of that stage property, the eagle owl.
‘I used the skill of the hunter,’ I told him, ‘not the skill of the shaman.’
‘Yet from somewhere you have the gift.’
Molay was standing up now, his deep eyes condemning me. He was impressive as a judge handing out a sentence, but neither ex-Colonel Hollaston nor the painter of the Holy Well were in a mood to be impressed.
I said that I had no power at all beyond the concentration of the master craftsman: a prayer as he had called it. I had seen what could be effected through the trance and dancing of the shaman, and by trial and error I had found out a little of the use of the familiar: of the good which I might do by communion with Meg and of the evil which was done to me, and life around me, by Odolaga and his training of Leyalá.
‘What you feel in me is the same as you felt in Freeman, to whom you released Meg’ I added. ‘It is a gift from my ancestors and not of my making. My grandfather had it. My great-great-grandfather had it, and we all were named Alfgif.’
‘I thought your name was Alfred,’ he said.
‘Alfred means Wise as an Elf. Alfgif is Gift of the Elf.’
‘What has that to do with it?’
‘I am told the elf is my valley. See it in any shape you like! I have never wished it to appear to me. But I too was taught to sing in silence.’
I must assume that I was possessed. Having no better spell, I used the incantation of tiger brother to call a spirit of the ancestors. I had closed my eyes as I rocked to and fro in the trance, so that I could neither see Molay nor any result, but on and on I chanted until I felt the Presence. When I opened my eyes and stood still except for shaking, Meg had left his shoulder and had begun to dance.
‘And now what shape did you give it?’ I asked.
‘I saw it in the shape you gave it.’
‘And what was that?’
‘Gentle and laughing and of the earth, Alfgif.’
It was the first time he had used my name. He asked me to tell him exactly what had happened on the slopes of Aquelarre. I gave him the story, from the first sight of Izar Odolaga to the making of the bow and the stampede of the terrified sheep. I fear there must have been some pride in my voice besides regret.
‘You said my Columns of the Sun was an invincible prayer,’ I reminded him, ‘and asked if I did not know it. I did not, but I found it was. So it is true that I had no more reason to fear Odolaga. His sending had failed. You must know by now what that was.’
He answered that he did know, that Odolaga in his desolation had confessed all to him.
‘Very well! And then the woman I love fell ill. Her soul was captured, as a shaman would say. Was it surprising that I believed it was another of Odolaga’s telepathic tricks and that I set out to warn him that my powers could be as dangerous as his?’
‘You were wrong to blame him.’
‘I know. It was you who first made me see that I myself could be responsible and now I am sure I was. All the same I think justice has been done—if one can set the beauty of my Holy Well against the beauty of his dear familiar.’
Molay lay back on his elbows in that unspoken courtroom of the glade and gestured to me to sit on the stump. He said that at least my motive had been more generous than Odolaga’s, that I had acted from love and he only from fear for himself.
‘So now you shall be the judge. Ask whatever questions you like!’
‘Did Odolaga kill Paddy for you?’
‘He did.’
‘So you are the devil!’
‘In the sense of anguished clergy long ago, yes, I am.’
‘Is there no other devil within the Purpose?’
‘I doubt it. But if evil were personified, it would be the antithesis of love. Have you forgotten the cough of the tiger which maddened sixty sheep? Man does not need a devil. He does well enough by himself.’
I said that I found it hard to imagine him as that ancestral Horned God, when we were talking face to face and sharing the same faith.
‘I dress my mind and not my body in the innocence of the horns and tail. I do not believe that my blood or my semen will fertilise a field, but it may be that I myself can still fertilise mankind. If I cannot, if my powers fail through age, then before I infect my people with my weakness it is right to kill me and choose a successor. He is already chosen, but he is still too young for the fullness of wisdom. Nothing mysterious there, my Alfgif! Even in politics a party may decide on its future leader before he is quite fit to lead. Therefore I must live longer and one of us had to die in my place. Paddy chose to do so. I did not wish to accept his sacrifice, but as Grand Master it is my duty.’
I could not see the point of either of them being killed, and asked him to explain if he could.
‘What is the point of a soldier’s death?’ he asked.
‘His society expects it of him.’
‘Yes. You have answered your own question. And now I will put one to you. Would you die for the sake of the Christian faith?’
‘Probably.’
‘Yet you have little respect for the Church and its creed.’
‘Or for its rites.’
‘There you are wrong, for rites are a shadow of the truth. I summoned you to me by what is remembered as the harp of Orpheus. You called up a Presence as mischievous and sweet as Meg by a rite far older. You had faith that you heard. I had faith that I saw. Reality? We are fools to ask what is reality, when all we touch and see and are is empty space and energy. Within the Purpose there are rites named of earth and rites named of heaven, all intermingled in all religions and culminating in that purest and simplest of rites: the Communion of the Christian with the Purpose.’
‘For you, then, what is the Purpose?’ I asked.
‘How often there is more beauty in living things than needed for survival! Consider the peacock’s tail and the feathers of the Bird of Paradise! To attract a mate and be recognised, we are told, but that could be achieved by a fraction of the display. Consider the majestic antlers of the stag! A magnificence and nothing but a handicap. The colours of the butterfly—they have a use but not to that extent of glory. Consider the Columns of the Sun and your late Holy Well! What use to your survival or the survival of the race are those? They have only one conceivable value, and that is to the observer. What the Purpose is we cannot know, but observation must be within it. Observe this garden of the earth and understand that when you cease to observe and to love, you exist no more!’
‘Then death is the end.’
‘You miss my meaning, Alfgif. I know nothing of death except that we should not whine for immortality. Take joy in the gift of life! If the object of my life is finished with my death, I rejoice that I have been able to serve. If it is not finished, I rejoice that there is still a use for me.’
He said that was enough of preaching and remained silent. The scent of the earth was stronger than I had ever known it. Meg ran between us, caressing his face with her whiskers and then returning to my feet. I asked him to tell me about Paddy.
‘Paddy was a healer of the animals. A Robin. His coven was formed of all his friends, though few were conscious of it. He was simpler and more saintly and quicker than I. He would have seen that you could never have abused your gift as I believed you had. He said you had the makings of a leader.’
‘A shaman?’
‘A Robin. I like that happy, English name. The healer. The provider of joy.’
‘And of sendings to the innocent,’ I added, remembering Odolaga.
‘Forgive him! He acted from foolish fear, and you would not blame the beast
which charges when it cannot run. And now for this girl of yours, my strange, chaste sorcerer! It seems you can copy the attack of the carnivore but not the tempest of its mating.’
‘How do you know?’
‘Only a monk could have so much passion and remain celibate. Were you never married?’
‘For two weeks.’
‘What happened?’
‘She died in my arms.’
‘I see. Guilt, But that was not beyond psychiatrists.’
‘I’ll have none of them. I am what I am and know more than they.’
‘But your tiger brother—couldn’t he cure you?’
‘No. He said that a white larva had made its home in my wretched organ and could not conjure it to leave.’
‘I think you would not let him, Alfgif. You believed in your guilt and clung to it. But now will you let me? I can make you as a Robin of old days, whose maidens would hang wreathes of poppies on the symbol of fertility. Will you be ashamed to dance naked with me?’
I might have been, but those gentle, piercing eyes would not release mine. And there was I naked while he, stripped to the waist only, like tiger brother, raised his arms in a hieratic gesture as if he were throwing over his shoulders the skin and tail of the God.
He began to beat the ground with his feet, always circling round me face to face, and I kept time with him. What ritual I was treading out I could not know, though there were memories of the forest and memories of the eager hunting dance which I had performed for my dinner, but never for myself.
‘Your horns are spread between sky and sky, my Alfgif. You have driven away your rivals and the herd of does awaits you. As a bird dances for its mate, so must you. Tell him, Valley, to dance for grandson Alfgif! Tell him, Meg, to dance with you! As we dance, so must you.’
There was much more, but that is what I remember. He circled me, chanting, and each time he passed a young plant of broom he plucked a green twig from it like a browsing goat. In the trance of beating feet, I was aware only of his hands and eyes; nor was I conscious of the erection, being so long forgotten, until he flung the wreath that he had been twisting as if it were a quoit over a peg.
He told me to dress and have no fear.
‘Mate after mate is yours if you wish, and if you wish only for one she will never leave you. What is her name? I will call her.’
‘Rita. But she cannot receive. She would not hear you.’
‘Better so, Alfgif! In you she will find the future and in her you will find the past. Go now, and tomorrow be with her!’
‘Shall I see you again?’
‘As a passing friend it may be, with the simplicity of Paddy.’
I asked him if he really lived on the Syrian shore, as Paddy had told me.
‘Often enough, because that is where all religions meet and all traditions remain. Among my ancestors were reigning devils, or Grand Masters if you wish: Jacques de Molay, Master of the Temple, burnt for heresy; Plantagenets reverenced by Christian and Pagan alike, and true to both. It may well be that you and I are not the first of our two families who have met and prayed together.’
‘Can I drive you anywhere?’ I asked, the question sounding absurdly out of time and place. ‘How are you going?’
‘As I came, Alfgif.’
He shook hands, blessed me and was gone, vanishing with the skill of tiger brother and with only the rustle of his footsteps to show that he was most certainly passing through the trees and not above them.
September 8
I write in Oxford the last entry of this notebook, which started off as an attempt to cure induced dementia and carried on as the record of an expedition along the frontiers between illusion and reality. Since the journey is at an end, my travel diary stops like any other.
Meg and I went home, and I slept more peacefully than for weeks past. In the morning I walked down to Rita’s cottage and found her packing up books and putting the place in order. I had not seen her for four days. She thought, she said, that I was too upset over the Holy Well to come and say good-bye. I explained that I had been busy in quite another way, not painting nor grieving but learning the responsibilities of a Robin.
She reproached me with being more sunk in myself than ever.
‘And I can’t understand how you look so well since you came back from Paris,’ she added.
‘It wasn’t Paris. It was essential that Concha Pirrone should not know where I was really going.’
‘Not to Izar Odolaga!’
‘Close to him. But it’s too confused a story for now.’
‘So little is for here and now except Meg.’
I longed to tell her that she had never been out of the here and now and never would be, but it was not a moment to choose when she was rightly annoyed with me.
‘I came to ask you if you would picnic on the downs with me this evening. It will be another warm night.’
‘No, Alfgif, I can’t. I shall be busy packing.’
‘Once you asked me if I would start a coven and dance with you in the moonlight.’
‘And you said you were no good at dancing.’
‘Because my tail was still at the tailors. A white cloth, bread, wine and meat the Robin used to bring. And oysters arrived in Penminster this morning. Shall we walk up the valley from my house or would you prefer a broomstick?’
‘I will imagine the broomstick.’
‘Then you will come?’
‘Of course I’ll come.’
At sunset we walked across the bullock paradise and up the smooth breast of the downs. She was talking with forced gaiety and I felt that she regretted her decision, believing that it would only lead to another memory of the door between us which would not open. As for myself, swinging one of Ginny’s great baskets and with Meg in my pocket, I was often looking away into the even dusk like an animal bound across country for its mate and nervous of interruption, though I could not have said by whom or by what. I seemed to sense that we were accompanied, perhaps by the blessing of Julian Molay, seeking us from wherever he stabled his stallion and comforted some other secret disciple, perhaps by that which had been present the night before and was flitting along with us to look down on its home.
Rita noticed my quick glances and asked suddenly:
‘There isn’t anyone else coming?’
‘Not unless Meg has invited a guest.’
‘Shouldn’t there be thirteen in all?’
‘That’s only on high holidays.’
The valley was silver, as on that night when I met my vixen and was overcome by terror. The stream had widened into a lake of haze, stationary between the woodland and the oaks. We were above it on the short and windless grass which still held the heat of the afternoon. A Robin of old days could not have appointed a better rendezvous for his coven, since there was no path for the wanderer and the mist, down in Penminster and the valley, would have kept the cottagers at home.
I laid out the white cloth in a dry combe below the ridge and spread out the food and drink for the Maiden of the Coven. The moon turned to white the pale gold of her forearms and the wine in the glasses. Her gaiety, true or false, did not return. We might have been picnicking on a cloud, like putti above the solemnity of an Italian betrothal, reverent but with growing cheerfulness as the nectar was handed round.
When our moonlight supper was over, we were at ease as in the first days of friendship, and she was finding in this peace either comfort or resignation. She lay with her hands behind her head. The irregular rise and fall of her breasts told me that her thoughts were troubled by so much perfection which was still imperfect, and that she was near sobbing.
A moment of difficulty. I could not cross the barrier of white tablecloth, breaking our old relationship so unexpectedly that she might mistrust the truth of the new, nor could I remind her abruptly that she had come to dance wi
th me. It was Meg who saved me. I said to myself that, by God, if I had any power over Meg I should use it now! In the ears of my mind was the summons which Molay had sent across the valley, calling it the Harp of Orpheus, and I now found in it a rhythm which I stroked and tapped out imperceptibly on Meg’s fur. She dived from my pocket, stood on hind legs to enquire, then tumbled, rolled and twisted into that waltz when one could swear she had an unseen partner.
Rita sat up to watch her, and at last I could say:
‘Come then! You too!’
It started with the bird-like flappings and posturings of modern dance and then turned into a more formal minuet in which we pirouetted under arched hands, separated and, in fun, bowed and curtsied.
‘But you are dancing as if there were music!’ she exclaimed.
Yes, I was, for rhythm remembered was clearer than ever.
‘The minstrel has come with Master Robin,’ I replied and speeded up the time.
Side by side we improvised the steps, never failing each other, sometimes with both hands joined, sometimes with my arm round her waist.
Now whether it was deliberate or whether, as she insisted later, she had tripped over the excited Meg I shall never know, but we came down on the turf together. Then the only dancing was of lips and arms and flung garments caught on the mats of thyme, and there was no doubt at all that Molay, the devil, could heal with the power of a saint.
‘And all that time you wanted me so much?’ she asked.
‘All the time.’
‘But I told you over and over again.’
‘I was afraid I should disappoint you.’
‘But how could you, my love?’
The truth was for me only, so I answered that she had been right when she said I was so seldom here and now.
‘I would not expect a Robin to be anything else. Robin—that will be my name for you always.’
‘And you must really leave the cottage tomorrow?’
‘I thought for ever,’ she said. ‘But now you must come with me, and be very near me for a day or two and bring me home again to all your family that I shall never see.’
The Sending Page 16