by Phil Rickman
‘Did you know by then of Siôn’s… qualities?’
She shook her head.
‘We came down the border, village to village, for some years. For some time I had work caring for the small daughters of a widowed gentleman who paid a village woman to look after Siôn by day. It seemed a good situation until I learned that I was expected to marry him. He was older than my father, and I… Anyway, it was back on the road until the money was all gone.’
I waited.
‘Then another rich man took us in.’
Looking at her, was it any surprise? All the rich men would be waiting in line.
‘He gave me money and offered me a house to live in. In Presteigne.’
‘Generous,’ I said.
‘It was a good dwelling, behind one of the clothing workshops. Too good to be given without demands on my… time.’
They were walking out of town when a man and his family stopped and gave them a ride on their stock cart. Pedr Morgan, shepherd of Pilleth, returning from taking fat lambs to market. They’d spent the night in his stable. She’d asked if there was anywhere she might find work and somewhere to live for a while.
‘The rest… is of small import. Save that it took time. The people here are slow to befriend a stranger. But at least there are no rich men, save Master Price. Rich men have not been good for me.’
‘Nor poor men, it sounds like.’
‘Except for Pedr Morgan.’
Who had lost his finest fleecing shears – must have fallen off the cart in one of the fields, he had no idea which. Been searching for a fortnight and more. Taking Anna’s advice, he’d shown his old pair to Siôn Ceddol, who had found the missing shears within an hour. Within a week, he’d found two new springs in the hillside. Wells were sunk, the Ceddols given food and offered dry barns to sleep in. And then Anna Ceddol had happened upon the Bryn, where nobody wanted to live and could be hers, for nothing.
And then Siôn Ceddol had found the thigh bone. The first of hundreds of body parts.
‘Where’s he gone?’ I said.
All the time she’d been talking, the red hat had been bobbing above the yellowing grass. No sign of it now.
‘He won’t be far away,’ she said. ‘Where did you put the bone? You might as well tell me.’
I told her I’d gone up to the little church, finding it empty. And then, walking around the side, had come upon…
‘Oh Jesu,’ Anna Ceddol said.
Already she was running up the hill, lifting her skirts, her breath coming hard.
I caught her up.
‘Mistress, it was the best test of him I could think of. A place he’s not used to going – a place he might avoid – though quite close. I needed to know how—’
‘I thought you understood!’
It was almost a scream. The most emotion I’d seen her show, and made me sick to my heart.
‘Listen,’ I said, running alongside of her, panting. ‘Please… I think I do understand. I think your brother possesses rare natural skills of a kind which are yet… fully explicable by emerging science. I’d like to… to help him develop them.’
‘That’s not possible.’
She stumbled on, the mist gathering more densely around us. Her head was lifted to the obscured sky, and her lips were moving in what looked to be rapid prayer, as we came up to the church’s grey walls. The tower was darkly garlanded in mist which seemed to hide no sun, trees bending away into the sloping churchyard. A cawking of crows and ravens, intimate in the fog, and, mingled with them, a kind of liquid wailing which sent Anna Ceddol, sobbing in relief, forward in a rush, to follow the church wall to the holy shrine of Our Lady of Pilleth.
I’d been in a hurry when I’d brought the bone and now saw the shrine and holy well as if for the first time: the green-slimed rocks, the steps down to the spring-fed pool, the stone wall built around it making it look like an open tomb.
On her ledge against the church walls, the mother of our saviour was smirched by the grime of neglect. Abandoned. Behind the body of the church, almost certainly older in its origins, the shrine of the holy virgin had been given back to nature.
And the bone given back to Siôn Ceddol.
He sat with his legs overhanging the pool, rocking from side to side, the dripping thigh bone in his arms, a gurgling in his throat.
He could, I suppose, have found it by accident, but why would he even come this way? And I’d hidden it close to the edge of the well, where bushes concealed the shallow water, and covered it over with silt and sodden leaves.
It was conclusive enough for me. I turned to his sister.
‘I do understand him. I know what he does.’
As if this were all that mattered.
Oh, the blindness of science.
I went down to the holy well, where rough steps sank towards the water, the mist gathered above it like a soiled veil. Siôn Ceddol clutched his bone to his chest and looked up at me as though he’d never seen me before and snarled, his face twisting like to a gargoyle’s.
And then…
‘He makes mockery of God!’
Christ, no.
Turning slowly to see the rector, in his long black coat. Everything happening as though darkly ordained for my undoing.
‘He is a walking blasphemy,’ Matthew Daunce said.
Anna Ceddol’s eyes closed, her shoulders falling, the shawl dropping to her elbows. Oh, dear God, oh, Christ, what had I done? What had I set in train here?
‘No,’ I said. ‘You know not what you’re saying.’ I stood up. ‘Mistress Ceddol. It’s best if you go. And the boy.’
Her eyes moved from the rector to me, and she took the boy’s arm and pulled him to his feet. He writhed, and she held him and the bone and dragged him away and looked at me.
‘Please,’ I said. ‘Go.’
‘You also.’ The rector’s face was a ball of white light in the mist. ‘Now I know who you are. You are not wanted here. You’re filled with dark sprites. The filth oozes from you.’
I said nothing. Watched the Ceddols backing away, Anna dragging the boy with his thigh bone bumping off the trees, leaving me staring into the rector’s pointing, rigid finger.
‘Go with your whore and her demonic sibling.’ His forefinger twisting as if to bore a hole between my eyes. ‘Go on! Before I call upon the Lord God to hurl you out.’
‘No,’ I said.
The word emerging fainter than I’d wanted, for I found I had no breath. Could almost see it leaving me, fading into the mist as, from the woods below the church, the horrific, faerie, vixen shriek of Siôn Ceddol tore the morn into dark strips.
XXXIII
The Single Eye
DUDLEY HAS TRIED several times to meet the single eye of Prys Gethin, determined to send back the curse to its source by force of will.
Like most of those around the Queen, he’s seen the advantages in a mild study of practical magic and is prepared for an exchange of black chemistry across the already tense courtroom.
But never once does he entrap the Welshman’s gaze.
Gethin stands limply in a corner of the prisoner’s dock, which is close to the centre of the courtroom, hands manacled behind him, two armed guards his companions in the wooden pen, the jury seated along the wall to his right.
Access to the court, not surprisingly, is limited. Dudley has gained his place by following Roger Vaughan into the attorneys’ enclosure. Five of them in there, with their books of notes. Hard to see what function they each perform, but the judge will have his reasons. Sir Christopher Legge is nothing if not coldly efficient, and such men as him, Dudley freely admits, are necessary.
The law is not about humanity.
Already, the rough-beamed former barn has taken on an air of London. Banners are hung on the wall behind the judge’s bench of green oak, reflecting the Queen’s Majesty, a royal authority. Something to be feared.
Yet it’s all too big for this petty affair, and Dudley is tormented with suspicion
.
The judge’s bench rises several feet higher than the attorneys’ to its right and the seats to its left which soon begin to be occupied by a handful of men who Vaughan says are the JPs from Radnorshire and neighbouring counties.
‘Come to see how it’s done?’ Dudley whispers. ‘How real justice is administered?’
‘Certainly, no one will have seen it done like this before,’ Vaughan tells him. ‘A trial here rarely takes longer than half an hour. Twenty cases might be heard in a morning. I’m thinking this will go on most of the day.’
God’s bollocks, Dudley thinks. Only a royal trial matches this.
He draws in a steadying breath and tries again to catch the eye of Prys Gethin, but Gethin is looking down, his face without expression. Has he been tortured, Dudley wonders, for the names of his fellow brigands in Plant Mat? Is he cowed from a night of beatings?
Nothing evident.
Outside, the sound of a massing of people, a dull roar, but in here the public gallery along the back wall is big enough only for about two dozen – Dudley marking one of them at once: Thomas Jones of Tregaron. Why is this bastard here? What’s his interest? Who let him in?
‘What have they told you, Vaughan?’
‘I’m a child in this. They tell me nothing. Only ask me questions about local matters and how people feel about them.’
They are at one end of the attorneys’ bench and Vaughan glances warily towards the other, where one of the older lawyers might only appear to be consulting his notes.
Dudley gets the message and keeps quiet, observing a man in a bishop’s mitre, attended by two clerics, entering through the main doors and approaching the bench, where two men in dark robes are arranging large books before the judge’s throne.
The bishop inclines his head and… hell, it’s John Scory of Hereford. They’ve brought the Bishop of Hereford here to represent God. Whose judgement is yet final, of course, in an English court. As if to confirm this, the morning sun at last breaks through, filling one of the high windows, and the air shimmers with dust motes.
The bishop goes out again. A robed usher enters, calls for silence and for every man to stand, and there’s a communal shuffling, and then Sir Christopher Legge slips in through a small Gothic-pointed door behind the judge’s bench.
Only after the prayers to a just God are delivered and the charges read out, is Prys Gethin’s red-stubbled chin seen to rise from his chest.
And through witchcraft did bring about the deaths of Thomas Harris and Hywel Griffiths in the county of Radnorshire on the night of September 20th, in the year of Our Lord 1560.
There were other charges relating to the stealing of cattle. Enough, on their own, to stow Gethin in the deepest cell for many a long year. Perhaps even hang him.
‘How do you plead, Master Gethin?’
Legge barely glancing at the accused. The sunbeams from the high windows create dusty cloisters in the air above the dock and the jury box.
A silence. Legge looking mildly irritated.
‘What have you to say, Master Gethin? If you wish to make plea in your own tongue, we have an interpreter.’
Glancing at Roger Vaughan.
Prys Gethin looks the judge full in the face.
‘I’ll not require an interpreter, my Lord, having spent considerable time in England. I plead not guilty to all charges.’
Legge nods. What else would he expect? The prisoner clears his throat.
‘And if I may be permitted to say, at this early stage, my Lord, my name is not Gethin but Gwilym Davies, gentleman farmer of Carmarthen. Something I’ve been trying to tell your minions, who seem strangely predisposed not to listen.’
Dudley sits up hard and, for just a moment, his eyes meet the prisoner’s one eye, where he sees laughter flaring like raging flames.
XXXIV
Adversary
SUCH WAS THE density of the fog now, it was as though the rector and I were set in wax. His body was like to a scarecrow’s, but his face shone as marble. I looked at him and saw an effigy from a tomb dressed in cast-out apparel, and his eyes were lit, I’d swear, with madness.
The air was grown thick as a damp, grey blanket around the forlorn shrine. The walls of the church were now as far as I could see. Shivering in my cheap jerkin, I felt that this was no longer a normal autumnal mist but a fogging of the senses. I breathed in its bitterness and spoke with insistence.
‘Let me tell you… about Siôn Ceddol…’
‘There is nothing’ – his voice coming back at me like a horsewhip – ‘that you can tell me about Siôn Ceddol. Nothing that will change my opinion of him as an inhuman carrier of demons, who should never have been born into this world.’
‘You’re wrong.’
‘Who are you to tell me—?’
‘What Siôn Ceddol does,’ I said, ‘religion has no bearing upon it.’
‘Religion has a bearing on everything. Are you a fool as well?’
‘As well as what?’
Standing at the top of the steps, where Siôn Ceddol had sat, my breath was coming harder. If a place of healing is a place of inherent power, there was no sense of healing here now. Only the power, and that was a cold power with none of the promise of transcendence implied by an old sacred site. Within the quaking mist, I was aware of an ancient conflict, shafts of darkness and light twisting like blades.
‘As well as what?’ I said quietly. ‘Say it.’
‘I shall not. You know what you are and appear to live with it. But I don’t have to. I do not have to tolerate your presence here. Get yourself away from my church, conjuror.’
‘There,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it?’
‘Get out of here!’
His narrow body jerking in fury, elongating like a shadow.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not before I tell you the truth about Siôn Ceddol.’
He’d turned away from me, so that I was speaking to his back.
‘How much do you know about water divining?’
‘Of the devil,’ he told the fog.
I shook my head with confidence.
‘A human faculty, known since early times, which may soon be explained by science. But only now are scholars finding it can be applied to more than the finding of water. Though the fact that Siôn Ceddol can find water as well as bones is surely proof—’
‘That he’s riddled with demons. Don’t waste my time.’
I would not give up. Spoke to the rector’s back about the great natural philosophers – Paracelsus, whom he’d have heard of as a healer, even if he disapproved. And the German, Georgius Agricola, of whom he probably would be ignorant.
‘This is the man who’s become the best known diviner in Europe. Who began with water, but then extended his art to finding metals and ore for mining. Using the same fork of hazel, which twisted and turned in his hands when he stood over an underground spring.’
I’d learned about Agricola at Louvain and, of course, had tried it myself, to no avail, before sending a report on it to Cecil, suggesting he might strike a bargain with one of the German experts to establish a mining enterprise in England. Cecil had seemed interested, but I’d heard nothing since and assumed he’d dispatched spies to Europe in the hope of acquiring the knowledge for no cost.
‘You don’t see it, do you?’ Daunce said. ‘You do not see the obvious. A demon enters a man and gives him knowledge he could not otherwise possess. Causing his limbs to move on their own. Snatching his body from the reins of his mind. I’ve watched that creature, seen its eyes go white as its hands burrow in the earth to bring up the dead.’
‘It’s becoming known that the mind can be attuned to whatever it needs to unearth.’
‘And what if there is no mind?’ His rage throwing him back to face me. ‘The brain of that monstrous boy will ever be in ruins, and ruins are where demons walk unchecked.’
Turning away his head again, in contempt. It was like talking to the rocks. But at least I’d told him what I
believed to be the truth; maybe he’d think about it.
Though probably, he wouldn’t.
I said wearily, ‘What are you doing here, Daunce? You hate this place. You distress its people. They’re not theologians eager to embrace the rigid tenets of Lutherism. They’re not going to change their ways with a snap of the fingers.’
‘The word of God will change their ways.’
It had long seemed to me that the word of God as filtered through a Puritan’s rigid liturgy would change nothing for the better.
I thought of the boy who hanged himself because he could see no future here. Who might normally have gone to his priest for advice. And the old man who did go to Daunce, with his fears of night walkers and was told it was the devil making him see what was not there.
I said, ‘Does Bishop Scory know of your… way of thinking?’
But if I thought to put him in fear…
‘Scory? That heretic? A man who worships the lewd and the sacrilegious in a secret chamber in the Cathedral itself?’
I realised he must mean Scory’s treasured map of the world, Scory himself having said some canons had been in fear of it and wanted it burned. Daunce, unsurprisingly, must have been one of them. I didn’t pursue this, but I’d not give up.
‘What progress can we ever make if we put everything we don’t understand at the door of the devil? If a man sees the ghost of his dead wife and we tell him, that was not your wife, that was an image wrought by the devil to torment you…’
‘The truth is not always easy to face,’ he said calmly. ‘But faced it must be.’
‘And there can be no ghosts of the dead because the Lutheran faith has decided there’s no purgatory?’
‘All papist myth and must be revealed as such. Stripping away these fondly held archaic beliefs is bound to cause a small period of pain, before the clear light is seen.’
Well, of course, he’d see it as a challenge, a mission. Slicing through all the layers of the place with the clean, cold butcher’s blade of the new Puritanism.
I glanced at the statue of the Virgin in her grotto in the rocks above the water, marking the green slime on her brow and her robes all smirched with slug-trails and dead insects. Whatever power was here now, the Virgin was no longer the source of it.