The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  Cowdray turned on his stool.

  ‘Nel… never heard you come in.’

  ‘Let me know,’ she said, ‘when you feel your increasing deafness is worth the expense of a consultation.’

  ‘Ha. How’s Master Roberts?’

  ‘Sleeping. The more he sleeps now, the better will be his chances.’

  The heavy-panelled room seemed to tilt. Even as I was adjusting to the realisation that this young woman must be Dudley’s doctor, I was hearing his voice in my head.

  ‘…both feet above the ground, and looking down on me with a terrible pity… the white moon shining through him… Cold.’

  XIII

  Elixir

  GHOSTS. OFT-TIMES I’d be asked about ghosts, and what was I to say, never having seen one?

  Would I have wished to see one?

  Of course. My God, yes.

  And yet…

  Wait. Let me try to explain this simply, as a scientist but without, I promise, any employment of arcane symbols.

  There are, as is well known, three spheres: the natural world, the celestial or astral world, and the supercelestial, wherein are angels. Much evidence exists, in certain forbidden books, that some living men can move, in thought, to the astral realm and, in thought, exist there for a while.

  Not me. I’ve never been there. Let me make my position full clear: my own searching suggests this to be unhealthy and dangerous, not least because of what may be brought back to the natural world. Our world.

  Therefore my work, as I’ve oft-times stated, must needs be aimed towards communion with the supercelestial sphere, wherein lies truth and light. Not ghosts, which the reformists anyway seek to banish from our beliefs along with the Catholic purgatory.

  What, then, can be said, realistically, about the walking dead? Well… if a living man can exist in thought in a higher realm, then it follows that a dead man can return to the lower or natural world – our own world – and exist here. Long enough, it would seem, to enshroud with fear anyone who might glimpse his shade. Fear, because the seer knows that the only reason a man or woman should wish to return, without body, to the lower world is because they left it while in a state of imbalance, preventing them rising into the light of God. That the presence of the shade in this world must needs be wrong.

  ‘Let me try to reassure you,’ the doctor said. ‘There’s no taint of imminent death around Master Roberts. I’ve examined him for signs of the worst things and find nothing obvious.’

  ‘Smallpox?’

  ‘’Tis more likely to be wool-sorters’ disease in this town, of which fever’s sometimes a sign. But you’d be unlikely to find that in a London man. I’m inclined to think this is a less sinister kind of fever. And… he’s young and strong.’

  I nodded, much relieved.

  ‘Though clearly troubled in his mind,’ the doctor said.

  We were in the courtyard behind the George, and clouds had killed the sun. The air was warmer than London but still had the knife-edge of February. Yet the doctor carried her cloak over one arm and the other had its sleeve rolled to the elbow, and the arm was speckled like a hen’s egg.

  ‘Troubled, mistress?’

  ‘Oh.’ She shrugged lightly. ‘He mumbles words that are… anguished. But not clear,’ she said hastily. ‘Not at all clear.’

  ‘Words?’

  .…wishing… that she might quietly succumb, in the deep hours before dawn, to some swift—

  Maybe I’d gone pale.

  ‘Anyway,’ the doctor said brightly, ‘he’s not the only one I’ve seen with the fever this week. ’Tis sent from France or Spain, I reckon. Where did you lie before arriving here?’

  I told her Bristol and she nodded, as if this explained everything. Across the yard, one of Cowdray’s boys carried hay into the stables. The doctor saw me looking at her bare arm and, frowning, rolled down her sleeve.

  ‘I’ll need to see him again in two days. He must needs lie in his chamber till then.’

  ‘And how would you suggest I make him do that?’

  She smiled, her front teeth slightly crooked. She was younger than I’d thought her in the dimness of the inn. Especially for her trade – in London I knew of no women of any age who were qualified doctors, only wise-women working in the shadows, and I’d not imagined it being so different out here.

  ‘Am I to assume,’ I said, ‘that you’ve aided his sleep?’

  ‘A harmless potion, that’s all.’

  ‘Containing?’

  ‘Mostly valerian and hops.’

  I nodded. Jack Simm would approve.

  ‘The other constituents I’ll keep to myself,’ the doctor said. ‘Be assured that sleep will do most to make him well. Meat is not necessary – not that he’ll want any – but you should see to it that he has as much fresh water as he can drink. And a bigger pot to piss in may also be required, for he must piss away the fever. Oh… and it would do no harm if some of his drinking water was from the holy well.’

  ‘Oh?’ Why some water should be held sacred is something that’s long interested me. ‘Would prayer not suffice?’

  ‘The well’s renowned for giving strength. Its water runs red, like… blood.’

  ‘Or iron?’

  ‘Or iron. The holy well,’ she said, with a heavy patience, ‘is just its name.’

  ‘And this well is where?’

  ‘Master Cowdray’s boy will show your servant.’

  ‘I think,’ I said, not quite knowing why I spoke thus, ‘that I’d like to see it for myself.’

  ‘Well…’ She paused. ‘I suppose I could take you. It isn’t too far from here.’

  No doubt the time spent on guiding me to this holy well would be added to her charges. But I was sensing that it might be worth it in other ways, for it was beginning to seem that this young woman was not such an orthodox piss-sniffer after all.

  ‘Thank you. Mistress…?’

  ‘Borrow.’ She shook out her cloak, spun it about her shoulders. ‘Eleanor Mary Borrow. Do you wish to call your servant to accompany us?’

  ‘He’s not my servant.’

  Martin Lythgoe had gone up to check on his master, leaving me to pay the doctor. I’d get the money back when Dudley was well enough to undo his purse.

  Mistress Borrow bent to pick up her cloth bag, but I’d reached for it first.

  ‘Might I… carry this for you?’

  She shrugged.

  ‘If you wish.’

  In London it would be considered unseemly for a man to walk in such isolation with a young woman he’d barely met, but it seemed to worry this one not at all. Being a doctor, I supposed.

  The bag must have had pouches inside for the potions and the leeches or whatever she carried around, for it didn’t rattle when I slung the strap over my shoulder.

  ‘I’ve nothing in there to hide,’ she said. ‘if that’s what you were thinking.’

  ‘No, no, I didn’t…’ Even my attempts at crude chivalry were ever misinterpreted. ‘Where did you train, mistress?’

  ‘Oh…’ She was walking swiftly across the yard towards the rear gate. ‘I’ve studied for many years.’

  ‘You don’t look old enough’ – catching up with her – ‘to have studied for many years.’

  She stopped at the gate, a hand on the bolt, and looked up at me, her eyes widening.

  ‘I don’t look sixty years old?’ Her head on one side. ‘What a marvellous thing is my father’s elixir of youth.’

  ‘Little short of miraculous. How old’s your father?’

  ‘Oh… he must be near to ninety years, now. Though looks barely fifty.’

  Turning quickly away, Mistress Borrow drew back the bolt with a clank which almost, but not quite, obscured what I thought might be laughter.

  ‘You’re following your father’s trade?’ I said.

  ‘And my mother’s,’ she said. ‘Though my poor mother’s been dead for …a while.’

  The gate had opened on to a patch of greensward, gr
azed by half a dozen geese, behind the high street. I followed Mistress Borrow onto an earthen path alongside it.

  ‘Both your parents were doctors?’

  ‘My father still is – he’s the finest doctor in the west. Would have come with Master Cowdray to your friend but had been summoned to the bedside of an old woman about to quit this world. No, my mother grew herbs. My father uses them.’

  ‘And you grow them still?’

  ‘I borrow them – from the land.’

  Oh, these clearly were not physicians as I was used to them in London. This sounded to me like a cunning man married to a wise woman. Which was like a breath of air to me, but Mistress Borrow could not know that.

  Ahead of us, pale as ash, rose a high and elegant tower. The church of St John the Baptist, I imagined, having read of it in my research. Leland calls it fair and lightsome.

  ‘A proud tower,’ I observed.

  ‘Built by Abbot Selwood a century ago.’

  ‘And who cares for it now?’

  ‘Who cares for anything?’

  She walked on, head down, dark brown hair flowing behind her, unrestrained by cap or coif. We passed through the churchyard, emerging at last on to the high street, where I saw a baker’s shop doing good business and a man having less success selling sheep fleeces from a cart. I followed Mistress Borrow along the street, which wound uphill past a building site backing onto the abbey wall – doubtless the plan was to use this as a supporting wall for new homes, but nobody was working on the site, and I recalled Cowdray:

  If you takes a stone from the abbey and puts it into your wall, you should kneel and do penance every morning for seven weeks. Or ’tis likely your house will not be at peace.

  But back at the inn Mistress Borrow had sounded sceptical. I caught up with her again.

  ‘The ghost of Abbot Whiting… do you not believe he’s seen?’

  ‘I didn’t say that. I said that such rumours might be employed to deter people from stealing stone.’

  ‘Then do you believe that he’s seen?’

  ‘It doesn’t surprise me. The poor man has little cause for rest. But as I don’t go in there it isn’t my business.’

  ‘You don’t sound afraid.’

  ‘Because I remember the abbot. From… when I was a small child. I remember him walking through the town, not far from here. He stopped to talk to us, my mother and me. His face… I remember his wrinkly smile, and his eyes had a kindness, like…’ She looked up at me. ‘For a long time, I thought I’d seen the face of God.’

  ‘How old were you?’

  ‘Three or four years.’

  People passed us, entering the pale Church of the Baptist. Outside, on the edge of the street, a young man was plucking discordantly upon a patched lute, another slapping at a goatskin drum, chickens pecking in the mud around them. It seemed to me, for a curious moment, as if the people were behaving as though in a play and feigning ordinary life. That the real life here happened on some other level.

  ‘At least, unlike the abbey, the church is in full daily use,’ I said. ‘Does it have a library?’

  ‘I don’t know. Should it?’

  ‘Everywhere should have a library.’

  ‘Why?’

  Walking faster, now she was away from the town centre.

  ‘Because –’ feeling the pull of my breathing as I kept up with her pace – ‘only through learning can we hope to attain…’

  The words unaccountably dying on me. I felt suddenly foolish. And inadequate, somehow, as Mistress Borrow stopped at the entrance to a narrow track, tall, bare trees on either side, and turned to look down at me.

  ‘And is learning acquired only from books?’

  She turned away again and began ascending the track.

  ‘Well, no,’ I said, ‘but the process of learning is surely much hastened. Is it not remarkable that, by means of a book, one man’s whole lifetime of learning can be passed to another in a matter of hours?’

  ‘All learning can be passed this way?’

  ‘Most of it. In my experience.’

  She stopped at a low wall with a stile. Stepping away from it and waiting while I climbed up and jumped down on the other side. Giving her my hand, to help her down. Her own hand was bare, not like the Queen’s rose-petal glove. I experienced a most disturbing reaction and let go of it quickly when she was down from the stile, and turned away, feeling the warm blood suffuse my cheeks.

  ‘The well is that way,’ she said

  Pointing towards a wood, a well-trodden path leading through it, and I had the sense of a mocking laughter rising within her. A laughter that seemed to be translated into a sudden, raucous cawking of crows, which caused me to look up in a hot displeasure mixed with apprehension and thus, through a gap in the trees, to espy, almost directly above us, a green mound like to a gigantic mole’s tump.

  A stone tower projecting from its summit, like a stalk from an apple and black against the cloud.

  XIV

  A Mortifying of the Flesh

  THE CLOUDS BEHIND the jutting tower were a strange and blinding white, the hill itself a more vivid green than was common in February. A shock to the senses, and I felt a momentary separation that I liked not.

  Division: part of me longing to go rushing to its summit, another part hissing, turn away.

  ‘So close to the town,’ I said, ‘and yet…’

  ‘Not of it,’ Mistress Borrow said. ‘It is its own place.’

  We stood on the edge of the wood in full silence. No birdsong. The hill, I saw, was ridged, had terraces approaching the summit, like the mounds of the castles in my family’s country burned down in the Glyndwr wars. But no castle mound I’d seen was so imposing, so steep or quite so startlingly conical. It was utterly strange, as if it were planted here, constructed by men – or angels – for some purpose.

  And I felt, oddly, as if some inner part of me was already familiar with it.

  Most likely from an engraving in a book.

  I said, ‘So an earthquake brought down the church.’

  ‘Nigh on three hundred years ago. Except for the tower. The church was rebuilt after the quake, but after that it never seemed happy to be more than a tower. After the Reform and what happened to the abbot up there, the church was abandoned, and they took away the bells. Now it is… as some say it began.’

  ‘As what?’

  Her eyes sparkled.

  ‘What brought about the earthquake? Was the church cleft to the bone by an act of God, or was it the work of Satan?’ She pointed upwards to the tower, shrunken now by our nearness to the hill. ‘Is it not become the finger of Satan?’

  ‘Meaning what?’

  A faint, serpentine mist was apparent around the tower, the white sky grained as if lightly dusted with soot. As if the tower was a chimney for some fire within the hill.

  ‘Like to a standing stone,’ she said. ‘A Druid stone? ’Tis well known that in the years before Our Saviour, this was a place of Druid worship. ’Tis said that Merlin’s own stronghold was there.’

  A throb in my chest.

  ‘Arthur’s Merlin?’

  ‘’Tis also said that inside the hill was the great gathering hall of the King of the Faerie, who rides the stormy sky with the hellhounds of the wild hunt. So, you see, to the religious, that tower is the finger of Satan.’ Mistress Borrow let her arm fall, then turned away. ‘The holy well’s along here.’

  Most holy wells I knew had stonework, crude statuary. This one was entirely unadorned. Twisted apple trees had grown around it in a rough circle, their branches curling into a protective nest.

  When I leaned to it, I heard the water threshing and tumbling with a rare power. Dark red in my cupped hands. I brought some to my mouth and tasted it: iron, as I’d expected. Iron for strength.

  ‘Many people have been cured by it.’ Mistress Borrow knelt in the damp grass. ‘Many pilgrims.’

  ‘And local people?’

  ‘Even local people. The most effecti
ve medicines come free from rocks and hedgerows. But you can see why this well’s best called holy.’

  I looked into her green eyes and tried not to blink.

  ‘Is it called holy?’

  ‘No.’ She smiled. ‘They call it the Blood Well.’

  ‘Whose blood?’

  ‘Ah…’

  A finger to her lips. I felt a pulsing inside me.

  ‘What kind of doctor are you?’

  ‘Oh… some would say, not a doctor at all, compared with my father who trained at good colleges. What do I know of leeches and the balancing of the humours? Not much at all. Only of crude surgery. And herbs. Which are more important, for all plants hold life and the energy of dew. Some more than others. If we know where and how to grow them. And when.’

  ‘And what mean you by that?’

  I’d felt a real quickening of interest, now. Mistress Borrow was winding a strand of her brown hair around a forefinger, looking suddenly and startlingly young. Must be a few years over twenty, but seeming no older, at this moment, than my mother’s housekeeper, Catherine Meadows.

  There was… a certain not-quite symmetry in her features which made me want to study them at length, calcule their proportions.

  ‘How do you know,’ I asked softly, ‘when it’s best for certain herbs to be grown?’

  She looked wary for a moment, and then her shoulders went loose and out it came.

  ‘Some ’tis best to sow under a new moon and then to harvest under a full moon. Or the other way around. Or cultivation may be more profitable when certain heavenly bodies are in certain portions of the sky. Also the curative qualities of some planets may be improved under certain planetary… what’s the matter?’

  ‘Where did you learn of this?’

  ‘From my mother, but –’ her eyes, of a sudden, sharpening with a defiant light – ‘I’ve also read books.’

  ‘And where did you obtain such books?’

  Thinking: the abbey library, which left Leland in awe.

  ‘Pass me my bag,’ she said. ‘There’s a flask inside which we can fill with water for your friend. You should give it to him sparingly, betwixt larger quantities of ordinary, pure water. Not that much of the water in Glastonbury is truly… ordinary.’