The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  …the feral ecstacy of the crowd in that glorious moment of hell’s halo: a conjuror’s head all raging with the madness of fire.

  And the head’s become a ball of light. Like to the sun.

  Like to the sun.

  XXXI

  Haze

  WHEN I WAS dead, it was raining.

  Soft, coloured rain, iridescent against the charcoal sky.

  A distant singing, all soft and melodious, and the air laden with the vague scent of apples.

  I tell you these things, knowing not how many hours had passed, for time was not the same. Nothing was the same and, though I knew I was dead, I knew also that it was not over for me.

  Walking through water, now.

  Clear, soft water that was flashing over the grass and cascading down the hill. Water like music.

  Me walking barefoot, the grass slick between my toes. Led by the hand, feet in the soft flowing land, down towards the nest of apple trees, and I could smell the breeze around them, the scent of apples and the ferment of cider, and all the juices of late summer.

  And the tor rising on the other side and the soaring golden pinnacles of the abbey.

  Walking through an old orchard, and the twigs of the apple trees were scraping at my bared skin.

  And then, with no awareness of a journey, I was in the sky.

  Not in my body but as a spirit made of finest air, and I was walking in the garden of the firmament, stars around my hands, whole worlds that I could hold, yet did not wish to hold, wished only to exist with them in peace and a sense of eternal wonder. And for a split instant, I almost knew His mind.

  Seemed to be here for many hours, but it might have been mere seconds before I was falling back in vague dismay.… back to a place that was close to our world yet not of it. Where I saw the land again – the Glastonbury land – veined with clear water.

  Then saw through the skin of fields and woods and hills, to the innards of the island, all the inner chambers and vessels linked by the flow of water underground, a low and rumbling power, the engine of the earth, held together by the bones of the hills and all the bones of the saints which lay here, the bones of Avalon…

  …and I drew back and all the shapes of the land were moving. I saw creatures there, made of the earth… a lion and a dove… fishes that swam in grass. And the earth went atilt, and the creatures formed a great circle all around me.

  ‘Where are you?’

  ‘I’m flying,’ I said.

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

  When the vision faded to a pastel blur and the body’s weight returned, I felt a stab of sorrow. But then I heard the old soft singing, a flow of molten gold, and saw the abbey from above, laid out below the tor like to a golden body.

  A paradise. Avalon.

  And I heard these words, soft-spoken but quite clear:

  The whole magistery depends upon the Sun and the Moon. The Sun is its father and the Moon is its mother, and we know truly that the red earth is nourished by the rays of the Moon and the Sun.

  The sun was in me. My head burned with gasses like to the orb of the sun. And the moon…

  …the moon was awaiting the sun.

  I was walking towards the summit of the tor.

  What can you see?

  The sky.

  And…?

  The tower.

  Go to it. Put your hands upon its nearest corner at chest height.

  Opening my hands, and the stone which had lain there was gone. A connecting. A shiver through the arms and into the breast, and I sprang away but did not fall this time.

  Did not fall.

  Knowing that the stone which had been in my hand had been absorbed back into the high standing stone whose spirit lived inside the tower upon the tor. And tower and stone both lived in me, when I walked back down the hill, lured by the the wappling of the water in the Blood Well at its foot. Rolling and sliding down the hill, my apparel left strewn out behind, and she was waiting and wore no cloak, nor over-dress, nor shift, and was but a haze in the soft air.

  Soft. The softness of the grass where we lay. The softness of lips and breasts, the yielding of flesh, the rising of the tower, all the energy entering into it as I rolled over and felt the opening of the well-head in the thicket and then the tower sliding deep into the well. And, oh God, a tongue ’twixt criss-cross teeth, greenlit eyes in bright water, a fluid white light, the light of a thousand candles, a river of white light flowing through me.

  And then, later, the sunrise in the heart.

  And I will travel to Avalon, to the fairest of all maidens… …and she shall make all my wounds sound and make me whole.

  PART FOUR

  Superstition requires credulity, just as true religion requires faith. Deep-rooted credulity is so powerful that it may even, in false beliefs, be thought to perform miracles. For if anyone believes most firmly that his religion is true, even if it is in fact false, he raises his spirit by reason of that very credulity until it becomes like the spirits who are the leaders and princes of that religion and seems to perform things which are not perceived by those in a normal and rational state.

  Cornelius Agrippa (1486–1535),

  De Occulta Philosophia.

  XXXII

  The Word

  When I awoke before dawn, it was as if I’d slept for whole days. Or rather as if I’d been away for days. And I felt…

  …felt my body was a strange place. Stretching out in the bed, I could feel all of it at once, from the soles of its feet to the weight of its skull and, betwixt them, the slow pulse of the unbound heart. And I felt…

  Whole. I felt whole. Entire. Complete. Felt the heaviness of the sun in me, its holy rays opening me up into an aching, languid release, and I rolled over, reaching out an arm for her.

  Nothing. Absence.

  When the arm closed on cold air, I was in terror, my eyes falling open like a trapdoor into darkness. I sat up and took in the empty chair, the empty board. The empty bed. I was alone in the half-light.

  Gone. Performed her alchemy and gone. I was thrown into panic: had it been a dream, a night excursion of the soul? I fell back, an aching void in me.

  Then, as my face slipped between the pillows, the scent of her came to me, her body’s wild-animal musk, and my breath caught in my throat.

  God. God, God, God…

  Rolled out of bed and found myself naked, the cold dawn seizing my flesh. Yet, for the first time, welcoming its bite. I stood and pulsed and tingled as if all the stars were lit within me. Had other men felt this? Did all men feel this, after…?

  After what, the condition of the bed and its emanations left little doubt. Thankful, tearful, I went back and laid upon it, burying my face in the scent of her, and when I closed my eyes the dust rose again, a ripple of images of moon and water, earth and…

  …fire. Even the fire was good.

  Jesu!

  I came off the bed again, moved slowly to the window. Touching it. The strangeness of glass. The miracle of seeing out from within.

  Of course, there must have been more to it. More than the potion, although that clearly had opened doors between my inner being and something that was out there. But, in some way, she’d made that happen in the way it had, and there was a word for this.

  The lower panes were jewelled with red and blue and orange, a pool of water on the sill reflecting these colours and more, and my eyes were drawn into it and I must have lost several minutes and…

  Oh, yes, the word.

  It had ever been with us, ever misunderstood, feared and rendered demonic by the churchmen – those same churchmen who preach that we should ever be open to higher influence.

  I saw the wet roofs shining red. Raised my eyes to the first sunlight running like syrup along the ramparts of an old night cloud. Felt a trembling of my whole being. And uttered the word, breathing it softly into the coppery fire of the nascent day.

  The word was magic.

  I knelt, th
en, and prayed.

  ‘You all right, Dr John? You look…’

  Cowdray in his sackcloth apron at the bottom of the stairs, all grey stubble and troubled eyes.

  ‘Thank you, I’m well,’ I said.

  Hearing my own voice for, it seemed, the first time. It sounded frail, immature, a boy’s voice.

  ‘None of us slept much last night, mind,’ Cowdray said. ‘Worst storm of the winter, by some way.’

  No, I wanted to tell him. This was the best of storms. Yet I knew there was much that was wrong. Moving down the stairs still feeling as if I walked in a body of light, yet knowing that even the rich magic of it must needs be contained before it hardened into a kind of madness.

  ‘Have you seen Nel Borrow?’

  This name like a sacred name to me now, some angelic invocation.

  ‘No.’ Cowdray’s face had gone empty. ‘Not this past day.’

  Of course, he had seen her, having offered her his attic room, but his caution was commendable, and I asked him nothing further. She would have slipped away while it was yet dark, without disturbing anyone. It was what she did: slipped away.

  But I’d find her again. Needing her with me, more than ever. And the finding of her was a quest beyond all other quests, for she was Circe and Medea and Morgan le Fay and… I saw her in vivid image, looking down on me between two tall trees at the entrance to a track leading to the Blood Well.

  And is learning acquired only from books?

  Wondering, from Cowdray’s slightly alarmed look, if the wild scent of her was around me like a swirling mist.

  ‘…of God,’ he was saying.

  ‘Mercy?’

  ‘A storm like this is seldom seen this time of year. People are saying it was the rage of God against the mire of sin and heathenism in this town.’

  ‘Who’s saying that?’

  He smiled grimly, made no answer.

  ‘Master Roberts is asking for you.’

  ‘He’s about?’

  ‘He’s been about over an hour,’ Cowdray said. ‘He bids you join him in the abbey. In the outhouse behind the abbot’s kitchen, where the… where the body lies. Your man’s cadaver.’

  Always a dark shadow in front of the light.

  ‘Now?’

  ‘I’ll prepare your breakfast, meanwhile. Not a patient man, is he, Master Roberts?’

  The hut seemed to have been a relic of the abbey’s occupation by the Flemish weavers in Edward’s reign. Its shutters had been nailed tight, its roof patched with straw. I approached it lightly enough through the fresh, chilled morn. But when I reached its open door my euphoria was broken by the foul, piercing stench of corrupting flesh.

  And it was this that brought back all that had come before the excursion. Those candlelit revelations.

  What happened to your servant… terrible almost beyond belief… but all this talk of devil magic, sacrifice…

  ‘Where the hell have you been?’

  Dudley, in the doorway, in his drab clerk’s apparel, more gaunt than ever I’d seen him.

  ‘I slept late,’ I told him. ‘The storm…’

  ‘Kept all of us awake. Except for this poor bastard.’

  His eyes were burning dully, not now with the fever but with a driven rage, as if some cold engine worked within him. He stepped outside, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and moustache, grains of sweat still agleam on his forehead.

  ‘Go in. Go and look.’

  ‘Robbie, I’ve seen all I can bear to see. What’s the use?

  ‘No!’ His features sharpening, jaw tensed. It was like he’d come out of a long sleep, was smitten with urgency, real life flung in his face. ‘Look again, I pray you. Closely. You know about these things, you’ve studied anatomy.’

  ‘I’ve studied books on anatomy—’

  Books, books, books…

  ‘John, listen to me. You were quick to deny this was ritual sacrifice. Well, if not that, then what? What’s his body have to tell us?’

  ‘Robbie, I doubt you’re even well enough to be—’

  ‘The hell with me. Go the fuck in.’

  I nodded. Stepping unwillingly inside the hut, breathing through my mouth.

  It was, in truth, no bloodier than a butcher’s shop, but the sight of remains such as these will always bring me to the brink of despair. Hard not to feel that the spirit itself has not been forever extinguished and, after all I’d seen this past night, what a grievous loss that would be.

  The body of Martin Lythgoe lay upon a board made from two mangers. It was dull and did not glisten. The candle had been knocked away from the mouth and lay beside the body, no longer spectral and nothing of the tor about it now. Merely a squalid insult to life and humanity.

  ‘What can I…?’ I was near to tears, shaking my head in despair at my uselessness. ‘What can I tell you, Robbie… more than you can see for yourself?’

  The right arm bridged the yawning chasm of the chest, and inside its elbow was lodged the crushed and shrivelled orb of Martin’s heart. I remembered the phantasm of him I’d seen through the dust, trying to hold it all in, and he hadn’t spoken then, and he wasn’t speaking now.

  The left arm dangled over the side of the board, and Dudley lifted it, supporting the hand, free by now from rigor mortis.

  ‘What do you make of this?’

  I bent over, with some reluctance, holding my breath.

  ‘Oh.’

  Wouldn’t normally have noticed it. You’d see the invaded chest, the ripped-out heart, and would turn away sickened before you’d mark the small but meaningful smitterings of dried blood on the fingertips, the blackened, broken nails.

  ‘The middle finger, John. The way the nail’s been all but torn away. See?’

  ‘Done as he fought back?’ I squatted down on the greasy straw on the floor, took up the cold, marbling hand at eye-level. ‘Or maybe it suggests the body was moved after death?’

  ‘Either of those is possible,’ Dudley said. ‘But I think it’s something worse. Look again. Closer.’

  ‘What’s this…?’

  Brown flakes which had fallen into my palm. Seemed unlikely to be dried blood.

  ‘Rust.’ Dudley knelt beside me. ‘It’s from an old iron nail. See it?’

  ‘Where… Oh, Jesu—’

  The length of it was wedged hard under the split and blackened fingernail, all the way to its root, where the point stuck out. I let the hand fall, in horror, wincing.

  ‘Hammered in,’ Dudley said. ‘Under his nail, until the head of it broke off.’

  ‘Then this is…?’

  ‘Torture,’ Dudley said. ‘Before he died, this poor bloody man was tortured.’

  I came weakly to my feet, trying to think of another explanation and could not.

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Why are men usually tortured?’

  ‘To make them confess to.…’

  ‘Uh huh.’ Dudley shaking his head. ‘To make them talk.’

  ‘About what? What would he know? He was a stranger here. He only came because of…’

  ‘Us. He came with us. He knew who we were and why we were here.’

  ‘And is that to kill for?’

  Dudley looked at me as if I were a child, while the eyes of Martin Lythgoe, cold as pebbles, gazed forever into the cobwebbed dark.

  ‘We need a witness to this,’ Dudley said. ‘Is Carew here yet? Or where’s… that other fellow?’

  ‘Fyche.’

  Shows this picture of himself as a Godly man in combat with the forces of Satan, and at the core, I’ll swear… that’s where you’ll find the real evil.

  ‘We don’t talk to Fyche,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure we even talk to Carew.’

  Dudley looked at me with narrowed eyes.

  ‘Take my word,’ I said.

  ‘All right. Fetch Cowdray, then.’

  ‘No… That is… there’s someone more qualified.’

  Clawing aside cobwebs hanging thick as ship’s rigging and stumbling
to the doorway for air.

  XXXIII

  A Man’s Path

  AN ELEMENT OF self-interest. I’ll admit that. Matthew Borrow, a medical man and surgeon, would be the best witness to confirm what had been done to Martin Lythgoe. But he might also know where his daughter was to be found.

  I ran.

  Nel: my body still shivering with soft and slippery memories of hers.

  And anxiety.

  The sky was brightening, near cloudless, as I moved fast and hard away from the abbey, splashing through streets still pooled and roiled with red mud from the storm. Part of me wanting to go on running, between the two church towers at either end of the town, out into the wettened fields towards the sun.

  Until I became aware that something was wrong, and slowed.

  The air was colder and refreshed from the storm yet, past eight, noone save me appeared to be out in it.

  I stopped and looked around: stone houses, wattle houses, the smoke of awakened fires. It was as if I saw the town for the first time, how sporadic and ill-structured it was now the abbey lay in ruins. A dead planet with no sun, all the energy gone to the tor.

  Gone back to the tor. And the tor, while it could be serene and hazed with a kind of holiness… that holiness, that magic, had not the formality and discipline of the abbey. It was the magic of chaos.

  Of a sudden, a cold vision was upon me. For a moment, it was as though I were seeing Glastonbury as it were seen by Sir Edmund Fyche. Feeling what he felt. A sense of loss. A vacuum filled now with a sense of rage.

  It came to me that I was watched, and I spun. Began to mark dull faces in doorways and windows and the furtive parting of shutters.

  A mute fear.

  News travels apace in a small town, as does sound. As if by instinct, I fled into the back streets and the alleys. By the time I reached the street under the solid new church of St Benignus, I could hear the voices unravelling like shrill ribbons. And then—