The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  Letting both hands fall into hair which went not to dust but only curled greasily around them, the wet and rotted skin from which it had grown coming away in slimed flakes, and then my fingers were sunk into the holes where her eyes had been. Eyes which had last seen daylight bulging against the constriction of a rope.

  If her’s scrawny, her can hold out a good while.

  With a sickening little bonecrack, I was raising her head. Heavier than you’d think. All the weight of mortality.

  For this spoke not of afterlife.

  XLIII

  Drawings for Children

  IN THE SMALL, panelled room at the George, we closed the shutters over the fogged and dripping glass, urgently refreshed the old red fire with applewood, piling on log after log, then finding more candles and lighting them all, until we sat within a nest of light and heat.

  Yet still shivered. I tell you, this is what it means to be cold to the soul.

  ‘If it’s all destroyed…’ Dudley eased off his sodden boots in the ingle. ‘I may find it hard to laugh.’

  My hands were reddened and chapped and scored all over with cuts and scratches. I was trying to flex them over the fire when we heard footsteps on the stairs, and then Cowdray was with us. He stood in the doorway, hands linked over his ale-belly, blue bags under his eyes.

  ‘We’re not thieves, innkeeper,’ Dudley said. ‘Unless you count an armful of logs.’

  Cowdray glanced at the board and then looked away, for the gravedirt was yet all over it. And us. We stank of the grave.

  ‘I seen you go out. Wondered if there was anything I could do for you.’

  ‘Do you never sleep?’

  ‘Not unless I’m sure I’m gonner wake up, Master Roberts.’

  ‘Who can ever be sure of that?’ Dudley said. ‘What hour is it, Master Cowdray?’

  ‘Gone three. I’d be up and about in a couple of hours, anyway. I get you anything?’

  ‘Small… small beer would be… most acceptable.’ No way to keep the tremor from my voice. ‘And some peace. If you please.’

  ‘I think he means that if you see anything of Carew, you should keep the bastard away from us,’ Dudley said.

  ‘I’ll leave the beer out for you. And Sir Peter lies at Meadwell.’

  ‘Does he?’

  ‘Word is, he and Sir Edmund’ll leave here after church, for Wells.’

  ‘For the assizes.’

  ‘On the morrow,’ Cowdray said. ‘Monday.’

  ‘Cowdray…’

  He turned to me. Flakes of drying soil crumbled from my sleeve.

  I said, ‘If you saw us leave, did you see if we were followed?’

  Dudley frowned at me. I cared not a toss. The state of us, what was Cowdray supposed to think?

  ‘No, Doctor,’ he said. ‘Nobody.’

  Tipping just one glance at what lay on the board before he left.

  It was about a foot long, maybe nine inches wide, but no thicker than my wrist, and stinking, still smirched with the unspeakable.

  ‘He knows who we are,’ I said. ‘He bloody knows—’

  ‘No,’ Dudley said. ‘He only knows who we are not. Now open it.’

  We pulled the board closer to the fire, and I turned over the pouch. It was made of leather and appeared to have been sealed all around with wax.

  Dudley kept his distance.

  ‘This is what you expected?’

  ‘I know not what I was expecting.’

  Bringing out my dagger and prising up the edging of wax. We’d replaced the stones one by one, filling in the grave, stamping down the earth to make it as level as we could, banging the cross back in place with the handle of the spade. After which, despite the cold, the fear that we were watched, the aching need to run, I’d bent for long minutes in the stream that bordered the herb garden, scrubbing my hands in the freezing water, washing my face of all mud-spatter.

  Dudley said. ‘If it turns out to be a damned Bible…’

  Lifting the flaps now, one by one, until it was all opened out.

  ‘It’s a notebook,’ I said. ‘Bound in hide.’

  Sat and looked at it, not touching. Nothing was scribed on the front.

  Its pages were browned and damp, some stuck together.

  ‘Undamaged, John? Readable?’

  I slid the blade between two pages. Saw inked diagrams, scribbled notes.

  ‘Readable… is it?’

  ‘Give me a chance…’

  Peering closer, I saw that some of it had been slashed out and scarred and ink-spattered, as if in rage. Turned over more pages – there were no more than twenty of them, a few blank.

  ‘Over half of it seems to be filled with fragments of charts. There are some across two pages. And some –’ I upended the book – ‘to a different scale.’

  ‘But what does it all show?’

  ‘I have…’ Looked up. ‘Absolutely no idea.’

  ‘So the cleverest man in the world…’

  ‘Sometimes it takes months… years.’

  ‘Which, of course, you have.’

  ‘Wait…’

  The unmistakable word Tor had appeared.

  Not in the middle of the page, but in its top right-hand corner. And then, further in, Abbey.

  I gathered more candles, arranging them around the notebook, as if their very symmetry could translate to what was writ in these pages.

  ‘It’s a plan of the land around here… some of it, anyway.’

  ‘A treasure chart?’

  I shrugged. Gradually, I made out place names: Glastonbury, of course. Also Meare and an arrow pointing to Wells. Hills were marked, and roads and the river and wavy lines to suggest wetland. Across the centre pages a circle was scribed in ink and inside the circle were shapes, some crudely drawn, others more complete. Symbols – a cross, a bell, a small skull. An arrow signifying north.

  I sat back and thought about it. Dudley was staring at me, as if waiting for the exposition to begin, the unravelling.

  My hands hurt. My brain was cold.

  ‘Drawn by Leland?’ Dudley said.

  ‘Looks like his writing. I’ve several of his manuscripts in my library. And seen many more. Copied them, even, when I was younger and studying the arts of geography and chorography. And we know he was working with Cate Borrow.’

  ‘On a plan of the area? Something to do with his itinerary?’

  ‘It’s what he did.’

  I turned the pages slowly, twice more. Words were few and all of them place names or topographical features – hedge, stream, stone, boundary. And the shapes of things.

  ‘It’s incomplete. Something in its early stages. The bones of a chart.’

  ‘Then why would she keep studying it?’

  ‘Maybe she was also still working on it. Maybe she thought he’d return some day.’

  ‘And then he went mad?’

  ‘Overwork. So it’s said. The magnitude of the task he’d set himself in charting all England and writing down its topography. He’d vowed to chronicle details of every hill and vale and river in the country… everything that could be marked. Not having realised the size of the task. And the limitations of one lifetime.’

  I could sympathise. All the times I’d awoken in the night, panicked by realisation of the brevity of life and the impossibility of learning all that was to be learned. No wonder that Leland, like me, had been drawn toward alchemy and astrology, the hope that we might call down celestial influences to guide us toward some elixir.

  ‘Maybe he was on his way into madness when he did this,’ Dudley said. ‘Defacing his own charts with drawings for children.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Animals.’

  I looked up at him.

  ‘Are you pissing up my leg?’

  ‘Well, what do you see them as? Look.’ He leaned over, tracing the shape with a finger. ‘There’s a hound… and a bird, with tail fanned?’

  ‘Robbie,’ I said. ‘Just fetch the beer.’

  Leland
. A driven man. Who knew the magic of charts. Vast areas of land and sea reduced to small shapes upon a page, so that our eyes can see it as if from on high. As above, so below, Leland, like me, having studied Plato, Pythagoras and, beyond them, thrice-great Hermes of ancient Egypt.

  A driven man. Driven into insanity.

  Dudley went out of the room and padded across the passage to the alehouse, leaving me turning over pages, time and time again, in a quiet frenzy. Tilting the notebook on end, almost scorching the thin paper in the candle flames.

  Found a second drawing on which the tor was marked. This time, one flank of it, as if seen from above, was picked out in heavy ink and became part of a far bigger shape which resembled what Dudley had thought to be a bird with tail fanned. Within its shape, the outlines of fields were thinly scribed.

  Maybe if I was at home in my library, with all that I possessed of Leland’s works, I might make something of this.

  Or maybe I’d understand it enough to know that it was of no relevance. The meaningless scribblings of a broken man, blaming himself for all that Cromwell had stolen from Glastonbury.

  Dudley set down an ale jug and two mugs – good pewter mugs, I noticed, the first time we’d been given them.

  ‘Might it be clearer, if you tore out all the pages,’ Dudley said, ‘and put them together? I’m clutching at straws.’

  ‘If he’d wanted that, he’d’ve done it.’ In truth, I hated to destroy a book. ‘I need time, Robbie.’

  ‘You don’t have time.’ Dudley drained his mug, then stretched out his arms, yawning. ‘Defeats me. I don’t think myself an idiot, but it defeats me how a man can stand on the ground and chart the land as if he were a bird flying over it.’

  ‘It’s a long and complicated process involving much walking. Robbie… You’ve been ill. You need rest. Why not go to your bed till dawn?’

  He looked down at me, his smile askew.

  ‘That means you want to be on your own with this, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Who said I taught you nothing of use?’

  I laughed, I suppose a little sadly.

  The disappointment over what we’d found must have been etched on my face.

  When I awoke, two hours later, head on an arm on the boardtop, three tallow candles had burned to a foul mush, and I was sickened at myself. The logs were all red and ashy in the hearth and I thought of Nel in the dungeon in Wells, another day of it before being hauled before a hanging judge and a jury of self-satisfied, pious minnows.

  My apparel was stiff with dried mud. With the first light palely aflare in the northeast, I stood up and went out back for a piss. Listening to the chittering of the early birds and Cowdray calling orders to the maids. In the yard, the ass was watching me benignly from the entrance to his stable.

  The moon was yet visible and there was a scatter of stars, the remains of my night garden.

  My garden.

  John Dee… the greatest adventurer of them all… a man of deepest learning and erudition… her Merlin.

  What a deluded fool I was. Nothing, going nowhere. Just a failed bone-collector.

  XLIV

  Harlot

  CLEANED UP AS best I could, clad in the spare doublet over an old, tattered shirt, I dragged myself to church. Dudley had not emerged from his chamber, and so I went alone: Dr Dee, specialist in matters of the hidden, throwing himself at the mercy of the God whose mind, with unspeakable arrogance, he’d determined to know. Dr Dee, lovesick, bent with sorrow, smirched with sin, in vain hope of absolution.

  The morning sky had become very quickly ominous: a fine line of salmon putting a sandy cast upon the long hill before the sun rose but briefly into a mantle of dense cloud which smothered Glastonbury from horizon to horizon.

  The beginning of the end of the world, the vicar said. Dear God, what had I expected: calm, fortitude and the sure hope of redemption?

  St Benignus, this was, the lesser church. Fyche and Carew, I’d guessed, would be at the more impressive St John’s, and I’d no wish to encounter either of them.

  The farmers and their families had come down from the hills and the modern church was packed to the doors, me standing at the very back, where it was darkest.

  Hell, in truth, all of it was dark. No candles on the altar, and there’d be no communion, nothing approaching the Mass, no enfolding element of the mystic. And, in this plump Welsh vicar, I heard the voice of an Abel Meadows.

  ‘At the end of days, it is foretold that the angels of light and the angels of darkness will engage in a great battle, and the field of that battle is the soul of mankind – your souls, my soul. Within every one of us… every one of us – that final battle will be fought. Will you give yourself, body and soul, to God?’

  The vicar panting, as he leaned over his pulpit, passing his eyes across all the congregation. I watched men go pale, a woman wring her hands, felt the air go cold with menace.

  ‘Or will you give your soul away? As some already have done, though they knew it not, by putting their faith in charms and talismans. By opening their mouths to receive potions from a witch’s cauldron. By… sucking the syrup of Satan…’

  I pressed myself against the wall in anger, felt that the cultured Abbot Bere, who built this place, would abhor this man.

  ‘Isaiah saeth, Now is the faithful city become a harlot! It was full of judgment; righteousness lodged in it, but now murderers!’

  The vicar bulging from his pulpit, wagging a flaccid forefinger.

  ‘We have not long, I tell you, to purge ourselves and this once-holy town of all sin, unbelief and wrong belief… before that which is foretold at the Bible’s end shalt indeed come to pass. And then shalt them – them as repents not – be embraced by a final darkness!’

  A skittering of feet on the flags as a woman collapsed into a faint. I marked Matthew Borrow – doubtless here only to avoid a twelve pence fine – squeezing through the congregation to aid her, his face without expression. I felt a profound guilt at what we’d done to his poor, dead wife, and all for nothing. I would avoid him afterwards.

  ‘The voice of God is heard in the thunder!’ the vicar roared, bumptious little twat. ‘Yeah, God hath split the night with his mighty voice, commanding us to root out and destroy the evil, before the end of days. And we must not turn our backs from what must be done, or the Lord God…’

  The finger scribing a steady line from face to face.

  ‘The Lord God will know. I say to you, reclaim your souls while there’s yet time!’

  I was the first out of there.

  Monger came to me at the church gate, still clad in his workaday cut-off monk’s robe. Coming at once to the guts of it.

  ‘Man’s reading from Fyche’s gospel. Fyche wants a crowd to see Nel hang, and he wants that crowd hungry for it. Only a death—’

  ‘How can they turn against her? People who’ve been healed by her?’

  ‘People who thought themselves to have been healed by God? People who’ll now be in terror, having been touched by Satan? A witch amongst them all this time, the spawn of another. You can hear them – Oh, how could we not see what she was? How could we be deceived by her merry manner? Those who were healed are now in fear that they were healed by the foul touch of the deceiver.’

  While, in truth, they were deceived by a man who, to my mind, was barely a priest.

  ‘The woman who collapsed in there?’ Monger said. ‘You know why she fainted? I’ll tell you. Treated of a sore throat by Nel and is now convinced her voice has changed, and deepened, as if a demon speaks through her. You see? Ah… enough of this shit. The word is that Nel won’t see you.’

  When I confirmed it, Monger sucked in his lips and led me to the bottom of the street where the green land fell away to the grey and limpid river.

  ‘Makes no clear sense to me, Dr John. I thought that you and she had… common ground.’

  ‘Me, also,’ I said. ‘Joe…’

  He’d turned away. It was beginning to rain.

 
; ‘’Tis happening again,’ he said. ‘Some perversion of fate. As if she’s inherited some curse.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Maybe ’twould help if I rode to Wells. But if she’d see neither her father nor you, what hope for a tired old farrier? Can you still plead her innocence at the assize without her agreement?’

  ‘Would hardly look well, but I hope to try.’

  ‘Under your own name?’

  ‘There,’ I said, ‘you have the principal problem.’ But there was another now. ‘Joe… help me. What was Cate Borrow working on before she was arrested?’

  ‘I don’t know, many things. She lived for her work.’

  ‘Like?’

  ‘Long-standing things – she and Matthew were trying for years to find a treatment for wool-sorters’, or the cause of it.’

  ‘I’m thinking of something related to topography. She worked with Leland, didn’t she, way back?’

  Monger began to walk toward the river through the spitting rain, his head half turned – I thought at first to avoid the rain, then realising that the rain was now full in his face. He was turning away from me. I caught up with him.

  ‘This is important. There was something Cate Borrow had – or knew – that Fyche wanted. Something she’d been working on with Leland.’

  ‘You should ask Matthew.’

  ‘I’ve asked him. Leland left her a— some papers. He’d buried them with her because she’d’ve hated them to fall into Fyche’s hands.’

  ‘Sounds like a private matter. I know nothing about it.’

  ‘What would an antiquarian want with a gardener?’

  He began to stride toward the riverbank so rapidly that I thought he’d walk off the bank.

  ‘Something to do with charts,’ I said.

  Monger stopped, inches from the water, staring into it, as if he might see the shadow of Arthur’s sword, Excalibur, cast away by Sir Bedivere.

  ‘Leland came after all of us. All who’d been at the abbey and were still in the town. He wanted to know what secret the abbot had failed to disclose under torture that he should be so brutally put to death.’