The Heresy of Dr Dee

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Or whatever demon he’s invested with the spirit of Rhys. You said that. What did you mean by it?’

  ‘Ah, well… I think we may have read some of the same books.’

  ‘But you more than—

  ‘Hush.’

  Thomas Jones was on his feet. The sound of a distant horse, moving at speed, was no longer so distant.

  XLVI

  Portal

  HE’D BEEN AFRAID to sleep lest they came for him, the local men who sought Gethin.

  Roger Vaughan: also a local man. The only local man within the judge’s company. Therefore, the local man who had let it happen, the young pettifogger raised beyond his abilities in return for selling his county town down its mean river. The cry of traitor resounding from an open window as he returned to his inn after taking my mare to the ostler. A big, sharp stone glancing from a wall by his head.

  ‘I was watching by my window, see,’ he said, ‘for those fools to come back from the hills. Trying to stay awake. Which is how I saw the arrival of Dr Jones at the Bull, and then the two of you leaving along the Knighton road, and I… felt less secure.’

  He truly thought he’d feel safer with us, a conjurer and a pardoned felon, than left alone in Presteigne?

  ‘We’re all gone from there now,’ the boy said. ‘Every one of us who journeyed with the judge.’

  A sheepish shrug as he stood there, holding his horse’s bridle. I explained our situation, telling Thomas Jones he could say what he wanted in front of Vaughan. Didn’t know how wise this was, but it was too late for secrecy. I suppose I was glad to have Roger Vaughan with us, a lawyer, with a lawyer’s sharp mind, but also a local man alert to the snares of the Hidden.

  ‘There might be a hundred armed men in Presteigne by morning,’ I said, ‘if Forest gets to Ludlow unharmed. But it would be foolish for us to wait for them.’

  ‘I know my way around Brynglas,’ Vaughan said.

  ‘We don’t know Dudley was taken there,’ I told him. ‘Or if he was, where exactly he might have been taken… But if these brothers have him, they’re likely to want proof that Gethin has been freed, before… they fulfil their side of the bargain.’

  It was my only hope for Dudley, but I saw Thomas Jones shaking his head.

  ‘It’s Gethin who’ll want the proof of his freedom. The knowledge than no one is on his trail. And also, from what I know of him, he’ll want to… well, an Englishman of Dudley’s status, he’ll want to finish it himself. In some…’

  He tightened his lips, half turned away.

  ‘Ritual fashion?’ I said.

  ‘He has a legend to support,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘And that’s another reason why he’d want it to be done here.’

  Looking between the trees to the moon-grazed hills, I experienced that momentary sensation of being separate from the physical: the uncomfortable feeling of following yourself, just one step behind, which always comes when there’s no time to contemplate its significance.

  And then it was fading, and Thomas Jones was untying his horse from the tree.

  ‘He may not even be there yet, especially if he’s on foot. You have weaponry, boys?’

  Vaughan produced a stubby dagger. I had nothing.

  ‘Only your magic, eh, John?’

  Thomas Jones smiled, more than a touch ruefully.

  Whitton Church lay by the side of the road, amid ancient yew trees, about half a mile short of Pilleth. It was two or three hundred years old and not in good repair. But it gave us some concealment as we looked out towards Brynglas, upon whose slopes the moonlight gave the illusion of a first fall of quiet snow.

  ‘Been here in my dreams so often,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Every Welshmen is inclined to venerate Owain Glyndwr.’

  Was this a time for following such dreams? I wondered again how far I might trust him. What if he played a double game, with his veneration of Glyndwr?

  This is what the night does to you.

  ‘If we go directly up the hill, we’ll be seen for miles,’ Vaughan said. ‘Better to follow the river, where it winds behind the trees.’

  He led us out past Nant-y-groes, where one small light shone in a downstairs room – or was it the moon’s reflection? And then we left the road to follow the River Lugg… the river of light living up to its name this night, still as a cold, white, twisting road. Behind us, a multitude of sheep lay close-packed in a corner of the pasture, like frogspawn on a pond.

  ‘They come down before sunset,’ I said. ‘They don’t like the hill at night.’

  We kept, as far as possible, behind the trees. The ground was rough and sloping. We went carefully, passing under the towering motte of the long-ruined castle, overgrown now, the river forming a natural moat.

  The moon was high and white and the clouds were rolled back, and the side of Brynglas shone now like a polished breastplate, looking bigger than I’d ever seen it. I thought of Anna Ceddol sleeping in the house that was half inside the hill – if ever there could be sleep with the mad boy in the house. Pushing back the thought, I called softly to Thomas Jones.

  ‘So how was it in your dreams?’

  ‘Brynglas? Like Jerusalem. A shrine. It makes me tremble.’

  His voice low and sibilant as the wind through dead foliage.

  ‘There is a shrine up there,’ I said, as we stopped. ‘ To the Virgin Mary. And, um, I suppose what came before her.’

  ‘I know.’ Thomas Jones gazed up, between tall trees, at the silvered hillside. ‘The heathen well, where nymphs would bathe. A portal to the otherworld, the land of the dead, of the ancestors.’

  ‘So they say.’

  ‘They also say Owain went there on the night before the battle, did you know that? There’d been this huge and savage storm, the sky ripped apart with lightning.’

  ‘Weather again.’

  ‘Indeed. His war began with a fiery star crossing the heavens, followed by thunder, and so it went on. And in the silence after this fierce storm in the summer of 1402, Owain and Rhys Gethin ascended the hill to the holy well. It was June the twenty-first. Midsummer. The old festival.’

  ‘And the next day they set fire to the church,’ I said. ‘They stood and watched the church burn.’

  Glyndwr had fired several churches on the way here, supposedly because they paid tithes into England, but I said nothing about this.

  ‘The new Rector of Pilleth, he’d say Glyndwr and Gethin had sold their immortal souls to the devil that night.’

  ‘And a goodish deal it was, boy. Imagine the terror when word of the victory reached the English court. Wondering if, by year’s end, they’d all be learning Welsh.’

  ‘But short-lived. Like all deals with the devil. Whatever he invoked here deserted him when he entered England. He died unfulfilled as, presumably, did Rhys Gethin.’

  ‘If he died.’ Thomas Jones reined in his horse. ‘Don’t make dust of this, boy. Owain’s death was never recorded, nor his burial place ever found. He simply disappeared. Oh, I’m not saying he lives… but something of him does. And, if it’s anywhere, it’s here.’

  He turned slowly in the saddle to face me, his round, pale face shining like a smaller moon.

  ‘Look at me, boy – fallen Welshman, recipient of an English pardon. See what it does to me, this place. Oh, they all come here, at least once. Not just the handful of mad old ragamuffins in Plant Mat, but all those who yet dream of an exalted Wales. They come here to seek… renewal. And they keep coming back, oft-times for reasons they’ll never quite understand. The men I drink with in Tregaron, the poets and the dreamers. They come quietly, and quietly they leave, at dusk or before dawn. Sometimes journeying all the way on foot.’

  I thought of the rector: I have seen them anointing themselves here at night, in the heathen way.

  ‘So this is the place for them, isn’t it? The shrine. The most likely, anyway. Where might they take him? What hiding places are there? How far is it from the village?’

  ‘Not within sight of the village at
night,’ I said. ‘And no one comes out of there after dark. The church itself… the shrine’s behind it, and the well, a long hole in the ground, with a pine wood behind.’

  And below it… the Bryn. Half sunk into the hill itself.

  Like a cave.

  I said nothing of this, but it would be the first place I’d go, to warn the Ceddols. I kept my voice steady.

  ‘There are wide views from the church,’ I said. ‘Especially on a night like this. You’d see anyone coming.’

  ‘Especially three of us, on horseback. If we ride directly up the hill, we’re meat. Is there another way?’

  ‘There is another way,’ I said. ‘With good tree cover.’

  ‘Fit for horses?’

  ‘If we dismount and lead them. I’m sure we could leave them in the stables at Nant-y-groes, but… Stephen Price is a cautious man, and the explanations would take time.’

  ‘We’ll continue,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘See what there is to be seen. If anything.’

  ‘Wait,’ I said. ‘How much do you believe? Is there magic?’

  ‘There’s magic everywhere on a night like this, boy.’

  But I had little faith that there was anything of the Hidden here. So many legends were woven with hindsight, to light mere coincidence with glamour: strange weather, moving stars, earth-tremors.

  ‘You feel a softening of the ground?’ Vaughan had dismounted and was tying his horse to a young oak. ‘We should be able to get through this way and up the hill from behind but not if we’re in bog.’

  Damn. I should have thought. When I came down the hill, through the oak wood, I’d only gone as far as the burial tump. Now I only wanted a swift and discreet way to the church and Dudley, if Dudley was there. And also to the Bryn.

  ‘I’ll go through on foot for a short way,’ Vaughan said. ‘See how firm it is for the horses.’

  I watched him vanish into a thickening of undergrowth, wishing there were more of us, then looked up at the hill and the moon. You could make out the grey tower of Pilleth Church, halfway up. A marker for the shrine. Of the village you could see nothing.

  ‘I’ve never asked,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘But why were you here when I followed the Roberts boys? I presumed just to visit your old family home, but…’

  ‘It’s dying,’ I said, not wanting to mention the peculiar talents of Siôn Ceddol and the lure of his sister. ‘The village is dying.’

  ‘I’d almost think you cared.’

  ‘It’s the old home of my father. My tad.’

  ‘Tad? That’s what you called him, in the Welsh way?’

  For years I hadn’t even realised it was Welsh. I said nothing.

  ‘Ah, you’re one of us more than you know, John Dee. Why’s the village dying?’

  ‘Weight of too much killing. The dead outnumber the living, and the dead are rising. It oppresses them. There were always priests of the old kind to help them cope, but now they’re told it’s their own fault for not praising God enough.’

  ‘My,’ he said. ‘You do care.’

  ‘I hardly know anyone here. My tad told them he’d come back, when he was rich. But he never was, not for long. And he never did come back. Tell me… do have any idea how practised Gethin believes himself to be… in the ways of magic?’

  ‘I doubt he’s read the books, John. But he’s said to have the Sight. And the desire. And what some might call the courage… and others the madness of—’

  Thomas Jones breaking off because of a sharp cry from down by the river. He began to turn his horse.

  ‘He’s in the marsh?’

  Twisting in the saddle, I saw the water’s glitter, sword-bright through a line of trees.

  ‘We should all have gone.’

  I slid to the ground and tied the mare to the slender trunk of the oak. Aware again of that feeling of separation from the physical, a shudder going through me, like you sometimes get in sleep – as if I were snatched out of my body and then flung back. The mare flinched, as if she’d felt it, too.

  ‘He’s here,’ Thomas Jones said uncertainly.

  I spun round, thinking for a fearful moment that he meant Prys Gethin, then saw Roger Vaughan fading up greyly from the riverbank, the shape of him imprinted on the night, but blurred in my sight, as if the ink had run. I moved towards him.

  He was limping. Not looking at either of us, only at the ground, as if he might sink into it.

  ‘I’m all right, Dr Dee. I’m not hurt.’

  His voice was cracked like old parchment. He was not all right. He was far from all right.

  XLVII

  Orifice

  VAUGHAN’S HORSE, QUITE a big grey stallion, was straining at his tether, panting and blowing, and I saw that the others were become restive, too, their eyes all aflare.

  I said to Vaughan, ‘What happened down there?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He clearly was shaken. ‘That is, I’m not sure. I think… I think there might be something dead down there. The smell. Might just be a sheep, but I… It don’t feel right in any way.’

  He went to soothe the stallion, putting his hands on it, I’d swear, in search of warmth and life, but the horse sheered away from him. I looked down towards the river.

  ‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Find out.’

  ‘Leave it, John,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘We’re better moving to higher ground, where we can see anyone coming. If Dudley’s only been missing since this morning, it’s not likely that—’

  ‘His body will yet stink? That rather depends, doesn’t it?’

  I knew not what it depended on, but must needs be sure. And I was weary of unexplained fears and shadowplay, nature’s marked cards and loaded dice. Before I could think better of it, I was scrabbling down the way Vaughan had come, over short turf which suggested the sheep had been here in profusion in daylight hours. The sheep which fled at sunset.

  Divers trees sprang up around me, from half-grown saplings to old oaks with bloated, cankered boles and branches like fingers with the gnarling sickness. The river was no longer to be seen – too close, or the bank had been raised up against winter floods.

  You might conclude that, on this hard moon-flayed night, I was not fully in my mind, and maybe I wasn’t. I’d experienced this in Glastonbury and other places where Christianity and old magic were interwoven – the air unsteady and full of sparks, and sometimes you thought you could hear it like the hum of bees or, indeed, smell it in a sudden rank, richness of earth.

  … you’re one of us more than you know, John Dee.

  I wondered now, if my tad’s evocation of Wales – the men bent like thorn trees, their skin scoured – had not simply been intended to keep me away from here, plant some deep revulsion inside me. Maybe some dark memory had lived inside him and the last thing he wanted was for his son to become one of us.

  But now I was here, whether by destiny or conspiracy, an educated man grown weary of the pinches and taunts, the mists and flickerings. I wove between the trees, looking for the river, recalling my own drawing of the valley, a place given form by ancient ritual. But the river was hidden now by the earth, of a sudden, rising before me, all humped like a deathbed.

  How our night-minds ever find the most sinister of likeness. It was only raised earth, an upturned bowl. Made bigger by enclosing shadows than it had looked by day, and the trees growing out of it turned into a conference of witches, one of them long-dead, naked boughs clawing for the moon. But it wasn’t the tree that stank.

  In the windless night, it seemed as if the smell was all over the tump. A raw essence of decay, of corrupted flesh, sharp and hideously sweet. Stephen Price and Pedr Morgan had secretly buried a new corpse here, which by now would indeed be in a ripe condition, but… buried.

  Under the moon’s lamp, I rounded the tump to where they’d dug and was driven back, as if struck, by a reek so insidiously putrid that I felt as if my own body were rotting in its blast. Was sent reeling away, a hand cupped over my nose, my feet slithering and…

>   Christ…

  A blow – a battlefield blow. A bright, ripping pain in the back of my head had me tumbling, flung around and thrown down, my stricken head jouncing from the bole of the tree behind me, legs slithering into a bed of twiggery and stony soil.

  I lay for long moments, benumbed, the night in spasm around me. I must simply have backed hard into a tree with a low and knobbled branch which had scored my skull and put me down. But it had felt like an act of violence.

  Reaching up a hand, I hissed in pain on finding a flap of peeled flesh, warm blood flooding through my fingers, my hair already thick with it.

  Embedded in tree roots, I stared through the pain into a blackness, as if into the cave where the children of Mat met – entrance so narrow that only one man at a time might pass through. And the devil. The hole gaped at me like an open mouth, and its breath was foul. No escape from the stench of bloating flesh from… not a cave…

  …but it was an orifice in the tump’s flank, where none had been when I was here before. When I opened my mouth to call out for Thomas Jones and Vaughan, something at once rushed in, foul as returning vomit.

  How can I tell you this? How can I describe the horror of closing my mouth on a mess of putrid flesh? Trying to retch, but finding no breath for it. Beginning to choke, the panic throwing me on my back amidst bone-hard roots, knowing full well that, although my throat and gut were tight with revulsion, there was nothing in my mouth.

  Nothing anywhere. No air. The moon gone, darkness absolute.

  Know that I like darkness. Nights when I can lie on my back, and planets and stars are laid out for me in strings and clusters like an intricate garden whose patterns I know with an intimacy as if I’d cultivated them myself.

  This was a solid darkness, like stilled smoke. Should I have formed a prayer, holding it inside me, or inscribed a protective pentagram on the air? We don’t think, even those of us who’ve pored for years over the Cabala and ascended, if only in our minds, the angelic stairways. In cold life, magic has a tendency to shrink back into the books. In the struggle against hungry death, we fall back on the physical.