by Phil Rickman
With the running blood pooling on my face, I pushed against the roots, dug my boots into soft earth, coming up very slowly, my back against the tree. But my body felt too heavy, and I was aware of something pulling me back.
Fighting it, cold sweat welling from my skin to join the blood, but it was too much for me and I slid back into the gleefully crackling leaves, and felt a presence, a nearness, an active resentment fast hardening into hatred as I realised I must needs go into the hole.
XLVIII
Not in a Goodly Way
A LOG THE size of a side of mutton was in slumber in the ingle at Nant-y-groes. I bent over the meagre glow from its underside, needing bodily heat more than ever I could remember. But Stephen Price was a farmer and wouldn’t even think to awaken his fire before morning.
‘Not that I sleep much these nights,’ he said. ‘Three or four hours, then I’ll awake and get dressed, have a bite to eat, and then mabbe doze till dawn, if I can. And tonight, with this Gethin let loose…’
‘You know about this?’
‘The whole country knows of it by now.’
I looked around. The moon was a wavering lamp in the poor, blued glass of a deep-hewn window. I could hear Clarys the housekeeper clattering somewhere. In the brightness of pain, my thoughts were voiced, fast as arrows.
‘Where’s your wife? Why do I never see your wife?’
Price shuffled uncomfortably on his stool.
‘Gone.’
‘I’m… very sorry to hear that.’
‘To Monaughty farm. To stay with my brother’s family.’
I’d thought he’d meant dead. A quiet woman, Anna Ceddol had said. Sits before the kitchen fire, goes out to listen to the priest on a Sunday and then goes home and worries. Well, I was glad she wasn’t dead, but why had she gone to stay at another farm, not even two miles away?
Stephen Price was asking me if I wanted to lie down. I shook my head… but slowly, the pain scraping ceaselessly at my head like a wind-driven bough against a window. I’d bathed it in the holy well and again with well-water in the yard at Nant-y-groes. The good housekeeper, Clarys, had applied a nettle balm, but it had begun to bleed again.
‘I’ll recover,’ I said.
Looked like you were rehearsing alone for some Christmas play, Thomas Jones had said, shaken. Pretending the other actors were there all around. Frit the hell out of me, boy.
‘I did not mean for this to happen,’ Price said. ‘I didn’t think it would happen to you.’
He hadn’t even asked why I, accompanied by two others, had come this night to Brynglas, seeming only grateful that I was attempting, in my way, to uncover what was wrong here. And if he hadn’t thought that anything would happen to me he seemed not unhappy that something had.
‘Didn’t think such things could happen to me either,’ I said dully.
And had once been foolish enough to think that if they ever did I’d feel… favoured? Maybe one day I’d be far enough removed from it to consider the science, but not now, when I felt as if my very soul had been snatched out and left to go cold.
Could not smother another spasm of shivering, and at last Stephen Price pulled down an iron poker from the wall and raised the log until a flame came tonguing through.
‘I… was not as forthright with you,’ he said stiffly, as I might’ve been. Never told you nothing wrong, but could’ve told you more.’
There was a clopping of hooves from the yard outside. The horses still were edgy, frit and sweating. I’d asked if we might leave all three at Nant-y-groes for a while, to calm down while we considered our situation. And so Vaughan and Thomas Jones had followed Price’s sons to the stables. Leaving us alone, Price and me.
We’d moved on, widely skirting the tump and the marshy ground. Leading the horses, at last, through the oak wood and up to Pilleth church.
Jones and I had waited in the trees while Vaughan crept up alone to the church, where it took him not long to establish that the building and surrounds were deserted. He said later that he’d stifled a cry when, on peering around the wall of the tower, he’d encountered the stone virgin on her plinth, her face so tainted that she seemed to sneer into his eyes. I think he meant to pray to her and could not.
But at least the cold virgin was alone, so we came down from the hill the more direct way, veering from the path only once, so that I might be sure that the door and shutters of the Bryn were closed tight against invasion.
At first despondent over our failure to find Dudley, I was briefly lit by a small hope that we’d been wildly wrong and that he was back in Presteigne in some other whore’s bed.
But that light soon went out.
‘Thing was, I was affeared she’d die.’
‘Your wife?’
I looked blearily at Price, my hair and face stiff with dried blood.
‘Couldn’t sleep, would not eat. Would not go out, not even in daylight. Gone thin as a rib. Sent her down to Monaughty farm to be cared for by my brother’s wife. Mabbe she won’t be back. It’s all different down there, see. Not much more’n a mile, but it lies easy.’
‘A monastery farm.’
‘A safer air. She never liked this house, or this valley, that’s what it come down to. Couldn’t wait to move to Monaughty where there’d be more company. More company… and less company.’
He looked down at the fire, shaking his head.
‘Wanted me to spend more money on the building work, finish the extension at Monaughty, so we could go. It led to much quarrelling at first. I was glad to get away to London, truth be told. You know what women are like, think you’re tight with money, don’t understand what you gotter spend keeping your ground in good heart, and…’
He looked up, stricken, his face all creased.
‘Truth of it is, I never want to go to Monaughty. Two brothers, one farm, divers sons, it don’t work. Stephen Price of Pilleth, that’s me. Was gonner make Meredith an offer for this house.’
‘It’s all your land down here?’
‘Most of it. But no house. Joan was all, “Oh thank God it’s only rented. We can be out of yere.” We’d signed for the place for two years. I thought to… mend things, somehow. Thought mabbe ole Walter, the priest, could change it for us. When we first come, if my wife or anybody seen anything, we’d send for Walter. And sometimes Marged, the wise woman. Mother Marged and Walter the priest… they had an understanding.’
‘What did they think was the problem here?’
‘Never listened much to ole Marged, it was all mumbles and spells. Father Walter, he’d say that, if you had the Sight, living yere you’d ever need the Saviour’s protection.’
‘What did he mean?’
‘Shrine to the Holy Mother, place of pilgrimage – you come, you pay your respects and then you leave with faith renewed. No one should live too close to such places, Walter said, ’cept mabbe monks and hermits trained to thrive on spiritual agony. The ole priest, you never knowed when he was serious, but he knowed what he was about. And then he died. And then ole Marged. Both gone, one after the other.’
‘And then all you had,’ I said quietly, ‘was a boy who brought death out of the earth but could not talk. And a new priest, all for the Bible.’
‘Had hopes for Daunce at first. That he’d bring some sense, with the new religion. Plain talking. But, in the end…’ Price stabbed the poker into the heart of the fire. ‘…putting it all down to the devil, that was the last thing we needed.’
‘So you came to me.’
‘You were sent to us. That’s how I seen it.’ He leaned away from the fire. ‘The boy with you out there. Was that young Vaughan of Hergest?’
‘And the man with him is my… my cousin, Thomas Jones, from the west of Wales.’
He and Vaughan had said they’d stay outside, watch the night, watch the hill for movement. Anything.
‘My wife’s been like this all her life,’ Price said. ‘Some has it, most of us en’t. I thought it didn’t bother her much any
more.’
‘But it was different here?’
‘She liked to walk. In the evening, when the air was soft.’
‘Not any more.’
‘No. Never any more.’
His accent was thicker this night, but his voice was higher, querulous.
‘What did she see?’
‘The dead?’ He prodded at the fire. ‘But not in a goodly way.’
‘You mean from the battlefield…’
‘Confused. Looking for a home. Fragments of them. She’d be walking through them, like they were part of the wind, blowing down the hill, scattered like leaves – that was how she described it. After a while, she wouldn’t go up the hill at all, except to church, in a group of us.’
‘Where did she walk then?’
‘By the river.’ He looked uncomfortable. ‘Quieter down there, see, until—’
I leaned forward, driven by sudden and powerful insight.
‘Until you buried a man’s body in the old grave mound?’
I sat back, into shadow. Felt I was close to the very heart of it. If it was just the fears of villagers, he’d pass it off as the superstitions of the uneducated. But his own wife… domestic troubles, matrimonial strife. His desire to remain here, in his own place, tempered by that fear that his wife, if they stayed, might even die of it.
I said, ‘Did she know what you’d buried in the mound?’
‘Christ, no.’
Of course not. It was even possible that his wife’s fear of Brynglas had been another good reason to dispose of the remains… before she could find out about it. The thought of what that might do to her.
‘Why did you bury him there?’
‘Why? Because it was the only place I could think of where the mad boy wouldn’t find him. Or, if he did, nobody would dig there because they all knowed it was an ole grave. Nobody disturbs a known grave.’
‘No.’ I nodded. ‘Can you tell me what happened down by the river… with your wife?’
Price sat staring at the window and the smeared moon.
‘Gone to walk. Around dusk. Pleasant, warm evening. Come back not an hour later… worst I’ve ever seen her. Close to swooning in distress. Face white as clouds. Took until next day ’fore she could even tell me.’
‘What was it she saw?’
‘Saw… smelled… felt.’
I nodded. I’d thought the smell would cling to my apparel, but when I left there it was gone. The smell had been part of the place. Part of what was there. And for the first time I’d been thankful that I did not see, like Mistress Price.
‘No more’n a white mist, at first,’ her husband said. ‘Drifting across the marsh. Taking shape when it got close. Too close to run from.’
‘What shape did it take?’
‘A man.’ He swallowed, shifting on his stool. ‘Clothed only… only in his rage.’
‘You mean naked?’
‘Violence.’ Price poked angrily at the log. ‘She felt the violence in him. A dirty violence. She felt… what he wanted to do to her. Felt it inside.’ He threw down the poker, turned away from the fire. ‘Inside. You know what I’m saying, Dr Dee? You know what it felt like? You heard of anything like that before.’
‘No.’
Though maybe read of it. I wasn’t sure. Horrified, I sought to reassure Price, telling him that no one was mad, that the old priest had been right about the peculiar air of a place of pilgrimage which might have its origins long before the shrine of the Virgin. That it seemed to me the tump had itself been placed in geometric accordance with the hill, the river, the shrine’s heathen precursor and perhaps other monuments now vanished – even the sun and moon and the stars – to give this place a certain mystic resonance. Maybe empowering the spirit of whoever lay within the tump. And anyone who disturbed it… might themselves be disturbed.
All of this unloaded unrefined from my hurting head. Years of study might make it no clearer. And I knew that, but for my own experience at the tump this night, I’d be inclined to say that Mistress Price had created the whole story in her head to persuade her husband to turn his back on Brynglas Hill.
‘We buried a naked man in the tump,’ Price said. ‘A man whose spirit did not rest. Who walked, and… more.’
‘And what did you do?’
‘She hadn’t been out of her bed for three days. After I’d spent the day with you on the hill, came back home and Clarys said Joan hadn’t been able to keep food down. Death was coming for her. Got the ole cart out, and we carried her on it, me and Clarys, took her down to Monaughty. And later, when all were abed, I went to the tump.’
‘On your own?’
‘With a lantern. And the bier from the church.’
I sought to frame a question; it would not come.
‘It was my fault,’ Price said. ‘My wife had been near death. My fault to put right. Like you say, it was the wrong place.’ He wiped his brow with a sleeve. ‘Not the pleasantest task. He stank to deepest hell. He was… green and going to fluids. Pieces were coming away from him. But I done it.’
‘What?’
I’d reared back.
‘Dug him out and took him away. Buried him the other side of the hill, behind the pines. Laid the turf on top and packed it tight. And said what prayers I could think of over him.’
‘No one saw you?’
‘Not as I know of. Doubt if I cared by then. Had to be done. Why? Was it wrong? Against the laws of God? I think not.’
‘Only the laws of man.’
‘Aye. Mabbe. But what choice did I have? Tell me that.’
I leaned forward, looking into Price’s round, firelit face.
‘So there’s nothing in there now. Nothing in the tump.’
‘Only what was there before. Whatever that may be.’
‘And the hole,’ I said. ‘The hole remains.’
‘No hole. I filled it in. Who would not?’
I gripped the wooden seat of my stool, my aching head all aswirl. I’d gone most of a day and a night without sleep, had little to eat and taken a blow to the head.
But I knew that I’d gone into the hole and… nothing there but a foul miasma and a swirling hatred and—
‘John, boy?’
Thomas Jones standing in the doorway, hands behind his back. How long he’d been there I knew not, but I knew the tilted smile on his face was no portent of good fortune.
‘Beg mercy if I interrupt you, John, but I thought you might want to know that at this moment there is a man walking quite openly along the road towards us, from the direction of Presteigne. Evidently making for the hill.’
I stood up.
‘Someone you know?’
‘Well… he’s yet some distance away, so we cannot be entirely sure. But, Vaughan and I are in general agreement that it might well be the man who likes to call himself Prys Gethin.’
I stood unsteadily, a hand on the ingle beam.
‘John, you look worse,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘You should stay here. Vaughan and I will follow him.’
‘I’ll come,’ I said. ‘I must needs come.’
For I was hearing his voice from earlier.
Killing and rape… as natural to him as taking a piss… O liked to do her while covered in pig blood, still wet… the demon he’s invested with the spirit of Rhys Gethin…
I stood pushing my hands back through my blood-stiffened hair, regardless of the pain, and then turned to Price and asked him what I’d thought, as a bookman and a philosopher, never to ask any man.
‘Master Price,’ I said, ‘have you weaponry here?’
XLIX
Skin of the Valley
AT FIRST SIGHT, looking down, you might almost have thought him drunk. Trying to stay upright, hands extended either side of his body, upturned as if weighing the air.
It was the first time I’d seen him.
We watched from a small orchard growing on a shelf of higher ground behind Nant-y-groes, standing inside a lattice of shadows and speaking in low v
oices. Stephen Price had offered to come with us, bringing both his sons, maybe rousing some of the local men. But Thomas Jones had pointed out that too many of us on Brynglas would only draw attention.
Besides, I’d no wish for too many people to know about Robert Dudley.
‘If it is Gethin,’ Vaughan said. ‘How did he avoid half the men of Presteigne?’
‘They’ll have given up long ago,’ I said, ‘though that doesn’t tell us how they failed to see him on the road.’
‘Unless,’ Vaughan said, ‘he was given help. Nobody saw him leave the court. He may have been smuggled away later than we think.’
‘It being important that he reaches his destination,’ I said.
It was all aglow again. The night alive and me half dead.
‘We have a choice,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘We could simply wait here until he goes past and then follow him in the assumption that he’ll lead us to wherever your friend is held. If he still lives.’
‘We’d have the moonlight on our side, so we could leave a reasonable distance between him and ourselves.’
I pointed to a line of pines on the eastern side of Brynglas Hill, which hid the village and would offer us some cover.
‘More copses and dingles up there than you’d imagine,’ Roger Vaughan said. ‘Plenty of places he can disappear if he does see us. Especially if he knows the hill.’
‘I think we can take it he knows the hill all too well,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘Having been here many times, following in the steps of Rhys Gethin, calling Rhys’s spirit into him. Rhys in the time of triumph.’
I said nothing. None of my mentors – Agrippa, Trithemius – would deem it possible for a man to summon another’s ghost into himself, except in his imagination. Which would have more effect on himself than upon others and should not be too much feared.
We could see him more clearly now, a sprightly puppet-figure under the moon, and sometimes it looked as if he was almost dancing and then his pace was slowed and he was walking down the middle of the road as if in a procession. As if he was not alone.
