by Phil Rickman
Something spoken in Welsh, Thomas Jones nodding, then gesturing toward an area of turf a yard or so out from his boots.
‘I am… required to invite you, John, to kneel and bow your head.’
I looked at the selected turf and backed away from it, into the arms of Gerallt Roberts who pulled me close, sharply, and I felt what could only be his head butting the back of mine, bursting open my wound, and I must have screamed as I sank in agony to my knees.
‘What a night for this,’ Prys Gethin said. ‘Did you see the star earlier? I witnessed it as I walked here. Crossed the whole of the sky, like the one which fired the heavens just before the start of Owain’s war. You’d know of that, as an astrologer.’
Through the pain came outrage. In 1402, a comet widely seen across Europe had been viewed as a portent of the End-time but hailed by Glyndwr as inscribing across the night sky the trajectory of his campaign. I’d charted the frequency of comets and if there’d been one this night I was no astronomer. This man was mad, and I could not believe that someone at the highest level of English government would bargain with him. Maybe it was the French or the Spaniards or some unbalanced independent contender like the preening Earl of Arundel.
‘When you are ready,’ Prys Gethin said, ‘it will be easier for all of us if you pull your hair to one side to enable a clean cut. Don’t think to further demean your race by attempting to run, or to struggle. The end of it would be the same, only bloodier.’
For just a moment – as I came stubbornly to my feet, yet refusing to believe – by some trick of the paling moon, his empty socket seem to glow, as if this imaginary comet burned inside his skull.
In such a man it could only portend horror and tragedy.
As it would.
LI
Ragged White
I STOOD, SWAYING, hands on my gut where the Wigmore shewstone swelled out of my jerkin like a cyst. Thomas Jones bent and laid down the butcher’s knife.
‘Let me talk to him,’ he said to Gethin. ‘With some small privacy. He was, after all, to have become my cousin.’
Gethin picked up the long knife.
‘Make it swift.’
He stood back and signalled to the big man to do the same. Thomas Jones came forward, not a weapon betwixt us. I wondered if, as a known sorcerer, a curse from me might have any effect. In such moments, you’ll consider anything.
‘Kneel, John,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘If you please.’
‘Piss off.’
‘There’s no way out of this,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘And yet you know there is. You know of these matters. If you go quietly—’
‘That will not happen.’
‘You know… that if you go quietly and with humility, your soul will slip away from this place in peace and grace. Whereas if you resist and must needs be ignominiously cut down, your embittered ghost will join all the other unquiet spirits which crowd Brynglas like crows.’
I would have had an answer for that, and a good and informed one, but then Thomas Jones was stepping away, holding out a hand to Gethin for the butcher’s knife. Hefting it from hand to hand, testing its balance. The big man, Roberts, was come close behind me again. The smell of his breath was worse at this moment than the stench of rotting flesh from the hole in the tump by the river.
I couldn’t speak. I stood swaying, new blood stiff on my cheeks. I was aware of Gethin walking over. Heard his rich, bladder-pipe voice, in Welsh, and then it broke off.
‘Translate for him,’ he said.
With no expression in his voice, Thomas Jones did as bid.
‘John, the Prince of Wales is with us now. He who could never leave while the English yoke lies heavily upon us.’
More Welsh, but all I heard was the voice of Thomas Jones from earlier.
…not saying he lives… but something of him does. And, if it’s anywhere, it’s here.
And now, having watched Prys Gethin sitting upon the hill, as if in silent summons, I was afraid.
I cleared my throat.
‘He was, in his way,’ I said, ‘a man of honour. I believe my family might even have supported his cause. And yet…’ I looked into the powdery night ’twixt Thomas Jones and Prys Gethin. ‘…he looks not happy. And who would be, knowing that his only representative on the hill of his finest day was a one-eyed, twisted scut who—’
A grunt from behind, and an agony as if my skull were cleaved open, but this time I stayed on my feet.
‘—who cares not a toss for the future of Wales, but only to satisfy his need for—’
‘Do it,’ Prys Gethin said.
* * *
When I knelt, every muscle and sinew in my legs was straining against it. The body fighting to live, the mind in furious, bitter conflict with itself over what to believe, who to trust. The need to hold on to the last small hope that a man you’d liked, who’d oft-times made you laugh, was not, after all, to be your murderer.
His voice at my ear.
‘I’m trying to help you, boy. To give you the quick and merciful passing that’s mete for a man of your standing.’
Shifting his gaze when I looked up at him. I knelt in the wet turf, and they stood in silence around me. With my head bowed, all I could see was their boots – one pair, worn by Roberts were all smirched with mud and pine needles but not enough to obscure the fine leather and good stitching and—
Oh God. Robbie…
When my head jerked, the wound under my hair sprang apart yet again and blood begin to run, down into my eyes. When the head was severed it would stop.
I let the breath go from my chest to my abdomen, beginning to pray, and in my head, against a cloth of deep blue, the sigil of St Michael appeared for a moment – Michael who brings courage.
Michael who is also the angel of death, weighing the soul, conveying it to where it must go.
Out of the corner of one eye, I saw the knife leave the ground. Then I saw, on the grey grass, the shadow of a raised blade extended from bowed arms.
Breath froze in my throat, silence roared in my ears. I saw the shadow of the blade at an oblique angle. Not the slender, fine-honed blade that beheaded Anne Boleyn in one stroke, but a rude butcher’s knife, made for mutton. I fell into prayer, as the shadow-blade twitched once and then fell with the echo of a cry across the night. Then came a brutal blow, my body tipping sideways, my head fallen heavily into the grass.
All shadow. Moments of emptiness, then wet splatter. Hot blood on my cheeks, in my mouth, in my eyes.
Through it, I saw the blade falling again and again and again. More blood flying up.
Up.
* * *
‘Up, John!’
The hand of God reaching down for me.
I didn’t move. Lay on my side, looking up through the blood into the face of Thomas Jones, his panicked eyes under a blur of madness and tears, as he kicked me over on to my back.
‘Get up, John… Get the fuck up…’
I could feel my hands, fingers flexing and then moving with an exploratory slowness to my neck, which somehow seemed yet to be held ’twixt my collar bones. Sitting up, now, in a pond of blood, looking down on the body of the big man, Roberts, heaving and squirming in the grass, his face a dark red carnival mask, and then flinching away from the sight of the thick blade coming down on him, and I heard Thomas Jones sob and, over the sickening splinter of bone, I heard the vixen shriek.
It came down the hillside with all the force of an arrow that would pierce my heart and, in a blinking, I was struggling to my feet. Fresh blood was slicked under my boots, and I stumbled and fell, dragged myself up again, scraping the salty blood from my eyes as I clambered up into the dregs of the night, and there was Prys Gethin creeping through the muddy dawn.
Quite some distance ahead of me, close to the church, something up there having trapped his attention.
A pale fluttering.
Gethin still now.
Standing, dagger in hand, feet apart. Waiting for the figure in the ragged wh
ite nightshirt to come down from the hill like a summoned ghost.
Oh, no. Oh dear God, no.
I ran crookedly up the steepening side of Brynglas. Stumbling twice and clawing at the grass. Knowing these two, black and white, would come together long before I could reach them, I began to cry out urgently and was answered, the way one owl answers another.
The nightshirt billowed. The long bone was raised. The vixen shriek resounded down the valley.
I saw what might have been the first pale rays of the rising sun in Prys Gethin’s blade as it was drawn quickly back and then pushed, with a practised ease, under the boy’s jaw.
Saw Gethin wipe the blade in the grass and stride away, not once looking back at any of us.
LII
The Wasting
I KNEW HE was gone before I reached him. The old white nightshirt lay around him like the flaccid feathers of a dead bird, slowly turning red under the bloody light of early dawn. His throat was laid open, as were his mad, unseeing eyes, to the awakening day.
Sick to my soul, I came to my knees beside him. He was quite still; his spirit had flit as lightly as a moth’s. I looked up, in dread, through the dimness for sign of his sister, but there was none, only her voice in my memory.
We’re country people. If he wanders out in the night here, as oft-times he does, I know he’ll come to no harm.
I threw my fist with savagery at the turf, grief and pity turned into a useless rage, as Thomas Jones arrived at my shoulder. I looked up at him and at Brynglas, a melancholic grey without even the mystery of mist. As though the last small hope of spiritual relief for this damned hill had lodged for a while in Siôn Ceddol and now was snuffed out.
Thomas Jones was painfully panting, florid-faced, still holding the butcher’s knife, reddened to the handle.
‘Who’s this?’
‘Boy from the village. Armed—’ My voice choked on the senseless, wasteful cruelty of it. ‘Armed with a …’
I picked up the age-browned thigh bone from where it lay, close to Siôn Ceddol’s half-curled left hand. I’d not noticed he was left handed, a sinistral – though doubtless the rector would have. Another unfailing sign of the demonic. To Gethin, he’d have looked unearthly in the half light.
Like an angel.
‘He’ll kill anyone in his path, now,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘You know that…’
Then he was bent over, coughing wretchedly, his hands bloodied to the wrists, the cuffs of his doublet blackened. He came up pointing towards the thickness of pines to the left of the church.
‘Went through there. The woods, not the churchyard.’
This brought me to my feet, dizzied for a moment, too long without sleep and bleeding from the head. The sky was the colour of ale. No sun yet. I looked down at Siôn Ceddol and his favourite bone, his open throat. I swallowed bile.
‘I’ll go after him.’
Took the butcher’s knife, its handle all clammy with blood and worse.
‘We’ l l go.’ Thomas Jones had me by the shoulders. ‘Listen… remember this. Don’t think to appeal to his reason. It’s gone. In the ruins of his mind, all is justified.’
‘What did he say to you? In Welsh.’
‘He said that only one of us need die. I weighed the odds and they weren’t good. I’ve seen Roberts take three men down in a street brawl. I did all I could think to do, which was to go with him… until the moment came.’
And what if the moment had not come? What if Gethin’s attention had not been snared by the vixen shriek and the fluttering figure in white who, unknowingly, may have given his life for mine?
I turned back towards the upper part of the hill, the high pines still black on the skyline.
‘What’s up there?’ Thomas Jones said.
‘I’m not sure. I don’t know. Maybe the Rector’s house.’
Along with the wasting of an innocent life, maybe the most innocent, the thin brown light of dawn had brought a mournful uncertainty.
* * *
The pines closed around us like the pillars of a rude temple. Wandering from tree to tree, apparel stiffened with dried and drying blood, saying nothing, we must have looked like war-sick soldiers escaping the fray.
Moving with caution now, as most of the trees were well grown enough to hide a man. I’d no wish for us to die foolishly at Gethin’s hands. If he died at ours, I’d feel no regret, but how likely was that? We were soft-skinned men who lived in books – even Thomas Jones nowadays – and one of us vainly courted the angelic. The man we sought had skin like a lizard’s, was well-practised in the art of killing, driven by devils.
The wood was deeper than it had appeared from the slope below the church. It crested Brynglas and continued down the northern flank. Could be that these pines had grown upon the land where Rhys Gethin’s fiery army had waited for Edmund Mortimer’s trained soldiers, yeomen and peasants. And the Welsh archers who knew – or yet did not – what they’d do. When the moment came.
Maybe this was also where the women waited. The women who travelled with Gethin’s heroes and were said to have come scurrying down, after the battle, with their little knives.
Standing in that clearing, under a whitening sky, I threw down the butcher’s knife in horrified realisation of the recent carnage it had performed in the saving of the unworthy life of a conjurer who might never know what he’d conjured… a seer who saw nothing beyond the physical. The Wigmore shewstone was a useless weight in the front pouch of my jerkin. Had it not been for my futile pursuit of advancement and the engines of creation, we would not have come here and Siôn Ceddol would yet live. Let not this place be tainted by your presence, said Rector Daunce, perhaps, after all, with prescience.
I kicked the knife away, and the blade came to rest at the bottom of one of the pines, around which a…
‘John—’
… rope was tied.
I felt a drumming in my chest. This was not the old and rotting hemp you might expect to find at the heart of a wood, but new rope, strong rope. Bending to it, I saw that other, shorter lengths lay nearby, tossed among the needles and cones – on top, not embedded.
‘Someone was roped to this tree… and then cut loose.’
‘And not long ago,’ Thomas Jones said.
‘Was this it… Dudley’s prison?’
I picked up a strand of rope. Its ragged end was brown with blood, and almost at once, across the clearing, I saw the reason.
* * *
He lay ’twixt two young pines on the edge of the clearing, where it was beginning to thicken into something approaching forestry.
He was most conspicuously dead, face down in a bolster of browning needles, a pond of blood beneath and around him.
And barefooted.
I shut my eyes in anguish. Close to weeping with despair, I followed Thomas Jones across the clearing to the corpse. He took a breath of pine wood and bent among the day’s first flies.
‘Stabbed in more than one place.’
‘But not freshly.’
The pond of blood beneath him was congealed, like a blackberry preserve.
‘Or efficiently. Looks to me, like the mortal injuries inflicted in a fight.’
Pine needles glued together by black blood, a trail. Thomas Jones stood up then bent and turned the body over, stood looking down, hands on hips.
‘John, if you thought this was…’
I turned slowly in the oily light.
The dead man’s eyes were open. An ooze of blood linked nose and mouth. A young man, maybe not yet twenty-five. I’d never seen him before. The breath went out of me.
‘Gwyn Roberts,’ Thomas Jones said.
‘You think Dudley…?’
‘The rope’s cut, Gwyn’s stabbed to death in what looks like a fight. I don’t—’
‘And his boots taken,’ I said. ‘You may not have noticed, but the older Roberts was wearing riding boots of the finest quality. Dudley’s. In one of which he keeps a blade.’
‘In his
boot?’
‘Used to, anyway.’
He’d shown it to me two or three years ago, on an older pair: the thin sheath stitched into a seam of leather, to fit beside the calf. The dagger it concealed had been no more than five inches long, including the bone handle. New boots, but he wouldn’t have abandoned an old precaution. Robert Dudley was as superstitious as anyone I knew.
‘Maybe he guessed they’d take his boots, for their value and to render him more helpless. Maybe he retrieved the knife from the boot after they’d searched him. I know not.’
‘So it’s likely he lives,’ Thomas Jones said.
‘Or lived’, I said. ‘If Gethin passed this way…’
I walked back into the clearing, wiping my mouth on a sleeve, not daring to think there was cause for hope. Finally snatching up the bloodied knife from which it seemed that destiny, that twisted joker, had decreed there could be no parting.
Flies sticking to it now.
* * *
Coming out of the pine wood, some minutes later, we found ourselves closer to the church of St Mary than I’d expected. An ominous quiet was hung upon the air. Dawn bird-sound was distant and thin. Thomas Jones went to the holy well to wash, but I sank to my knees in the grass, sucking dew into my dry mouth. This was the second dawn I’d seen since sleeping, and I knew not when I’d ever felt as weary.
Wet faced, I walked around the front of the little grey church to the now familiar view over the cauldron of hills, down the battlefield of Brynglas, becoming aware of movement, villagers gathering. A dozen or more, including several women, on the hill, under the dirty-bruised skin of the sky.
I saw old Goodwife Thomas and Gareth Puw, the blacksmith, and others I recognised but could not name, but there was no sign of Vaughan or Price and his sons.
Only, some distance away, something still as a sculpted tableau in the grass which no one approached.
Siôn Ceddol’s head lolled in his sister’s lap, her own head bowed, her dense brown hair down around her face and his. She did not seem to see any of them, kneeling in an island of grief to which none could cross.
