The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  ‘Like so many of them,’ Monger said, ‘that fellow gets away with it because he’s useful. Hired by Fyche to find the original well at Meadwell, and he found two.’

  ‘Found?’

  ‘By use of the forked twig that jumps in the hand.’

  ‘A water diviner.’

  ‘A water witcher, some called it.’

  They did. Once outlawed as witchcraft, but always far too useful to be banned for long, and I only wished I could do it myself. I shook my head.

  ‘It’s science, Master Farrier. Science we don’t yet understand. There’s a man named Agricola, who is said to be able to find metal ore in the ground by similar means. You’d think it were not possible.’

  ‘Most things are possible,’ Monger said. ‘And some things which are not possible are said to be possible… here. Especially those involving water, for we’re yet an island. Avalon, in spirit.’

  He continued to stroll placidly, almost gliding, through the market, walking like a monk. As if he still were a monk and protected.

  ‘All gone!’ An old man in an apron stood in the doorway of a baker’s shop, waving his arms at the queue outside. ‘Bloody constables took a whole batch, look, nothing I could do.’

  ‘Pies,’ Monger said. ‘Master Worthy makes the finest mutton pies in Somersetshire.’

  As the queue dispersed, muttering, Monger led me into the shop.

  ‘All gone, Joe,’ the baker said. ‘I just—’

  ‘Yes, we heard. Master Worthy, I’d like you meet Dr John, from the Queen’s Commission on Antiquities, here to make account of what remains from the abbey.’

  The old baker, plump and bald, I’d guess, beneath his cap, went conspicuously stiff.

  ‘Dr John seeks only assurance,’ Monger said, ‘that such items that were not destroyed are… in good hands. You have nothing to fear.’

  I looked at Monger. How could he be sure that this man had nothing to fear from me? He knew me not.

  Something here was not right.

  When we emerged, the tip of the tower upon the tor had appeared ’twixt two market stalls, lit by a sudden angel-fan of creamy light.

  ‘And this is it?’ I said. ‘These are Fyche’s sorcerers?’

  In a hole in the wall, concealed behind a disused oven, several old books had been hidden, the finest of them being the first volume of Steganographia, the masterwork on magic and cypher by Johannes Trithemius, the late Abbot of Sponheim. It could only have come from the abbey, and you could have locked me in that bakery with it for a week.

  ‘Emmanuel Worthy fancies himself as an alchemist,’ Monger said. ‘For no reason other than the possession of those books with their arcane diagrams that he’ll never understand. But I could point you to others more potent. A healer who cures through the toes in the old Egyptian way. A seventh child of a seventh child who foresees the future. At least five people who insist they can commune with the dead. Oh, and a maker of charms from the wood of the cross – though I might take issue with that.’

  ‘But all known to—’

  ‘All known to one another, yes. Even scattered over the town and various of the outlying villages, they’re a community. Some of them will gather together later, when the market’s spent. At least –’ Monger glanced over his shoulder – ‘they would usually gather. Tonight, things may be different.’

  ‘Were they here when you were a monk at the abbey? Did you know then who and what they were?’

  ‘Some were here. Not so many as now. Or maybe it was just that we didn’t notice them the same because we, the pious brethren, were in the majority then.’

  I learned that many of these seekers – Monger could only call them that – had journeyed here from the ends of the country, and some from abroad. When the abbey flourished, this had gone, if not unnoticed, at least uncommented on. The town was growing and always full of pilgrims. It was only after the fall of the abbey and the exodus of the wealthy and the pious that people began to notice the nature of the incomers who did not leave… who, in fact, began to increase their numbers, some arriving like poor travellers, living in camps and abandoned houses. Attending church only as much as was necessary to avoid prosecution, for their own religious obediences clearly belonged… elsewhere.

  A whole immigrant community spurning the bigger pickings of Bristol and London to scratch a living here. Why?

  ‘Not so simple,’ Monger said.

  I heard Fyche again in my head with his talk of the fires in the midnight and the maggot-people chattering and squealing to the moon.

  Feeling again the most acute strangeness. Why was Monger telling all this to me, a clerk from London who was almost certainly of the reformed church? It was beginning to make me anxious, but my interest had been trapped, and all caution had long been dismissed by the scholar in me.

  Like the woman in the eyepatch, I seemed to have gained entry to an unknown realm.

  ‘How came you to know these people, Master Farrier?’

  ‘My trade.’ Monger glided on, not looking at me. ‘The abbey was where I learned my trade. Attending to the horses of visitors and pilgrims – remarkable how little regard the pious may have for their animals. Eventually I was given a forge in the abbey grounds, and now I have one on the other side of the walls. While still keeping a monk’s hours… and – more quietly – a monk’s religious observances.’

  ‘Without harassment?’

  ‘A farrier’s an essential man in any community. A good farrier is nigh-on untouchable. And this is still a Catholic town, whichever church its goodfolk attend. The abbey… cast a spiritual light over the place, and there was healing. People who’d limped in on sticks walking out and tossing the sticks over the hedge.’

  ‘But that’s gone…’

  ‘No, no… you’re not getting this, are you?’

  We’d reached the edge of the market, and the houses were becoming poorer and crumbling into fields and heath, and when the farrier turned to me at last there was a kind of intense serenity in his grey gaze.

  ‘It’s not gone, Dr John. It was here before the abbey and it’s still here. Do you see? It was always here.’

  I stopped walking, feeling something like a gathering of stars in my abdomen. Oft-times I’d fancied that places where great churches and abbeys were built had some quality, some atmosphere related more to the balance of hills and fields and water than their orientation toward Jerusalem. An eagerness had seized me, but I said nothing.

  ‘With the abbey itself just a shell,’ Monger said, ‘there’s a need to provide channels for… energies which might otherwise overflow, perchance causing harm.’

  Hadn’t Eleanor Borrow said something similar, about the monks being needed to keep a balance? For all my learning, I felt like a child again who saw before him adult human knowledge like an outline of distant mountains.

  ‘Most of us had little understanding of it at the time,’ Monger said, ‘but if you consider the real function of the abbey was to transform the energy that was there into a Godly substance, and spread it afar. Lay it soft on the land… a spiritual irrigation…’

  ‘Yes.’

  I could see it and hear it. The river of a Gregorian chant, in all its glorious mathematical symmetry.

  Ice in my spine.

  ‘How was this known?’

  ‘Tradition,’ he said.

  ‘Not written down?’

  ‘Some traditions –’ he smiled – ‘are never written down.’

  ‘Then how…?’

  But he’d moved away, holding up both his long hands as if in benediction over the townsfolk clustered below us around the myriad market stalls.

  ‘Still they come. People in search of something. People who think that just by being here, on this holy soil, their lives will be transformed.’

  ‘Holy?’

  ‘A big, bad word,’ Monger said. ‘But everything has its darker side. There are some who would… speed the process.’

  ‘By sorcery?’

 
I thought of what Fyche had said about the cockerel in the abbey. And earlier about finding new-born babes in the grass with their throats cut in sacrifice.

  ‘By the use of ritual magic?’ I said.

  ‘When the new religion is in disarray, some may turn again to the older ones.’

  Monger the farrier gazed placidly down across the huddle of the town. Like the player over the chesstable, and I was the knight, which is moved in such a fashion that he cannot easily see the way ahead.

  The farrier turned his grey gaze upon me. ‘Where stand you, Dr Dee?’ he murmured. ‘For this surely is the town in England closest to your own heart.’

  XXII

  Black as Pitch

  SOMETIMES I’D THINK that, for all my learning, I was still like to an infant, milky-eyed and unknowing. That, being sent early to college and raising my eyes but rarely from printed pages, a whole part of my being was yet undeveloped, leaving me with little understanding of a world so carelessly traversed by the less-educated.

  A child of two and thirty. Dudley knew that. However you survived in the cesspits of Paris and Antwerp…

  The plain truth being that I’d never been in the cesspits of Paris or Antwerp, only in their lecture halls and libraries.

  Now I was walking numbly through the streets, as if naked, following the farrier into a mean, cramped drinking hovel on the upper edge of town.

  Huddling in its dark, cider-smelling belly, beside a sooted inglenook with a fire of peat, while the stained ceiling sagged threateningly betwixt beams and my head was swelled with questions I had not the will to ask.

  Cowering into the shadows, I watched a wench of about fifteen serving cider from an earthenware jug. Watched Monger waiting in line behind two farmer-looking men, four others sitting around the room on stools. The only talk I could hear was of sheep-prices until Monger returned, setting down two mugs upon the board and himself on the low, three-legged stool opposite me, pushing his thin hair behind his ears.

  ‘It was Nel,’ he said. ‘What?’

  Monger drank some cider with the same restraint that William Cecil had displayed over a glass of fine wine.

  ‘People here follow your career with interest. Through pamphlets and such passed around amongst the seekers.’

  Pamphlets. God help me. ‘Still,’ Monger said, ‘as you must have gathered by now, for a good many in this town, the word conjurer is far from a term of abuse.’

  The fire coughed out weak yellow flames. My mouth was dry but I couldn’t drink.

  ‘A man deep into fever,’ Monger said, ‘is seldom aware of his indiscretions. And is even, in his fuddled state, apt to call out for his friend by name.’

  ‘Oh.’

  I drank some of the strong cider.

  ‘A name alone being not, of course sufficient,’ Monger said. ‘Many men have the same name. Indeed, poor Nel was at first reluctant to believe her own ears.’

  ‘Who else has she told?’

  ‘Only me, after much havering… in the hope that I might be able to confirm it.’

  ‘Which you seem to think you have.’

  ‘At some risk, I may say, if you’d turned out, after all, to be an agent of the Queen.’

  ‘I am an agent of the Queen.’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘It’s what we like about you.’

  I sensed a smile which it was too dark in here to see.

  ‘And what, after all,’ Monger said, ‘would a mere clerk know about Agricola the dowser?’

  In better circumstance, I might have even been laughing. It was all so clear, to me now, all the traps laid out in my path. The daring talk of Mistress Eleanor Borrow:

  ’Tis best to sow under a new moon and then to harvest under a full moon… It has a power… Oh, am I stepping close to heresy?

  And Monger… would he have revealed Emmanuel Worthy’s magical library to someone who might have regarded the books as heretical? Would he have fingered to me every penny-a-poke street-seer in the Glastonbury market, if not sure of his ground?

  ‘While both Nel and I accept,’ he murmured, ‘that Dr John Dee is a man of science rather than a procurer of spirits, we still find it curious that someone renowned for the breadth of his learning should arrive in a little town much reduced in its fortunes… merely to make account of what miserable antiquities remain there.’

  Now here was trouble. If I failed to quench the farrier’s curiosity, he could expose me to whoever he liked. Might, indeed, choose to enlighten Sir Edmund Fyche, for whom the distinction ’twixt science and sorcery would be a line not so much fine as imperceptible.

  ‘It’s not so far removed from the truth,’ I said.

  And, in the hope that the fevered Dudley had not announced himself as the Royal Master of the Horse, was about to tell him more of the truth… when the door of poor planks creaked and opened to a slit of light.

  A shadow fell across the crack, as if an eye was peering in, and then the door opened just wide enough for a woman to slip inside.

  Shutting it rapidly behind her, pushing it tight with her arse, wild grey hair springing from a ragged coif.

  ‘Pour’s a big one, Sal! Us could be deep in the shitty yere, girl.’ Eyepatch.

  Monger raised himself from his stool.

  ‘Joan. Over here.’

  ‘Zat you, Brother Joe? Be hard enough to zee in this hole with both fuckin’ eyes.’

  ‘Mug of strong cider for Mistress Tyrre!’ Monger called out, as she came bundling herself towards our board, bony white hands groping the air like it was muslin. ‘Something amiss, Joan?’

  ‘Constables. Zo-called. They’ze everywhere. Big bazzards on big ’osses. Weren’t good to trade n’ more today, Joe, we come outer there damn quick, look.’

  I dragged over another stool for her and she peered around the room with her one eye and then lifted her skirts and sat down with her knees shamelessly apart.

  ‘Normal thing, they comes nozyin’ around, you offers ’em a readin’ for free or a feel o’ your tits, and they’s sweet as you likes. But not today, not today, boy.’

  ‘Man was murdered, Joan,’ Monger said. ‘That’s probably—’

  ‘Howzat tie up with the likes of us? I never kilt ’im.’ She stiffened at the sight of me in the recess. ‘Whozis?’

  ‘A friend. Dr John, over from London.’

  ‘Wozze do?’

  ‘Works for the Queen, Joan.’

  ‘Do he? Well, that’s all well and fine, Joe, but I en’t gonner truss no bugger today. There’s a funny air, look. Dark as you likes.’ Wrapping her twig-thin arms around herself as if all warmth were fled from the room. ‘Black as pitch over the tor. Somethin’ a’ comin’. You zee it a’ comin’? You zee— Oh fuck and buggery…’

  A flash of brightness as the door shuddered open. At once, a couple of the farmers were putting down their mugs, shambling quietly to their feet, placing themselves flat to the wall.

  Two men black against the light.

  ‘Joan Tyrre?’

  ‘Shitty,’ Joan breathed. ‘Coulder sweared they fuckers en’t follered me.’

  ‘Over there.’

  One of the men was pointing at our board. Now the other was coming over slowly and Joan Tyrre was rising, putting the legs of her stool out in front of her.

  ‘Now then, you boys, you juss keep away, yer knows I en’t done nothin’, look—’

  ‘Only led us a merry bloody chase, you old puttock.’

  Throwing out his arms as a barrier, Joan skipping from side to side, laughing, jabbing the stool at him until he snatched it away from her.

  ‘Enough! Don’t you think to go nowhere, Joannie. You know what we wants.’

  ‘What? Front of all these folks?’

  Joan cackling, dodging nimbly as he hurled the stool at her, and it splintered on the wall behind.

  ‘Where’s the woman calls herself a doctor?’

  I went rigid.

  ‘You was with her earlier, we knows that. Where is she?’

&
nbsp; ‘How’ze I gonner know that?’ Joan Tyrre said. ‘How’ze a poor ole bag like me gonner pay for a doctor?’

  ‘You’ll talk fuckin’ civil to us or I’ll—’

  Making a lunge for her, and Joan was leaping back, but not quite quick enough.

  ‘Get yer gurt hands off of me, you— uh!’

  Her head whipping to one side as the second man struck her with full fist on the side of the face.

  Joan’s head hanging now like a broken doll’s, and I came to my feet, but Monger grabbed my arm, hissing into my ear.

  ‘Don’t make this worse…’

  XXIII

  Lowest Form of Doctoring

  THE ONLY SOUND was the dribble of ale over the edge of our board from an overturned mug. Joan Tyrre was down on the flags, squirming away, an arm raised to protect her face. The two constables standing over her, silent now.

  ‘The doctor-woman, Mistress Tyrre. If you please.’

  The one who spoke now, the one who’d struck her, he was just a boy, with a boy’s voice.

  ‘En’t seen her.’ Joan mumbling into the stone flags, her eyepatch all askew. ‘Swearder God.’

  ‘Where’d you see her last?’

  ‘Don’t recall.’

  ‘Think harder.’ Bringing back his boot. ‘This help?’

  ‘All right! Bazzard! Her was off to zeein’ to a man in the George.’

  ‘What man?’

  ‘Man who’s lyin’ there.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘All I knows, swearder God.’

  ‘Better be true.’

  ‘’Tis true.’

  He kicked her hard in the side. A sliver of light from the doorway opened up a cold grin like a gash in his face, and it seemed like a face I’d seen before.

  Joan made small moans but didn’t move until they’d left, the alehouse door swinging and the farmers coming away from the walls and calmly taking their seats again as if this happened every day. Maybe it did.

  ‘Man with the fever!’ Joan screamed from the floor. ‘And I hopes by the Lord Gwyn as you both fuckin’ gets it off of he an’ dies afore the morrow!’