The Bones of Avalon

by Phil Rickman

  ‘If he hadn’t thrown a fit,’ Monger said to me. ‘As if his heart were held in seizure.’

  ‘Poor ole boy collapses on ’em, all droolin’ from the mouth, eyes up in his head, and one of em’s goin’, A demon face, a demon face! Divil’s into him, look, and I reckon they got scared then, and they was off. Worthy breathin’ like an ole sheep, well out of it. I figured best thing be to get Dr Borrow. But he weren’t there.’

  ‘Bazzards.’

  Joan Tyrre standing there like a ragged blackbird, shifting from one foot to the other. The first frail candlelight flickering in a stone house across the yard.

  ‘Time I got back, he was stone dead, poor ole bugger,’ Woolly said. ‘Could be he was already sick, but you’d never know it, would you? Picture of health, all that fat on him, and in truth he weren’t n’more’n… what would you reckon, thirty-nine?’

  Monger, calmer now, nodded at Dudley.

  ‘This is your companion, Dr John, from the… ah… Queen’s Commission on Antiquities?’

  ‘Much recovered now. Master Roberts… knows all that I know.’

  ‘Then you both should also know this is only the start of it. As JP, Fyche has the power to deal with all civil disturbance and affray and will use it to the full.’

  ‘Is there affray?’

  ‘Anything can be an affray, even a gathering to bemoan the baker’s death. I keep telling people to stay off the streets, they don’t listen to me. They don’t see what’s coming.’

  ‘Forgive my London innocence,’ Dudley said, ‘but what is coming?’

  Monger went to the yard gate, peered into the high street, then returned. It had grown cold.

  ‘The storm’s been proclaimed as an omen. The word planted that God’s sorely annoyed with Glastonbury, a town ready to throw away its sanctity as Jesu’s own domain in England. If homes are raided, people beaten, then it’s clearly the will of God that all false belief be driven out.’

  ‘Only through scourging,’ I suggested, ‘will the town find redemption?’

  ‘For a clerk of antiquities, your grasp of provincial theology is admirably acute, Dr John. Anything that looks like an assembly, they’ll pounce. Anyone named as a witch or a wizard, whether named freely or under duress… Neighbour will betray neighbour.’

  ‘Does no-one cry out against this? The vicar – where’s he stand?’

  ‘Stands were he’s told. There are two vicars, and one at least is an ignorant placeman who needs his fingers to read the lessons.’

  Like so many. If ever a town needed a clergyman of wisdom and intellect, it was Glastonbury in this time of disarray.

  ‘Mistress Borrow,’ I said. ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Wells. Special assize on Monday.’

  ‘What’s the charge?’

  ‘Unspoken, as yet, but nothing that doesn’t carry the death penalty or t’would be dealt with by Fyche himself.’

  ‘And the judge?’

  ‘Does it matter? They’re all tight together on this circuit.’

  It was near to night now, the last lucent clouds retreating beyond the tower of the Baptist’s Church. Woolly looked up at the bakery wall.

  ‘We needs get Worthy’s poor ole body out of there. Been in the oven heat the whole day.’

  ‘Wait until full dark then we’ll move him.’ Monger put a hand on Woolly’s shoulder. ‘Not the best time for Glastonbury to be permeated by the sweet stench of decay.’

  I thought of what Nel Borrow had said about the town becoming like to a wound left open… gangrene and rot, mortifying of the flesh. Turned to Monger but could not tell his expression in the gloom.

  Later, Dudley and I went down to the alehouse of the George to learn what we could, but it was not a good place to be. The air was greasy with tallow and rendered fraught by a trailing taper of violence which, periodically, would flare like last night’s lightning.

  Cowdray was serving the drink himself, no women around, and the usual farmers and wool-merchants were pushed to the periphery by the constables – must have been twenty of them, some I was beginning to recognise.

  They were a rabble, thrusting others aside like pigs at a trough when their drinking vessels were empty, and anyone who dared challenge them would wish he’d stayed by his own fireside. I saw one man leaving on hands and knees, bleeding from an ear, after a kicking. Later, a vicious fight broke out between two rival constables from Wells and Taunton. By nine of the clock, the benches were agleam with blood and cider.

  It was then that the man with ragged grey hair and cracked teeth, who’d led the assault on Matthew Borrow, sought to calm the situation, raising a king-size flagon and holding forth to his fellows.

  Calming me, however, not at all.

  ‘Longest I ever seen, look, was near to two hours.’

  ‘Go to!’

  ‘I’m fuckin’ tellin’ you! Little short, stubby feller, neck like a pig’s. Hardly moved the whole time, just saggin’ like a sack o’ flour.’

  ‘How’d they know he en’t gone, then?’

  ‘Ah, well, they’s all thinkin’ he’s gone… goes over to cut ’im down, look, and then, of a sudden, he gives ’em a big grin. Like this… bleaaaaargh! Scares the livin’ shit of ’em, and, oh, he d’ love that, he do. He just grins and grins, and when he don’t stop grinnin, they d’ swing on his legs, three of ’em.’

  ‘Then what?’

  ‘Well, he went. Obviously, he went then.’

  ‘Still grinnin’?’

  ‘Musc’lar neck, look. They can hold out. Women, though, a poor show, most of ’em…’

  ‘Time to leave, I think, ’ Dudley murmured.

  But some self-wounding impulse in me made me say and have it inflicted upon me. I stood by the door to the stairs, looking down at my boots.

  ‘Women, it’s too quick,’ some man yelped. ‘No fight in ’em.’

  ‘Ah now,’ cracked-teeth said. ‘Not always, look. If her’s scrawny, bones like a sparrer, her can hold out a good while. Not the weight there, see, to tighten the ole rope.’

  ‘John—’

  Dudley gripping my shoulder. I marked Benlow, the bone-man, slumped over his mug. He was drunk.

  ‘They dances real pretty, mind, some of ’em does,’ a small man said wistfully. ‘Legs goin’ this way an’ that.’

  ‘All you wants, Simeon, is a peek up their fuckin’ skirts!’

  ‘Surprisin’ what you sees up the skirts of a woman when her’s hangin’,’ Simeon said in the trail of the laughter.

  We left then, but I slept not well that night.

  XXXVII

  The Heresy

  THOUGH I’D DRUNK only small beer, I stumbled down next morning with a head bidding to equal my aching heart. Last night’s dreams had been lit with a dark vision, reminding me of some madman’s paintings I’d seen in the low countries in which tiny men and women roiled and squittered like demonic insects.

  Or the maggots Fyche claimed to see on the side of the tor, writhing around my feet and ankles as I walked endlessly amid the dream hills around Glastonbury, lured by the distant chinging of church bells.

  Always unreachable; when I reached the first dream-church, all that would remain would be an echo, mixed with the cawking of crows, and the insect people would still be squirming and chittering around my boots, some hacking at them with tiny axes, my feet all pricked and sore, and I’d hear the bells picked up from another far-off tower or steeple and set off in that direction only for the same to happen.

  And so till dawn, and the discovery of Sir Peter Carew hefting a flagon of cider in the alehouse, still foul with last night’s sweat and vomit. When I took the opportunity to tell him what I wanted, he said he hoped he’d live to see me crawling up the walls of the Bedlam from the inside.

  ‘This would be your way of saying no, Sir Peter?’

  Carew stroked the back of one roughened hand with the palm of another, fingers curling into a fist, indicating he could think of a more emphatic way. We were never like
ly to be friends. Maybe he’d glimpsed the writing on the wall which suggested that all those centuries of supremacy by the fighting man were at last yielding to the wiles of the thinking man. But not in his lifetime. Oh no. To Carew, a man without relish for violence was a Bessie.

  I’d not walk away this time.

  ‘You need do nothing,’ I said, ‘except arrange for me to ride to Wells and speak with the accused.’

  ‘Jesu, you’re a fucking—’ Carew had turned to the doorway where Dudley now stood, rubbing his eyes. ‘You tell him. Tell him of the madness of taking on Fyche on behalf of a witch. ’

  ‘He serves the Queen, Carew,’ Dudley said. ‘Not Fyche. Nor even you.’

  ‘He’s a fucking conjurer!’

  ‘But, even if that were true, he’d be the Queen’s fucking conjurer. So if I were you – God forbid – I’d be tempted to go along with his proposal.’

  ‘Tell Fyche my friend from the Commission on Antiquities deems it his role to represent the woman accused of murdering his colleague’s servant?’

  Dudley smiled tiredly.

  ‘Fix it. Why not?’

  Carew stood shaking his head.

  ‘All right. I’ll help you. I’ll help you see the weakness of your judgement. Show you and the conjurer the truth of what you think to defend.’

  In his efforts to sell me a new cloak, Benlow the bone-man had suggested the deepest of winter might be yet to come, but this morning appeared to dispute his forecast. The sun shone stronger than on any day this year, and the Poet’s Narcissus was budding at the roadsides. It was as if the thunderstorm, far from being an expression of God’s ire, had been the herald of an early spring, the gay ghost of some long-dead Mayday dancing in the wasteland of February.

  Did I feel Eleanor Borrow with me as we approached her herb garden? Did I sense her presence on this hillside? In truth, I sensed it everywhere, now, as if she were become the spirit of this curious town and all that it had brought to me.

  It had taken us no more than ten minutes to walk here from the George. Across the street, to the edge of the town, then over a stile to follow a muddied path on the flank of the long hill which sheltered the town like an arm. Now I stood by a wooden gate, looking up at the strip of land hedged all around, with a fast-flowing stream down one side. Its mainly empty furrows were neat and drawn as if aligned to the tor, the battlements of whose tower crested the highest horizon. The air was shimmering with bright alchemical dew. And I felt…

  What I felt was naked. Naked in my emotions. Close to breaking down and had to turn away from Carew and Dudley. Standing there facing the lower skyline, where the sun lit up the channels of water and pale pools all the way to the sea, until I found composure.

  ‘What does she grow here?’ Dudley asked.

  ‘Her mother had two hundred kinds of herbs,’ I mumbled, and Carew’s head swivelled.

  ‘Who told you that?’

  ‘I… forget. Could’ve been Fyche.’

  ‘There aren’t two hundred kinds of herbs in the world,’ Carew said.

  ‘There are far more than that.’

  And they’d grow well here… a well-sheltered place, in its way, with good soil and an abundance of water. It moved me to think of what I’d read of the herb garden of the visionary Hildegard of Bingen, a woman well ahead of her time in the relating of science to creation and the use of plants to treat the melancholic condition.

  ‘You really want to know what she grew here?’ Carew wore a slanting smile. ‘I’ll show you what she fucking grew. Stay there.’

  He moved off across the land, but I ignored him, walking up the slow slope. Sensing her walking beside me, the swish of her dress in the wet grass, following the winter-brown hedge toward the top of the field, where I’d seen a wooden cross.

  There was no name on it, but I knew by its siting.

  Felt so safe in her garden. Open to the land all the way to the sea, and the tor rising on the other side and the soaring golden pinnacles of the abbey.

  I turned slowly, and it was there below me, its highest arches making gilded loops like dusty sunbeams. A paradise. Avalon.

  This had been the abbey’s ground. Most everything here, for miles around, had belonged to the abbey. And the abbot had given over this land to Cate Borrow to continue her experiments with plants and herbs. This particular place, so perfect for its views of abbey and tor and the watery lands below… as if it might absorb the influences given off by these holy sites.

  And more. A crossing place for all the energies of the earth. A Christian holiness, a pagan sanctity. I felt I’d been here when my mind was given up to the dust of vision. What would have happened had I imbibed the potion here, on such a morning?

  It mattered not. The dust of vision had only been the grease to unrust the lock, free the door. There was no need for more; the door was open now… or at least ajar.

  Time was suspended for some moments, and I existed in a state of profound yearning, the kind I’d once experienced only when gazing into the infinite vastness of a starlit sky. And I thought of what we were told by the church: that all life is lived for the glory of God, and that any rewards for us would come not in this world but the next.

  But people here, in this town where the Saviour walked, and Merlin, did not accept this. Under this canopy of ancient magic, who could blame them for coming to the belief that they could have here – now, in this life – a kind of heaven. As if being here could, through prayer and knowledge, endow them with more than what God, according to the Church, allows.

  No book, no dogma, just being here.

  This was the Avalon Heresy.

  What Fyche hated most.

  ‘The witch’s grave, eh?’

  I turned, and there was Carew, swinging back on his heels, hands behind his back, eyes lit with bright malice. Dudley with him, sombre-faced.

  ‘Couldn’t have the cow planted in consecrated ground, obviously,’ Carew said.

  ‘Or maybe,’ I told him, ‘this place is more consecrated, in its way, than either of the churchyards.’

  Carew scowled. This was heresy. Well, fuck him. Hard to believe that the Queen had put the abbey into this man’s horny hands.

  Which now were no longer behind his back, and he was leering through the hole in his black beard, as if in foul imitation of what they held.

  Two earth-brown skulls, jawless and broken-toothed.

  ‘This is what she grew, Doctor,’ Carew said. ‘She grew death.’

  XXXVIII

  Old Bones, New Bones

  DUDLEY SAID, ‘THIS looks not good, John.’

  As if it needed saying. We’d watched Carew walking away into the sunlight, with a lightness of step that belied his weight. Spring was in his walk and in the air, but it was a spring smirched now, like his smile, with a cold malevolence.

  I moved further up the path, up the hillside, putting more distance ’twixt us and Carew… and also the herb garden, sullied now. I did not want to go back to it.

  Carew had assiduously reburied the skulls where he’d uncovered them. Promising, as he walked away, that he’d send word to Wells to arrange a meeting for me with the prisoner – that I might ask her, he said, about all the other body parts which could be unearthed in her garden.

  ‘I know how it looks,’ I said to Dudley, ‘and I know how it’ll sound to a jury in court, but that doesn’t make it any less of a contrivance. The bones were brought here not by Nel Borrow.’

  But I was sickened to see that Dudley’s patrician face was marked now with doubt.

  ‘How do you know that, John? You don’t. You can’t. And didn’t you tell me of evidence brought before her mother’s trial that she fertilised her soil by spreading graveyard earth?’

  ‘It’s no more true than any of this.’

  ‘You don’t know, though, John.’ Speading his hands in defeat. ‘Do you? And what did this supposed necromancy create but the potion that causes St Anthony’s Fire, which reduces men to tormented, gibbering ma
dness?’

  ‘No.’ Shaking my head. ‘The dust of vision’s from a mould found on cereal crops. Not grown here.’

  ‘But still produced by this woman. I know, I know… if taken by a man such as yourself, it may bring forth redemption and cleansing. But, at the end of the day, her mother was hanged as a witch and, instead of renouncing it, your… first love… chose to follow her mother’s path. That’s what they’ll say – what a judge will say. And even you can’t deny that.’

  ‘Healing’s an honourable path.’

  We’d come some distance now, were close to the top of the hill which overlooked the town and the abbey. We stopped by a lone thorn tree, where I subsided on to the grass.

  ‘You think Carew’s part of this?’

  Dudley considered, positioning himself ’twixt the roots of the thorn tree.

  ‘He has a certain blunt integrity. He’ll support Fyche because Fyche is the law. If Fyche put the abbot in the frame on false evidence… well, difficult times, and the abbot was a wealthy papist.’

  ‘But do you see him involved?’

  ‘In the stitching up of the abbot?’

  ‘I’m thinking more of Cate Borrow.’

  ‘He’s not a schemer. He’ll always prefer action. Though I do see him choosing, when it’s deemed strategic, to look the other way. He’s a soldier. A practical man. It’s all means to an end.’

  ‘I even know where the bones are from,’ I said.

  ‘Presumably dug from the graves which Carew told us had been descrated?’

  ‘More likely procured from Benlow, the bone-seller. I’ll find out.’

  ‘Beat the truth out of him?’

  ‘Reason with him.’

  ‘In that case –’ Dudley stood up, dusting down his doublet – ‘I shall ride to Butleigh, find with the woman who was delivered of twins.’

  He’d brushed out his beard, and his moustache was starting to lengthen and curl again, as if this were a sign of regained health.

  I said, ‘There may be another problem.’