All this the burner on duty told me, a cheerful grin splitting his black-dusted face, evidently pleased to have company. I arrived at the point which interested me by saying that I couldn’t understand how charcoal could produce enough heat to melt iron from the ore, and got the most suprising answer.
‘Cor! Shouldn’t a believed it meself! But now ‘ee canst go see it done. Customers of mine they are. ‘Eathen Mohammedans, I’m told, but no ‘arm in ’em. All live together and do everything as it ain’t done no more. Now, if ’ee ‘urries –’ he pulled out a printed sheet from his pocket and consulted it. ‘Aye, there’s frying today! Nip on down to Flaxley Woods, and you’ll catch ’em at it twixt road and stream.’
I knew exactly where he meant and hurried, after changing in the car to Personality No. 2. Car and 2 were not supposed to be seen together, but the risk was small and any future developments seemed likely to call for No. 2 and his feet. Not far off the road was a quarter circle of low cliff left by ancient diggings, and below it open grass where time and the rains had smoothed spoil from the mine into a bumpy amphitheatre. There a furnace had been built of uncut stones mortared with clay. Near it was the Broom Lodge van containing sacks of charcoal.
A huge pair of bellows projected from the bottom of the kiln, worked by Raeburn stripped to the waist with the sweat pouring down his chest. Ballard was holding a mould in tongs, about to catch the drip from the furnace. Three small groups were watching: one of children and a schoolmaster, another of passers-by, and a third of four middle-aged and scholarly-looking men who might have been social historians or assistant directors of a folk museum.
They were getting their iron on the spot. At the back of the hollow and at the foot of the low cliff a band of ore showed plainly, which probably petered out too soon to have been of interest to a miner. A better demonstration for schoolchildren I cannot imagine. There was the whole process from the rock to the ingot.
One question, however, puzzled me. The home-made ingots were far from commonplace, but why should they be sacred? I guessed at a very tentative answer. The whole set-up could be a most ingenious blind like Marrin’s alchemy. Since there was no easy method of smelting iron secretly, he had decided to do it publicly. It was certainly ore from the surface rock which was being extracted, but if ore from quite another source (say, their revered Wigpool) went into the furnace, no onlooker would be any the wiser.
After returning to my car and driving it further between the trees, I slipped back to the free show. I wanted to know what the pair of metallurgists would do when they knocked off, and I had discovered a satisfactory lair from which to watch. There miners of unknown ancestry and language had been ruthless in chasing the ore, leaving behind a landscape of miniature crags which reminded me – though the sweeping, green shelter of a great oak confirmed that I was in England – of some painting of cypresses hanging in a grey Mediterranean gorge. A branch of the oak could be reached from a sharp pinnacle or rock. I climbed the tree and between the leaves had a perfect view of the furnace and the open ground.
The spectators drifted away, the high-brows remaining to the last and asking questions of Raeburn and Ballard, who were visibly impatient. Left alone, the two ran off the little remaining iron and cleared the slag. They showed no respect for the stuff and threw it into a pit. No suggestion of sacred ingots there! They then recharged the furnace with charcoal.
After satisfying themselves that no one was watching, they unloaded from their truck two little bags of a powdered mineral which looked like a very shiny coal and loaded the furnace with it. Raeburn, the bellows operator, swore. That was most irreverent in view of what followed but even devout Druids must be human.
‘God damn the bloody tin!’ he said, and turned again to the bellows.
So that was the metal of the sacred ingots. At first sight all that deception just to get a few slugs of tin seemed unnecessary. But one must remember that no smelting could be done secretly in the Forest, for the fire watchers would have been down at the first plume of smoke or the glare of the furnace by night; nor could it be done underground in the Wigpool workings. Ventilation would be a problem, especially if using charcoal.
But why not at Broom Lodge, teaching the craft to the whole commune instead of to the inner circle only? The answer lies in the mysteries of their creed, the confusion of past and future which also attracted the major, though he managed to find it compatible with Christianity. To Marrin and his followers those earliest workable minerals, gold, tin and copper, were to be venerated, and the process of ore to ingots was more sacred still. They were re-enacting the magic whereby the wizards of the tribe transmuted stones to arrowheads.
No doubt Marrin’s end-product was going to be bronze. Somewhere he had a source of the sacred tin. Copper he would have to buy – cheating, but it was most unlikely that he would ever find a vein of ore. Probably he was producing the alloy by means of his electric furnace, pending the elaboration of some more traditional method, to be occulted by oak grove, river mist or cave.
When dusk was beginning to fall the tin was flowing from the charcoal into the mould, enough for a small ingot of not more than three cubic inches. With ritual bows they set it aside to cool and solidify, and then retired to the cab of the truck to eat and drink.
I felt the presence of Nodens. I can only put the miracle down to him for I am not mischievous – at least not often. I decided to give these pagan puritans something to think about: an ingot really deserving veneration containing the protest of a happy neolithic hunter against distasteful industry. Inspired by a little chip of flint exposed at the foot of my oak, neat and thin enough to be an arrow head, though I don’t think it was one, I slid down quietly from the tree, spat on it for luck, rubbed it clean in my handkerchief and dropped it into the centre of the ingot so that it remained like a gem floating on the surface. Nodens was amused. Together we had created a myth. He is obviously a god whose divine nature it is to rejoice in the improbable. A finder of lost property could be nothing else, especially if he had stolen it in the first place.
When the two returned, their behaviour was even more exaggerated than I expected. They got the hunter’s message all right. After silent prayer they fetched a black velvet cushion from the truck and with the tongs reverently placed the ingot upon it. When the cushion naturally began to smoke, they recovered common sense and looked around for a safe high altar upon which the ingot might be placed, setting it temporarily on the flat top of the very pinnacle from which I had climbed my oak. It astounds me how the ultra pious of any religion will always choose some esoteric explanation of the otherwise inexplicable rather than ascribe it to human intervention. And that is a pity because it merely provides ammunition for those who scoff at the possibility of any unknown source of power.
The pair stood by their truck, discussing whether they should leave the ingot in the impressive position where it was or carry it back to Brother Evans. They decided on Brother Evans. Lord help the community I thought, if that pretentious fool had succeeded Marrin! The inner circle might accept him as High Priest, but I doubted if the main body of honest and innocent colonists would take his orders.
‘He’ll still be up there,’ one of them said.
I sneaked hastily back to my car and took the main road through the Forest which they, too, would have to follow unless they meant to go down to the river, which was unlikely. At a crossroads some four miles away I had a good chance of discovering where ‘up there’ was. They would turn left for Broom Lodge and right for Wigpool. If they drove straight on it would be to an unknown destination, and I dared not follow too closely.
I got away just ahead of them and parked in cover by the cross roads. They turned right. I gave them five minutes and cautiously circled Wigpool Common until I was approaching the Bailey Rock – or where I believed it to be, for the major’s report of his expedition had merely mentioned it. I could not find any good hiding place for the car and finally left it parked among others outside a Me
thodist chapel where some fête or committee meeting was in progress. Then I set out on foot.
Narrow lanes and open tracks seemed to lead in all directions. My chief fear was that the truck would find me, not I the truck. It was just after lighting-up time and I could only hope that the druidicals were good citizens and that the headlights of their oncoming truck would give enough warning for me to dive into the nearest ditch. I need not have bothered. This last finger of the Forest, pointing north, was so remote that I saw no wheeled vehicle whatever.
However, I did see tyre tracks when I was crossing an open field. Since they were recent and led to a spinney where there was no gate, I was interested. They could of course have been made by a farmer inspecting his fences, but he had neither returned nor driven off to either side and apparently had gone on into the spinney. In that case he must have cut the wire and replaced it. Close examination showed that he had done just that, and inefficiently – odder and odder and very unfarmerlike, unless he had gone in to haul out timber. There was no sign of that, so I climbed the barbed-wire fence – making my hard-worn trousers more disreputable than ever – and followed the tracks. They led me into a thicket of bramble and decaying pine trees, leaning or uprooted by the wind, and there was the major’s ancient Humber.
It looked very much as if Brother Evans had the same reactions as Marrin when threatened. Around the forlorn and friendly old car there was no sign of life except swooping bats. A detective no doubt would have come up with a dozen deductions, but the only one I could make was that the car must be at a safe distance from the shaft where the ‘geologists’ were prospecting with the full knowledge of the local villagers.
Prospecting for what? For gold, the major had thought at first. But that I was sure was nonsense. I myself had suggested that they were communing with spirits of the earth, which seemed to me quite a likely lunacy if there was a black lake somewhere underground. The answer now was more prosaic. They were searching for tin among the remaining pockets of iron in a mine long since deserted.
I reckoned that it was no good looking for the truck, which must have left long since if Brother Evans had been driven back to the site of the furnace to inspect and collect the fabulous ingot, so my only hope was to find the shaft, though it was nearly dark. I retraced my steps to the Bailey Rock and started again to explore the open country to the north of it, feeling that I had been too obsessed by the shadowy forest. I could find no recent heaps of spoil nor any hut. But there need not be either. A hole in a slope or low cliff would be enough. I remembered such a slope where half an hour earlier I had tripped over rusty bits of machinery overgrown by long grass. A small mine must have once been thereabouts, so I followed the foot of the slope.
I nearly walked slap into a sentry. He was sitting on a pile of pit props and away to his left was a jagged patch of black which had to be the entrance to the shaft. He heard me, but by the time he had got to his feet and started to flash a torch around I was lying flat in cover. A few sheep were sleeping not far off and I think he must have assumed that the slight noise was due to one of them, for he settled back on his pit props and lit a pipe. Working round him on lower ground, I crossed the wheel marks of traffic coming and going on a rough lane which confirmed that I was in the right place. So I crawled up the slope and made myself comfortable on the grass above the sentry, prepared to wait until something happened. As usual I was hungry, having had nothing since a breakfast of scraps in the den, but food could wait. By way of charcoal and schoolchildren I was on the scent of the golden cauldron. This was where it was, stolen by Evans and Co. before Marrin’s executors could get at it and now presiding over their futile ceremonies when it ought to be on a table in the British Museum with experts in committee around it to decide its date and provenance.
The truck returned with Evans, Raeburn and Ballard. They picked up the sentry and drove off after a short conversation which I was not near enough to overhear. A light drizzle of rain had drifted into the Forest from the Welsh mountains and under the low cloud, darkness and silence were absolute. I came down to the mouth of the shaft and walked along the passage until I was stopped by a wall of solid timbers reinforced by bands of iron, which had evidently been in place for years, presumably to keep out adventurous children. I could find no opening in the sides of the shaft offering a way round it and would have assumed that I was in the wrong place if it had not been for the scatter of pit props. Depressed by the wet mist and the difficulty of finding any concealed entrance in broken ground and thick night I gave up and tried to return to the Methodist chapel and my car. Tried, I write – for the country was like an open maze in which the shortest apparent route led nowhere and the longest way round was usually right. When I slumped into the driving seat I was tired out and damned if I was going all the way to the Chepstow car park.
I left the car on a forest track close under my hill and staggered shivering up to the den with the bag containing the tweed suit of that sane and ordinary economist, Personality No. 1. My own supplies of alcohol were finished. So was the major’s whisky. But after stripping off soaking clothes, his magnificent rug enabled me to get some tepid sleep with knees to chest. I hoped that he at least was fed and warm and dreaming of the Grail. It seemed unlikely. Remembering the Box Rock, I was obsessed by the thought of that black pool reported to be at the bottom of the workings.
In the morning I spread out No. 2 outfit to dry, though I could not see how the devil it was going to when even the midday sun hesitated to enter my safe but gloomy home. Then I drove into Chepstow and consumed an immense breakfast at the hotel. Resting in the lounge afterwards and reviewing the events of the night, the pile of pit props came to mind. I had not looked at them closely, but memory behind the eyes recalled ragged ends in all and a deep split in one. Now surely Marrin would have bought new and trustworthy props? He could well afford them and he was always thorough. The pile of props could be another of his ingenious frauds. That man ought never to have been a professional prophet. He’d have been famous as a designer of sets for the National Theatre. Under the pile, easily to be moved and rearranged, could be an entrance which by-passed the barrier.
I had at once to find the major, if only to relieve my own anxiety. Since my opponents were armed with religion rather than reason it was also essential to protect Elsa against incalculable reactions. I telephoned her at the estate office, insisting again that she should leave Broom Lodge at once and hand over her life to me as lover or husband or whatever she liked. She murmured that husband would do very well but then seemed anxious, depressed and obstinate. Land and workshops were running normally with the colonists as diligent as ever, but naturally there were questions on the minor day-to-day issues of policy and finance. Her uncle used to settle them all decisively and with common sense, and now the commune expected her to advise them. The man Evans had quietly taken over religious leadership but when it came to the practical running of the colony he left it to the various groups. Marrin’s will had been short and plain enough. He had bequeathed the estate to the commune.
But the commune wasn’t a limited company and it wasn’t a cooperative. What was it? Meanwhile, the bank manager was being as helpful as he could to such a good customer.
I pitied the bank manager. Evans might be sound on ritual and reincarnation but was not a man to understand that his authority in financial matters must be legal. And he would leave an impression behind him in the manager’s office that he was proud to live by barter or the begging bowl. I could only advise Elsa to refuse any responsibility and find some colonist – preferably a lawyer or accountant who had opted out of the rat race – with enough character to chair a meeting and obtain general agreement.
I thought that at last we should be able to get a line on Simeon Marrin’s income and what had enriched him, but there too he had covered his tracks.
‘What about the funds that he paid into the commune?’ I asked.
‘He drew on his private account, and they say there in London
that he always paid in cash over the counter. They thought he must be some kind of a criminal until the manager here explained that he ran a monastery.’
The London bank was right. A criminal he was, robbing this ancient country of invaluable evidence of its past. I had said little to Elsa on this point, allowing her to half believe in the alchemy or, failing that, in a substantial profit from his goldsmith’s work. The truth might have involved me in admitting that I had been present at his death and in agonising her with the revelation that he had tried to kill me.
‘By the way, did Evans bring in a new sacred ingot this morning?’ I asked.
‘No. But he came in and took them all away. He said that the lab wasn’t the right place for them.’
I went shopping to re-stock the den with food, and then took the bus into the forest and walked home. I dozed and rested through the afternoon since I might need all the endurance I had, and meanwhile the June sun was kind enough to dry last night’s clothes. Before sunset I started out on the eight-mile tramp to Wigpool, taking it easy and stopping on the way for a meal. The wind, what there was of it, had gone round to the north and the night was clear and starlit.
After approaching the shaft from the back, I lay down to await developments and noticed that the pile of old pit props had been arranged in something like a hollow square. That was fine. Somebody was about to go down or come out and I was prepared to watch all night for him to appear.
At last there was a quick flash of light between the timbers and a man emerged from the middle of them. I could not be sure who he was till I was closer, when he turned out to be that white worm, Ballard, He returned the props to their normal shape of a stack and cleared off. As I wanted to see where he had parked his car and who would pick him up, I followed him, from time to time deliberately making a little mysterious noise to bother him. I did, for he quickened his pace and started to whistle to keep up his courage. Meditation should have been enough to dispel such worldly matters. It may be harder when they are unworldly.
Summon the Bright Water Page 10
