The Bones of Avalon

XVIII
The First Age of Light

Three Spheres.

The natural world, the celestial or astral world, and the supercelestial, wherein are angels.

Though she’s never spoken of it to me, I’ve reason to believe that my mother once went with our neighbour, Goodwife Faldo, to visit a woman who kept a skrying crystal through which she professed to see the faces of the dead.

This would have been not long after my father’s death, so I could understand why my mother had done it. But I knew, even then, that my ambition must needs be loftier, aiming for communion with the supercelestial, wherein lies truth and light and not deception.

Therefore not ghosts. A ghost in the natural world is un natural. To call down a spirit of the departed into this world is necromancy. Even if it be the spirit of my poor tad.

Or the shade of what once was a man of God?

I heard again the voice of Bishop Bonner, the day he came into my prison cell, asking the question which would determine whether I lived or burned.

Tell me, Dr Dee… do you believe that the soul is divine?

Me telling him what I believed to be the truth:

The soul is… not itself divine, but it can acquire divinity.

And Bonner going, Tell me, then, Doctor, how can the soul acquire divinity?

Extending my string, his little eyes tindered like the glowing tips of tapers.

By prayer, I’d said. And learning. The Bible… and the sacred knowledge of the Jews.

Getting it right, guessing what Bonner was after.

But I’d omitted martyrdom.

As in tortured, hanged, drawn and quartered.

The night was cold and still but not quite freezing. Cloaked and shadowy, I entered the abbey grounds through the open gateway, finding the gates closed but unlocked. Never thinking it would be quite so easy to gain admission. But then, what was to steal now but the stones themselves?

I’d read what I could find about the history and layout of the abbey. Enough to recognise the plundered remains of the abbot’s grand house and his distinctive kitchen, with its ornate pinnacle, pale as ice in the moonlight, and the Lady Chapel above where the bones of Arthur had been found.

But I was shocked at the condition of the place. What once must have been well-scythed lawn was now a wilderness of bushes and black brambles whipping and ripping at my boots. Broken walls were rearing around me like an old carcass left to the weather and the crows, and I could even smell its decay, all moist and foetid.

I stopped and looked around in the silvered pool of moonlight. An apartment had been built near here for the one and only visit of the Queen’s grandfather, Henry VII. When, of course, he would have seen the black marble tomb. What had he been told about it, this man who’d ridden into England through Wales, trailing the legend of the undying British king? Would he have seen this evidence of the great Arthur’s death as a threat to the credibility of the next Arthur, his son?

But there’d been no indication of a future religious division then, and King Henry would never have thought to lay a finger on this or any other tomb. And, anyway, the new King Arthur… this was not to be. The prince had died before his father who had himself departed soon afterwards. Heavy with melancholy, it was said, and sick with the fear that his Tudor line might, through hubris, have brought down upon itself not dynastic glory but some old curse.

As if he should have worried about hubris. If this comparatively frugal, cautious man had reason to think his line accursed, what could be said about the son who’d succeeded him in Arthur’s stead? Starting wars, building palace after palace – temples to himself – and then, to help pay for it all, directing the wreck and plunder of religious houses. Little wonder that the Queen feared the worst and thought herself haunted by evil.

Haunted.

I looked up in search of my far-off friends, the stars, finding Orion’s belt and then, prominent tonight, the seven-starred body of Ursa Major, the Great Bear, my hands instinctively reaching out to cup it like a cluster of jewels. While I was embraced by the skeletal frame of the abbey whose walls, honeyed by daylight, now came in weathered-bone shades of white and grey.

It was not a welcoming embrace. I heard a movement and turned and saw small, moonlit orbs.

Jesu…

Ewes. Sheep grazed in here, now.

I sat down on a low wall until my breath was regular again, imagining these walls aglow in the light of a thousand candles which would flicker in rhythm with the ethereal rise and fall of the Roman chant. It was this incandescence which I held in my head as I stood and, with right arm extended, inscribed, in the air and then on the ground before me, the sign of the pentagram.

The old protection, but it needed more. Kneeling in the centre of the imagined pentagram, amongst broken stones at the entrance to the nave, I began to pray in a whisper, invoking the ancient shield of St Patrick’s Breastplate, which would almost certainly have been known to Arthur.

‘Christ be with me, Christ within me

Christ behind me, Christ before me

Christ beside me…’

Breaking off, aghast, remembering how I’d held a bone purported to be part of Patrick’s actual breastplate.

What was I doing?

But the words went on inside my head, as if creating their own momentum.

Natural magic.

‘I bind unto myself the Name

The Strong Name of the Trinity

By invocation of the same

The Three in One and One in Three…’

When I’d finished, keeping my eyes tight closed, I called back the words of those who’d known the abbot in life, in good times and then the worst of times.

Cowdray: saw him lashed to a hurdle, dragged through the high street. Bumping along like a deer carcass. An old man, beaten, bruised and cut about like a low-born thief…

Mistress Borrow: remember his wrinkly smile, and his eyes had a kindness. For a long time, I thought I’d seen the face of God.

Better, yes. But more important…

The poor man has little cause for rest.

If he was still here and rested not, then this surely would not be the crime against God and State which was called necromancy.

Which, I swear to you, I had never attempted. Not my direction. Smelled too much of grave-dirt and divination by the examination of entrails. Necromancy: the very word whispered death. As if the dead had no purpose but to serve the desires of the living.

Afraid, then?

I came to my feet. After all my years of study, I hadn’t expected to be afraid. Our grandparents crouched over their fires, the slits in their walls shuttered against the storms. Even in Tad’s day there were still those who believed a ghost was a walking corpse, an earthen being rising putrid from the grave.

But now we live in the first age of light. Now we stand behind walls of glass like great lanterns and watch the bending of the trees and the bursting of the skies. We stand, protected, and study, in warmth, the force and the violence of nature. And thus old shadows fall away, and the spirits of the dead are become flitting, half-seen moonbeams.

I gripped cold stone, slick with slugtrails.

Perchance I can help.

Listen to me.

Perchance we might help one another, you and I, Abbot, two men of learning divided only by the thin skein of mortality.

Here, within my protective pentagram, upon the cold hearth of our faith, intoning words and phrases borrowed from the grimoires, rendered safe and wholesome, or so I must needs believe, by Christian prayer.

Not conjuring. I won’t command, in the manner of the old sorcerers. I only request…

‘…humbly, in the name of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, if the Trinity doth so consent. Dear God, if it be your will that I might help your servant Abbot Whiting find peace… that I may bear a portion of his burden, in return for some small enlightenment, then let him appear to me now in… in a not unpleasant form.’

A not unpleasant form. Essential, that. Always important in the grimoires to imagine how you would wish to view the spirit.

State it firmly. A not unpleasant form. Say it strongly, then let it go. Imagination, when bound to our human will, can be a powerful tool for altering the course of events but, when left to its own devices, can cause havoc in the mind.

So, do I feel, or do I imagine, the air growing cold around me? Should I, as a scientist, try to still such feelings, separating myself from them to stand aside, become an observer? Or allow these fancies to form around me, creating a numinous cloud into which a spirit, some watery essence of a man, might gradually become manifest?

The conjurer at work.

Dear God.

You think me reckless?

You who watch from behind your window glass. You who were not there that night, cold in the belly of the abbey.

Slowly lifting my face, I placed him there, imprinting him upon my closed eyelids, marking that look of helpless sorrow on his face and his hands raised in formal, weary benediction.

Who’s to say what are visions and what are signs of an oncoming madness?

I must have been close to the edge of a kind of madness when, in a instant of heart-lurch, I knew that I was not alone.

Knew? How did I know? How? Did I hear then movement, a footfall among the riffling of last winter’s crispen leaves, the slow beat of owl wings?

It was none of that. None of anything. Only an absence, a flatness, a deadness, a not-hearing. A void which spoke of the dreadful.

I’m trying, God help me, to explain this. Without diagrams or arcane symbols. To evoke the crawling fear it awoke in me as, with a last, slack-lipped prayer, wildly slashing another pentagram in the air before me, I began moving, open-eyed now, along the moon-washed, rubbled nave towards the chancel.

Towards what was there.