The Bones of Avalon

XXI

What Constitutes Sorcery

Fyche, it seemed, would not be waiting for Carew. Stepping outside the yard door, under a low and foaming sky, I could at once hear the criers from the street.

It was all we needed…

The town of Glaston was being informed that the Justice of the Peace had formally proclaimed the hue and cry and every man was now to make himself available to hunt the unholiest of bloody murderers who, this night just past, in the service of Satan himself, had mutilated and slain a pious officer of the Queen.

A silence now. The air would be fouled with fear – not so much, I was guessing, at the thought of a killer in the town as of what penalty might be imposed upon the townsfolk if he were not caught.

‘Not the most useful exercise,’ the farrier observed. ‘No man’s obliged to inquire into a crime where there’s no known felon.’

This was true in London also. The hue and cry, whilst effective on occasion, was a blunt instrument and limited and would oft-times create the kind of mass panic and confusion which would only make it easier for an unidentified offender to escape.

‘It’s a black day for you and I’m sorry,’ the farrier said.

A sad-eyed, willowy man with thin grey hair at shoulder length. His working apparel, the colour of dark earth, was evidently made from his old monk’s habit cut off at the knees. He resumed his trimming of the ass’s hoof, like peeling an apple. Like he had no curiosity about me or why I should want to speak with him.

‘Master Farrier,’ I said, ‘if I may ask… our servant who’s murdered, did he come to you yesterday?’

‘Maybe. What did he look like?’

‘Big man. Yellow hair, thick on top. A northerner’s accent.’

He considered, examining the hoof then picking out a small pebble.

‘No, sir. Never recently crossed paths with anyone possessed of all of those good qualities. Also, I was out towards Somerton the whole day, shoeing plough-horses. Not back till nightfall.’

The grey ass farted gently as Master Monger put down the hoof. He stood up, easing his knee-pads.

‘Why would you think I’d had dealings with this tragic man?’

I was tired and couldn’t quickly respond. Monger put away the last of his tools in a leather satchel. Patted the ass’s rump, with affection, and the ass lumbered off into the stable.

‘I only ask, Dr John, because there are armed men on the street, and if you had reason to think I was the last to speak with the victim of a most savage murder, then so might they.’

His eyes were calm, accepting. He had a stillness I’ve oft-times observed both in priests – though not Bonner, obviously – and men who work closely with animals. Seldom in men like myself who roam the world in search of learning the way other men pursue women and strong drink.

‘The full savagery of what was done,’ I said. ‘Is that widely known in the town?’

‘Known to all. Except, possibly, to Simeon Flavius, who’s said to be ninety-five years old, deaf and no longer in his mind.’

The farrier waited in silence, perfectly still. From inside the stable, we heard the ass’s jaws at work on the straw. I sighed.

‘We’re sent here by the Queen’s Commission on Antiquities, as you doubtless know. Instructed to find out what has been removed from the abbey and what remains in the town. We were told some monks from the abbey were still in the area… including you. I’d asked Martin Lythgoe to go and find you. That’s all.’

Monger raised a grey eyebrow.

‘You sent your servant to speak with me? Rather than come to me yourself?’

I might take this as a statement, and so made no reply. Monger was reopening his toolbag.

‘I was at the abbey until the end. Until there was nothing left there that was holy. And you were no doubt wondering if perchance your servant came to me in search of valuables I’d stolen from the abbey, and I killed him?’ His hand sliding into the bag. ‘Split his ribs with this-?’

‘No.’ Backing off, groping for the line of the dagger in my doublet, as his hand emerged…

…empty.

‘I could do it,’ he said softly. ‘I’ve tools here that could do it. And I’m stronger than I look.’

‘And a monk.’

‘ Formerly a monk.’

I nodded.

‘As indeed,’ Monger said, ‘was our esteemed Justice of the Peace. And he now has men hanged.’

‘And women.’

‘Oh, indeed.’ He closed the bag, lowered it to the ground ’twixt his feet. ‘They’ll catch someone for this, of course. This very grievous crime involving London men. They’ll want a lid on that.’

‘What are you saying? Even if they have to force a confession out of someone who may not be guilty?’

Monger shrugged.

‘Look, I’d merely wondered,’ I said, ‘if perchance you’d pointed our man in the direction of someone else. Maybe someone you thought might have knowledge of items removed from the abbey. Someone who-’

‘Killed him for fear of exposure? We keep returning to this motive. But, beg mercy, isn’t Sir Edmund Fyche, in light of the mutilation of the body, proclaiming it an act of devilry?’

‘He is, yet…’

This would be a gamble; Fyche and Monger had both come out of the abbey and the JP might well be an important source of income for a farrier, but I’d grown tired of verbal swordplay.

‘…might it not be possible,’ I said, ‘that when Fyche insists this town has a multitude of witches and sorcerers… he exaggerates?’

The farrier let slip the kind of smile which, along with the earthen colours of his apparel, suggested the dominance of the melancholic Saturn in his birth-chart.

‘Fyche exaggerates,’ he said, ‘only by his own perception of what constitutes sorcery.’

‘Ah.’

‘Do you wish to know about this?’

‘Know?’

‘Where his problems lie.’

I sought his eyes but he turned away, shouldering his toolbag.

‘It’s market day. If you walk with me into the town, it may all become apparent.’

He walked away and I could only follow him, a thin wind whistling through my head. Not for the first time since arriving here, I had the feeling of events being in some way beyond my powers. As if I were a chess-piece and there were only certain directions in which I might proceed.

The main problem being that I knew not which piece I was, nor who – or what – was moving me.

Market day in Glastonbury was not the event it might once have been – certainly not this day – but still colourful enough. Cart-top stalls hung with rabbits, sheepskins and fresh fish. Barrels of cider and ale. A pieman and a blacksmith selling spades and mattocks. Mainly essentials in these, for Glastonbury, worn-down times.

Yet there was also a board offering lurid-hued foreign sweetmeats for those who could afford them, as well as local preserves. And a band with battered lutes and skin drums played some country dance tune outside the Church of the Baptist.

No-one danced, though. Small groups stood in wary silence under a sky of roiling cloud. Shouts of arousal could be heard in the distance, the criers and constables summoning a rabble.

Monger nodded toward a thin little woman in a doorway. She wore an eyepatch and was purveying jams from a tray.

‘Joan Tyrre,’ he said. ‘Moved here about three years ago from Taunton. Used to do the market there until she was taken in for questioning about her relations with the fair folk.’

‘The fair… ’

I looked at him. A soured gash of watery sunlight leaked between the clouds like pus from a poisoned wound.

‘Met a strange man at the market one day who sought her friendship,’ Monger said. ‘And she followed him to his… dwelling place. When they found her, she’d lost the sight of both eyes.’

I blinked. Memories. A legend I’d heard in my childhood: if you saw what men and women of this world were not supposed to see, you might be robbed of your sight. Don’t you go wandering away, my mother would say, or you might go where you’re not wanted and come back blinded.

Must needs admit I’d never before encountered one on whom this punishment had been inflicted.

‘By the time she was brought before the church court,’ Monger said. ‘She had some sight back in one eye.’

‘Accused of…?’

‘I don’t know the exact nature of the charges. Discourse with the faerie? Is that a charge, or does it all come under the gross heading of witchery? Someone probably reported her to the local vicar. I imagine she was lucky to escape prison at the very least. And knew it, which was why she moved herself over here.’

‘I don’t follow you. Why here?’

‘I guess she thought it best to leave Taunton for a place where such peculiar talents might be not wholly condemned. ’Tis said that if she takes off the eyepatch what she sees through that blinded eye is not of this… Ah… now… observe that woman over there.’

A gentlewoman in a grey cape was bending to speak with a younger woman with a faded red shawl over her hair and shoulders, sitting on a step with a basket of pink ribbons in her lap. As I watched, she stood up with her basket and the gentlewoman followed her into an alleyway.

‘In the bottom of the basket,’ Monger said, ‘under the ribbons, lies a much-prized skrying crystal.’

I said nothing. Back in Mortlake I had five of them. From a stall, I bought two winter-withered apples and gave one to Monger, and we moved towards the top of the town, where he pointed out a woman who, he said, read the mystic cards from France which foretold destiny. Then he nodded to a man with two terrier dogs.

The man grinned.

‘Just off home for my ole stick, Joe. Case I runs into a feller with horns and claws drippin’ blood.’

He was short, with a cloud of hair and a beard white as a napkin to his chest and eyes that glinted like chips of quartz. Monger smiled thinly at him.

‘A touch more discretion may be called for this day, Woolly. Even for you.’

‘Oh ar? I’m supposed to join the hue and cry in pursuit of whoever they decides cut up this Lunnon feller? Well, you know what I says to that, Joe, man? I says they can piss off.’

He nodded, patting his thigh, and the terriers followed him into the throng.

‘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.’