The Bones of Avalon

XXX

Like to the Sun

I went to sit on the edge of the bed, and we talked. Or she did. I only sat and listened to the soft, sad music of her voice as she spoke of her father and how, after her mother’s execution, he’d thrown himself into his work, riding out each night to care for the sick, spending no more waking minutes than he needed in the bed where his wife would lie no more.

The tragedy of it was so extreme and there was such physical pain in my heart that I began to weep into my hands.

‘Damn,’ Nel Borrow murmured. ‘What do you do to lose the cares of the day, Dr John?’

‘Cares?’ Wiped my eyes on my sleeve, dragging out a smile. ‘There are no cares if I’m working. Did your mother have cares when she was tending her garden?’

‘She had -’ a wistful smile – ‘two hundred kinds of herbs. They took a lot of care. If life were only work and we were allowed to do it unmolested…’

‘Then there’d be no sorrow, for some of us.’

And no joy either, my mother would snap back, she who understood not the heady pleasures of scholarship.

‘Felt so safe in her garden,’ Nel said. ‘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. It was a paradise. Avalon.’

I thought of my own garden in the sky, its constellations laid out like arrangements of flowers in a fine elusive symmetry that awoke in me a yearning deeper than the night.

‘You still maintain her garden?’

‘Well… best I can. Fewer than half as many herbs now. When the abbey was alive, she’d have help. Even the abbot… the abbot came and went and they’d go for long walks through the fields and along the marshland, by the river, gathering plants…’

As she talked, I could see the shining river as in summer, the strips of water shimmering on the edges of the fields, blue-white mist rising like the ghost of the long-departed sea.

‘…and also Master Leland, for a while.’

I looked up.

‘ John Leland? John Leland the antiquarian?’

I began pinching my lower thigh to confirm that I was not yet taken into some other sphere.

‘And maker of charts. Recorder of topography.’

‘John Leland worked with your mother and the abbot?’

‘Not with the abbot. I think the abbot was wary of him. He came sometimes and walked with my mother. Poor Master Leland.’

She sighed, and the sigh became a tapestry of shadows drawn around her. Her body was outlined with quiet light against the umber shades of the woods in the tapestry, and I had to turn my eyes away. Knowing nothing of Leland’s interest in herbs. Only old manuscripts and the arrangement of the land.

‘So this was not on Leland’s first visit to the town.’

‘He came back.’

‘I know. After the Dissolution.’

Dissolution. The word bubbling out of me, a pelucid stream over pebbles. I bent and let it ripple over my fingers.

‘I’ve a memory of Master Leland coming to our house. Can still see his beardless face, all bony like a Roman statue. I remember him shouting, “You don’t understand, I’m my own man now.” He kept saying that.’

‘What did he mean? Was he in his right mind? Because-’

‘How would I know? I was young.’

Still young.

I gazed into the core of the candlefire, where small, tight flames were coalescing into a single body of light like to a full and golden moon, and I felt my heart swelling in my breast like a blood-red poppy close to exploding from its bud.

But stop. Dear God. Think.

I looked up, which seemed to take a very long time.

‘You know that, in the end, John Leland went mad?’ Feeling my body begin to list I put out a hand to the nearest bedpost. ‘It was said that his mind was overloaded with the magnitude of his obsession… his task of chronicling the topography of the whole country?’

‘All I know is my father mistrusted him. Said his first visit was to collect treasure, and his second was to collect… the place itself.’

The stone moved in my hand.

‘My father says that on that last visit he went in search of former monks from the abbey. He went looking for them.’

‘Leland?’

I opened my hand and the stone was still.

‘But they’d have nothing to do with him. Blaming him, in part, for the killing of Abbot Whiting.’

‘What did he want from the monks?’

This question seemed at the crux of it. What did the monks know? I reached out for an answer, the stock of the apple tree hard against my shoulder.

‘I know not. Nor what he wanted from my mother. All the treasure was long gone.’

I looked for her expression, but her face was in complete darkness, for she’d moved deeper into the circle of trees and bushes, away from the probing moon.

The stone in my hand was squirming and pulsing like a toad.

Long gone.

I crooked an arm around the tree at my side and saw the cold majesty of the tor rising before me out of the thick, brown mist with the sky aswirl around its tower. And now it was no longer night but not full day either, a darkness overhead, a dark beating, and I looked up to see the air all full of cawking crows, and a man labouring towards me down the hill, swaying slightly, side to side.

‘When did Leland…?’

The words beaten away into the air by the wings of the crows all around me, and I turned away and covered my head with my arms. But the crows swooped and pecked at my hands, ripping the flesh from the backs of them and sought my eyes, and I was crying out and fell on my face on the damp earth and lay there for a long time.

Hours passing, me smeared upon the richness of the soil, born of dead matter, new life out of decay. Thinking on this for many long hours, all the fecund beauty of it, until I felt the silence growing around me, a black pressing that, with time, I could not ignore and, turning, with great apprehension, upon my back, I saw, above me, Martin Lythgoe.

Gazing down upon me, a look of bafflement on his face and his hands linked at his abdomen to receive the shining intestines slithering out of him in a soup of blood.

Tried to turn away and couldn’t. Couldn’t move.

Knowing now, for sure, that it was me. That I’d killed him. Sending him away to his death. Murdering him just as sure as Cate Borrow had killed the boy in Somerton… twin souls, the witch and the conjuror. In seeking knowledge, we court the night.

Guilt.

And did, by means of sorcery, attempt to kill or grievously harm Her Majesty…

Struggling to breathe.

‘Still,’ she said. ‘Be still, John.’

Take him.

Taking my hands as I’m bound from behind. My back to the post and the rusted iron hoop around my chest and the air’s tainted now with the grey smoke of foreboding, and now comes the smell of old dry straw and the excited crackle of bone-dry twigs at first kindling.

Heresy.

A sudden rush of acrid gases to the throat, and I can’t breathe, nor hardly cough, for there’s only smoke, all about me now, and I try to cry out, but the air is full of choking gas and the crickle-crackle of the twigs and the chitter-chatter of the gathering crowd.

Fine line, Dr John.

A rush and a fizz as the straw catches light. A little sizzling.

The s-word, John, the s-word.

Here’s Bishop Bonner in monk’s habit with that plump and full-toothed grin. Observing, with a giggle, the ignition of clothing, points of savage heat and piercing agony, now, in the skin, and a slow funnelling of smoke from my sleeves.

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

His laughter’s a peal of discordant bells, and there’s a smell on the air of roasting pork, rich and succulent.

By prayer…

Whispered through the hiss of spitting fat.

…and suffering.

Bonner’s beam outshines the fire as I look down at my hands, and one hand’s gone charcoal black, the skin all shrivelled and the fingers crisped and flaking away.

And I’m screaming hard against the roaring in my ears, the molten wax, but there’s no release for the scream, for my cheeks are full of gas, and there’s a core of heat behind the eyes, a boiling in the sockets and then, of a sudden, the sparks have found my hair, making there a small forest fire, and then there’s a great whooooop…

…the feral ecstacy of the crowd in that glorious moment of hell’s halo: a conjuror’s head all raging with the madness of fire.

And the head’s become a ball of light. Like to the sun.

Like to the sun.