The Bones of Avalon

XXXI

Haze

When I was dead, it was raining.

Soft, coloured rain, iridescent against the charcoal sky.

A distant singing, all soft and melodious, and the air laden with the vague scent of apples.

I tell you these things, knowing not how many hours had passed, for time was not the same. Nothing was the same and, though I knew I was dead, I knew also that it was not over for me.

Walking through water, now.

Clear, soft water that was flashing over the grass and cascading down the hill. Water like music.

Me walking barefoot, the grass slick between my toes. Led by the hand, feet in the soft flowing land, down towards the nest of apple trees, and I could smell the breeze around them, the scent of apples and the ferment of cider, and all the juices of late summer.

And the tor rising on the other side and the soaring golden pinnacles of the abbey.

Walking through an old orchard, and the twigs of the apple trees were scraping at my bared skin.

And then, with no awareness of a journey, I was in the sky.

Not in my body but as a spirit made of finest air, and I was walking in the garden of the firmament, stars around my hands, whole worlds that I could hold, yet did not wish to hold, wished only to exist with them in peace and a sense of eternal wonder. And for a split instant, I almost knew His mind.

Seemed to be here for many hours, but it might have been mere seconds before I was falling back in vague dismay… back to a place that was close to our world yet not of it. Where I saw the land again – the Glastonbury land – veined with clear water.

Then saw through the skin of fields and woods and hills, to the innards of the island, all the inner chambers and vessels linked by the flow of water underground, a low and rumbling power, the engine of the earth, held together by the bones of the hills and all the bones of the saints which lay here, the bones of Avalon…

…and I drew back and all the shapes of the land were moving. I saw creatures there, made of the earth… a lion and a dove… fishes that swam in grass. And the earth went atilt, and the creatures formed a great circle all around me.

‘Where are you?’

‘I’m flying,’ I said.

‘Come,’ she said. ‘This may be too much too soon.’

When the vision faded to a pastel blur and the body’s weight returned, I felt a stab of sorrow. But then I heard the old soft singing, a flow of molten gold, and saw the abbey from above, laid out below the tor like to a golden body.

A paradise. Avalon.

And I heard these words, soft-spoken but quite clear:

The whole magistery depends upon the Sun and the Moon. The Sun is its father and the Moon is its mother, and we know truly that the red earth is nourished by the rays of the Moon and the Sun.

The sun was in me. My head burned with gasses like to the orb of the sun. And the moon…

…the moon was awaiting the sun.

I was walking towards the summit of the tor.

What can you see?

The sky.

And…?

The tower.

Go to it. Put your hands upon its nearest corner at chest height.

Opening my hands, and the stone which had lain there was gone. A connecting. A shiver through the arms and into the breast, and I sprang away but did not fall this time.

Did not fall.

Knowing that the stone which had been in my hand had been absorbed back into the high standing stone whose spirit lived inside the tower upon the tor. And tower and stone both lived in me, when I walked back down the hill, lured by the the wappling of the water in the Blood Well at its foot. Rolling and sliding down the hill, my apparel left strewn out behind, and she was waiting and wore no cloak, nor over-dress, nor shift, and was but a haze in the soft air.

Soft. The softness of the grass where we lay. The softness of lips and breasts, the yielding of flesh, the rising of the tower, all the energy entering into it as I rolled over and felt the opening of the well-head in the thicket and then the tower sliding deep into the well. And, oh God, a tongue ’twixt criss-cross teeth, greenlit eyes in bright water, a fluid white light, the light of a thousand candles, a river of white light flowing through me.

And then, later, the sunrise in the heart.

And I will travel to Avalon, to the fairest of all maidens……and she shall make all my wounds sound and make me whole.