The Bones of Avalon

XXXII

The Word

When I awoke before dawn, it was as if I’d slept for whole days. Or rather as if I’d been away for days. And I felt…

…felt my body was a strange place. Stretching out in the bed, I could feel all of it at once, from the soles of its feet to the weight of its skull and, betwixt them, the slow pulse of the unbound heart. And I felt…

Whole. I felt whole. Entire. Complete. Felt the heaviness of the sun in me, its holy rays opening me up into an aching, languid release, and I rolled over, reaching out an arm for her.

Nothing. Absence.

When the arm closed on cold air, I was in terror, my eyes falling open like a trapdoor into darkness. I sat up and took in the empty chair, the empty board. The empty bed. I was alone in the half-light.

Gone. Performed her alchemy and gone. I was thrown into panic: had it been a dream, a night excursion of the soul? I fell back, an aching void in me.

Then, as my face slipped between the pillows, the scent of her came to me, her body’s wild-animal musk, and my breath caught in my throat.

God. God, God, God…

Rolled out of bed and found myself naked, the cold dawn seizing my flesh. Yet, for the first time, welcoming its bite. I stood and pulsed and tingled as if all the stars were lit within me. Had other men felt this? Did all men feel this, after…?

After what, the condition of the bed and its emanations left little doubt. Thankful, tearful, I went back and laid upon it, burying my face in the scent of her, and when I closed my eyes the dust rose again, a ripple of images of moon and water, earth and…

…fire. Even the fire was good.

Jesu!

I came off the bed again, moved slowly to the window. Touching it. The strangeness of glass. The miracle of seeing out from within.

Of course, there must have been more to it. More than the potion, although that clearly had opened doors between my inner being and something that was out there. But, in some way, she ’d made that happen in the way it had, and there was a word for this.

The lower panes were jewelled with red and blue and orange, a pool of water on the sill reflecting these colours and more, and my eyes were drawn into it and I must have lost several minutes and…

Oh, yes, the word.

It had ever been with us, ever misunderstood, feared and rendered demonic by the churchmen – those same churchmen who preach that we should ever be open to higher influence.

I saw the wet roofs shining red. Raised my eyes to the first sunlight running like syrup along the ramparts of an old night cloud. Felt a trembling of my whole being. And uttered the word, breathing it softly into the coppery fire of the nascent day.

The word was magic.

I knelt, then, and prayed.

‘You all right, Dr John? You look…’

Cowdray in his sackcloth apron at the bottom of the stairs, all grey stubble and troubled eyes.

‘Thank you, I’m well,’ I said.

Hearing my own voice for, it seemed, the first time. It sounded frail, immature, a boy’s voice.

‘None of us slept much last night, mind,’ Cowdray said. ‘Worst storm of the winter, by some way.’

No, I wanted to tell him. This was the best of storms. Yet I knew there was much that was wrong. Moving down the stairs still feeling as if I walked in a body of light, yet knowing that even the rich magic of it must needs be contained before it hardened into a kind of madness.

‘Have you seen Nel Borrow?’

This name like a sacred name to me now, some angelic invocation.

‘No.’ Cowdray’s face had gone empty. ‘Not this past day.’

Of course, he had seen her, having offered her his attic room, but his caution was commendable, and I asked him nothing further. She would have slipped away while it was yet dark, without disturbing anyone. It was what she did: slipped away.

But I’d find her again. Needing her with me, more than ever. And the finding of her was a quest beyond all other quests, for she was Circe and Medea and Morgan le Fay and… I saw her in vivid image, looking down on me between two tall trees at the entrance to a track leading to the Blood Well.

And is learning acquired only from books?

Wondering, from Cowdray’s slightly alarmed look, if the wild scent of her was around me like a swirling mist.

‘…of God,’ he was saying.

‘Mercy?’

‘A storm like this is seldom seen this time of year. People are saying it was the rage of God against the mire of sin and heathenism in this town.’

‘Who’s saying that?’

He smiled grimly, made no answer.

‘Master Roberts is asking for you.’

‘He’s about?’

‘He’s been about over an hour,’ Cowdray said. ‘He bids you join him in the abbey. In the outhouse behind the abbot’s kitchen, where the… where the body lies. Your man’s cadaver.’

Always a dark shadow in front of the light.

‘Now?’

‘I’ll prepare your breakfast, meanwhile. Not a patient man, is he, Master Roberts?’

The hut seemed to have been a relic of the abbey’s occupation by the Flemish weavers in Edward’s reign. Its shutters had been nailed tight, its roof patched with straw. I approached it lightly enough through the fresh, chilled morn. But when I reached its open door my euphoria was broken by the foul, piercing stench of corrupting flesh.

And it was this that brought back all that had come before the excursion. Those candlelit revelations.

What happened to your servant… terrible almost beyond belief… but all this talk of devil magic, sacrifice…

‘Where the hell have you been?’

Dudley, in the doorway, in his drab clerk’s apparel, more gaunt than ever I’d seen him.

‘I slept late,’ I told him. ‘The storm…’

‘Kept all of us awake. Except for this poor bastard.’

His eyes were burning dully, not now with the fever but with a driven rage, as if some cold engine worked within him. He stepped outside, wiping the back of his hand across his mouth and moustache, grains of sweat still agleam on his forehead.

‘Go in. Go and look.’

‘Robbie, I’ve seen all I can bear to see. What’s the use?

‘No!’ His features sharpening, jaw tensed. It was like he’d come out of a long sleep, was smitten with urgency, real life flung in his face. ‘Look again, I pray you. Closely. You know about these things, you’ve studied anatomy.’

‘I’ve studied books on anatomy-’

Books, books, books…

‘John, listen to me. You were quick to deny this was ritual sacrifice. Well, if not that, then what? What’s his body have to tell us?’

‘Robbie, I doubt you’re even well enough to be-’

‘The hell with me. Go the fuck in.’

I nodded. Stepping unwillingly inside the hut, breathing through my mouth.

It was, in truth, no bloodier than a butcher’s shop, but the sight of remains such as these will always bring me to the brink of despair. Hard not to feel that the spirit itself has not been forever extinguished and, after all I’d seen this past night, what a grievous loss that would be.

The body of Martin Lythgoe lay upon a board made from two mangers. It was dull and did not glisten. The candle had been knocked away from the mouth and lay beside the body, no longer spectral and nothing of the tor about it now. Merely a squalid insult to life and humanity.

‘What can I…?’ I was near to tears, shaking my head in despair at my uselessness. ‘What can I tell you, Robbie… more than you can see for yourself?’

The right arm bridged the yawning chasm of the chest, and inside its elbow was lodged the crushed and shrivelled orb of Martin’s heart. I remembered the phantasm of him I’d seen through the dust, trying to hold it all in, and he hadn’t spoken then, and he wasn’t speaking now.

The left arm dangled over the side of the board, and Dudley lifted it, supporting the hand, free by now from rigor mortis.

‘What do you make of this?’

I bent over, with some reluctance, holding my breath.

‘Oh.’

Wouldn’t normally have noticed it. You’d see the invaded chest, the ripped-out heart, and would turn away sickened before you’d mark the small but meaningful smitterings of dried blood on the fingertips, the blackened, broken nails.

‘The middle finger, John. The way the nail’s been all but torn away. See?’

‘Done as he fought back?’ I squatted down on the greasy straw on the floor, took up the cold, marbling hand at eye-level. ‘Or maybe it suggests the body was moved after death?’

‘Either of those is possible,’ Dudley said. ‘But I think it’s something worse. Look again. Closer.’

‘What’s this…?’

Brown flakes which had fallen into my palm. Seemed unlikely to be dried blood.

‘Rust.’ Dudley knelt beside me. ‘It’s from an old iron nail. See it?’

‘Where… Oh, Jesu-’

The length of it was wedged hard under the split and blackened fingernail, all the way to its root, where the point stuck out. I let the hand fall, in horror, wincing.

‘Hammered in,’ Dudley said. ‘Under his nail, until the head of it broke off.’

‘Then this is…?’

‘Torture,’ Dudley said. ‘Before he died, this poor bloody man was tortured.’

I came weakly to my feet, trying to think of another explanation and could not.

‘Why?’

‘Why are men usually tortured?’

‘To make them confess to…’

‘Uh huh.’ Dudley shaking his head. ‘To make them talk.’

‘About what? What would he know? He was a stranger here. He only came because of…’

‘Us. He came with us. He knew who we were and why we were here.’

‘And is that to kill for?’

Dudley looked at me as if I were a child, while the eyes of Martin Lythgoe, cold as pebbles, gazed forever into the cobwebbed dark.

‘We need a witness to this,’ Dudley said. ‘Is Carew here yet? Or where’s… that other fellow?’

‘Fyche.’

Shows this picture of himself as a Godly man in combat with the forces of Satan, and at the core, I’ll swear… that’s where you’ll find the real evil.

‘We don’t talk to Fyche,’ I said. ‘I’m not sure we even talk to Carew.’

Dudley looked at me with narrowed eyes.

‘Take my word,’ I said.

‘All right. Fetch Cowdray, then.’

‘No… That is… there’s someone more qualified.’

Clawing aside cobwebs hanging thick as ship’s rigging and stumbling to the doorway for air.