The Bones of Avalon

XXXIII

A Man’s Path

An element of self-interest. I’ll admit that. Matthew Borrow, a medical man and surgeon, would be the best witness to confirm what had been done to Martin Lythgoe. But he might also know where his daughter was to be found.

I ran.

Nel: my body still shivering with soft and slippery memories of hers.

And anxiety.

The sky was brightening, near cloudless, as I moved fast and hard away from the abbey, splashing through streets still pooled and roiled with red mud from the storm. Part of me wanting to go on running, between the two church towers at either end of the town, out into the wettened fields towards the sun.

Until I became aware that something was wrong, and slowed.

The air was colder and refreshed from the storm yet, past eight, noone save me appeared to be out in it.

I stopped and looked around: stone houses, wattle houses, the smoke of awakened fires. It was as if I saw the town for the first time, how sporadic and ill-structured it was now the abbey lay in ruins. A dead planet with no sun, all the energy gone to the tor.

Gone back to the tor. And the tor, while it could be serene and hazed with a kind of holiness… that holiness, that magic, had not the formality and discipline of the abbey. It was the magic of chaos.

Of a sudden, a cold vision was upon me. For a moment, it was as though I were seeing Glastonbury as it were seen by Sir Edmund Fyche. Feeling what he felt. A sense of loss. A vacuum filled now with a sense of rage.

It came to me that I was watched, and I spun. Began to mark dull faces in doorways and windows and the furtive parting of shutters.

A mute fear.

News travels apace in a small town, as does sound. As if by instinct, I fled into the back streets and the alleys. By the time I reached the street under the solid new church of St Benignus, I could hear the voices unravelling like shrill ribbons. And then ‘Stop them!’

The woman’s scream bringing me up sharp, flattened against a flimsy wall of bared wattle, peering with caution around its corner. The air down here was murked with smoke from morning fires. Figures dancing in it, agitated like puppets, under the new church tower.

‘Stay back!’ A voice like a scourge. ‘Next one moves goes with us.’

Edging to the end of the wall, choking back a cough, I saw a score of people: goodwives and children and old men lining the street, as if for a parade.

In the road, I saw two men holding a third, an older man struggling vainly against them. As I watched, a man in a leather jerkin arose from behind, on the steps of a house, and appeared to strike him several times with a short stick, and he crumpled to the cobbles, as if his strings were cut.

‘ Jes – Stop!’

The beaten man, once down, tried to roll away. It was Dr Borrow. A foot seemed aimed at his exposed head. Me screaming, starting forward.

‘Stop this! Stop it now, you bastards, in the Queen’s name!’

A silence. The boot frozen in the air.

‘Stay out of it.’ Broken teeth framed in greying beard. ‘Whoever the fuck you are.’

A glimpse of blade half pulled from the leather jerkin. Much attention on me now, squirmings in the smoke, and I saw that there were five of them, and I was in deepest shit for the townsfolk knew me not and would make no move to save me.

‘We’re the law, fellow,’ the leather man said. ‘You don’t even think to fool with us.’

Found myself standing alone in the road and shrugging.

‘And I’m Dr John, of the Queen’s Commission. Rode here with Sir Peter Carew. If this man’s sorely hurt, I’ll see it comes back on you. All of you. You understand?’

Watching out of the side of an eye as Matthew Borrow dragged himself away.

‘No,’ I said. ‘Let him go.’

My voice low, but it seemed to carry. I felt an unaccustomed calm in me. I stared at the man in the leather, able, somehow, to hold the silence for long moments before I spoke again.

‘You’ll walk away now, all of you. Or you’ll be back before you know it, to your old life of stale crusts and petty thieving.’

Maybe it was the tone – a tone I hardly knew – but he very nearly did step back, his eyes swivelling, as if I’d made a move on him. Then he shook his head.

‘’Tis your word, friend. Your word against mine – and his -’ thumb jerked toward his companions. ‘And his.’

‘You count for nothing,’ I said quietly. ‘Any of you. You’re no more than a hired mob. Expendable.’

I doubt he understood the word, and although my face was unshaven, my apparel in disarray, he’d marked an element of threat and a confidence that even I could not explain. He sneered, but his eyes would no longer meet mine. At length, he sniffed, pushing the blade back into his jerkin, while I stood and waited and felt… felt apart from me. The dust rising. It was as if I stood in the air, looking down on this scene and all the poor houses and rubbish-strewn yards.

‘Piss off,’ I said. ‘Before I think to remember your faces.’

The man in leathers signalled briefly to his companions and made to push roughly past me, and I didn’t move and caught his shoulder hard with mine, which was painful, but I felt a curious elation as he stumbled.

Resisting the urge to rub my shoulder, I watched his hands as he straightened up, but the dagger didn’t reappear. Looking straight ahead, oblivious of him, I saw a young man watching me, as if puzzled and, for a moment, I was also puzzled for I’d seen him before, though not in jerkin and hose.

Two women, one of them Joan Tyrre, were helping Matthew Borrow up the steps to his house, but he clearly had no wish to go in. He was looking up the street past the church, his right arm hanging like an empty scabbard.

I went to him.

‘Dr Borrow, what in God’s name was this about?’

He began to cough. The woman with Joan Tyrre turned to me.

‘They was outside at dawn, sir, banging on the door, demanding to search the premises.’

‘Bazzards,’ Joan said.

‘Take him inside, Joan,’ the woman said. ‘Do what you can, I’ll be with you now, Matthew.’ Her accent was of Wales, the south. She turned to me. ‘I live across, by there. Vicar’s wife. I saw them go in. Had him up against the wall they did, before the door was full open.’

‘But they know him. He probably healed their-’

‘No,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘They don’t know him. These are not men of Glaston. The people here don’t know any of them.’

No surprise. Some men would travel miles to join a hue and cry, just for the chase and the violence of it and what they might steal, who they might rape.

‘The town’s overrun with them, it is,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘They was in the taverns last night through the storm. Dozens of them.’

‘Bazzards,’ Joan said.

‘Dozens?’ I followed the vicar’s wife down into the street. ‘What did they want here?’

She looked at me, with uncertainty. A stout woman, fawn-coloured hair under the coif.

‘It weren’t no normal night, Master. My husband, the vicar, he’s been at the altar since first light, praying for forgiveness. The weight of sin lies heavy on us all.’

‘Joe Monger,’ I said, ‘will vouch for me. What did they want here, Mistress?’

‘They got what they wanted,’ she said. ‘But ’twasn’t enough. Well, they knowed he wouldn’t take it quietly, and when he come running out after her, they laid about him. ’Twasn’t his fault she was bred from his loins.’

‘Beg-’

‘Why she came back I’ll never know.’

‘Who?’ It was as if cracks were forming in the sky; I almost seized her by the shoulders. ‘Tell me.’

‘They must’ve been watching the house, all night, all I can think.’

The sky began to fall.

She said, ‘You didn’t see them take her?’

‘Christ…’

She stared at me, appalled at my profanity and I wanted to shake her, shake out all the false piety which had replaced thought and reason.

‘Tell me!’

My whole head felt to be alight, and I think she saw the madness in my eyes and backed away. I saw the young man again, watching us, and realised it was Brother Stephen, the younger of the two monks who’d been with Fyche when first I’d met him, on the tor.

The vicar’s wife pushed straying hair back under her coif.

‘Said she- Well, we heard her, we all did. Shouting down the stairs as how she’d go quietly if they left her father alone. ’Course, soon as they had her out of sight…’

I turned to look up the street, the gathering of people dispersing now. Felt my mouth moving but it could shape no words.

‘En’t fair for a man to get beaten for the sins of his daughter,’ the vicar’s wife said. ‘Is it?’

I stared at her.

‘Sins?’

‘She never said they was wrong when they read out the charge to her face. When they said she was a witch and a murderer, she never said they was wrong. Folks here, they’ve seen this coming – a young woman who thinks she can walk a man’s path when she should be married and keeping a man’s home.’

‘Mistress,’ I said, ‘for God’s sake, if a woman has skills…’

But her face had fallen into an expression of blankness, a self-preserving forced indifference I’d seen too many times in this divided land.

From the heart of the town, I heard whoops and jeering.