The Bones of Avalon

XXXVII

The Heresy

Though I’d drunk only small beer, I stumbled down next morning with a head bidding to equal my aching heart. Last night’s dreams had been lit with a dark vision, reminding me of some madman’s paintings I’d seen in the low countries in which tiny men and women roiled and squittered like demonic insects.

Or the maggots Fyche claimed to see on the side of the tor, writhing around my feet and ankles as I walked endlessly amid the dream hills around Glastonbury, lured by the distant chinging of church bells.

Always unreachable; when I reached the first dream-church, all that would remain would be an echo, mixed with the cawking of crows, and the insect people would still be squirming and chittering around my boots, some hacking at them with tiny axes, my feet all pricked and sore, and I’d hear the bells picked up from another far-off tower or steeple and set off in that direction only for the same to happen.

And so till dawn, and the discovery of Sir Peter Carew hefting a flagon of cider in the alehouse, still foul with last night’s sweat and vomit. When I took the opportunity to tell him what I wanted, he said he hoped he’d live to see me crawling up the walls of the Bedlam from the inside.

‘This would be your way of saying no, Sir Peter?’

Carew stroked the back of one roughened hand with the palm of another, fingers curling into a fist, indicating he could think of a more emphatic way. We were never likely to be friends. Maybe he’d glimpsed the writing on the wall which suggested that all those centuries of supremacy by the fighting man were at last yielding to the wiles of the thinking man. But not in his lifetime. Oh no. To Carew, a man without relish for violence was a Bessie.

I’d not walk away this time.

‘You need do nothing,’ I said, ‘except arrange for me to ride to Wells and speak with the accused.’

‘ Jesu, you’re a fucking-’ Carew had turned to the doorway where Dudley now stood, rubbing his eyes. ‘ You tell him. Tell him of the madness of taking on Fyche on behalf of a witch. ’

‘He serves the Queen, Carew,’ Dudley said. ‘Not Fyche. Nor even you.’

‘He’s a fucking conjurer!’

‘But, even if that were true, he’d be the Queen’s fucking conjurer. So if I were you – God forbid – I’d be tempted to go along with his proposal.’

‘Tell Fyche my friend from the Commission on Antiquities deems it his role to represent the woman accused of murdering his colleague’s servant?’

Dudley smiled tiredly.

‘Fix it. Why not?’

Carew stood shaking his head.

‘All right. I’ll help you. I’ll help you see the weakness of your judgement. Show you and the conjurer the truth of what you think to defend.’

In his efforts to sell me a new cloak, Benlow the bone-man had suggested the deepest of winter might be yet to come, but this morning appeared to dispute his forecast. The sun shone stronger than on any day this year, and the Poet’s Narcissus was budding at the roadsides. It was as if the thunderstorm, far from being an expression of God’s ire, had been the herald of an early spring, the gay ghost of some long-dead Mayday dancing in the wasteland of February.

Did I feel Eleanor Borrow with me as we approached her herb garden? Did I sense her presence on this hillside? In truth, I sensed it everywhere, now, as if she were become the spirit of this curious town and all that it had brought to me.

It had taken us no more than ten minutes to walk here from the George. Across the street, to the edge of the town, then over a stile to follow a muddied path on the flank of the long hill which sheltered the town like an arm. Now I stood by a wooden gate, looking up at the strip of land hedged all around, with a fast-flowing stream down one side. Its mainly empty furrows were neat and drawn as if aligned to the tor, the battlements of whose tower crested the highest horizon. The air was shimmering with bright alchemical dew. And I felt…

What I felt was naked. Naked in my emotions. Close to breaking down and had to turn away from Carew and Dudley. Standing there facing the lower skyline, where the sun lit up the channels of water and pale pools all the way to the sea, until I found composure.

‘What does she grow here?’ Dudley asked.

‘Her mother had two hundred kinds of herbs,’ I mumbled, and Carew’s head swivelled.

‘Who told you that?’

‘I… forget. Could’ve been Fyche.’

‘There aren’t two hundred kinds of herbs in the world,’ Carew said.

‘There are far more than that.’

And they’d grow well here… a well-sheltered place, in its way, with good soil and an abundance of water. It moved me to think of what I’d read of the herb garden of the visionary Hildegard of Bingen, a woman well ahead of her time in the relating of science to creation and the use of plants to treat the melancholic condition.

‘You really want to know what she grew here?’ Carew wore a slanting smile. ‘I’ll show you what she fucking grew. Stay there. ’

He moved off across the land, but I ignored him, walking up the slow slope. Sensing her walking beside me, the swish of her dress in the wet grass, following the winter-brown hedge toward the top of the field, where I’d seen a wooden cross.

There was no name on it, but I knew by its siting.

Felt so safe in her garden. 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.

I turned slowly, and it was there below me, its highest arches making gilded loops like dusty sunbeams. A paradise. Avalon.

This had been the abbey’s ground. Most everything here, for miles around, had belonged to the abbey. And the abbot had given over this land to Cate Borrow to continue her experiments with plants and herbs. This particular place, so perfect for its views of abbey and tor and the watery lands below… as if it might absorb the influences given off by these holy sites.

And more. A crossing place for all the energies of the earth. A Christian holiness, a pagan sanctity. I felt I’d been here when my mind was given up to the dust of vision. What would have happened had I imbibed the potion here, on such a morning?

It mattered not. The dust of vision had only been the grease to unrust the lock, free the door. There was no need for more; the door was open now… or at least ajar.

Time was suspended for some moments, and I existed in a state of profound yearning, the kind I’d once experienced only when gazing into the infinite vastness of a starlit sky. And I thought of what we were told by the church: that all life is lived for the glory of God, and that any rewards for us would come not in this world but the next.

But people here, in this town where the Saviour walked, and Merlin, did not accept this. Under this canopy of ancient magic, who could blame them for coming to the belief that they could have here – now, in this life – a kind of heaven. As if being here could, through prayer and knowledge, endow them with more than what God, according to the Church, allows.

No book, no dogma, just being here.

This was the Avalon Heresy.

What Fyche hated most.

‘The witch’s grave, eh?’

I turned, and there was Carew, swinging back on his heels, hands behind his back, eyes lit with bright malice. Dudley with him, sombre-faced.

‘Couldn’t have the cow planted in consecrated ground, obviously,’ Carew said.

‘Or maybe,’ I told him, ‘this place is more consecrated, in its way, than either of the churchyards.’

Carew scowled. This was heresy. Well, fuck him. Hard to believe that the Queen had put the abbey into this man’s horny hands.

Which now were no longer behind his back, and he was leering through the hole in his black beard, as if in foul imitation of what they held.

Two earth-brown skulls, jawless and broken-toothed.

‘ This is what she grew, Doctor,’ Carew said. ‘ She grew death.’