‘So this is the place for them, isn’t it? The shrine. The most likely, anyway. Where might they take him? What hiding places are there? How far is it from the village?’
‘Not within sight of the village at night,’ I said. ‘And no one comes out of there after dark. The church itself… the shrine’s behind it, and the well, a long hole in the ground, with a pine wood behind.’
And below it… the Bryn. Half sunk into the hill itself.
Like a cave.
I said nothing of this, but it would be the first place I’d go, to warn the Ceddols. I kept my voice steady.
‘There are wide views from the church,’ I said. ‘Especially on a night like this. You’d see anyone coming.’
‘Especially three of us, on horseback. If we ride directly up the hill, we’re meat. Is there another way?’
‘There is another way,’ I said. ‘With good tree cover.’
‘Fit for horses?’
‘If we dismount and lead them. I’m sure we could leave them in the stables at Nant-y-groes, but… Stephen Price is a cautious man, and the explanations would take time.’
‘We’ll continue,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘See what there is to be seen. If anything.’
‘Wait,’ I said. ‘How much do you believe? Is there magic?’
‘There’s magic everywhere on a night like this, boy.’
But I had little faith that there was anything of the Hidden here. So many legends were woven with hindsight, to light mere coincidence with glamour: strange weather, moving stars, earth-tremors.
‘You feel a softening of the ground?’ Vaughan had dismounted and was tying his horse to a young oak. ‘We should be able to get through this way and up the hill from behind but not if we’re in bog.’
Damn. I should have thought. When I came down the hill, through the oak wood, I’d only gone as far as the burial tump. Now I only wanted a swift and discreet way to the church and Dudley, if Dudley was there. And also to the Bryn.
‘I’ll go through on foot for a short way,’ Vaughan said. ‘See how firm it is for the horses.’
I watched him vanish into a thickening of undergrowth, wishing there were more of us, then looked up at the hill and the moon. You could make out the grey tower of Pilleth Church, halfway up. A marker for the shrine. Of the village you could see nothing.
‘I’ve never asked,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘But why were you here when I followed the Roberts boys? I presumed just to visit your old family home, but…’
‘It’s dying,’ I said, not wanting to mention the peculiar talents of Siôn Ceddol and the lure of his sister. ‘The village is dying.’
‘I’d almost think you cared.’
‘It’s the old home of my father. My tad.’
‘Tad? That’s what you called him, in the Welsh way?’
For years I hadn’t even realised it was Welsh. I said nothing.
‘Ah, you’re one of us more than you know, John Dee. Why’s the village dying?’
‘Weight of too much killing. The dead outnumber the living, and the dead are rising. It oppresses them. There were always priests of the old kind to help them cope, but now they’re told it’s their own fault for not praising God enough.’
‘My,’ he said. ‘You do care.’
‘I hardly know anyone here. My tad told them he’d come back, when he was rich. But he never was, not for long. And he never did come back. Tell me… do have any idea how practised Gethin believes himself to be… in the ways of magic?’
‘I doubt he’s read the books, John. But he’s said to have the Sight. And the desire. And what some might call the courage… and others the madness of—’
Thomas Jones breaking off because of a sharp cry from down by the river. He began to turn his horse.
‘He’s in the marsh?’
Twisting in the saddle, I saw the water’s glitter, sword-bright through a line of trees.
‘We should all have gone.’
I slid to the ground and tied the mare to the slender trunk of the oak. Aware again of that feeling of separation from the physical, a shudder going through me, like you sometimes get in sleep – as if I were snatched out of my body and then flung back. The mare flinched, as if she’d felt it, too.
‘He’s here,’ Thomas Jones said uncertainly.
I spun round, thinking for a fearful moment that he meant Prys Gethin, then saw Roger Vaughan fading up greyly from the riverbank, the shape of him imprinted on the night, but blurred in my sight, as if the ink had run. I moved towards him.
He was limping. Not looking at either of us, only at the ground, as if he might sink into it.
‘I’m all right, Dr Dee. I’m not hurt.’
His voice was cracked like old parchment. He was not all right. He was far from all right.
XLVII
Orifice
VAUGHAN’S HORSE, QUITE a big grey stallion, was straining at his tether, panting and blowing, and I saw that the others were become restive, too, their eyes all aflare.
I said to Vaughan, ‘What happened down there?’
‘I don’t know.’ He clearly was shaken. ‘That is, I’m not sure. I think… I think there might be something dead down there. The smell. Might just be a sheep, but I… It don’t feel right in any way.’
He went to soothe the stallion, putting his hands on it, I’d swear, in search of warmth and life, but the horse sheered away from him. I looked down towards the river.
‘I’ll go,’ I said. ‘Find out.’
‘Leave it, John,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘We’re better moving to higher ground, where we can see anyone coming. If Dudley’s only been missing since this morning, it’s not likely that—’
‘His body will yet stink? That rather depends, doesn’t it?’
I knew not what it depended on, but must needs be sure. And I was weary of unexplained fears and shadowplay, nature’s marked cards and loaded dice. Before I could think better of it, I was scrabbling down the way Vaughan had come, over short turf which suggested the sheep had been here in profusion in daylight hours. The sheep which fled at sunset.
Divers trees sprang up around me, from half-grown saplings to old oaks with bloated, cankered boles and branches like fingers with the gnarling sickness. The river was no longer to be seen – too close, or the bank had been raised up against winter floods.
You might conclude that, on this hard moon-flayed night, I was not fully in my mind, and maybe I wasn’t. I’d experienced this in Glastonbury and other places where Christianity and old magic were interwoven – the air unsteady and full of sparks, and sometimes you thought you could hear it like the hum of bees or, indeed, smell it in a sudden rank, richness of earth.
… you’re one of us more than you know, John Dee.
I wondered now, if my tad’s evocation of Wales – the men bent like thorn trees, their skin scoured – had not simply been intended to keep me away from here, plant some deep revulsion inside me. Maybe some dark memory had lived inside him and the last thing he wanted was for his son to become one of us.
But now I was here, whether by destiny or conspiracy, an educated man grown weary of the pinches and taunts, the mists and flickerings. I wove between the trees, looking for the river, recalling my own drawing of the valley, a place given form by ancient ritual. But the river was hidden now by the earth, of a sudden, rising before me, all humped like a deathbed.
How our night-minds ever find the most sinister of likeness. It was only raised earth, an upturned bowl. Made bigger by enclosing shadows than it had looked by day, and the trees growing out of it turned into a conference of witches, one of them long-dead, naked boughs clawing for the moon. But it wasn’t the tree that stank.