He stomped out of the clearing, returning the way he had come. I stayed where I was until all sounds of his departure had ceased and blessed silence once more enfolded me, and until cramp in both my legs forced me to my feet. I extricated myself from my hiding place, not without some difficulty and further damage to my clothes, and resumed my journey with more speed than dignity. Just before sundown, I found the alehouse, clean and welcoming, and breathed a sigh of relief.
TWO
There are people who maintain that the thirty-three Daughters of Albion were the children of that scourge of the Christian Church, the Emperor Diocletian. But that’s arrant nonsense, of course. The story is obviously set in the dawn of history, long, long before the rise of the Roman Empire. And surely even legends must have their logic. So I favour the version that the sisters were the offspring of some ancient Grecian king who, when his daughters rose as one woman and slaughtered their husbands, was so appalled by the deed that he was unable to tolerate their presence at his court. But neither could he bring himself to kill his own flesh and blood. Instead, he provisioned a ship with six months’ supply of food and water and set the women afloat upon the open sea, at the mercy of wind and tide.
When half a year had passed and the provisions were about to run out, the ship fetched up on the shores of an island rising out of the mists on the edge of the world; an island without a name. Albia, the eldest of the thirty-three sisters therefore decreed that it should be called after her: Albion. The island was peopled only by demons, horned and tailed, with whom the sisters mated to produce a race of giants, and these giants ruled Albion for the next seven hundred years. (The great gorge, just outside Bristol, is said to have been hewn from the rock by two of the giants, two brothers, Vincent and Goram, and you can still see the latter’s chair carved into the rock face, rising sheer from the bed of the River Avon to the heights above.)
But then came Brutus — son of Silvius, grandson of Ascanius, great-grandson of Aeneas — and his band of Trojans, landing, so it is said, at Totnes in south Devon. He renamed the island Britain and finally, after many hard-fought battles, overcame the giants, carrying their leaders, Gog and Magog, in chains to the Trojans’ new settlement on the banks of the River Thames. There the pair were forced to serve as doorkeepers until they were too old to be of any further use, when they were turned, by magic, into two painted effigies of themselves, and where they can still be seen, one on either side of the Guildhall entrance. Mind you, older folk will tell you that, in reality, these effigies formed a part of the street decorations when King Henry V entered his capital in triumph after the battle of Agincourt. (Of course, older people always like to air their superior knowledge in order to disillusion the young. They gain great enjoyment from it. I know because I do the same myself nowadays.)
So how, you may ask, did I become acquainted with these myths and legends? Well, the history of Brutus and his Trojans is told in Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Britonum which Brother Hilarion, our Novice Master at Glastonbury, permitted his charges to borrow now and then from the abbey library. But this interesting room also contained other delights in the shape of a locked cupboard whose contents we novices were forbidden even to touch, let alone to read. So, naturally, we were desperate to get our hands on them. Now, I think I have mentioned on more than one occasion in these chronicles my friend and fellow novice, Nicholas Fletcher, whose talent for lock-picking was unrivaled by anyone else whom I have ever met. I don’t believe the lock was invented that he was unable to open. It was therefore inevitable that, sooner or later, he would break into the forbidden cupboard and allow the rest of us a glimpse of the banned folios — which is how I first learned of the legend of the Daughters of Albion. This particular tale was lavishly illustrated with graphic depictions of the thirty-three sisters mating with the demons; drawings which made our hair stand on end. (And not just our hair, I can tell you. I believe it was that book, as much as anything else, which made me realize that the celibate life was not for me.) Of course, in the end, Brother Hilarion discovered what we were up to and we were all thoroughly whipped and set penances that seemed to last for an eternity. But it was worth it, for me at least.
These legends came crowding back into my mind one showery morning seated on the lower slopes of Silbury Hill, that strange and eerie mound built thousands of years ago by the Celtic tribes who originally inhabited this island, although for what purpose no one has ever discovered. I have even heard it suggested that it was raised by a race of beings who came from a land beyond the stars. But that is blasphemy. Beyond the stars is Heaven, God’s paradise, which we all hope to attain some day.
Ten days had passed since I left London; ten days of steady walking, still keeping to the side roads and woodland tracks, following the path I had mapped out for myself in my head. It brought me, eventually, to Silbury Hill and, later that same day, to Avebury village where I managed to obtain a supper of freshly-baked bread, goat’s-milk cheese and some of those little leeks which grow so profusely in spring and are eaten raw. ‘Stink-breaths’ we called them as children, not without good reason. After my meal, and in order to disperse some of the flatulence it was causing, I walked around the remains of the ancient stone circles which echoed the great Giant’s Dance to the south, on Salisbury Plain. The stones at Avebury have worn less well and are mere stumps in many places, but they are spread over a far greater area than those at Stonehenge. As far as I could tell after walking around for an hour or so — and it was not easy to discern anything with certainty — I thought I could make out two smaller henges within a larger one, and reflected how the circle, without beginning and without end, had always been a source of fascination; the serpent biting its tail, the ring that signifies fidelity.
A butterfly hovered and settled near me on one of the stones, the pale transparency of its wings opalescent in the watery sunlight. Then, just as suddenly as it had arrived, it was gone in a shimmer of coruscating amber and pearl. Indeed, so brief had been the time between its appearance and disappearance that, for a moment, I wondered if I had really seen it or if it was simply a figment of my imagination or the incarnation of a visitor from another world. .
I gave myself a mental shake and also, literally, shook my head in order to clear my mind of such dangerous fancies. But there was something about this tract of country that gave one fantastical thoughts; visions almost. As I have said, the Giant’s Dance lay some miles to the south of Avebury, while roughly an equal number of miles to the north, as I knew from my travels among the lower slopes of the Cotswold hills, was Wayland’s smithy and the strange white horse, carved into a hillside near Uffington. The latter is thousands of years old and nothing but a series of sweeping curves cut into the chalk beneath the downs, not at all as our artists today would portray the beast and yet, from a distance, instantly recognizable as a horse. Locals secretly worship it as the depiction of an ancient goddess and for century after century, in defiance of the Church’s ruling, have kept the outline clear of encroaching grass. As for Wayland the Smith, he belongs to Norse mythology and perhaps came to these shores with the Viking invaders; a magical being who would shoe travellers’ horses in return for a silver coin. I once knew a man who had tried it, leaving his offering at the mouth of the long barrow where the smith is said to have his forge, but nothing, he informed me sadly, had happened. When he awoke in the morning, his horse still had the same old shoes. He really wasn’t surprised, but disappointed nonetheless.