Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

The full truth of this broke, as if the walls of our poor house were collapsing around me, and I stood with my back to the window and the owl and found myself to be weeping.

October, 1560. Brynglas at Pilleth on the Welsh Border.

A SINGLE EYE looks up at Anna Ceddol through a veil of shivering ground-mist, and all the rest is blood.

She’s saying, ‘Who is he?’

As if anyone could be sure. You must imagine Anna Ceddol clutching her woollen shawl tight across her breast but refusing to look away. Down the valley, the early sun hangs amid rusted coils of mist.

At first she could not understand what all the fear was about – Pedr Morgan’s wife drumming with both fists on her door as the sky grew pink. A dead man found on Brynglas? Wouldn’t be the first this year, nor the twelfth. All those forlorn heaps of browning bones turned up by the plough, all ragged with the remnants of leather jerkins and makeshift armour. Too many.

The dead are removed upon an old cart kept in a tumbledown sheep shelter halfway up the lower slope. Taken for reburial with small ceremony in the field beside the church where, even after a century and a half, their descendants come to pray and visit the holy well.

But anyone can see what’s different about this one.

‘Likely been yere all night,’ Pedr Morgan, the shepherd says.

‘But no longer than that. That’s the point, isn’t it?’

The stink of blood and shit will be wafting up at Anna, and still, I imagine, she does not turn away.

His face has been split open with a spade or an axe. One eye hanging out, laid upon the remains of a cheek, while the other has been taken, most likely by a crow. The naked chest and stomach have also been ripped and plucked by scavenging birds or foxes. Bands of glistening entrails left entwined like to a scatter of dull jewellery.

‘We need the cart,’ Anna says. ‘He can’t be left here much longer, or there’ll be nothing left of him.’

She looks up at the church, Our Lady of Pilleth. Miraculous cures were once recorded here, under the statue of the Holy Mother above this shallow cauldron of empty hills. That was before a thousand men were shot and hacked to death. Before the sacred spring ran brown with blood and the church itself burned. There are more bones in the earth here than tree roots and no one wants to build over an unknown grave. Which is why they send for Siôn.

Maybe she’s recalling how, when she was pulling on her shawl this morning, her brother began to howl piteously, his fingers clawing at the empty air. As if the terror of Goodwife Morgan was making divers pictures around him which he must needs rip away.

Anna has left him squatting by the fire, wrapped in a sheepskin and hugging himself. He didn’t want to go with her – as though he already knew what was here, just as he’d known what lay in the foundations of Stephen Price’s new barn.

Siôn Ceddol. A miracle in himself.

‘No sign of his apparel?’

The shepherd shakes his head, closing his eyes, as though cursing the circumstance that had him born here, as he oft-times does aloud. In the valley, fresh smoke spouts from the chimney of an oak-framed house where new braces support an upper storey.

Nant-y-groes, where my father, Rowland Dee, was born, below the hill of bones.

‘There’s more, see,’ Pedr Morgan says faintly, and Anna Ceddol stares at him. He turns to where the man with the ruined face lies on his back, half under a thorn tree. Its roots and bole are covered with vicious brambles, some of which have been dragged across the lower part of the body as if to conceal its male emblems.

Pedr Morgan pulls some of the brambles away to reveal a leg twisted at the knee.

‘I’d not have my wife see this.’

Anna Ceddol almost smiles. She’s grown used to being treated not as a normal woman. This, she knows, is because of the tasks she has to perform in the care of her brother. Their parents died within a year of one another, and so Anna has never married – too old now, at twenty-nine, she’ll say, unless some widower is in need of comfort in his dotage.

But there’s no hope of comfort with Siôn in the house – sixteen years now and terrifying to most.

‘There’s evil here,’ Pedr Morgan says.

Anna Ceddol has borrowed Pedr’s knife to cut away more brambles. When she glances up from the corpse, the shepherd is turned away, looking down the valley. She says nothing and bends to the brambles, working patiently and her hands do not tremble. She disregards the smells, seemingly unaware of the grace with which she undertakes such a foul task.

Both her hands bleeding freely from wrenching carelessly at the brambles. She slides a knife under a thick stem bristling with savage thorns and lifts. Up it comes, all of a sudden, bringing with it smaller shoots, and all is peeled away from the dead man’s thighs.

‘Oh,’ Anna says.

Of course, she’s heard the tales, still told in the alehouses of Presteigne, tales spat out like bile from the gut.

About what happened after the battle between Mortimer’s cobbled-together army of untrained English peasantry and the hungry Welsh, serving their fork-bearded wizard. On windy nights, they say, the last cries of dying men still are heard, bright threads of agony woven into the fabric of the storm.

This hill of faith and death. This holy hill soiled by slaughter and an old hatred that never quite goes away because this is border country and its air is ever ajangle with bewildered, jostling ghosts.

Anna Ceddol sees the dead man’s mouth is a mash of shattered teeth, though nothing parts them but a bloody pulp.

Betwixt his thighs, however…

Anyone can tell that’s not done by the crows.

I WAS THROWN back at the sight of several dozen men with pikes and crossbows and a half-concealed firearm or two. And a dozen laden carts, all gathered under a whelk-shell sky in the field beyond London Bridge.

Seemed at first like an advance guard for the Queen, and it was only when I left the wherry that I marked the absence of flags, music or any hint of merriment. And saw that the shabby-clad man approaching me was Dudley.

‘Dr Dee.’ He shook my hand with formality. ‘Master Roberts. Remember me?’

First I’d seen of him since that night in my workroom. When I’d taken up his offer for me to lie at his house in Kew until our departure for Wales, he’d been absent the whole time. A bedchamber had been prepared for me and my meals made daily by the servants, while I spent long hours in solitary book-study. No one in the house appeared to know where Dudley had gone.

Master Roberts?

The name he’d been known by on our mission to Glastonbury at the end of the winter. An indication that discretion was to be exercised on this journey, for him if not for me, and yet…

…Jesu. I surveyed the clattering assembly with dismay. This was his idea of discretion? Before I could question it, Dudley led me across the well-trodden field, away from the throng.

We stopped close to the bridge itself, where it was quiet.

I said, ‘Have the trumpeters been delayed?’

The crow-picked head of a man had fallen from one of the poles and lay in the grass near our feet. I wondered if it had belonged to some executed traitor I might recognise, winced and looked away as Dudley kicked the head down the bank, then grinned.