Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

‘Kneel, John,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘If you please.’

‘Piss off.’

‘There’s no way out of this,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘And yet you know there is. You know of these matters. If you go quietly—’

‘That will not happen.’

‘You know … that if you go quietly and with humility, your soul will slip away from this place in peace and grace. Whereas if you resist and must needs be ignominiously cut down, your embittered ghost will join all the other unquiet spirits which crowd Brynglas like crows.’

I would have had an answer for that, and a good and informed one, but then Thomas Jones was stepping away, holding out a hand to Gethin for the butcher’s knife. Hefting it from hand to hand, testing its balance. The big man, Roberts, was come close behind me again. The smell of his breath was worse at this moment than the stench of rotting flesh from the hole in the tump by the river.

I couldn’t speak. I stood swaying, new blood stiff on my cheeks. I was aware of Gethin walking over. Heard his rich, bladder-pipe voice, in Welsh, and then it broke off.

‘Translate for him,’ he said.

With no expression in his voice, Thomas Jones did as bid.

‘John, the Prince of Wales is with us now. He who could never leave while the English yoke lies heavily upon us.’

More Welsh, but all I heard was the voice of Thomas Jones from earlier.

…not saying he lives … but something of him does. And, if it’s anywhere, it’s here.

And now, having watched Prys Gethin sitting upon the hill, as if in silent summons, I was afraid.

I cleared my throat.

‘He was, in his way,’ I said, ‘a man of honour. I believe my family might even have supported his cause. And yet…’ I looked into the powdery night ’twixt Thomas Jones and Prys Gethin. ‘…he looks not happy. And who would be, knowing that his only representative on the hill of his finest day was a one-eyed, twisted scut who—’

A grunt from behind, and an agony as if my skull were cleaved open, but this time I stayed on my feet.

‘—who cares not a toss for the future of Wales, but only to satisfy his need for—’

‘Do it,’ Prys Gethin said.

When I knelt, every muscle and sinew in my legs was straining against it. The body fighting to live, the mind in furious, bitter conflict with itself over what to believe, who to trust. The need to hold on to the last small hope that a man you’d liked, who’d oft-times made you laugh, was not, after all, to be your murderer.

His voice at my ear.

‘I’m trying to help you, boy. To give you the quick and merciful passing that’s mete for a man of your standing.’

Shifting his gaze when I looked up at him. I knelt in the wet turf, and they stood in silence around me. With my head bowed, all I could see was their boots – one pair, worn by Roberts were all smirched with mud and pine needles but not enough to obscure the fine leather and good stitching and—

Oh God. Robbie…

When my head jerked, the wound under my hair sprang apart yet again and blood begin to run, down into my eyes. When the head was severed it would stop.

I let the breath go from my chest to my abdomen, beginning to pray, and in my head, against a cloth of deep blue, the sigil of St Michael appeared for a moment – Michael who brings courage.

Michael who is also the angel of death, weighing the soul, conveying it to where it must go.

Out of the corner of one eye, I saw the knife leave the ground. Then I saw, on the grey grass, the shadow of a raised blade extended from bowed arms.

Breath froze in my throat, silence roared in my ears. I saw the shadow of the blade at an oblique angle. Not the slender, fine-honed blade that beheaded Anne Boleyn in one stroke, but a rude butcher’s knife, made for mutton. I fell into prayer, as the shadow-blade twitched once and then fell with the echo of a cry across the night. Then came a brutal blow, my body tipping sideways, my head fallen heavily into the grass.

All shadow. Moments of emptiness, then wet splatter. Hot blood on my cheeks, in my mouth, in my eyes.

Through it, I saw the blade falling again and again and again. More blood flying up.

Up.

‘Up, John!’

The hand of God reaching down for me.

I didn’t move. Lay on my side, looking up through the blood into the face of Thomas Jones, his panicked eyes under a blur of madness and tears, as he kicked me over on to my back.

‘Get up, John… Get the fuck up… ’

I could feel my hands, fingers flexing and then moving with an exploratory slowness to my neck, which somehow seemed yet to be held ’twixt my collar bones. Sitting up, now, in a pond of blood, looking down on the body of the big man, Roberts, heaving and squirming in the grass, his face a dark red carnival mask, and then flinching away from the sight of the thick blade coming down on him, and I heard Thomas Jones sob and, over the sickening splinter of bone, I heard the vixen shriek.

It came down the hillside with all the force of an arrow that would pierce my heart and, in a blinking, I was struggling to my feet. Fresh blood was slicked under my boots, and I stumbled and fell, dragged myself up again, scraping the salty blood from my eyes as I clambered up into the dregs of the night, and there was Prys Gethin creeping through the muddy dawn.

Quite some distance ahead of me, close to the church, something up there having trapped his attention.

A pale fluttering.

Gethin still now.

Standing, dagger in hand, feet apart. Waiting for the figure in the ragged white nightshirt to come down from the hill like a summoned ghost.

Oh, no. Oh dear God, no.

I ran crookedly up the steepening side of Brynglas. Stumbling twice and clawing at the grass. Knowing these two, black and white, would come together long before I could reach them, I began to cry out urgently and was answered, the way one owl answers another.

The nightshirt billowed. The long bone was raised. The vixen shriek resounded down the valley.

I saw what might have been the first pale rays of the rising sun in Prys Gethin’s blade as it was drawn quickly back and then pushed, with a practised ease, under the boy’s jaw.

Saw Gethin wipe the blade in the grass and stride away, not once looking back at any of us.

I KNEW HE was gone before I reached him. The old white nightshirt lay around him like the flaccid feathers of a dead bird, slowly turning red under the bloody light of early dawn. His throat was laid open, as were his mad, unseeing eyes, to the awakening day.

Sick to my soul, I came to my knees beside him. He was quite still; his spirit had flit as lightly as a moth’s. I looked up, in dread, through the dimness for sign of his sister, but there was none, only her voice in my memory.

We’re country people. If he wanders out in the night here, as oft-times he does, I know he’ll come to no harm.

I threw my fist with savagery at the turf, grief and pity turned into a useless rage, as Thomas Jones arrived at my shoulder. I looked up at him and at Brynglas, a melancholic grey without even the mystery of mist. As though the last small hope of spiritual relief for this damned hill had lodged for a while in Siôn Ceddol and now was snuffed out.

Thomas Jones was painfully panting, florid-faced, still holding the butcher’s knife, reddened to the handle.

‘Who’s this?’

‘Boy from the village. Armed—’ My voice choked on the senseless, wasteful cruelty of it. ‘Armed with a …’

I picked up the age-browned thigh bone from where it lay, close to Siôn Ceddol’s half-curled left hand. I’d not noticed he was left handed, a sinistral – though doubtless the rector would have. Another unfailing sign of the demonic. To Gethin, he’d have looked unearthly in the half light.