Phil Rickman - The Heresy of Dr Dee

Stabbing the knife into the ground, I stood between the small trees on the edge of the churchyard, from where we’d watched Prys Gethin summoning his demons.

Maybe it was through fatigue or because I did blame myself for the boy’s killing that I didn’t go down. There was nothing I could say to her, not in front of the villagers. The boy was slain, and I could not bring him back.

‘Who is she, John?’

Thomas Jones had come round from the well. He’d stripped away his ruined doublet, stood in his shirt, the sleeves rolled up, blood streaks not fully washed from his arms.

Anna let Siôn’s head slip from her lap and, laying it tenderly in the turf, slowly arose. Her overdress was darkened at the thighs, her lips parted in a soundless distress.

‘His mother?’

‘Sister. He was… there was something missing in his mind. But something else there… that we don’t have.’

A bar of sunlight split the fleshy cloud, lighting the hillside. I turned my head away, blinded for the moment, and then Thomas Jones was pulling me back ’twixt the trees, speaking quietly.

‘Do nothing.’

A hundred paces below us, Prys Gethin had emerged like a sprite from the pines. I reached for the butcher’s knife, but we were too far away and already it was too late.

BLACK, NOW, AGAINST the rosening sun whose rays, for a moment, seemed to sprout from his shoulders like small wings of dark fire.

Dark angel rising.

His movements had been so swift and easy that he was already half a dozen paces down the hill, taking Anna Ceddol with him, the blade which had penetrated her brother’s throat now at her own.

‘Stay where you are, John,’ Thomas Jones murmured, voice very low, heavy with warning.

Gethin had twisted her head to his chest, was pulling her backwards. One of the women cried out. I saw Gareth Puw, the blacksmith, taking steps towards him and then reeling back at what Gethin had done.

Anna’s overdress was parted at the top, a single red petal blooming above her shift.

I drew savage breath as the blade was lifted, red-edged.

‘Freshly-sharpened,’ Gethin said.

The piping voice was light and clear, risen into a kind of rapture. I made out his fingers and thumb tight around Anna Ceddol’s jaw, as if he were squeezing juice from an orange, as if his whole body was revelling in the sensation of it, bright bells pealing in his head.

‘Who wishes,’ he sang, ‘to see the ease with which it severs a breast?’

‘Do not move,’ Thomas Jones hissed. ‘If he sees either of us coming, he’ll do it.’

‘ Anyone? ’

Gethin’s voice risen higher, and now he faced the pines, from which men were emerging: Roger Vaughan, Stephen Price.

‘No further,’ Gethin said. ‘Or her lifeblood flows.’

‘Harm her,’ Stephen Price said hoarsely, ‘and you’ll be torn apart by all of us.’

‘Not before she’s dead. And more of you with her.’

Even from this distance, I saw Gethin’s smile open up, a split in the wood. The silence around him was waxen, Price’s round face was pale and sagging. Helpless. A whole community held at bay by one man, who believed himself more than a man. Who looked like more than a man. I sensed a demon moving inside a puppet of skin.

‘Untethered,’ Thomas Jones said, ‘from all human constraint.’

Anna Ceddol sagged in Gethin’s grip. My breath was rapid, my thoughts feverish. It would be unwise to kill her now, he’d know that, but I didn’t doubt that he’d deform her and take pleasure in it. I wondered if I could cross from the church to the pines, go further down the hill from Price and Vaughan, maybe come out behind him.

Thomas Jones said, ‘Whatever you’re thinking…’

‘I know. I know. ’

He’d moved too far away from the pines; wherever I was coming from he’d see me running out, and his knife hand would twitch.

And then Gethin spoke, so quietly that I caught only half of it.

‘—who I want.’

The sun had gone in. Gethin waited.

Until, out of the pines, not too far from the churchyard where we stood, came the ruins of a man.

His long face discoloured, lips cut and swollen.

One eye enpurpled and abulge with blood. One arm bound up in a sling ill-made of rope. A man so beaten he could no longer stand aright.

It took me a moment. Even me.

‘So let her go.’

The voice was a rasp against dry stone.

Prys Gethin said, ‘Where’s your blade?’

A stillness for maybe three heartbeats, then something dropped to the turf.

‘Further out,’ Gethin said.

Robert Dudley looked down for a moment and then stepped over the body of Siôn Ceddol.

‘You.’ With Anna Ceddol’s head crooked in an elbow, Gethin pointed, with the tip of his blade, at Roger Vaughan. ‘Come out.’

Even from here I marked the terror in Vaughan’s face as he left the shelter of the pine wood, glancing behind him at Price’s face, impassive.

‘Take the rope from his arm,’ Gethin said. ‘Do it, or she—’

‘Yes…’

Vaughan put up his hands, found the knot in the sling. No resistance from Dudley and no scream when his arm was freed, only a tightening of the mouth that might have cracked teeth. The way the arm fell from the rope made clear that it was broken. Prys Gethin pointed his blade at the rope where it lay on the ground.

‘Pick it up. Bind his hands. Behind his back.’

Price said, ‘But his arm’s—’

‘Do it!’ The blade moved against Anna’s throat. ‘Bind it tight …’

Dudley’s face creasing, pale as cloud, as he bit down on his agony whilst the binding was done.

‘Now take his boots,’ Gethin said.

Dudley sniffed, kicked off one of Gwyn Roberts’s boots. It came easily from his foot. He said something that I took to be derogatory about Welsh leather, and I felt a foolish admiration for him. This absurd hauteur in the face of imminent death.

I’d kept looking down the hill and across the valley for a sign of the hundred armed men promised by John Forest. Nothing. Betrayal at every level. I felt the Wigmore shewstone pressing through the worn fabric of my jerkin into my abdomen, reminding me how all this had started. In the noble cause of expanding the Queen’s vision . Would she ever know how it had ended?

Vaughan knelt and pulled off the second boot.

‘You can go back now,’ Gethin said.

With the tip of his knife, he beckoned Dudley forward. Some women were turned away looking at the ground, averting their eyes from an expected execution.

Thomas Jones looked at me, baffled.

‘He can’t kill Dudley whilst holding the woman. If he lets the woman go, some of these men may try and take him. And succeed.’

But Gethin didn’t let the woman go.

He pointed down the hill, towards the river, sent Dudley limping barefoot ahead of him.

‘I hear anyone following us,’ Gethin said, ‘and you know what will happen.’

‘His fucking mind’s gone,’ Thomas Jones said. ‘He can’t do this. He cannot do it on his own.’

The progress was slow and awkward, Gethin holding Anna Ceddol tight and the knife tighter, Dudley shuffling and stumbling a few feet in front, head thrown back in obvious agony.

‘Then either he believes himself not alone,’ I said. ‘Or he isn’t.’

As they crossed the hill and entered a small copse of birch and rowan, I saw that the petal on Anna’s breast was become a rose in full bloom.

I seized the butcher’s knife.

‘Tell them where I’ve gone,’ I said.

‘Where? For God’s sake—’

‘You know where.’