Julian Rathbone - Kings of Albion

And he asked Boddington for a candle to light our way to bed.

So. No heavenly city. No jewels beyond the dreams of avarice littering the streets. What did we find? First, a river called the Mersey, across which we took a ferry, then a forest, with a glade in its centre. At the ferry Edwin left us. It was dangerous, said the ferryman, for a poor man with no education to be found anywhere near where the Brothers of the Free Spirit had lived. Had lived? Gerald, the ferryman, looked grim but would not respond to our questions.

Forests, to be satisfactory, require management. So said a forester who appeared on the other side of the river and agreed to take us further. He was a big man, one of the biggest I have seen, with a red curly beard and a merry eye.

Old and rotting trees need to be taken out; rides created, which will also, in dry summers, act as fire-breaks; thickets allowed to grow for deer to shelter in and the roe deer especially, who are secretive, to have their young – some birds, too, prefer thickets to trees for their nests. Streams should be banked or encouraged, where the lie of the land suggests it, to form ponds and stocked with fish. Macclesfield Forest, like so much of the rest of Ingerlond, had been neglected for twenty years or more, due to the wars, both foreign and civil. Rides and paths were overgrown, brambles and briars had filled them, and the fallen trees had been left to rot. But in the heart of winter none of this was too much of a problem – the briars were reduced to coils of thorny stems, the grass was withered and the leaves dropped from the saplings as well as the giants so one could see one's way clear and, from the occasional rises, across extensive views. All this was explained by the forester as he led us to the centre.

It rained, but not as heavily as it had in Manchester the day before. More a gentle mist, a healing rain, the forester called it. Not only tall, he was well-built too, dressed in green, with a longbow, and a horn on his belt. Brother Peter teasingly called him Robin Hood, and had his head bitten off for his pains. The gear was pretty standard for a forester was the message we got. From the pommel of his saddle there swung a large axe, its blade sheathed in leather. It didn't seem unreasonable for a forester to carry an axe but Peter muttered something on the lines that if he wasn't Robin Hood then he must be the Green Giant, whose head was struck off with his own axe by Sir Gawain at the court of King Arthur.

At this point the forester reined in and pointed down from the low escarpment we had arrived on across a wide valley, an almost perfectly circular bowl, about a mile across. And even in winter it was evident that here things grew with a floridness, a burgeoning, a freshness and greenness different from the rest of the forest.

'Some call it the Garden of Eden," he said, 'others the Garden of Earthly Delights. But most follow the Church and Bishop and call it the Devil's Bowl. Fifty years ago, or thereabouts, a ball of fire dropped out of heaven. The earth shook. A fire raged through this part of the old forest for a week. And when the smoke cleared and the fire died down, there was this great hollow in the land like an upturned palm. All the people were terrified of it, and no one would go into it. Within a year or so, though, it began to green up again, first just mosses and heath, but then the trees came back and, of course, because the people were afraid of the area, all species that are hunted came into it and bred undisturbed, perhaps as they really did in paradise. There are deer, of course, and hares, wild boar, pheasants and partridge, orioles and magpies, and in the river that runs through it otters, beavers, trout, crayfish and, in early summer, salmon. And all are bigger and more handsome than any you will see elsewhere. And also a wider variety of plants – not just the forest ones but apple, pear and cherry, too, currants, raspberries and strawberries all took hold before the big forest trees like the oak, the ash, the beech could cover all with life-denying shade. And flowers, of course: aconites which you may find in bloom already on the forest floor, do not eat them they are poisonous, then celandines, wind-anemones, primroses, snowdrops, and violets, daffodils, Solomon's seal, borages, worts of all sorts, wild garlic and many, many more. It's a shame you cannot see it in May or June…' He pulled up and looked around at us. 'You will find the Brothers' dwellings as near to the centre as you can get.'

'And the Brothers?' cried Prince Harihara, his face pale with foreboding.

But the green man had already turned his horse's head and was making his way back down the outer slope of what we now realised was a rim, very like that of a shallow bowl. As he went, a shaft of sunlight broke through the clouds and a shower of raindrops as clear as stainless shards of chalcedony fell about his shoulders. Then he was gone.

A bare half-mile down a track that had been wide and over-arched with beech, but was now encroached upon by holly and butcher's broom, took us to the centre. On the way red squirrels chattered from the boughs and dropped nut-casings on our heads. A red fox trotted by. We crossed a stream that ran between banks of red clay and a robin redbreast sang on a willow twig above it. I recalled aloud that red is the colour of death, but pushed the thought away when none of my companions found an answer.

When we arrived in it there was no doubting we were there. First a hedge or ring of holly, much of it heavy still with red berries, twenty yards or so across, enclosed a wide swathe of grass, a lawn cropped by deer and rabbits to less than an inch but even in January thick and lush. This in turn made a ring round a low fence of wicker hurdles many of which, untended, had fallen or been pushed down. Inside this circle there was a tiny village of about ten stone huts roofed with turf, though again most had been tumbled by malice or time. In the very middle a round hut stood, bigger than the rest, and apart from a hole or two in the roof where the turf hail fallen through, more or less intact.

In the huts and the tiny passages between them we counted fifteen skeletons or cadavers, including eight who were young: babies, small children, older children. Skeletons? Not quite. Although the beasts of the forest had eaten out the hearts, lungs and livers, and the birds had attacked their eyes and smaller parts, the summer heat had dried what was left and patches of skin still clung to their heads, and hair too. Some had been decapitated but most had been stabbed with spears or slashed and hacked with swords or axes.

There was no sign to suggest that any had been other than naked. Four still held in their hands single roses, dried and withered now, no doubt cut before they were attacked or perhaps when they knew they were about to be attacked, to be offered to their assailants. These had been plucked from the gardens, overgrown now, of course, we found on the far side of the settlement.

The larger hut in the middle seemed to be a blank, a circular wall with no door or windows. We walked round it. Brother Peter mumbled and sighed, and stumbled on the dressed stones that lay in his way. Tears streamed down Anish's plump cheeks. Prince Harihara looked angry to the core of his being, his lips tight, his fists clenched, his complexion white, his eyes burning. I paused to consider how I felt. Well. I have seen such things too often since I was left for dead at the top of a well Stuffed with the bodies of my parents and siblings. I felt numb. And my knees and knuckles hurt.

One thing I felt sure of. I knew the signs. When men kill tor power, prestige, or out of greed or hunger, even for revenge or to punish, you feel there is an imperative there that is natural, even rational, that has come from something deep in our natures. It means something. Even for the victims. They know why they have died. But the cruellest, stupidest, meanest and most horrible murders, murders preceded by rape, living dismemberment, come from a hatred that has only one root and that innately meaningless and trivial, unnatural and irrational. Religion. These people, like my own people, had chosen the wrong god.