PART ONE: The Well of Knowledge
Handsome is the yellow horse,
But a hundred times better
Is my cream-coloured one,
Swift as the sea mew
Taliesin, Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees)
Accursed be the damsel,
Who, after the wailing,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging deep
Accursed be the maiden,
Who, after the conflict,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging sea
Taliesin, Seithenin
Chapter One: The White Horse
(Wed 14th April 1937)
On a warm mid-April morning in 1937 three gentlemen, two Oxford dons and a solicitor, were beginning their customary annual walking tour that this year was to be a ‘literary pilgrimage’ from the pretty market town of Marlborough in Wiltshire to Porlock in the Quantock Hills of Somerset where in 1797 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, intoxicated with opium, had written the famously obscure and unfinished verse ‘Kubla Khan’. Their plan was to walk the nearly 100 miles to Porlock over a leisurely eight or nine days, taking in the ancient sites of Wiltshire, before crossing into Somerset and reaching their goal via the Cathedral of Wells and the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Having left Marlborough at nine in the morning, the three friends had taken the path westwards across the Downs, climbing slowly for about a mile and then turning northwest at the hamlet of Rockley, to the Hakpen horse – one of Wessex’s famous white-horses carved into the chalk hills of the Downs. Here they had decided to stop for a few minutes to enjoy the view before turning south and taking the prehistoric track-way known as the Ridgeway to Overton down, where they would join the Marlborough to Bath road close to their first proper stop, the village of Avebury, a small unassuming village that stood within the bounds of what was the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world. The intention of the three hikers was to take lunch in the Red Lion, the pub that lay at the centre of the circle, before walking the last few miles to Calne, where Coleridge had stayed in 1814-16, and where they aimed to spend that night. From then on they would take a bus to Wells and walk the rest of the way to Porlock, all going well.
Clive Staples Lewis, who his friends knew as ‘Jack’, dark, balding and thickset, was presently leading the other two men down the gentle slope of the hill on which the Hakpen horse had been carved a century before. Behind him strode Owen Barfield, lean, tall and well-built with a full head of dark hair, above a handsome, elfin face – who was struggling to keep up a conversation with his friend who kept striding forward out of earshot. Their physical differences had always amused the third member of the party, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who, like Lewis, was a fellow of the school of English at the University of Oxford. This kind, if serious-faced man, the shortest and the eldest of the three by 6 years being now in his mid-forties, and who seemed to wear a perpetual frown as if always chewing over some deep problem, watched the ill-matched pair walk ahead and disappear over the brow of the hill vanishing out of sight.
Damn their route-march! Tolkien thought. This was a supposed to be a leisurely hike, not a military exercise! Well… let them march on! He thought, letting his heavy pack fall from his shoulders.
The April sun was pleasing; Tolkien, who had already removed his tweed jacket on the climb out of Marlborough, now rolled up his shirtsleeves and took off his hat, wiping his now-greying dark fringe where it had stuck to his brow. Then, fishing into the pocket of his plain brown waistcoat for his pipe and tin of Navy Cut tobacco, he began to fill his pipe, tamping the tobacco down with a thumb and then scrabbled about in his trouser pocket for a box of matches.
As he smoked Tolkien felt himself relax for the first time in what seemed months. The spring term at Oxford had not been any busier than normal, but all his spare time had been taken up since before Christmas correcting the proofs of his book. He had tried, not wholly successfully, to remain unruffled at the errors the type-setters had made, but at least correcting their mistakes had allowed him the opportunity to add some new material and to iron out some minor inconsistencies he had discovered in his tale. You think a book is done and dusted, but writing it is only the beginning! He had said in frustration to Lewis over a half a glass of beer in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen college two days before. He had just returned from the Post Office having sent his publisher, Stanley Unwin, an illustration for the dust-jacket, showing the dragon Smaug flying out of the Lonely Mountain; it was, to Tolkien’s eye, a little amateurish, but preferable to what some professional artist with no real idea of the story might dream up. Jack had raised his glass to the success of the book, but Tolkien had shrugged. ‘I’m happier celebrating that the bloody thing is finally out of my hands, Jack. It had become, alas, like a guest who outstays his welcome. No doubt in time I will miss his company, but for now I’m happy to be free once more.’. ‘Freedom, Tollers, is one of those invisible qualities one fails to appreciate until it is taken from oneself. Like a fish only appreciates water when dangling from the angler’s hook…’.
‘When I was in Flanders…’ Tolkien said, ‘I thought a simple glass of beer, in a quiet country pub, would be a joy forever. And so it was, for a time; but then came the time I just downed the drink and thought no more of it; the tragedy of mankind is his ability to forget…’
‘Then may we ever be sent…’ said Lewis, raising his glass, ‘adversity, so that we may never tire of freedom.’
…
Now distanced from the demands of not only book, but also family and work, Tolkien let out a happy sigh. After Mass that morning he had left his stack of papers on his desk at Northmoor Road and had left for the station determined not to even think of Hobbits or dragons until he returned home late the following week. He hoped, now, that this was the end of the matter; and standing here looking out over the valley he felt a sudden sense of freedom welling up within him, that escaped as a chuckle; this was a new start – no longer constrained by ‘The Hobbit’ he could return to his languages and mythology.
Above him skylarks were singing, invisible against the pale sky; he stood in the long grass, watching as industrious bees flitted from cowslip to cowslip. Below him, out of sight, he could hear Jack laughing, and so he walked on to join his companions who were now sat on the sloping ground close to the carved horse’s head.
On first sight the Hakpen horse was a strange looking beast, more reminiscent of a dog than a horse, Tolkien thought, thin legged and barrel bodied, though he conceded one was meant to see it from a distance away not upside down from above its back.
‘You’ll know, Tollers... Why do you imagine these horses were carved?’ Lewis turned and asked Tolkien as the latter approached the seated pair.
‘This one is a century old, as I recall – and I believe was cut to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria; but as for the others - why do people ever feel the need to mark the landscape?’ he replied, seating himself beside his companions, and refilling his pipe.
Lewis looked down over the valley for an answer – the only marks he could see were the lines of hedges and field boundaries; a small road ran north to south at the bottom of the valley, with a single motorcar heading along it.
‘To show land ownership: “This land is mine!” I suppose?’ He suggested, his slight Belfast accent adding a tuneful lilt to the words.
‘Spot on, I would say.’ Tolkien replied. ‘They were originally, I would think, a stamp of ownership of the local landowner; it’s like hanging a Stubbs above your fireplace – the Uffington horse, for instance, was undoubtedly a territorial marker for the tribe that lived in the hill-fort above it.’ His own words tumbled out quickly and slightly incoherently, somewhat staccato and punctuated with quick flashes of a smile.
The Uffington horse, to which Tolkien referred, was the most striking, as well as being the oldest, of all the Wessex horses. It’s sinuous, streamlined form had graced the Berkshire Downs from time immemorial; once believed to have been carved by Alfred the Great to celebrate a victory over the Vikings at Ethandune in 878 AD, its curved, abstract, and almost skeletal shape, three times the size of the Hakpen horse, had always suggested to Tolkien an origin much further back in prehistory.
‘But why a horse? What has a horse to do with territory per se?’ Lewis continued, lighting a cigarette.
‘Everything – to a prehistoric tribesman. Think, Jack! As a tribesman, how do you defend your land?’
‘Earthworks; arrows; swords.’ He said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke that drifted lazily away.
‘Now how large is your territory going to be?’ Tolkien prodded.
Lewis shrugged. ‘As large as you can defend, I suppose, within a few hours walk from your camp.’ Their view over the edge of the Wiltshire Downs presented such a territory – it would take them a good few hours to reach the distant slopes above Cherhill, to their west; it was a rich land; worth defending; worth planting and settling on; worth fighting for.
‘Well think how much more territory you could defend on horseback than on foot. The first tribes to ride horses possessed a marked superiority over their contemporaries: they could not only possess more land, and defend it, but also embark on taking that of others – taking their land and their resources – their herds of cattle...’
Tolkien looked down at the carved face, dulled with age; overgrown with grasses and moss.
‘This one may be relatively new, but the white horse of Uffington… well, it’s is still galloping possibly thousands of years after it was carved, still claiming that land for a tribe who have long since journeyed beyond that vale to another...’ he drew on his pipe and peered out over the valley.
‘So you agree with Chesterton that it’s old?’ Lewis said, meaning the Uffington Horse.
Tolkien nodded. Chesterton’s poetry rose in his mind and he gave voice to his words over the crudely cut body of the chalk steed below:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.
Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.’
He flashed a quick smile at his companions; although on the surface he often appeared shy, there was something of the bard about this man, and, when encouraged, enjoyed such recitations.
Lewis let out a sigh. ‘I must read the ballad again, Tollers. It has some beautiful parts – how does that verse go?:
For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.’
Lewis turned to the hitherto silent Barfield, who had been consulting his map.
‘Listen, Owen. Did I tell you? Tollers, Warnie and I walked to Uffington last summer and we were at the pub in the village, discussing why the hill beside the horse had been named Dragon Hill. Well, Warnie and Tollers were talking about dragons in general, sadly commenting on how they were all dead and gone when some local workman pipes up ‘They are not! I seen ‘em myself!!’
Lewis roared with laughter.
‘So why does it bear the name of Dragon Hill?’ Barfield asked, smiling at his friend’s jollity.
‘Local legend says it’s where St George slew the Dragon.’ Tolkien answered. ‘But I wonder just how old the name is - the Dragon-slaying myth is really very ancient indeed, so I doubt Good Old Saint George had much a part to play in it! One only has to think of Apollo slaying the Python at Delphi to see that it’s really a myth about new cults and new gods overcoming the old, and in many cases taking over their holy sites.’
‘Ah, so you think the older British cults, like the Greek, were represented by the dragon or the serpent?’ Barfield asked. ‘That is interesting; I’m not overly familiar with ancient British beliefs but wait until we get to Avebury: I’ll show you something that I think might interest you.’
Lewis yawned.
‘Yes, Avebury… Delightful as this view is, I can’t help feeling we’re wasting precious drinking time at the Red Lion by being here. Horses and dragons aren’t really part of the Coleridgean theme of this holiday, after all…’
‘No?’ Barfield said, an eyebrow raised on his boyish face, ‘You may have a point about dragons, but not horses: think of Kubla Khan… is it not said that he owned ten thousand white horses? And was not the milk of these beasts only to be drunk by the Khan himself? Perhaps this milk was even the Milk of Paradise of Coleridge’s poem? I would say the white horse is extremely Coleridgean!!’
Lewis conceded the point to his friend and rose, shouldering his pack and waving his walking stick in the air with a cry of ‘Onward! Ale awaits!’ Tolkien remained seated for a moment, looking out over the pale landscape, to where the distant downs fading to blue were crested by the spike of the Cherhill monument, marking the end of that day’s proposed walk. He narrowed his eyes in the bright morning sun and muttered a few more lines of Chesterton before he rose to follow the others:
And the great kings of Wessex
Wearied and sank in gore,
And even their ghosts in that great stress
Grew greyer and greyer, less and less,
With the lords that died in Lyonesse
And the king that comes no more.
This image of the white horse stayed with Tolkien for the hour it took to walk along Hakpen hill to the edge of the downs at Overton. Here, at the point where the path met the Marlborough to Bath road, the hillside was crowned with a line of large round hillocks: the burial mounds of long-forgotten prehistoric kings; Lewis slowed his pace momentarily to survey these grass-covered tombs, four thousand years in age, but did not stop. Tolkien, however, paused and then ambled across from the path into the meadow to the middle one of the three ancient and time-weathered graves, now strewn with grasses, dandelions and other meadow flowers.
Tolkien climbed atop the steep rise of the barrow, and took a deep breath of the warm, spring scented air. Before him stretched the Kennet valley; running east to west, the Downs rising on both sides, steeper to the north where he sat, more gentle to the south, rising in soft folds of palest green, interrupted here and there by a copse of trees or lines of hedgerow, before fading to a lilac wash against the sky.
Tolkien re-lit his pipe and let his mind sink into the deep past. How might this gently undulating valley have looked when the kings whose bones lay beneath these once chalk-white burial mounds had first climbed this rise thousands of years before? He could almost hear the thumping of their horses’ hooves, see their pale hair blowing in the wind; hear their strange voices calling out even stranger names… their bronze spears glinting in the sun, striking fear into the small dark men with their flint blades who had lived in this place before them, and who stood cowering in the trees on seeing these tall mounted warriors arriving from the east. Did they see them, he wondered, as the Aztecs had seen the Spanish Conquistadors – as dreadful hybrid beasts, never having seen a horse and thinking man and steed were a single animal? What prehistoric Cortez or Pizarro rode this ridge so long ago, and did he accept the peace of the painted tribesmen who prostrated themselves before him or did he like the Conquistadors turn these green hills into a sea of blood?
It was these newcomers, Tolkien mused, who having overcome the native cults were perhaps the first to carve the shape of their steeds into the green hillsides of Wessex… a white horse on a field of green as a sign of victory; (why did that phrase always arise in his mind, he wondered?). But the Uffington horse, at least, was a strangely emaciated beast of victory, with a beak-like muzzle. He shuddered at a memory: the half-rotted body of a horse he had marched past on the way to the trenches of the Somme twenty years before, left hanging, bloated and rotting on a barbed wire fence, its body moving with rats, its head eyeless and lipless – the bleached bones of the muzzle protruding from the flyblown jaw … Tolkien blanched at the recollection. For four thousand years the horse and rider had dominated warfare but times had changed and no cavalry could match the artillery and machine gun fire of the modern battlefield.
The words of an Old English poem arose in his mind:
Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære….
Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away, dark under the cover of night,
As if it had never been.
Gently he twisted a blade of grass around a finger. The memory of the decaying horse had made him uncommonly anxious, but perhaps that was as much to do with what Barfield had been talking about over breakfast at Marlborough that morning after they had alighted from the Oxford bus: the damned war in Spain; and that ignoramus Hitler sending troops there to support the fascists; and France extending its defences along its border with Germany…
Tolkien drove the thought from his mind. Such speculation not only solved nothing, but also cast a cloud over what was a beautiful spring day. And it was beautiful - the sky cloudless; his book was finished and his time his own; the grass smelled sweet, and the peace of the day only disturbed by the sound of an automobile wending its lonely way along the road back to Marlborough; his eyes were becoming heavy… maybe, he thought, he should just rest a bit longer…
Chapter Two: Sanctuary
(29th June 2012)
Eighty five years later, over the same stretch of hill on which the barrows of the prehistoric Kings ran like humps on the back of some giant half-submerged sea-creature, on a road now wider and heavy with speeding traffic, Conall Astor’s campervan lurched to a sudden halt causing a number of unsecured objects to crash into the back of his seat. Behind his van the driver of a pristine black Audi that had been tailgating him all the way from Marlborough screeched to a stop, sounded his horn and gesticulated wildly. Conall put his arm out the window and stuck up his middle finger as the Audi veered around him.
‘Fucking wanker!’ the driver yelled, so Conall changed his gesture, lifting up a curled little finger in the sign for ‘small dick’. To his immense relief the car carried on.
The cause of Conall’s sudden halt seemed oblivious to the accident it had nearly produced: the hare in the centre of the road fixed Conall with a golden eye before lolloping nonchalantly towards the grass verge. It’s angular, cat-like beauty was entrancing - like an emissary from an older world out of place on the burning tarmac – it’s indifference seemed to suggest that it, and not the road and its dirty machines, had precedence; my kind were here before yours, it seemed to say.
‘You take your time, lady!’ Conall shouted, sarcastically. The hare reached the roadside grass sat for a few seconds then was gone, leaving some flattened grass-stems as the only witness to its presence.
Restarting his van, and lifting a hand to the queue of vehicles that had formed behind him, Conall drove onwards a few yards and then signalled and turned into a small open area on the right of the road where a number of cars and vans were parked; and having found a space, the camper shivered once more to a silent halt.
For a few moments Conall sat still, gazing ahead at the rolling landscape of pale wheat and sheep-dotted insipid grassland, relieved that the three hour drive had ended; then with a nervous glance he took off his sunglasses and turned to inspect the damage in the back of the camper. Coffee was splashed up the back of the seat and lay in a puddle on the floor in which a number of books, papers, empty tobacco packets and diet coke bottles were scattered. Shit. He’d forgotten about the coffee cup. He picked up a dripping black notebook, wiped it on the seat next to him, and leaned across and shoved it into the crowded glovebox, whose contents promptly tumbled out into the foot-well.
‘Fuck it.’
A small cardboard packet had tumbled out, spilling its contents, a few blister packs of green and cream capsules, onto the floor. It was three weeks since he’d taken the last tablet, and already he had felt a sense of the old him returning; a sharpening of edges long dulled, slivers of happiness felt for the first time in many, many months; cold washes of grief, too – real grief, not the numb dumb-show the anti-depressants had afforded him for the last year. He didn’t know why he’d bothered to bring them. Weakness, he supposed; a prop, in case it all went horribly wrong again. Wrong again? That implied things had got better, and they hadn’t; it was time, that was all – not that one could put a time limit on grieving, no – but it was time to try to start living again, he supposed. At least he had the choice. She didn’t; but she wouldn’t have wanted him to give up.
I should just throw these into the first bin I find, he thought, leaving them where they had fallen.
The drive down from London had been uneventful; he had begun it with a vague sense of stress, and had been half tempted to turn around and head for home, but having reached Fleet services on the M3, he had sat on the bank of the car park with a coffee and a cigarette, and had felt that the old lightness of spirit might yet return if he relaxed and gave it a chance. Wasn’t that the whole reason for coming here? To mark a new start by returning to a place where in the past he had always been happy, but which had become slighted in his memory by those dark, tragic events of the previous year? He took a deep breath.
It had been over a year since he had last been here; and in that time his life had changed utterly and irrecoverably. Coming back here was an attempt to put it all in perspective; to draw a line under the past; not to forget it, but to try to move on from it, to lay a ghost to rest. This place had been somewhere where he had immediately felt at home, where he could just be. Might it now welcome him home like a prodigal son, past misdemeanours waiting, if he was fortunate, to be forgiven? But just now such a hope seemed a pipe-dream; all seemed flat to him, dull – the world was leaden, and he seemed to lack the means to shake off the veneer of greyness that seemed to coat everything like a fine ash. A walk should help, he mused; and a beer.
Conall leaned out of the window and looked at himself in the wing-mirror; a tired, unshaven, face looked back at him from beneath dark curls. He looked away. Still, a year on, he couldn’t hold his own gaze for long. Conall was, in his own words, ‘pushing forty’, and for the first time in his life he felt his age. He was dreading the day itself; all his life there had been two cakes – two sets of presents; last year it hadn’t mattered as they had all been too numb with the shock, but this year – with only a couple of months to go, and it being a ‘biggy’, as she had used to call such occasions, the idea of celebrating it alone, with her not there, was unthinkable.
Conall opened the door and stepped into the heat of the early July afternoon. The majority of the cars around him were empty; though muffled music was coming from a large converted minibus a little further up the path; it was painted black, with tinted windows, and howling wolves and a giant full-moon airbrushed on its side.
Though he was still a mile or so from the main village, he had decided to stop here knowing that on such a gorgeous day the main car parks that served Avebury village and the stone circle that surrounded it would already be full; besides, he reasoned, he wished to walk into the village the old way, from the Sanctuary and along the Avenue. And he wanted to walk after spending such a long time behind the wheel. Besides, he could leave the van here and return later in the evening and camp the night; the main car park shut at seven and he would only have to move the van again – and to do that he’d need to be sober; something he had no intention of being.
Behind him, beyond the fence, and reached by a path in the long grass, lay the Bronze Age barrows; for a moment he had the urge to go and climb them but his goal for the moment lay to the immediate south of the road he had just turned off, and so locking his camper (not that, he imagined, anyone in their right mind would attempt to steal it or any of its coffee-stained contents) he headed for the road.
The road, where it crossed the brow of the hill, was steep and curved so that Conall was more reliant on his hearing to gauge a gap in the traffic than his sight. After a minute or so of waiting as cars, lorries, coaches and motorcycles roared past Conall ran across the road, a few yards from where the hare had crossed minutes before. Something furred but flat and dry coated the road, maybe once a fox or a hare. He grimaced and felt a wave of sadness.
Despite the large number of cars that had been in the lay-by Conall found the meadow in which the Sanctuary lay bereft of tourists. The only signs of life were three jackdaws poking around the long grass looking for insects, seemingly unconcerned with the roar of the traffic a few feet away. As ancient monuments went the Sanctuary, Conall thought, was singularly unimpressive. Concentric rings of concrete markers now showed where the great posts of a prehistoric structure had once stood lending to this circular meadow the feel of a badly conceived modern art installation; but its view was serene: to the east in the distance lay the cragged teeth-like stones that marked the façade of a large prehistoric tomb known as West Kennet long-barrow; and to its right the strangely rounded form of Silbury hill could be seen over the shoulder of the intervening hilltop. All lay bathed in a haze that bleached the distant rises of Milk hill and Tan hill into a uniform ridge of cyan – bluer than the sky itself which was almost colourless and hurt Conall’s eyes now he had taken his sunglasses off. The wheat field next to the long-barrow was marked with a huge crop circle, a vast circle of flattened wheat with radials of increasingly smaller circles spinning counter-clockwise from the centre. These crop glyphs still amazed him however many times he’d seen them; the work, he supposed, of guerrilla artists rather than extra-terrestrials they nevertheless still possessed a certain mystery, perhaps born of their anonymity, their perfection and their elusive meaning.
Conall walked to the central concrete ring, sat himself on one of the posts, and took a pack of American Spirit tobacco out of his shirt pocket. First taking a pinch, he crumbled the already powdery tobacco onto the earth before him. Itsipaiitapio’pah, Great Spirit, he mumbled under his breath, a habit he had picked up on his last visit here from an old man who had since returned to the Ancestors - at least he was old, Conall thought, thinking of the old man; it’s easier to deal with then – a good innings as they say, trite though it may be; no one could have said it of her though: a good innings. Thirty-eight years old. She’ll always be thirty-eight... they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. It’s not just the years that condemn, Con thought; survivors guilt; or just plain guilt – there’s a pretty fucking hefty dose of condemnation there.
He inhaled and breathed out the smoke in the direction of the swifts that were screaming and tumbling overhead beneath the criss-cross of vapour trails that divided up the sky. Not so long ago he would have looked up jealously, wishing he had been jetting off to somewhere other than where he was; somewhere where he couldn’t be reminded of things. But today Conall Astor knew that he had to stop running away.
Alone, in the circle, he put a hand over his face. Then, straightening and wiping his eyes, he drew a deep breath on his cigarette. ‘Well, I’m back!’ he said.
Chapter Three: The Serpent’s Head
‘Tollers?!’
Tolkien looked up from where he had lain down on the mound a few minutes earlier. Lewis had crossed back over the road and was leant over the fence to the barrow field.
‘Come on, man. We’re in need of tea! What are you doing?’
‘You miss so much with your marching, Jack!’ Tolkien muttered, standing up somewhat awkwardly and replacing his hat.
Lewis’s already sunburned head turned away and he headed back over the road to the field opposite where Barfield was slowly walking in a wide circle, eyes to the ground. Tolkien reluctantly shouldered his pack, and descended from the barrow, turning back for a moment to bow to the bones of the unknown king whose tomb it had been, sweeping off his hat and uttering words of farewell.
A few yards from the road in the direction of another great barrow lay a flat circular expanse of ground, its short grass studded with a number of pristine concentric circles of short concrete posts of varying sizes.
‘This place,’ Barfield, who had been circling the posts, said as he approached the others ‘is the Sanctuary – it was excavated a couple of years back – and it seems that it was originally some kind of circular wooden structure – these concrete posts mark where the wooden poles once stood - and it was probably roofed. And then at some point it was all surrounded by a ring of sarsen stones… they’ve all gone now - destroyed by pious locals since the 1700’s though the antiquarian Stukeley drew them in a sketch he made here in the 1720’s…’
‘What was it, Baedeker Barfield – a temple?’ Lewis asked.
Barfield shrugged, digging around in his backpack. ’Possibly, or a mortuary-house, I think someone suggested – where the bodies of the dead were left to rot before they were put in the tombs, the long-barrows. But you know what Stukeley called it?! The hakpen, the snake’s head. It’s after this structure that the whole ridge from here to the horse seems to have been named. Now, with what you were saying earlier about the Old Religion, Tollers, and the defeat of the serpent cults…’
Lewis looked down at the rings of posts in un-characteristic silence; seemingly nonplussed. ‘I suppose this was just an empty field when we were last here.’ He said, looking at Barfield.
‘I guess so. We must have walked past here, but I don’t recall much about it – except the rain.’
‘Ha! And the ride back, do you remember?!’ Lewis laughed. ‘Hitching a lift to Marlborough on that cart?’
Barfield smiled with affection. ‘Yes, in the dark and the rain, and Harwood singing!’
Tolkien felt oddly touchy at their reminiscing; he had hardly known Lewis back then. I do hope this trip doesn’t turn into a nostalgic reverie for those two, he thought gruffly. He bristled at his own jealousy. Was it jealousy, though, he wondered? Yes, in part, but not for Lewis and his cronies; it was, perhaps, more sadness he had not been able to make such memories himself with those he should have been here with. But stoically he cast such thoughts from his mind.
‘So, I guess the ridge is the back of the snake and this hill that marks the end of the ridge is its head?’ Tolkien asked.
Barfield turned. ‘No. It heads north-west from here; Stukeley believed the whole of the Avebury monument was the serpent… it’s a serpent writ large in stone…’ Having found the volume he had been searching in his rucksack he opened it out on a folded-over page that showed an old black and white hand-drawn map; it was Stukeley’s plan of the monuments.
‘Look, here’s the head, where we are now, at Overton Hill’ he said, pointing at the right-hand side of the drawing to a circular feature, ‘…and then an avenue of stones, the beast’s neck, snakes its way to the main circle at the centre, in which two smaller stone circles are to be found… though each of them was as big as Stonehenge, which gives one some idea of just how huge the main circle is! Then the tail, if you will, is another avenue leaving the circle on its western side and heading towards Beckhampton. You must admit it is rather snakelike. The naming of hakpen hill, then, is more than coincidental… it seems to support Stukeley’s theory.’
Tolkien looked up from the page. From their current viewpoint the main stone circle and village within was still obscured by the rise of what Stukeley’s plan called ‘Windmill hill’ to the northwest. Hakpen. But on what authority, Tolkien wondered, had it been so named, or just in Stukeley’s imagination?
‘And here’s where we’ll find the pub!’ Lewis said, pointing to the centre of the circle. ‘Fiendishly clever of them to build a pub right at the heart of the circle!’ He joked. ‘Obviously, the avenues were for guiding them home on dark nights when they were worse for wear with drink! How long until we get there? An hour? You know, I know it’s ten years on, but I really don’t recall much of this at all.’
‘Three-quarters of an hour, I would think.’ Barfield said. He looked at his pocket watch. ‘It’s eleven already, too early for lunch, really. But there is a tearoom down there beside the road near Silbury Hill’ he said, pointing to a flat-topped rise just visible above the trees, ‘and we could perhaps stop there for tea and then eat properly at the pub later. We have all day.’
‘Well, you have the map and we’ll trust your judgement.’ Lewis said, not looking up from the plan.
Tolkien paused and looked up at the skylarks, his own choice would have been, as they were already at the so-called ‘serpent’s head’, to skip tea and continue down its throat into its belly down the Avenue, the route the people of Avebury would have no doubt taken four and a half thousand years earlier.
Lewis, still looking at the plan – pointed a nicotine stained finger at the central feature - a great domed hill with a flattened top, so perfect in its shape that it was quite obviously man-made. Then peering up from the plan to the western horizon saw the same flat-topped mound in the flesh, peeking over the intervening hills.
‘Rather a fitting start to our Coleridge homage, wouldn’t you say?’ Barfield said, ‘the great hill of Silbury - the stately pleasure dome in the valley of the sacred river Kennet,’ lifting lines from Coleridge’s poem. ‘It’s old – the Romans had to curve their otherwise straight road to Bath around it in order to avoid it.’
‘It’s always struck me as looking like a huge steamed pudding,’ remarked Lewis; ‘All this walking has made me hungry. Do you think there might be steak and kidney pudding at the Red Lion?’
‘Shall we climb it?’ Barfield said, ignoring Lewis’s comment.
Lewis looked at the steep sides of the hill and scratched at his chin in thought.
‘I’m in two minds. It would possibly be better, if we are to attempt the feat, to climb it now before the day gets too warm; but my stomach is disagreeing with me. Still, we could have a pot of tea and then decide.’
‘I climbed it myself years ago, before our last visit!’ The solicitor’s face lit up with a puckish smile. ‘And we danced on the summit!’
‘Why did they build it, Owen? Is it a tomb, like the Pyramids?’ Lewis asked.
‘No – no burial has been found, despite the local legends…’
‘Don’t mention legends, Barfield… we’ll never get our tea…see how Toller’s ears picked up like a hound?’ Jack quipped.
Tolkien held a match to his pipe and puffed away, grinning. ‘I already know them, Jack.’ He said through pipe-clenched teeth, ‘Despite crossing the county border this is still, you know, my neck of the woods mythologically speaking. A King Zel is supposed to be buried in the hill, on horseback, in golden armour…’
‘Golden armour, indeed!’ Jack mocked. ’There’s the mark of a modern myth, surely; gold armour would be practically useless against a bronze or iron blade.’
‘Unless the gold is a symbol for the sun?’ Suggested Barfield.
‘Perhaps.’ Lewis conceded. ‘What if Silbury were derived from the Roman Sol? The Hill of the Sun?’
He looked towards Tolkien, but the latter seemed deep in contemplation.
‘Possibly; that argument has merit….’ Tolkien answered, ‘but Sil is closer to the Welsh word for the sun, Sul…’ (he pronounced it, correctly, as ‘seel’) ‘…If, if, the Celtic place-name hakpen has survived here then why not Sul?’
It seemed strange in this beautiful English setting to hear the echoes of the old Celtic tongue now long driven from these Downs; it was almost as if such ancient places were reluctant to let them go, or perhaps the newcomers, bound by fear or superstition, had thought it unwise to change the names. It lent the place a feeling of timelessness; as if some relic of a dark pagan Celtic past had broken through the veneer of England, like a long buried celandine from an ancient forest floor pushing up through a lawn in spring, long after the trees of the forest had been cleared to make way for the garden. Words could be vehicles for such feelings; passports into a different reality, or worlds long passed, Tolkien had always thought.
As Tolkien looked across the landscape England faded as if into a mist; and an ancient place emerged; he stood no more on Overton hill, or Hakpen ridge facing towards Silbury – he stood on the head of the serpent temple gazing on the hill of the sun, in the heart of a land that bore other names, names now only remembered in legend: Ynys Prydein, the Isle of the Mighty; Clas Myrddin: Merlin’s enclosure; Logres; Albion …
The temple of the Dragon, he thought. Was it possible or just the over-ripe imaginings of that antiquarian Stukeley - a man who had later claimed to be a druid and to have divined Biblical numbers in the measurements of Stonehenge? As he stood in thought the unsolicited image of a grinning dragon crossed, unwanted, into his consciousness. Smaug! How am I meant to forget my book when all around I’m surrounded by dragons?! He thought, suddenly annoyed at the obtrusion of work, of deadlines, of editorial queries into his reverie. Be gone, foul slitherer and leave me be! In his mind he saw the hero of old, his bow drawn back, shooting at the heart of the dragon; the incoming heroes on their white steeds, come to crush the serpent of gods of the older religion and their worshippers, and take from them their land and their women. A couple of verses from his beloved Genesis welled up in his mind:
‘And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust thou shalt eat all the days of thy life: And I shall put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise they head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’
He ground his heel into the ground of the Hakpen, banishing Smaug from his thoughts, determined that no more would his book intrude on his holiday; a resolution that would stand no chance of remaining kept.
Chapter Four: The Book and the Feather
Conall had returned to the campervan, and was taking a few moments to mop the remnants of the spilled coffee from the floor with a dirty t-shirt, and to replace the rest of the fallen objects (and others that had already been on the floor) to their proper place – stuffed under the sofa-bed. Most of his stuff had, in fairness, been properly packed away, but the decision to come here had been last-minute and so he had thrown a number of items on to the sofa-bed wrapped in a duvet, hoping they would be ok. The coffee had been a mistake, though. He’d wedged the unfinished cup between a pile of fairly heavy books and a lever-arch file on the small kitchen worktop behind the driver’s seat– and it would have been okay there, or so he told himself, if it hadn’t been for the hare…
The file, marked PhD, with the words ‘unfinished’ scrawled on the label lay half-open, and he collected a number of hand-written pages, star-maps and photocopies of ancient artefacts, statues and inscriptions that had cascaded from out of it. A few of the sheets were wrinkled and brown with coffee, but he gathered them up all the same and pushed them carelessly into the pile – pages of sketches of little clay figurines copied from Marija Gimbutas’ books on ‘Old’ Europe, with lozenge shapes and zig zags marked in black pen; carved cow-horns from Iberian tombs; print-outs of stellar alignments, some highlighted in red pen and exclamation marks. He didn’t need them now anyway. He snorted at the memory: a conversation from a few months before and the words of his then-tutor: ‘Astronomy is supposed to be science! Your original subject, on evidence for astronomy in prehistory was fine, if a little loose; but to start delving into these myths, well, Con, you’re on very shaky ground. If it’s not Indian myth, it’s Red Indian myth… I know you’ve had a very, very difficult time of late. But these subjects are simply not tenable, and I really cannot support your continued study of them, I’m sorry!’
‘Red Indian? That’s not very PC, is it?’ Con had answered. His tutor had just blinked at him and waved it off with a motion of his hand as irrelevant. Behind the tutor’s head was a large poster of stars being created in Orion’s belt as imaged by the Hubble telescope, and above this a poster of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva including an image of an atom with electrons flying about the nucleus like billiard balls; the great and the small; was this guy so focussed on these extremes that he couldn’t see the everyday world, Con had thought? Surely what was interesting about stars and atoms was that we were made of both: the very substance of our being were atoms forged in those great stellar furnaces, matter that was, the closer you looked at it, just energy seeming to flit into being from out of some mysterious and timeless zero energy field… physics surely was supposed to allow one look at the world in wonder – not to ignore it.
Conall had often waxed-lyrical about this to anyone who would listen: on a quantum level space and time were illusory; changing the energy state of a single atom here changed every single other atom in the cosmos; alter the course of a pair of particles once joined and the other would move, too – even if it was thousands of millions of miles away – even though according to science nothing moved faster than light-speed – something between these particles carried that information in an instant. How could that be – that a pair of particles once joined were forever linked?! Modern physics was mystical, magical and it had returned the stuffy academic that Con had once been in danger of becoming into a would-be mystic, something closer to how he had been as a child; an image of Tao, the yin-yang symbol, now hung on a string around his neck, his hair, at least then, long. But his tutor remained unaware of any of this magic, un-awakened by its import – and had failed to see its importance to his student.
‘You’re a scientist Con. This research is NOT science.’
‘You accepted my proposal. I clearly stated that I’d be investigating ancient myths…’ Con retorted.
‘Look – every PhD proposal needs tweaking – we had hoped you’d come to realise that this kind of research is currently frowned upon in the academic community and that perhaps other aspects of the subject might take precedence in your research. You’re a physicist at heart; get this ‘Tao of physics’ rubbish out of your system and grow up.’
‘It’s pronounced Dao’ was all Con could muster in reply as he left the office.
Con had driven home from this meeting fuming; by the time he had reached his house and sat down at his computer his anger had not abated. He had typed the shortest email of his life. ‘I quit.’ He had wanted it to be twice as long but decided to leave ‘you wanker’ unwritten. But in writing the email he had quit not just a PhD, but its associated lectureship in astrophysics; and he wasn’t sorry. The fire he had once had for the subject had left him since she had gone, and lecturing without fire was a mere dumb-show; thirty pairs of eyes, open like the mouths of chicks screaming to be fed, and he not able to even feed himself. He would not miss that. Besides, he had been told to rein in too many times; to leave the ‘new age’ nonsense out of the class. He was fed up of being told what he should or should not believe. As if truth was something you could measure.
Two particles once joined, linked forever... but the truth was she had died, and he had carried on living; and he had not known, not at the time; not unless you counted that dream – but how could you count that dream? He daren’t even go there, daren’t even begin to think... The dream… the river of milk, the horse on its banks…. No! He cast it from his mind. It was impossible; it was madness. It was okay for microscopic particles in the world of quantum reality to behave that way – to be entangled – twinned - but in the real world, the world of Newton, and television, and water bills? If it were true, if they had been linked and the dream had been some kind of warning, surely, he would have known; he would have felt her fear?
Without any real thought he put his folder to one side and reached for a book on the dresser shelf above the worktop. It had been hers and her name was scribbled inside the front page in a felt-tip pen: Melissa Astor; oldest and best of the Astor twins. It was an edition of the collected of poems of Coleridge, its cover faded by sunlight, its pages heavily thumbed, many turned down at the corner. It opened naturally at a well-worn page, the poem ‘Kubla Khan’, underlined and annotated in a small, hurried hand, the same as had written the name at the start. He half-read the notes, half-remembered them, so many times had he poured over them in the last year. He sat down on the sofa-bed with the book in his hands and read for a few moments more. The handwriting was legible, if rushed, little circles dotted the ‘i’s, and triple lines underlined words in the printed poem, often followed by a barrage of exclamation marks; the handwriting of someone excited, alive. But there they hid the truth.
Kubla Khan. Her favourite poem: their favourite – they’d learned it by heart just for the fun of it. He looked out of the window at nothing in particular and recited the first verse.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
A white barn-owl feather, edged with cream and smoky brown stripes, that had been placed in the back pages, fell onto the mattress of the sofa-bed; he picked it up gently, twisting it between his fingers; brushed it against his lips; and thought of the dark-haired girl who had given it to him, not the same girl who had once owned this book, but one now equally lost to him, it seemed. The feather brought back a memory of this other girl and of her grandfather; of a conversation a year earlier in a garden not two of miles from where Con now sat, with the frail white-haired man over the best soil for roses:
‘I don’t think he’s that interested in roses, granddad,’ the dark-haired girl had laughed.
‘Well he should be! If he learns the patience to cultivate a rose, he’ll have patience to cultivate a life with my beautiful grand-daughter’ the old man had replied, with a slow wink that creased the whole of his already much-lined face. Both Conall and the girl had coloured at this. ‘Granddad!’ she had said, abashed, and had mouthed a silent ‘sorry’ to Con.
Conall would go and lay tobacco on this old man’s grave tomorrow, at the Church in Avebury village, speaking the words the elder had taught him – Itsipaiitapio’pah - Great Spirit… he wondered if anyone laid flowers there now that his dark-haired granddaughter, his only surviving relative, would have returned home. Placing the book back on the shelf he continued with cleaning the van. A book from one girl, and a feather from another, he mused; it was a shame they had never met. It was tragic that they now never would. If I hadn’t been here… he began to think, but angrily cast the thought from his mind.
When the tidying was done Conall stepped outside and wrung the spilled coffee from his t-shirt then threw it back inside. The van up the way with the howling wolves on its side, curtains closed, music blaring, was gently rocking rhythmically on its squeaky suspension. He stared for a moment then quickly looked away, suddenly understanding. Lucky bastard, he thought to himself. Then imagining a night of this music and squeaking wheels he decided he would have to find another spot, closer to the circle, to camp.
Chapter Five: The River of Death
The three friends, having left the Sanctuary at the top of the ridge behind them, had descended into the valley bottom down a path beside the road, edged with lush new grasses, to where the lazy river Kennet was beginning its meandering journey through Wiltshire on its way to joining the Thames at Reading.
Another half mile walk along the snaking river brought them to the farm cottages of West Kennet on the curve of the Bath road, where they crossed the stone bridge and continued through fields lined with early blossoming whitethorn bushes in which a cuckoo could be heard, a herald of summer’s approach; ahead the companions could now see, unobscured by intervening hills for the first time, the majestic rise of Silbury Hill. At this point the Kennet turned to their left, to the south, to its source, as Barfield informed them, at the ‘Kennet spring’, as it was named on Stukeley’s plan; while another small tributary, its origins further to the north, swung around and skirted past the bottom of the hill, which was casting a great shadow over the water-logged meadow in which it lay.
While Barfield and Lewis gazed in wonder at the mound Tolkien had idled a few paces away towards the sedge covered banks of the slow, clear, river, where he gazed a while on the sticklebacks flitting in and out of the rills of dark green weed swaying in the glassy shallows. Above him a pair of crows were cawing as they circled, then flew off to the south.
He crouched, gazing into its clear depths, its shallow bottom, in the dappled shade from the water weeds, flecked here and there with pieces of chalk. He removed his boots and socks, rolled up his trouser bottoms and dipped a tentative foot into the water; it was icy cold, but before long he had grown used to it, and he sat on the bank, moving his feet hither and thither, stirring up a milky cloud of sediment that floated gently away downstream.
‘Enlighten us Tollers’ Lewis said, striding over to where Tolkien was seated, ‘The river name, Kennet, means what?’ he looked back and winked at Barfield.
‘I know what you’re getting at, Jack, and I happen to disagree with that particular vulgar etymology!’ Tolkien leaned forward amongst the rushes and dipped his hand into the cool water.
‘The earliest record is Cunnit, but we’re not looking at a Saxon profanity –beyond Marlborough is a place named Mildenhall called Cunetio by the Romans, no doubt after the river. The name cannot therefore be Saxon if it was here centuries prior to the Adventus…’. The adventus Tolkien was referring to was the Adventus Saxonum, the coming of the Saxons, which tradition dated to AD 430, some 20 years after the last of the legions had left Britain for good. The conversations between these gentlemen were always peppered with such terms – Latin and Greek phrases, snippets of poetry from all ages, used not to impress, but as a kind of scholarly shorthand. A casual listener might be forgiven for wondering if they were often talking in code.
‘Cut to the chase, Tollers – Kennet means…?’ despite his seeming briskness Lewis was smiling. His shadow moved across the water, scattering the sticklebacks.
Tolkien nevertheless bristled at being cut short.
‘The first part is from Cuno the old British word for dog…’
‘The river Dog?’ Lewis roared with laughter. ‘What a strange name!’
‘That’s rich coming from you, Jacksie!’ said Barfield, referring to the fact that since childhood Lewis had insisted he be called after the name of his favourite dog rather than his given name, Clive.
Tolkien ignored their quips.
‘The second element stems from dagos,’ Tolkien continued, ‘linked to our word ‘day’, but it stems from an older word meaning bright; and so ‘bright-hound’ is my preferred translation. Cunodagos, Cunetio, Kennet – it’s the same name. Shining dog. Bright hound.’ He turned back to watch the waters plashing over his milk-white feet. It was an odd name. Something to do with the chalk, perhaps? But why hound?
Lewis, still amused, nevertheless tried to suppress his mirth for the sake of Tolkien who could be touchy about his subjects.
‘The river of the bright hound…That, I concede, makes some sense if we think in terms of this place as a funerary landscape; after all, the Greeks imagined the river Styx that separated the land of the living from that of the dead as guarded on its far bank by the three headed dog Cerberus… could he be the dog?’
Tolkien frowned, weighing up the possibility in his mind.
Barfield, looking across the valley, offered support for Lewis’s observation, ‘Actually, the idea of the river as a dividing line between the realm of the dead and of the living could work here - West Kennet Long Barrow… there,’ he said, pointing to a rise on the crest of the hill to their south ‘the burial place of the builders of Avebury, stands on that side of the river, and the stone circles lay on this. I’ve always thought of the circle as an expression of life…’
‘So, like the Roman, you think they buried their dead away from the settlements? A river is as good a barrier as any…’ Tolkien said.
‘So luckily any hellhound guarding this river would be on that side!’’ Lewis observed, looking aslant at opposite bank of the bubbling waters, where in a nearby copse the cuckoo was still calling. Nothing could seem more incongruous on this beautiful spring day than the idea that this vale of green, spotted with the yellows and blues of meadow flowers and the creamy masses of whitethorn bushes fat with blossom could in any way be associated with death. All seemed alive, burgeoning with vitality and renewed growth.
Tolkien lent over the edge of the stream, where pieces of chalk and river rolled flints could be seen poking above the muddy depths of the clear water. He lent forward and plunged his hand into the cool depths, taking a stone from the bottom – a smooth river-rolled chalk pebble, and began to recite a few lines of verse:
In the depths stood dazzling stones aheap
As a glitter through glass that glowed with light,
As streaming stars when on earth men sleep
Stare in the welkin in winter night’
‘That’s beautiful,’ said Barfield. ‘It’s from The Pearl is it not?’
Tolkien nodded. ‘We have no recourse to rush to the Greeks to find mention of the River of Death, when our own poets express it so eloquently.’ He said, holding the white pebble between his thumb and forefinger and examining it closely, before placing it in his waistcoat pocket.
Jack nodded, more serious now. ‘I was always touched by that scene – one of the most haunting in any medieval lyric, I would say; and I suppose that poem is more fitting, for it is the garden of Paradise that lies over the river, not some dark hell inhabited by bat-like souls that one finds across the Styx in the Classical traditions.’ He gazed out over the fields; his eyes narrowed against the sun. The poem, which told of the dream of a grieving father in which he spies his deceased daughter, the Pearl of the title, across the river of death, had been read aloud by Tolkien on one of their Thursday nights at Magdalen at the tail end of the previous year.
‘But the river was wide, I durst not swim’ Tolkien quoted, touching the chalk in his pocket.
‘…I durst not swim…’
Tolkien’s voice was tinged with melancholy, and Barfield wondered what his quiet friend was thinking as he gazed across the river to the ruinous tomb on the crest of the hill, what pallid ghost he was seeing in his mind’s eye in place of the lost daughter of the poem, whose words continued to flow from his lips, but now in a whisper.
Barfield turned and once more took the path that headed westwards between the river and the road; and soon Jack was beside him, striding forward.
‘Is Ronald okay?’ Owen asked. ‘He seems distant; preoccupied.’
‘Oh don’t mind Ronald; he’s had his head in his books for so long he’s just taking a while to remember how to relax.’ He looked back to where Tolkien stood looking across the river.
‘But there is always something of the melancholic in him;’ Lewis continued ‘I think he pines for something; if I could put it in a nutshell I’d say he was homesick – homesick for a place he’s never been; nor perhaps ever could have, save in his imagination.’
‘The imagination is a powerful thing.’ Barfield said.
‘It is.’ Jack said. ‘But ultimately it is fancy, not blood and stone; not real.’
Barfield shook his head. ‘What is real?’ he asked.
‘My grumbling stomach is real, Owen. Spare me your metaphysics until I at least have a cup of tea inside of me!’
Chapter Six: The Avenue
Opening the side door of the camper van, now re-parked a few minutes’ drive from the Sanctuary in a lay-by of the narrow road that ran alongside the Avenue, Conall took a enamel tin mug from its hook in the cupboard and piled a large spoonful of instant coffee into it, and then put his kettle on to boil.
While the kettle was heating he sat with his legs out of the side-door, enjoying the heat of the mid afternoon sun; then he stood and walked over to the wooden fence that divided the Avenue from the road. The stones of the Avenue stood pale and silent in the long grass that trembled slightly in the warm breeze; each stone stood taller and wider than a man – and were arranged in pairs, a few metres apart – as if a procession of giants, two by two, had, by some long-forgotten spell, been turned to stone while shuffling towards the circle that lay over the hill, out of sight. The Avenue snaked its way, in this fashion, to the southern entrance of the henge, a good quarter of an hour walk away from where Conall now stood, eyes closed, leaning against the fence, - the heat of the sun somehow melting the lead of his earlier sadness.
A steady rising whistle from the van alerted him to the fact the kettle was boiling, and so returned to the cool shade of the kitchenette and poured the steaming water into his cup. He blew on, and then took a sip of, the black liquid; coffee was perhaps too generous a description of this scorching, bitter, brew; a splash of cold water and a couple of sugars made it slightly more palatable.
He picked up an old and battered wide-brimmed straw hat from the seat and placed it on his head; then in a moment of inspiration took down the Collected Coleridge, removed the owl feather and stuck it into the rim of the hat. In memory of you both, he thought.
Setting the cup aside he rolled a cigarette, hung it from his lips and then, coffee in hand, pulled shut the camper door and walked over to the gate that lead into the avenue.
The grass in between the stones had been recently mowed, though the stones themselves stood in small islands of long grass where the mower had not been able to reach. Conall walked towards the centre of the Avenue – sipping his drink, and peering to where, some 500 yards distant, the stones disappeared over the brow of the slight hill. There, near the brow, a dog was sniffing about one of the stones, and he could hear the distant voice of its owner calling it back; it disappeared back over the hill, leaving Conall once more alone.
From this position at the centre of the Avenue it was plain to see that the stones had been arranged in some kind of order: those to his left were thin and pillar-like, while those to his right, bordering the road, were squatter, wider, almost diamond shaped. Male and female, others had reasoned; but archaeologists often lacked imagination, he thought, taking his lighter from his pocket and lighting his cigarette.
He idled over to the first of the ‘male’ stones and laid a palm on its side. These stones had, in the same way that old trees had, a kind of brooding physicality that gave them a sense of character; and this particular stone held special connotations for Conall – last spring when he had visited the Avebury circle for the first time, he had slept up against it, protected from the view of the road with its passing traffic by its width; a stone headrest against which he’d lain, gazing up at the night sky. Though he had a van to camp in, the desire to sleep here, under the stars, protected by this ancient sentinel, was stronger than the call of the sofa-bed.
‘Hello, old friend’ he muttered, breathing out a plume of smoke. ‘Do you remember me, stone?’ he whispered. Then removed his hat and he leant forward so that his forehead was pressed against the rough cool pillar, scabbed with lichen – beaming his thoughts into its heart. So much has changed, stone. But I’m back.
Just then voices in the distance alerted him to the approach of a group of walkers. Conall walked around the stone and sat down on the grass about its feet, on the sunlit southern facing side of the stone that hid him from the road and Avenue. The walkers came and went, and he settled back, the sun hot on his cheeks, and lighting up the inside of his closed eyelids with a blood-red glow until he pulled the rim of the hat down to shade them. He could hear the distant ratcheting churring of a magpie, the hoo-hoooo-hoo of the doves, and the bleating of the sheep in the next field. These sounds relaxed him, and the crackle of his cigarette as he inhaled helped this feeling along. Time seemed to slow, became irrelevant; a quarter of an hour or so he sat here, drinking in the sounds and smells of this Wessex paradise. His mind began to drift…
Which sense, he had often been asked, would you lose if you had to? Sat here, the smell of the warm mowed grass, cigarette smoke, and sheep shit seemed as vital to the world as vision – more so, perhaps. Perhaps he would choose to lose his sight. No books though, part of him countered – but what good were books anyway? Homer, after all, was blind, so they said. Had he always been blind? Did he never actually see rosy-fingered dawn or the wine-dark sea? Imagine never having seen the sea, or a tree, or a blade of grass? Imagine never having seen the face of a beautiful woman; if I was blind – what would beauty be to me? Where would beauty reside if the eye of the beholder were blind? I mustn’t fall asleep, he said to himself, shaking his head, aware his mind was beginning to wander – or I’ll wake up sunburned.
Rising, he moved away from the stone, but fleetingly touched its side as he did so. See you later; he whispered.
Having made sure his van was locked Conall set off along the Avenue, intent on reaching the circle and grabbing something to eat in the pub that stood at its centre. The heat of the day was increasing rather than abating, and he removed his shirt and tied it about his waist; the heat of the sun on his skin felt good. As he crested the hill he saw, in the distance, a small group of people in bright yellow visi-vests huddled about a small area of stripped soil at the foot of one of the male stones besides which a small tent had been erected; he passed them with a ‘hello’ - not stopping to ask what these archaeologists scraping at the sun-baked soil were trying to uncover; he didn’t envy them lying out in this heat, with their white hard-hats on. A few minutes later, having crested another rise, he stopped to take in the vista that now spread before him – a sight that never usually failed to stir him, though today its effect was bittersweet: the great circle of stones of Avebury; so vast one could not take it in from any single viewpoint – set within a staggeringly impressive circular bank and ditch, once some 40 feet deep. From his present viewpoint he could see only the southern half of the circle – the southern entrance lay before him, through which now passed the road to Swindon, cutting through its mighty banks. To the right these same banks were crowned with great trees, but the section on the left was clear, giving one an unimpeded view of the massive sweep of stones around which visitors were treading, many picnicking in their shade, and the line of buildings beyond which were part of the village of Avebury. There, where the Swindon road met the village high street at a staggered cross-road, was the Red Lion, a large two-storey building under a heavy thatched roof, its forecourt that bordered the road spread with wooden tables, crammed full with people enjoying a drink in the sun. Conall suddenly felt very thirsty.
Leaving the avenue Conall entered the circle itself, passing between the huge stones that once marked the southern entrance; roughly angled, these stones dwarfed him as he stepped through them; but he did not stop to admire them, nor the smaller circle of stones, again, one of a pair, that he walked through. He would have time to admire the stones later, he reasoned.
The pub forecourt was busy and loud with laughter; an eclectic mix of new-age types with long hair and loose clothes, bikers in their leathers and families here for a day out crowded the tables. There, in one corner, sat a group of young people in visi-vests; more archaeologists, Conall assumed, probably university students on their summer dig; while on a table nearest the car-park a folk-group in white shirts decorated with coloured ribbons were taking musical instruments from out of their black cases. From all around the smell of fried food and cigarette smoke reached his nose. He hadn’t expected it to be so busy, but he supposed last year he had been here in April, after the Easter holidays had finished, and although the place had not been quiet, it wasn’t anything like as crowded as today.
No, he thought, turning away from the pub, I have something to do first.
He walked westwards past the pub and along a narrow road, past a small group of shops selling souvenirs, and a row of Bed & Breakfasts, until he had left the banks of the circle, and the street grew quieter; the street narrowed to a row of small brick cottages on the left, and on the right was the wall of the churchyard.
A cottage stood opposite the lych gate, a window box below the window thick with Nicotiana, its pendulous white flowers still closed; its doorway, newly painted, bore the name Church Cottage, and the small porch had been fixed-up by the new occupants; but the old occupant lay a few feet away across the road, as his granddaughter’s letter had informed him; the memorial plaque was simple:
In loving memory Alfred John Mac Govan-Crow 1935–2011
Con found it easily thanks to a posy of nicotiana placed on the grave; someone, then, in the village, still cared.
He knelt beside the plaque and removed the pouch of tobacco from his pocket. He took a pinch and crumbled it on the soft grass:
Itsipaiitapio’pah – he said.
Bless you, Old Man, he mumbled. May the Great Spirit protect you... and those you love.
The inside of the Red Lion was cool and dark after the glaring heat outside, and Conall suddenly remembered he was shirtless; putting the shirt back on and removing his hat he waited for a gap to appear at the bar; after a couple of minutes the pretty barmaid smiled at him and he asked for a pint of Green King bitter, and while he waited for it to be poured he grabbed a menu and hungrily poured over the choices. There was no chance of nabbing a table outside, he reasoned, but a small table stood free in the corner opposite the bar, so Conall told the barmaid he’d be sitting there. She gave him a table number scrawled in marker pen on a wooden spoon and he sat down with his pint.
A shaft of sunlight bisected the table like a wall of fire; and for a while Conall sat entranced at the dance of the particles of dust illuminated by it, while outside the folk-group were playing accompanied by claps from the crowd. Then he raised his pint, delighting in that first cool mouthful, the bitter tang of hops, and felt himself begin to relax. And now what? He thought.
What happened was not what he had expected.
Chapter Seven: Orient and Immortal Wheat
The tea-rooms Barfield had mentioned were in a wooden bungalow with a veranda, one of a number of small wooden buildings beside an unsightly petrol station on the north side of the road, just past Silbury hill. Despite their inauspicious appearance the bungalow, at least, was welcoming, and it wasn’t too long before the three friends found themselves ensconced in a sunny spot looking over the road and the green fields of newly sprouted wheat opposite, and enjoying a pot of tea.
A couple of farm labourers and another small group of walkers were the only other clientele on the veranda, though there were other workmen seated in the shaded part of the building, laughing and playing cards.
Barfield sipped his tea and looked longingly out over the forecourt.
‘I used to stop here for tea on my trips down to Cornwall when still a student.’ He said. ‘Those were lovely times; if only I’d appreciated how lovely at the time; I’m sure I did, but I think it takes a period of hard work and drudgery to give these things perspective.’ His face had dropped at the mention of drudgery.
‘What took you to Cornwall?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Folk dancing…’ Barfield smiled again, seeming to drift off in to some lovely memory, ‘and unrequited love…’
‘Ah,’ Lewis said, with a wink; ‘the one love I didn’t dare mention in ‘The Four Loves’’
‘Blissful torture, at the time, I can assure you. But I learned a great lesson from it, probably one of the greatest of my life!’ Barfield said, stirring his tea.
‘Being?’ asked Tolkien.
‘Well. When you have been in love, and given so much of yourself, and that love hasn’t been returned you have two choices: you can pine after the girl forever, or you do something rather more pragmatic, like sublimate those feelings into something else… you see, looking back on it I can see that my love for the girl was, I suppose, a love of life, really – or at least the possibilities life had still to offer me. I was stricken for a good while – very low – not really able to move on – it was a great blow at the time - until I had this moment of realisation that I could fall in love again; and I did; with nature, with life – with the world!’
‘With Maud?’
‘Yes…’ Owen said, haltingly, at the mention of his wife’s name. He seemed to shift uncomfortably in his seat for a second, before he resumed:
‘I do wonder whether anyone who’s never been in love can really fully appreciate the ecstasy that comes from it. I’m talking of that sense of sheer awe one feels in the presence of the beloved. Love, I suppose, romantic love, is a force of nature that just sweeps all else away. It is a primordial, magical, experience!’
‘But ultimately illusory.’ Lewis said, dunking a biscuit into his cup.
‘Why so?’ Barfield countered.
‘Because it is transient; I believe it almost a trick of nature to capture a man and fool him into marriage.’
‘So says an unmarried man’ observed Tolkien, wryly.
Barfield arched an eyebrow. ‘Does Nature perform tricks, Jack? Your attitude is typical of modern man’s distrust of Dame Natura which sees himself not only as separate from Her, but above Her, believing that She is some evil temptress!’
He took a hasty sip of tea and continued.
‘To reduce Romantic love to a biological ‘trick’ is to demean one of the most liberating of emotions. Look at the art that love has produced: would we have ‘The Divine Comedy’ if Dante had never seen Beatrice? Are you dismissing The Inferno because it was founded on love?’
Lewis was frowning. ‘Founded on love it may have been,’ he said, swallowing his mouthful of biscuit, ‘but not Romantic love. Romantic love, my dear Owen, cannot be separated from sex, and sexual desire is transitory...Beatrice Portinari was 9 years old when Dante first saw her, if you think this was based on romantic, which is sexual, love then we are on dangerous ground… ’
A couple on a nearby table seemed to shift uncomfortably at Lewis’s words.
‘…Dante’s work was not based on lust;’ Lewis continued ‘Beatrice for him was a spiritual ideal rather than a flesh and blood woman.’
‘Absolute poppycock, Jack!’ Barfield snorted, ‘For one, Dante himself was the same age as her when they met – so let’s not sully his love with any hints of paedophilia - and for another, Beatrice was precisely who she was and no other, not a symbol, nor an allegory for some ‘higher’ or ‘purer’ state of caritas: she was simply a beautiful green-eyed Florentine girl who turned the head of an intelligent and sensitive young man, and thereby opened his eyes to the beauty of the world!’
‘Are you talking about Beatrice or your green-eyed Cornish girl?’ Jack said, playfully, seemingly amused by Barfield’s fervour that had brought a flush to the taller man’s smooth cheeks.
‘Both! What is this delight of being in love but an experience of joy, of connection with the world? And what is poetry but the communication of such rapture?! One cannot read Dante, or any other great poet, without feeling it!’ Barfield’s eyes flashed with passion, seeming to drink in the landscape which no doubt was fuelling his ideas with nostalgic memories.
He paused to take another sip of tea, expecting a rebuff from Lewis that never came. The latter merely shook his head slowly, at a loss to even attempt to argue against what he thought as erroneous, and took another biscuit from the plate.
Just then a rumbling outside the veranda announced the arrival of a vehicle; the workmen in the shadows of the café looked and murmured to each-other as a strange machine, seeming half car and half tank, with caterpillar tracks for back wheels pulled up at the garage forecourt a little past the tea-house.
One of the workmen on the nearby table muttered to his colleague; and his companion guffawed at what must have been a private joke. A small, handsome man in a long and well-tailored pale overcoat and cap could be seen chatting animatedly to the petrol attendant.
Tolkien pushed his empty cup away from him and leaned across the table,
‘I like your view, Owen, that the poet is one who sees the rapture of existence and seeks to tell of it to his blinkered fellow man.’
Barfield smiled appreciatively at Tolkien’s attempts to steer the conversation back on line.
Tolkien carried on: ‘…that poetry is like some magical potion that allows you to see things differently, to see things shining with qualities otherwise hidden from us…’
‘It’s as I’ve said before,’ Barfield replied, ‘the poet sees the world as others do not, and he seeks to communicate his experience in the only way now available to him: poetic metaphor.’
‘Why won’t prose suffice?’ Lewis asked, his eyes flitting from the strange vehicle momentarily back to Barfield.
‘You’re being deliberately obstinate now, Jack – we’ve talked about this. many times before! Prose is the language of the modern everyday world, a world at odds with the poetic vision. The use of poetic metaphor restores man to his original state of participation in nature. Think of Traherne’s beautiful phrase ‘orient and immortal wheat’…’
He waved his hand in the direction of the sun-drenched sloping hills on the opposite side of the road, green with freshly sprung blades of new-born wheat still not yet much more than a foot in height.
‘When I think of those lines I see things differently; it’s as if I’m no longer looking at a field of corn, a few weeks old; what was pleasant greenery newly sprung from the soil becomes something terrible and sublime: for those shoots grow from a buried seed, and those seeds in turn were the ears upon last year’s shoots… where does one begin and the other end? The answer is that surely, they are somehow one. And if last year’s corn sprouted from the ears of the previous years, and so on, ad infinitum, we are left with the startling truth that yon green field thither is not covered in fresh new life, but a life thousands upon thousands of years old, which each year takes on a new skin, as it were, and at the end of each year casts it off so that what the farmers fill their barns with at harvest is but the sloughed skin, really, of an organism far, far older than mankind himself. Those plants, there, are in reality the same plants that were brought here from the Near East by the first farmers thousands of years ago, whose form has remained constant, though the substance through which that form is expressed has changed: Orient and immortal indeed.’
Tolkien stared at the verdant hillside, baulking at Barfield’s musings – and for a moment he saw, literally saw, a difference – what was a rolling peaceful green valley was suddenly transformed so that its sides were no longer inert, seeming dead compared to the skylarks that flew over them, but alive in a way he had never before perceived – the leaves of the wheat became upward-thrusting scales of a giant plumed serpent which covered the entire valley, scales that would be sloughed off at harvest, only to grow anew… a serpent that had wended its way to this valley some 6,000 years ago having travelled thousands of miles from its birthplace in the river valleys of the Near East… ancient, orient, immortal… dying each winter, buried in the black earth then rising again in the spring…
Barfield lit his pipe and continued. ‘That is what Traherne’s poetic phrase suggests to me, and carries far more meaning than the single word ‘corn’ or ‘wheat’ could ever do – for in it we start to get a glimpse of what early man must have seen when he was still close to Nature, not alienated from Her as he is today.’
‘A sense of the true nature of things?’ Tolkien suggested.
‘A sense of the divinity of things!’ Barfield replied, ‘for ancient man the corn was the body of a god – not in a quaint symbolic way such as our folk image of ‘John Barleycorn’ but as something real and experienced; to the Egyptians the crops were the green-skinned Osiris, torn apart, buried and resurrected each year – later echoed in Jesus as the Bread of Life, dying and rising again…’
Lewis coughed. ‘No, Owen; those earlier vegetation gods were a pre-figuration of Christ; Christ’s life was the metaphor made fact, the earlier vegetation gods were the echo…’
Owen waved his hand dismissing his friend’s interruption. ‘We’re getting away from my point – what I’m saying is that to ancient man corn was an expression of a divinity immanent in all things, man included; if you think about it, the very idea of a vegetation god presents a view of reality worlds apart from our own: this wasn’t a world where the Creator was separate from his creation, and mankind created as a lord above all other animals – no – this was a world in which nature itself was the body of the god, and man, kin to all other creatures, was part of this divinity too. If we saw all as Holy we would be less prone to trivialise, exploit and destroy our world…’
He stopped for a moment while a waitress came and leaned over and refilled their tea-pot with boiling water, avoiding all eye contact with these strange university types, friends, perhaps, of the ‘Marmalade Man’, she thought, her eyes flitting to the dapper gentlemen at the petrol pump. She coloured, feeling suddenly awkward. Maybe these were some of those friends? The ones the Red Indian gardener had told her about, with their strange rituals and the women they shipped in for the night and packed off to London by taxi the next day…
‘Imagine a world where each and every word you uttered expressed the divinity inherent in all things…’ Barfield continued, adding a mouthed a thank you to the waitress, who smiled back awkwardly and left the table; ‘how different would we look at that field if we called wheat ‘Osiris’ or ‘Persephone’ and saw, really saw, it as divine? Well this is exactly what the ancients saw; we dwell in a world where one says ‘the wheat is like Osiris’, but they would have said the equivalent of ‘the wheat is Osiris’: their language would seem to us as pure poetry; their experience of the world poetic, mystic. But it was not meant as a deceit. It expressed a truth.’
Tolkien nodded in agreement and poured each of the men more tea. How wonderful it was to hear this man talk. He was eloquent and intelligent – such a waste that he should have become a lawyer and not an academic! He has the best mind of all of us, Tolkien thought. Lewis’s attention, however, seemed to be on the man at the petrol pumps.
Barfield continued: ‘We no longer see that way because we have fallen from that original Edenic state – Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and becoming aware of their nakedness is a metaphor for mankind losing that state of participation with nature and realising his difference from the animals; his expulsion from Eden is brought about by the development of his sense of self-consciousness - which alienates us from nature – to use the image of the dismembered corn-god, our modern mind is like the evil brother Seth who divides and separates the divine world into disconnected objects, tearing it limb from limb: a world once experienced as divine is divided up, categorised, its former connectivity broken, the divinity killed; but the poet is one who can, like the goddess Isis, re-assemble the pieces of this dismembered god and bring him back to life: to literally re-member the god, the original state of pre-fall unity, where every object sang out with its participation in the divine; so that man is once more at one with the birds, beasts, fish and trees…’ Barfield’s voice had risen to a crescendo of excitement, his hands emphasising every word. ‘…for mankind still abides in Eden – indeed he never left it – for Eden is around us, but we do not see it!’ he brought his palm down hard on the table-top to emphasise each of the last six syllables, rattling the tea-set and causing the people on the nearby table to look round again, nervously.
Tolkien stared into Barfield’s ecstatic face – I’m sure you see it, Owen, he thought – as the latter gazed open eyed with rapture at the dance of the windblown corn. He had never seen Owen so animated, so energised; stirred up, no doubt by memories of youth and love. Tolkien cleared his throat, a little wary of breaking the spell his friend had fallen under.
‘You know, Owen, that one of my poetic creations, Tom Bombadil, whose adventures I recall reading to you all at an Inklings a few years back now, I’d imagine – well, I didn’t say it at the time but Bombadil, who is really the spirit of our fast disappearing Oxford and Berkshire countryside, a kind of genius loci, was in no small measure influenced by your theories. He speaks in verse, for he exists before the fall of language, before speech became prose; he is the Eldest; he speaks to the badgers and the trees and the barrow-wights; I imagine Bombadil to possess what today man can only glimpse in myth and poetry; he can talk to the birds, like Siegfried who gains that ability by drinking the blood of the dragon Fafnir...’
Barfield nodded. ‘When I try to picture that original state of unity, I always imagine Orpheus with his magical lyre that could tame the wild beasts and make the trees and even the stones dance about him in a circle.’ Barfield suggested. ‘Orpheus, like Osiris, is torn to pieces, yet his head goes on singing – you see, despite being rent apart the voice of the god can still be heard, singing of the unity of all things, remembering Eden before the Fall, if men but listen…. Poets hear it…. lovers hear it…’
‘This mystic state of unity, you know - it all sounds rather like being drunk.’ Lewis commented with a wink; suddenly back in the conversation now the vehicle and its dapper driver had pulled away.
Tolkien smiled.
‘You have a point, Jack: think of all those Norse legends that tell of drinking the mead or ale of poetry; for in intoxication man achieves something akin to that sense of belonging, does he not, and forgets his alienation? Behind every alcoholic, I suspect, lays a poet!’
‘Well, the reverse is certainly the case!’ said Lewis.
‘Yourself included?’ asked Barfield.
Lewis didn’t seem amused by Barfield’s quip, instead his eyes seemed to pale a little.
‘Sadly I think I gave up the urge to become a poet long ago. I now seek solace in my cups.’ He smiled weakly. ‘The blood of John Barleycorn gives me courage bold, not inspiration.’
Tolkien understood, now, why Lewis had seemed so uninterested in what Barfield had been saying; it was like rubbing salt into a wound – here was Lewis who in his youth had wished to be a poet above all things, but who had not received the recognition he had really deserved, and who was now reduced to writing prose – while Barfield was extolling the virtues of the poetic vision; Lewis must have felt somehow unworthy.
‘In which case,’ Lewis was continuing, ‘let us hope the beer at the Red Lion isn’t varnish!’
‘Hear, hear!’ Barfield laughed, ‘Though if it’s too good the long road to Calne will begin to lose its appeal…’
‘Well,’ Lewis said, ‘if the stones of Avebury circle begin to dance about us like they’ve been enchanted by Orpheus’s lyre we’ll know it’s time to down our cups and move on…’
Tolkien was nodding. ‘It’s funny; I had this image in my head then, when Owen was speaking: I had initially thought it was the dismembered body of Orpheus on the banks of the river Hebrus and his severed head floating down the river - but instead of some Mediterranean stream all I could see was the Kennet and instead of Orpheus’s head bobbing amongst the sticklebacks it was the image of a woman – her hair spread out like Ophelia. It was so persistent that I’m sure my mind was trying to tell me something: I’m sure it has something to do with this landscape, though quite what I don’t yet know…’
‘Well let us pray the mead of poetry inspires an answer, Tollers!’ Lewis beamed, used to Tolkien’s ‘flights of fancy’. ‘For myself that tea has restored my vigour; I’m a little too full for climbing the hill, now, if I’m honest – but a constitutional to Orpheus’s dancing stones itself seems a fair prospect.’
Chapter Eight: Shenandoah
With a second pint in hand Conall strode blinking out of the pub to the tables arranged on the flagstones fronting the road. The main lunchtime rush was over and there was now the odd spare seat here and there, though no totally empty tables. He raised his glass and took a large sip of beer, contemplating whether to squeeze in amongst the hippies gathered around the folk band, the archaeologists or the bikers, or whether to just cross the road and go and sit amongst the stones. Still a little sunblind and squinting he moved aside to let someone past him into the pub. But they stopped.
‘Conall?!’
He turned, confused at the mention of his name. A woman stood beaming up at him, dressed in a simple faded red t-shirt under a suede jacket, pale blue jeans and black boots, a bag slung over one shoulder - but it was only when she removed her sunglasses and hugged him and he found himself with his nose and mouth pressed against the top of her head, breathing the scent of her sun-warmed long dark hair, that it fully sunk in who this was.
‘What the hell are you doing here?!’ she said, grinning as she pulled away, her brows creased in a deep frown.
Conall stood speechless, his mind screaming with a car-crash of conflicting thoughts and emotions.
‘Shen?!’ he said aware of the colour draining from his face.
‘Why are you here? Are you down here for long? You’re not leaving yet?’ Shenandoah asked, all at once.
Con shook his head. No words seemed to want to come.
‘No. Good. Look - I’m just going to drop something off in here,’ she said, motioning towards the door of the pub with her head, ‘but – you got time – I mean can I join you for a drink? Quick, grab us those seats then we’ll talk!’ she said, and then was gone, but not before looking back and smiling again, shaking her head.
Some of the archaeologists had just got up, leaving a table free, to which Conall walked, seating himself facing the sun. It was only when he picked up his pint that he realised his hand was shaking. The chances that he should meet her again, here, and now, seemed to him so astronomically slim he could only lift his eyes skywards, questioning whatever power might have arranged such a bitter-sweet coincidence. When he had met her here last year she had only been here for a matter of days, to visit her granddad - for she had long since moved away from Wiltshire; but Her Granddad had died shortly after, and anyway, since then all contact between Conall and her had ceased... She had no reason to be here, he thought; and yet here she was. Why? Why did he have to see her now? Could I, he asked himself, just slip away? All this was going through Conall’s mind, but behind it all was a more constant and more appealing image from their past: of her dark eyes looking up at him and closing as he leaned in to kiss her; and then a wave of sadness and guilt swept through him, and an image appeared in his mind’s eye - a line of Coleridge’s poetry savagely underlined in red biro:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw…
And beside those words others in a shaky, wild hand:
I go to the river to die…
Behind him, following a burst of applause, the folk band had begun another song, and a strong female voice had started to sing.
There was three kings into the east,
Three kings both great and high,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn should die.
They took a plough and plough'd him down,
Put clods upon his head,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn was dead.
Just then the woman’s voice was joined by that of a man coming from the opposite side of the forecourt, deep, with a strong northern accent. Con turned – the man was shaven headed with a goatee beard, his wiry arms blue with tattoos – each forearm emblazoned with a spiralling serpent, the heads of which flicked their forked tongues across the back of his hands.
They've let him lie for a very long time,
'til the rains from heaven did fall
And little Sir John sprung up his head
and so amazed them all
The man had risen and was making his way from his seat near the door of the pub, past the folk singers, towards the road.
They've let him stand 'til Midsummer's Day
'til he looked both pale and wan
And little Sir John's grown a long, long beard
and so become a man.
He bowed to the group, grinning broadly and as he passed Con he winked at him mischievously before heading off across the road to the circle, his pint glass in his hand. Behind him the woman’s voice continued, and Con turned back and drank some more beer.
They've ta’en a weapon, long and sharp,
And cut him by the knee;
Then tied him fast upon a cart,
Like a rogue for forgerie.
‘Wake up, John-a-dreams!’
Conall looked up and met Shen’s dark-brown eyes, looking out from the curtain of her dark straight hair. She was holding a large glass of what looked to be coke, and a pint for him.
‘How come you’re here?’ Conall asked, dry mouthed. Shen bit her lip. Her eyes glistened and she forced a smile. ‘I’ve been here sorting Granddad’s things out since March; he left me the house in his will. I couldn’t sell it; just couldn’t. Oh, and there’s something he left for you, too. I meant to…’
‘No matter…. I was sorry to hear about your Granddad. I’ve just left some tobacco on his grave.’ Conall said, matter-of-factly. ‘… I don’t know if it’s a Blackfoot tradition or not, but it seemed kind of appropriate.’
‘That’s kind of you.’ She said.
‘I saw the flowers there, too – I didn’t for a second think they would have been from you… So you’re living here now?’
‘Partly; it’s taking a while to get the business off the ground here and I still have the house on Scilly, but I’m renting that out over the summer as a holiday cottage; I’m probably going to sell it. I was never comfortable there; the sea can be so oppressive…Anyway… what about you?! What are you up to?’. Her smile seemed genuine, if a little strained. ‘How are you doing?’
Conall looked down, frowning, thinking of what to say, the words of the song distracting him.
They laid him down upon his back,
And cudgell'd him full sore;
They hung him up before the storm,
And turn'd him o'er and o'er.
They filled up a darksome pit
With water to the brim,
They heav'd in John Barleycorn-
There, let him sink or swim!
Con shivered at the image of a pale body floating in dark water that had risen in his mind’s eye.
‘Con? Hello!? Earth to Con…’
He half-smiled and shrugged. ‘Well I’m writing the odd article,’ he said, speaking louder than usual to be heard over the singing, ‘giving the odd lecture here and there...’ he took another sip to buy himself time while he struggled to rein in his emotions.
‘You know what I meant.’
Conall stared at his pint.
‘Yeah, I’m okay. I’m doing better.’ He smiled, gently, unconvincingly.
‘I thought about you.’ She suddenly said. Conall raised his eyes to hers in genuine surprise.
‘Likewise’ was all he could muster; he looked into her eyes, but she didn’t hold his gaze for long, lowering her eyes and picking up her drink.
‘I don’t really know what to say.’ Shen said, ‘I would have written again… but you said not to…’
She looked across at him again, fleetingly, with a slight hint of awkwardness.
He felt like he should say something to explain, but the words weren’t there. ‘Look, I'm sorry. I was in a bit of a shit place...’
'It's okay, Con. I know. God, you don’t need to apologise.'
‘But thanks for letting me know about Alfred…’ he mumbled.
She had been looking down at her small hands, fiddling with a jade and silver ring, but now she looked up.
‘It’s all so shit, isn’t it? And I knew Granddad was ill… I had time to prepare… but you…’
Conall shrugged again and smiled weakly, not wanting her to go on.
It was strange for them both to be sitting here in silence, after all the laughter and incessant talking they had enjoyed the last time they had met. It seemed so long ago. When they had parted it had all been good between them; but to meet again now, like this, perhaps it might have been better had he not seen her. Con sipped his pint in silence, and turned his head to watch the folk band finish their song.
They wasted, o'er a scorching flame,
The marrow of his bones;
But a miller us'd him worst of all,
For he crush'd him between two stones.
And they hae taen his very heart's blood,
And drank it round and round;
And still the more and more they drank,
Their joy did more abound.
John Barleycorn was a hero bold,
Of noble enterprise;
For if you do but taste his blood,
'Twill make your courage rise.
'Twill make a man forget his woe;
'Twill heighten all his joy;
'Twill make the widow's heart to sing,
Tho' the tear were in her eye.
The crowds applauded and Con and Shen joined them, politely. When Con looked back at Shen, she was regarding him anxiously, feeling the same tension as him.
‘Well, this is awkward.’ She said. ‘God, Con, let’s not be off with each other, it’s not like we see each other every day…’. He nodded, smiling at her directness.
‘So did you ever work it out, your lost star myth – the dragon thing?’ she asked, seeming to relax a little.
He smiled. ‘I think so. It’s kind of changed a bit, not massively but a bit. It’s why I’m here,’ he half-lied, ‘the sky’s supposed to be clear for the next few days. You just can’t see any sky in London.’
‘It was always a bit beyond me, you know, your theorising.’ She shrugged. ‘But I loved the stories. Granddad did too. I loved it that night when you showed me which stars were which, and the tales behind them all.’
It had been on that night that he had first told her that he could really fall for her. Had that really happened? He felt himself redden. Was she remembering that too? But it had also been that night that the other thing had happened; not that Shen knew. Neither did he at the time; he had to wait a few more days for that news, and then everything had changed.
…They filled up a darksome pit
With water to the brim…
He cast the unwanted image from his mind, clenching his hand into a fist. ‘It’s the stories that are the key Shenandoah… they hold all that information, I’m sure of it. But it’s like a code that needs cracking… it was an intuition, that’s all – but I never had time to follow it up. Not until recently. And now, well… it makes sense, but I just don’t know if I’m right or if I’m seeing things…’
‘And you’re still at the uni?’ she asked.
‘Not anymore; I quit.’.
‘Quit? Why?’
He shrugged. ‘Long story.’ He sipped his drink.
‘How long’s long?’ she smiled.
‘Too long for now; I don’t want to bore you.’
‘Well, you’d better quit now then; it is probably very boring.’ She joked.
In the more companionable silence that followed he relaxed and was able to take her in; sitting with her back to the sun, her broad-high cheek-boned face in shadow, it was clear that she owed her looks to a more exotic ancestry than her hyphened part-Irish surname, Mac Govan-Crow, suggested. Con recalled a scene from their previous meeting, when, sitting upon West Kennet Long-Barrow, he had stuck the owl feather she had given him in her hair and told her she now looked like her great-great grandmother whose photo she had showed him on her granddad’s dresser… the same feather he had stuck in his hat not an hour before…
‘That’s my granddad’s dad, George, as a baby, and his parents, Kills Crow and Medicine Smoke Woman.’ she had said, pointing at the sepia image.
‘You look like her.’ He had said, his eyes on her rather than the photo. A silence had passed between them then. The truth was that she looked almost more native than her grandfather had done; her long straight dark hair especially, and her cheekbones that seemed to push her eyes into heavily lidded crescents; their colour somewhere between chocolate and black, depending on the light.
‘I guess Shenandoah is a Native name?’ he had said then.
She had smiled, ‘Well, it is, it’s a native river name - but that’s not why I’m called it – it’s after the song, my granddad sang it to me just after I was born, he liked the Jimmy Stewart film, and it stuck – thank God – I think my parents had been toying with Derdriu.’
‘Derdriu?’ he’d laughed.
‘Don’t laugh – it’s a family name, and it’s still my middle name.’
‘Ok, Deirdre.’
‘Shenandoah Derdriu Mac Govan-Crow… fuck me, that’s a mouthful!’ he had laughed.
A year and a world later Con took his tobacco from his pocket and rolled a cigarette, offering Shen one. She looked about her guiltily, with a voiced indrawn breath. ‘Oh god! Don’t!’
‘You given up?’
‘Kind of. My boyfriend doesn’t really like me smoking.’
Conall felt the smile freeze on his face. Boyfriend; of course: someone like Shen would never stay single for long, he reasoned. He felt a strange sense of deflation, but then she smiled at him and he felt somehow better; relieved even. Too much had changed.
‘Go on, have one. Blame the smell on me.’ Conall said with a wink, pushing the tobacco her way.
She hesitated, stared at the proffered tobacco, looked up at Con and then relented.
‘Who’s the lucky man?’ Conall asked, handing her the papers and rolling himself another.
‘He’s from Swindon…’
‘Oh I’m sorry…’ Con joked.
Shen narrowed her eyes and continued ‘– he’s called Hayden; been seeing him since last summer. He’s a fireman,’ she said, as he lit her cigarette.
‘Has that got anything to do with the no smoking? If he catches you will he turn the hose on you out of habit?’ Conall asked. She shook her head, smiling. ‘Uh huh, he’s a bit of a health nut. You need to be fit in that line of work…. God that’s good’ she said, exhaling and looking down at the cigarette. ‘I’ve got half an hour before I’m meeting him – time for some of the smell to fade, I hope. I can always get some gum.’
Conall eyed his two thirds full second pint and full third pint and wondered if he could down both in less than half an hour. But at least if he, what was his name? Hayden, turned up they wouldn’t have to talk about what had happened since he’d last seen Shen. Again, the image of that manic handwriting beside the printed poem rose to consciousness: I go to the river to die… as if to punish him for this moment of levity.
‘You’ll have to see what I’ve done to the cottage. How long are you down for, again?’
‘A few days, not sure really.’
‘Well, unfortunately with the protest I’ve let my spare rooms out for the next few days, otherwise I’d have put you up.’
‘What protest?’ Conall asked.
‘Over the bones in the museum.’
He shook his head.
‘They’re bringing some new bones here that had been stored away in Devizes museum, and putting them in this swanky new display here; the museum’s been shut for a month or so while they’ve been renovating it; the Chairman of English Heritage is going to be here on Wednesday to visit the excavations and to open the new exhibit; there’s going to be a group of protesters there to meet him, pagans, who don’t think he should be on display. The head of them, Wolf, is lodging at Granddad’s. Granddad’s has kind of become unofficial protest HQ… if you’re around tonight we’ll be here in the pub – at half eight… you’ll be most welcome. Oh, and…’ she said, fumbling about in her bag; She took a card from out of her purse and handed it to him. Shenandoah Mac Govan Crow - Tarot card readings – individuals and parties catered for; followed by a mobile number and an email address.
‘Spread the word. Business is picking up – I mean, there’s loads of stuff like this down in Glastonbury, but not here.’
‘So will you read my cards?’ he asked. ‘You promised to last time but didn’t.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah, course I will! I read Wolf’s last night; it was fun.’
He felt a twinge of jealousy over this Wolf character…
‘And did the cards say they would win the protest?’
Shen shrugged. ‘Yes and no, strangely; they wouldn’t win but would get what they wanted.’
‘Hmm. Helpfully vague.’ Con grinned.
A beeping noise sounded from her handbag and she dug around until she had found her phone. Mouthing sorry she pressed to answer the call.
‘Hello? Hi! No, I’m at the pub…just dropped in some more cards…’ It’s Hayden, she mouthed at Conall. ‘Why don’t you come up?... No? Ok. Suit yourself…’ she raised her eyes skywards as if to say ‘whatever’ ‘…I’ll be down soon.’ She put the phone back in her bag.
‘He’s already let himself in.’ she explained, ‘I’d better head off in a minute. He’s been on nights… grumpy as hell!’ She said. Suddenly her face dropped. ‘Shit! Do you have any chewing gum or anything?’ she asked, suddenly dropping the unfinished cigarette into the ashtray.
‘Nope’ said Conall, ‘sorry’.
‘Bugger. Oh well, he’ll probably be too grumpy to kiss me for a while anyway.’ She said, rising to her feet.
‘One for the road?’ Conall joked, offering her the packet of cigarette papers. She stuck out her tongue sarcastically.
She breathed into her hand and sniffed. ‘Oh, that’s not too bad.’ She said. Then she looked down at Conall and smiled, putting out her hand as if she were about to ruffle his hair, and touching him on the cheek instead.
‘I still can’t believe you’re here! I’m glad Con. I’m glad I got to see you again.’
‘Didn’t the cards tell you I would be here again?’ he asked, to which she half smiled half snorted; ‘not the cards, no’ she said enigmatically.
‘You’ll be here tonight then? The meeting?’ she asked.
‘Half eight!’ he said, nodding, and then she was gone.
After a few seconds there was only her mostly empty glass and her half-smoked cigarette smouldering in the ashtray to evidence she had been there at all. He lifted her glass and downed the coke, surprised at the taste of brandy in it, then finished her cigarette, but not before silently lifting it heavenwards, offering the first smoke to Itsipaiitapio’pah, the Great Spirit, as her grandfather had taught him.
‘Fuck,’ was all he could think to say. ‘Fuck!’
Chapter Nine: The Marmalade Man
Avebury village was small and picturesque in parts; its short high-street, half of which lay within the circle, was pretty enough, with stone cottages lining one side opposite the church; as one entered the earth embankments one passed the village shop, and here grander houses appeared on the other side of the road, behind which, secluded in trees, lay the Manor House – but as one reached the centre of the circle, passing the cross-roads on which stood the Red Lion, then followed the road east past more houses on each side of the narrow road, the village soon petered out in a few huddles of small cottages, a mess of wooden shacks, allotments, pig sties, chicken pens and overgrown copses of trees. Choked with refuse and abandoned farm machinery.
The small car park and forecourt of the pub was filled with an assortment of vehicles; the strange half-tank half-car that had stopped at the garage earlier, and a number of large trucks bearing the insignia ‘E H Bradley; building works, Swindon’ on their sides. Around these vehicles, strewn on the cobbles of the forecourt and sat upon muddy tyre tracks, were several crates and sacks, spades, ropes.
‘Hmm. Hardly the English idyll I remember’ grumbled Lewis.
‘I’m sure it’s fine inside, Jack,’ Owen said, ‘This will all be something to do with the excavations.’ He explained, waving his hand at the mess before them. Nevertheless, he felt a strong urge to draw their attention elsewhere to lighten his friend’s mood. ‘It’s not quite lunchtime, so let’s walk some of the circle.’ He suggested.
The men had approached Avebury from the west, the direction of Beckhampton and had entered the circle along the high street – so now Barfield led them back a few hundred yards and turned south off the street through a wooden gate to where the banks and ditch of the great circle could be seen, curving far out of sight.
The remains of the circle itself still impressed: it would have taken one at least half an hour to have walked the circumference of the ditch with its towering external bank that marked the bounds of the monument. Even though in places it was choked with trees and scrubby bushes the great earthwork remained imposing, despite having been weathered by over four thousand years of Wiltshire winters.
The three friends strolled along the south-western quarter of the circle, which was divided into four segments by the roads that entered the village from each of the cardinal points, near enough, roads that respected the original entrances of the circle. The grass in the south-western quarter was being kept low by the numerous sheep that roamed here. Along this entire stretch there lay just one standing stone, though mounds along the inner edge of the ditch suggested where more lay beneath the surface, as if sleeping under grassy blankets.
The single remaining stone was larger than any of the men there present, gnarled, unworked and slightly twisted like the trunk of a storm blasted tree; and each took time to touch its rough, lichen-covered skin, warm to the touch at first, but soon yielding to a deep coolness, the heart of the stone yet to be warmed by the growing sun.
‘I don’t know why but I had imagined the stones like those at Stonehenge – taller and dressed; this is far more earthy, somehow, more wild…’ Lewis said.
‘I thought you had seen them before?’ remarked Tolkien.
‘No – we made a dash for the Red Lion in the rain and when we had emerged again it was quite dark.’
‘Imagine how it would have looked when all the stones were standing…’ Barfield said.
Lewis nodded. ‘Where did the rest go?’
‘Some were buried,’ Barfield said, gesturing at the humps dotted about the inner edge of the ditch, ‘others destroyed – heated by fires built around them and then dowsed in cold water so they broke apart.’ Barfield added.
‘Damn puritans!’ Lewis said, winking at Tolkien.
‘Were they pulled down by religious zealots or by farmers wanting decent material for their dry-stone walls, I wonder?’ Tolkien mused. He ran his hand over the stone; it seemed so alone now that its fellows were gone or lying nearby under the turf. An image crossed his mind of the sleeping stones waking and casting off their green covers on some magical future dawn, rough faces creased against the light of the rising sun on the Day of Judgement. Would the rocks and stones themselves be held accountable for what ancient man had done in ignorance here at their feet, or would they shout hosanna and be exalted when the crooked was made straight and the rough places plain?
‘This is one of the smaller of the remaining stones, however.’ Barfield said, gesturing them onwards.
Crossing the road into the south-eastern quarter the friends arrived before two leviathans of stone that had once marked the southern entrance.
‘I’ve lived in smaller houses than this!’ Lewis said, walking around the first of the stones. It stood twice as tall as a man, and he guessed ten men could stand side by side along its width. It was angular rather than rounded, set aslant so that no side, save the front and back faces, seemed level. Halfway along its southern side lay a fissure with a ledge upon which a man could have easily sat.
‘My word! It simply dwarfs any other stone circle I’ve ever seen!’ Lewis exclaimed.
‘Careful which way you walk, Jack…’ Barfield scolded. ‘This is the Devil’s Chair: if you walk three times around it anti-clockwise the Devil appears.’
Lewis tried it, to no avail.
‘Maybe it has to be at midnight? These things usually are…’ Tolkien suggested, as Lewis finished his final circumnavigation.
‘Or at full moon, or midsummer.’ Lewis proposed, slightly breathless. ‘Is it full moon?’
‘No – just past the new, we may be treated to a beautiful crescent later.’ Tolkien said, secretly thinking how sad it was that most people had no idea what phase the Moon was at.
The three friends continued their stroll along the top of the ditch, which in this quarter was choked with bushes and trees – until they crossed into the north-east section, having passed a large number of mature trees on the outer bank, their roots entwined like thousands of serpents pouring down into the ditch below; as they continued they stopped at the few remaining stones until they had nearly completed the entire circuit of the monument. They had reached its northernmost point, where the road to Swindon cut through the banks, here another huge marker stone remained, on the opposite side of the circle from the Devil’s chair they had seen earlier. They were admiring this massive diamond of rock from across the road when at that moment a great boom sounded, accompanied by shouts, from beyond the stone; a boom that made Tolkien wince in memory.
‘What on earth was that?’ Lewis asked.
They crossed the road and passed the stone in its cove of trees, approaching a large group of individuals who they could now see assembled in a far section of the quadrant, who were gazing up at the tree-lined banks ahead. One of the men turned, and, spotting the three friends, hastened towards them.
The man was stocky, with creased friendly eyes and gingery brown hair, greying at the temples, swept over his forehead, but from his long pale overcoat and cap he was recognisable as the gentleman who they had seen at the tea-rooms earlier, re-fuelling the strangely military-looking car.
‘Afternoon gentlemen!’ he beamed, in a clipped, upper class voice, with only slight traces of a Scots accent. ‘A word of warning: we’re blasting the tree roots from the banks, and so if you wouldn’t mind keeping your distance from that part of the path, we wouldn’t want you to be caught in the falling debris.’ he smiled broadly. There was something of the schoolboy in his manner.
‘Is this to do with the excavation?’ Barfield asked.
‘Excavation? Yes, yes! Are you interested in archaeology?’ he asked, his eyes lit up with boyish enthusiasm.
‘Well, yes...’ Replied Barfield, but before he could qualify the statement the man had grinned and continued.
‘Alexander Keiller,’ he said, extending his hand, ‘I’m heading the excavations here; please let me show you what we’re up to!’
Introducing themselves to their excitable guide as they walked the three friends followed Keiller towards the assembled group, some smartly dressed, others clearly labourers in their shirtsleeves, dirty from their work, but before they reached the main group Keiller turned and beckoned to the three friends to join him at the edge of the ditch; here it had been excavated far below its present level – incredibly so – if the present ditch was the depths of two men, the excavated section, with its crisp straight sides in blazing white chalk, was another six men deep.
Young workmen in caps and waistcoats, their shirtsleeves rolled up, were digging the dirty chalk from the ditch; and shoring up the sides of the vast trench with wooden revetments noisily being hammered into place. In one place on the floor of the ditch a large bone stuck out of the soil, and beside it the unmistakeable smooth polished curve of a yellowed skull.
‘The original ditch, before time silted it up – was some forty feet in depth! And the bank, too, we suppose, much, much higher than it appears today. In short this feature would have been absolutely impenetrable!’
Lewis was shaking his head. ‘My word! That is truly astounding – one would never have guessed!’
‘No, quite! It shocked us, too – we kept on thinking we had reached the bottom, but no! This site is the most spectacular prehistoric circle in the world… and it’s my dream to restore it to its former glory… already we’ve located many of the stones that were buried, and we can erect them once more. The ditches and banks can be cleared of trees, which just leaves the…’ and he waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the edge of the village with its shanty building and animal pens.
Just then the group gathered to the south edged back from the ditch as a man further up the bank opposite shouted a warning, and ran back round along the top of the bank to a safe distance. A few seconds later another boom rang out and a fountain of earth and debris was thrown into the air, pattering down into the ditch and leaving a smoking crater from which the gnarled and blasted remnants of a tree root poked.
A cry rang out and a tall dark-haired young man clutched at his head then bent over to retrieve his glasses that had been knocked off by a piece of falling matter. A couple of those nearby rushed over to see if he was okay, and he nodded that he was fine.
Keiller whooped with delight. ‘Ha! Piggott!’ he shouted over ‘It’s good for you younger men to know how we felt in the trenches in 1916!’ He winked and laughed heartily.
Lewis rested his hand on Tolkien’s arm, seeing the latter pale at the explosion.
‘I’m okay, Jack.’ He said. Besides, he thought, I’m thinking of them, not me - and the bloody mess happening in Germany right now. What if these ditches they’re digging here are just practice? I’m thinking of my sons…
Keiller turned to the friends, gesturing them to follow him towards the main group. Piggott didn’t look impressed. He held out the piece of wood that had hit him towards Keiller– not a large piece but big enough for him to dab a handkerchief in his dark hair and examine it for any signs of blood.
‘You’ll live, my boy – I’d keep that as a souvenir! Look: it looks like they’ve found some more human remains in the ditch…’ he said, guiding Piggot away, but not before turning to the three friends.
‘I really must dash – very nice to have met you! Always nice to meet fellow enthusiasts… you’d be surprised at how many consider this the height of time-wasting and folly.’ Keiller beamed, before disappearing with the dazed and frowning Piggot towards the white chalk ditch.
‘Now there’s a man with vision.’ Remarked Lewis as they approached the car park of the Red Lion.
‘Let’s hope it’s the same one our ancestors had, if he’s hoping to rebuild what was here.’ Barfield said.
‘It’s easier to have a vision when you have the money to back it up.’ Tolkien said.
‘Yes, I suppose. Where do you think his money is coming from?’ Lewis asked.
‘It’s Keiller, Jack. As in Keiller’s Dundee marmalade,’ said Barfield.
‘Ah, yes! The marmalade millionaire!’ Lewis laughed. ‘I have a jar at the Kilns! Warnie will be most impressed!’
He suddenly stopped and laughed again. ‘He certainly seemed to be possessed with a real ‘zest’ for his subject…’ Lewis proposed, grinning.
Tolkien chuckled. ‘Who better, then, to preserve the past?’
Barfield shook his head. ‘Do you think he’ll want to rename this place Scone-henge?’
‘For that appalling pun, Owen, you’re buying the first round’ Lewis said, opening the door to the Red Lion.
Chapter Ten: The Dream
Conall’s walk back to the camper had been a gloriously drunken affair; clutching a large bottle of water he’d bought at the Avebury post-office as he left the village, he had staggered back along the avenue, smiling at the stones and greeting the blackbirds and sheep with hellos; he had attained, so it seemed to him, a glimpse into the state of, if not Mankind before the Fall, at least himself before the events of the last year had overshadowed him; the words of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill, his favourite poem, formed an internal soundtrack to his stumbling;
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold
And the Sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams
Conall stood in the Avenue, arms wide, and recited the poem to the sky.
It was all shining, It was Adam and Maiden.
Maiden… maiden. Just the mere word sent a primal and visceral quiver through his chest…Oh Shenandoah…
I long to see you! Away, you rolling river!
Such a state was a rare and precious occurrence in any man, let alone Conall for whom the last year had offered little respite from unhappiness. Three hours driving and three swift pints were no doubt part of the recipe on this occasion (though such recipes were doomed to failure if consciously repeated) but the role his meeting with Shenandoah Mac Govan-Crow had played in inducing this state would have been impossible for him to fathom; quite why his initial shock and disquiet had given way to this unexpected upwelling of joy eluded him. And his reaction was not to question it too closely lest this flimsy shell of happiness cracked. It did not even seem to lie wholly in the unlikely possibility that last year’s sentiments might once more be resurrected; subsequent events had put pay to that possibility, as had the presence of, what was his name again? Hayden. Perhaps then, after all, it was simply the peace of the place and the alcohol, and the memory of happiness reminding him that the emotion still lived, though sleeping deep, within him?
Alcohol; that wonderful poison! It numbed the brain from the outside in – and as the outermost part of this organ was the youngest evolutionary speaking, and which contained our so-called civilised side, our inhibitions and social niceties, these were the first qualities to vanish when the poison started working… Con remembered an image he’s seen of a brain in a textbook, sliced in half and its different areas shaded; like the rings of a tree, the deeper you went in, the older the organ became; on the outer surface was the neo-mammalian brain, shared by us and other developed mammals – beneath that lay the palaeo-mammalian brain and within that, towards the core, lay the reptilian brain – a level of brain we shared with lizards and fish; indeed, as an embryo in the womb we had gills and a tail and went through the whole of evolution in nine months, from fish to hairless ape; he thought of his own mother’s womb with the twin fish swimming aside each other, like Yin and Yang. Perhaps this was why when we drink we feel closer to the animals, Con reasoned, we’re sloughing off our humanity, that thin, filmy outer surface of the brain, and we’re thinking instead (if thinking was an apt word, which he doubted) with our deeper animal brains; and if we drank so much, or if we could perhaps somehow go all the way back, why… we’d be like snakes or fish - primal sea serpents – what kind of knowledge would we then possess – knowledge of our ancient selves – what kind of deep primeval memories might lie stirring in our deep serpentine brains? He wondered. If we could but think those thoughts and shut off all the noise of the later brains! An image arose in his mind from one of Wagner’s operas he’d once been forced to watch (and had grown to enjoy) where Siegfried slew the dragon and drank his blood and could understand the language of the birds. The dragon’s blood clearly gave access to that primal reptilian knowledge, older than man – locked within our psyches – usually never heard or heeded, save perhaps when we lie basking in the warmth of the sun; yet our most basic functions are controlled from this part of the brain – breathing, regulation of temperature… was this why wisdom was often depicted in serpentine form? The entwined snakes on the caduceus of Hermes or the staff of Asclepius?
The sun was still high above Waden Hill, the shadows of the stones short; the farthest stones visible of the southern end of the Avenue danced in the heat; all seemed still; no birds were flying. The archaeologists had ceased digging and were sat with their backs to the sun in the shadow of two stones. Con was pissed enough to wonder over to them.
‘Found anything?’ he asked, dumbly.
A middle-aged man with a short silver goatee beard ran his fingers through his hair and swallowed the mouthful of sandwich he had been eating, and looked up at Con, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand.
‘Well… we were looking to see if the stone was in the right place – the circle was partly rebuilt in the 30’s; this one had been put back in place with concrete, and so we’re looking to see if we can find traces of the original stone-hole… but we’re also looking at the original ground-surface…’
He stood. ‘See the compacted chalk, here?’
Con nodded, looking at a smooth and pristine square of exposed white earth, inches below the topsoil with its long pale grass.
‘We’re looking to see if it’s more worn and compacted between the stones or outside of them…’
‘So, you can gauge if people were processing along them or not?’ Con asked.
‘Precisely. It tells us just as much if we find out that they weren’t…’
Con looked puzzled.
‘This site is part of a henge,,,’ the archaeologist said, ‘basically a big circular ceremonial structure, and we know henges are ceremonial as they have a bank on the outside of the ditch…’ he waved loosely in the direction of the huge henge bank over his shoulder that ringed the village, the trees that lined it still visible at this distance.
‘That would be useless as a defensive feature – where you’d ideally put the bank on the inside…’
Con knew all of this but was nodding anyway, wondering where the archaeologist was heading, and suddenly needing to piss…
‘But what if they were defensive, but from the inside? What if they were keeping something in?’ He raised an eyebrow, grinning.
‘What, like animals? Herds of cows?’ Con asked. Or bulls? He wondered, suddenly seeing the henge as a great bullring, ringed with cheering crowds.
The man shrugged. ‘We’ll see. If you’re here over the next couple of days, we may find out. We might find foot or hoofprints along the avenue… or we may find evidence of footfall outside of the Avenue… as it may have been it wasn’t meant for mortals to walk on at all.’
‘A kind of ghost road?’ Con asked.
‘Yes, something like that. Perhaps the stones represented ancestors or spirits.’
‘Keep me posted.’ Con said, wanting to stay and talk but increasingly needing to pee.
Once over the hill and out of view of the archaeologists he lent with an unsteady hand on a stone and pissed against its base - returning nitrogen to the soil, he reasoned, yet feeling slightly uneasy, remembering what the archaeologist had said about the stones; nevertheless, it was with a lighter step that he marched down the slope to where his camper lay parked beside the road.
The inside of the camper was like an oven; he closed the curtains, slid open the windows on the opposite side, and cleared the heap of clothes off the sofa-bed; Con took a large tepid draught from his water bottle and lay down, eyes closed. His plan was to re-hydrate himself and snooze for a while so that he wouldn’t spend the night at the pub with a blinding headache sipping orange juice.
For a moment he swooned into a deep, dark, state of relaxation, but a few seconds later his feet seemed to be rising above his head sickeningly, and so he sat upright and drank a little more water until the van stopped moving skywards. I’m such a lightweight, he thought. Three pints and I’m pissed. His eyes began to close, and the room fell away again; he felt nauseous. Fuck, fuck, fuck; the ancient reptile within was rebelling against the poison; the alcohol had changed the viscosity of the liquid in his inner ear, making him feel he was moving when he was still; the primal serpent, basically an alimentary canal on legs, was attempting to rid itself of the poison that was threatening its life. But Con was able to summon enough outer brain to fight this urge.
It took a further twenty minutes of attempting, and failing, to keep his eyes closed without feeling dizzy before the motion of passing cars rocking the camper lulled him into a half-doze. He dozed on and off, drinking some more water when he remembered, until finally the urge to sleep left him.
Sitting up he felt the first dull twinges of headache. He searched the drawers above the hob and sink for an ibuprofen. He couldn’t find the bloody things, and instead he reached higher and took the Collected Coleridge from the bookshelf; he didn’t open it, just held it to his chest, lost in thought. He was thinking of a dream he had had some twenty years before whose meaning had eluded him at the time but which had somehow become connected to all of this… to this place, to her; he had shaken it from his mind earlier but now in his half-aware state he allowed himself to remember.
The dream was simple yet profound:
He was walking through a spring landscape, at some unspecified date long ago in the past – deep in prehistory - on the site, though no monument was yet present, of some future circular earthwork or henge. In the distance there was a mountainous expanse with a great chasm in its side. Continuing to walk he had found himself beside a gently meandering stream on the banks of which were three white cows with red ears, grazing, and beside them a stately woman, no, a goddess, in a long blue robe, her face hidden by a hood. She approached the stream and placed one end of the wand she was carrying into the water, whereupon the river turned milky white. Conall removed his clothes and walked into the water, then knelt and submerged himself in the cool depths three times… after the last submersion he turned to see a white horse with a shining crescent moon set between its brows standing on the river bank beside him. He walked out of the water and kissed it between her brows but instead of leaping on to its back, as it gestured him to do, Conall walked beside it, still naked…
The dream imagery had stuck with him far longer than any normal dream; it had had the clarity of a vision; it had seemed to suggest rebirth, a new start- but only now was he starting to understand it – images within it which had remained a mystery had started to make sense over the past couple of years; clues within it had been instrumental – more than instrumental – vital – in his academic work investigating these ancient sites; and details that had meant nothing at the time had come to seem more than coincidental, as if the dream had been prophetic – and it’s tied to this place, thought Con, I know it.
When he had been here last spring, he had returned to his camper one evening after seeing Shen at the cottage, feeling restless, uneasy, like he wanted to run or shout or smash something; it was a feeling of a joyous rage, of intoxication. It was as if a fire had been lit within him; like he wanted to roar with the life he felt. Remembering the dream, he had gone to the Kennet that night, wishing to act it out; it seemed madness at the time – what did he think he was doing? This, he had reasoned, is how rituals must start – with the physical acting out of a vision. He had felt compelled to go – the dream image kept rising in his mind, relentless, hypnotic in its quiet insistence; the thought of entering those cool waters promised not a dampening or cooling of his ardour, but a transformation of it. Maybe I’m ready, he had thought, to start anew; he remembered how he had felt in the dream, slick from the water, his hair plastered back from his forehead, like a new born; he’d felt like a young god, like the kouros of Poseidon rising from the some primal amniotic fluid – but he hadn’t gone through with it. He had just stared into the inky waters feeling empty and suddenly wary and had returned to the camper, mute and deflated.
Why that night of all nights, he now wondered? Had he somehow known? Not that there was any way he could have – even if twin quantum particles could affect each other though separated millions of light years apart in space – how would it be remotely possible that he could somehow intuit what she had been doing at that very moment? Because it had been then, he knew in his heart of hearts. But he had felt a sense of renewal, not of fear. And surely, he should have felt her fear?
I go to the river to die…
But there had been no connection; it was coincidence, that’s all; it was all in his head; it was a door into madness to think otherwise. And yet he would have rushed headlong through that door if it meant, for a single precious moment, that the connection had been there - a hint that the entanglement had been real; that somehow, beyond time and space, they had always been, and therefore always would be, together.
But he had not known her anguish. There was no quantum entanglement; no tie; no hope; just mute nothingness and an old book, bent out of shape and disfigured by the desperate scribblings of her pain, which now mercifully had ended. He was too shocked to close his eyes and try to sleep again; and too hurt to cry. He drew aside the curtain facing the Avenue; the field with its double line of stones lay empty. Likewise, out of sight, the tourists in the main circle to the north were slowly departing, leaving it to its ghosts. Long past its zenith the sun was gilding the edges of the stones and the trees that crested the hills, but Con was immune to its beauty. The fine shell of happiness had cracked.
Chapter Eleven: Mac Govan-Crow
Tolkien and Barfield sat at the small table beside the window, relieved to have at last reached the Red Lion and un-shouldered their heavy packs. Lewis was at the bar, where he was talking to the barman as the latter poured beer from a jug into three pint mugs.
The room was busy and filled with smoke; in one corner two men in caps played at dominoes; in the other corner, far from the patch of sunlight in which Tolkien found himself sitting, sat a solitary figure, puffing on his pipe and eyeing Tolkien with dark heavy lidded eyes. Tolkien looked away hurriedly and smiled at Barfield.
‘Jack’s on top form.’ he said, on hearing the barman laugh at one of Lewis’s witticisms. Owen nodded, but his eyes suggested something different than the smile that briefly played over his lips.
‘I find Jack somewhat, I don’t know, flat of late.’ he said.
‘Flat?’
‘His arguments lack conviction. It’s as if some of that fire he once had has left him. I suppose it was the part of him that was searching… but now he has found God it’s as if the search is over and that hunger has somewhat abated. His opinions have become fixed.’
It was clear from his expression that Barfield had found this change in his friend painful. ‘I did so used to enjoy seeing him fired up.’ He smiled sadly and blinked a few times. ‘Did you see his face when he said about no longer being a poet? That’s all that used to drive him. He seems lost, for having become found.’
Tolkien looked away, unsure of how to respond to his friend’s observation, and found himself once more under the gaze of the swarthy man in the corner. Having had his gaze met Tolkien decided he could not be rude and look away for a second time and so he touched his cap in greeting. Slowly, the man in the corner responded, touching his cap with stubby, dirty fingers, his eyes remaining still fixed on the pair at the window, midst the blue cloud of pipe smoke.
Unnerved, Tolkien fidgeted in his waistcoat pocket for his own pipe, filled the bowl and then laid it on the table, then changed his mind and put it in his mouth unlit, then took it out to speak.
‘He seems little altered to me, Owen; but you have known him longer, I suppose. Perhaps what you’re observing is the mellowing of a man in his middle years, as we all are, no doubt?!’
Owen smiled. ‘Perhaps you are right, Ronald.’
‘Time ever marches on.’ Tolkien said, striking a match and lifting to his pipe. ‘Unlike us. I think it’s a good decision to stay here tonight,’ he said; they had reached this decision moments before. What had appeared during their planning a decent spot to pause had, in truth, appeared more attractive in the flesh, so to speak; Calne could wait.
Lewis returned to the table with the foaming mugs in his hands. He was frowning.
‘No room at the Inn, I am sorry to say – nor, it seems, at the other place across the road… all been booked up by that archaeologist Keiller, but all is not lost...’ He said enigmatically and he returned to the bar.
Tolkien sipped at the foam of the beer. ‘I do hope so. I don’t really fancy walking much further today. I thought the idea was to break us in slowly, not kill us off on day one.’ A fleeting smile played across his lips. ‘I dare say there should be room still at Calne if it should come to that...’
Just then the barman, with whom Lewis was talking, turned and raised his voice.
‘George?’
At this, the dark-complexioned man in the corner who had been watching Barfield and Tolkien, set down his drink and headed for the bar, where he was seen to engage Lewis in conversation. Tolkien eyed the pair, noting the man’s long-hair bound in a ponytail, like some tinker or gypsy, he thought. A moment later the two men were walking towards the table. Tolkien and Barfield stood to greet the stranger.
‘This is Mr Mac Govan-Crow,’ Lewis said, ‘and it seems he has a couple of rooms to rent in the village, which is excellent news.’
Mr Mac Govan-Crow once again touched his hand to his cap.
‘He has invited us to see the rooms, but I’ve assured him that I am sure they will be more than suitable; shall we bring our packs along after our lunch?’ he asked the newcomer.
Mr Mac Govan seemed to be eyeing the three gentlemen with veiled amusement, much to Tolkien’s discomfort. ‘’Tis no bother, sirs. I’ll take your luggage now; if you come after you’ve eaten, I shall provide you with a key.’ His accent was pure West Country, even if his swarthy, aquiline looks with their black eyes like crescents over high cheekbones, were not. He effortlessly shouldered Lewis’s pack, despite his short stature, then picked up the other two in his hands and exited the pub.
‘Good god he must be as strong as an ox!’ exclaimed Tolkien. ‘Mac Govan-Crow, eh? If he’s a Celt, then I’m a Zulu!’
‘Yes. I know. Listen to this. He's a full-blooded Red Indian by all accounts, so the barman told me! ‘Hawkeye, Last of the Mohicans’ the landlord called him.’ Lewis said.
‘Hawkeye?! People can be so uneducated!’ Tolkien scowled.
Lewis nodded.
‘Everyone knows that the last of the Mohicans was Uncas! Hawkeye was a white man!’ Tolkien explained.
Lewis suddenly laughed. ‘My dear Tollers! There was I agreeing over what I thought was your annoyance over a racial stereotype whereas your real annoyance was over the fact the barman didn’t know his Fennimore-Cooper well enough!’
Tolkien smiled. ‘Both rankle with me –ignorance is ignorance, I suppose. And if you’re stupid enough to cast about racist nicknames you’re also stupid enough not to know you’ve chosen a character of the wrong race to begin with! I was brought up reading the Leatherstocking tales; I used to fantasize about living in the forests, hunting with a bow…this is absolutely marvellous! I wonder if he speaks any Native languages…?’ Tolkien asked, his eyes lighting up. ‘How on earth did he end up in Wiltshire?!’ he continued. ‘What tribe is he?’
‘I don’t care, as long as he can cook a good English breakfast.’ Lewis quipped, and sipped his pint. But Tolkien wouldn’t let the subject drop.
Owen had spread his ordnance survey map out across the table – and the friends spent a few minutes looking closely at the finer details, while thirstily emptying their glasses.
‘So, the question is whether we take a walk back to Silbury now and climb it before dinner – or, seeing is we are now staying the night, we save that until tomorrow.’
Tolkien was looking at the map in silence.
‘Just look at the number of ancient features – dozens more burial mounds than I suspected; and look at that…’
‘What is it?’ asked Lewis.
‘That hill – Windmill hill on Stukeley’s map – there’s some kind of square enclosure on top and here the hill is called Waden hill.’
‘Waden? And what do you deduce from that?’ Lewis asked, downing his pint.
‘And the spring…’ he continued, not pausing to answer Lewis’s question, ‘the Kennet spring, is here named Swallowhead! Swallow. Well I never! Suilo. It seems my vision of that lady floating in the waters of the Kennet was probably correct…if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the book over the last few days I would’ve had time to do some research, I had no idea… the hill’s named after the spring…not vice versa…’
‘Explain!’ Lewis said, annoyed at his friend’s seemingly random muttering
‘Only if you get in another jug, this is going to be thirsty work!! We need the ale of inspiration!’
Chapter Twelve: Adversity
Once more seated at the table by the window of the Red Lion Conall was swirling his glass of diet coke so that the large effervescent paracetamol and codeine tablets he’d dropped into it would dissolve more quickly. The fizzing finally stopped, and he swallowed the resulting bittersweet liquid with a grimace. He had left his campervan dehydrated with his head threatening to burst with every heartbeat making the walk to the pub nauseatingly painful and arduous. Now faced with a veggie lasagne with onion rings he looked down at the plate and wanted to heave, but he dipped a ring into a large heap of mayonnaise and persevered. Then he ate like a starving dog.
At the bar sat the wiry, shaven-headed man who had joined in with the folk singers earlier that day; he had greeted Conall with ‘y’alright?’ as he’d ordered his meal and Conall had done his best to nod, noticing the piercing in the man’s bottom lip above a greying goatee beard constrained in a leather thong, and the heavily tattooed arms. Now seated by the window Conall couldn’t help but listen to the man, who was speaking in a thick Yorkshire accent, talking to the pretty barmaid who had taken his food order earlier. The man’s words, like his accent, were strong – liberally peppered with swearing. He was showing the barmaid something he had on a lace about his neck that she was regarding with interest.
A little later the shaven-headed man left for a smoke and Conall took his now-empty plate to the bar; he ordered a Jack Daniels and coke and repaired to his seat. His headache had abated somewhat, but still hang around his temples; perhaps the shot would help, he thought, optimistically. He suddenly realised he was rocking back and forth on his seat like a caged animal, and so made a conscious effort to stop, only to find his fingers rapping on the tabletop. It was through these physical expressions that Conall realised just how nervous he was about seeing Shen. There, at that very bar, he had first talked to her, all those months ago. He had been less nervous then. He couldn’t imagine doing it now. My fire has left me, he thought bitterly.
The door creaked open and Conall’s pulse shot up, but it was not Shen. It was a man in a biker’s jacket, tall, well-built, with a shock of red-blond hair and short fiery beard and blue eyes; Con breathed a sigh of relief, but it caught in his throat as he spied Shen walking in after him; she leant up and said something to him, then glanced about for Conall.
Shen smiled and lifted a hand, but before she could walk over the shaven-headed man had walked back in and had greeted her with a bear hug; turning, he shook Hayden’s hand and the two men headed for the bar.
‘What would you like to drink?’ Shen asked, walking over to Conall, her eyes smiling. ‘A beer; Green King – same as earlier’ he said. But rather than stay sitting waiting to be introduced to the others Conall rose and approached the bar with her.
‘Conall, this is Wolf Jones, he’s staying at the cottage, and this is Hayden…’ Wolf’s handshake was friendly and vigorous, and accompanied by the same ‘Y’alright?’ as earlier; Hayden’s grip was firm and he glanced at Conall with a lack of scrutiny that suggested either Shen had said nothing about their past (not that there was much to tell, he thought), or Hayden was not the kind of bloke to be troubled by such things.
‘A bitter drinker, eh?’ he said, his voice deep with a strong West Country tang. ‘That’s what we like to see! You here for the protest?’
‘I didn’t know it was happening, to be honest – I just needed to get away from London.’ Con stated.
‘Where are you staying?’ Hayden asked.
‘In my campervan ‘, he began, and when Wolf raised his eyebrows in interest he continued ‘I’m parked down by the avenue.’ Conall replied.
‘Silver fiat Scudo?’ Wolf said, ‘I think I saw it at the Sanctuary earlier. Nice little conversion – I’d love to have a poke around’ Wolf cut in. Conall tried to recall if he’d seen anyone there, ‘I was in my van just up from you – big black bastard with wolves on t’side.’ He chuckled.
‘Yeah, I saw your van.’ Conall said, trying not to think of the van rocking…
Shen and Wolf took their drinks over to the table while Conall waited for his own to be poured. He stood in silence next to Hayden who was tapping in his pin number into the card reader. Conall made an offer to pay for his pint but the other refused, and so Conall took both his and Hayden’s pints back to the table. Wolf had sat opposite Shen, leaving Conall to decide whether to sit next to Wolf or next to Shen; either way he’d have to sit opposite Hayden. He decided to sit beside Wolf – at least that way he’d be able to look Shen in the face.
‘Shen says you’re doing some research on the henges?’ Wolf asked.
‘Something like that…’ Con answered, dismissively.
‘It’s a cool place; the energy here is amazing. I was up at West Kennet this morning drumming…’ he closed his eyes and exhaled ‘…it was a beautiful sunrise.’
Hayden had arrived and nestled in beside Shen.
‘Did I hear you say drumming? Another fucking weirdo!’ He laughed.
‘I’ll pick you up at 5am tomorrow then, Hayden? I’ve got a spare drum…’
Hayden raised a sceptical eyebrow and smiled.
‘Such a shame, mate – I’ll be leaving for work before that… maybe next time.’ He said, winking. ‘You see it all here – drums, didgeridoos… croppies’ he swigged his pint.
‘Joking aside, you should try it.’ Wolf suggested, with sincerity.
‘Nah. Not my thing.’ He placed his hand over Shen’s, ‘I’m kind of a bit too practical for all that shit; but live and let live – it don’t bother me.’
Conall had so far remained silent, trying desperately hard to find something to say.
‘What’s a croppy?’ he asked
Hayden nodded towards a group on a table by the fire – long haired for the most part and sporting various types of facial hair, but these were not the usual hippy types dressed in colourful loose clothes – these seemed more techno-nerds, in blacks and dark greens – close-fitting, camouflaging - who were currently sharing images on their mobile phones and laughing.
‘Circlemakers.’
‘What – crop circles? These guys make them?’
‘Well, you can be sure little green men don’t – this lot are behind most – though they’ll not admit it; it’s all part of the mystique, apparently.’
‘I think I’d tell people – I’d be well proud.’ Wolf laughed.
‘They make a shit load of money, too – corporate branding etcetera – media and businesses pay these guys to stick advertising in fields – there was one a couple of years ago advertising Shredded Wheat – or film promos. If they let on they did them all they’d ruin the mystery and then no one would pay them to do it; it pays for them to keep quiet.’
Con continued to look over at them; they looked unassuming - perhaps, he thought, they derived some nerdish glee from pulling the wool over people’s eyes - drinking beer then going and playing practical jokes in a Wiltshire cornfield on a balmy summer’s night and gleefully listening to the speculation here the next day seemed a fairly innocuous hobby; it was all mercurial, childish fun. But perhaps he was doing them a disservice; perhaps they really were really faceless artists speaking up for the earth.
Another pint drunk, Conall was finding his tongue beginning to loosen.
‘So do you let Shen read your cards?’ he asked Hayden.
Hayden laughed and shot him a look that said ‘are you serious?’
‘It’s bollocks – I mean, a tarot card can no more tell my future than this beer mat; You know what I think? It’s more to do with her reading the people and then making the cards fit, don’t you think? She’s bloody good at reading people.’ He turned to Shen. ‘I mean it – you should go into psychology, or something. Use your skills properly. Or even the police, CID or something. This stuff’s okay, and people lap it up round here, but you could do something proper with it….’
Shenandoah looked up at him, her eyes wide. Conall couldn’t read what she was thinking.
‘I’m happy how it is, Hay. It’s starting to pay its way. And I can fit it in around my painting…’
‘Yeah, it is babe, but I just think you could be doing something better with it, that’s all.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘You’re wasted doing that.’
She looked up again and shrugged.
She met Con’s gaze for an instant, smiled weakly and then sipped her brandy and coke. He remembered her laughter from last year. She looked different now, kind of beaten down, or maybe she was just biting her tongue for the sake of the group. Besides, he guessed she could say the same of him – he felt uncomfortable here, a ghost playing at living, a cartoon character amongst flesh and blood men. Why can I never think of anything to say?! He berated himself.
‘So what do you do, Colin?’
‘Conall. Well, up ‘til recently I was a lecturer, in astrophysics.’
‘At last, a scientist!’ Hayden laughed and put out his hand for Con to shake. Conall shook his hand but felt like an idiot in doing so; Hayden’s hands were large and calloused; his own felt like a child’s in comparison.
‘til recently, you say?’
‘Yeah – I’m looking to lecture independently, and write – articles and stuff; I’m just fed up of London.’
‘He who is tired of London is tired of life’ – who said that?’ Wolf asked.
‘Samuel Johnson; well I guess I’m tired of life. I hate cities. I think mankind made a massive mistake in ever leaving the countryside.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you lived here; it’s fucking dead!’ Hayden laughed.
Con shrugged. ‘We’re not adapted for city life – we evolved in the Savannah, moving in small groups, close to nature; in a city we see more people in ten seconds than your average prehistoric man would have seen in a lifetime; I just don’t think we’re adapted for it – I think we miss it.’
Hayden snorted. ‘How can we miss what we’ve never had?’
Con shrugged.
‘I read once of an experiment where generations of finches were brought up in a secluded lab, yet despite never having been outside nor seen a predator, when a plastic hawk was passed overhead they all crouched and tried to hide… they’d never seen a hawk yet felt fear. It’s instinct. The yearning for nature is an instinct, too. We can miss the world our ancestors knew.’
I miss it, he thought; that ancient sense of belonging, of living in harmony with Nature; not barricading her outside of the city gates. I don’t feel at home among other people; I sleep better under the stars than in any bed…
‘Yeah, I do get where you’re coming from, but you can’t turn back the clock.’ Hayden said. ‘Or stop the march of progress.’
‘More’s the pity,’ said Wolf. ‘I’m sure there’s a correlation between stress and cruelty and the way cities depersonalize you… look at what happened when the Native Americans formed cities – human sacrifice on a mass scale.’
‘You can’t blame that on cities,’ Hayden re-joined ‘– that was just due to plain barbarism. 84,000 people sacrificed over 2 days, so the Spanish Chroniclers said.’
‘Exactly, Spanish Chroniclers – sooo trustworthy and unbiased….’ said Shen, chagrined.
‘Well,’ continued Hayden in what must have been a perennial argument between them, given the withering look on her face ‘it just goes to show the Indians were just as brutal as the Europeans – this crap people spout nowadays about the poor tree-hugging natives is just bullshit – Aho! It’s a good day to die!!! your ancestors were just as bloodthirsty as mine.’
Shen pouted. ‘One - The Aztecs weren’t my ancestors; you can’t lump a whole continent of peoples together like that. There’s a bit of a distance between Mexico and Canada, you know? And two - that’s like me blaming your Scottish ancestors for the Holocaust just because you’re European.’
In the half hour or so of conversations that followed Conall found himself still silent and increasingly morose; that mercurial spark of drunken vision he had known earlier had vanished; his second beer that night was, like the first, tackled more out of duty than enjoyment, and he was remaining resolutely and unfortunately sober. Having lost its control momentarily earlier his outer brain was not willing to relinquish its command so easily again. His social niceties and insecurities had snapped back in force. Sitting opposite Hayden he found that his view of Shen was mostly blocked by both Wolf and Hayden, as it was these two who were doing most of the talking, and both kept leaning forward over their drinks. Wolf would now and again ask Conall a question, but Hayden seemed to ignore Conall and Shen as he alternately clashed swords with Wolf or joined the other in raucous laughter. Now and again Conall would catch her eye and she’d raise an eyebrow. Eventually out of frustration Conall stood up and went and sat between her and Wolf at the end of the table.
‘You ok?’ he asked.
She smiled too broadly and said she was.
‘So what do you charge for a tarot reading?’ he asked, deliberately choosing the topic Hayden had been so dismissive of.
‘Well, if there’s a group of four or five, and I get a lot of groups, I’ll charge £100 for the evening.’
‘And individually?’
‘£25 to £30 I suppose. It’s tiring, though.’
‘I think it’s good, what you’re doing.’ He said.
She smiled again but looked sad. She looked at him, but he couldn’t read what was behind the look.
‘And the painting?’
‘So so. I’ve just got too much to do what with doing the house up, and the card readings; plus, it’s hard to find the time – as in I need space, you know, when I’m doing it. And…’ she hushed her voice ‘certain people don’t like me spending all my time concentrating on it and not them; I get a fair few interruptions…’
They smiled conspiratorially.
She sipped at her brandy and coke.
‘I really shouldn’t have any more; I’m such a light-weight these days!’
She held his gaze and her eyes creased in a smile.
‘I’m glad you’re here. Avebury, I mean – not the pub – not just the pub; sorry. I wondered how you were doing.’
‘Life goes on.’ Con said.
‘Yes, it does.’
Wolf, meanwhile, was explaining to Hayden about the protest, telling how when the archaeologist Stuart Piggott had excavated West Kennet Long-Barrow in the 1950’s most of the bones found in the chambers had been taken to Devizes museum. But recently a researcher had re-discovered the most important of these remains – a full skeleton (rare, as most of the bones in the mound had been leg bones) in the bowels of the museum stores and these remains were being moved into a new display in the museum here at Avebury. Why, Wolf was arguing, could they not be repatriated?
‘This man is one of our ancestors; why should he be put on display in a museum to be gawped at?’ Wolf said.
Hayden had been listening to this preamble without saying a word, but now began to speak.
‘Unless they do DNA testing on the bones he can’t really be claimed as an ancestor; besides – the bones are of scientific interest. What’s important is what the bones tell us about how people lived back then; their diet, their diseases.’
‘Yeah, that’s interesting – but what if it was your granddad being put on display?’ Wolf said.
Conall tried not to look at Shen.
‘He’s not, though,’ replied Hayden, ‘nor is he anyone’s granddad that’s alive today. You’re just being sentimental and giving the bones a value they don’t possess.’
‘What of the wishes of the man himself? He would want to be with his people, not in a glass case in a museum.’
‘Well, to be frank, we can’t ask him his wishes, can we? It just all seems a bit phoney.’ Hayden continued.
‘It would be different if he had been buried a Christian, though, wouldn’t it?’ Wolf countered, ‘or these were some Saint’s relics? People are so bloody careful about not treading on the toes of Christians, Muslims or anyone else that might take offence, but the rights of Pagans and our Pagan ancestors are completely overlooked.’
‘Maybe that’s because there’s no continuity of tradition. You pagans are just using the bones to make a point; you’re trying to find a link to the past to justify your own beliefs. If you have ancestors you can see and touch then you have roots you can boast of. It’s possibly different if you’re a Red Indian and you can show the White Man has dug up your ancestral burial ground and taken the bones of an individual you can possibly name – but that’s not the case here. ’
Con looked aside at Shen to see if she would react to the rather derogatory term ‘Red Indian’ but she seemed distant, as if not listening to the argument between the two men. Remembering his PhD tutor’s comments Con bit his tongue and remained silent.
‘But even though we don’t know his name we can probably say that thousands of us are descended from him.’
‘Which is why when he’s on display in the museum it’ll be interesting and informative. How can we learn from him when he’s stuck back up in West Kennet or buried up on Windmill Hill, is it, as you’re proposing?’
‘It’s not about learning, it’s about respect.’ Wolf said. ‘And you tell me the principal reason for him being on display is scientific? Is it bollocks! It’s entertainment. It’s about numbers through the door and selling more fookin’ guidebooks. It’s getting kids to gawp at a skeleton for entertainment, not education. If it wasn’t going to make money they wouldn’t bother.’
Hayden took a mouthful of beer.
‘I know that’s how you feel, but the protest just seems pointless. It’s whimsical and would deprive us of any future attempts to use the bones for all types of analyses we’ve yet to discover, despite what you think about it not really being scientific. Right, Colin? You’re a scientist; you understand the importance of this.’ Con just looked at Hayden without changing his expression, not that Hayden seemed to notice, for he continued speaking without pause: ‘Why should the greater part of mankind lose out just to satisfy the weird beliefs of a handful of hippies? Why should these few individuals lay claim to these bones when, as you say, thousands of us are descended from him?’
Con shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
‘Anyway…’ Hayden continued, ‘I’ve never been a fan of ineffective protests – and this is a waste of yours and everyone’s time; they’ve built the bloody display now – printed the new guidebooks, mugs, postcards, keyrings – and all manner of tat… what are they going to do? Say you’ve got a point and burn it all?’
Wolf paused, and instead of reacting he held his hand up and smiled; instantly any tension that had been building up around the table dissipated.
‘Well, we’ll agree to disagree on this.’ He said, taking out a pouch of tobacco and rolling himself a cigarette. He offered the pouch to Shen, who refused, with a furtive look at Conall. Hayden shook his head, but Conall took the proffered pouch from Wolf and rolled himself one.
Outside the pub, under the thatched eaves strung with outdoor lights, Wolf lit Conall’s fag, then his own.
‘That was very noble of you to bite your tongue.’ Conall offered.
Wolf blew out a long cloud of smoke, shaking his head.
‘I’ve heard it all before – but when I was talking about respect, I meant it. We have to respect the wishes of the person we’re putting on display... The way he was buried; the special treatment of his body as opposed to the others – he wasn’t the same; he had a special role; and we need to honour that…Putting him on display just isn’t right. It’s disrespectful. and to argue that we might lose out on future scientific discovery is just bullshit! Is this all he is – some science experiment? So, they cut up the bones and find out he ate 5% more wheat than a similar skeleton from France – so fucking what?’
Conall nodded. ‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘What does it say about modern man that he puts science before humanity? Hayden talks about value, but fails to see that surely the greatest value the bones possess isn’t the abstract facts we can glean about his life from them but from the very fact they were part of a living human being – that surely is where their true value lies... ’
‘So you’re with us? Hehe!’ Wolf said, grinning, and slapped him on the back. ‘You should’ve said that back in there… but I can tell you’re not much of a talker, are you? Besides, I’m not doing it because I’m a Pagan – I bloody hate most Pagans – you know, the weekend witch types; I know that it’s what the ancestors want.’ And he fixed Conall with a sidelong look.
‘I’m not interested in any religion that may or may not be made up, and a lot of modern paganism is, I’m talking about the spirits of the land, and those spirits are just as present today as they were thousands of years ago. You just have to have the humility to listen to them.’
He looked southwards over the stones, now cloaked in darkness.
‘You see, it’s not about the past – about turning back the clock, despite what Hayden thinks; it’s about remembering what we need NOW. That’s why I get fed up with people who moan on about the good old days - they have lost sight of the potential of the present… and we only have the present; we can change the direction our species is travelling in, but not backwards.’
Con nodded in agreement.
‘Do you know Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’?’ he asked his shaven-headed companion;
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”’
Now. It has to be now. He thought; the past is no more sacred than the now… only I find it hard to see it, damaged as I am by guilt.
‘There’s no going back, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from the past; all these progressives are so fucking dumb…’ Wolf spat. ‘I hate their self-serving greed– it’s all for the good of man, this myth of progress… some Jetsons future where all disease is cured and we’re all in flying cars; and what have we done to get there? Analysed all the bones, cut up all the animals; cut down all the trees... but it’s ok because it was done in the service of man. It’s bollocks. If you were walking in city and you realised you’d strayed into a shit neighbourhood you wouldn’t blindly carry, you’d bloody well turn back round and choose another route. That’s where we’re at, Con, or should I say Colin?’ he laughed ‘as a species we’ve taken a wrong turn, and we need the humility to accept we need to change our path,’
Conall looked at this strange mixture of a man; his tattoos, piercings, wiry strong arms, wickedly glinting, predator-like pale eyes. There was no pretence about him, nothing done for effect; he was as he was.
‘Civilization is not the be all and end all. Civilizations have come and gone and will do again; I just don’t want to be part of the civilization that took the whole world with it when it fell…’ Wolf said. Un-beckoned the image of a vast wave sweeping over towns and cities rose in Con’s mind…of lightning in a blackened, churning sky, and the view of collapsing cliffs viewed from a violently lurching boat… where the hell did that come from? He wondered, bemused. I know that scene…
‘The ancestors - they are saying remember us.’ Wolf was saying. Con, roused from his disturbing yet weirdly familiar reverie glanced out to where Wolf was gesturing, towards the stones whose giant hunched silhouettes were slowly becoming visible against the pallid night sky as their eyes became used to the darkness; And can you hear their voices? Con wanted to ask. Is this some poetic metaphor or can you really hear the voices of the dead? Can you hear her?
‘So, are you a pagan?’ Wolf asked.
Con shrugged.
‘I’m not a fan of labels; I sometimes think I’m close to a Taoist or a Buddhist – but a lot of their philosophy seems very life-negating – the universe is a veil of tears and delusion and we need to jump off it…’
Wolf nodded. ‘You know, I’m the same – some of the basic tenets I love, but I agree – life is to be lived; it’s not fucking easy – but it’s not meant to be easy; it’s certainly not meant to be thrown away.’
‘It can be fucking cruel.’ Con commented.
Wolf pulled a face.
‘Depends on your perspective; what if it’s not so much cruel as not making things easy?’
‘That implies intention – you can’t say that there’s some great cosmic being who intends for the world to be this way – babies dying in Africa, kids with cancer; earthquakes, hurricanes, murder…’
‘No, mate – I look at it on a smaller scale than that – what if there was a part of ourselves, not some great cosmic force, but something in us that somehow stage managed our lives? It could be part of that greater force, just not all of it. It’s like when you dream – you’re in the dream, talking to someone who isn’t you – yet when you wake up it’s all been in your own head, so that other person WAS you, you just couldn’t see it from within the perspective of the dream. What if life is like that dream, and really, we’re the stage manager and the actors – we just don’t have the perspective right now…I’m not saying I believe this, but I do sometimes wonder. If there was a greater part of me controlling things beyond my reach, I wouldn’t expect it to make things easy for me – for me to win the lottery or have a string of birds on my arm 24/7 – because if it was easy you wouldn’t try, and it’s through trying that you grow. Fortune favours the brave, and to be brave you need adversity.’
Adversity, thought Con. I’ve had my fair share…
‘There’s something that Krishna says in the Mahabaratha – love your enemies as they give you your destiny…’ Wolf said, then, changing tack, turned and looked directly at Con. ‘What do you think of Hayden?’
Conall shrugged, knowing any answer he gave wouldn’t be without bias.
Wolf smiled; ‘I don’t agree with his views, but he’s no fool. He’s a brave fucker: He was telling me last night about a rescue he was involved in on the M4 last year; I suppose you have to be no-nonsense and practical to deal with that kind of stuff; and have a certain amount of emotional distance. No room for sentimentality.’ Wolf grinned. ‘Hmm. Did you hope I was going to say he was a twat?’
Conall laughed. ‘Maybe. Maybe I wanted him to be one – I mean a fucking tall blond fireman. It’s like sitting opposite Thor.’
Wolf laughed. ‘What’s the story, then, with you and the lovely Shenandoah?’
Conall inhaled then blew the smoke out his nose with a shrug.
‘I met her down here last year. Spent a few days with her; we got on really well, but then something happened…’
Wolf gazed at him, unflinching. ‘She told me, you know… about your twin sister’s accident; I hope you don’t mind. I suppose she didn’t want me to put my foot in it or anything.’
Conall shook his head, both surprised she had mentioned it to Wolf, and that he didn’t mind she had done so.
‘Were you identical – you know, as I suppose a man and a woman can be?’
Con smiled. ‘No – different sex twins come from two eggs, actually - fertilised at the same time; we didn’t share an egg but we shared a womb – but yeah, she had the same hair as me – poor girl; but blue eyes.’
‘Same beard…?’ Wolf grinned. ‘Well, if you ever need to talk…I know that sounds lame, but it’s a genuine offer…’
Con paused as the laughing group of croppies exited the pub and walked into the dark.
‘Thank you. I think it’s all been said, though.’ He took a final drag off the cigarette, looking out over the field of stones across the road from the pub.
Wolf once more fixed him with his pale, predator’s eyes.
‘I very much doubt that. I get the feeling you’ve not even begun to talk about it. And you know that, too.’
‘It won’t bring her back.’ Conall said, through a cloud of smoke.
Wolf was quiet for a moment before he spoke.
‘No. But it might you.’
Chapter Thirteen: An Eye for an Eye
‘So are you going to enlighten us, now?’ Lewis asked, returning to the table with a jug of beer.
Tolkien was smiling. He took a sip of beer and lit his pipe.
‘Yes. That strange image I had of the lady floating down the Kennet like Ophelia… you see, I thought that had come about from our discussions of the dismembered vegetation god, or of Orpheus, but in fact I now see that it had its roots in what we had been discussing earlier, at Silbury. Remember I had argued that ‘Sil’ had come from the Welsh ‘Sul’, as in sun? Well, the word had been going round my head, clamouring for attention…’ he took another sip of beer – ‘but it was only just now when I saw the name of the spring, Swallowhead, that I understood what I was being shown…’
He scratched his chin, his eyes seeming to focus on a point far in the distance.
‘You see, Silbury and Swallowhead must both be derived from the same root word, which can’t be ‘sol’, Jack, as linguistically ‘sol’ could not become ‘swall’ – so we’re not looking at a derivation from the Latin, but from something much earlier. They both, in fact, come from a very ancient word that predates both the Latin and the Welsh form, that was closer to ‘sawol’; now in Irish this ancient word became ‘suil’ meaning ‘eye’… the sun being the eye in the heavens, one supposes – the divine eye.’
‘As in Ancient Egypt – where the eye of Ra, or of Horus, was the sun?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Exactly, Jack. This would make Silbury the ‘bury’, that is barrow, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘bearw’ - so mound of the eye’; and the Swallowhead spring would be the spring of the eye. As Swallowhead preserves the older form of Sawol, I would suggest it, and not the hill, was named first, though I may be wrong…’
‘If you don’t mind me asking, Ronald, whether derived from sun or eye, or whether the name of the spring predated the hill, what is the connection to your Ophelia?’ Barfield asked.
‘If one follows the old Roman road that goes past Silbury,’ Tolkien continued, ‘which follows a much older track-way, you find yourself at Bath – which as you know was known as Aquae Sulis the ‘waters of the goddess Sulis’; Sulis-Minerva was the goddess of the healing springs there, and her name shares the same etymology so it seems highly possible to me that she is also implicated here at Avebury.’
‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Lewis. ‘It hadn’t even entered my thoughts to link Silbury to Sulis. ’
‘Nor mine,’ Tolkien conceded ‘until I saw the name Swallowhead on this map – it was the connection of the word Sul to the waters of the spring rather than the hill that suggested it.’
‘I now have a rather incongruous image of Minerva, half submerged in the Kennet in a Greek chiton dress, a spear in one hand and an owl perched on her shoulder… ‘ Lewis said, laughing. ‘But the image of the eye and the spring, and a goddess of the waters is, as you know, an old Celtic trope… it’s found in the Irish legend of the origin of the river Boyne in Ireland.’
‘Remind me.’ Said Barfield.
He lit a cigarette and began;
‘The Boyne, Owen, was named after the goddess Boann who was a princess of the Tuatha De Danann, the people of the Goddess Danu, that is the Sidhe, the fairy folk; and her abode was the fairy mound of Newgrange. Now Boann had a husband named Nechtan who owned a magical spring. The spring was surrounded by nine hazel trees and the hazel nuts would fall into the water and be eaten by the speckled salmon who lived therein – and as the nuts contained all knowledge whoever drank of the waters of that well or ate of the salmon would become knowledgeable of all there was to know, had ever been known, and ever would be known...’
Jack’s eyes glistened; he enjoyed the telling of tales immensely.
‘…Only Nechtan and his three cupbearers could drink of the well; but out of curiosity Boann one day approached the well, wishing to drink for herself, and walked about it three times counter-clockwise… but the waters of the well rose up, creating a rushing river that pursued Boann to the coast, and it was said that the water erupted with such power that it ripped a leg, an arm and a single eye from her body, and that she drowned in the flood of waters that became the river which today bears her name.’
Tolkien nodded. ‘Given the number of river names in Europe associated with ancient Goddesses,’ he stated, ‘we can assume that the river was the goddess; so I think we can suggest that a similar legend once existed here at Avebury concerning that same goddess of the eye and/or sun, named Sulis – who perhaps drowned at the Swallowhead, or at least transformed into those waters.’
‘And the name Waden Hill…’ Jack offered, ‘comes from Woden? He, too lost an eye at a well…’ he stubbed out his cigarette on the table and let the butt fall onto the floor.
‘It’s a similar myth, Jack, but the name is sheer coincidence - Waden means hill of the idol – weoh-dun – that square enclosure on the map may once have been a shrine housing a heathen image.’ Tolkien said, ‘But you’re right about Woden and the eye. Wishing to gain knowledge of all things, he journeys to the well of Mimir in order to drink from it; but as we know, the price is high – for he has to forfeit one of his eyes to take a draught. – just as Boann loses an eye when she drinks of the well.’
‘Aha! I see,’ Lewis said, ‘…. pardon the pun. But what on earth does it mean? Why the loss of an eye in return for the gaining of wisdom?’
Tolkien frowned for a moment.
‘Well, that is the question! The losing of the eye is an act of sacrifice, to prove how much the gaining of knowledge meant, a kind of bartering: one gives up vision in this world to gain vision in another…an eye for an eye…but I’m not sure… After our talk earlier at the tea-rooms a very different answer springs to mind: Surely, to drink of the waters of knowledge should increase one’s visionary faculties, not deplete them; so in what way could losing an eye been seen as a gain? Well it suddenly seems blindingly obvious, pardon my pun, that what is gained through drinking from the spring is the unified mystic vision Owen was celebrating earlier - where all is seen as connected, no longer separate. What better way of depicting this than by making the wisdom seeker one-eyed? Two eyes suggest duality, division, normal everyday vision - but the one eye suggests the undivided vision of the poet!
‘But I think this is all later metaphysical speculation and that the original myth of the losing and gaining of an eye is rooted in mankind’s experience of the natural world – I think (and note, I’m not espousing some all-pervasive solar-theory a la Max Muller, when I say this) that it’s probably solar. Forget the later metaphysics – it’s a seasonal myth – it’s about the loss and return of the sun at winter.’
Tolkien looked up from his drink to find the eager eyes of his friends willing him to continue; for a moment, motes of dust hung suspended in the golden light pouring in from the window.
‘Think of the myth of Orion, the great hunter; he is blinded, but then he journeys across the sea bearing Kedalion, the servant of Hephaestus the Smith, on his shoulders, like St Christopher, and reaches the eastern horizon and regains his vision from Helios, the sun god.’
‘Like Wade carrying Wayland the smith across the Groenasund?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Precisely… and Thunor carries Orvandel across the icy Elivogs river in a basket on his back…’ Tolkien added; ‘Obviously the mythical Orion is linked to the constellation; now, the sun rises near this constellation in the spring, but by the autumn Orion has moved to the other side of the sky at daybreak, so has ‘lost’ the sun; clearly all this marching to the east to regain his eyes from Helios is really an image of the constellation regaining of the sun, the solar eye, in the spring.
‘As for the icy river…’
‘…it’s the Milky Way?’ Barfield suggested. ‘So this Sulis, this goddess, was she also a constellation?’ he asked.
Tolkien scratched his chin in thought.
‘Did you know,’ Lewis said, while Tolkien sat pondering, ‘that in the Old Irish stories Druids were known to cast spells standing on one leg and with one eye closed – it was seen as a magical stance – it’s exactly the same symbolism as Boann in the river, deprived of an arm, leg and eye. That same one-eyed figure appears in other Celtic myths, you know – he is one who can summon the animals, a kind of wild man. The master of animals, they call him.’ Lewis added.
‘Like Orpheus.’ Barfield said.
‘Or Bombadil.’ Tolkien re-joined.
‘Are these, then, constellations, too?’
Tolkien cleared his throat, and took out his pipe, methodically packing it as he considered the questions that had been put to him.
‘Oh, and can you also explain, while you’re at it, given all this sun and eye symbolism, why the river Kennet is named after a dog?’
Tolkien seemed about to answer when the door of the pub opened and Mr Mac Govan-Crow strode in, heading straight for their table.
‘Begging your pardon. My wife is wondering if you would like to eat with us at the house tonight. You would be most welcome.’
The three friends nodded in agreement.
‘We shall eat around six, but feel free to return when you wish; I’ll let you get back to your drinks.’ he said, smiling and leaving as promptly as he had arrived.
‘Excellent!’ Lewis said, ‘tonight we dine on venison!’
‘Jack!’ scolded Barfield.
‘What? It’s not me who called him Hawkeye!’ referring to the latter’s epithet of Deerslayer.
The three men laughed. ‘Actually, it would be quite an adventure, being led off into the wilds with Hawkeye…through forests and waterfalls, sleeping under the stars…’ Lewis said.
‘Hunted by the Huron? Idyllic indeed!’ Barfield said, sarcastically.
Tolkien smiled. ‘You know, Jack, for all your romanticism you would hate it! Mac Govan-Crow wouldn’t let you stop for a cup of tea, you know! With the Huron on our heels there wouldn’t be time for a decent pint of beer, either.’
Tolkien tuned to Barfield. ‘Imagine how he’d grumble, Owen!’ he said, nodding towards Lewis.
‘It would be unbearable.’ Barfield agreed ‘We could leave him for the Huron, but I doubt even they would want him…’
‘Why so?’ asked Jack, frowning.
‘–nothing to scalp!’ Barfield laughed, pointing at Jack’s bald crown.
Chapter Fourteen: Tarot
It was strange to think only eleven hours had passed since Con had last been in this self-same spot, outside Church cottage opposite the lych-gate on the narrow high-street, a few minutes' walk west of the pub outside the circle; it already seemed like another day, far further back in time. The only difference from earlier, however, was the presence of Hayden’s large motorbike parked outside on the road, and the scent of the large, almost luminous, white-petalled Nicotiana, their buds now open, tumbling from the window box. Then he had thought Shen to be long gone from this place, but here he was, a few hours later, following her into the cottage. Never presume you know where you’re going, he thought to himself. Life often has different plans from those we envision…
While Conall followed Wolf into the kitchen to grab a drink Shen set about preparing the small living room for the reading; she lit a joss stick and a few tea lights on the coffee table in front of the cast-iron fireplace, and turned the overhead light off, though the small table lamp by the fireside was left on so that Hayden could sit and read the magazine he’d nonchalantly picked up.
‘Get us a beer, Shen,’ he said, not bothering to look up. ‘And put some toast on.’
‘Get it yourself, you lazy bugger, I’m setting up.’ She smiled. Hayden muttered something about working all day and slumped into the kitchen.
‘You having your cards read?’ Conall asked, tongue in cheek, emboldened from drinking.
Hayden looked at him witheringly, took a beer from the fridge and walked back out.
‘I take it that’s a no!’ whispered Wolf to Con, snorting.
Shen had moved the sofa forward for Conall and Wolf to sit on, but she herself sat cross-legged on the wooden floor opposite them in front of the fire place, over which hung a long Native American wooden flute with feathers and beads hanging off it on a cord; Alfred’s flute. He’d heard him play it once in this very room; a room that had cluttered with photographs and the detritus of a long life –a room heady with the scent of pipe tobacco. She must really miss him, he thought, watching as Shen took a sip of her drink and handed the cards to Wolf.
‘Shuffle them then give them back.’ she said.
‘Look at you being all professional!’ Conall quipped; Shen stuck out her tongue at him and giggled.
Wolf shuffled the cards and handed them back to Shen, who spread them face down in a perfect arc on the coffee table. Wolf was instructed to take three cards. When he had chosen them, Shen took them from him and placed these cards face down, and then turned them one by one. For a moment she said nothing. Conall leaned forward and looked at the cards. The first depicted five youths in tunics and tights holding staffs in their hands, which they seemed to be either waving at each other or fighting with; the second was the knight of swords, boldly leaping forward on a pale horse; the final card showed, again, a figure on horseback, but crowned with a wreath, and holding a staff, similarly crowned –in the background seemed to be the same gaggle of youths from the first card, but now holding their staffs straight. Shen looked up at Wolf, who was leaning forward and tapping his knees with his hands excitedly;
‘You wanted to know about the protest again. Well…five of wands; that’s disorder –it means nuisances, bad luck –see how the men are at odds with each other? There’s tension there, confusion –conflict even. A load of hassle.’
‘But the Knight of swords –he’s someone that is campaigning for what is right. He has strong values and will stand up for them. The last card, the six of wands sees order forming out of the disorder that preceded it; it has connotations of recognition; of praise for a job well done.’
Shen looked up nervously at Wolf. ‘So, it’s like I saw yesterday,’ she continued, ‘there’s bad luck, but somehow things will turn out well. I can’t see anything more than that. I can’t say I understand it.’
Wolf nodded and thanked her, but left unspoken any thoughts that were crossing his mind. Taking up his cards Shen placed them back in the pack and began to shuffle. Conall felt his pulse quicken…I wonder what she’ll see, he thought; but Shen did not hand him the cards, instead she seemed to be about to consult them herself. Again, she placed the cards in an arc, and picked her selection.
‘What are you asking?’ Conall asked. Shen shrugged;
‘Just looking.’ she said, but Conall had caught her giving a sideways glance towards Hayden as she spoke, so fleeting perhaps Shen herself was unaware that she had done it. The three cards she had selected were quickly placed back in the pack. Once more Shen sipped her drink, then took up the pack and handed them to Conall.
‘Your turn. Shuffle them, then take six cards.’
‘Six?’
‘Yeah, I’ll do your full reading.’
The cards were large and slightly unwieldy; Conall found it hard to shuffle them, and at one point nearly let them spill onto the floor; but persevering he shuffled them a few more times for good measure and gave them back. Shen smiled and nodded, spread the cards, and Conall took six cards from the table. As Shen turned the cards over Conall, just as Wolf had a few minutes before, leaned forward in expectation.
The first showed a tower being struck by lightning with people falling from it; the second showed the skeletal figure of Death astride a white horse; the third card was less grave –a robed woman with a strange white crown and the moon at her feet: the high Priestess; next, another woman, the queen of cups, enthroned and holding a strange elaborate vessel; the next card showed a row of vessels and a red-hooded figure holding one and offering it to a diminutive white haired woman. The last card was also in the suit of cups: ten cups shone radiantly against the arc of a rainbow, while below a dark haired man and woman stood arm in arm, while beside them children played.
‘Those look cheery.’ Conall said, glancing at the first two cards. Shen coloured and waved a hand over the cards, not looking up at Conall.
‘Look, Conall – Death isn’t normally literally…death;’ she looked up apologetically, ‘…in fact the tower is more likely to foretell death or change than Death itself... You start off with some kind of ego crisis; could be a breakdown, or a sudden change…so in this context I would say that what is dying is some old and outmoded way of being; it’s a rebirth, really.’
Con nodded. I bloody need it, he thought. ‘Is that happening now?’
‘Yes; or imminently.’
Con looked across at her –her eyes were black in this light; exotically slanting, serious; gone was the seeming awkwardness and weakness he’d thought he’d seen in the pub.
‘The High priestess…and the queen of cups…hmm…these suggest someone in your life who is, um, a healer, or a psychic, and the priestess links her with knowledge or wisdom.’
Shen didn’t look at Conall as she said this, but it seemed obvious to him from her muted reaction that she was referring to herself. Or was he just imagining that?
‘Now the six of cups; that’s to do with nostalgia, looking backwards –but in a positive way –it seems that something from the past is going to influence you –it will be of great benefit to your future –something forgotten will turn up and will change the way you look at things; because look –the ten of cups –that’s contentment, achievement…’ but her fingers, flitting across the card, seemed not to point at the cups in the sky but at the two dark-haired figures, arm in arm below them. Then the card was gone as Shen swiftly gathered them together.
‘Did that make any sense?’ she asked, not looking up.
‘I’m not sure it did –I think maybe I’m tired.
’Conall was nodding slowly, still trying to take it in.
‘No –it all seemed fine - Breakdown; rebirth –a psychic and something from the past leading to happiness.’ he summarised. She nodded and their eyes met again for a moment. What are you thinking? He wondered. Something from the past…is that you, Shen? Something forgotten turning up? He felt suddenly drunk and he swallowed. Can you read my thoughts? He mused. Do you know how lovely you are? Do you know about that night, what really happened? ‘
Are you going to do yours?’ he asked. Shen held his gaze. ‘I could do, maybe.’
But she didn’t, instead she put the cards away in a cloth, which she placed on the bookcase by the window; she paused for a second and then looked at Conall with a half-smile on her face.
‘I have something for you.’ she said, turning to the fireplace and taking down the wooden flute from its hook above the fireplace. She handed it to him without ceremony. He took it and turned it in his hands, not understanding.
‘My grandfather wanted you to have it.’ Conall was speechless; he held the instrument close, examining the faded feathers and beadwork, and the small carved owl that jutted out from above the finger-holes.
It was Wolf who broke the silence. ‘That is awesome!’
Con was frowning. ‘The flute? I –I can’t take this, Shen, it belonged to your Grandfather. It belongs to you! It should be yours, surely?’
She was smiling sadly and shook her head.
‘He wanted you to have it; he wrote it in his will –to give the flute to the young man who told him about the stars, in thanks for reuniting brother and sister. What did he mean by that, Con?
’Long story.’ Conall said, abashed at the attention from all three people in the room. ‘I can’t take this Shen.’ Con stammered.
Shen frowned. ‘It was his wish, Con.’
‘But he told me it had been in his family for generations!
’I know. And it was his to give to whoever he chose; and he chose you.’
Conall didn’t voice the question racing across his mind. Why me? I hardly knew him! A few times, we met, that was it –over those four fateful days.
‘It’ll save me dusting it.’ Shen joked, trying to break the awkward silence.
‘Oh my God, Shen. Thank you.’ and then, looking into the fire, he said ‘Thank you Alfred.’
Hayden yawned loudly from his chair in the corner, and announced he was off to bed.
‘Laters’ he said, his hand in the air, and disappeared from the room.
‘I suppose I should be going, too’ Con said, suddenly feeling the need to be away from here, to have space to think. ‘Shall I leave it here for now?’ Shen shook her head.
‘No, I’d rather it was gone now.’ she said sadly. ‘If you’re at a loose end tomorrow I’ll be around; send me a text.’
She took the flute from his hands and, taking a cloth from the sideboard, wrapped the flute in the cloth and handed it back.
‘Take care of it Con.’ she said.
‘This is the most precious gift I’ve ever been given; Of course I’ll take care of it.’ And he smiled back at her as she opened the door and he walked out into the clear, Nicotiana-scented, summer night.
Chapter Fifteen: Bear-Skin Woman
‘If you don’t mind me asking, George, what brought you to England?’ Tolkien asked.
They had just finished a meal prepared for them by George Mac Govan-Crow’s wife, Shona, in the small kitchen of their house at Church Cottage and had moved through to the sitting room, where George was busy preparing a fire now the evening had grown cooler. Tolkien sat in a chair by the fire, nursing a whiskey, while Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms to unpack; on the couch against the wall Shona sat, her young son Alfred half sleeping in her arms, lulled by his mother’s gentle rocking.
George smiled.
‘My parents,’ he said, taking down a photo frame from the mantelpiece and handing it to Tolkien, ‘were part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s ‘Wild West Show’ and had been touring Europe, but my mother was pregnant with my brother and they ‘jumped ship’ here when the tour came to Swindon as she was very ill during the pregnancy. They didn’t want to take a baby back on tour or risk the journey back to Canada with a babe in arms, and her health still poor; I was 4 at the time and had been travelling with them. My first memories are of the buffalo hunt, and of watching my father Kills Crow sing the victory song and shout the war whoop over the body of Custer!’ He laughed. ‘That was from the show. Had I been brought up on the reservation I’d have probably never seen a buffalo, never heard the victory songs. I understood that when I went back to visit my people one time. We were enacting a life that had already vanished. It was all show, but it was at least something.’
Tolkien looked at the photo – obviously staged, with the young George strapped to his mother’s back on a cradle-board, and his father in buckskins with feathers in his hair, against a poorly painted background showing wagons and cactuses and tall desolate flat-topped mesas. The eyes of the figures were sharp, lost. The man was very like George, but half of his face was picked out in a bright paint; the woman flat-faced, young, beautiful yet stern; earthy.
My father was Saul Fine Gun, of the Canadian Blackfoot, the Siksikawa; but he was given the name Kills Crow for the show; and in turn when he settled here he chose to keep Crow as a surname, and was known as Saul Crow. My parents reasoned their children might be better off here than if they had gone back to Canada; life had been hard for them on the reservation. It was never the same after the buffalo had gone…’
‘Do you have a name in Blackfoot?’ Tolkien asked.
George remained kneeling, placing more kindling on the fire, and then blowing at the embers until they roared into life. For a moment Tolkien thought he would not answer but staring into the fire he began to speak.
‘Ipisowaasi. It’s the name of the Morning Star.’
‘Ipis…?’
‘Ipisowaasi.’
‘Ipiso-wa-asi.’ Tolkien repeated.
‘And you have had the fortune to visit your father’s people, you said?’
‘My people.’ George corrected. ‘Yes. After the War, my family took the boat to Canada and I spent many months with them. My brother and mother stayed. My father, you see, was killed in the war; he volunteered to fight; he was a cavalryman in the Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars.’
For the second time that day Tolkien was reminded of the dead horses he’d seen scattered across no-man’s-land in France. An incongruous image arose in his mind, of George’s father, Kills Crow, astride his horse, charging through the machine-gun fire, raising the war whoop with his painted face and eagle feathers in his hair. The Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars… Queer Objects on Horseback the regular troops had laughingly called them…
‘I am sorry to hear about your father. I was a signalling officer in the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers.’ A brief expression of pain flashed across his features.
George nodded slowly and held the other’s gaze, then continued.
‘I couldn’t stay in Canada. I was 21 by that time. My home was here, and my Shona was here.’ He looked over and smiled at his wife.
‘Two exiles together!’ she said, in her broad Irish accent, her cheeks flushed.
Tolkien lifted his glass and sipped at his whiskey. After what seemed an eternity of silence George spoke again. He stood up from before the fire, replaced the photograph and took down from where it hung above the mantelpiece a wooden instrument, handing it to Tolkien.
‘This was my mother’s flute, and she had it from her mother, and she had it from who knows where.’
Tolkien took the object, hung with beadwork and feathers; he turned it in his hands, admiring its craftsmanship.
‘It’s alder wood; and the feathers are of the owl.’
Tolkien handed it back to George with a smile. ‘It’s beautiful. Can you play it?’
George put it to his lips and played a short melody. This playing seemed to provide a musical prologue to what happened next.
‘I said I would tell you one of our tales; listen, this is how it was told to me by my father.’
The room was silent save for the cracking and popping of the twigs on the fire. Shona’s face was distracted, serene; George replaced the flute on the wall and took a seat in the other leather chair opposite Tolkien, his own face, in contrast, serious – severe even. For a moment, in the flickering copper firelight, it took on the proportions of a story-book Indian from Tolkien’s childhood; that wild, untamed, frightening yet romantic form of the Red Man – the Noble Savage – a man of the ancient earth… and then it was gone, and he was George again, a west country gardener.
George picked up his pipe and pinched a clump of tobacco from his tin; silently he threw a small part of this into the fire; mouthing words whose sense eluded Tolkien - Itsipaiitapio’pah - and then filled his pipe and lit it.
‘There was once a maiden named Bear-Skin-Woman who had many suitors but who would not marry. She had seven brothers and a younger sister, and because her mother had died the youngest sister would look after the smallest brother, because he was still a baby, and carry him on her back on a cradle-board.
‘Each day the six eldest brothers would go out hunting, and the little sister with her baby brother would remain at home with their older sister. Every day, Bear-Skin-Woman would leave to collect wood – but she never returned with very much wood and the younger sister began to wonder if she was not really collecting wood in the forest, but meeting with a man.
‘One day, when her sister had left to collect wood from the forest the little sister crept out of their lodge and followed her through the trees until she saw her go into the cave where the bear lived. She followed her and she saw that the bear and her sister were lovers.
‘That night the younger sister told her father what she had seen; and her father said, ‘So this is why my daughter refuses to marry!’ He went into the village to let his people know that they had a bear as a relation, and that they should follow him into the forest and kill the bear. This the people did.
‘Bear-Skin-Woman for a while hated her younger sister, but in time they were friends again. The young sister one day asked that they play at being bears, and the older sister agreed, saying ‘I shall be the bear but you must promise not to touch me above the kidneys or there will be evil.’ Her sister promised but, in their play, she forgot, and touched her elder sister above the kidneys and she turned into a real bear because she was a powerful medicine woman. Taking up her little brother, the younger sister ran back and hid in the lodge in fear. The older sister ran into the village and killed many, many people. The younger sister was relieved when her sister came home, transformed back into her human form. Still a-feared, the little sister ran to where her brothers were hunting and warned them of what their elder sister had done to their relatives in the village, and that she even now would be coming to kill her remaining siblings.
‘Sure enough through the wood they spied their sister, Bear-Skin-Woman, in the shape of the bear hunting for them, and so they ran. As she was just about to snap them up one of the brothers cast down a handful of water which became a vast lake, around which the bear had to run. As she came close once more another brother threw back a comb onto the ground and there a great thicket of bushes sprung up which delayed the bear for a little longer.
‘Eventually Bear-Skin-Woman was at their heels and so they climbed a great tree; but the bear shook the tree and four brothers fell out and died.
‘A bird flew about the tree and it sang to the eldest brother, telling him to shoot the bear in the head; and so he took his bow and he put an arrow through the bear’s head and killed it.
‘The remaining three brothers and the young sister were grieved on seeing their four dead brothers; but the youngest took the eldest of the dead brother’s bow and shot an arrow into the air. When it landed one the dead brother stirred and came to life. This he did again until all the dead brothers were alive.
‘’Where shall we go?’ they asked ‘seeing as our relatives are all dead and we have no family to return to?’
‘’Let us go the sky’ they said, and they closed their eyes and they rose up to the heavens as stars.
‘The littlest brother became the North Star, and his six brothers and little sister became the Great Bear. And the young sister is the closest star to the North Star, as she looked after her baby brother on earth so she does in the sky.’
George stared into the fire and puffed a few times on his pipe.
‘George…Ipisowaasi…’ Tolkien began, ‘Thank you.’ His voice was measured, and polite, but his mind, below this calm exterior, was sparking and cracking like the fire that illuminated the both of them; so many questions… but Tolkien sensed that George was not a man who enjoyed being bothered by questions.
Nevertheless, he began again:
‘It’s fascinating that the Blackfoot have this image of the woman who becomes a bear; the image of the human becoming a bear is found in myths and legends from Europe, too…’ George’s seeming blank expression caused Tolkien to halt and stammer. 'The Vikings had warriors named Berserkers who would change into bears during battle. Berserker means bear-shirt or bear-skin...' he paused, and then began to talk once more.
‘Do you know about Callisto?’ he ventured. George shook his head.
Tolkien cleared his throat.
‘The Greek Goddess Artemis, the virgin huntress… she, it was said, expected her companions to be as chaste as she herself, but one day, noticing her companion, the nymph Callisto, was with child after being seduced by none other than the great God Zeus, Artemis turned Callisto into a bear – whereon she gave birth to a son, Arcas. Artemis sent her hounds to chase and to kill them. Eventually having hunted down the nymph and the boy, Artemis killed them with her bow and arrow; But Zeus, taking pity on Callisto and her boy, lifted them up to the heavens and placed them amongst the stars where she became Ursa Major – the Great Bear – and Arcas, Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.’
Tolkien picked up his glass and sipped a little more whiskey, then lit his pipe and sat smoking in seeming calm before, to George’s evident surprise, Tolkien leapt up from the chair and began pacing in front of the fire, talking in great haste and using his pipe stem as a pointer to punctuate his remarks.
‘…it’s remarkable!’ he stammered, ‘on face value these are two very different tales; but underneath there are clear similarities: the transformation of a woman into a bear, and the killing of that self-same bear with a bow and arrow following a hunt; the placing of a young boy in the constellation of Ursa Minor…’
George was looking up at Tolkien in stunned silence. He looked over at Shona who had a half smile on her face. Tolkien, unaware of the effect of his performance on the two adults present, continued his lecture.
‘Of course we then not only have the fact that both stories are about bears but pertain to be a foundation stories for Ursa Major – something we might put down to sheer coincidence were it not for the fact that the Great Bear looks nothing like a bear! Don’t you find?’
It was George’s turn to stammer and clear his throat. ‘I suppose, so. It does look more like a saucepan, granted. As to whether it looks like a bear; not explicitly so, no.’
‘Exactly!’ Tolkien said, pointing at him with his pipe stem. ‘The main feature of Ursa Major is the handle of the saucepan as you put it – or as it is drawn on star maps, the tail of the bear. But bears do not have long tails!’ he flashed a grin.
‘This means the figure of the bear that links these two stories is not suggested by the form, the shape, of the stars themselves - we are not, then, looking at independent invention based on the shape of the constellation... the earliest maps of the heavens drew on the myths of the bear already associated with those seven stars, and tried to make them look like a bear – rather badly! And, what’s more, we can immediately discount direct borrowings from one culture to another – had the Blackfoot learned the tale from European settlers sometime after Columbus then the form of the story would be much closer to that of the original Greek; clearly the Blackfoot version, if it is related to the Greek tale – it is through a common, and very ancient ancestor!’
On the couch the toddler Alfred had begun to snivel and cry in his mother’s arms at the staccato ramblings and eccentric gesturing of this odd little stranger who had invaded his home.
Tolkien hesitated and smiled apologetically.
‘Do you see what I’m driving at Mr Mac Govan-Crow? Scholars believe that the American Indian reached the New World many thousands of years ago by crossing the Bering straits when they were iced over; the story you have just told could be very old indeed, for if both stories sprang from a common ancestor, as seems the case, that common ancestor would have to be at least 10,000 years old, the date the Americas separated from Eurasia after the Bering ice-bridge had melted! A tale from ancient Ice Age Europe now spread across the whole globe!’
In the silence that followed Tolkien finally allowed himself to sit down and slow his breathing.
‘It is strange, Sir.’ said George. ‘Only my people, the Siksikawa, maintain that we didn’t come from anywhere else except the ‘New World’ as you put it, which is not ‘new’ to us. Have you ever considered that perhaps the white man may have learned the story from the Red, those thousands of years ago?’ he lifted an eyebrow in challenge.
If George Mac Govan-Crow had expected to see Tolkien chastened, or defensive, he was to be disappointed; for Tolkien was staring intently into the flames of the fire, and when he turned to Ipisowaasi of the Siksikawa it was with utter humility and honesty that he spoke:
‘My friend, nothing would surprise me less than to discover that. There are many truths that have been lost to us over the passage of time – who knows what tales were spread, and how, in past ages, when the very face of the earth as we know it was different; before fire and flood changed the shape of the coasts, and sent lands once proud of the sea into its depths..?’
As he spoke an image rose in his mind…a recurring nightmare of a great wave sweeping over green fields, destroying all in its path…
George nodded. And for the first time since they had met, Tolkien saw the wariness and mistrust fall from the man’s eyes; George Mac Govan-Crow smiled.
Chapter Sixteen: On Waden Hill
Conall Astor was still drunk; he had left Shen’s and crossed the stone circle, passing close by the Devil’s chair stone, to which he had bowed in greeting, before continuing along the Avenue for the fourth time that day, his path winding this way and that as he looked heavenwards at the constellations, so clear in the absence of street-lights. The night was warm and just the gentlest of breezes was present, carrying with it the scent of grasses and hedgerows.
Conall fumbled with the keys of the camper, entered, and gathered up the bedding from the couch; he proceeded to walk to his favourite stone and dumped the pile on the side facing away from the road. He retraced his steps and picked up the remnants of the bottle of water from earlier, then sat on the tailgate and brushed his teeth in the moonlight.
After he had rinsed his mouth, he lit the hurricane-lantern that hung from a hook on the van’s ceiling and unrolled the alder-wood flute from the cloth Shen had wrapped it. The flute was beautifully carved, and the wood warm to the touch; just below the mouthpiece but above the finger-holes there was a carving of an owl, secured to the main body with twine, from which a couple of faded feathers and beads were hanging. Traces of stained patterns were visible along the instrument. A faint smell of wood smoke, incense and pipe tobacco rose from it. Conall held it up before him.
‘Thank you, Alfred.’
He had no idea of the age or provenance of the flute; for all he knew it could have been many hundreds of years old… predating the arrival of the White Man. He felt both proud and abashed that such a precious item should have been entrusted to him; maybe he shouldn’t have taken it; maybe he should have left it with Shen. But he supposed it was the old man’s wish. He held it close, not daring to play it; not here, by the road, not without ceremony. He wasn’t tired; he should walk somewhere, and do it honour…
Leaving his bedding in the care of the stone, Conall took the footpath that led away from the Avenue westwards up over the brow of Waden hill. The hill was steep but soon he had crested it, and he stood for a moment taking in the view. Behind him, the way he had come, Hakpen hill rose on the other side of the road, while to his south was the spread of the Kennet valley, and beyond the river the roll of the downs as they rose up to the soft peaks of Tan and Milk Hill. But from his vantage point atop Waden Hill, Conall could glance over at the bowl of Silbury to the south west as it stood majestically proud of the valley within its moat, now iridescent in the low, nearly full moonlight.
Conall dug into his jacket pocket and took out his tobacco; sitting on the long grass he took some from the packet, and as earlier crumbled some onto the ground. Itsipaiitapio’pah, he muttered, Great Spirit, as Alfred had taught him, and as his father George had taught him before…. He then rolled and placed a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, then lifted it to the sky, then to the ground, and exhaled upwards, repeating the Blackfoot phrase.
When he had finished, he unwrapped the flute from its cloth and held it up to the sky. Son of Ipisowaasi, thank you. Great spirits, I am honoured to accept this gift, he said. Then nervously he put the wooden mouthpiece to his lips and breathed softly into it. A warm, hollow note sounded clearly, filling the still night. Conall felt anyone walking in the surrounding valleys or hills would have been able to hear it… nevertheless, emboldened by alcohol, he continued, moving his fingers slowly and inexpertly, but feeling almost as if the flute was playing itself. He played to the stars; he played to the memory of Alfred, he played to the memory of his sister; but mostly he played for Shen, wondering if from her room in Church cottage, she might hear the sound of her Grandfather’s flute playing; it wasn’t her fault, none of it; but if I hadn’t been here…no, it was surely too late by then anyway…
When the urge to play had left him, he stood, gazing skywards again, north to the Great Bear, and he began to spin, his arms outstretched, and then sweeping back round like a swooping eagle, turning, turning, treading out a flat circle in the grass; and as he span the Bear span above him in turn around the still central point of the heavens; and he bowed his back, squared his shoulders, rhythmically turning, imagining himself the bear, mouthing silent meaningless words; and even though miles from the nearest human being his voice remained a whisper so that this guttural chanting that arose from some deep part of his psyche ended at his lips and went no further; yet still he danced under those seven burning brothers and their sister who had escaped to the sky in the story Alfred had told him a year before…
…
…Conall had listened to the tale and they had both stood a while in thought looking up at the Great bear from the back-garden of Church cottage; he had considered not saying anything, but his curiosity compelled him to speak.
‘Alfred?’ he had begun. The old man had nodded for him to continue. ‘You say four brothers were dragged out of the tree and killed?’
‘Yes, that is how my father told it me.’ The old man said, sucking on the stem of his pipe.
‘Wouldn’t it make sense if the four stars there were the brothers?’ he had asked, pointing at the rectangular body of the Great Bear. Alfred had looked up quietly.
‘I see why you might think that; but the sister needs to be one of them so she can be close to her young brother, who is the northern star, there.’ He had pointed to the Little Bear.
Conall had smiled to himself.
‘There are seven brothers and one sister, yes? Now what if there was a way that they could all be together in the Great Bear, and the little brother not all the way over there in the Little Bear?’ he had asked. Alfred shrugged.
‘That would be pleasing, I suppose. But there are only seven stars in the Great Bear’ He had said, rubbing the back of his neck.
‘Alfred – look at the second star from the end of the tail, closely.’
‘What am I looking for?’ he said, through a cloud of smoke.
‘How many stars do you see?’
For a while there had been silence as the old man squinted at the stars, and then a low chuckle had escaped him.
Conall had laughed along with him.
‘That’s right. Most people don’t notice it, but that second star is a double star – it has a smaller, fainter companion, riding on its back. So, there’s your younger sister, and there, still riding on the cradleboard on her back as in life, her baby brother!’
‘So the family is together again. Brother and sister united. That’s good.’ Alfred had said. And this is what he had meant in the will when he had gifted the flute to Con for re-uniting brother and sister…
…
On the hillside Conall looked up and held the sister star in his gaze and remembered his sister Melissa and himself, as children, her carrying him piggy-back across their garden, laughing, as he swished at her with a small twig ‘Giddy up, horsey! Giddy up!’ his hand gripping a great mass of her dark curly hair, identical to his own. Identical. Two particles once joined, linked forever...
And he imagined those same two particles spinning in space, once joined but now separate, shooting apart into the void… and one shining, spinning particle faltering, flickering, dying, yet the other carrying on unaffected…
And he thought of the dream of the horse on the riverbank – and how it was on such a night as this that he’d walked to the Kennet last year because the dream was burning in his head – and how one particle, spinning in space, had chosen not to go into that water, while the other had done so, never to rise again…
At last he cried out, finding his voice:
‘I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry! Melissa! I’m sorry!!! I didn’t know – why didn’t I know?!’
Chapter Seventeen: The Lady of the Lake
After a brief nightcap by the fire, Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms, but Tolkien was not yet sleepy; he had gone outside to the small garden of the cottage to take in the cool night air, and when Alfred had been lulled to sleep by her singing, Shona Mac Govan-Crow had stepped outside to join him.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ she said, ‘when you were talking over dinner about Boann and the well - I didn’t feel it was my place to say but it reminded me of something. And since you later mentioned the stars…’
‘No, please, tell me, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow.’ Tolkien insisted.
‘Shona, please’ she insisted. Shona pointed upwards at the sky to the pale band of stars that bisected the heavens.
‘It’s just that I always think of Boann when I see the Milky Way.’
‘Why so?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Bothar Bo Finne is the Gaelic name for it,’ Shona said, ‘’Path of the White Cow’’ Boann means white cow.’
Tolkien lifted his brows in delight.
‘Thank you. I never knew that.’
Shona remained gazing upwards at the Milky Way. ‘Sometimes I come out here and look up at the stars and feel like I’m home. There’s my beloved Boyne. I wonder which was named first, though, the river on earth or the one in the sky?’
Tolkien tapped his pipe-bowl against the low garden wall and sat on its top, touching a small pile of white rocks clustered on the wall top, beside which stood a couple of burned out snubs of old candles.
‘It’s her dog I feel most sorry for.’ Shona smiled, as she turned to go.
‘Her dog?’
‘Yes; Boann’s lapdog. Dabilla was its name; poor mite was washed out to sea and drowned with her. I had a dog named Dabilla as a child, I named it after Boann’s dog…’
Tolkien looked up at the stars, open mouthed and flushed – and then laughed out loud at his own ignorance.
‘Ha! You’re a dunce, Ronald!’ he chuckled. Shona looked a little taken aback.
‘If that’s the Boyne in the sky then there’s your lost dog, safe and sound!’
Tolkien gestured skywards to the pale celestial river and there on its banks he pointed out to Shona the constellation of Canis Major, the Great Dog, not hard to see for its brightest star, Sirius, the ‘dog-star’ as it was known, was the brightest star in the entire northern sky.
Why hadn’t he seen it earlier? All the clues were there! Where else should one look for a ‘bright dog’ but the star Sirius, the brightest star, the dog-star, pacing beside the river in the heavens? Tolkien berated himself. So many legends had been writ large upon the heavens in antiquity – just as the siblings in Mr Mac Govan-Crow’s bear story had been transferred to the heavens so too in the west – many heroes of myth had been afforded the same privilege; the sky was populated by heroes and gods – so why not the characters of British myth, too? Orion, the hunter, had been the subject of their discussion earlier – and they’d agreed the icy river he was crossing to regain, somehow, his solar eye, was the Milky Way, but Tolkien had not quite grasped the final part of the image - Orion’s hunting dog, following its master, trotting alongside the Milky Way, had in all probability inspired the name of the Kennet… ‘bright dog’ - meaning the Kennet, like the Boyne, was somehow the earthly equivalent of the river of stars in the sky. The presence of Dabilla in the Irish tale had made it a near-certainty that a version of the Boann myth had existed here – there was the river of the dog, and the well-head of the eye, linked by name to the nearby goddess of the waters at Bath.
I should have known after all our talk earlier, he thought…It was there all along in ‘Pearl’ - under the nose of this dim-witted philologist for years and I never saw it! He softly intoned the verses of this medieval lyric, so close to his heart, the meaning of the stone-strewn river separating the poet from his deceased child suddenly clear:
In the depths stood dazzling stones aheap
As a glitter through glass that glowed with light,
As streaming stars when on earth men sleep
Stare in the welkin in winter night
Like the river in the poem, the Kennet’s depths were stippled with small pebbles of chalk that shone white like stars in the winter sky. And remembering the stone he had picked up earlier he put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the small piece of chalk. The river of the poem was the river that divided Paradise from mortal realms – the same as the Greek Styx on whose banks the three-headed dog Cerberus roamed; the river and the dog; now of course its stones twinkled like stars, for they were stars! He wondered if the poet had drawn on some older tradition when he had written these lines, unbeknown of their meaning, or whether he had known all along of what he was writing, and Tolkien just hadn’t seen it: The river of paradise was the heavenly river – the Milky Way, across which the souls of the dead might pass…
‘I’m ever so sorry, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow, but would it be overly rude if I went for a short walk? I have some thinking to do…’ he said, his voice shaking with repressed excitement.
…
Tolkien had retraced the route they had walked earlier back past where the road curved about Silbury, and along to a gate in the field below the hill on whose easternmost point West Kennet rose, and where Barfield had earlier pointed out a copse of trees at the far side of the field in which the Swallowhead spring was hidden. Taking the path towards the trees Tolkien continued until he reached a still pool, crossed by a handful of large sarsen steppingstones. Beyond the stones, in a hollow cradled by the hillside, stood two willow trees, and from between them the waters of the Kennet bubbled from the earth. He strolled around the trees, noticing a small stone cut in the hillside beyond; here, he guessed, in the winter, the waters would rise, but already, in April, the flow had lessened to emerge from the earth closer to the pool.
Tolkien returned to the brook and sat on one of the large, flat stones that forded the stream; he sat gazing into its clear depths.
There, to the north, was the shadow of the domed Silbury hill against the pale starlight, and at his feet the chuckling water, one part silvered now by the light of the crescent-moon; all was quiet, save the lilting of the water, though in the distance an owl hooted, two, three times.
How long had men come here to worship or seek solace at the wisdom-giving waters of the eye, he wondered, here beneath the stars at this holy stream?
This flashing silver river that seemed to divide the world of the dead from the living; the river of the bright dog…
Tolkien knelt, and cupped a clear handful of the cool water, and let it flow back through his fingers. And as he did so he lifted his head, and lo! There above him on the rim of the south-western sky, as if summoned, the jewel-like Sirius still hung in the heavens, flashing a purplish blue, just on the point of sinking down below the hillside to follow its master Orion into the lands below the horizon, but it would rise again in the east as herald of the new dawn. And in the east at this late hour lay Vega, glinting blue in the Lyre, and to its left, Deneb, the tail of the swan - and rising to a gentle arch across the back of the swan in the northern sky was the milky waters of the heavenly river aping the flow of the Kennet on the ground.
Was this pool once ringed with hazel, he wondered? Did the salmon of wisdom swim here, silver beneath the moon?
The reflection of the crescent-moon, like a curved barque sailing between the horns of Taurus, seemed to traverse the waters before him, casting a bright shifting path across the water, that trembled then broke into many pieces before reconstituting; forming then dissolving, trembling and breaking, the crescent becoming a lidded white eye, a curved back of a silver salmon; it broke apart, re-forming, shivering, pulsing and morphing into wild patterns and shapes; a crescent, boat; a lidded eye again; a dancing cool white flame; a trail of flowers, of stars, of sparks, of fish; once more a sliver of moon …
It was hypnotising, lulling, and Tolkien, tired from the days walk and the whisky found himself drifting somewhere between thought and sleep. The waters of the river seemed to rise and swirl; churning to a white starry foam; lifting, breaching their banks; a dual stream of liquid shooting forth to land and sky; one flooding the land and creating a broad river on earth, the other rising to the sky and forming the milky river of stars… the primal waters divided into above and below.
Into these waters Tolkien stared entranced… and there, at the heart of the black mirror, the reflected flash of the moon like a pale severed head in the ripples of the stream lay as if suspended from the branches or caught in the roots of a shining tree that joined earth and heaven… But it shifted and flashed, became distorted into an eye, first a barely-open white eye, then the burning eye of the sun, yellow like a cat’s; and it seemed to him that the eye looked across time and space from a place that knew neither, and that somehow the one eye was wise but possessive… wishing to hide its precious treasure from the unworthy, from those who would steal it… it became the eye of Fafnir the dragon, hiding the ring that would be stolen from him by Siegfried… the eye of Smaug guarding the cup that Bilbo Baggins would steal; and the eye of Nechtan jealously guarding the waters of knowledge from Boann… or the lamp-like pale eye of the creature Gollum…
Then, in the reflecting waters, it seemed he saw, in that eternal moment between two thoughts, the lady of the waters, the fairy princess, lady of the white cows; Sulis-Minerva, mistress of magic – the poet’s daughter who in the Pearl poem lay across the river of death on the shores of Paradise - about her head a silvery-gold corona of stars; now rising from the waters and straddling the river. She bent over the waters, seeming to pour the glimmering flashes of moonlight into the pool; her pale beauteous face lifted high amid the stars, and she bridged the earth and the heavens like a pallid rainbow, the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia her nourishing breasts, a white-shadow arching over the sleeping men of earth; blessed; snow-white, queen of stars....
All in white she was, her hair loose about her shoulders, soft as the owl’s feather; wise beyond years, and about her throat a pendant or phial of rock crystal, lit by an inner fire; the reflected light of the star shining from on the western horizon; and she seemed to peer down into the mirrored surface of the waters…no, she WAS the waters, and the stars combined, and one flowed into the other… a face below and a face above, their gaze meeting; two but yet one.
There she arched above and below, this maid of the Sidhe, this Elven princess, this lady of the lake; her white track streaming behind her… a track of flowers, of stars, of chalk pebbles in the holy stream, of the shimmering ripples caused by the moonlight on the waters… and it seemed to him that she had come from a far distant land, a land that was beyond the reach of mortal man… from Paradise… But the water! Flooding over the low, green land! The terror of the approaching waves! The burning, baleful eye…blazing over the flood… … and then there was a dark-haired girl floating in the water surrounded by flowers and shining stones and then flames and the sound of gunfire and shells exploding… the past, or shadows of what might yet come to pass?
Then at last this shifting reflection calmed and resolved once more into a mirrored form of distant figure standing on the far, green, shore; a kind, sad, face, and his heart leapt… Mother? … his heart cried out… Mother?! Unthinking he reached forward, seeking to grasp her reflection, his hand plunging into the cool water so that the image atomised into fragments and disappeared.
When the void closed the sparkling water resolved to mirror the moon-ship sailing across the heavens above; the vision that had come unbidden left him as swiftly as it had arrived. The moon on the water, though, still shifted and trembled, but now through the prism of his tears; in the distance the owl once more called, once, twice, three times….PART ONE: The Well of Knowledge
Handsome is the yellow horse,
But a hundred times better
Is my cream-coloured one,
Swift as the sea mew
Taliesin, Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees)
Accursed be the damsel,
Who, after the wailing,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging deep
Accursed be the maiden,
Who, after the conflict,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging sea
Taliesin, Seithenin
Chapter One: The White Horse
(Wed 14th April 1937)
On a warm mid-April morning in 1937 three gentlemen, two Oxford dons and a solicitor, were beginning their customary annual walking tour that this year was to be a ‘literary pilgrimage’ from the pretty market town of Marlborough in Wiltshire to Porlock in the Quantock Hills of Somerset where in 1797 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, intoxicated with opium, had written the famously obscure and unfinished verse ‘Kubla Khan’. Their plan was to walk the nearly 100 miles to Porlock over a leisurely eight or nine days, taking in the ancient sites of Wiltshire, before crossing into Somerset and reaching their goal via the Cathedral of Wells and the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Having left Marlborough at nine in the morning, the three friends had taken the path westwards across the Downs, climbing slowly for about a mile and then turning northwest at the hamlet of Rockley, to the Hakpen horse – one of Wessex’s famous white-horses carved into the chalk hills of the Downs. Here they had decided to stop for a few minutes to enjoy the view before turning south and taking the prehistoric track-way known as the Ridgeway to Overton down, where they would join the Marlborough to Bath road close to their first proper stop, the village of Avebury, a small unassuming village that stood within the bounds of what was the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world. The intention of the three hikers was to take lunch in the Red Lion, the pub that lay at the centre of the circle, before walking the last few miles to Calne, where Coleridge had stayed in 1814-16, and where they aimed to spend that night. From then on they would take a bus to Wells and walk the rest of the way to Porlock, all going well.
Clive Staples Lewis, who his friends knew as ‘Jack’, dark, balding and thickset, was presently leading the other two men down the gentle slope of the hill on which the Hakpen horse had been carved a century before. Behind him strode Owen Barfield, lean, tall and well-built with a full head of dark hair, above a handsome, elfin face – who was struggling to keep up a conversation with his friend who kept striding forward out of earshot. Their physical differences had always amused the third member of the party, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who, like Lewis, was a fellow of the school of English at the University of Oxford. This kind, if serious-faced man, the shortest and the eldest of the three by 6 years being now in his mid-forties, and who seemed to wear a perpetual frown as if always chewing over some deep problem, watched the ill-matched pair walk ahead and disappear over the brow of the hill vanishing out of sight.
Damn their route-march! Tolkien thought. This was a supposed to be a leisurely hike, not a military exercise! Well… let them march on! He thought, letting his heavy pack fall from his shoulders.
The April sun was pleasing; Tolkien, who had already removed his tweed jacket on the climb out of Marlborough, now rolled up his shirtsleeves and took off his hat, wiping his now-greying dark fringe where it had stuck to his brow. Then, fishing into the pocket of his plain brown waistcoat for his pipe and tin of Navy Cut tobacco, he began to fill his pipe, tamping the tobacco down with a thumb and then scrabbled about in his trouser pocket for a box of matches.
As he smoked Tolkien felt himself relax for the first time in what seemed months. The spring term at Oxford had not been any busier than normal, but all his spare time had been taken up since before Christmas correcting the proofs of his book. He had tried, not wholly successfully, to remain unruffled at the errors the type-setters had made, but at least correcting their mistakes had allowed him the opportunity to add some new material and to iron out some minor inconsistencies he had discovered in his tale. You think a book is done and dusted, but writing it is only the beginning! He had said in frustration to Lewis over a half a glass of beer in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen college two days before. He had just returned from the Post Office having sent his publisher, Stanley Unwin, an illustration for the dust-jacket, showing the dragon Smaug flying out of the Lonely Mountain; it was, to Tolkien’s eye, a little amateurish, but preferable to what some professional artist with no real idea of the story might dream up. Jack had raised his glass to the success of the book, but Tolkien had shrugged. ‘I’m happier celebrating that the bloody thing is finally out of my hands, Jack. It had become, alas, like a guest who outstays his welcome. No doubt in time I will miss his company, but for now I’m happy to be free once more.’. ‘Freedom, Tollers, is one of those invisible qualities one fails to appreciate until it is taken from oneself. Like a fish only appreciates water when dangling from the angler’s hook…’.
‘When I was in Flanders…’ Tolkien said, ‘I thought a simple glass of beer, in a quiet country pub, would be a joy forever. And so it was, for a time; but then came the time I just downed the drink and thought no more of it; the tragedy of mankind is his ability to forget…’
‘Then may we ever be sent…’ said Lewis, raising his glass, ‘adversity, so that we may never tire of freedom.’
…
Now distanced from the demands of not only book, but also family and work, Tolkien let out a happy sigh. After Mass that morning he had left his stack of papers on his desk at Northmoor Road and had left for the station determined not to even think of Hobbits or dragons until he returned home late the following week. He hoped, now, that this was the end of the matter; and standing here looking out over the valley he felt a sudden sense of freedom welling up within him, that escaped as a chuckle; this was a new start – no longer constrained by ‘The Hobbit’ he could return to his languages and mythology.
Above him skylarks were singing, invisible against the pale sky; he stood in the long grass, watching as industrious bees flitted from cowslip to cowslip. Below him, out of sight, he could hear Jack laughing, and so he walked on to join his companions who were now sat on the sloping ground close to the carved horse’s head.
On first sight the Hakpen horse was a strange looking beast, more reminiscent of a dog than a horse, Tolkien thought, thin legged and barrel bodied, though he conceded one was meant to see it from a distance away not upside down from above its back.
‘You’ll know, Tollers... Why do you imagine these horses were carved?’ Lewis turned and asked Tolkien as the latter approached the seated pair.
‘This one is a century old, as I recall – and I believe was cut to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria; but as for the others - why do people ever feel the need to mark the landscape?’ he replied, seating himself beside his companions, and refilling his pipe.
Lewis looked down over the valley for an answer – the only marks he could see were the lines of hedges and field boundaries; a small road ran north to south at the bottom of the valley, with a single motorcar heading along it.
‘To show land ownership: “This land is mine!” I suppose?’ He suggested, his slight Belfast accent adding a tuneful lilt to the words.
‘Spot on, I would say.’ Tolkien replied. ‘They were originally, I would think, a stamp of ownership of the local landowner; it’s like hanging a Stubbs above your fireplace – the Uffington horse, for instance, was undoubtedly a territorial marker for the tribe that lived in the hill-fort above it.’ His own words tumbled out quickly and slightly incoherently, somewhat staccato and punctuated with quick flashes of a smile.
The Uffington horse, to which Tolkien referred, was the most striking, as well as being the oldest, of all the Wessex horses. It’s sinuous, streamlined form had graced the Berkshire Downs from time immemorial; once believed to have been carved by Alfred the Great to celebrate a victory over the Vikings at Ethandune in 878 AD, its curved, abstract, and almost skeletal shape, three times the size of the Hakpen horse, had always suggested to Tolkien an origin much further back in prehistory.
‘But why a horse? What has a horse to do with territory per se?’ Lewis continued, lighting a cigarette.
‘Everything – to a prehistoric tribesman. Think, Jack! As a tribesman, how do you defend your land?’
‘Earthworks; arrows; swords.’ He said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke that drifted lazily away.
‘Now how large is your territory going to be?’ Tolkien prodded.
Lewis shrugged. ‘As large as you can defend, I suppose, within a few hours walk from your camp.’ Their view over the edge of the Wiltshire Downs presented such a territory – it would take them a good few hours to reach the distant slopes above Cherhill, to their west; it was a rich land; worth defending; worth planting and settling on; worth fighting for.
‘Well think how much more territory you could defend on horseback than on foot. The first tribes to ride horses possessed a marked superiority over their contemporaries: they could not only possess more land, and defend it, but also embark on taking that of others – taking their land and their resources – their herds of cattle...’
Tolkien looked down at the carved face, dulled with age; overgrown with grasses and moss.
‘This one may be relatively new, but the white horse of Uffington… well, it’s is still galloping possibly thousands of years after it was carved, still claiming that land for a tribe who have long since journeyed beyond that vale to another...’ he drew on his pipe and peered out over the valley.
‘So you agree with Chesterton that it’s old?’ Lewis said, meaning the Uffington Horse.
Tolkien nodded. Chesterton’s poetry rose in his mind and he gave voice to his words over the crudely cut body of the chalk steed below:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.
Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.’
He flashed a quick smile at his companions; although on the surface he often appeared shy, there was something of the bard about this man, and, when encouraged, enjoyed such recitations.
Lewis let out a sigh. ‘I must read the ballad again, Tollers. It has some beautiful parts – how does that verse go?:
For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.’
Lewis turned to the hitherto silent Barfield, who had been consulting his map.
‘Listen, Owen. Did I tell you? Tollers, Warnie and I walked to Uffington last summer and we were at the pub in the village, discussing why the hill beside the horse had been named Dragon Hill. Well, Warnie and Tollers were talking about dragons in general, sadly commenting on how they were all dead and gone when some local workman pipes up ‘They are not! I seen ‘em myself!!’
Lewis roared with laughter.
‘So why does it bear the name of Dragon Hill?’ Barfield asked, smiling at his friend’s jollity.
‘Local legend says it’s where St George slew the Dragon.’ Tolkien answered. ‘But I wonder just how old the name is - the Dragon-slaying myth is really very ancient indeed, so I doubt Good Old Saint George had much a part to play in it! One only has to think of Apollo slaying the Python at Delphi to see that it’s really a myth about new cults and new gods overcoming the old, and in many cases taking over their holy sites.’
‘Ah, so you think the older British cults, like the Greek, were represented by the dragon or the serpent?’ Barfield asked. ‘That is interesting; I’m not overly familiar with ancient British beliefs but wait until we get to Avebury: I’ll show you something that I think might interest you.’
Lewis yawned.
‘Yes, Avebury… Delightful as this view is, I can’t help feeling we’re wasting precious drinking time at the Red Lion by being here. Horses and dragons aren’t really part of the Coleridgean theme of this holiday, after all…’
‘No?’ Barfield said, an eyebrow raised on his boyish face, ‘You may have a point about dragons, but not horses: think of Kubla Khan… is it not said that he owned ten thousand white horses? And was not the milk of these beasts only to be drunk by the Khan himself? Perhaps this milk was even the Milk of Paradise of Coleridge’s poem? I would say the white horse is extremely Coleridgean!!’
Lewis conceded the point to his friend and rose, shouldering his pack and waving his walking stick in the air with a cry of ‘Onward! Ale awaits!’ Tolkien remained seated for a moment, looking out over the pale landscape, to where the distant downs fading to blue were crested by the spike of the Cherhill monument, marking the end of that day’s proposed walk. He narrowed his eyes in the bright morning sun and muttered a few more lines of Chesterton before he rose to follow the others:
And the great kings of Wessex
Wearied and sank in gore,
And even their ghosts in that great stress
Grew greyer and greyer, less and less,
With the lords that died in Lyonesse
And the king that comes no more.
This image of the white horse stayed with Tolkien for the hour it took to walk along Hakpen hill to the edge of the downs at Overton. Here, at the point where the path met the Marlborough to Bath road, the hillside was crowned with a line of large round hillocks: the burial mounds of long-forgotten prehistoric kings; Lewis slowed his pace momentarily to survey these grass-covered tombs, four thousand years in age, but did not stop. Tolkien, however, paused and then ambled across from the path into the meadow to the middle one of the three ancient and time-weathered graves, now strewn with grasses, dandelions and other meadow flowers.
Tolkien climbed atop the steep rise of the barrow, and took a deep breath of the warm, spring scented air. Before him stretched the Kennet valley; running east to west, the Downs rising on both sides, steeper to the north where he sat, more gentle to the south, rising in soft folds of palest green, interrupted here and there by a copse of trees or lines of hedgerow, before fading to a lilac wash against the sky.
Tolkien re-lit his pipe and let his mind sink into the deep past. How might this gently undulating valley have looked when the kings whose bones lay beneath these once chalk-white burial mounds had first climbed this rise thousands of years before? He could almost hear the thumping of their horses’ hooves, see their pale hair blowing in the wind; hear their strange voices calling out even stranger names… their bronze spears glinting in the sun, striking fear into the small dark men with their flint blades who had lived in this place before them, and who stood cowering in the trees on seeing these tall mounted warriors arriving from the east. Did they see them, he wondered, as the Aztecs had seen the Spanish Conquistadors – as dreadful hybrid beasts, never having seen a horse and thinking man and steed were a single animal? What prehistoric Cortez or Pizarro rode this ridge so long ago, and did he accept the peace of the painted tribesmen who prostrated themselves before him or did he like the Conquistadors turn these green hills into a sea of blood?
It was these newcomers, Tolkien mused, who having overcome the native cults were perhaps the first to carve the shape of their steeds into the green hillsides of Wessex… a white horse on a field of green as a sign of victory; (why did that phrase always arise in his mind, he wondered?). But the Uffington horse, at least, was a strangely emaciated beast of victory, with a beak-like muzzle. He shuddered at a memory: the half-rotted body of a horse he had marched past on the way to the trenches of the Somme twenty years before, left hanging, bloated and rotting on a barbed wire fence, its body moving with rats, its head eyeless and lipless – the bleached bones of the muzzle protruding from the flyblown jaw … Tolkien blanched at the recollection. For four thousand years the horse and rider had dominated warfare but times had changed and no cavalry could match the artillery and machine gun fire of the modern battlefield.
The words of an Old English poem arose in his mind:
Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære….
Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away, dark under the cover of night,
As if it had never been.
Gently he twisted a blade of grass around a finger. The memory of the decaying horse had made him uncommonly anxious, but perhaps that was as much to do with what Barfield had been talking about over breakfast at Marlborough that morning after they had alighted from the Oxford bus: the damned war in Spain; and that ignoramus Hitler sending troops there to support the fascists; and France extending its defences along its border with Germany…
Tolkien drove the thought from his mind. Such speculation not only solved nothing, but also cast a cloud over what was a beautiful spring day. And it was beautiful - the sky cloudless; his book was finished and his time his own; the grass smelled sweet, and the peace of the day only disturbed by the sound of an automobile wending its lonely way along the road back to Marlborough; his eyes were becoming heavy… maybe, he thought, he should just rest a bit longer…
Chapter Two: Sanctuary
(29th June 2012)
Eighty five years later, over the same stretch of hill on which the barrows of the prehistoric Kings ran like humps on the back of some giant half-submerged sea-creature, on a road now wider and heavy with speeding traffic, Conall Astor’s campervan lurched to a sudden halt causing a number of unsecured objects to crash into the back of his seat. Behind his van the driver of a pristine black Audi that had been tailgating him all the way from Marlborough screeched to a stop, sounded his horn and gesticulated wildly. Conall put his arm out the window and stuck up his middle finger as the Audi veered around him.
‘Fucking wanker!’ the driver yelled, so Conall changed his gesture, lifting up a curled little finger in the sign for ‘small dick’. To his immense relief the car carried on.
The cause of Conall’s sudden halt seemed oblivious to the accident it had nearly produced: the hare in the centre of the road fixed Conall with a golden eye before lolloping nonchalantly towards the grass verge. It’s angular, cat-like beauty was entrancing - like an emissary from an older world out of place on the burning tarmac – it’s indifference seemed to suggest that it, and not the road and its dirty machines, had precedence; my kind were here before yours, it seemed to say.
‘You take your time, lady!’ Conall shouted, sarcastically. The hare reached the roadside grass sat for a few seconds then was gone, leaving some flattened grass-stems as the only witness to its presence.
Restarting his van, and lifting a hand to the queue of vehicles that had formed behind him, Conall drove onwards a few yards and then signalled and turned into a small open area on the right of the road where a number of cars and vans were parked; and having found a space, the camper shivered once more to a silent halt.
For a few moments Conall sat still, gazing ahead at the rolling landscape of pale wheat and sheep-dotted insipid grassland, relieved that the three hour drive had ended; then with a nervous glance he took off his sunglasses and turned to inspect the damage in the back of the camper. Coffee was splashed up the back of the seat and lay in a puddle on the floor in which a number of books, papers, empty tobacco packets and diet coke bottles were scattered. Shit. He’d forgotten about the coffee cup. He picked up a dripping black notebook, wiped it on the seat next to him, and leaned across and shoved it into the crowded glovebox, whose contents promptly tumbled out into the foot-well.
‘Fuck it.’
A small cardboard packet had tumbled out, spilling its contents, a few blister packs of green and cream capsules, onto the floor. It was three weeks since he’d taken the last tablet, and already he had felt a sense of the old him returning; a sharpening of edges long dulled, slivers of happiness felt for the first time in many, many months; cold washes of grief, too – real grief, not the numb dumb-show the anti-depressants had afforded him for the last year. He didn’t know why he’d bothered to bring them. Weakness, he supposed; a prop, in case it all went horribly wrong again. Wrong again? That implied things had got better, and they hadn’t; it was time, that was all – not that one could put a time limit on grieving, no – but it was time to try to start living again, he supposed. At least he had the choice. She didn’t; but she wouldn’t have wanted him to give up.
I should just throw these into the first bin I find, he thought, leaving them where they had fallen.
The drive down from London had been uneventful; he had begun it with a vague sense of stress, and had been half tempted to turn around and head for home, but having reached Fleet services on the M3, he had sat on the bank of the car park with a coffee and a cigarette, and had felt that the old lightness of spirit might yet return if he relaxed and gave it a chance. Wasn’t that the whole reason for coming here? To mark a new start by returning to a place where in the past he had always been happy, but which had become slighted in his memory by those dark, tragic events of the previous year? He took a deep breath.
It had been over a year since he had last been here; and in that time his life had changed utterly and irrecoverably. Coming back here was an attempt to put it all in perspective; to draw a line under the past; not to forget it, but to try to move on from it, to lay a ghost to rest. This place had been somewhere where he had immediately felt at home, where he could just be. Might it now welcome him home like a prodigal son, past misdemeanours waiting, if he was fortunate, to be forgiven? But just now such a hope seemed a pipe-dream; all seemed flat to him, dull – the world was leaden, and he seemed to lack the means to shake off the veneer of greyness that seemed to coat everything like a fine ash. A walk should help, he mused; and a beer.
Conall leaned out of the window and looked at himself in the wing-mirror; a tired, unshaven, face looked back at him from beneath dark curls. He looked away. Still, a year on, he couldn’t hold his own gaze for long. Conall was, in his own words, ‘pushing forty’, and for the first time in his life he felt his age. He was dreading the day itself; all his life there had been two cakes – two sets of presents; last year it hadn’t mattered as they had all been too numb with the shock, but this year – with only a couple of months to go, and it being a ‘biggy’, as she had used to call such occasions, the idea of celebrating it alone, with her not there, was unthinkable.
Conall opened the door and stepped into the heat of the early July afternoon. The majority of the cars around him were empty; though muffled music was coming from a large converted minibus a little further up the path; it was painted black, with tinted windows, and howling wolves and a giant full-moon airbrushed on its side.
Though he was still a mile or so from the main village, he had decided to stop here knowing that on such a gorgeous day the main car parks that served Avebury village and the stone circle that surrounded it would already be full; besides, he reasoned, he wished to walk into the village the old way, from the Sanctuary and along the Avenue. And he wanted to walk after spending such a long time behind the wheel. Besides, he could leave the van here and return later in the evening and camp the night; the main car park shut at seven and he would only have to move the van again – and to do that he’d need to be sober; something he had no intention of being.
Behind him, beyond the fence, and reached by a path in the long grass, lay the Bronze Age barrows; for a moment he had the urge to go and climb them but his goal for the moment lay to the immediate south of the road he had just turned off, and so locking his camper (not that, he imagined, anyone in their right mind would attempt to steal it or any of its coffee-stained contents) he headed for the road.
The road, where it crossed the brow of the hill, was steep and curved so that Conall was more reliant on his hearing to gauge a gap in the traffic than his sight. After a minute or so of waiting as cars, lorries, coaches and motorcycles roared past Conall ran across the road, a few yards from where the hare had crossed minutes before. Something furred but flat and dry coated the road, maybe once a fox or a hare. He grimaced and felt a wave of sadness.
Despite the large number of cars that had been in the lay-by Conall found the meadow in which the Sanctuary lay bereft of tourists. The only signs of life were three jackdaws poking around the long grass looking for insects, seemingly unconcerned with the roar of the traffic a few feet away. As ancient monuments went the Sanctuary, Conall thought, was singularly unimpressive. Concentric rings of concrete markers now showed where the great posts of a prehistoric structure had once stood lending to this circular meadow the feel of a badly conceived modern art installation; but its view was serene: to the east in the distance lay the cragged teeth-like stones that marked the façade of a large prehistoric tomb known as West Kennet long-barrow; and to its right the strangely rounded form of Silbury hill could be seen over the shoulder of the intervening hilltop. All lay bathed in a haze that bleached the distant rises of Milk hill and Tan hill into a uniform ridge of cyan – bluer than the sky itself which was almost colourless and hurt Conall’s eyes now he had taken his sunglasses off. The wheat field next to the long-barrow was marked with a huge crop circle, a vast circle of flattened wheat with radials of increasingly smaller circles spinning counter-clockwise from the centre. These crop glyphs still amazed him however many times he’d seen them; the work, he supposed, of guerrilla artists rather than extra-terrestrials they nevertheless still possessed a certain mystery, perhaps born of their anonymity, their perfection and their elusive meaning.
Conall walked to the central concrete ring, sat himself on one of the posts, and took a pack of American Spirit tobacco out of his shirt pocket. First taking a pinch, he crumbled the already powdery tobacco onto the earth before him. Itsipaiitapio’pah, Great Spirit, he mumbled under his breath, a habit he had picked up on his last visit here from an old man who had since returned to the Ancestors - at least he was old, Conall thought, thinking of the old man; it’s easier to deal with then – a good innings as they say, trite though it may be; no one could have said it of her though: a good innings. Thirty-eight years old. She’ll always be thirty-eight... they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. It’s not just the years that condemn, Con thought; survivors guilt; or just plain guilt – there’s a pretty fucking hefty dose of condemnation there.
He inhaled and breathed out the smoke in the direction of the swifts that were screaming and tumbling overhead beneath the criss-cross of vapour trails that divided up the sky. Not so long ago he would have looked up jealously, wishing he had been jetting off to somewhere other than where he was; somewhere where he couldn’t be reminded of things. But today Conall Astor knew that he had to stop running away.
Alone, in the circle, he put a hand over his face. Then, straightening and wiping his eyes, he drew a deep breath on his cigarette. ‘Well, I’m back!’ he said.
Chapter Three: The Serpent’s Head
‘Tollers?!’
Tolkien looked up from where he had lain down on the mound a few minutes earlier. Lewis had crossed back over the road and was leant over the fence to the barrow field.
‘Come on, man. We’re in need of tea! What are you doing?’
‘You miss so much with your marching, Jack!’ Tolkien muttered, standing up somewhat awkwardly and replacing his hat.
Lewis’s already sunburned head turned away and he headed back over the road to the field opposite where Barfield was slowly walking in a wide circle, eyes to the ground. Tolkien reluctantly shouldered his pack, and descended from the barrow, turning back for a moment to bow to the bones of the unknown king whose tomb it had been, sweeping off his hat and uttering words of farewell.
A few yards from the road in the direction of another great barrow lay a flat circular expanse of ground, its short grass studded with a number of pristine concentric circles of short concrete posts of varying sizes.
‘This place,’ Barfield, who had been circling the posts, said as he approached the others ‘is the Sanctuary – it was excavated a couple of years back – and it seems that it was originally some kind of circular wooden structure – these concrete posts mark where the wooden poles once stood - and it was probably roofed. And then at some point it was all surrounded by a ring of sarsen stones… they’ve all gone now - destroyed by pious locals since the 1700’s though the antiquarian Stukeley drew them in a sketch he made here in the 1720’s…’
‘What was it, Baedeker Barfield – a temple?’ Lewis asked.
Barfield shrugged, digging around in his backpack. ’Possibly, or a mortuary-house, I think someone suggested – where the bodies of the dead were left to rot before they were put in the tombs, the long-barrows. But you know what Stukeley called it?! The hakpen, the snake’s head. It’s after this structure that the whole ridge from here to the horse seems to have been named. Now, with what you were saying earlier about the Old Religion, Tollers, and the defeat of the serpent cults…’
Lewis looked down at the rings of posts in un-characteristic silence; seemingly nonplussed. ‘I suppose this was just an empty field when we were last here.’ He said, looking at Barfield.
‘I guess so. We must have walked past here, but I don’t recall much about it – except the rain.’
‘Ha! And the ride back, do you remember?!’ Lewis laughed. ‘Hitching a lift to Marlborough on that cart?’
Barfield smiled with affection. ‘Yes, in the dark and the rain, and Harwood singing!’
Tolkien felt oddly touchy at their reminiscing; he had hardly known Lewis back then. I do hope this trip doesn’t turn into a nostalgic reverie for those two, he thought gruffly. He bristled at his own jealousy. Was it jealousy, though, he wondered? Yes, in part, but not for Lewis and his cronies; it was, perhaps, more sadness he had not been able to make such memories himself with those he should have been here with. But stoically he cast such thoughts from his mind.
‘So, I guess the ridge is the back of the snake and this hill that marks the end of the ridge is its head?’ Tolkien asked.
Barfield turned. ‘No. It heads north-west from here; Stukeley believed the whole of the Avebury monument was the serpent… it’s a serpent writ large in stone…’ Having found the volume he had been searching in his rucksack he opened it out on a folded-over page that showed an old black and white hand-drawn map; it was Stukeley’s plan of the monuments.
‘Look, here’s the head, where we are now, at Overton Hill’ he said, pointing at the right-hand side of the drawing to a circular feature, ‘…and then an avenue of stones, the beast’s neck, snakes its way to the main circle at the centre, in which two smaller stone circles are to be found… though each of them was as big as Stonehenge, which gives one some idea of just how huge the main circle is! Then the tail, if you will, is another avenue leaving the circle on its western side and heading towards Beckhampton. You must admit it is rather snakelike. The naming of hakpen hill, then, is more than coincidental… it seems to support Stukeley’s theory.’
Tolkien looked up from the page. From their current viewpoint the main stone circle and village within was still obscured by the rise of what Stukeley’s plan called ‘Windmill hill’ to the northwest. Hakpen. But on what authority, Tolkien wondered, had it been so named, or just in Stukeley’s imagination?
‘And here’s where we’ll find the pub!’ Lewis said, pointing to the centre of the circle. ‘Fiendishly clever of them to build a pub right at the heart of the circle!’ He joked. ‘Obviously, the avenues were for guiding them home on dark nights when they were worse for wear with drink! How long until we get there? An hour? You know, I know it’s ten years on, but I really don’t recall much of this at all.’
‘Three-quarters of an hour, I would think.’ Barfield said. He looked at his pocket watch. ‘It’s eleven already, too early for lunch, really. But there is a tearoom down there beside the road near Silbury Hill’ he said, pointing to a flat-topped rise just visible above the trees, ‘and we could perhaps stop there for tea and then eat properly at the pub later. We have all day.’
‘Well, you have the map and we’ll trust your judgement.’ Lewis said, not looking up from the plan.
Tolkien paused and looked up at the skylarks, his own choice would have been, as they were already at the so-called ‘serpent’s head’, to skip tea and continue down its throat into its belly down the Avenue, the route the people of Avebury would have no doubt taken four and a half thousand years earlier.
Lewis, still looking at the plan – pointed a nicotine stained finger at the central feature - a great domed hill with a flattened top, so perfect in its shape that it was quite obviously man-made. Then peering up from the plan to the western horizon saw the same flat-topped mound in the flesh, peeking over the intervening hills.
‘Rather a fitting start to our Coleridge homage, wouldn’t you say?’ Barfield said, ‘the great hill of Silbury - the stately pleasure dome in the valley of the sacred river Kennet,’ lifting lines from Coleridge’s poem. ‘It’s old – the Romans had to curve their otherwise straight road to Bath around it in order to avoid it.’
‘It’s always struck me as looking like a huge steamed pudding,’ remarked Lewis; ‘All this walking has made me hungry. Do you think there might be steak and kidney pudding at the Red Lion?’
‘Shall we climb it?’ Barfield said, ignoring Lewis’s comment.
Lewis looked at the steep sides of the hill and scratched at his chin in thought.
‘I’m in two minds. It would possibly be better, if we are to attempt the feat, to climb it now before the day gets too warm; but my stomach is disagreeing with me. Still, we could have a pot of tea and then decide.’
‘I climbed it myself years ago, before our last visit!’ The solicitor’s face lit up with a puckish smile. ‘And we danced on the summit!’
‘Why did they build it, Owen? Is it a tomb, like the Pyramids?’ Lewis asked.
‘No – no burial has been found, despite the local legends…’
‘Don’t mention legends, Barfield… we’ll never get our tea…see how Toller’s ears picked up like a hound?’ Jack quipped.
Tolkien held a match to his pipe and puffed away, grinning. ‘I already know them, Jack.’ He said through pipe-clenched teeth, ‘Despite crossing the county border this is still, you know, my neck of the woods mythologically speaking. A King Zel is supposed to be buried in the hill, on horseback, in golden armour…’
‘Golden armour, indeed!’ Jack mocked. ’There’s the mark of a modern myth, surely; gold armour would be practically useless against a bronze or iron blade.’
‘Unless the gold is a symbol for the sun?’ Suggested Barfield.
‘Perhaps.’ Lewis conceded. ‘What if Silbury were derived from the Roman Sol? The Hill of the Sun?’
He looked towards Tolkien, but the latter seemed deep in contemplation.
‘Possibly; that argument has merit….’ Tolkien answered, ‘but Sil is closer to the Welsh word for the sun, Sul…’ (he pronounced it, correctly, as ‘seel’) ‘…If, if, the Celtic place-name hakpen has survived here then why not Sul?’
It seemed strange in this beautiful English setting to hear the echoes of the old Celtic tongue now long driven from these Downs; it was almost as if such ancient places were reluctant to let them go, or perhaps the newcomers, bound by fear or superstition, had thought it unwise to change the names. It lent the place a feeling of timelessness; as if some relic of a dark pagan Celtic past had broken through the veneer of England, like a long buried celandine from an ancient forest floor pushing up through a lawn in spring, long after the trees of the forest had been cleared to make way for the garden. Words could be vehicles for such feelings; passports into a different reality, or worlds long passed, Tolkien had always thought.
As Tolkien looked across the landscape England faded as if into a mist; and an ancient place emerged; he stood no more on Overton hill, or Hakpen ridge facing towards Silbury – he stood on the head of the serpent temple gazing on the hill of the sun, in the heart of a land that bore other names, names now only remembered in legend: Ynys Prydein, the Isle of the Mighty; Clas Myrddin: Merlin’s enclosure; Logres; Albion …
The temple of the Dragon, he thought. Was it possible or just the over-ripe imaginings of that antiquarian Stukeley - a man who had later claimed to be a druid and to have divined Biblical numbers in the measurements of Stonehenge? As he stood in thought the unsolicited image of a grinning dragon crossed, unwanted, into his consciousness. Smaug! How am I meant to forget my book when all around I’m surrounded by dragons?! He thought, suddenly annoyed at the obtrusion of work, of deadlines, of editorial queries into his reverie. Be gone, foul slitherer and leave me be! In his mind he saw the hero of old, his bow drawn back, shooting at the heart of the dragon; the incoming heroes on their white steeds, come to crush the serpent of gods of the older religion and their worshippers, and take from them their land and their women. A couple of verses from his beloved Genesis welled up in his mind:
‘And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust thou shalt eat all the days of thy life: And I shall put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise they head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’
He ground his heel into the ground of the Hakpen, banishing Smaug from his thoughts, determined that no more would his book intrude on his holiday; a resolution that would stand no chance of remaining kept.
Chapter Four: The Book and the Feather
Conall had returned to the campervan, and was taking a few moments to mop the remnants of the spilled coffee from the floor with a dirty t-shirt, and to replace the rest of the fallen objects (and others that had already been on the floor) to their proper place – stuffed under the sofa-bed. Most of his stuff had, in fairness, been properly packed away, but the decision to come here had been last-minute and so he had thrown a number of items on to the sofa-bed wrapped in a duvet, hoping they would be ok. The coffee had been a mistake, though. He’d wedged the unfinished cup between a pile of fairly heavy books and a lever-arch file on the small kitchen worktop behind the driver’s seat– and it would have been okay there, or so he told himself, if it hadn’t been for the hare…
The file, marked PhD, with the words ‘unfinished’ scrawled on the label lay half-open, and he collected a number of hand-written pages, star-maps and photocopies of ancient artefacts, statues and inscriptions that had cascaded from out of it. A few of the sheets were wrinkled and brown with coffee, but he gathered them up all the same and pushed them carelessly into the pile – pages of sketches of little clay figurines copied from Marija Gimbutas’ books on ‘Old’ Europe, with lozenge shapes and zig zags marked in black pen; carved cow-horns from Iberian tombs; print-outs of stellar alignments, some highlighted in red pen and exclamation marks. He didn’t need them now anyway. He snorted at the memory: a conversation from a few months before and the words of his then-tutor: ‘Astronomy is supposed to be science! Your original subject, on evidence for astronomy in prehistory was fine, if a little loose; but to start delving into these myths, well, Con, you’re on very shaky ground. If it’s not Indian myth, it’s Red Indian myth… I know you’ve had a very, very difficult time of late. But these subjects are simply not tenable, and I really cannot support your continued study of them, I’m sorry!’
‘Red Indian? That’s not very PC, is it?’ Con had answered. His tutor had just blinked at him and waved it off with a motion of his hand as irrelevant. Behind the tutor’s head was a large poster of stars being created in Orion’s belt as imaged by the Hubble telescope, and above this a poster of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva including an image of an atom with electrons flying about the nucleus like billiard balls; the great and the small; was this guy so focussed on these extremes that he couldn’t see the everyday world, Con had thought? Surely what was interesting about stars and atoms was that we were made of both: the very substance of our being were atoms forged in those great stellar furnaces, matter that was, the closer you looked at it, just energy seeming to flit into being from out of some mysterious and timeless zero energy field… physics surely was supposed to allow one look at the world in wonder – not to ignore it.
Conall had often waxed-lyrical about this to anyone who would listen: on a quantum level space and time were illusory; changing the energy state of a single atom here changed every single other atom in the cosmos; alter the course of a pair of particles once joined and the other would move, too – even if it was thousands of millions of miles away – even though according to science nothing moved faster than light-speed – something between these particles carried that information in an instant. How could that be – that a pair of particles once joined were forever linked?! Modern physics was mystical, magical and it had returned the stuffy academic that Con had once been in danger of becoming into a would-be mystic, something closer to how he had been as a child; an image of Tao, the yin-yang symbol, now hung on a string around his neck, his hair, at least then, long. But his tutor remained unaware of any of this magic, un-awakened by its import – and had failed to see its importance to his student.
‘You’re a scientist Con. This research is NOT science.’
‘You accepted my proposal. I clearly stated that I’d be investigating ancient myths…’ Con retorted.
‘Look – every PhD proposal needs tweaking – we had hoped you’d come to realise that this kind of research is currently frowned upon in the academic community and that perhaps other aspects of the subject might take precedence in your research. You’re a physicist at heart; get this ‘Tao of physics’ rubbish out of your system and grow up.’
‘It’s pronounced Dao’ was all Con could muster in reply as he left the office.
Con had driven home from this meeting fuming; by the time he had reached his house and sat down at his computer his anger had not abated. He had typed the shortest email of his life. ‘I quit.’ He had wanted it to be twice as long but decided to leave ‘you wanker’ unwritten. But in writing the email he had quit not just a PhD, but its associated lectureship in astrophysics; and he wasn’t sorry. The fire he had once had for the subject had left him since she had gone, and lecturing without fire was a mere dumb-show; thirty pairs of eyes, open like the mouths of chicks screaming to be fed, and he not able to even feed himself. He would not miss that. Besides, he had been told to rein in too many times; to leave the ‘new age’ nonsense out of the class. He was fed up of being told what he should or should not believe. As if truth was something you could measure.
Two particles once joined, linked forever... but the truth was she had died, and he had carried on living; and he had not known, not at the time; not unless you counted that dream – but how could you count that dream? He daren’t even go there, daren’t even begin to think... The dream… the river of milk, the horse on its banks…. No! He cast it from his mind. It was impossible; it was madness. It was okay for microscopic particles in the world of quantum reality to behave that way – to be entangled – twinned - but in the real world, the world of Newton, and television, and water bills? If it were true, if they had been linked and the dream had been some kind of warning, surely, he would have known; he would have felt her fear?
Without any real thought he put his folder to one side and reached for a book on the dresser shelf above the worktop. It had been hers and her name was scribbled inside the front page in a felt-tip pen: Melissa Astor; oldest and best of the Astor twins. It was an edition of the collected of poems of Coleridge, its cover faded by sunlight, its pages heavily thumbed, many turned down at the corner. It opened naturally at a well-worn page, the poem ‘Kubla Khan’, underlined and annotated in a small, hurried hand, the same as had written the name at the start. He half-read the notes, half-remembered them, so many times had he poured over them in the last year. He sat down on the sofa-bed with the book in his hands and read for a few moments more. The handwriting was legible, if rushed, little circles dotted the ‘i’s, and triple lines underlined words in the printed poem, often followed by a barrage of exclamation marks; the handwriting of someone excited, alive. But there they hid the truth.
Kubla Khan. Her favourite poem: their favourite – they’d learned it by heart just for the fun of it. He looked out of the window at nothing in particular and recited the first verse.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
A white barn-owl feather, edged with cream and smoky brown stripes, that had been placed in the back pages, fell onto the mattress of the sofa-bed; he picked it up gently, twisting it between his fingers; brushed it against his lips; and thought of the dark-haired girl who had given it to him, not the same girl who had once owned this book, but one now equally lost to him, it seemed. The feather brought back a memory of this other girl and of her grandfather; of a conversation a year earlier in a garden not two of miles from where Con now sat, with the frail white-haired man over the best soil for roses:
‘I don’t think he’s that interested in roses, granddad,’ the dark-haired girl had laughed.
‘Well he should be! If he learns the patience to cultivate a rose, he’ll have patience to cultivate a life with my beautiful grand-daughter’ the old man had replied, with a slow wink that creased the whole of his already much-lined face. Both Conall and the girl had coloured at this. ‘Granddad!’ she had said, abashed, and had mouthed a silent ‘sorry’ to Con.
Conall would go and lay tobacco on this old man’s grave tomorrow, at the Church in Avebury village, speaking the words the elder had taught him – Itsipaiitapio’pah - Great Spirit… he wondered if anyone laid flowers there now that his dark-haired granddaughter, his only surviving relative, would have returned home. Placing the book back on the shelf he continued with cleaning the van. A book from one girl, and a feather from another, he mused; it was a shame they had never met. It was tragic that they now never would. If I hadn’t been here… he began to think, but angrily cast the thought from his mind.
When the tidying was done Conall stepped outside and wrung the spilled coffee from his t-shirt then threw it back inside. The van up the way with the howling wolves on its side, curtains closed, music blaring, was gently rocking rhythmically on its squeaky suspension. He stared for a moment then quickly looked away, suddenly understanding. Lucky bastard, he thought to himself. Then imagining a night of this music and squeaking wheels he decided he would have to find another spot, closer to the circle, to camp.
Chapter Five: The River of Death
The three friends, having left the Sanctuary at the top of the ridge behind them, had descended into the valley bottom down a path beside the road, edged with lush new grasses, to where the lazy river Kennet was beginning its meandering journey through Wiltshire on its way to joining the Thames at Reading.
Another half mile walk along the snaking river brought them to the farm cottages of West Kennet on the curve of the Bath road, where they crossed the stone bridge and continued through fields lined with early blossoming whitethorn bushes in which a cuckoo could be heard, a herald of summer’s approach; ahead the companions could now see, unobscured by intervening hills for the first time, the majestic rise of Silbury Hill. At this point the Kennet turned to their left, to the south, to its source, as Barfield informed them, at the ‘Kennet spring’, as it was named on Stukeley’s plan; while another small tributary, its origins further to the north, swung around and skirted past the bottom of the hill, which was casting a great shadow over the water-logged meadow in which it lay.
While Barfield and Lewis gazed in wonder at the mound Tolkien had idled a few paces away towards the sedge covered banks of the slow, clear, river, where he gazed a while on the sticklebacks flitting in and out of the rills of dark green weed swaying in the glassy shallows. Above him a pair of crows were cawing as they circled, then flew off to the south.
He crouched, gazing into its clear depths, its shallow bottom, in the dappled shade from the water weeds, flecked here and there with pieces of chalk. He removed his boots and socks, rolled up his trouser bottoms and dipped a tentative foot into the water; it was icy cold, but before long he had grown used to it, and he sat on the bank, moving his feet hither and thither, stirring up a milky cloud of sediment that floated gently away downstream.
‘Enlighten us Tollers’ Lewis said, striding over to where Tolkien was seated, ‘The river name, Kennet, means what?’ he looked back and winked at Barfield.
‘I know what you’re getting at, Jack, and I happen to disagree with that particular vulgar etymology!’ Tolkien leaned forward amongst the rushes and dipped his hand into the cool water.
‘The earliest record is Cunnit, but we’re not looking at a Saxon profanity –beyond Marlborough is a place named Mildenhall called Cunetio by the Romans, no doubt after the river. The name cannot therefore be Saxon if it was here centuries prior to the Adventus…’. The adventus Tolkien was referring to was the Adventus Saxonum, the coming of the Saxons, which tradition dated to AD 430, some 20 years after the last of the legions had left Britain for good. The conversations between these gentlemen were always peppered with such terms – Latin and Greek phrases, snippets of poetry from all ages, used not to impress, but as a kind of scholarly shorthand. A casual listener might be forgiven for wondering if they were often talking in code.
‘Cut to the chase, Tollers – Kennet means…?’ despite his seeming briskness Lewis was smiling. His shadow moved across the water, scattering the sticklebacks.
Tolkien nevertheless bristled at being cut short.
‘The first part is from Cuno the old British word for dog…’
‘The river Dog?’ Lewis roared with laughter. ‘What a strange name!’
‘That’s rich coming from you, Jacksie!’ said Barfield, referring to the fact that since childhood Lewis had insisted he be called after the name of his favourite dog rather than his given name, Clive.
Tolkien ignored their quips.
‘The second element stems from dagos,’ Tolkien continued, ‘linked to our word ‘day’, but it stems from an older word meaning bright; and so ‘bright-hound’ is my preferred translation. Cunodagos, Cunetio, Kennet – it’s the same name. Shining dog. Bright hound.’ He turned back to watch the waters plashing over his milk-white feet. It was an odd name. Something to do with the chalk, perhaps? But why hound?
Lewis, still amused, nevertheless tried to suppress his mirth for the sake of Tolkien who could be touchy about his subjects.
‘The river of the bright hound…That, I concede, makes some sense if we think in terms of this place as a funerary landscape; after all, the Greeks imagined the river Styx that separated the land of the living from that of the dead as guarded on its far bank by the three headed dog Cerberus… could he be the dog?’
Tolkien frowned, weighing up the possibility in his mind.
Barfield, looking across the valley, offered support for Lewis’s observation, ‘Actually, the idea of the river as a dividing line between the realm of the dead and of the living could work here - West Kennet Long Barrow… there,’ he said, pointing to a rise on the crest of the hill to their south ‘the burial place of the builders of Avebury, stands on that side of the river, and the stone circles lay on this. I’ve always thought of the circle as an expression of life…’
‘So, like the Roman, you think they buried their dead away from the settlements? A river is as good a barrier as any…’ Tolkien said.
‘So luckily any hellhound guarding this river would be on that side!’’ Lewis observed, looking aslant at opposite bank of the bubbling waters, where in a nearby copse the cuckoo was still calling. Nothing could seem more incongruous on this beautiful spring day than the idea that this vale of green, spotted with the yellows and blues of meadow flowers and the creamy masses of whitethorn bushes fat with blossom could in any way be associated with death. All seemed alive, burgeoning with vitality and renewed growth.
Tolkien lent over the edge of the stream, where pieces of chalk and river rolled flints could be seen poking above the muddy depths of the clear water. He lent forward and plunged his hand into the cool depths, taking a stone from the bottom – a smooth river-rolled chalk pebble, and began to recite a few lines of verse:
In the depths stood dazzling stones aheap
As a glitter through glass that glowed with light,
As streaming stars when on earth men sleep
Stare in the welkin in winter night’
‘That’s beautiful,’ said Barfield. ‘It’s from The Pearl is it not?’
Tolkien nodded. ‘We have no recourse to rush to the Greeks to find mention of the River of Death, when our own poets express it so eloquently.’ He said, holding the white pebble between his thumb and forefinger and examining it closely, before placing it in his waistcoat pocket.
Jack nodded, more serious now. ‘I was always touched by that scene – one of the most haunting in any medieval lyric, I would say; and I suppose that poem is more fitting, for it is the garden of Paradise that lies over the river, not some dark hell inhabited by bat-like souls that one finds across the Styx in the Classical traditions.’ He gazed out over the fields; his eyes narrowed against the sun. The poem, which told of the dream of a grieving father in which he spies his deceased daughter, the Pearl of the title, across the river of death, had been read aloud by Tolkien on one of their Thursday nights at Magdalen at the tail end of the previous year.
‘But the river was wide, I durst not swim’ Tolkien quoted, touching the chalk in his pocket.
‘…I durst not swim…’
Tolkien’s voice was tinged with melancholy, and Barfield wondered what his quiet friend was thinking as he gazed across the river to the ruinous tomb on the crest of the hill, what pallid ghost he was seeing in his mind’s eye in place of the lost daughter of the poem, whose words continued to flow from his lips, but now in a whisper.
Barfield turned and once more took the path that headed westwards between the river and the road; and soon Jack was beside him, striding forward.
‘Is Ronald okay?’ Owen asked. ‘He seems distant; preoccupied.’
‘Oh don’t mind Ronald; he’s had his head in his books for so long he’s just taking a while to remember how to relax.’ He looked back to where Tolkien stood looking across the river.
‘But there is always something of the melancholic in him;’ Lewis continued ‘I think he pines for something; if I could put it in a nutshell I’d say he was homesick – homesick for a place he’s never been; nor perhaps ever could have, save in his imagination.’
‘The imagination is a powerful thing.’ Barfield said.
‘It is.’ Jack said. ‘But ultimately it is fancy, not blood and stone; not real.’
Barfield shook his head. ‘What is real?’ he asked.
‘My grumbling stomach is real, Owen. Spare me your metaphysics until I at least have a cup of tea inside of me!’
Chapter Six: The Avenue
Opening the side door of the camper van, now re-parked a few minutes’ drive from the Sanctuary in a lay-by of the narrow road that ran alongside the Avenue, Conall took a enamel tin mug from its hook in the cupboard and piled a large spoonful of instant coffee into it, and then put his kettle on to boil.
While the kettle was heating he sat with his legs out of the side-door, enjoying the heat of the mid afternoon sun; then he stood and walked over to the wooden fence that divided the Avenue from the road. The stones of the Avenue stood pale and silent in the long grass that trembled slightly in the warm breeze; each stone stood taller and wider than a man – and were arranged in pairs, a few metres apart – as if a procession of giants, two by two, had, by some long-forgotten spell, been turned to stone while shuffling towards the circle that lay over the hill, out of sight. The Avenue snaked its way, in this fashion, to the southern entrance of the henge, a good quarter of an hour walk away from where Conall now stood, eyes closed, leaning against the fence, - the heat of the sun somehow melting the lead of his earlier sadness.
A steady rising whistle from the van alerted him to the fact the kettle was boiling, and so returned to the cool shade of the kitchenette and poured the steaming water into his cup. He blew on, and then took a sip of, the black liquid; coffee was perhaps too generous a description of this scorching, bitter, brew; a splash of cold water and a couple of sugars made it slightly more palatable.
He picked up an old and battered wide-brimmed straw hat from the seat and placed it on his head; then in a moment of inspiration took down the Collected Coleridge, removed the owl feather and stuck it into the rim of the hat. In memory of you both, he thought.
Setting the cup aside he rolled a cigarette, hung it from his lips and then, coffee in hand, pulled shut the camper door and walked over to the gate that lead into the avenue.
The grass in between the stones had been recently mowed, though the stones themselves stood in small islands of long grass where the mower had not been able to reach. Conall walked towards the centre of the Avenue – sipping his drink, and peering to where, some 500 yards distant, the stones disappeared over the brow of the slight hill. There, near the brow, a dog was sniffing about one of the stones, and he could hear the distant voice of its owner calling it back; it disappeared back over the hill, leaving Conall once more alone.
From this position at the centre of the Avenue it was plain to see that the stones had been arranged in some kind of order: those to his left were thin and pillar-like, while those to his right, bordering the road, were squatter, wider, almost diamond shaped. Male and female, others had reasoned; but archaeologists often lacked imagination, he thought, taking his lighter from his pocket and lighting his cigarette.
He idled over to the first of the ‘male’ stones and laid a palm on its side. These stones had, in the same way that old trees had, a kind of brooding physicality that gave them a sense of character; and this particular stone held special connotations for Conall – last spring when he had visited the Avebury circle for the first time, he had slept up against it, protected from the view of the road with its passing traffic by its width; a stone headrest against which he’d lain, gazing up at the night sky. Though he had a van to camp in, the desire to sleep here, under the stars, protected by this ancient sentinel, was stronger than the call of the sofa-bed.
‘Hello, old friend’ he muttered, breathing out a plume of smoke. ‘Do you remember me, stone?’ he whispered. Then removed his hat and he leant forward so that his forehead was pressed against the rough cool pillar, scabbed with lichen – beaming his thoughts into its heart. So much has changed, stone. But I’m back.
Just then voices in the distance alerted him to the approach of a group of walkers. Conall walked around the stone and sat down on the grass about its feet, on the sunlit southern facing side of the stone that hid him from the road and Avenue. The walkers came and went, and he settled back, the sun hot on his cheeks, and lighting up the inside of his closed eyelids with a blood-red glow until he pulled the rim of the hat down to shade them. He could hear the distant ratcheting churring of a magpie, the hoo-hoooo-hoo of the doves, and the bleating of the sheep in the next field. These sounds relaxed him, and the crackle of his cigarette as he inhaled helped this feeling along. Time seemed to slow, became irrelevant; a quarter of an hour or so he sat here, drinking in the sounds and smells of this Wessex paradise. His mind began to drift…
Which sense, he had often been asked, would you lose if you had to? Sat here, the smell of the warm mowed grass, cigarette smoke, and sheep shit seemed as vital to the world as vision – more so, perhaps. Perhaps he would choose to lose his sight. No books though, part of him countered – but what good were books anyway? Homer, after all, was blind, so they said. Had he always been blind? Did he never actually see rosy-fingered dawn or the wine-dark sea? Imagine never having seen the sea, or a tree, or a blade of grass? Imagine never having seen the face of a beautiful woman; if I was blind – what would beauty be to me? Where would beauty reside if the eye of the beholder were blind? I mustn’t fall asleep, he said to himself, shaking his head, aware his mind was beginning to wander – or I’ll wake up sunburned.
Rising, he moved away from the stone, but fleetingly touched its side as he did so. See you later; he whispered.
Having made sure his van was locked Conall set off along the Avenue, intent on reaching the circle and grabbing something to eat in the pub that stood at its centre. The heat of the day was increasing rather than abating, and he removed his shirt and tied it about his waist; the heat of the sun on his skin felt good. As he crested the hill he saw, in the distance, a small group of people in bright yellow visi-vests huddled about a small area of stripped soil at the foot of one of the male stones besides which a small tent had been erected; he passed them with a ‘hello’ - not stopping to ask what these archaeologists scraping at the sun-baked soil were trying to uncover; he didn’t envy them lying out in this heat, with their white hard-hats on. A few minutes later, having crested another rise, he stopped to take in the vista that now spread before him – a sight that never usually failed to stir him, though today its effect was bittersweet: the great circle of stones of Avebury; so vast one could not take it in from any single viewpoint – set within a staggeringly impressive circular bank and ditch, once some 40 feet deep. From his present viewpoint he could see only the southern half of the circle – the southern entrance lay before him, through which now passed the road to Swindon, cutting through its mighty banks. To the right these same banks were crowned with great trees, but the section on the left was clear, giving one an unimpeded view of the massive sweep of stones around which visitors were treading, many picnicking in their shade, and the line of buildings beyond which were part of the village of Avebury. There, where the Swindon road met the village high street at a staggered cross-road, was the Red Lion, a large two-storey building under a heavy thatched roof, its forecourt that bordered the road spread with wooden tables, crammed full with people enjoying a drink in the sun. Conall suddenly felt very thirsty.
Leaving the avenue Conall entered the circle itself, passing between the huge stones that once marked the southern entrance; roughly angled, these stones dwarfed him as he stepped through them; but he did not stop to admire them, nor the smaller circle of stones, again, one of a pair, that he walked through. He would have time to admire the stones later, he reasoned.
The pub forecourt was busy and loud with laughter; an eclectic mix of new-age types with long hair and loose clothes, bikers in their leathers and families here for a day out crowded the tables. There, in one corner, sat a group of young people in visi-vests; more archaeologists, Conall assumed, probably university students on their summer dig; while on a table nearest the car-park a folk-group in white shirts decorated with coloured ribbons were taking musical instruments from out of their black cases. From all around the smell of fried food and cigarette smoke reached his nose. He hadn’t expected it to be so busy, but he supposed last year he had been here in April, after the Easter holidays had finished, and although the place had not been quiet, it wasn’t anything like as crowded as today.
No, he thought, turning away from the pub, I have something to do first.
He walked westwards past the pub and along a narrow road, past a small group of shops selling souvenirs, and a row of Bed & Breakfasts, until he had left the banks of the circle, and the street grew quieter; the street narrowed to a row of small brick cottages on the left, and on the right was the wall of the churchyard.
A cottage stood opposite the lych gate, a window box below the window thick with Nicotiana, its pendulous white flowers still closed; its doorway, newly painted, bore the name Church Cottage, and the small porch had been fixed-up by the new occupants; but the old occupant lay a few feet away across the road, as his granddaughter’s letter had informed him; the memorial plaque was simple:
In loving memory Alfred John Mac Govan-Crow 1935–2011
Con found it easily thanks to a posy of nicotiana placed on the grave; someone, then, in the village, still cared.
He knelt beside the plaque and removed the pouch of tobacco from his pocket. He took a pinch and crumbled it on the soft grass:
Itsipaiitapio’pah – he said.
Bless you, Old Man, he mumbled. May the Great Spirit protect you... and those you love.
The inside of the Red Lion was cool and dark after the glaring heat outside, and Conall suddenly remembered he was shirtless; putting the shirt back on and removing his hat he waited for a gap to appear at the bar; after a couple of minutes the pretty barmaid smiled at him and he asked for a pint of Green King bitter, and while he waited for it to be poured he grabbed a menu and hungrily poured over the choices. There was no chance of nabbing a table outside, he reasoned, but a small table stood free in the corner opposite the bar, so Conall told the barmaid he’d be sitting there. She gave him a table number scrawled in marker pen on a wooden spoon and he sat down with his pint.
A shaft of sunlight bisected the table like a wall of fire; and for a while Conall sat entranced at the dance of the particles of dust illuminated by it, while outside the folk-group were playing accompanied by claps from the crowd. Then he raised his pint, delighting in that first cool mouthful, the bitter tang of hops, and felt himself begin to relax. And now what? He thought.
What happened was not what he had expected.
Chapter Seven: Orient and Immortal Wheat
The tea-rooms Barfield had mentioned were in a wooden bungalow with a veranda, one of a number of small wooden buildings beside an unsightly petrol station on the north side of the road, just past Silbury hill. Despite their inauspicious appearance the bungalow, at least, was welcoming, and it wasn’t too long before the three friends found themselves ensconced in a sunny spot looking over the road and the green fields of newly sprouted wheat opposite, and enjoying a pot of tea.
A couple of farm labourers and another small group of walkers were the only other clientele on the veranda, though there were other workmen seated in the shaded part of the building, laughing and playing cards.
Barfield sipped his tea and looked longingly out over the forecourt.
‘I used to stop here for tea on my trips down to Cornwall when still a student.’ He said. ‘Those were lovely times; if only I’d appreciated how lovely at the time; I’m sure I did, but I think it takes a period of hard work and drudgery to give these things perspective.’ His face had dropped at the mention of drudgery.
‘What took you to Cornwall?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Folk dancing…’ Barfield smiled again, seeming to drift off in to some lovely memory, ‘and unrequited love…’
‘Ah,’ Lewis said, with a wink; ‘the one love I didn’t dare mention in ‘The Four Loves’’
‘Blissful torture, at the time, I can assure you. But I learned a great lesson from it, probably one of the greatest of my life!’ Barfield said, stirring his tea.
‘Being?’ asked Tolkien.
‘Well. When you have been in love, and given so much of yourself, and that love hasn’t been returned you have two choices: you can pine after the girl forever, or you do something rather more pragmatic, like sublimate those feelings into something else… you see, looking back on it I can see that my love for the girl was, I suppose, a love of life, really – or at least the possibilities life had still to offer me. I was stricken for a good while – very low – not really able to move on – it was a great blow at the time - until I had this moment of realisation that I could fall in love again; and I did; with nature, with life – with the world!’
‘With Maud?’
‘Yes…’ Owen said, haltingly, at the mention of his wife’s name. He seemed to shift uncomfortably in his seat for a second, before he resumed:
‘I do wonder whether anyone who’s never been in love can really fully appreciate the ecstasy that comes from it. I’m talking of that sense of sheer awe one feels in the presence of the beloved. Love, I suppose, romantic love, is a force of nature that just sweeps all else away. It is a primordial, magical, experience!’
‘But ultimately illusory.’ Lewis said, dunking a biscuit into his cup.
‘Why so?’ Barfield countered.
‘Because it is transient; I believe it almost a trick of nature to capture a man and fool him into marriage.’
‘So says an unmarried man’ observed Tolkien, wryly.
Barfield arched an eyebrow. ‘Does Nature perform tricks, Jack? Your attitude is typical of modern man’s distrust of Dame Natura which sees himself not only as separate from Her, but above Her, believing that She is some evil temptress!’
He took a hasty sip of tea and continued.
‘To reduce Romantic love to a biological ‘trick’ is to demean one of the most liberating of emotions. Look at the art that love has produced: would we have ‘The Divine Comedy’ if Dante had never seen Beatrice? Are you dismissing The Inferno because it was founded on love?’
Lewis was frowning. ‘Founded on love it may have been,’ he said, swallowing his mouthful of biscuit, ‘but not Romantic love. Romantic love, my dear Owen, cannot be separated from sex, and sexual desire is transitory...Beatrice Portinari was 9 years old when Dante first saw her, if you think this was based on romantic, which is sexual, love then we are on dangerous ground… ’
A couple on a nearby table seemed to shift uncomfortably at Lewis’s words.
‘…Dante’s work was not based on lust;’ Lewis continued ‘Beatrice for him was a spiritual ideal rather than a flesh and blood woman.’
‘Absolute poppycock, Jack!’ Barfield snorted, ‘For one, Dante himself was the same age as her when they met – so let’s not sully his love with any hints of paedophilia - and for another, Beatrice was precisely who she was and no other, not a symbol, nor an allegory for some ‘higher’ or ‘purer’ state of caritas: she was simply a beautiful green-eyed Florentine girl who turned the head of an intelligent and sensitive young man, and thereby opened his eyes to the beauty of the world!’
‘Are you talking about Beatrice or your green-eyed Cornish girl?’ Jack said, playfully, seemingly amused by Barfield’s fervour that had brought a flush to the taller man’s smooth cheeks.
‘Both! What is this delight of being in love but an experience of joy, of connection with the world? And what is poetry but the communication of such rapture?! One cannot read Dante, or any other great poet, without feeling it!’ Barfield’s eyes flashed with passion, seeming to drink in the landscape which no doubt was fuelling his ideas with nostalgic memories.
He paused to take another sip of tea, expecting a rebuff from Lewis that never came. The latter merely shook his head slowly, at a loss to even attempt to argue against what he thought as erroneous, and took another biscuit from the plate.
Just then a rumbling outside the veranda announced the arrival of a vehicle; the workmen in the shadows of the café looked and murmured to each-other as a strange machine, seeming half car and half tank, with caterpillar tracks for back wheels pulled up at the garage forecourt a little past the tea-house.
One of the workmen on the nearby table muttered to his colleague; and his companion guffawed at what must have been a private joke. A small, handsome man in a long and well-tailored pale overcoat and cap could be seen chatting animatedly to the petrol attendant.
Tolkien pushed his empty cup away from him and leaned across the table,
‘I like your view, Owen, that the poet is one who sees the rapture of existence and seeks to tell of it to his blinkered fellow man.’
Barfield smiled appreciatively at Tolkien’s attempts to steer the conversation back on line.
Tolkien carried on: ‘…that poetry is like some magical potion that allows you to see things differently, to see things shining with qualities otherwise hidden from us…’
‘It’s as I’ve said before,’ Barfield replied, ‘the poet sees the world as others do not, and he seeks to communicate his experience in the only way now available to him: poetic metaphor.’
‘Why won’t prose suffice?’ Lewis asked, his eyes flitting from the strange vehicle momentarily back to Barfield.
‘You’re being deliberately obstinate now, Jack – we’ve talked about this. many times before! Prose is the language of the modern everyday world, a world at odds with the poetic vision. The use of poetic metaphor restores man to his original state of participation in nature. Think of Traherne’s beautiful phrase ‘orient and immortal wheat’…’
He waved his hand in the direction of the sun-drenched sloping hills on the opposite side of the road, green with freshly sprung blades of new-born wheat still not yet much more than a foot in height.
‘When I think of those lines I see things differently; it’s as if I’m no longer looking at a field of corn, a few weeks old; what was pleasant greenery newly sprung from the soil becomes something terrible and sublime: for those shoots grow from a buried seed, and those seeds in turn were the ears upon last year’s shoots… where does one begin and the other end? The answer is that surely, they are somehow one. And if last year’s corn sprouted from the ears of the previous years, and so on, ad infinitum, we are left with the startling truth that yon green field thither is not covered in fresh new life, but a life thousands upon thousands of years old, which each year takes on a new skin, as it were, and at the end of each year casts it off so that what the farmers fill their barns with at harvest is but the sloughed skin, really, of an organism far, far older than mankind himself. Those plants, there, are in reality the same plants that were brought here from the Near East by the first farmers thousands of years ago, whose form has remained constant, though the substance through which that form is expressed has changed: Orient and immortal indeed.’
Tolkien stared at the verdant hillside, baulking at Barfield’s musings – and for a moment he saw, literally saw, a difference – what was a rolling peaceful green valley was suddenly transformed so that its sides were no longer inert, seeming dead compared to the skylarks that flew over them, but alive in a way he had never before perceived – the leaves of the wheat became upward-thrusting scales of a giant plumed serpent which covered the entire valley, scales that would be sloughed off at harvest, only to grow anew… a serpent that had wended its way to this valley some 6,000 years ago having travelled thousands of miles from its birthplace in the river valleys of the Near East… ancient, orient, immortal… dying each winter, buried in the black earth then rising again in the spring…
Barfield lit his pipe and continued. ‘That is what Traherne’s poetic phrase suggests to me, and carries far more meaning than the single word ‘corn’ or ‘wheat’ could ever do – for in it we start to get a glimpse of what early man must have seen when he was still close to Nature, not alienated from Her as he is today.’
‘A sense of the true nature of things?’ Tolkien suggested.
‘A sense of the divinity of things!’ Barfield replied, ‘for ancient man the corn was the body of a god – not in a quaint symbolic way such as our folk image of ‘John Barleycorn’ but as something real and experienced; to the Egyptians the crops were the green-skinned Osiris, torn apart, buried and resurrected each year – later echoed in Jesus as the Bread of Life, dying and rising again…’
Lewis coughed. ‘No, Owen; those earlier vegetation gods were a pre-figuration of Christ; Christ’s life was the metaphor made fact, the earlier vegetation gods were the echo…’
Owen waved his hand dismissing his friend’s interruption. ‘We’re getting away from my point – what I’m saying is that to ancient man corn was an expression of a divinity immanent in all things, man included; if you think about it, the very idea of a vegetation god presents a view of reality worlds apart from our own: this wasn’t a world where the Creator was separate from his creation, and mankind created as a lord above all other animals – no – this was a world in which nature itself was the body of the god, and man, kin to all other creatures, was part of this divinity too. If we saw all as Holy we would be less prone to trivialise, exploit and destroy our world…’
He stopped for a moment while a waitress came and leaned over and refilled their tea-pot with boiling water, avoiding all eye contact with these strange university types, friends, perhaps, of the ‘Marmalade Man’, she thought, her eyes flitting to the dapper gentlemen at the petrol pump. She coloured, feeling suddenly awkward. Maybe these were some of those friends? The ones the Red Indian gardener had told her about, with their strange rituals and the women they shipped in for the night and packed off to London by taxi the next day…
‘Imagine a world where each and every word you uttered expressed the divinity inherent in all things…’ Barfield continued, adding a mouthed a thank you to the waitress, who smiled back awkwardly and left the table; ‘how different would we look at that field if we called wheat ‘Osiris’ or ‘Persephone’ and saw, really saw, it as divine? Well this is exactly what the ancients saw; we dwell in a world where one says ‘the wheat is like Osiris’, but they would have said the equivalent of ‘the wheat is Osiris’: their language would seem to us as pure poetry; their experience of the world poetic, mystic. But it was not meant as a deceit. It expressed a truth.’
Tolkien nodded in agreement and poured each of the men more tea. How wonderful it was to hear this man talk. He was eloquent and intelligent – such a waste that he should have become a lawyer and not an academic! He has the best mind of all of us, Tolkien thought. Lewis’s attention, however, seemed to be on the man at the petrol pumps.
Barfield continued: ‘We no longer see that way because we have fallen from that original Edenic state – Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and becoming aware of their nakedness is a metaphor for mankind losing that state of participation with nature and realising his difference from the animals; his expulsion from Eden is brought about by the development of his sense of self-consciousness - which alienates us from nature – to use the image of the dismembered corn-god, our modern mind is like the evil brother Seth who divides and separates the divine world into disconnected objects, tearing it limb from limb: a world once experienced as divine is divided up, categorised, its former connectivity broken, the divinity killed; but the poet is one who can, like the goddess Isis, re-assemble the pieces of this dismembered god and bring him back to life: to literally re-member the god, the original state of pre-fall unity, where every object sang out with its participation in the divine; so that man is once more at one with the birds, beasts, fish and trees…’ Barfield’s voice had risen to a crescendo of excitement, his hands emphasising every word. ‘…for mankind still abides in Eden – indeed he never left it – for Eden is around us, but we do not see it!’ he brought his palm down hard on the table-top to emphasise each of the last six syllables, rattling the tea-set and causing the people on the nearby table to look round again, nervously.
Tolkien stared into Barfield’s ecstatic face – I’m sure you see it, Owen, he thought – as the latter gazed open eyed with rapture at the dance of the windblown corn. He had never seen Owen so animated, so energised; stirred up, no doubt by memories of youth and love. Tolkien cleared his throat, a little wary of breaking the spell his friend had fallen under.
‘You know, Owen, that one of my poetic creations, Tom Bombadil, whose adventures I recall reading to you all at an Inklings a few years back now, I’d imagine – well, I didn’t say it at the time but Bombadil, who is really the spirit of our fast disappearing Oxford and Berkshire countryside, a kind of genius loci, was in no small measure influenced by your theories. He speaks in verse, for he exists before the fall of language, before speech became prose; he is the Eldest; he speaks to the badgers and the trees and the barrow-wights; I imagine Bombadil to possess what today man can only glimpse in myth and poetry; he can talk to the birds, like Siegfried who gains that ability by drinking the blood of the dragon Fafnir...’
Barfield nodded. ‘When I try to picture that original state of unity, I always imagine Orpheus with his magical lyre that could tame the wild beasts and make the trees and even the stones dance about him in a circle.’ Barfield suggested. ‘Orpheus, like Osiris, is torn to pieces, yet his head goes on singing – you see, despite being rent apart the voice of the god can still be heard, singing of the unity of all things, remembering Eden before the Fall, if men but listen…. Poets hear it…. lovers hear it…’
‘This mystic state of unity, you know - it all sounds rather like being drunk.’ Lewis commented with a wink; suddenly back in the conversation now the vehicle and its dapper driver had pulled away.
Tolkien smiled.
‘You have a point, Jack: think of all those Norse legends that tell of drinking the mead or ale of poetry; for in intoxication man achieves something akin to that sense of belonging, does he not, and forgets his alienation? Behind every alcoholic, I suspect, lays a poet!’
‘Well, the reverse is certainly the case!’ said Lewis.
‘Yourself included?’ asked Barfield.
Lewis didn’t seem amused by Barfield’s quip, instead his eyes seemed to pale a little.
‘Sadly I think I gave up the urge to become a poet long ago. I now seek solace in my cups.’ He smiled weakly. ‘The blood of John Barleycorn gives me courage bold, not inspiration.’
Tolkien understood, now, why Lewis had seemed so uninterested in what Barfield had been saying; it was like rubbing salt into a wound – here was Lewis who in his youth had wished to be a poet above all things, but who had not received the recognition he had really deserved, and who was now reduced to writing prose – while Barfield was extolling the virtues of the poetic vision; Lewis must have felt somehow unworthy.
‘In which case,’ Lewis was continuing, ‘let us hope the beer at the Red Lion isn’t varnish!’
‘Hear, hear!’ Barfield laughed, ‘Though if it’s too good the long road to Calne will begin to lose its appeal…’
‘Well,’ Lewis said, ‘if the stones of Avebury circle begin to dance about us like they’ve been enchanted by Orpheus’s lyre we’ll know it’s time to down our cups and move on…’
Tolkien was nodding. ‘It’s funny; I had this image in my head then, when Owen was speaking: I had initially thought it was the dismembered body of Orpheus on the banks of the river Hebrus and his severed head floating down the river - but instead of some Mediterranean stream all I could see was the Kennet and instead of Orpheus’s head bobbing amongst the sticklebacks it was the image of a woman – her hair spread out like Ophelia. It was so persistent that I’m sure my mind was trying to tell me something: I’m sure it has something to do with this landscape, though quite what I don’t yet know…’
‘Well let us pray the mead of poetry inspires an answer, Tollers!’ Lewis beamed, used to Tolkien’s ‘flights of fancy’. ‘For myself that tea has restored my vigour; I’m a little too full for climbing the hill, now, if I’m honest – but a constitutional to Orpheus’s dancing stones itself seems a fair prospect.’
Chapter Eight: Shenandoah
With a second pint in hand Conall strode blinking out of the pub to the tables arranged on the flagstones fronting the road. The main lunchtime rush was over and there was now the odd spare seat here and there, though no totally empty tables. He raised his glass and took a large sip of beer, contemplating whether to squeeze in amongst the hippies gathered around the folk band, the archaeologists or the bikers, or whether to just cross the road and go and sit amongst the stones. Still a little sunblind and squinting he moved aside to let someone past him into the pub. But they stopped.
‘Conall?!’
He turned, confused at the mention of his name. A woman stood beaming up at him, dressed in a simple faded red t-shirt under a suede jacket, pale blue jeans and black boots, a bag slung over one shoulder - but it was only when she removed her sunglasses and hugged him and he found himself with his nose and mouth pressed against the top of her head, breathing the scent of her sun-warmed long dark hair, that it fully sunk in who this was.
‘What the hell are you doing here?!’ she said, grinning as she pulled away, her brows creased in a deep frown.
Conall stood speechless, his mind screaming with a car-crash of conflicting thoughts and emotions.
‘Shen?!’ he said aware of the colour draining from his face.
‘Why are you here? Are you down here for long? You’re not leaving yet?’ Shenandoah asked, all at once.
Con shook his head. No words seemed to want to come.
‘No. Good. Look - I’m just going to drop something off in here,’ she said, motioning towards the door of the pub with her head, ‘but – you got time – I mean can I join you for a drink? Quick, grab us those seats then we’ll talk!’ she said, and then was gone, but not before looking back and smiling again, shaking her head.
Some of the archaeologists had just got up, leaving a table free, to which Conall walked, seating himself facing the sun. It was only when he picked up his pint that he realised his hand was shaking. The chances that he should meet her again, here, and now, seemed to him so astronomically slim he could only lift his eyes skywards, questioning whatever power might have arranged such a bitter-sweet coincidence. When he had met her here last year she had only been here for a matter of days, to visit her granddad - for she had long since moved away from Wiltshire; but Her Granddad had died shortly after, and anyway, since then all contact between Conall and her had ceased... She had no reason to be here, he thought; and yet here she was. Why? Why did he have to see her now? Could I, he asked himself, just slip away? All this was going through Conall’s mind, but behind it all was a more constant and more appealing image from their past: of her dark eyes looking up at him and closing as he leaned in to kiss her; and then a wave of sadness and guilt swept through him, and an image appeared in his mind’s eye - a line of Coleridge’s poetry savagely underlined in red biro:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw…
And beside those words others in a shaky, wild hand:
I go to the river to die…
Behind him, following a burst of applause, the folk band had begun another song, and a strong female voice had started to sing.
There was three kings into the east,
Three kings both great and high,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn should die.
They took a plough and plough'd him down,
Put clods upon his head,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn was dead.
Just then the woman’s voice was joined by that of a man coming from the opposite side of the forecourt, deep, with a strong northern accent. Con turned – the man was shaven headed with a goatee beard, his wiry arms blue with tattoos – each forearm emblazoned with a spiralling serpent, the heads of which flicked their forked tongues across the back of his hands.
They've let him lie for a very long time,
'til the rains from heaven did fall
And little Sir John sprung up his head
and so amazed them all
The man had risen and was making his way from his seat near the door of the pub, past the folk singers, towards the road.
They've let him stand 'til Midsummer's Day
'til he looked both pale and wan
And little Sir John's grown a long, long beard
and so become a man.
He bowed to the group, grinning broadly and as he passed Con he winked at him mischievously before heading off across the road to the circle, his pint glass in his hand. Behind him the woman’s voice continued, and Con turned back and drank some more beer.
They've ta’en a weapon, long and sharp,
And cut him by the knee;
Then tied him fast upon a cart,
Like a rogue for forgerie.
‘Wake up, John-a-dreams!’
Conall looked up and met Shen’s dark-brown eyes, looking out from the curtain of her dark straight hair. She was holding a large glass of what looked to be coke, and a pint for him.
‘How come you’re here?’ Conall asked, dry mouthed. Shen bit her lip. Her eyes glistened and she forced a smile. ‘I’ve been here sorting Granddad’s things out since March; he left me the house in his will. I couldn’t sell it; just couldn’t. Oh, and there’s something he left for you, too. I meant to…’
‘No matter…. I was sorry to hear about your Granddad. I’ve just left some tobacco on his grave.’ Conall said, matter-of-factly. ‘… I don’t know if it’s a Blackfoot tradition or not, but it seemed kind of appropriate.’
‘That’s kind of you.’ She said.
‘I saw the flowers there, too – I didn’t for a second think they would have been from you… So you’re living here now?’
‘Partly; it’s taking a while to get the business off the ground here and I still have the house on Scilly, but I’m renting that out over the summer as a holiday cottage; I’m probably going to sell it. I was never comfortable there; the sea can be so oppressive…Anyway… what about you?! What are you up to?’. Her smile seemed genuine, if a little strained. ‘How are you doing?’
Conall looked down, frowning, thinking of what to say, the words of the song distracting him.
They laid him down upon his back,
And cudgell'd him full sore;
They hung him up before the storm,
And turn'd him o'er and o'er.
They filled up a darksome pit
With water to the brim,
They heav'd in John Barleycorn-
There, let him sink or swim!
Con shivered at the image of a pale body floating in dark water that had risen in his mind’s eye.
‘Con? Hello!? Earth to Con…’
He half-smiled and shrugged. ‘Well I’m writing the odd article,’ he said, speaking louder than usual to be heard over the singing, ‘giving the odd lecture here and there...’ he took another sip to buy himself time while he struggled to rein in his emotions.
‘You know what I meant.’
Conall stared at his pint.
‘Yeah, I’m okay. I’m doing better.’ He smiled, gently, unconvincingly.
‘I thought about you.’ She suddenly said. Conall raised his eyes to hers in genuine surprise.
‘Likewise’ was all he could muster; he looked into her eyes, but she didn’t hold his gaze for long, lowering her eyes and picking up her drink.
‘I don’t really know what to say.’ Shen said, ‘I would have written again… but you said not to…’
She looked across at him again, fleetingly, with a slight hint of awkwardness.
He felt like he should say something to explain, but the words weren’t there. ‘Look, I'm sorry. I was in a bit of a shit place...’
'It's okay, Con. I know. God, you don’t need to apologise.'
‘But thanks for letting me know about Alfred…’ he mumbled.
She had been looking down at her small hands, fiddling with a jade and silver ring, but now she looked up.
‘It’s all so shit, isn’t it? And I knew Granddad was ill… I had time to prepare… but you…’
Conall shrugged again and smiled weakly, not wanting her to go on.
It was strange for them both to be sitting here in silence, after all the laughter and incessant talking they had enjoyed the last time they had met. It seemed so long ago. When they had parted it had all been good between them; but to meet again now, like this, perhaps it might have been better had he not seen her. Con sipped his pint in silence, and turned his head to watch the folk band finish their song.
They wasted, o'er a scorching flame,
The marrow of his bones;
But a miller us'd him worst of all,
For he crush'd him between two stones.
And they hae taen his very heart's blood,
And drank it round and round;
And still the more and more they drank,
Their joy did more abound.
John Barleycorn was a hero bold,
Of noble enterprise;
For if you do but taste his blood,
'Twill make your courage rise.
'Twill make a man forget his woe;
'Twill heighten all his joy;
'Twill make the widow's heart to sing,
Tho' the tear were in her eye.
The crowds applauded and Con and Shen joined them, politely. When Con looked back at Shen, she was regarding him anxiously, feeling the same tension as him.
‘Well, this is awkward.’ She said. ‘God, Con, let’s not be off with each other, it’s not like we see each other every day…’. He nodded, smiling at her directness.
‘So did you ever work it out, your lost star myth – the dragon thing?’ she asked, seeming to relax a little.
He smiled. ‘I think so. It’s kind of changed a bit, not massively but a bit. It’s why I’m here,’ he half-lied, ‘the sky’s supposed to be clear for the next few days. You just can’t see any sky in London.’
‘It was always a bit beyond me, you know, your theorising.’ She shrugged. ‘But I loved the stories. Granddad did too. I loved it that night when you showed me which stars were which, and the tales behind them all.’
It had been on that night that he had first told her that he could really fall for her. Had that really happened? He felt himself redden. Was she remembering that too? But it had also been that night that the other thing had happened; not that Shen knew. Neither did he at the time; he had to wait a few more days for that news, and then everything had changed.
…They filled up a darksome pit
With water to the brim…
He cast the unwanted image from his mind, clenching his hand into a fist. ‘It’s the stories that are the key Shenandoah… they hold all that information, I’m sure of it. But it’s like a code that needs cracking… it was an intuition, that’s all – but I never had time to follow it up. Not until recently. And now, well… it makes sense, but I just don’t know if I’m right or if I’m seeing things…’
‘And you’re still at the uni?’ she asked.
‘Not anymore; I quit.’.
‘Quit? Why?’
He shrugged. ‘Long story.’ He sipped his drink.
‘How long’s long?’ she smiled.
‘Too long for now; I don’t want to bore you.’
‘Well, you’d better quit now then; it is probably very boring.’ She joked.
In the more companionable silence that followed he relaxed and was able to take her in; sitting with her back to the sun, her broad-high cheek-boned face in shadow, it was clear that she owed her looks to a more exotic ancestry than her hyphened part-Irish surname, Mac Govan-Crow, suggested. Con recalled a scene from their previous meeting, when, sitting upon West Kennet Long-Barrow, he had stuck the owl feather she had given him in her hair and told her she now looked like her great-great grandmother whose photo she had showed him on her granddad’s dresser… the same feather he had stuck in his hat not an hour before…
‘That’s my granddad’s dad, George, as a baby, and his parents, Kills Crow and Medicine Smoke Woman.’ she had said, pointing at the sepia image.
‘You look like her.’ He had said, his eyes on her rather than the photo. A silence had passed between them then. The truth was that she looked almost more native than her grandfather had done; her long straight dark hair especially, and her cheekbones that seemed to push her eyes into heavily lidded crescents; their colour somewhere between chocolate and black, depending on the light.
‘I guess Shenandoah is a Native name?’ he had said then.
She had smiled, ‘Well, it is, it’s a native river name - but that’s not why I’m called it – it’s after the song, my granddad sang it to me just after I was born, he liked the Jimmy Stewart film, and it stuck – thank God – I think my parents had been toying with Derdriu.’
‘Derdriu?’ he’d laughed.
‘Don’t laugh – it’s a family name, and it’s still my middle name.’
‘Ok, Deirdre.’
‘Shenandoah Derdriu Mac Govan-Crow… fuck me, that’s a mouthful!’ he had laughed.
A year and a world later Con took his tobacco from his pocket and rolled a cigarette, offering Shen one. She looked about her guiltily, with a voiced indrawn breath. ‘Oh god! Don’t!’
‘You given up?’
‘Kind of. My boyfriend doesn’t really like me smoking.’
Conall felt the smile freeze on his face. Boyfriend; of course: someone like Shen would never stay single for long, he reasoned. He felt a strange sense of deflation, but then she smiled at him and he felt somehow better; relieved even. Too much had changed.
‘Go on, have one. Blame the smell on me.’ Conall said with a wink, pushing the tobacco her way.
She hesitated, stared at the proffered tobacco, looked up at Con and then relented.
‘Who’s the lucky man?’ Conall asked, handing her the papers and rolling himself another.
‘He’s from Swindon…’
‘Oh I’m sorry…’ Con joked.
Shen narrowed her eyes and continued ‘– he’s called Hayden; been seeing him since last summer. He’s a fireman,’ she said, as he lit her cigarette.
‘Has that got anything to do with the no smoking? If he catches you will he turn the hose on you out of habit?’ Conall asked. She shook her head, smiling. ‘Uh huh, he’s a bit of a health nut. You need to be fit in that line of work…. God that’s good’ she said, exhaling and looking down at the cigarette. ‘I’ve got half an hour before I’m meeting him – time for some of the smell to fade, I hope. I can always get some gum.’
Conall eyed his two thirds full second pint and full third pint and wondered if he could down both in less than half an hour. But at least if he, what was his name? Hayden, turned up they wouldn’t have to talk about what had happened since he’d last seen Shen. Again, the image of that manic handwriting beside the printed poem rose to consciousness: I go to the river to die… as if to punish him for this moment of levity.
‘You’ll have to see what I’ve done to the cottage. How long are you down for, again?’
‘A few days, not sure really.’
‘Well, unfortunately with the protest I’ve let my spare rooms out for the next few days, otherwise I’d have put you up.’
‘What protest?’ Conall asked.
‘Over the bones in the museum.’
He shook his head.
‘They’re bringing some new bones here that had been stored away in Devizes museum, and putting them in this swanky new display here; the museum’s been shut for a month or so while they’ve been renovating it; the Chairman of English Heritage is going to be here on Wednesday to visit the excavations and to open the new exhibit; there’s going to be a group of protesters there to meet him, pagans, who don’t think he should be on display. The head of them, Wolf, is lodging at Granddad’s. Granddad’s has kind of become unofficial protest HQ… if you’re around tonight we’ll be here in the pub – at half eight… you’ll be most welcome. Oh, and…’ she said, fumbling about in her bag; She took a card from out of her purse and handed it to him. Shenandoah Mac Govan Crow - Tarot card readings – individuals and parties catered for; followed by a mobile number and an email address.
‘Spread the word. Business is picking up – I mean, there’s loads of stuff like this down in Glastonbury, but not here.’
‘So will you read my cards?’ he asked. ‘You promised to last time but didn’t.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah, course I will! I read Wolf’s last night; it was fun.’
He felt a twinge of jealousy over this Wolf character…
‘And did the cards say they would win the protest?’
Shen shrugged. ‘Yes and no, strangely; they wouldn’t win but would get what they wanted.’
‘Hmm. Helpfully vague.’ Con grinned.
A beeping noise sounded from her handbag and she dug around until she had found her phone. Mouthing sorry she pressed to answer the call.
‘Hello? Hi! No, I’m at the pub…just dropped in some more cards…’ It’s Hayden, she mouthed at Conall. ‘Why don’t you come up?... No? Ok. Suit yourself…’ she raised her eyes skywards as if to say ‘whatever’ ‘…I’ll be down soon.’ She put the phone back in her bag.
‘He’s already let himself in.’ she explained, ‘I’d better head off in a minute. He’s been on nights… grumpy as hell!’ She said. Suddenly her face dropped. ‘Shit! Do you have any chewing gum or anything?’ she asked, suddenly dropping the unfinished cigarette into the ashtray.
‘Nope’ said Conall, ‘sorry’.
‘Bugger. Oh well, he’ll probably be too grumpy to kiss me for a while anyway.’ She said, rising to her feet.
‘One for the road?’ Conall joked, offering her the packet of cigarette papers. She stuck out her tongue sarcastically.
She breathed into her hand and sniffed. ‘Oh, that’s not too bad.’ She said. Then she looked down at Conall and smiled, putting out her hand as if she were about to ruffle his hair, and touching him on the cheek instead.
‘I still can’t believe you’re here! I’m glad Con. I’m glad I got to see you again.’
‘Didn’t the cards tell you I would be here again?’ he asked, to which she half smiled half snorted; ‘not the cards, no’ she said enigmatically.
‘You’ll be here tonight then? The meeting?’ she asked.
‘Half eight!’ he said, nodding, and then she was gone.
After a few seconds there was only her mostly empty glass and her half-smoked cigarette smouldering in the ashtray to evidence she had been there at all. He lifted her glass and downed the coke, surprised at the taste of brandy in it, then finished her cigarette, but not before silently lifting it heavenwards, offering the first smoke to Itsipaiitapio’pah, the Great Spirit, as her grandfather had taught him.
‘Fuck,’ was all he could think to say. ‘Fuck!’
Chapter Nine: The Marmalade Man
Avebury village was small and picturesque in parts; its short high-street, half of which lay within the circle, was pretty enough, with stone cottages lining one side opposite the church; as one entered the earth embankments one passed the village shop, and here grander houses appeared on the other side of the road, behind which, secluded in trees, lay the Manor House – but as one reached the centre of the circle, passing the cross-roads on which stood the Red Lion, then followed the road east past more houses on each side of the narrow road, the village soon petered out in a few huddles of small cottages, a mess of wooden shacks, allotments, pig sties, chicken pens and overgrown copses of trees. Choked with refuse and abandoned farm machinery.
The small car park and forecourt of the pub was filled with an assortment of vehicles; the strange half-tank half-car that had stopped at the garage earlier, and a number of large trucks bearing the insignia ‘E H Bradley; building works, Swindon’ on their sides. Around these vehicles, strewn on the cobbles of the forecourt and sat upon muddy tyre tracks, were several crates and sacks, spades, ropes.
‘Hmm. Hardly the English idyll I remember’ grumbled Lewis.
‘I’m sure it’s fine inside, Jack,’ Owen said, ‘This will all be something to do with the excavations.’ He explained, waving his hand at the mess before them. Nevertheless, he felt a strong urge to draw their attention elsewhere to lighten his friend’s mood. ‘It’s not quite lunchtime, so let’s walk some of the circle.’ He suggested.
The men had approached Avebury from the west, the direction of Beckhampton and had entered the circle along the high street – so now Barfield led them back a few hundred yards and turned south off the street through a wooden gate to where the banks and ditch of the great circle could be seen, curving far out of sight.
The remains of the circle itself still impressed: it would have taken one at least half an hour to have walked the circumference of the ditch with its towering external bank that marked the bounds of the monument. Even though in places it was choked with trees and scrubby bushes the great earthwork remained imposing, despite having been weathered by over four thousand years of Wiltshire winters.
The three friends strolled along the south-western quarter of the circle, which was divided into four segments by the roads that entered the village from each of the cardinal points, near enough, roads that respected the original entrances of the circle. The grass in the south-western quarter was being kept low by the numerous sheep that roamed here. Along this entire stretch there lay just one standing stone, though mounds along the inner edge of the ditch suggested where more lay beneath the surface, as if sleeping under grassy blankets.
The single remaining stone was larger than any of the men there present, gnarled, unworked and slightly twisted like the trunk of a storm blasted tree; and each took time to touch its rough, lichen-covered skin, warm to the touch at first, but soon yielding to a deep coolness, the heart of the stone yet to be warmed by the growing sun.
‘I don’t know why but I had imagined the stones like those at Stonehenge – taller and dressed; this is far more earthy, somehow, more wild…’ Lewis said.
‘I thought you had seen them before?’ remarked Tolkien.
‘No – we made a dash for the Red Lion in the rain and when we had emerged again it was quite dark.’
‘Imagine how it would have looked when all the stones were standing…’ Barfield said.
Lewis nodded. ‘Where did the rest go?’
‘Some were buried,’ Barfield said, gesturing at the humps dotted about the inner edge of the ditch, ‘others destroyed – heated by fires built around them and then dowsed in cold water so they broke apart.’ Barfield added.
‘Damn puritans!’ Lewis said, winking at Tolkien.
‘Were they pulled down by religious zealots or by farmers wanting decent material for their dry-stone walls, I wonder?’ Tolkien mused. He ran his hand over the stone; it seemed so alone now that its fellows were gone or lying nearby under the turf. An image crossed his mind of the sleeping stones waking and casting off their green covers on some magical future dawn, rough faces creased against the light of the rising sun on the Day of Judgement. Would the rocks and stones themselves be held accountable for what ancient man had done in ignorance here at their feet, or would they shout hosanna and be exalted when the crooked was made straight and the rough places plain?
‘This is one of the smaller of the remaining stones, however.’ Barfield said, gesturing them onwards.
Crossing the road into the south-eastern quarter the friends arrived before two leviathans of stone that had once marked the southern entrance.
‘I’ve lived in smaller houses than this!’ Lewis said, walking around the first of the stones. It stood twice as tall as a man, and he guessed ten men could stand side by side along its width. It was angular rather than rounded, set aslant so that no side, save the front and back faces, seemed level. Halfway along its southern side lay a fissure with a ledge upon which a man could have easily sat.
‘My word! It simply dwarfs any other stone circle I’ve ever seen!’ Lewis exclaimed.
‘Careful which way you walk, Jack…’ Barfield scolded. ‘This is the Devil’s Chair: if you walk three times around it anti-clockwise the Devil appears.’
Lewis tried it, to no avail.
‘Maybe it has to be at midnight? These things usually are…’ Tolkien suggested, as Lewis finished his final circumnavigation.
‘Or at full moon, or midsummer.’ Lewis proposed, slightly breathless. ‘Is it full moon?’
‘No – just past the new, we may be treated to a beautiful crescent later.’ Tolkien said, secretly thinking how sad it was that most people had no idea what phase the Moon was at.
The three friends continued their stroll along the top of the ditch, which in this quarter was choked with bushes and trees – until they crossed into the north-east section, having passed a large number of mature trees on the outer bank, their roots entwined like thousands of serpents pouring down into the ditch below; as they continued they stopped at the few remaining stones until they had nearly completed the entire circuit of the monument. They had reached its northernmost point, where the road to Swindon cut through the banks, here another huge marker stone remained, on the opposite side of the circle from the Devil’s chair they had seen earlier. They were admiring this massive diamond of rock from across the road when at that moment a great boom sounded, accompanied by shouts, from beyond the stone; a boom that made Tolkien wince in memory.
‘What on earth was that?’ Lewis asked.
They crossed the road and passed the stone in its cove of trees, approaching a large group of individuals who they could now see assembled in a far section of the quadrant, who were gazing up at the tree-lined banks ahead. One of the men turned, and, spotting the three friends, hastened towards them.
The man was stocky, with creased friendly eyes and gingery brown hair, greying at the temples, swept over his forehead, but from his long pale overcoat and cap he was recognisable as the gentleman who they had seen at the tea-rooms earlier, re-fuelling the strangely military-looking car.
‘Afternoon gentlemen!’ he beamed, in a clipped, upper class voice, with only slight traces of a Scots accent. ‘A word of warning: we’re blasting the tree roots from the banks, and so if you wouldn’t mind keeping your distance from that part of the path, we wouldn’t want you to be caught in the falling debris.’ he smiled broadly. There was something of the schoolboy in his manner.
‘Is this to do with the excavation?’ Barfield asked.
‘Excavation? Yes, yes! Are you interested in archaeology?’ he asked, his eyes lit up with boyish enthusiasm.
‘Well, yes...’ Replied Barfield, but before he could qualify the statement the man had grinned and continued.
‘Alexander Keiller,’ he said, extending his hand, ‘I’m heading the excavations here; please let me show you what we’re up to!’
Introducing themselves to their excitable guide as they walked the three friends followed Keiller towards the assembled group, some smartly dressed, others clearly labourers in their shirtsleeves, dirty from their work, but before they reached the main group Keiller turned and beckoned to the three friends to join him at the edge of the ditch; here it had been excavated far below its present level – incredibly so – if the present ditch was the depths of two men, the excavated section, with its crisp straight sides in blazing white chalk, was another six men deep.
Young workmen in caps and waistcoats, their shirtsleeves rolled up, were digging the dirty chalk from the ditch; and shoring up the sides of the vast trench with wooden revetments noisily being hammered into place. In one place on the floor of the ditch a large bone stuck out of the soil, and beside it the unmistakeable smooth polished curve of a yellowed skull.
‘The original ditch, before time silted it up – was some forty feet in depth! And the bank, too, we suppose, much, much higher than it appears today. In short this feature would have been absolutely impenetrable!’
Lewis was shaking his head. ‘My word! That is truly astounding – one would never have guessed!’
‘No, quite! It shocked us, too – we kept on thinking we had reached the bottom, but no! This site is the most spectacular prehistoric circle in the world… and it’s my dream to restore it to its former glory… already we’ve located many of the stones that were buried, and we can erect them once more. The ditches and banks can be cleared of trees, which just leaves the…’ and he waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the edge of the village with its shanty building and animal pens.
Just then the group gathered to the south edged back from the ditch as a man further up the bank opposite shouted a warning, and ran back round along the top of the bank to a safe distance. A few seconds later another boom rang out and a fountain of earth and debris was thrown into the air, pattering down into the ditch and leaving a smoking crater from which the gnarled and blasted remnants of a tree root poked.
A cry rang out and a tall dark-haired young man clutched at his head then bent over to retrieve his glasses that had been knocked off by a piece of falling matter. A couple of those nearby rushed over to see if he was okay, and he nodded that he was fine.
Keiller whooped with delight. ‘Ha! Piggott!’ he shouted over ‘It’s good for you younger men to know how we felt in the trenches in 1916!’ He winked and laughed heartily.
Lewis rested his hand on Tolkien’s arm, seeing the latter pale at the explosion.
‘I’m okay, Jack.’ He said. Besides, he thought, I’m thinking of them, not me - and the bloody mess happening in Germany right now. What if these ditches they’re digging here are just practice? I’m thinking of my sons…
Keiller turned to the friends, gesturing them to follow him towards the main group. Piggott didn’t look impressed. He held out the piece of wood that had hit him towards Keiller– not a large piece but big enough for him to dab a handkerchief in his dark hair and examine it for any signs of blood.
‘You’ll live, my boy – I’d keep that as a souvenir! Look: it looks like they’ve found some more human remains in the ditch…’ he said, guiding Piggot away, but not before turning to the three friends.
‘I really must dash – very nice to have met you! Always nice to meet fellow enthusiasts… you’d be surprised at how many consider this the height of time-wasting and folly.’ Keiller beamed, before disappearing with the dazed and frowning Piggot towards the white chalk ditch.
‘Now there’s a man with vision.’ Remarked Lewis as they approached the car park of the Red Lion.
‘Let’s hope it’s the same one our ancestors had, if he’s hoping to rebuild what was here.’ Barfield said.
‘It’s easier to have a vision when you have the money to back it up.’ Tolkien said.
‘Yes, I suppose. Where do you think his money is coming from?’ Lewis asked.
‘It’s Keiller, Jack. As in Keiller’s Dundee marmalade,’ said Barfield.
‘Ah, yes! The marmalade millionaire!’ Lewis laughed. ‘I have a jar at the Kilns! Warnie will be most impressed!’
He suddenly stopped and laughed again. ‘He certainly seemed to be possessed with a real ‘zest’ for his subject…’ Lewis proposed, grinning.
Tolkien chuckled. ‘Who better, then, to preserve the past?’
Barfield shook his head. ‘Do you think he’ll want to rename this place Scone-henge?’
‘For that appalling pun, Owen, you’re buying the first round’ Lewis said, opening the door to the Red Lion.
Chapter Ten: The Dream
Conall’s walk back to the camper had been a gloriously drunken affair; clutching a large bottle of water he’d bought at the Avebury post-office as he left the village, he had staggered back along the avenue, smiling at the stones and greeting the blackbirds and sheep with hellos; he had attained, so it seemed to him, a glimpse into the state of, if not Mankind before the Fall, at least himself before the events of the last year had overshadowed him; the words of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill, his favourite poem, formed an internal soundtrack to his stumbling;
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold
And the Sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams
Conall stood in the Avenue, arms wide, and recited the poem to the sky.
It was all shining, It was Adam and Maiden.
Maiden… maiden. Just the mere word sent a primal and visceral quiver through his chest…Oh Shenandoah…
I long to see you! Away, you rolling river!
Such a state was a rare and precious occurrence in any man, let alone Conall for whom the last year had offered little respite from unhappiness. Three hours driving and three swift pints were no doubt part of the recipe on this occasion (though such recipes were doomed to failure if consciously repeated) but the role his meeting with Shenandoah Mac Govan-Crow had played in inducing this state would have been impossible for him to fathom; quite why his initial shock and disquiet had given way to this unexpected upwelling of joy eluded him. And his reaction was not to question it too closely lest this flimsy shell of happiness cracked. It did not even seem to lie wholly in the unlikely possibility that last year’s sentiments might once more be resurrected; subsequent events had put pay to that possibility, as had the presence of, what was his name again? Hayden. Perhaps then, after all, it was simply the peace of the place and the alcohol, and the memory of happiness reminding him that the emotion still lived, though sleeping deep, within him?
Alcohol; that wonderful poison! It numbed the brain from the outside in – and as the outermost part of this organ was the youngest evolutionary speaking, and which contained our so-called civilised side, our inhibitions and social niceties, these were the first qualities to vanish when the poison started working… Con remembered an image he’s seen of a brain in a textbook, sliced in half and its different areas shaded; like the rings of a tree, the deeper you went in, the older the organ became; on the outer surface was the neo-mammalian brain, shared by us and other developed mammals – beneath that lay the palaeo-mammalian brain and within that, towards the core, lay the reptilian brain – a level of brain we shared with lizards and fish; indeed, as an embryo in the womb we had gills and a tail and went through the whole of evolution in nine months, from fish to hairless ape; he thought of his own mother’s womb with the twin fish swimming aside each other, like Yin and Yang. Perhaps this was why when we drink we feel closer to the animals, Con reasoned, we’re sloughing off our humanity, that thin, filmy outer surface of the brain, and we’re thinking instead (if thinking was an apt word, which he doubted) with our deeper animal brains; and if we drank so much, or if we could perhaps somehow go all the way back, why… we’d be like snakes or fish - primal sea serpents – what kind of knowledge would we then possess – knowledge of our ancient selves – what kind of deep primeval memories might lie stirring in our deep serpentine brains? He wondered. If we could but think those thoughts and shut off all the noise of the later brains! An image arose in his mind from one of Wagner’s operas he’d once been forced to watch (and had grown to enjoy) where Siegfried slew the dragon and drank his blood and could understand the language of the birds. The dragon’s blood clearly gave access to that primal reptilian knowledge, older than man – locked within our psyches – usually never heard or heeded, save perhaps when we lie basking in the warmth of the sun; yet our most basic functions are controlled from this part of the brain – breathing, regulation of temperature… was this why wisdom was often depicted in serpentine form? The entwined snakes on the caduceus of Hermes or the staff of Asclepius?
The sun was still high above Waden Hill, the shadows of the stones short; the farthest stones visible of the southern end of the Avenue danced in the heat; all seemed still; no birds were flying. The archaeologists had ceased digging and were sat with their backs to the sun in the shadow of two stones. Con was pissed enough to wonder over to them.
‘Found anything?’ he asked, dumbly.
A middle-aged man with a short silver goatee beard ran his fingers through his hair and swallowed the mouthful of sandwich he had been eating, and looked up at Con, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand.
‘Well… we were looking to see if the stone was in the right place – the circle was partly rebuilt in the 30’s; this one had been put back in place with concrete, and so we’re looking to see if we can find traces of the original stone-hole… but we’re also looking at the original ground-surface…’
He stood. ‘See the compacted chalk, here?’
Con nodded, looking at a smooth and pristine square of exposed white earth, inches below the topsoil with its long pale grass.
‘We’re looking to see if it’s more worn and compacted between the stones or outside of them…’
‘So, you can gauge if people were processing along them or not?’ Con asked.
‘Precisely. It tells us just as much if we find out that they weren’t…’
Con looked puzzled.
‘This site is part of a henge,,,’ the archaeologist said, ‘basically a big circular ceremonial structure, and we know henges are ceremonial as they have a bank on the outside of the ditch…’ he waved loosely in the direction of the huge henge bank over his shoulder that ringed the village, the trees that lined it still visible at this distance.
‘That would be useless as a defensive feature – where you’d ideally put the bank on the inside…’
Con knew all of this but was nodding anyway, wondering where the archaeologist was heading, and suddenly needing to piss…
‘But what if they were defensive, but from the inside? What if they were keeping something in?’ He raised an eyebrow, grinning.
‘What, like animals? Herds of cows?’ Con asked. Or bulls? He wondered, suddenly seeing the henge as a great bullring, ringed with cheering crowds.
The man shrugged. ‘We’ll see. If you’re here over the next couple of days, we may find out. We might find foot or hoofprints along the avenue… or we may find evidence of footfall outside of the Avenue… as it may have been it wasn’t meant for mortals to walk on at all.’
‘A kind of ghost road?’ Con asked.
‘Yes, something like that. Perhaps the stones represented ancestors or spirits.’
‘Keep me posted.’ Con said, wanting to stay and talk but increasingly needing to pee.
Once over the hill and out of view of the archaeologists he lent with an unsteady hand on a stone and pissed against its base - returning nitrogen to the soil, he reasoned, yet feeling slightly uneasy, remembering what the archaeologist had said about the stones; nevertheless, it was with a lighter step that he marched down the slope to where his camper lay parked beside the road.
The inside of the camper was like an oven; he closed the curtains, slid open the windows on the opposite side, and cleared the heap of clothes off the sofa-bed; Con took a large tepid draught from his water bottle and lay down, eyes closed. His plan was to re-hydrate himself and snooze for a while so that he wouldn’t spend the night at the pub with a blinding headache sipping orange juice.
For a moment he swooned into a deep, dark, state of relaxation, but a few seconds later his feet seemed to be rising above his head sickeningly, and so he sat upright and drank a little more water until the van stopped moving skywards. I’m such a lightweight, he thought. Three pints and I’m pissed. His eyes began to close, and the room fell away again; he felt nauseous. Fuck, fuck, fuck; the ancient reptile within was rebelling against the poison; the alcohol had changed the viscosity of the liquid in his inner ear, making him feel he was moving when he was still; the primal serpent, basically an alimentary canal on legs, was attempting to rid itself of the poison that was threatening its life. But Con was able to summon enough outer brain to fight this urge.
It took a further twenty minutes of attempting, and failing, to keep his eyes closed without feeling dizzy before the motion of passing cars rocking the camper lulled him into a half-doze. He dozed on and off, drinking some more water when he remembered, until finally the urge to sleep left him.
Sitting up he felt the first dull twinges of headache. He searched the drawers above the hob and sink for an ibuprofen. He couldn’t find the bloody things, and instead he reached higher and took the Collected Coleridge from the bookshelf; he didn’t open it, just held it to his chest, lost in thought. He was thinking of a dream he had had some twenty years before whose meaning had eluded him at the time but which had somehow become connected to all of this… to this place, to her; he had shaken it from his mind earlier but now in his half-aware state he allowed himself to remember.
The dream was simple yet profound:
He was walking through a spring landscape, at some unspecified date long ago in the past – deep in prehistory - on the site, though no monument was yet present, of some future circular earthwork or henge. In the distance there was a mountainous expanse with a great chasm in its side. Continuing to walk he had found himself beside a gently meandering stream on the banks of which were three white cows with red ears, grazing, and beside them a stately woman, no, a goddess, in a long blue robe, her face hidden by a hood. She approached the stream and placed one end of the wand she was carrying into the water, whereupon the river turned milky white. Conall removed his clothes and walked into the water, then knelt and submerged himself in the cool depths three times… after the last submersion he turned to see a white horse with a shining crescent moon set between its brows standing on the river bank beside him. He walked out of the water and kissed it between her brows but instead of leaping on to its back, as it gestured him to do, Conall walked beside it, still naked…
The dream imagery had stuck with him far longer than any normal dream; it had had the clarity of a vision; it had seemed to suggest rebirth, a new start- but only now was he starting to understand it – images within it which had remained a mystery had started to make sense over the past couple of years; clues within it had been instrumental – more than instrumental – vital – in his academic work investigating these ancient sites; and details that had meant nothing at the time had come to seem more than coincidental, as if the dream had been prophetic – and it’s tied to this place, thought Con, I know it.
When he had been here last spring, he had returned to his camper one evening after seeing Shen at the cottage, feeling restless, uneasy, like he wanted to run or shout or smash something; it was a feeling of a joyous rage, of intoxication. It was as if a fire had been lit within him; like he wanted to roar with the life he felt. Remembering the dream, he had gone to the Kennet that night, wishing to act it out; it seemed madness at the time – what did he think he was doing? This, he had reasoned, is how rituals must start – with the physical acting out of a vision. He had felt compelled to go – the dream image kept rising in his mind, relentless, hypnotic in its quiet insistence; the thought of entering those cool waters promised not a dampening or cooling of his ardour, but a transformation of it. Maybe I’m ready, he had thought, to start anew; he remembered how he had felt in the dream, slick from the water, his hair plastered back from his forehead, like a new born; he’d felt like a young god, like the kouros of Poseidon rising from the some primal amniotic fluid – but he hadn’t gone through with it. He had just stared into the inky waters feeling empty and suddenly wary and had returned to the camper, mute and deflated.
Why that night of all nights, he now wondered? Had he somehow known? Not that there was any way he could have – even if twin quantum particles could affect each other though separated millions of light years apart in space – how would it be remotely possible that he could somehow intuit what she had been doing at that very moment? Because it had been then, he knew in his heart of hearts. But he had felt a sense of renewal, not of fear. And surely, he should have felt her fear?
I go to the river to die…
But there had been no connection; it was coincidence, that’s all; it was all in his head; it was a door into madness to think otherwise. And yet he would have rushed headlong through that door if it meant, for a single precious moment, that the connection had been there - a hint that the entanglement had been real; that somehow, beyond time and space, they had always been, and therefore always would be, together.
But he had not known her anguish. There was no quantum entanglement; no tie; no hope; just mute nothingness and an old book, bent out of shape and disfigured by the desperate scribblings of her pain, which now mercifully had ended. He was too shocked to close his eyes and try to sleep again; and too hurt to cry. He drew aside the curtain facing the Avenue; the field with its double line of stones lay empty. Likewise, out of sight, the tourists in the main circle to the north were slowly departing, leaving it to its ghosts. Long past its zenith the sun was gilding the edges of the stones and the trees that crested the hills, but Con was immune to its beauty. The fine shell of happiness had cracked.
Chapter Eleven: Mac Govan-Crow
Tolkien and Barfield sat at the small table beside the window, relieved to have at last reached the Red Lion and un-shouldered their heavy packs. Lewis was at the bar, where he was talking to the barman as the latter poured beer from a jug into three pint mugs.
The room was busy and filled with smoke; in one corner two men in caps played at dominoes; in the other corner, far from the patch of sunlight in which Tolkien found himself sitting, sat a solitary figure, puffing on his pipe and eyeing Tolkien with dark heavy lidded eyes. Tolkien looked away hurriedly and smiled at Barfield.
‘Jack’s on top form.’ he said, on hearing the barman laugh at one of Lewis’s witticisms. Owen nodded, but his eyes suggested something different than the smile that briefly played over his lips.
‘I find Jack somewhat, I don’t know, flat of late.’ he said.
‘Flat?’
‘His arguments lack conviction. It’s as if some of that fire he once had has left him. I suppose it was the part of him that was searching… but now he has found God it’s as if the search is over and that hunger has somewhat abated. His opinions have become fixed.’
It was clear from his expression that Barfield had found this change in his friend painful. ‘I did so used to enjoy seeing him fired up.’ He smiled sadly and blinked a few times. ‘Did you see his face when he said about no longer being a poet? That’s all that used to drive him. He seems lost, for having become found.’
Tolkien looked away, unsure of how to respond to his friend’s observation, and found himself once more under the gaze of the swarthy man in the corner. Having had his gaze met Tolkien decided he could not be rude and look away for a second time and so he touched his cap in greeting. Slowly, the man in the corner responded, touching his cap with stubby, dirty fingers, his eyes remaining still fixed on the pair at the window, midst the blue cloud of pipe smoke.
Unnerved, Tolkien fidgeted in his waistcoat pocket for his own pipe, filled the bowl and then laid it on the table, then changed his mind and put it in his mouth unlit, then took it out to speak.
‘He seems little altered to me, Owen; but you have known him longer, I suppose. Perhaps what you’re observing is the mellowing of a man in his middle years, as we all are, no doubt?!’
Owen smiled. ‘Perhaps you are right, Ronald.’
‘Time ever marches on.’ Tolkien said, striking a match and lifting to his pipe. ‘Unlike us. I think it’s a good decision to stay here tonight,’ he said; they had reached this decision moments before. What had appeared during their planning a decent spot to pause had, in truth, appeared more attractive in the flesh, so to speak; Calne could wait.
Lewis returned to the table with the foaming mugs in his hands. He was frowning.
‘No room at the Inn, I am sorry to say – nor, it seems, at the other place across the road… all been booked up by that archaeologist Keiller, but all is not lost...’ He said enigmatically and he returned to the bar.
Tolkien sipped at the foam of the beer. ‘I do hope so. I don’t really fancy walking much further today. I thought the idea was to break us in slowly, not kill us off on day one.’ A fleeting smile played across his lips. ‘I dare say there should be room still at Calne if it should come to that...’
Just then the barman, with whom Lewis was talking, turned and raised his voice.
‘George?’
At this, the dark-complexioned man in the corner who had been watching Barfield and Tolkien, set down his drink and headed for the bar, where he was seen to engage Lewis in conversation. Tolkien eyed the pair, noting the man’s long-hair bound in a ponytail, like some tinker or gypsy, he thought. A moment later the two men were walking towards the table. Tolkien and Barfield stood to greet the stranger.
‘This is Mr Mac Govan-Crow,’ Lewis said, ‘and it seems he has a couple of rooms to rent in the village, which is excellent news.’
Mr Mac Govan-Crow once again touched his hand to his cap.
‘He has invited us to see the rooms, but I’ve assured him that I am sure they will be more than suitable; shall we bring our packs along after our lunch?’ he asked the newcomer.
Mr Mac Govan seemed to be eyeing the three gentlemen with veiled amusement, much to Tolkien’s discomfort. ‘’Tis no bother, sirs. I’ll take your luggage now; if you come after you’ve eaten, I shall provide you with a key.’ His accent was pure West Country, even if his swarthy, aquiline looks with their black eyes like crescents over high cheekbones, were not. He effortlessly shouldered Lewis’s pack, despite his short stature, then picked up the other two in his hands and exited the pub.
‘Good god he must be as strong as an ox!’ exclaimed Tolkien. ‘Mac Govan-Crow, eh? If he’s a Celt, then I’m a Zulu!’
‘Yes. I know. Listen to this. He's a full-blooded Red Indian by all accounts, so the barman told me! ‘Hawkeye, Last of the Mohicans’ the landlord called him.’ Lewis said.
‘Hawkeye?! People can be so uneducated!’ Tolkien scowled.
Lewis nodded.
‘Everyone knows that the last of the Mohicans was Uncas! Hawkeye was a white man!’ Tolkien explained.
Lewis suddenly laughed. ‘My dear Tollers! There was I agreeing over what I thought was your annoyance over a racial stereotype whereas your real annoyance was over the fact the barman didn’t know his Fennimore-Cooper well enough!’
Tolkien smiled. ‘Both rankle with me –ignorance is ignorance, I suppose. And if you’re stupid enough to cast about racist nicknames you’re also stupid enough not to know you’ve chosen a character of the wrong race to begin with! I was brought up reading the Leatherstocking tales; I used to fantasize about living in the forests, hunting with a bow…this is absolutely marvellous! I wonder if he speaks any Native languages…?’ Tolkien asked, his eyes lighting up. ‘How on earth did he end up in Wiltshire?!’ he continued. ‘What tribe is he?’
‘I don’t care, as long as he can cook a good English breakfast.’ Lewis quipped, and sipped his pint. But Tolkien wouldn’t let the subject drop.
Owen had spread his ordnance survey map out across the table – and the friends spent a few minutes looking closely at the finer details, while thirstily emptying their glasses.
‘So, the question is whether we take a walk back to Silbury now and climb it before dinner – or, seeing is we are now staying the night, we save that until tomorrow.’
Tolkien was looking at the map in silence.
‘Just look at the number of ancient features – dozens more burial mounds than I suspected; and look at that…’
‘What is it?’ asked Lewis.
‘That hill – Windmill hill on Stukeley’s map – there’s some kind of square enclosure on top and here the hill is called Waden hill.’
‘Waden? And what do you deduce from that?’ Lewis asked, downing his pint.
‘And the spring…’ he continued, not pausing to answer Lewis’s question, ‘the Kennet spring, is here named Swallowhead! Swallow. Well I never! Suilo. It seems my vision of that lady floating in the waters of the Kennet was probably correct…if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the book over the last few days I would’ve had time to do some research, I had no idea… the hill’s named after the spring…not vice versa…’
‘Explain!’ Lewis said, annoyed at his friend’s seemingly random muttering
‘Only if you get in another jug, this is going to be thirsty work!! We need the ale of inspiration!’
Chapter Twelve: Adversity
Once more seated at the table by the window of the Red Lion Conall was swirling his glass of diet coke so that the large effervescent paracetamol and codeine tablets he’d dropped into it would dissolve more quickly. The fizzing finally stopped, and he swallowed the resulting bittersweet liquid with a grimace. He had left his campervan dehydrated with his head threatening to burst with every heartbeat making the walk to the pub nauseatingly painful and arduous. Now faced with a veggie lasagne with onion rings he looked down at the plate and wanted to heave, but he dipped a ring into a large heap of mayonnaise and persevered. Then he ate like a starving dog.
At the bar sat the wiry, shaven-headed man who had joined in with the folk singers earlier that day; he had greeted Conall with ‘y’alright?’ as he’d ordered his meal and Conall had done his best to nod, noticing the piercing in the man’s bottom lip above a greying goatee beard constrained in a leather thong, and the heavily tattooed arms. Now seated by the window Conall couldn’t help but listen to the man, who was speaking in a thick Yorkshire accent, talking to the pretty barmaid who had taken his food order earlier. The man’s words, like his accent, were strong – liberally peppered with swearing. He was showing the barmaid something he had on a lace about his neck that she was regarding with interest.
A little later the shaven-headed man left for a smoke and Conall took his now-empty plate to the bar; he ordered a Jack Daniels and coke and repaired to his seat. His headache had abated somewhat, but still hang around his temples; perhaps the shot would help, he thought, optimistically. He suddenly realised he was rocking back and forth on his seat like a caged animal, and so made a conscious effort to stop, only to find his fingers rapping on the tabletop. It was through these physical expressions that Conall realised just how nervous he was about seeing Shen. There, at that very bar, he had first talked to her, all those months ago. He had been less nervous then. He couldn’t imagine doing it now. My fire has left me, he thought bitterly.
The door creaked open and Conall’s pulse shot up, but it was not Shen. It was a man in a biker’s jacket, tall, well-built, with a shock of red-blond hair and short fiery beard and blue eyes; Con breathed a sigh of relief, but it caught in his throat as he spied Shen walking in after him; she leant up and said something to him, then glanced about for Conall.
Shen smiled and lifted a hand, but before she could walk over the shaven-headed man had walked back in and had greeted her with a bear hug; turning, he shook Hayden’s hand and the two men headed for the bar.
‘What would you like to drink?’ Shen asked, walking over to Conall, her eyes smiling. ‘A beer; Green King – same as earlier’ he said. But rather than stay sitting waiting to be introduced to the others Conall rose and approached the bar with her.
‘Conall, this is Wolf Jones, he’s staying at the cottage, and this is Hayden…’ Wolf’s handshake was friendly and vigorous, and accompanied by the same ‘Y’alright?’ as earlier; Hayden’s grip was firm and he glanced at Conall with a lack of scrutiny that suggested either Shen had said nothing about their past (not that there was much to tell, he thought), or Hayden was not the kind of bloke to be troubled by such things.
‘A bitter drinker, eh?’ he said, his voice deep with a strong West Country tang. ‘That’s what we like to see! You here for the protest?’
‘I didn’t know it was happening, to be honest – I just needed to get away from London.’ Con stated.
‘Where are you staying?’ Hayden asked.
‘In my campervan ‘, he began, and when Wolf raised his eyebrows in interest he continued ‘I’m parked down by the avenue.’ Conall replied.
‘Silver fiat Scudo?’ Wolf said, ‘I think I saw it at the Sanctuary earlier. Nice little conversion – I’d love to have a poke around’ Wolf cut in. Conall tried to recall if he’d seen anyone there, ‘I was in my van just up from you – big black bastard with wolves on t’side.’ He chuckled.
‘Yeah, I saw your van.’ Conall said, trying not to think of the van rocking…
Shen and Wolf took their drinks over to the table while Conall waited for his own to be poured. He stood in silence next to Hayden who was tapping in his pin number into the card reader. Conall made an offer to pay for his pint but the other refused, and so Conall took both his and Hayden’s pints back to the table. Wolf had sat opposite Shen, leaving Conall to decide whether to sit next to Wolf or next to Shen; either way he’d have to sit opposite Hayden. He decided to sit beside Wolf – at least that way he’d be able to look Shen in the face.
‘Shen says you’re doing some research on the henges?’ Wolf asked.
‘Something like that…’ Con answered, dismissively.
‘It’s a cool place; the energy here is amazing. I was up at West Kennet this morning drumming…’ he closed his eyes and exhaled ‘…it was a beautiful sunrise.’
Hayden had arrived and nestled in beside Shen.
‘Did I hear you say drumming? Another fucking weirdo!’ He laughed.
‘I’ll pick you up at 5am tomorrow then, Hayden? I’ve got a spare drum…’
Hayden raised a sceptical eyebrow and smiled.
‘Such a shame, mate – I’ll be leaving for work before that… maybe next time.’ He said, winking. ‘You see it all here – drums, didgeridoos… croppies’ he swigged his pint.
‘Joking aside, you should try it.’ Wolf suggested, with sincerity.
‘Nah. Not my thing.’ He placed his hand over Shen’s, ‘I’m kind of a bit too practical for all that shit; but live and let live – it don’t bother me.’
Conall had so far remained silent, trying desperately hard to find something to say.
‘What’s a croppy?’ he asked
Hayden nodded towards a group on a table by the fire – long haired for the most part and sporting various types of facial hair, but these were not the usual hippy types dressed in colourful loose clothes – these seemed more techno-nerds, in blacks and dark greens – close-fitting, camouflaging - who were currently sharing images on their mobile phones and laughing.
‘Circlemakers.’
‘What – crop circles? These guys make them?’
‘Well, you can be sure little green men don’t – this lot are behind most – though they’ll not admit it; it’s all part of the mystique, apparently.’
‘I think I’d tell people – I’d be well proud.’ Wolf laughed.
‘They make a shit load of money, too – corporate branding etcetera – media and businesses pay these guys to stick advertising in fields – there was one a couple of years ago advertising Shredded Wheat – or film promos. If they let on they did them all they’d ruin the mystery and then no one would pay them to do it; it pays for them to keep quiet.’
Con continued to look over at them; they looked unassuming - perhaps, he thought, they derived some nerdish glee from pulling the wool over people’s eyes - drinking beer then going and playing practical jokes in a Wiltshire cornfield on a balmy summer’s night and gleefully listening to the speculation here the next day seemed a fairly innocuous hobby; it was all mercurial, childish fun. But perhaps he was doing them a disservice; perhaps they really were really faceless artists speaking up for the earth.
Another pint drunk, Conall was finding his tongue beginning to loosen.
‘So do you let Shen read your cards?’ he asked Hayden.
Hayden laughed and shot him a look that said ‘are you serious?’
‘It’s bollocks – I mean, a tarot card can no more tell my future than this beer mat; You know what I think? It’s more to do with her reading the people and then making the cards fit, don’t you think? She’s bloody good at reading people.’ He turned to Shen. ‘I mean it – you should go into psychology, or something. Use your skills properly. Or even the police, CID or something. This stuff’s okay, and people lap it up round here, but you could do something proper with it….’
Shenandoah looked up at him, her eyes wide. Conall couldn’t read what she was thinking.
‘I’m happy how it is, Hay. It’s starting to pay its way. And I can fit it in around my painting…’
‘Yeah, it is babe, but I just think you could be doing something better with it, that’s all.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘You’re wasted doing that.’
She looked up again and shrugged.
She met Con’s gaze for an instant, smiled weakly and then sipped her brandy and coke. He remembered her laughter from last year. She looked different now, kind of beaten down, or maybe she was just biting her tongue for the sake of the group. Besides, he guessed she could say the same of him – he felt uncomfortable here, a ghost playing at living, a cartoon character amongst flesh and blood men. Why can I never think of anything to say?! He berated himself.
‘So what do you do, Colin?’
‘Conall. Well, up ‘til recently I was a lecturer, in astrophysics.’
‘At last, a scientist!’ Hayden laughed and put out his hand for Con to shake. Conall shook his hand but felt like an idiot in doing so; Hayden’s hands were large and calloused; his own felt like a child’s in comparison.
‘til recently, you say?’
‘Yeah – I’m looking to lecture independently, and write – articles and stuff; I’m just fed up of London.’
‘He who is tired of London is tired of life’ – who said that?’ Wolf asked.
‘Samuel Johnson; well I guess I’m tired of life. I hate cities. I think mankind made a massive mistake in ever leaving the countryside.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you lived here; it’s fucking dead!’ Hayden laughed.
Con shrugged. ‘We’re not adapted for city life – we evolved in the Savannah, moving in small groups, close to nature; in a city we see more people in ten seconds than your average prehistoric man would have seen in a lifetime; I just don’t think we’re adapted for it – I think we miss it.’
Hayden snorted. ‘How can we miss what we’ve never had?’
Con shrugged.
‘I read once of an experiment where generations of finches were brought up in a secluded lab, yet despite never having been outside nor seen a predator, when a plastic hawk was passed overhead they all crouched and tried to hide… they’d never seen a hawk yet felt fear. It’s instinct. The yearning for nature is an instinct, too. We can miss the world our ancestors knew.’
I miss it, he thought; that ancient sense of belonging, of living in harmony with Nature; not barricading her outside of the city gates. I don’t feel at home among other people; I sleep better under the stars than in any bed…
‘Yeah, I do get where you’re coming from, but you can’t turn back the clock.’ Hayden said. ‘Or stop the march of progress.’
‘More’s the pity,’ said Wolf. ‘I’m sure there’s a correlation between stress and cruelty and the way cities depersonalize you… look at what happened when the Native Americans formed cities – human sacrifice on a mass scale.’
‘You can’t blame that on cities,’ Hayden re-joined ‘– that was just due to plain barbarism. 84,000 people sacrificed over 2 days, so the Spanish Chroniclers said.’
‘Exactly, Spanish Chroniclers – sooo trustworthy and unbiased….’ said Shen, chagrined.
‘Well,’ continued Hayden in what must have been a perennial argument between them, given the withering look on her face ‘it just goes to show the Indians were just as brutal as the Europeans – this crap people spout nowadays about the poor tree-hugging natives is just bullshit – Aho! It’s a good day to die!!! your ancestors were just as bloodthirsty as mine.’
Shen pouted. ‘One - The Aztecs weren’t my ancestors; you can’t lump a whole continent of peoples together like that. There’s a bit of a distance between Mexico and Canada, you know? And two - that’s like me blaming your Scottish ancestors for the Holocaust just because you’re European.’
In the half hour or so of conversations that followed Conall found himself still silent and increasingly morose; that mercurial spark of drunken vision he had known earlier had vanished; his second beer that night was, like the first, tackled more out of duty than enjoyment, and he was remaining resolutely and unfortunately sober. Having lost its control momentarily earlier his outer brain was not willing to relinquish its command so easily again. His social niceties and insecurities had snapped back in force. Sitting opposite Hayden he found that his view of Shen was mostly blocked by both Wolf and Hayden, as it was these two who were doing most of the talking, and both kept leaning forward over their drinks. Wolf would now and again ask Conall a question, but Hayden seemed to ignore Conall and Shen as he alternately clashed swords with Wolf or joined the other in raucous laughter. Now and again Conall would catch her eye and she’d raise an eyebrow. Eventually out of frustration Conall stood up and went and sat between her and Wolf at the end of the table.
‘You ok?’ he asked.
She smiled too broadly and said she was.
‘So what do you charge for a tarot reading?’ he asked, deliberately choosing the topic Hayden had been so dismissive of.
‘Well, if there’s a group of four or five, and I get a lot of groups, I’ll charge £100 for the evening.’
‘And individually?’
‘£25 to £30 I suppose. It’s tiring, though.’
‘I think it’s good, what you’re doing.’ He said.
She smiled again but looked sad. She looked at him, but he couldn’t read what was behind the look.
‘And the painting?’
‘So so. I’ve just got too much to do what with doing the house up, and the card readings; plus, it’s hard to find the time – as in I need space, you know, when I’m doing it. And…’ she hushed her voice ‘certain people don’t like me spending all my time concentrating on it and not them; I get a fair few interruptions…’
They smiled conspiratorially.
She sipped at her brandy and coke.
‘I really shouldn’t have any more; I’m such a light-weight these days!’
She held his gaze and her eyes creased in a smile.
‘I’m glad you’re here. Avebury, I mean – not the pub – not just the pub; sorry. I wondered how you were doing.’
‘Life goes on.’ Con said.
‘Yes, it does.’
Wolf, meanwhile, was explaining to Hayden about the protest, telling how when the archaeologist Stuart Piggott had excavated West Kennet Long-Barrow in the 1950’s most of the bones found in the chambers had been taken to Devizes museum. But recently a researcher had re-discovered the most important of these remains – a full skeleton (rare, as most of the bones in the mound had been leg bones) in the bowels of the museum stores and these remains were being moved into a new display in the museum here at Avebury. Why, Wolf was arguing, could they not be repatriated?
‘This man is one of our ancestors; why should he be put on display in a museum to be gawped at?’ Wolf said.
Hayden had been listening to this preamble without saying a word, but now began to speak.
‘Unless they do DNA testing on the bones he can’t really be claimed as an ancestor; besides – the bones are of scientific interest. What’s important is what the bones tell us about how people lived back then; their diet, their diseases.’
‘Yeah, that’s interesting – but what if it was your granddad being put on display?’ Wolf said.
Conall tried not to look at Shen.
‘He’s not, though,’ replied Hayden, ‘nor is he anyone’s granddad that’s alive today. You’re just being sentimental and giving the bones a value they don’t possess.’
‘What of the wishes of the man himself? He would want to be with his people, not in a glass case in a museum.’
‘Well, to be frank, we can’t ask him his wishes, can we? It just all seems a bit phoney.’ Hayden continued.
‘It would be different if he had been buried a Christian, though, wouldn’t it?’ Wolf countered, ‘or these were some Saint’s relics? People are so bloody careful about not treading on the toes of Christians, Muslims or anyone else that might take offence, but the rights of Pagans and our Pagan ancestors are completely overlooked.’
‘Maybe that’s because there’s no continuity of tradition. You pagans are just using the bones to make a point; you’re trying to find a link to the past to justify your own beliefs. If you have ancestors you can see and touch then you have roots you can boast of. It’s possibly different if you’re a Red Indian and you can show the White Man has dug up your ancestral burial ground and taken the bones of an individual you can possibly name – but that’s not the case here. ’
Con looked aside at Shen to see if she would react to the rather derogatory term ‘Red Indian’ but she seemed distant, as if not listening to the argument between the two men. Remembering his PhD tutor’s comments Con bit his tongue and remained silent.
‘But even though we don’t know his name we can probably say that thousands of us are descended from him.’
‘Which is why when he’s on display in the museum it’ll be interesting and informative. How can we learn from him when he’s stuck back up in West Kennet or buried up on Windmill Hill, is it, as you’re proposing?’
‘It’s not about learning, it’s about respect.’ Wolf said. ‘And you tell me the principal reason for him being on display is scientific? Is it bollocks! It’s entertainment. It’s about numbers through the door and selling more fookin’ guidebooks. It’s getting kids to gawp at a skeleton for entertainment, not education. If it wasn’t going to make money they wouldn’t bother.’
Hayden took a mouthful of beer.
‘I know that’s how you feel, but the protest just seems pointless. It’s whimsical and would deprive us of any future attempts to use the bones for all types of analyses we’ve yet to discover, despite what you think about it not really being scientific. Right, Colin? You’re a scientist; you understand the importance of this.’ Con just looked at Hayden without changing his expression, not that Hayden seemed to notice, for he continued speaking without pause: ‘Why should the greater part of mankind lose out just to satisfy the weird beliefs of a handful of hippies? Why should these few individuals lay claim to these bones when, as you say, thousands of us are descended from him?’
Con shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
‘Anyway…’ Hayden continued, ‘I’ve never been a fan of ineffective protests – and this is a waste of yours and everyone’s time; they’ve built the bloody display now – printed the new guidebooks, mugs, postcards, keyrings – and all manner of tat… what are they going to do? Say you’ve got a point and burn it all?’
Wolf paused, and instead of reacting he held his hand up and smiled; instantly any tension that had been building up around the table dissipated.
‘Well, we’ll agree to disagree on this.’ He said, taking out a pouch of tobacco and rolling himself a cigarette. He offered the pouch to Shen, who refused, with a furtive look at Conall. Hayden shook his head, but Conall took the proffered pouch from Wolf and rolled himself one.
Outside the pub, under the thatched eaves strung with outdoor lights, Wolf lit Conall’s fag, then his own.
‘That was very noble of you to bite your tongue.’ Conall offered.
Wolf blew out a long cloud of smoke, shaking his head.
‘I’ve heard it all before – but when I was talking about respect, I meant it. We have to respect the wishes of the person we’re putting on display... The way he was buried; the special treatment of his body as opposed to the others – he wasn’t the same; he had a special role; and we need to honour that…Putting him on display just isn’t right. It’s disrespectful. and to argue that we might lose out on future scientific discovery is just bullshit! Is this all he is – some science experiment? So, they cut up the bones and find out he ate 5% more wheat than a similar skeleton from France – so fucking what?’
Conall nodded. ‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘What does it say about modern man that he puts science before humanity? Hayden talks about value, but fails to see that surely the greatest value the bones possess isn’t the abstract facts we can glean about his life from them but from the very fact they were part of a living human being – that surely is where their true value lies... ’
‘So you’re with us? Hehe!’ Wolf said, grinning, and slapped him on the back. ‘You should’ve said that back in there… but I can tell you’re not much of a talker, are you? Besides, I’m not doing it because I’m a Pagan – I bloody hate most Pagans – you know, the weekend witch types; I know that it’s what the ancestors want.’ And he fixed Conall with a sidelong look.
‘I’m not interested in any religion that may or may not be made up, and a lot of modern paganism is, I’m talking about the spirits of the land, and those spirits are just as present today as they were thousands of years ago. You just have to have the humility to listen to them.’
He looked southwards over the stones, now cloaked in darkness.
‘You see, it’s not about the past – about turning back the clock, despite what Hayden thinks; it’s about remembering what we need NOW. That’s why I get fed up with people who moan on about the good old days - they have lost sight of the potential of the present… and we only have the present; we can change the direction our species is travelling in, but not backwards.’
Con nodded in agreement.
‘Do you know Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’?’ he asked his shaven-headed companion;
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”’
Now. It has to be now. He thought; the past is no more sacred than the now… only I find it hard to see it, damaged as I am by guilt.
‘There’s no going back, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from the past; all these progressives are so fucking dumb…’ Wolf spat. ‘I hate their self-serving greed– it’s all for the good of man, this myth of progress… some Jetsons future where all disease is cured and we’re all in flying cars; and what have we done to get there? Analysed all the bones, cut up all the animals; cut down all the trees... but it’s ok because it was done in the service of man. It’s bollocks. If you were walking in city and you realised you’d strayed into a shit neighbourhood you wouldn’t blindly carry, you’d bloody well turn back round and choose another route. That’s where we’re at, Con, or should I say Colin?’ he laughed ‘as a species we’ve taken a wrong turn, and we need the humility to accept we need to change our path,’
Conall looked at this strange mixture of a man; his tattoos, piercings, wiry strong arms, wickedly glinting, predator-like pale eyes. There was no pretence about him, nothing done for effect; he was as he was.
‘Civilization is not the be all and end all. Civilizations have come and gone and will do again; I just don’t want to be part of the civilization that took the whole world with it when it fell…’ Wolf said. Un-beckoned the image of a vast wave sweeping over towns and cities rose in Con’s mind…of lightning in a blackened, churning sky, and the view of collapsing cliffs viewed from a violently lurching boat… where the hell did that come from? He wondered, bemused. I know that scene…
‘The ancestors - they are saying remember us.’ Wolf was saying. Con, roused from his disturbing yet weirdly familiar reverie glanced out to where Wolf was gesturing, towards the stones whose giant hunched silhouettes were slowly becoming visible against the pallid night sky as their eyes became used to the darkness; And can you hear their voices? Con wanted to ask. Is this some poetic metaphor or can you really hear the voices of the dead? Can you hear her?
‘So, are you a pagan?’ Wolf asked.
Con shrugged.
‘I’m not a fan of labels; I sometimes think I’m close to a Taoist or a Buddhist – but a lot of their philosophy seems very life-negating – the universe is a veil of tears and delusion and we need to jump off it…’
Wolf nodded. ‘You know, I’m the same – some of the basic tenets I love, but I agree – life is to be lived; it’s not fucking easy – but it’s not meant to be easy; it’s certainly not meant to be thrown away.’
‘It can be fucking cruel.’ Con commented.
Wolf pulled a face.
‘Depends on your perspective; what if it’s not so much cruel as not making things easy?’
‘That implies intention – you can’t say that there’s some great cosmic being who intends for the world to be this way – babies dying in Africa, kids with cancer; earthquakes, hurricanes, murder…’
‘No, mate – I look at it on a smaller scale than that – what if there was a part of ourselves, not some great cosmic force, but something in us that somehow stage managed our lives? It could be part of that greater force, just not all of it. It’s like when you dream – you’re in the dream, talking to someone who isn’t you – yet when you wake up it’s all been in your own head, so that other person WAS you, you just couldn’t see it from within the perspective of the dream. What if life is like that dream, and really, we’re the stage manager and the actors – we just don’t have the perspective right now…I’m not saying I believe this, but I do sometimes wonder. If there was a greater part of me controlling things beyond my reach, I wouldn’t expect it to make things easy for me – for me to win the lottery or have a string of birds on my arm 24/7 – because if it was easy you wouldn’t try, and it’s through trying that you grow. Fortune favours the brave, and to be brave you need adversity.’
Adversity, thought Con. I’ve had my fair share…
‘There’s something that Krishna says in the Mahabaratha – love your enemies as they give you your destiny…’ Wolf said, then, changing tack, turned and looked directly at Con. ‘What do you think of Hayden?’
Conall shrugged, knowing any answer he gave wouldn’t be without bias.
Wolf smiled; ‘I don’t agree with his views, but he’s no fool. He’s a brave fucker: He was telling me last night about a rescue he was involved in on the M4 last year; I suppose you have to be no-nonsense and practical to deal with that kind of stuff; and have a certain amount of emotional distance. No room for sentimentality.’ Wolf grinned. ‘Hmm. Did you hope I was going to say he was a twat?’
Conall laughed. ‘Maybe. Maybe I wanted him to be one – I mean a fucking tall blond fireman. It’s like sitting opposite Thor.’
Wolf laughed. ‘What’s the story, then, with you and the lovely Shenandoah?’
Conall inhaled then blew the smoke out his nose with a shrug.
‘I met her down here last year. Spent a few days with her; we got on really well, but then something happened…’
Wolf gazed at him, unflinching. ‘She told me, you know… about your twin sister’s accident; I hope you don’t mind. I suppose she didn’t want me to put my foot in it or anything.’
Conall shook his head, both surprised she had mentioned it to Wolf, and that he didn’t mind she had done so.
‘Were you identical – you know, as I suppose a man and a woman can be?’
Con smiled. ‘No – different sex twins come from two eggs, actually - fertilised at the same time; we didn’t share an egg but we shared a womb – but yeah, she had the same hair as me – poor girl; but blue eyes.’
‘Same beard…?’ Wolf grinned. ‘Well, if you ever need to talk…I know that sounds lame, but it’s a genuine offer…’
Con paused as the laughing group of croppies exited the pub and walked into the dark.
‘Thank you. I think it’s all been said, though.’ He took a final drag off the cigarette, looking out over the field of stones across the road from the pub.
Wolf once more fixed him with his pale, predator’s eyes.
‘I very much doubt that. I get the feeling you’ve not even begun to talk about it. And you know that, too.’
‘It won’t bring her back.’ Conall said, through a cloud of smoke.
Wolf was quiet for a moment before he spoke.
‘No. But it might you.’
Chapter Thirteen: An Eye for an Eye
‘So are you going to enlighten us, now?’ Lewis asked, returning to the table with a jug of beer.
Tolkien was smiling. He took a sip of beer and lit his pipe.
‘Yes. That strange image I had of the lady floating down the Kennet like Ophelia… you see, I thought that had come about from our discussions of the dismembered vegetation god, or of Orpheus, but in fact I now see that it had its roots in what we had been discussing earlier, at Silbury. Remember I had argued that ‘Sil’ had come from the Welsh ‘Sul’, as in sun? Well, the word had been going round my head, clamouring for attention…’ he took another sip of beer – ‘but it was only just now when I saw the name of the spring, Swallowhead, that I understood what I was being shown…’
He scratched his chin, his eyes seeming to focus on a point far in the distance.
‘You see, Silbury and Swallowhead must both be derived from the same root word, which can’t be ‘sol’, Jack, as linguistically ‘sol’ could not become ‘swall’ – so we’re not looking at a derivation from the Latin, but from something much earlier. They both, in fact, come from a very ancient word that predates both the Latin and the Welsh form, that was closer to ‘sawol’; now in Irish this ancient word became ‘suil’ meaning ‘eye’… the sun being the eye in the heavens, one supposes – the divine eye.’
‘As in Ancient Egypt – where the eye of Ra, or of Horus, was the sun?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Exactly, Jack. This would make Silbury the ‘bury’, that is barrow, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘bearw’ - so mound of the eye’; and the Swallowhead spring would be the spring of the eye. As Swallowhead preserves the older form of Sawol, I would suggest it, and not the hill, was named first, though I may be wrong…’
‘If you don’t mind me asking, Ronald, whether derived from sun or eye, or whether the name of the spring predated the hill, what is the connection to your Ophelia?’ Barfield asked.
‘If one follows the old Roman road that goes past Silbury,’ Tolkien continued, ‘which follows a much older track-way, you find yourself at Bath – which as you know was known as Aquae Sulis the ‘waters of the goddess Sulis’; Sulis-Minerva was the goddess of the healing springs there, and her name shares the same etymology so it seems highly possible to me that she is also implicated here at Avebury.’
‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Lewis. ‘It hadn’t even entered my thoughts to link Silbury to Sulis. ’
‘Nor mine,’ Tolkien conceded ‘until I saw the name Swallowhead on this map – it was the connection of the word Sul to the waters of the spring rather than the hill that suggested it.’
‘I now have a rather incongruous image of Minerva, half submerged in the Kennet in a Greek chiton dress, a spear in one hand and an owl perched on her shoulder… ‘ Lewis said, laughing. ‘But the image of the eye and the spring, and a goddess of the waters is, as you know, an old Celtic trope… it’s found in the Irish legend of the origin of the river Boyne in Ireland.’
‘Remind me.’ Said Barfield.
He lit a cigarette and began;
‘The Boyne, Owen, was named after the goddess Boann who was a princess of the Tuatha De Danann, the people of the Goddess Danu, that is the Sidhe, the fairy folk; and her abode was the fairy mound of Newgrange. Now Boann had a husband named Nechtan who owned a magical spring. The spring was surrounded by nine hazel trees and the hazel nuts would fall into the water and be eaten by the speckled salmon who lived therein – and as the nuts contained all knowledge whoever drank of the waters of that well or ate of the salmon would become knowledgeable of all there was to know, had ever been known, and ever would be known...’
Jack’s eyes glistened; he enjoyed the telling of tales immensely.
‘…Only Nechtan and his three cupbearers could drink of the well; but out of curiosity Boann one day approached the well, wishing to drink for herself, and walked about it three times counter-clockwise… but the waters of the well rose up, creating a rushing river that pursued Boann to the coast, and it was said that the water erupted with such power that it ripped a leg, an arm and a single eye from her body, and that she drowned in the flood of waters that became the river which today bears her name.’
Tolkien nodded. ‘Given the number of river names in Europe associated with ancient Goddesses,’ he stated, ‘we can assume that the river was the goddess; so I think we can suggest that a similar legend once existed here at Avebury concerning that same goddess of the eye and/or sun, named Sulis – who perhaps drowned at the Swallowhead, or at least transformed into those waters.’
‘And the name Waden Hill…’ Jack offered, ‘comes from Woden? He, too lost an eye at a well…’ he stubbed out his cigarette on the table and let the butt fall onto the floor.
‘It’s a similar myth, Jack, but the name is sheer coincidence - Waden means hill of the idol – weoh-dun – that square enclosure on the map may once have been a shrine housing a heathen image.’ Tolkien said, ‘But you’re right about Woden and the eye. Wishing to gain knowledge of all things, he journeys to the well of Mimir in order to drink from it; but as we know, the price is high – for he has to forfeit one of his eyes to take a draught. – just as Boann loses an eye when she drinks of the well.’
‘Aha! I see,’ Lewis said, ‘…. pardon the pun. But what on earth does it mean? Why the loss of an eye in return for the gaining of wisdom?’
Tolkien frowned for a moment.
‘Well, that is the question! The losing of the eye is an act of sacrifice, to prove how much the gaining of knowledge meant, a kind of bartering: one gives up vision in this world to gain vision in another…an eye for an eye…but I’m not sure… After our talk earlier at the tea-rooms a very different answer springs to mind: Surely, to drink of the waters of knowledge should increase one’s visionary faculties, not deplete them; so in what way could losing an eye been seen as a gain? Well it suddenly seems blindingly obvious, pardon my pun, that what is gained through drinking from the spring is the unified mystic vision Owen was celebrating earlier - where all is seen as connected, no longer separate. What better way of depicting this than by making the wisdom seeker one-eyed? Two eyes suggest duality, division, normal everyday vision - but the one eye suggests the undivided vision of the poet!
‘But I think this is all later metaphysical speculation and that the original myth of the losing and gaining of an eye is rooted in mankind’s experience of the natural world – I think (and note, I’m not espousing some all-pervasive solar-theory a la Max Muller, when I say this) that it’s probably solar. Forget the later metaphysics – it’s a seasonal myth – it’s about the loss and return of the sun at winter.’
Tolkien looked up from his drink to find the eager eyes of his friends willing him to continue; for a moment, motes of dust hung suspended in the golden light pouring in from the window.
‘Think of the myth of Orion, the great hunter; he is blinded, but then he journeys across the sea bearing Kedalion, the servant of Hephaestus the Smith, on his shoulders, like St Christopher, and reaches the eastern horizon and regains his vision from Helios, the sun god.’
‘Like Wade carrying Wayland the smith across the Groenasund?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Precisely… and Thunor carries Orvandel across the icy Elivogs river in a basket on his back…’ Tolkien added; ‘Obviously the mythical Orion is linked to the constellation; now, the sun rises near this constellation in the spring, but by the autumn Orion has moved to the other side of the sky at daybreak, so has ‘lost’ the sun; clearly all this marching to the east to regain his eyes from Helios is really an image of the constellation regaining of the sun, the solar eye, in the spring.
‘As for the icy river…’
‘…it’s the Milky Way?’ Barfield suggested. ‘So this Sulis, this goddess, was she also a constellation?’ he asked.
Tolkien scratched his chin in thought.
‘Did you know,’ Lewis said, while Tolkien sat pondering, ‘that in the Old Irish stories Druids were known to cast spells standing on one leg and with one eye closed – it was seen as a magical stance – it’s exactly the same symbolism as Boann in the river, deprived of an arm, leg and eye. That same one-eyed figure appears in other Celtic myths, you know – he is one who can summon the animals, a kind of wild man. The master of animals, they call him.’ Lewis added.
‘Like Orpheus.’ Barfield said.
‘Or Bombadil.’ Tolkien re-joined.
‘Are these, then, constellations, too?’
Tolkien cleared his throat, and took out his pipe, methodically packing it as he considered the questions that had been put to him.
‘Oh, and can you also explain, while you’re at it, given all this sun and eye symbolism, why the river Kennet is named after a dog?’
Tolkien seemed about to answer when the door of the pub opened and Mr Mac Govan-Crow strode in, heading straight for their table.
‘Begging your pardon. My wife is wondering if you would like to eat with us at the house tonight. You would be most welcome.’
The three friends nodded in agreement.
‘We shall eat around six, but feel free to return when you wish; I’ll let you get back to your drinks.’ he said, smiling and leaving as promptly as he had arrived.
‘Excellent!’ Lewis said, ‘tonight we dine on venison!’
‘Jack!’ scolded Barfield.
‘What? It’s not me who called him Hawkeye!’ referring to the latter’s epithet of Deerslayer.
The three men laughed. ‘Actually, it would be quite an adventure, being led off into the wilds with Hawkeye…through forests and waterfalls, sleeping under the stars…’ Lewis said.
‘Hunted by the Huron? Idyllic indeed!’ Barfield said, sarcastically.
Tolkien smiled. ‘You know, Jack, for all your romanticism you would hate it! Mac Govan-Crow wouldn’t let you stop for a cup of tea, you know! With the Huron on our heels there wouldn’t be time for a decent pint of beer, either.’
Tolkien tuned to Barfield. ‘Imagine how he’d grumble, Owen!’ he said, nodding towards Lewis.
‘It would be unbearable.’ Barfield agreed ‘We could leave him for the Huron, but I doubt even they would want him…’
‘Why so?’ asked Jack, frowning.
‘–nothing to scalp!’ Barfield laughed, pointing at Jack’s bald crown.
Chapter Fourteen: Tarot
It was strange to think only eleven hours had passed since Con had last been in this self-same spot, outside Church cottage opposite the lych-gate on the narrow high-street, a few minutes' walk west of the pub outside the circle; it already seemed like another day, far further back in time. The only difference from earlier, however, was the presence of Hayden’s large motorbike parked outside on the road, and the scent of the large, almost luminous, white-petalled Nicotiana, their buds now open, tumbling from the window box. Then he had thought Shen to be long gone from this place, but here he was, a few hours later, following her into the cottage. Never presume you know where you’re going, he thought to himself. Life often has different plans from those we envision…
While Conall followed Wolf into the kitchen to grab a drink Shen set about preparing the small living room for the reading; she lit a joss stick and a few tea lights on the coffee table in front of the cast-iron fireplace, and turned the overhead light off, though the small table lamp by the fireside was left on so that Hayden could sit and read the magazine he’d nonchalantly picked up.
‘Get us a beer, Shen,’ he said, not bothering to look up. ‘And put some toast on.’
‘Get it yourself, you lazy bugger, I’m setting up.’ She smiled. Hayden muttered something about working all day and slumped into the kitchen.
‘You having your cards read?’ Conall asked, tongue in cheek, emboldened from drinking.
Hayden looked at him witheringly, took a beer from the fridge and walked back out.
‘I take it that’s a no!’ whispered Wolf to Con, snorting.
Shen had moved the sofa forward for Conall and Wolf to sit on, but she herself sat cross-legged on the wooden floor opposite them in front of the fire place, over which hung a long Native American wooden flute with feathers and beads hanging off it on a cord; Alfred’s flute. He’d heard him play it once in this very room; a room that had cluttered with photographs and the detritus of a long life –a room heady with the scent of pipe tobacco. She must really miss him, he thought, watching as Shen took a sip of her drink and handed the cards to Wolf.
‘Shuffle them then give them back.’ she said.
‘Look at you being all professional!’ Conall quipped; Shen stuck out her tongue at him and giggled.
Wolf shuffled the cards and handed them back to Shen, who spread them face down in a perfect arc on the coffee table. Wolf was instructed to take three cards. When he had chosen them, Shen took them from him and placed these cards face down, and then turned them one by one. For a moment she said nothing. Conall leaned forward and looked at the cards. The first depicted five youths in tunics and tights holding staffs in their hands, which they seemed to be either waving at each other or fighting with; the second was the knight of swords, boldly leaping forward on a pale horse; the final card showed, again, a figure on horseback, but crowned with a wreath, and holding a staff, similarly crowned –in the background seemed to be the same gaggle of youths from the first card, but now holding their staffs straight. Shen looked up at Wolf, who was leaning forward and tapping his knees with his hands excitedly;
‘You wanted to know about the protest again. Well…five of wands; that’s disorder –it means nuisances, bad luck –see how the men are at odds with each other? There’s tension there, confusion –conflict even. A load of hassle.’
‘But the Knight of swords –he’s someone that is campaigning for what is right. He has strong values and will stand up for them. The last card, the six of wands sees order forming out of the disorder that preceded it; it has connotations of recognition; of praise for a job well done.’
Shen looked up nervously at Wolf. ‘So, it’s like I saw yesterday,’ she continued, ‘there’s bad luck, but somehow things will turn out well. I can’t see anything more than that. I can’t say I understand it.’
Wolf nodded and thanked her, but left unspoken any thoughts that were crossing his mind. Taking up his cards Shen placed them back in the pack and began to shuffle. Conall felt his pulse quicken…I wonder what she’ll see, he thought; but Shen did not hand him the cards, instead she seemed to be about to consult them herself. Again, she placed the cards in an arc, and picked her selection.
‘What are you asking?’ Conall asked. Shen shrugged;
‘Just looking.’ she said, but Conall had caught her giving a sideways glance towards Hayden as she spoke, so fleeting perhaps Shen herself was unaware that she had done it. The three cards she had selected were quickly placed back in the pack. Once more Shen sipped her drink, then took up the pack and handed them to Conall.
‘Your turn. Shuffle them, then take six cards.’
‘Six?’
‘Yeah, I’ll do your full reading.’
The cards were large and slightly unwieldy; Conall found it hard to shuffle them, and at one point nearly let them spill onto the floor; but persevering he shuffled them a few more times for good measure and gave them back. Shen smiled and nodded, spread the cards, and Conall took six cards from the table. As Shen turned the cards over Conall, just as Wolf had a few minutes before, leaned forward in expectation.
The first showed a tower being struck by lightning with people falling from it; the second showed the skeletal figure of Death astride a white horse; the third card was less grave –a robed woman with a strange white crown and the moon at her feet: the high Priestess; next, another woman, the queen of cups, enthroned and holding a strange elaborate vessel; the next card showed a row of vessels and a red-hooded figure holding one and offering it to a diminutive white haired woman. The last card was also in the suit of cups: ten cups shone radiantly against the arc of a rainbow, while below a dark haired man and woman stood arm in arm, while beside them children played.
‘Those look cheery.’ Conall said, glancing at the first two cards. Shen coloured and waved a hand over the cards, not looking up at Conall.
‘Look, Conall – Death isn’t normally literally…death;’ she looked up apologetically, ‘…in fact the tower is more likely to foretell death or change than Death itself... You start off with some kind of ego crisis; could be a breakdown, or a sudden change…so in this context I would say that what is dying is some old and outmoded way of being; it’s a rebirth, really.’
Con nodded. I bloody need it, he thought. ‘Is that happening now?’
‘Yes; or imminently.’
Con looked across at her –her eyes were black in this light; exotically slanting, serious; gone was the seeming awkwardness and weakness he’d thought he’d seen in the pub.
‘The High priestess…and the queen of cups…hmm…these suggest someone in your life who is, um, a healer, or a psychic, and the priestess links her with knowledge or wisdom.’
Shen didn’t look at Conall as she said this, but it seemed obvious to him from her muted reaction that she was referring to herself. Or was he just imagining that?
‘Now the six of cups; that’s to do with nostalgia, looking backwards –but in a positive way –it seems that something from the past is going to influence you –it will be of great benefit to your future –something forgotten will turn up and will change the way you look at things; because look –the ten of cups –that’s contentment, achievement…’ but her fingers, flitting across the card, seemed not to point at the cups in the sky but at the two dark-haired figures, arm in arm below them. Then the card was gone as Shen swiftly gathered them together.
‘Did that make any sense?’ she asked, not looking up.
‘I’m not sure it did –I think maybe I’m tired.
’Conall was nodding slowly, still trying to take it in.
‘No –it all seemed fine - Breakdown; rebirth –a psychic and something from the past leading to happiness.’ he summarised. She nodded and their eyes met again for a moment. What are you thinking? He wondered. Something from the past…is that you, Shen? Something forgotten turning up? He felt suddenly drunk and he swallowed. Can you read my thoughts? He mused. Do you know how lovely you are? Do you know about that night, what really happened? ‘
Are you going to do yours?’ he asked. Shen held his gaze. ‘I could do, maybe.’
But she didn’t, instead she put the cards away in a cloth, which she placed on the bookcase by the window; she paused for a second and then looked at Conall with a half-smile on her face.
‘I have something for you.’ she said, turning to the fireplace and taking down the wooden flute from its hook above the fireplace. She handed it to him without ceremony. He took it and turned it in his hands, not understanding.
‘My grandfather wanted you to have it.’ Conall was speechless; he held the instrument close, examining the faded feathers and beadwork, and the small carved owl that jutted out from above the finger-holes.
It was Wolf who broke the silence. ‘That is awesome!’
Con was frowning. ‘The flute? I –I can’t take this, Shen, it belonged to your Grandfather. It belongs to you! It should be yours, surely?’
She was smiling sadly and shook her head.
‘He wanted you to have it; he wrote it in his will –to give the flute to the young man who told him about the stars, in thanks for reuniting brother and sister. What did he mean by that, Con?
’Long story.’ Conall said, abashed at the attention from all three people in the room. ‘I can’t take this Shen.’ Con stammered.
Shen frowned. ‘It was his wish, Con.’
‘But he told me it had been in his family for generations!
’I know. And it was his to give to whoever he chose; and he chose you.’
Conall didn’t voice the question racing across his mind. Why me? I hardly knew him! A few times, we met, that was it –over those four fateful days.
‘It’ll save me dusting it.’ Shen joked, trying to break the awkward silence.
‘Oh my God, Shen. Thank you.’ and then, looking into the fire, he said ‘Thank you Alfred.’
Hayden yawned loudly from his chair in the corner, and announced he was off to bed.
‘Laters’ he said, his hand in the air, and disappeared from the room.
‘I suppose I should be going, too’ Con said, suddenly feeling the need to be away from here, to have space to think. ‘Shall I leave it here for now?’ Shen shook her head.
‘No, I’d rather it was gone now.’ she said sadly. ‘If you’re at a loose end tomorrow I’ll be around; send me a text.’
She took the flute from his hands and, taking a cloth from the sideboard, wrapped the flute in the cloth and handed it back.
‘Take care of it Con.’ she said.
‘This is the most precious gift I’ve ever been given; Of course I’ll take care of it.’ And he smiled back at her as she opened the door and he walked out into the clear, Nicotiana-scented, summer night.
Chapter Fifteen: Bear-Skin Woman
‘If you don’t mind me asking, George, what brought you to England?’ Tolkien asked.
They had just finished a meal prepared for them by George Mac Govan-Crow’s wife, Shona, in the small kitchen of their house at Church Cottage and had moved through to the sitting room, where George was busy preparing a fire now the evening had grown cooler. Tolkien sat in a chair by the fire, nursing a whiskey, while Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms to unpack; on the couch against the wall Shona sat, her young son Alfred half sleeping in her arms, lulled by his mother’s gentle rocking.
George smiled.
‘My parents,’ he said, taking down a photo frame from the mantelpiece and handing it to Tolkien, ‘were part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s ‘Wild West Show’ and had been touring Europe, but my mother was pregnant with my brother and they ‘jumped ship’ here when the tour came to Swindon as she was very ill during the pregnancy. They didn’t want to take a baby back on tour or risk the journey back to Canada with a babe in arms, and her health still poor; I was 4 at the time and had been travelling with them. My first memories are of the buffalo hunt, and of watching my father Kills Crow sing the victory song and shout the war whoop over the body of Custer!’ He laughed. ‘That was from the show. Had I been brought up on the reservation I’d have probably never seen a buffalo, never heard the victory songs. I understood that when I went back to visit my people one time. We were enacting a life that had already vanished. It was all show, but it was at least something.’
Tolkien looked at the photo – obviously staged, with the young George strapped to his mother’s back on a cradle-board, and his father in buckskins with feathers in his hair, against a poorly painted background showing wagons and cactuses and tall desolate flat-topped mesas. The eyes of the figures were sharp, lost. The man was very like George, but half of his face was picked out in a bright paint; the woman flat-faced, young, beautiful yet stern; earthy.
My father was Saul Fine Gun, of the Canadian Blackfoot, the Siksikawa; but he was given the name Kills Crow for the show; and in turn when he settled here he chose to keep Crow as a surname, and was known as Saul Crow. My parents reasoned their children might be better off here than if they had gone back to Canada; life had been hard for them on the reservation. It was never the same after the buffalo had gone…’
‘Do you have a name in Blackfoot?’ Tolkien asked.
George remained kneeling, placing more kindling on the fire, and then blowing at the embers until they roared into life. For a moment Tolkien thought he would not answer but staring into the fire he began to speak.
‘Ipisowaasi. It’s the name of the Morning Star.’
‘Ipis…?’
‘Ipisowaasi.’
‘Ipiso-wa-asi.’ Tolkien repeated.
‘And you have had the fortune to visit your father’s people, you said?’
‘My people.’ George corrected. ‘Yes. After the War, my family took the boat to Canada and I spent many months with them. My brother and mother stayed. My father, you see, was killed in the war; he volunteered to fight; he was a cavalryman in the Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars.’
For the second time that day Tolkien was reminded of the dead horses he’d seen scattered across no-man’s-land in France. An incongruous image arose in his mind, of George’s father, Kills Crow, astride his horse, charging through the machine-gun fire, raising the war whoop with his painted face and eagle feathers in his hair. The Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars… Queer Objects on Horseback the regular troops had laughingly called them…
‘I am sorry to hear about your father. I was a signalling officer in the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers.’ A brief expression of pain flashed across his features.
George nodded slowly and held the other’s gaze, then continued.
‘I couldn’t stay in Canada. I was 21 by that time. My home was here, and my Shona was here.’ He looked over and smiled at his wife.
‘Two exiles together!’ she said, in her broad Irish accent, her cheeks flushed.
Tolkien lifted his glass and sipped at his whiskey. After what seemed an eternity of silence George spoke again. He stood up from before the fire, replaced the photograph and took down from where it hung above the mantelpiece a wooden instrument, handing it to Tolkien.
‘This was my mother’s flute, and she had it from her mother, and she had it from who knows where.’
Tolkien took the object, hung with beadwork and feathers; he turned it in his hands, admiring its craftsmanship.
‘It’s alder wood; and the feathers are of the owl.’
Tolkien handed it back to George with a smile. ‘It’s beautiful. Can you play it?’
George put it to his lips and played a short melody. This playing seemed to provide a musical prologue to what happened next.
‘I said I would tell you one of our tales; listen, this is how it was told to me by my father.’
The room was silent save for the cracking and popping of the twigs on the fire. Shona’s face was distracted, serene; George replaced the flute on the wall and took a seat in the other leather chair opposite Tolkien, his own face, in contrast, serious – severe even. For a moment, in the flickering copper firelight, it took on the proportions of a story-book Indian from Tolkien’s childhood; that wild, untamed, frightening yet romantic form of the Red Man – the Noble Savage – a man of the ancient earth… and then it was gone, and he was George again, a west country gardener.
George picked up his pipe and pinched a clump of tobacco from his tin; silently he threw a small part of this into the fire; mouthing words whose sense eluded Tolkien - Itsipaiitapio’pah - and then filled his pipe and lit it.
‘There was once a maiden named Bear-Skin-Woman who had many suitors but who would not marry. She had seven brothers and a younger sister, and because her mother had died the youngest sister would look after the smallest brother, because he was still a baby, and carry him on her back on a cradle-board.
‘Each day the six eldest brothers would go out hunting, and the little sister with her baby brother would remain at home with their older sister. Every day, Bear-Skin-Woman would leave to collect wood – but she never returned with very much wood and the younger sister began to wonder if she was not really collecting wood in the forest, but meeting with a man.
‘One day, when her sister had left to collect wood from the forest the little sister crept out of their lodge and followed her through the trees until she saw her go into the cave where the bear lived. She followed her and she saw that the bear and her sister were lovers.
‘That night the younger sister told her father what she had seen; and her father said, ‘So this is why my daughter refuses to marry!’ He went into the village to let his people know that they had a bear as a relation, and that they should follow him into the forest and kill the bear. This the people did.
‘Bear-Skin-Woman for a while hated her younger sister, but in time they were friends again. The young sister one day asked that they play at being bears, and the older sister agreed, saying ‘I shall be the bear but you must promise not to touch me above the kidneys or there will be evil.’ Her sister promised but, in their play, she forgot, and touched her elder sister above the kidneys and she turned into a real bear because she was a powerful medicine woman. Taking up her little brother, the younger sister ran back and hid in the lodge in fear. The older sister ran into the village and killed many, many people. The younger sister was relieved when her sister came home, transformed back into her human form. Still a-feared, the little sister ran to where her brothers were hunting and warned them of what their elder sister had done to their relatives in the village, and that she even now would be coming to kill her remaining siblings.
‘Sure enough through the wood they spied their sister, Bear-Skin-Woman, in the shape of the bear hunting for them, and so they ran. As she was just about to snap them up one of the brothers cast down a handful of water which became a vast lake, around which the bear had to run. As she came close once more another brother threw back a comb onto the ground and there a great thicket of bushes sprung up which delayed the bear for a little longer.
‘Eventually Bear-Skin-Woman was at their heels and so they climbed a great tree; but the bear shook the tree and four brothers fell out and died.
‘A bird flew about the tree and it sang to the eldest brother, telling him to shoot the bear in the head; and so he took his bow and he put an arrow through the bear’s head and killed it.
‘The remaining three brothers and the young sister were grieved on seeing their four dead brothers; but the youngest took the eldest of the dead brother’s bow and shot an arrow into the air. When it landed one the dead brother stirred and came to life. This he did again until all the dead brothers were alive.
‘’Where shall we go?’ they asked ‘seeing as our relatives are all dead and we have no family to return to?’
‘’Let us go the sky’ they said, and they closed their eyes and they rose up to the heavens as stars.
‘The littlest brother became the North Star, and his six brothers and little sister became the Great Bear. And the young sister is the closest star to the North Star, as she looked after her baby brother on earth so she does in the sky.’
George stared into the fire and puffed a few times on his pipe.
‘George…Ipisowaasi…’ Tolkien began, ‘Thank you.’ His voice was measured, and polite, but his mind, below this calm exterior, was sparking and cracking like the fire that illuminated the both of them; so many questions… but Tolkien sensed that George was not a man who enjoyed being bothered by questions.
Nevertheless, he began again:
‘It’s fascinating that the Blackfoot have this image of the woman who becomes a bear; the image of the human becoming a bear is found in myths and legends from Europe, too…’ George’s seeming blank expression caused Tolkien to halt and stammer. 'The Vikings had warriors named Berserkers who would change into bears during battle. Berserker means bear-shirt or bear-skin...' he paused, and then began to talk once more.
‘Do you know about Callisto?’ he ventured. George shook his head.
Tolkien cleared his throat.
‘The Greek Goddess Artemis, the virgin huntress… she, it was said, expected her companions to be as chaste as she herself, but one day, noticing her companion, the nymph Callisto, was with child after being seduced by none other than the great God Zeus, Artemis turned Callisto into a bear – whereon she gave birth to a son, Arcas. Artemis sent her hounds to chase and to kill them. Eventually having hunted down the nymph and the boy, Artemis killed them with her bow and arrow; But Zeus, taking pity on Callisto and her boy, lifted them up to the heavens and placed them amongst the stars where she became Ursa Major – the Great Bear – and Arcas, Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.’
Tolkien picked up his glass and sipped a little more whiskey, then lit his pipe and sat smoking in seeming calm before, to George’s evident surprise, Tolkien leapt up from the chair and began pacing in front of the fire, talking in great haste and using his pipe stem as a pointer to punctuate his remarks.
‘…it’s remarkable!’ he stammered, ‘on face value these are two very different tales; but underneath there are clear similarities: the transformation of a woman into a bear, and the killing of that self-same bear with a bow and arrow following a hunt; the placing of a young boy in the constellation of Ursa Minor…’
George was looking up at Tolkien in stunned silence. He looked over at Shona who had a half smile on her face. Tolkien, unaware of the effect of his performance on the two adults present, continued his lecture.
‘Of course we then not only have the fact that both stories are about bears but pertain to be a foundation stories for Ursa Major – something we might put down to sheer coincidence were it not for the fact that the Great Bear looks nothing like a bear! Don’t you find?’
It was George’s turn to stammer and clear his throat. ‘I suppose, so. It does look more like a saucepan, granted. As to whether it looks like a bear; not explicitly so, no.’
‘Exactly!’ Tolkien said, pointing at him with his pipe stem. ‘The main feature of Ursa Major is the handle of the saucepan as you put it – or as it is drawn on star maps, the tail of the bear. But bears do not have long tails!’ he flashed a grin.
‘This means the figure of the bear that links these two stories is not suggested by the form, the shape, of the stars themselves - we are not, then, looking at independent invention based on the shape of the constellation... the earliest maps of the heavens drew on the myths of the bear already associated with those seven stars, and tried to make them look like a bear – rather badly! And, what’s more, we can immediately discount direct borrowings from one culture to another – had the Blackfoot learned the tale from European settlers sometime after Columbus then the form of the story would be much closer to that of the original Greek; clearly the Blackfoot version, if it is related to the Greek tale – it is through a common, and very ancient ancestor!’
On the couch the toddler Alfred had begun to snivel and cry in his mother’s arms at the staccato ramblings and eccentric gesturing of this odd little stranger who had invaded his home.
Tolkien hesitated and smiled apologetically.
‘Do you see what I’m driving at Mr Mac Govan-Crow? Scholars believe that the American Indian reached the New World many thousands of years ago by crossing the Bering straits when they were iced over; the story you have just told could be very old indeed, for if both stories sprang from a common ancestor, as seems the case, that common ancestor would have to be at least 10,000 years old, the date the Americas separated from Eurasia after the Bering ice-bridge had melted! A tale from ancient Ice Age Europe now spread across the whole globe!’
In the silence that followed Tolkien finally allowed himself to sit down and slow his breathing.
‘It is strange, Sir.’ said George. ‘Only my people, the Siksikawa, maintain that we didn’t come from anywhere else except the ‘New World’ as you put it, which is not ‘new’ to us. Have you ever considered that perhaps the white man may have learned the story from the Red, those thousands of years ago?’ he lifted an eyebrow in challenge.
If George Mac Govan-Crow had expected to see Tolkien chastened, or defensive, he was to be disappointed; for Tolkien was staring intently into the flames of the fire, and when he turned to Ipisowaasi of the Siksikawa it was with utter humility and honesty that he spoke:
‘My friend, nothing would surprise me less than to discover that. There are many truths that have been lost to us over the passage of time – who knows what tales were spread, and how, in past ages, when the very face of the earth as we know it was different; before fire and flood changed the shape of the coasts, and sent lands once proud of the sea into its depths..?’
As he spoke an image rose in his mind…a recurring nightmare of a great wave sweeping over green fields, destroying all in its path…
George nodded. And for the first time since they had met, Tolkien saw the wariness and mistrust fall from the man’s eyes; George Mac Govan-Crow smiled.
Chapter Sixteen: On Waden Hill
Conall Astor was still drunk; he had left Shen’s and crossed the stone circle, passing close by the Devil’s chair stone, to which he had bowed in greeting, before continuing along the Avenue for the fourth time that day, his path winding this way and that as he looked heavenwards at the constellations, so clear in the absence of street-lights. The night was warm and just the gentlest of breezes was present, carrying with it the scent of grasses and hedgerows.
Conall fumbled with the keys of the camper, entered, and gathered up the bedding from the couch; he proceeded to walk to his favourite stone and dumped the pile on the side facing away from the road. He retraced his steps and picked up the remnants of the bottle of water from earlier, then sat on the tailgate and brushed his teeth in the moonlight.
After he had rinsed his mouth, he lit the hurricane-lantern that hung from a hook on the van’s ceiling and unrolled the alder-wood flute from the cloth Shen had wrapped it. The flute was beautifully carved, and the wood warm to the touch; just below the mouthpiece but above the finger-holes there was a carving of an owl, secured to the main body with twine, from which a couple of faded feathers and beads were hanging. Traces of stained patterns were visible along the instrument. A faint smell of wood smoke, incense and pipe tobacco rose from it. Conall held it up before him.
‘Thank you, Alfred.’
He had no idea of the age or provenance of the flute; for all he knew it could have been many hundreds of years old… predating the arrival of the White Man. He felt both proud and abashed that such a precious item should have been entrusted to him; maybe he shouldn’t have taken it; maybe he should have left it with Shen. But he supposed it was the old man’s wish. He held it close, not daring to play it; not here, by the road, not without ceremony. He wasn’t tired; he should walk somewhere, and do it honour…
Leaving his bedding in the care of the stone, Conall took the footpath that led away from the Avenue westwards up over the brow of Waden hill. The hill was steep but soon he had crested it, and he stood for a moment taking in the view. Behind him, the way he had come, Hakpen hill rose on the other side of the road, while to his south was the spread of the Kennet valley, and beyond the river the roll of the downs as they rose up to the soft peaks of Tan and Milk Hill. But from his vantage point atop Waden Hill, Conall could glance over at the bowl of Silbury to the south west as it stood majestically proud of the valley within its moat, now iridescent in the low, nearly full moonlight.
Conall dug into his jacket pocket and took out his tobacco; sitting on the long grass he took some from the packet, and as earlier crumbled some onto the ground. Itsipaiitapio’pah, he muttered, Great Spirit, as Alfred had taught him, and as his father George had taught him before…. He then rolled and placed a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, then lifted it to the sky, then to the ground, and exhaled upwards, repeating the Blackfoot phrase.
When he had finished, he unwrapped the flute from its cloth and held it up to the sky. Son of Ipisowaasi, thank you. Great spirits, I am honoured to accept this gift, he said. Then nervously he put the wooden mouthpiece to his lips and breathed softly into it. A warm, hollow note sounded clearly, filling the still night. Conall felt anyone walking in the surrounding valleys or hills would have been able to hear it… nevertheless, emboldened by alcohol, he continued, moving his fingers slowly and inexpertly, but feeling almost as if the flute was playing itself. He played to the stars; he played to the memory of Alfred, he played to the memory of his sister; but mostly he played for Shen, wondering if from her room in Church cottage, she might hear the sound of her Grandfather’s flute playing; it wasn’t her fault, none of it; but if I hadn’t been here…no, it was surely too late by then anyway…
When the urge to play had left him, he stood, gazing skywards again, north to the Great Bear, and he began to spin, his arms outstretched, and then sweeping back round like a swooping eagle, turning, turning, treading out a flat circle in the grass; and as he span the Bear span above him in turn around the still central point of the heavens; and he bowed his back, squared his shoulders, rhythmically turning, imagining himself the bear, mouthing silent meaningless words; and even though miles from the nearest human being his voice remained a whisper so that this guttural chanting that arose from some deep part of his psyche ended at his lips and went no further; yet still he danced under those seven burning brothers and their sister who had escaped to the sky in the story Alfred had told him a year before…
…
…Conall had listened to the tale and they had both stood a while in thought looking up at the Great bear from the back-garden of Church cottage; he had considered not saying anything, but his curiosity compelled him to speak.
‘Alfred?’ he had begun. The old man had nodded for him to continue. ‘You say four brothers were dragged out of the tree and killed?’
‘Yes, that is how my father told it me.’ The old man said, sucking on the stem of his pipe.
‘Wouldn’t it make sense if the four stars there were the brothers?’ he had asked, pointing at the rectangular body of the Great Bear. Alfred had looked up quietly.
‘I see why you might think that; but the sister needs to be one of them so she can be close to her young brother, who is the northern star, there.’ He had pointed to the Little Bear.
Conall had smiled to himself.
‘There are seven brothers and one sister, yes? Now what if there was a way that they could all be together in the Great Bear, and the little brother not all the way over there in the Little Bear?’ he had asked. Alfred shrugged.
‘That would be pleasing, I suppose. But there are only seven stars in the Great Bear’ He had said, rubbing the back of his neck.
‘Alfred – look at the second star from the end of the tail, closely.’
‘What am I looking for?’ he said, through a cloud of smoke.
‘How many stars do you see?’
For a while there had been silence as the old man squinted at the stars, and then a low chuckle had escaped him.
Conall had laughed along with him.
‘That’s right. Most people don’t notice it, but that second star is a double star – it has a smaller, fainter companion, riding on its back. So, there’s your younger sister, and there, still riding on the cradleboard on her back as in life, her baby brother!’
‘So the family is together again. Brother and sister united. That’s good.’ Alfred had said. And this is what he had meant in the will when he had gifted the flute to Con for re-uniting brother and sister…
…
On the hillside Conall looked up and held the sister star in his gaze and remembered his sister Melissa and himself, as children, her carrying him piggy-back across their garden, laughing, as he swished at her with a small twig ‘Giddy up, horsey! Giddy up!’ his hand gripping a great mass of her dark curly hair, identical to his own. Identical. Two particles once joined, linked forever...
And he imagined those same two particles spinning in space, once joined but now separate, shooting apart into the void… and one shining, spinning particle faltering, flickering, dying, yet the other carrying on unaffected…
And he thought of the dream of the horse on the riverbank – and how it was on such a night as this that he’d walked to the Kennet last year because the dream was burning in his head – and how one particle, spinning in space, had chosen not to go into that water, while the other had done so, never to rise again…
At last he cried out, finding his voice:
‘I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry! Melissa! I’m sorry!!! I didn’t know – why didn’t I know?!’
Chapter Seventeen: The Lady of the Lake
After a brief nightcap by the fire, Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms, but Tolkien was not yet sleepy; he had gone outside to the small garden of the cottage to take in the cool night air, and when Alfred had been lulled to sleep by her singing, Shona Mac Govan-Crow had stepped outside to join him.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ she said, ‘when you were talking over dinner about Boann and the well - I didn’t feel it was my place to say but it reminded me of something. And since you later mentioned the stars…’
‘No, please, tell me, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow.’ Tolkien insisted.
‘Shona, please’ she insisted. Shona pointed upwards at the sky to the pale band of stars that bisected the heavens.
‘It’s just that I always think of Boann when I see the Milky Way.’
‘Why so?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Bothar Bo Finne is the Gaelic name for it,’ Shona said, ‘’Path of the White Cow’’ Boann means white cow.’
Tolkien lifted his brows in delight.
‘Thank you. I never knew that.’
Shona remained gazing upwards at the Milky Way. ‘Sometimes I come out here and look up at the stars and feel like I’m home. There’s my beloved Boyne. I wonder which was named first, though, the river on earth or the one in the sky?’
Tolkien tapped his pipe-bowl against the low garden wall and sat on its top, touching a small pile of white rocks clustered on the wall top, beside which stood a couple of burned out snubs of old candles.
‘It’s her dog I feel most sorry for.’ Shona smiled, as she turned to go.
‘Her dog?’
‘Yes; Boann’s lapdog. Dabilla was its name; poor mite was washed out to sea and drowned with her. I had a dog named Dabilla as a child, I named it after Boann’s dog…’
Tolkien looked up at the stars, open mouthed and flushed – and then laughed out loud at his own ignorance.
‘Ha! You’re a dunce, Ronald!’ he chuckled. Shona looked a little taken aback.
‘If that’s the Boyne in the sky then there’s your lost dog, safe and sound!’
Tolkien gestured skywards to the pale celestial river and there on its banks he pointed out to Shona the constellation of Canis Major, the Great Dog, not hard to see for its brightest star, Sirius, the ‘dog-star’ as it was known, was the brightest star in the entire northern sky.
Why hadn’t he seen it earlier? All the clues were there! Where else should one look for a ‘bright dog’ but the star Sirius, the brightest star, the dog-star, pacing beside the river in the heavens? Tolkien berated himself. So many legends had been writ large upon the heavens in antiquity – just as the siblings in Mr Mac Govan-Crow’s bear story had been transferred to the heavens so too in the west – many heroes of myth had been afforded the same privilege; the sky was populated by heroes and gods – so why not the characters of British myth, too? Orion, the hunter, had been the subject of their discussion earlier – and they’d agreed the icy river he was crossing to regain, somehow, his solar eye, was the Milky Way, but Tolkien had not quite grasped the final part of the image - Orion’s hunting dog, following its master, trotting alongside the Milky Way, had in all probability inspired the name of the Kennet… ‘bright dog’ - meaning the Kennet, like the Boyne, was somehow the earthly equivalent of the river of stars in the sky. The presence of Dabilla in the Irish tale had made it a near-certainty that a version of the Boann myth had existed here – there was the river of the dog, and the well-head of the eye, linked by name to the nearby goddess of the waters at Bath.
I should have known after all our talk earlier, he thought…It was there all along in ‘Pearl’ - under the nose of this dim-witted philologist for years and I never saw it! He softly intoned the verses of this medieval lyric, so close to his heart, the meaning of the stone-strewn river separating the poet from his deceased child suddenly clear:
In the depths stood dazzling stones aheap
As a glitter through glass that glowed with light,
As streaming stars when on earth men sleep
Stare in the welkin in winter night
Like the river in the poem, the Kennet’s depths were stippled with small pebbles of chalk that shone white like stars in the winter sky. And remembering the stone he had picked up earlier he put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the small piece of chalk. The river of the poem was the river that divided Paradise from mortal realms – the same as the Greek Styx on whose banks the three-headed dog Cerberus roamed; the river and the dog; now of course its stones twinkled like stars, for they were stars! He wondered if the poet had drawn on some older tradition when he had written these lines, unbeknown of their meaning, or whether he had known all along of what he was writing, and Tolkien just hadn’t seen it: The river of paradise was the heavenly river – the Milky Way, across which the souls of the dead might pass…
‘I’m ever so sorry, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow, but would it be overly rude if I went for a short walk? I have some thinking to do…’ he said, his voice shaking with repressed excitement.
…
Tolkien had retraced the route they had walked earlier back past where the road curved about Silbury, and along to a gate in the field below the hill on whose easternmost point West Kennet rose, and where Barfield had earlier pointed out a copse of trees at the far side of the field in which the Swallowhead spring was hidden. Taking the path towards the trees Tolkien continued until he reached a still pool, crossed by a handful of large sarsen steppingstones. Beyond the stones, in a hollow cradled by the hillside, stood two willow trees, and from between them the waters of the Kennet bubbled from the earth. He strolled around the trees, noticing a small stone cut in the hillside beyond; here, he guessed, in the winter, the waters would rise, but already, in April, the flow had lessened to emerge from the earth closer to the pool.
Tolkien returned to the brook and sat on one of the large, flat stones that forded the stream; he sat gazing into its clear depths.
There, to the north, was the shadow of the domed Silbury hill against the pale starlight, and at his feet the chuckling water, one part silvered now by the light of the crescent-moon; all was quiet, save the lilting of the water, though in the distance an owl hooted, two, three times.
How long had men come here to worship or seek solace at the wisdom-giving waters of the eye, he wondered, here beneath the stars at this holy stream?
This flashing silver river that seemed to divide the world of the dead from the living; the river of the bright dog…
Tolkien knelt, and cupped a clear handful of the cool water, and let it flow back through his fingers. And as he did so he lifted his head, and lo! There above him on the rim of the south-western sky, as if summoned, the jewel-like Sirius still hung in the heavens, flashing a purplish blue, just on the point of sinking down below the hillside to follow its master Orion into the lands below the horizon, but it would rise again in the east as herald of the new dawn. And in the east at this late hour lay Vega, glinting blue in the Lyre, and to its left, Deneb, the tail of the swan - and rising to a gentle arch across the back of the swan in the northern sky was the milky waters of the heavenly river aping the flow of the Kennet on the ground.
Was this pool once ringed with hazel, he wondered? Did the salmon of wisdom swim here, silver beneath the moon?
The reflection of the crescent-moon, like a curved barque sailing between the horns of Taurus, seemed to traverse the waters before him, casting a bright shifting path across the water, that trembled then broke into many pieces before reconstituting; forming then dissolving, trembling and breaking, the crescent becoming a lidded white eye, a curved back of a silver salmon; it broke apart, re-forming, shivering, pulsing and morphing into wild patterns and shapes; a crescent, boat; a lidded eye again; a dancing cool white flame; a trail of flowers, of stars, of sparks, of fish; once more a sliver of moon …
It was hypnotising, lulling, and Tolkien, tired from the days walk and the whisky found himself drifting somewhere between thought and sleep. The waters of the river seemed to rise and swirl; churning to a white starry foam; lifting, breaching their banks; a dual stream of liquid shooting forth to land and sky; one flooding the land and creating a broad river on earth, the other rising to the sky and forming the milky river of stars… the primal waters divided into above and below.
Into these waters Tolkien stared entranced… and there, at the heart of the black mirror, the reflected flash of the moon like a pale severed head in the ripples of the stream lay as if suspended from the branches or caught in the roots of a shining tree that joined earth and heaven… But it shifted and flashed, became distorted into an eye, first a barely-open white eye, then the burning eye of the sun, yellow like a cat’s; and it seemed to him that the eye looked across time and space from a place that knew neither, and that somehow the one eye was wise but possessive… wishing to hide its precious treasure from the unworthy, from those who would steal it… it became the eye of Fafnir the dragon, hiding the ring that would be stolen from him by Siegfried… the eye of Smaug guarding the cup that Bilbo Baggins would steal; and the eye of Nechtan jealously guarding the waters of knowledge from Boann… or the lamp-like pale eye of the creature Gollum…
Then, in the reflecting waters, it seemed he saw, in that eternal moment between two thoughts, the lady of the waters, the fairy princess, lady of the white cows; Sulis-Minerva, mistress of magic – the poet’s daughter who in the Pearl poem lay across the river of death on the shores of Paradise - about her head a silvery-gold corona of stars; now rising from the waters and straddling the river. She bent over the waters, seeming to pour the glimmering flashes of moonlight into the pool; her pale beauteous face lifted high amid the stars, and she bridged the earth and the heavens like a pallid rainbow, the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia her nourishing breasts, a white-shadow arching over the sleeping men of earth; blessed; snow-white, queen of stars....
All in white she was, her hair loose about her shoulders, soft as the owl’s feather; wise beyond years, and about her throat a pendant or phial of rock crystal, lit by an inner fire; the reflected light of the star shining from on the western horizon; and she seemed to peer down into the mirrored surface of the waters…no, she WAS the waters, and the stars combined, and one flowed into the other… a face below and a face above, their gaze meeting; two but yet one.
There she arched above and below, this maid of the Sidhe, this Elven princess, this lady of the lake; her white track streaming behind her… a track of flowers, of stars, of chalk pebbles in the holy stream, of the shimmering ripples caused by the moonlight on the waters… and it seemed to him that she had come from a far distant land, a land that was beyond the reach of mortal man… from Paradise… But the water! Flooding over the low, green land! The terror of the approaching waves! The burning, baleful eye…blazing over the flood… … and then there was a dark-haired girl floating in the water surrounded by flowers and shining stones and then flames and the sound of gunfire and shells exploding… the past, or shadows of what might yet come to pass?
Then at last this shifting reflection calmed and resolved once more into a mirrored form of distant figure standing on the far, green, shore; a kind, sad, face, and his heart leapt… Mother? … his heart cried out… Mother?! Unthinking he reached forward, seeking to grasp her reflection, his hand plunging into the cool water so that the image atomised into fragments and disappeared.
When the void closed the sparkling water resolved to mirror the moon-ship sailing across the heavens above; the vision that had come unbidden left him as swiftly as it had arrived. The moon on the water, though, still shifted and trembled, but now through the prism of his tears; in the distance the owl once more called, once, twice, three times….
Handsome is the yellow horse,
But a hundred times better
Is my cream-coloured one,
Swift as the sea mew
Taliesin, Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees)
Accursed be the damsel,
Who, after the wailing,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging deep
Accursed be the maiden,
Who, after the conflict,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging sea
Taliesin, Seithenin
Chapter One: The White Horse
(Wed 14th April 1937)
On a warm mid-April morning in 1937 three gentlemen, two Oxford dons and a solicitor, were beginning their customary annual walking tour that this year was to be a ‘literary pilgrimage’ from the pretty market town of Marlborough in Wiltshire to Porlock in the Quantock Hills of Somerset where in 1797 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, intoxicated with opium, had written the famously obscure and unfinished verse ‘Kubla Khan’. Their plan was to walk the nearly 100 miles to Porlock over a leisurely eight or nine days, taking in the ancient sites of Wiltshire, before crossing into Somerset and reaching their goal via the Cathedral of Wells and the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Having left Marlborough at nine in the morning, the three friends had taken the path westwards across the Downs, climbing slowly for about a mile and then turning northwest at the hamlet of Rockley, to the Hakpen horse – one of Wessex’s famous white-horses carved into the chalk hills of the Downs. Here they had decided to stop for a few minutes to enjoy the view before turning south and taking the prehistoric track-way known as the Ridgeway to Overton down, where they would join the Marlborough to Bath road close to their first proper stop, the village of Avebury, a small unassuming village that stood within the bounds of what was the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world. The intention of the three hikers was to take lunch in the Red Lion, the pub that lay at the centre of the circle, before walking the last few miles to Calne, where Coleridge had stayed in 1814-16, and where they aimed to spend that night. From then on they would take a bus to Wells and walk the rest of the way to Porlock, all going well.
Clive Staples Lewis, who his friends knew as ‘Jack’, dark, balding and thickset, was presently leading the other two men down the gentle slope of the hill on which the Hakpen horse had been carved a century before. Behind him strode Owen Barfield, lean, tall and well-built with a full head of dark hair, above a handsome, elfin face – who was struggling to keep up a conversation with his friend who kept striding forward out of earshot. Their physical differences had always amused the third member of the party, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who, like Lewis, was a fellow of the school of English at the University of Oxford. This kind, if serious-faced man, the shortest and the eldest of the three by 6 years being now in his mid-forties, and who seemed to wear a perpetual frown as if always chewing over some deep problem, watched the ill-matched pair walk ahead and disappear over the brow of the hill vanishing out of sight.
Damn their route-march! Tolkien thought. This was a supposed to be a leisurely hike, not a military exercise! Well… let them march on! He thought, letting his heavy pack fall from his shoulders.
The April sun was pleasing; Tolkien, who had already removed his tweed jacket on the climb out of Marlborough, now rolled up his shirtsleeves and took off his hat, wiping his now-greying dark fringe where it had stuck to his brow. Then, fishing into the pocket of his plain brown waistcoat for his pipe and tin of Navy Cut tobacco, he began to fill his pipe, tamping the tobacco down with a thumb and then scrabbled about in his trouser pocket for a box of matches.
As he smoked Tolkien felt himself relax for the first time in what seemed months. The spring term at Oxford had not been any busier than normal, but all his spare time had been taken up since before Christmas correcting the proofs of his book. He had tried, not wholly successfully, to remain unruffled at the errors the type-setters had made, but at least correcting their mistakes had allowed him the opportunity to add some new material and to iron out some minor inconsistencies he had discovered in his tale. You think a book is done and dusted, but writing it is only the beginning! He had said in frustration to Lewis over a half a glass of beer in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen college two days before. He had just returned from the Post Office having sent his publisher, Stanley Unwin, an illustration for the dust-jacket, showing the dragon Smaug flying out of the Lonely Mountain; it was, to Tolkien’s eye, a little amateurish, but preferable to what some professional artist with no real idea of the story might dream up. Jack had raised his glass to the success of the book, but Tolkien had shrugged. ‘I’m happier celebrating that the bloody thing is finally out of my hands, Jack. It had become, alas, like a guest who outstays his welcome. No doubt in time I will miss his company, but for now I’m happy to be free once more.’. ‘Freedom, Tollers, is one of those invisible qualities one fails to appreciate until it is taken from oneself. Like a fish only appreciates water when dangling from the angler’s hook…’.
‘When I was in Flanders…’ Tolkien said, ‘I thought a simple glass of beer, in a quiet country pub, would be a joy forever. And so it was, for a time; but then came the time I just downed the drink and thought no more of it; the tragedy of mankind is his ability to forget…’
‘Then may we ever be sent…’ said Lewis, raising his glass, ‘adversity, so that we may never tire of freedom.’
…
Now distanced from the demands of not only book, but also family and work, Tolkien let out a happy sigh. After Mass that morning he had left his stack of papers on his desk at Northmoor Road and had left for the station determined not to even think of Hobbits or dragons until he returned home late the following week. He hoped, now, that this was the end of the matter; and standing here looking out over the valley he felt a sudden sense of freedom welling up within him, that escaped as a chuckle; this was a new start – no longer constrained by ‘The Hobbit’ he could return to his languages and mythology.
Above him skylarks were singing, invisible against the pale sky; he stood in the long grass, watching as industrious bees flitted from cowslip to cowslip. Below him, out of sight, he could hear Jack laughing, and so he walked on to join his companions who were now sat on the sloping ground close to the carved horse’s head.
On first sight the Hakpen horse was a strange looking beast, more reminiscent of a dog than a horse, Tolkien thought, thin legged and barrel bodied, though he conceded one was meant to see it from a distance away not upside down from above its back.
‘You’ll know, Tollers... Why do you imagine these horses were carved?’ Lewis turned and asked Tolkien as the latter approached the seated pair.
‘This one is a century old, as I recall – and I believe was cut to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria; but as for the others - why do people ever feel the need to mark the landscape?’ he replied, seating himself beside his companions, and refilling his pipe.
Lewis looked down over the valley for an answer – the only marks he could see were the lines of hedges and field boundaries; a small road ran north to south at the bottom of the valley, with a single motorcar heading along it.
‘To show land ownership: “This land is mine!” I suppose?’ He suggested, his slight Belfast accent adding a tuneful lilt to the words.
‘Spot on, I would say.’ Tolkien replied. ‘They were originally, I would think, a stamp of ownership of the local landowner; it’s like hanging a Stubbs above your fireplace – the Uffington horse, for instance, was undoubtedly a territorial marker for the tribe that lived in the hill-fort above it.’ His own words tumbled out quickly and slightly incoherently, somewhat staccato and punctuated with quick flashes of a smile.
The Uffington horse, to which Tolkien referred, was the most striking, as well as being the oldest, of all the Wessex horses. It’s sinuous, streamlined form had graced the Berkshire Downs from time immemorial; once believed to have been carved by Alfred the Great to celebrate a victory over the Vikings at Ethandune in 878 AD, its curved, abstract, and almost skeletal shape, three times the size of the Hakpen horse, had always suggested to Tolkien an origin much further back in prehistory.
‘But why a horse? What has a horse to do with territory per se?’ Lewis continued, lighting a cigarette.
‘Everything – to a prehistoric tribesman. Think, Jack! As a tribesman, how do you defend your land?’
‘Earthworks; arrows; swords.’ He said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke that drifted lazily away.
‘Now how large is your territory going to be?’ Tolkien prodded.
Lewis shrugged. ‘As large as you can defend, I suppose, within a few hours walk from your camp.’ Their view over the edge of the Wiltshire Downs presented such a territory – it would take them a good few hours to reach the distant slopes above Cherhill, to their west; it was a rich land; worth defending; worth planting and settling on; worth fighting for.
‘Well think how much more territory you could defend on horseback than on foot. The first tribes to ride horses possessed a marked superiority over their contemporaries: they could not only possess more land, and defend it, but also embark on taking that of others – taking their land and their resources – their herds of cattle...’
Tolkien looked down at the carved face, dulled with age; overgrown with grasses and moss.
‘This one may be relatively new, but the white horse of Uffington… well, it’s is still galloping possibly thousands of years after it was carved, still claiming that land for a tribe who have long since journeyed beyond that vale to another...’ he drew on his pipe and peered out over the valley.
‘So you agree with Chesterton that it’s old?’ Lewis said, meaning the Uffington Horse.
Tolkien nodded. Chesterton’s poetry rose in his mind and he gave voice to his words over the crudely cut body of the chalk steed below:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.
Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.’
He flashed a quick smile at his companions; although on the surface he often appeared shy, there was something of the bard about this man, and, when encouraged, enjoyed such recitations.
Lewis let out a sigh. ‘I must read the ballad again, Tollers. It has some beautiful parts – how does that verse go?:
For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.’
Lewis turned to the hitherto silent Barfield, who had been consulting his map.
‘Listen, Owen. Did I tell you? Tollers, Warnie and I walked to Uffington last summer and we were at the pub in the village, discussing why the hill beside the horse had been named Dragon Hill. Well, Warnie and Tollers were talking about dragons in general, sadly commenting on how they were all dead and gone when some local workman pipes up ‘They are not! I seen ‘em myself!!’
Lewis roared with laughter.
‘So why does it bear the name of Dragon Hill?’ Barfield asked, smiling at his friend’s jollity.
‘Local legend says it’s where St George slew the Dragon.’ Tolkien answered. ‘But I wonder just how old the name is - the Dragon-slaying myth is really very ancient indeed, so I doubt Good Old Saint George had much a part to play in it! One only has to think of Apollo slaying the Python at Delphi to see that it’s really a myth about new cults and new gods overcoming the old, and in many cases taking over their holy sites.’
‘Ah, so you think the older British cults, like the Greek, were represented by the dragon or the serpent?’ Barfield asked. ‘That is interesting; I’m not overly familiar with ancient British beliefs but wait until we get to Avebury: I’ll show you something that I think might interest you.’
Lewis yawned.
‘Yes, Avebury… Delightful as this view is, I can’t help feeling we’re wasting precious drinking time at the Red Lion by being here. Horses and dragons aren’t really part of the Coleridgean theme of this holiday, after all…’
‘No?’ Barfield said, an eyebrow raised on his boyish face, ‘You may have a point about dragons, but not horses: think of Kubla Khan… is it not said that he owned ten thousand white horses? And was not the milk of these beasts only to be drunk by the Khan himself? Perhaps this milk was even the Milk of Paradise of Coleridge’s poem? I would say the white horse is extremely Coleridgean!!’
Lewis conceded the point to his friend and rose, shouldering his pack and waving his walking stick in the air with a cry of ‘Onward! Ale awaits!’ Tolkien remained seated for a moment, looking out over the pale landscape, to where the distant downs fading to blue were crested by the spike of the Cherhill monument, marking the end of that day’s proposed walk. He narrowed his eyes in the bright morning sun and muttered a few more lines of Chesterton before he rose to follow the others:
And the great kings of Wessex
Wearied and sank in gore,
And even their ghosts in that great stress
Grew greyer and greyer, less and less,
With the lords that died in Lyonesse
And the king that comes no more.
This image of the white horse stayed with Tolkien for the hour it took to walk along Hakpen hill to the edge of the downs at Overton. Here, at the point where the path met the Marlborough to Bath road, the hillside was crowned with a line of large round hillocks: the burial mounds of long-forgotten prehistoric kings; Lewis slowed his pace momentarily to survey these grass-covered tombs, four thousand years in age, but did not stop. Tolkien, however, paused and then ambled across from the path into the meadow to the middle one of the three ancient and time-weathered graves, now strewn with grasses, dandelions and other meadow flowers.
Tolkien climbed atop the steep rise of the barrow, and took a deep breath of the warm, spring scented air. Before him stretched the Kennet valley; running east to west, the Downs rising on both sides, steeper to the north where he sat, more gentle to the south, rising in soft folds of palest green, interrupted here and there by a copse of trees or lines of hedgerow, before fading to a lilac wash against the sky.
Tolkien re-lit his pipe and let his mind sink into the deep past. How might this gently undulating valley have looked when the kings whose bones lay beneath these once chalk-white burial mounds had first climbed this rise thousands of years before? He could almost hear the thumping of their horses’ hooves, see their pale hair blowing in the wind; hear their strange voices calling out even stranger names… their bronze spears glinting in the sun, striking fear into the small dark men with their flint blades who had lived in this place before them, and who stood cowering in the trees on seeing these tall mounted warriors arriving from the east. Did they see them, he wondered, as the Aztecs had seen the Spanish Conquistadors – as dreadful hybrid beasts, never having seen a horse and thinking man and steed were a single animal? What prehistoric Cortez or Pizarro rode this ridge so long ago, and did he accept the peace of the painted tribesmen who prostrated themselves before him or did he like the Conquistadors turn these green hills into a sea of blood?
It was these newcomers, Tolkien mused, who having overcome the native cults were perhaps the first to carve the shape of their steeds into the green hillsides of Wessex… a white horse on a field of green as a sign of victory; (why did that phrase always arise in his mind, he wondered?). But the Uffington horse, at least, was a strangely emaciated beast of victory, with a beak-like muzzle. He shuddered at a memory: the half-rotted body of a horse he had marched past on the way to the trenches of the Somme twenty years before, left hanging, bloated and rotting on a barbed wire fence, its body moving with rats, its head eyeless and lipless – the bleached bones of the muzzle protruding from the flyblown jaw … Tolkien blanched at the recollection. For four thousand years the horse and rider had dominated warfare but times had changed and no cavalry could match the artillery and machine gun fire of the modern battlefield.
The words of an Old English poem arose in his mind:
Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære….
Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away, dark under the cover of night,
As if it had never been.
Gently he twisted a blade of grass around a finger. The memory of the decaying horse had made him uncommonly anxious, but perhaps that was as much to do with what Barfield had been talking about over breakfast at Marlborough that morning after they had alighted from the Oxford bus: the damned war in Spain; and that ignoramus Hitler sending troops there to support the fascists; and France extending its defences along its border with Germany…
Tolkien drove the thought from his mind. Such speculation not only solved nothing, but also cast a cloud over what was a beautiful spring day. And it was beautiful - the sky cloudless; his book was finished and his time his own; the grass smelled sweet, and the peace of the day only disturbed by the sound of an automobile wending its lonely way along the road back to Marlborough; his eyes were becoming heavy… maybe, he thought, he should just rest a bit longer…
Chapter Two: Sanctuary
(29th June 2012)
Eighty five years later, over the same stretch of hill on which the barrows of the prehistoric Kings ran like humps on the back of some giant half-submerged sea-creature, on a road now wider and heavy with speeding traffic, Conall Astor’s campervan lurched to a sudden halt causing a number of unsecured objects to crash into the back of his seat. Behind his van the driver of a pristine black Audi that had been tailgating him all the way from Marlborough screeched to a stop, sounded his horn and gesticulated wildly. Conall put his arm out the window and stuck up his middle finger as the Audi veered around him.
‘Fucking wanker!’ the driver yelled, so Conall changed his gesture, lifting up a curled little finger in the sign for ‘small dick’. To his immense relief the car carried on.
The cause of Conall’s sudden halt seemed oblivious to the accident it had nearly produced: the hare in the centre of the road fixed Conall with a golden eye before lolloping nonchalantly towards the grass verge. It’s angular, cat-like beauty was entrancing - like an emissary from an older world out of place on the burning tarmac – it’s indifference seemed to suggest that it, and not the road and its dirty machines, had precedence; my kind were here before yours, it seemed to say.
‘You take your time, lady!’ Conall shouted, sarcastically. The hare reached the roadside grass sat for a few seconds then was gone, leaving some flattened grass-stems as the only witness to its presence.
Restarting his van, and lifting a hand to the queue of vehicles that had formed behind him, Conall drove onwards a few yards and then signalled and turned into a small open area on the right of the road where a number of cars and vans were parked; and having found a space, the camper shivered once more to a silent halt.
For a few moments Conall sat still, gazing ahead at the rolling landscape of pale wheat and sheep-dotted insipid grassland, relieved that the three hour drive had ended; then with a nervous glance he took off his sunglasses and turned to inspect the damage in the back of the camper. Coffee was splashed up the back of the seat and lay in a puddle on the floor in which a number of books, papers, empty tobacco packets and diet coke bottles were scattered. Shit. He’d forgotten about the coffee cup. He picked up a dripping black notebook, wiped it on the seat next to him, and leaned across and shoved it into the crowded glovebox, whose contents promptly tumbled out into the foot-well.
‘Fuck it.’
A small cardboard packet had tumbled out, spilling its contents, a few blister packs of green and cream capsules, onto the floor. It was three weeks since he’d taken the last tablet, and already he had felt a sense of the old him returning; a sharpening of edges long dulled, slivers of happiness felt for the first time in many, many months; cold washes of grief, too – real grief, not the numb dumb-show the anti-depressants had afforded him for the last year. He didn’t know why he’d bothered to bring them. Weakness, he supposed; a prop, in case it all went horribly wrong again. Wrong again? That implied things had got better, and they hadn’t; it was time, that was all – not that one could put a time limit on grieving, no – but it was time to try to start living again, he supposed. At least he had the choice. She didn’t; but she wouldn’t have wanted him to give up.
I should just throw these into the first bin I find, he thought, leaving them where they had fallen.
The drive down from London had been uneventful; he had begun it with a vague sense of stress, and had been half tempted to turn around and head for home, but having reached Fleet services on the M3, he had sat on the bank of the car park with a coffee and a cigarette, and had felt that the old lightness of spirit might yet return if he relaxed and gave it a chance. Wasn’t that the whole reason for coming here? To mark a new start by returning to a place where in the past he had always been happy, but which had become slighted in his memory by those dark, tragic events of the previous year? He took a deep breath.
It had been over a year since he had last been here; and in that time his life had changed utterly and irrecoverably. Coming back here was an attempt to put it all in perspective; to draw a line under the past; not to forget it, but to try to move on from it, to lay a ghost to rest. This place had been somewhere where he had immediately felt at home, where he could just be. Might it now welcome him home like a prodigal son, past misdemeanours waiting, if he was fortunate, to be forgiven? But just now such a hope seemed a pipe-dream; all seemed flat to him, dull – the world was leaden, and he seemed to lack the means to shake off the veneer of greyness that seemed to coat everything like a fine ash. A walk should help, he mused; and a beer.
Conall leaned out of the window and looked at himself in the wing-mirror; a tired, unshaven, face looked back at him from beneath dark curls. He looked away. Still, a year on, he couldn’t hold his own gaze for long. Conall was, in his own words, ‘pushing forty’, and for the first time in his life he felt his age. He was dreading the day itself; all his life there had been two cakes – two sets of presents; last year it hadn’t mattered as they had all been too numb with the shock, but this year – with only a couple of months to go, and it being a ‘biggy’, as she had used to call such occasions, the idea of celebrating it alone, with her not there, was unthinkable.
Conall opened the door and stepped into the heat of the early July afternoon. The majority of the cars around him were empty; though muffled music was coming from a large converted minibus a little further up the path; it was painted black, with tinted windows, and howling wolves and a giant full-moon airbrushed on its side.
Though he was still a mile or so from the main village, he had decided to stop here knowing that on such a gorgeous day the main car parks that served Avebury village and the stone circle that surrounded it would already be full; besides, he reasoned, he wished to walk into the village the old way, from the Sanctuary and along the Avenue. And he wanted to walk after spending such a long time behind the wheel. Besides, he could leave the van here and return later in the evening and camp the night; the main car park shut at seven and he would only have to move the van again – and to do that he’d need to be sober; something he had no intention of being.
Behind him, beyond the fence, and reached by a path in the long grass, lay the Bronze Age barrows; for a moment he had the urge to go and climb them but his goal for the moment lay to the immediate south of the road he had just turned off, and so locking his camper (not that, he imagined, anyone in their right mind would attempt to steal it or any of its coffee-stained contents) he headed for the road.
The road, where it crossed the brow of the hill, was steep and curved so that Conall was more reliant on his hearing to gauge a gap in the traffic than his sight. After a minute or so of waiting as cars, lorries, coaches and motorcycles roared past Conall ran across the road, a few yards from where the hare had crossed minutes before. Something furred but flat and dry coated the road, maybe once a fox or a hare. He grimaced and felt a wave of sadness.
Despite the large number of cars that had been in the lay-by Conall found the meadow in which the Sanctuary lay bereft of tourists. The only signs of life were three jackdaws poking around the long grass looking for insects, seemingly unconcerned with the roar of the traffic a few feet away. As ancient monuments went the Sanctuary, Conall thought, was singularly unimpressive. Concentric rings of concrete markers now showed where the great posts of a prehistoric structure had once stood lending to this circular meadow the feel of a badly conceived modern art installation; but its view was serene: to the east in the distance lay the cragged teeth-like stones that marked the façade of a large prehistoric tomb known as West Kennet long-barrow; and to its right the strangely rounded form of Silbury hill could be seen over the shoulder of the intervening hilltop. All lay bathed in a haze that bleached the distant rises of Milk hill and Tan hill into a uniform ridge of cyan – bluer than the sky itself which was almost colourless and hurt Conall’s eyes now he had taken his sunglasses off. The wheat field next to the long-barrow was marked with a huge crop circle, a vast circle of flattened wheat with radials of increasingly smaller circles spinning counter-clockwise from the centre. These crop glyphs still amazed him however many times he’d seen them; the work, he supposed, of guerrilla artists rather than extra-terrestrials they nevertheless still possessed a certain mystery, perhaps born of their anonymity, their perfection and their elusive meaning.
Conall walked to the central concrete ring, sat himself on one of the posts, and took a pack of American Spirit tobacco out of his shirt pocket. First taking a pinch, he crumbled the already powdery tobacco onto the earth before him. Itsipaiitapio’pah, Great Spirit, he mumbled under his breath, a habit he had picked up on his last visit here from an old man who had since returned to the Ancestors - at least he was old, Conall thought, thinking of the old man; it’s easier to deal with then – a good innings as they say, trite though it may be; no one could have said it of her though: a good innings. Thirty-eight years old. She’ll always be thirty-eight... they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. It’s not just the years that condemn, Con thought; survivors guilt; or just plain guilt – there’s a pretty fucking hefty dose of condemnation there.
He inhaled and breathed out the smoke in the direction of the swifts that were screaming and tumbling overhead beneath the criss-cross of vapour trails that divided up the sky. Not so long ago he would have looked up jealously, wishing he had been jetting off to somewhere other than where he was; somewhere where he couldn’t be reminded of things. But today Conall Astor knew that he had to stop running away.
Alone, in the circle, he put a hand over his face. Then, straightening and wiping his eyes, he drew a deep breath on his cigarette. ‘Well, I’m back!’ he said.
Chapter Three: The Serpent’s Head
‘Tollers?!’
Tolkien looked up from where he had lain down on the mound a few minutes earlier. Lewis had crossed back over the road and was leant over the fence to the barrow field.
‘Come on, man. We’re in need of tea! What are you doing?’
‘You miss so much with your marching, Jack!’ Tolkien muttered, standing up somewhat awkwardly and replacing his hat.
Lewis’s already sunburned head turned away and he headed back over the road to the field opposite where Barfield was slowly walking in a wide circle, eyes to the ground. Tolkien reluctantly shouldered his pack, and descended from the barrow, turning back for a moment to bow to the bones of the unknown king whose tomb it had been, sweeping off his hat and uttering words of farewell.
A few yards from the road in the direction of another great barrow lay a flat circular expanse of ground, its short grass studded with a number of pristine concentric circles of short concrete posts of varying sizes.
‘This place,’ Barfield, who had been circling the posts, said as he approached the others ‘is the Sanctuary – it was excavated a couple of years back – and it seems that it was originally some kind of circular wooden structure – these concrete posts mark where the wooden poles once stood - and it was probably roofed. And then at some point it was all surrounded by a ring of sarsen stones… they’ve all gone now - destroyed by pious locals since the 1700’s though the antiquarian Stukeley drew them in a sketch he made here in the 1720’s…’
‘What was it, Baedeker Barfield – a temple?’ Lewis asked.
Barfield shrugged, digging around in his backpack. ’Possibly, or a mortuary-house, I think someone suggested – where the bodies of the dead were left to rot before they were put in the tombs, the long-barrows. But you know what Stukeley called it?! The hakpen, the snake’s head. It’s after this structure that the whole ridge from here to the horse seems to have been named. Now, with what you were saying earlier about the Old Religion, Tollers, and the defeat of the serpent cults…’
Lewis looked down at the rings of posts in un-characteristic silence; seemingly nonplussed. ‘I suppose this was just an empty field when we were last here.’ He said, looking at Barfield.
‘I guess so. We must have walked past here, but I don’t recall much about it – except the rain.’
‘Ha! And the ride back, do you remember?!’ Lewis laughed. ‘Hitching a lift to Marlborough on that cart?’
Barfield smiled with affection. ‘Yes, in the dark and the rain, and Harwood singing!’
Tolkien felt oddly touchy at their reminiscing; he had hardly known Lewis back then. I do hope this trip doesn’t turn into a nostalgic reverie for those two, he thought gruffly. He bristled at his own jealousy. Was it jealousy, though, he wondered? Yes, in part, but not for Lewis and his cronies; it was, perhaps, more sadness he had not been able to make such memories himself with those he should have been here with. But stoically he cast such thoughts from his mind.
‘So, I guess the ridge is the back of the snake and this hill that marks the end of the ridge is its head?’ Tolkien asked.
Barfield turned. ‘No. It heads north-west from here; Stukeley believed the whole of the Avebury monument was the serpent… it’s a serpent writ large in stone…’ Having found the volume he had been searching in his rucksack he opened it out on a folded-over page that showed an old black and white hand-drawn map; it was Stukeley’s plan of the monuments.
‘Look, here’s the head, where we are now, at Overton Hill’ he said, pointing at the right-hand side of the drawing to a circular feature, ‘…and then an avenue of stones, the beast’s neck, snakes its way to the main circle at the centre, in which two smaller stone circles are to be found… though each of them was as big as Stonehenge, which gives one some idea of just how huge the main circle is! Then the tail, if you will, is another avenue leaving the circle on its western side and heading towards Beckhampton. You must admit it is rather snakelike. The naming of hakpen hill, then, is more than coincidental… it seems to support Stukeley’s theory.’
Tolkien looked up from the page. From their current viewpoint the main stone circle and village within was still obscured by the rise of what Stukeley’s plan called ‘Windmill hill’ to the northwest. Hakpen. But on what authority, Tolkien wondered, had it been so named, or just in Stukeley’s imagination?
‘And here’s where we’ll find the pub!’ Lewis said, pointing to the centre of the circle. ‘Fiendishly clever of them to build a pub right at the heart of the circle!’ He joked. ‘Obviously, the avenues were for guiding them home on dark nights when they were worse for wear with drink! How long until we get there? An hour? You know, I know it’s ten years on, but I really don’t recall much of this at all.’
‘Three-quarters of an hour, I would think.’ Barfield said. He looked at his pocket watch. ‘It’s eleven already, too early for lunch, really. But there is a tearoom down there beside the road near Silbury Hill’ he said, pointing to a flat-topped rise just visible above the trees, ‘and we could perhaps stop there for tea and then eat properly at the pub later. We have all day.’
‘Well, you have the map and we’ll trust your judgement.’ Lewis said, not looking up from the plan.
Tolkien paused and looked up at the skylarks, his own choice would have been, as they were already at the so-called ‘serpent’s head’, to skip tea and continue down its throat into its belly down the Avenue, the route the people of Avebury would have no doubt taken four and a half thousand years earlier.
Lewis, still looking at the plan – pointed a nicotine stained finger at the central feature - a great domed hill with a flattened top, so perfect in its shape that it was quite obviously man-made. Then peering up from the plan to the western horizon saw the same flat-topped mound in the flesh, peeking over the intervening hills.
‘Rather a fitting start to our Coleridge homage, wouldn’t you say?’ Barfield said, ‘the great hill of Silbury - the stately pleasure dome in the valley of the sacred river Kennet,’ lifting lines from Coleridge’s poem. ‘It’s old – the Romans had to curve their otherwise straight road to Bath around it in order to avoid it.’
‘It’s always struck me as looking like a huge steamed pudding,’ remarked Lewis; ‘All this walking has made me hungry. Do you think there might be steak and kidney pudding at the Red Lion?’
‘Shall we climb it?’ Barfield said, ignoring Lewis’s comment.
Lewis looked at the steep sides of the hill and scratched at his chin in thought.
‘I’m in two minds. It would possibly be better, if we are to attempt the feat, to climb it now before the day gets too warm; but my stomach is disagreeing with me. Still, we could have a pot of tea and then decide.’
‘I climbed it myself years ago, before our last visit!’ The solicitor’s face lit up with a puckish smile. ‘And we danced on the summit!’
‘Why did they build it, Owen? Is it a tomb, like the Pyramids?’ Lewis asked.
‘No – no burial has been found, despite the local legends…’
‘Don’t mention legends, Barfield… we’ll never get our tea…see how Toller’s ears picked up like a hound?’ Jack quipped.
Tolkien held a match to his pipe and puffed away, grinning. ‘I already know them, Jack.’ He said through pipe-clenched teeth, ‘Despite crossing the county border this is still, you know, my neck of the woods mythologically speaking. A King Zel is supposed to be buried in the hill, on horseback, in golden armour…’
‘Golden armour, indeed!’ Jack mocked. ’There’s the mark of a modern myth, surely; gold armour would be practically useless against a bronze or iron blade.’
‘Unless the gold is a symbol for the sun?’ Suggested Barfield.
‘Perhaps.’ Lewis conceded. ‘What if Silbury were derived from the Roman Sol? The Hill of the Sun?’
He looked towards Tolkien, but the latter seemed deep in contemplation.
‘Possibly; that argument has merit….’ Tolkien answered, ‘but Sil is closer to the Welsh word for the sun, Sul…’ (he pronounced it, correctly, as ‘seel’) ‘…If, if, the Celtic place-name hakpen has survived here then why not Sul?’
It seemed strange in this beautiful English setting to hear the echoes of the old Celtic tongue now long driven from these Downs; it was almost as if such ancient places were reluctant to let them go, or perhaps the newcomers, bound by fear or superstition, had thought it unwise to change the names. It lent the place a feeling of timelessness; as if some relic of a dark pagan Celtic past had broken through the veneer of England, like a long buried celandine from an ancient forest floor pushing up through a lawn in spring, long after the trees of the forest had been cleared to make way for the garden. Words could be vehicles for such feelings; passports into a different reality, or worlds long passed, Tolkien had always thought.
As Tolkien looked across the landscape England faded as if into a mist; and an ancient place emerged; he stood no more on Overton hill, or Hakpen ridge facing towards Silbury – he stood on the head of the serpent temple gazing on the hill of the sun, in the heart of a land that bore other names, names now only remembered in legend: Ynys Prydein, the Isle of the Mighty; Clas Myrddin: Merlin’s enclosure; Logres; Albion …
The temple of the Dragon, he thought. Was it possible or just the over-ripe imaginings of that antiquarian Stukeley - a man who had later claimed to be a druid and to have divined Biblical numbers in the measurements of Stonehenge? As he stood in thought the unsolicited image of a grinning dragon crossed, unwanted, into his consciousness. Smaug! How am I meant to forget my book when all around I’m surrounded by dragons?! He thought, suddenly annoyed at the obtrusion of work, of deadlines, of editorial queries into his reverie. Be gone, foul slitherer and leave me be! In his mind he saw the hero of old, his bow drawn back, shooting at the heart of the dragon; the incoming heroes on their white steeds, come to crush the serpent of gods of the older religion and their worshippers, and take from them their land and their women. A couple of verses from his beloved Genesis welled up in his mind:
‘And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust thou shalt eat all the days of thy life: And I shall put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise they head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’
He ground his heel into the ground of the Hakpen, banishing Smaug from his thoughts, determined that no more would his book intrude on his holiday; a resolution that would stand no chance of remaining kept.
Chapter Four: The Book and the Feather
Conall had returned to the campervan, and was taking a few moments to mop the remnants of the spilled coffee from the floor with a dirty t-shirt, and to replace the rest of the fallen objects (and others that had already been on the floor) to their proper place – stuffed under the sofa-bed. Most of his stuff had, in fairness, been properly packed away, but the decision to come here had been last-minute and so he had thrown a number of items on to the sofa-bed wrapped in a duvet, hoping they would be ok. The coffee had been a mistake, though. He’d wedged the unfinished cup between a pile of fairly heavy books and a lever-arch file on the small kitchen worktop behind the driver’s seat– and it would have been okay there, or so he told himself, if it hadn’t been for the hare…
The file, marked PhD, with the words ‘unfinished’ scrawled on the label lay half-open, and he collected a number of hand-written pages, star-maps and photocopies of ancient artefacts, statues and inscriptions that had cascaded from out of it. A few of the sheets were wrinkled and brown with coffee, but he gathered them up all the same and pushed them carelessly into the pile – pages of sketches of little clay figurines copied from Marija Gimbutas’ books on ‘Old’ Europe, with lozenge shapes and zig zags marked in black pen; carved cow-horns from Iberian tombs; print-outs of stellar alignments, some highlighted in red pen and exclamation marks. He didn’t need them now anyway. He snorted at the memory: a conversation from a few months before and the words of his then-tutor: ‘Astronomy is supposed to be science! Your original subject, on evidence for astronomy in prehistory was fine, if a little loose; but to start delving into these myths, well, Con, you’re on very shaky ground. If it’s not Indian myth, it’s Red Indian myth… I know you’ve had a very, very difficult time of late. But these subjects are simply not tenable, and I really cannot support your continued study of them, I’m sorry!’
‘Red Indian? That’s not very PC, is it?’ Con had answered. His tutor had just blinked at him and waved it off with a motion of his hand as irrelevant. Behind the tutor’s head was a large poster of stars being created in Orion’s belt as imaged by the Hubble telescope, and above this a poster of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva including an image of an atom with electrons flying about the nucleus like billiard balls; the great and the small; was this guy so focussed on these extremes that he couldn’t see the everyday world, Con had thought? Surely what was interesting about stars and atoms was that we were made of both: the very substance of our being were atoms forged in those great stellar furnaces, matter that was, the closer you looked at it, just energy seeming to flit into being from out of some mysterious and timeless zero energy field… physics surely was supposed to allow one look at the world in wonder – not to ignore it.
Conall had often waxed-lyrical about this to anyone who would listen: on a quantum level space and time were illusory; changing the energy state of a single atom here changed every single other atom in the cosmos; alter the course of a pair of particles once joined and the other would move, too – even if it was thousands of millions of miles away – even though according to science nothing moved faster than light-speed – something between these particles carried that information in an instant. How could that be – that a pair of particles once joined were forever linked?! Modern physics was mystical, magical and it had returned the stuffy academic that Con had once been in danger of becoming into a would-be mystic, something closer to how he had been as a child; an image of Tao, the yin-yang symbol, now hung on a string around his neck, his hair, at least then, long. But his tutor remained unaware of any of this magic, un-awakened by its import – and had failed to see its importance to his student.
‘You’re a scientist Con. This research is NOT science.’
‘You accepted my proposal. I clearly stated that I’d be investigating ancient myths…’ Con retorted.
‘Look – every PhD proposal needs tweaking – we had hoped you’d come to realise that this kind of research is currently frowned upon in the academic community and that perhaps other aspects of the subject might take precedence in your research. You’re a physicist at heart; get this ‘Tao of physics’ rubbish out of your system and grow up.’
‘It’s pronounced Dao’ was all Con could muster in reply as he left the office.
Con had driven home from this meeting fuming; by the time he had reached his house and sat down at his computer his anger had not abated. He had typed the shortest email of his life. ‘I quit.’ He had wanted it to be twice as long but decided to leave ‘you wanker’ unwritten. But in writing the email he had quit not just a PhD, but its associated lectureship in astrophysics; and he wasn’t sorry. The fire he had once had for the subject had left him since she had gone, and lecturing without fire was a mere dumb-show; thirty pairs of eyes, open like the mouths of chicks screaming to be fed, and he not able to even feed himself. He would not miss that. Besides, he had been told to rein in too many times; to leave the ‘new age’ nonsense out of the class. He was fed up of being told what he should or should not believe. As if truth was something you could measure.
Two particles once joined, linked forever... but the truth was she had died, and he had carried on living; and he had not known, not at the time; not unless you counted that dream – but how could you count that dream? He daren’t even go there, daren’t even begin to think... The dream… the river of milk, the horse on its banks…. No! He cast it from his mind. It was impossible; it was madness. It was okay for microscopic particles in the world of quantum reality to behave that way – to be entangled – twinned - but in the real world, the world of Newton, and television, and water bills? If it were true, if they had been linked and the dream had been some kind of warning, surely, he would have known; he would have felt her fear?
Without any real thought he put his folder to one side and reached for a book on the dresser shelf above the worktop. It had been hers and her name was scribbled inside the front page in a felt-tip pen: Melissa Astor; oldest and best of the Astor twins. It was an edition of the collected of poems of Coleridge, its cover faded by sunlight, its pages heavily thumbed, many turned down at the corner. It opened naturally at a well-worn page, the poem ‘Kubla Khan’, underlined and annotated in a small, hurried hand, the same as had written the name at the start. He half-read the notes, half-remembered them, so many times had he poured over them in the last year. He sat down on the sofa-bed with the book in his hands and read for a few moments more. The handwriting was legible, if rushed, little circles dotted the ‘i’s, and triple lines underlined words in the printed poem, often followed by a barrage of exclamation marks; the handwriting of someone excited, alive. But there they hid the truth.
Kubla Khan. Her favourite poem: their favourite – they’d learned it by heart just for the fun of it. He looked out of the window at nothing in particular and recited the first verse.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
A white barn-owl feather, edged with cream and smoky brown stripes, that had been placed in the back pages, fell onto the mattress of the sofa-bed; he picked it up gently, twisting it between his fingers; brushed it against his lips; and thought of the dark-haired girl who had given it to him, not the same girl who had once owned this book, but one now equally lost to him, it seemed. The feather brought back a memory of this other girl and of her grandfather; of a conversation a year earlier in a garden not two of miles from where Con now sat, with the frail white-haired man over the best soil for roses:
‘I don’t think he’s that interested in roses, granddad,’ the dark-haired girl had laughed.
‘Well he should be! If he learns the patience to cultivate a rose, he’ll have patience to cultivate a life with my beautiful grand-daughter’ the old man had replied, with a slow wink that creased the whole of his already much-lined face. Both Conall and the girl had coloured at this. ‘Granddad!’ she had said, abashed, and had mouthed a silent ‘sorry’ to Con.
Conall would go and lay tobacco on this old man’s grave tomorrow, at the Church in Avebury village, speaking the words the elder had taught him – Itsipaiitapio’pah - Great Spirit… he wondered if anyone laid flowers there now that his dark-haired granddaughter, his only surviving relative, would have returned home. Placing the book back on the shelf he continued with cleaning the van. A book from one girl, and a feather from another, he mused; it was a shame they had never met. It was tragic that they now never would. If I hadn’t been here… he began to think, but angrily cast the thought from his mind.
When the tidying was done Conall stepped outside and wrung the spilled coffee from his t-shirt then threw it back inside. The van up the way with the howling wolves on its side, curtains closed, music blaring, was gently rocking rhythmically on its squeaky suspension. He stared for a moment then quickly looked away, suddenly understanding. Lucky bastard, he thought to himself. Then imagining a night of this music and squeaking wheels he decided he would have to find another spot, closer to the circle, to camp.
Chapter Five: The River of Death
The three friends, having left the Sanctuary at the top of the ridge behind them, had descended into the valley bottom down a path beside the road, edged with lush new grasses, to where the lazy river Kennet was beginning its meandering journey through Wiltshire on its way to joining the Thames at Reading.
Another half mile walk along the snaking river brought them to the farm cottages of West Kennet on the curve of the Bath road, where they crossed the stone bridge and continued through fields lined with early blossoming whitethorn bushes in which a cuckoo could be heard, a herald of summer’s approach; ahead the companions could now see, unobscured by intervening hills for the first time, the majestic rise of Silbury Hill. At this point the Kennet turned to their left, to the south, to its source, as Barfield informed them, at the ‘Kennet spring’, as it was named on Stukeley’s plan; while another small tributary, its origins further to the north, swung around and skirted past the bottom of the hill, which was casting a great shadow over the water-logged meadow in which it lay.
While Barfield and Lewis gazed in wonder at the mound Tolkien had idled a few paces away towards the sedge covered banks of the slow, clear, river, where he gazed a while on the sticklebacks flitting in and out of the rills of dark green weed swaying in the glassy shallows. Above him a pair of crows were cawing as they circled, then flew off to the south.
He crouched, gazing into its clear depths, its shallow bottom, in the dappled shade from the water weeds, flecked here and there with pieces of chalk. He removed his boots and socks, rolled up his trouser bottoms and dipped a tentative foot into the water; it was icy cold, but before long he had grown used to it, and he sat on the bank, moving his feet hither and thither, stirring up a milky cloud of sediment that floated gently away downstream.
‘Enlighten us Tollers’ Lewis said, striding over to where Tolkien was seated, ‘The river name, Kennet, means what?’ he looked back and winked at Barfield.
‘I know what you’re getting at, Jack, and I happen to disagree with that particular vulgar etymology!’ Tolkien leaned forward amongst the rushes and dipped his hand into the cool water.
‘The earliest record is Cunnit, but we’re not looking at a Saxon profanity –beyond Marlborough is a place named Mildenhall called Cunetio by the Romans, no doubt after the river. The name cannot therefore be Saxon if it was here centuries prior to the Adventus…’. The adventus Tolkien was referring to was the Adventus Saxonum, the coming of the Saxons, which tradition dated to AD 430, some 20 years after the last of the legions had left Britain for good. The conversations between these gentlemen were always peppered with such terms – Latin and Greek phrases, snippets of poetry from all ages, used not to impress, but as a kind of scholarly shorthand. A casual listener might be forgiven for wondering if they were often talking in code.
‘Cut to the chase, Tollers – Kennet means…?’ despite his seeming briskness Lewis was smiling. His shadow moved across the water, scattering the sticklebacks.
Tolkien nevertheless bristled at being cut short.
‘The first part is from Cuno the old British word for dog…’
‘The river Dog?’ Lewis roared with laughter. ‘What a strange name!’
‘That’s rich coming from you, Jacksie!’ said Barfield, referring to the fact that since childhood Lewis had insisted he be called after the name of his favourite dog rather than his given name, Clive.
Tolkien ignored their quips.
‘The second element stems from dagos,’ Tolkien continued, ‘linked to our word ‘day’, but it stems from an older word meaning bright; and so ‘bright-hound’ is my preferred translation. Cunodagos, Cunetio, Kennet – it’s the same name. Shining dog. Bright hound.’ He turned back to watch the waters plashing over his milk-white feet. It was an odd name. Something to do with the chalk, perhaps? But why hound?
Lewis, still amused, nevertheless tried to suppress his mirth for the sake of Tolkien who could be touchy about his subjects.
‘The river of the bright hound…That, I concede, makes some sense if we think in terms of this place as a funerary landscape; after all, the Greeks imagined the river Styx that separated the land of the living from that of the dead as guarded on its far bank by the three headed dog Cerberus… could he be the dog?’
Tolkien frowned, weighing up the possibility in his mind.
Barfield, looking across the valley, offered support for Lewis’s observation, ‘Actually, the idea of the river as a dividing line between the realm of the dead and of the living could work here - West Kennet Long Barrow… there,’ he said, pointing to a rise on the crest of the hill to their south ‘the burial place of the builders of Avebury, stands on that side of the river, and the stone circles lay on this. I’ve always thought of the circle as an expression of life…’
‘So, like the Roman, you think they buried their dead away from the settlements? A river is as good a barrier as any…’ Tolkien said.
‘So luckily any hellhound guarding this river would be on that side!’’ Lewis observed, looking aslant at opposite bank of the bubbling waters, where in a nearby copse the cuckoo was still calling. Nothing could seem more incongruous on this beautiful spring day than the idea that this vale of green, spotted with the yellows and blues of meadow flowers and the creamy masses of whitethorn bushes fat with blossom could in any way be associated with death. All seemed alive, burgeoning with vitality and renewed growth.
Tolkien lent over the edge of the stream, where pieces of chalk and river rolled flints could be seen poking above the muddy depths of the clear water. He lent forward and plunged his hand into the cool depths, taking a stone from the bottom – a smooth river-rolled chalk pebble, and began to recite a few lines of verse:
In the depths stood dazzling stones aheap
As a glitter through glass that glowed with light,
As streaming stars when on earth men sleep
Stare in the welkin in winter night’
‘That’s beautiful,’ said Barfield. ‘It’s from The Pearl is it not?’
Tolkien nodded. ‘We have no recourse to rush to the Greeks to find mention of the River of Death, when our own poets express it so eloquently.’ He said, holding the white pebble between his thumb and forefinger and examining it closely, before placing it in his waistcoat pocket.
Jack nodded, more serious now. ‘I was always touched by that scene – one of the most haunting in any medieval lyric, I would say; and I suppose that poem is more fitting, for it is the garden of Paradise that lies over the river, not some dark hell inhabited by bat-like souls that one finds across the Styx in the Classical traditions.’ He gazed out over the fields; his eyes narrowed against the sun. The poem, which told of the dream of a grieving father in which he spies his deceased daughter, the Pearl of the title, across the river of death, had been read aloud by Tolkien on one of their Thursday nights at Magdalen at the tail end of the previous year.
‘But the river was wide, I durst not swim’ Tolkien quoted, touching the chalk in his pocket.
‘…I durst not swim…’
Tolkien’s voice was tinged with melancholy, and Barfield wondered what his quiet friend was thinking as he gazed across the river to the ruinous tomb on the crest of the hill, what pallid ghost he was seeing in his mind’s eye in place of the lost daughter of the poem, whose words continued to flow from his lips, but now in a whisper.
Barfield turned and once more took the path that headed westwards between the river and the road; and soon Jack was beside him, striding forward.
‘Is Ronald okay?’ Owen asked. ‘He seems distant; preoccupied.’
‘Oh don’t mind Ronald; he’s had his head in his books for so long he’s just taking a while to remember how to relax.’ He looked back to where Tolkien stood looking across the river.
‘But there is always something of the melancholic in him;’ Lewis continued ‘I think he pines for something; if I could put it in a nutshell I’d say he was homesick – homesick for a place he’s never been; nor perhaps ever could have, save in his imagination.’
‘The imagination is a powerful thing.’ Barfield said.
‘It is.’ Jack said. ‘But ultimately it is fancy, not blood and stone; not real.’
Barfield shook his head. ‘What is real?’ he asked.
‘My grumbling stomach is real, Owen. Spare me your metaphysics until I at least have a cup of tea inside of me!’
Chapter Six: The Avenue
Opening the side door of the camper van, now re-parked a few minutes’ drive from the Sanctuary in a lay-by of the narrow road that ran alongside the Avenue, Conall took a enamel tin mug from its hook in the cupboard and piled a large spoonful of instant coffee into it, and then put his kettle on to boil.
While the kettle was heating he sat with his legs out of the side-door, enjoying the heat of the mid afternoon sun; then he stood and walked over to the wooden fence that divided the Avenue from the road. The stones of the Avenue stood pale and silent in the long grass that trembled slightly in the warm breeze; each stone stood taller and wider than a man – and were arranged in pairs, a few metres apart – as if a procession of giants, two by two, had, by some long-forgotten spell, been turned to stone while shuffling towards the circle that lay over the hill, out of sight. The Avenue snaked its way, in this fashion, to the southern entrance of the henge, a good quarter of an hour walk away from where Conall now stood, eyes closed, leaning against the fence, - the heat of the sun somehow melting the lead of his earlier sadness.
A steady rising whistle from the van alerted him to the fact the kettle was boiling, and so returned to the cool shade of the kitchenette and poured the steaming water into his cup. He blew on, and then took a sip of, the black liquid; coffee was perhaps too generous a description of this scorching, bitter, brew; a splash of cold water and a couple of sugars made it slightly more palatable.
He picked up an old and battered wide-brimmed straw hat from the seat and placed it on his head; then in a moment of inspiration took down the Collected Coleridge, removed the owl feather and stuck it into the rim of the hat. In memory of you both, he thought.
Setting the cup aside he rolled a cigarette, hung it from his lips and then, coffee in hand, pulled shut the camper door and walked over to the gate that lead into the avenue.
The grass in between the stones had been recently mowed, though the stones themselves stood in small islands of long grass where the mower had not been able to reach. Conall walked towards the centre of the Avenue – sipping his drink, and peering to where, some 500 yards distant, the stones disappeared over the brow of the slight hill. There, near the brow, a dog was sniffing about one of the stones, and he could hear the distant voice of its owner calling it back; it disappeared back over the hill, leaving Conall once more alone.
From this position at the centre of the Avenue it was plain to see that the stones had been arranged in some kind of order: those to his left were thin and pillar-like, while those to his right, bordering the road, were squatter, wider, almost diamond shaped. Male and female, others had reasoned; but archaeologists often lacked imagination, he thought, taking his lighter from his pocket and lighting his cigarette.
He idled over to the first of the ‘male’ stones and laid a palm on its side. These stones had, in the same way that old trees had, a kind of brooding physicality that gave them a sense of character; and this particular stone held special connotations for Conall – last spring when he had visited the Avebury circle for the first time, he had slept up against it, protected from the view of the road with its passing traffic by its width; a stone headrest against which he’d lain, gazing up at the night sky. Though he had a van to camp in, the desire to sleep here, under the stars, protected by this ancient sentinel, was stronger than the call of the sofa-bed.
‘Hello, old friend’ he muttered, breathing out a plume of smoke. ‘Do you remember me, stone?’ he whispered. Then removed his hat and he leant forward so that his forehead was pressed against the rough cool pillar, scabbed with lichen – beaming his thoughts into its heart. So much has changed, stone. But I’m back.
Just then voices in the distance alerted him to the approach of a group of walkers. Conall walked around the stone and sat down on the grass about its feet, on the sunlit southern facing side of the stone that hid him from the road and Avenue. The walkers came and went, and he settled back, the sun hot on his cheeks, and lighting up the inside of his closed eyelids with a blood-red glow until he pulled the rim of the hat down to shade them. He could hear the distant ratcheting churring of a magpie, the hoo-hoooo-hoo of the doves, and the bleating of the sheep in the next field. These sounds relaxed him, and the crackle of his cigarette as he inhaled helped this feeling along. Time seemed to slow, became irrelevant; a quarter of an hour or so he sat here, drinking in the sounds and smells of this Wessex paradise. His mind began to drift…
Which sense, he had often been asked, would you lose if you had to? Sat here, the smell of the warm mowed grass, cigarette smoke, and sheep shit seemed as vital to the world as vision – more so, perhaps. Perhaps he would choose to lose his sight. No books though, part of him countered – but what good were books anyway? Homer, after all, was blind, so they said. Had he always been blind? Did he never actually see rosy-fingered dawn or the wine-dark sea? Imagine never having seen the sea, or a tree, or a blade of grass? Imagine never having seen the face of a beautiful woman; if I was blind – what would beauty be to me? Where would beauty reside if the eye of the beholder were blind? I mustn’t fall asleep, he said to himself, shaking his head, aware his mind was beginning to wander – or I’ll wake up sunburned.
Rising, he moved away from the stone, but fleetingly touched its side as he did so. See you later; he whispered.
Having made sure his van was locked Conall set off along the Avenue, intent on reaching the circle and grabbing something to eat in the pub that stood at its centre. The heat of the day was increasing rather than abating, and he removed his shirt and tied it about his waist; the heat of the sun on his skin felt good. As he crested the hill he saw, in the distance, a small group of people in bright yellow visi-vests huddled about a small area of stripped soil at the foot of one of the male stones besides which a small tent had been erected; he passed them with a ‘hello’ - not stopping to ask what these archaeologists scraping at the sun-baked soil were trying to uncover; he didn’t envy them lying out in this heat, with their white hard-hats on. A few minutes later, having crested another rise, he stopped to take in the vista that now spread before him – a sight that never usually failed to stir him, though today its effect was bittersweet: the great circle of stones of Avebury; so vast one could not take it in from any single viewpoint – set within a staggeringly impressive circular bank and ditch, once some 40 feet deep. From his present viewpoint he could see only the southern half of the circle – the southern entrance lay before him, through which now passed the road to Swindon, cutting through its mighty banks. To the right these same banks were crowned with great trees, but the section on the left was clear, giving one an unimpeded view of the massive sweep of stones around which visitors were treading, many picnicking in their shade, and the line of buildings beyond which were part of the village of Avebury. There, where the Swindon road met the village high street at a staggered cross-road, was the Red Lion, a large two-storey building under a heavy thatched roof, its forecourt that bordered the road spread with wooden tables, crammed full with people enjoying a drink in the sun. Conall suddenly felt very thirsty.
Leaving the avenue Conall entered the circle itself, passing between the huge stones that once marked the southern entrance; roughly angled, these stones dwarfed him as he stepped through them; but he did not stop to admire them, nor the smaller circle of stones, again, one of a pair, that he walked through. He would have time to admire the stones later, he reasoned.
The pub forecourt was busy and loud with laughter; an eclectic mix of new-age types with long hair and loose clothes, bikers in their leathers and families here for a day out crowded the tables. There, in one corner, sat a group of young people in visi-vests; more archaeologists, Conall assumed, probably university students on their summer dig; while on a table nearest the car-park a folk-group in white shirts decorated with coloured ribbons were taking musical instruments from out of their black cases. From all around the smell of fried food and cigarette smoke reached his nose. He hadn’t expected it to be so busy, but he supposed last year he had been here in April, after the Easter holidays had finished, and although the place had not been quiet, it wasn’t anything like as crowded as today.
No, he thought, turning away from the pub, I have something to do first.
He walked westwards past the pub and along a narrow road, past a small group of shops selling souvenirs, and a row of Bed & Breakfasts, until he had left the banks of the circle, and the street grew quieter; the street narrowed to a row of small brick cottages on the left, and on the right was the wall of the churchyard.
A cottage stood opposite the lych gate, a window box below the window thick with Nicotiana, its pendulous white flowers still closed; its doorway, newly painted, bore the name Church Cottage, and the small porch had been fixed-up by the new occupants; but the old occupant lay a few feet away across the road, as his granddaughter’s letter had informed him; the memorial plaque was simple:
In loving memory Alfred John Mac Govan-Crow 1935–2011
Con found it easily thanks to a posy of nicotiana placed on the grave; someone, then, in the village, still cared.
He knelt beside the plaque and removed the pouch of tobacco from his pocket. He took a pinch and crumbled it on the soft grass:
Itsipaiitapio’pah – he said.
Bless you, Old Man, he mumbled. May the Great Spirit protect you... and those you love.
The inside of the Red Lion was cool and dark after the glaring heat outside, and Conall suddenly remembered he was shirtless; putting the shirt back on and removing his hat he waited for a gap to appear at the bar; after a couple of minutes the pretty barmaid smiled at him and he asked for a pint of Green King bitter, and while he waited for it to be poured he grabbed a menu and hungrily poured over the choices. There was no chance of nabbing a table outside, he reasoned, but a small table stood free in the corner opposite the bar, so Conall told the barmaid he’d be sitting there. She gave him a table number scrawled in marker pen on a wooden spoon and he sat down with his pint.
A shaft of sunlight bisected the table like a wall of fire; and for a while Conall sat entranced at the dance of the particles of dust illuminated by it, while outside the folk-group were playing accompanied by claps from the crowd. Then he raised his pint, delighting in that first cool mouthful, the bitter tang of hops, and felt himself begin to relax. And now what? He thought.
What happened was not what he had expected.
Chapter Seven: Orient and Immortal Wheat
The tea-rooms Barfield had mentioned were in a wooden bungalow with a veranda, one of a number of small wooden buildings beside an unsightly petrol station on the north side of the road, just past Silbury hill. Despite their inauspicious appearance the bungalow, at least, was welcoming, and it wasn’t too long before the three friends found themselves ensconced in a sunny spot looking over the road and the green fields of newly sprouted wheat opposite, and enjoying a pot of tea.
A couple of farm labourers and another small group of walkers were the only other clientele on the veranda, though there were other workmen seated in the shaded part of the building, laughing and playing cards.
Barfield sipped his tea and looked longingly out over the forecourt.
‘I used to stop here for tea on my trips down to Cornwall when still a student.’ He said. ‘Those were lovely times; if only I’d appreciated how lovely at the time; I’m sure I did, but I think it takes a period of hard work and drudgery to give these things perspective.’ His face had dropped at the mention of drudgery.
‘What took you to Cornwall?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Folk dancing…’ Barfield smiled again, seeming to drift off in to some lovely memory, ‘and unrequited love…’
‘Ah,’ Lewis said, with a wink; ‘the one love I didn’t dare mention in ‘The Four Loves’’
‘Blissful torture, at the time, I can assure you. But I learned a great lesson from it, probably one of the greatest of my life!’ Barfield said, stirring his tea.
‘Being?’ asked Tolkien.
‘Well. When you have been in love, and given so much of yourself, and that love hasn’t been returned you have two choices: you can pine after the girl forever, or you do something rather more pragmatic, like sublimate those feelings into something else… you see, looking back on it I can see that my love for the girl was, I suppose, a love of life, really – or at least the possibilities life had still to offer me. I was stricken for a good while – very low – not really able to move on – it was a great blow at the time - until I had this moment of realisation that I could fall in love again; and I did; with nature, with life – with the world!’
‘With Maud?’
‘Yes…’ Owen said, haltingly, at the mention of his wife’s name. He seemed to shift uncomfortably in his seat for a second, before he resumed:
‘I do wonder whether anyone who’s never been in love can really fully appreciate the ecstasy that comes from it. I’m talking of that sense of sheer awe one feels in the presence of the beloved. Love, I suppose, romantic love, is a force of nature that just sweeps all else away. It is a primordial, magical, experience!’
‘But ultimately illusory.’ Lewis said, dunking a biscuit into his cup.
‘Why so?’ Barfield countered.
‘Because it is transient; I believe it almost a trick of nature to capture a man and fool him into marriage.’
‘So says an unmarried man’ observed Tolkien, wryly.
Barfield arched an eyebrow. ‘Does Nature perform tricks, Jack? Your attitude is typical of modern man’s distrust of Dame Natura which sees himself not only as separate from Her, but above Her, believing that She is some evil temptress!’
He took a hasty sip of tea and continued.
‘To reduce Romantic love to a biological ‘trick’ is to demean one of the most liberating of emotions. Look at the art that love has produced: would we have ‘The Divine Comedy’ if Dante had never seen Beatrice? Are you dismissing The Inferno because it was founded on love?’
Lewis was frowning. ‘Founded on love it may have been,’ he said, swallowing his mouthful of biscuit, ‘but not Romantic love. Romantic love, my dear Owen, cannot be separated from sex, and sexual desire is transitory...Beatrice Portinari was 9 years old when Dante first saw her, if you think this was based on romantic, which is sexual, love then we are on dangerous ground… ’
A couple on a nearby table seemed to shift uncomfortably at Lewis’s words.
‘…Dante’s work was not based on lust;’ Lewis continued ‘Beatrice for him was a spiritual ideal rather than a flesh and blood woman.’
‘Absolute poppycock, Jack!’ Barfield snorted, ‘For one, Dante himself was the same age as her when they met – so let’s not sully his love with any hints of paedophilia - and for another, Beatrice was precisely who she was and no other, not a symbol, nor an allegory for some ‘higher’ or ‘purer’ state of caritas: she was simply a beautiful green-eyed Florentine girl who turned the head of an intelligent and sensitive young man, and thereby opened his eyes to the beauty of the world!’
‘Are you talking about Beatrice or your green-eyed Cornish girl?’ Jack said, playfully, seemingly amused by Barfield’s fervour that had brought a flush to the taller man’s smooth cheeks.
‘Both! What is this delight of being in love but an experience of joy, of connection with the world? And what is poetry but the communication of such rapture?! One cannot read Dante, or any other great poet, without feeling it!’ Barfield’s eyes flashed with passion, seeming to drink in the landscape which no doubt was fuelling his ideas with nostalgic memories.
He paused to take another sip of tea, expecting a rebuff from Lewis that never came. The latter merely shook his head slowly, at a loss to even attempt to argue against what he thought as erroneous, and took another biscuit from the plate.
Just then a rumbling outside the veranda announced the arrival of a vehicle; the workmen in the shadows of the café looked and murmured to each-other as a strange machine, seeming half car and half tank, with caterpillar tracks for back wheels pulled up at the garage forecourt a little past the tea-house.
One of the workmen on the nearby table muttered to his colleague; and his companion guffawed at what must have been a private joke. A small, handsome man in a long and well-tailored pale overcoat and cap could be seen chatting animatedly to the petrol attendant.
Tolkien pushed his empty cup away from him and leaned across the table,
‘I like your view, Owen, that the poet is one who sees the rapture of existence and seeks to tell of it to his blinkered fellow man.’
Barfield smiled appreciatively at Tolkien’s attempts to steer the conversation back on line.
Tolkien carried on: ‘…that poetry is like some magical potion that allows you to see things differently, to see things shining with qualities otherwise hidden from us…’
‘It’s as I’ve said before,’ Barfield replied, ‘the poet sees the world as others do not, and he seeks to communicate his experience in the only way now available to him: poetic metaphor.’
‘Why won’t prose suffice?’ Lewis asked, his eyes flitting from the strange vehicle momentarily back to Barfield.
‘You’re being deliberately obstinate now, Jack – we’ve talked about this. many times before! Prose is the language of the modern everyday world, a world at odds with the poetic vision. The use of poetic metaphor restores man to his original state of participation in nature. Think of Traherne’s beautiful phrase ‘orient and immortal wheat’…’
He waved his hand in the direction of the sun-drenched sloping hills on the opposite side of the road, green with freshly sprung blades of new-born wheat still not yet much more than a foot in height.
‘When I think of those lines I see things differently; it’s as if I’m no longer looking at a field of corn, a few weeks old; what was pleasant greenery newly sprung from the soil becomes something terrible and sublime: for those shoots grow from a buried seed, and those seeds in turn were the ears upon last year’s shoots… where does one begin and the other end? The answer is that surely, they are somehow one. And if last year’s corn sprouted from the ears of the previous years, and so on, ad infinitum, we are left with the startling truth that yon green field thither is not covered in fresh new life, but a life thousands upon thousands of years old, which each year takes on a new skin, as it were, and at the end of each year casts it off so that what the farmers fill their barns with at harvest is but the sloughed skin, really, of an organism far, far older than mankind himself. Those plants, there, are in reality the same plants that were brought here from the Near East by the first farmers thousands of years ago, whose form has remained constant, though the substance through which that form is expressed has changed: Orient and immortal indeed.’
Tolkien stared at the verdant hillside, baulking at Barfield’s musings – and for a moment he saw, literally saw, a difference – what was a rolling peaceful green valley was suddenly transformed so that its sides were no longer inert, seeming dead compared to the skylarks that flew over them, but alive in a way he had never before perceived – the leaves of the wheat became upward-thrusting scales of a giant plumed serpent which covered the entire valley, scales that would be sloughed off at harvest, only to grow anew… a serpent that had wended its way to this valley some 6,000 years ago having travelled thousands of miles from its birthplace in the river valleys of the Near East… ancient, orient, immortal… dying each winter, buried in the black earth then rising again in the spring…
Barfield lit his pipe and continued. ‘That is what Traherne’s poetic phrase suggests to me, and carries far more meaning than the single word ‘corn’ or ‘wheat’ could ever do – for in it we start to get a glimpse of what early man must have seen when he was still close to Nature, not alienated from Her as he is today.’
‘A sense of the true nature of things?’ Tolkien suggested.
‘A sense of the divinity of things!’ Barfield replied, ‘for ancient man the corn was the body of a god – not in a quaint symbolic way such as our folk image of ‘John Barleycorn’ but as something real and experienced; to the Egyptians the crops were the green-skinned Osiris, torn apart, buried and resurrected each year – later echoed in Jesus as the Bread of Life, dying and rising again…’
Lewis coughed. ‘No, Owen; those earlier vegetation gods were a pre-figuration of Christ; Christ’s life was the metaphor made fact, the earlier vegetation gods were the echo…’
Owen waved his hand dismissing his friend’s interruption. ‘We’re getting away from my point – what I’m saying is that to ancient man corn was an expression of a divinity immanent in all things, man included; if you think about it, the very idea of a vegetation god presents a view of reality worlds apart from our own: this wasn’t a world where the Creator was separate from his creation, and mankind created as a lord above all other animals – no – this was a world in which nature itself was the body of the god, and man, kin to all other creatures, was part of this divinity too. If we saw all as Holy we would be less prone to trivialise, exploit and destroy our world…’
He stopped for a moment while a waitress came and leaned over and refilled their tea-pot with boiling water, avoiding all eye contact with these strange university types, friends, perhaps, of the ‘Marmalade Man’, she thought, her eyes flitting to the dapper gentlemen at the petrol pump. She coloured, feeling suddenly awkward. Maybe these were some of those friends? The ones the Red Indian gardener had told her about, with their strange rituals and the women they shipped in for the night and packed off to London by taxi the next day…
‘Imagine a world where each and every word you uttered expressed the divinity inherent in all things…’ Barfield continued, adding a mouthed a thank you to the waitress, who smiled back awkwardly and left the table; ‘how different would we look at that field if we called wheat ‘Osiris’ or ‘Persephone’ and saw, really saw, it as divine? Well this is exactly what the ancients saw; we dwell in a world where one says ‘the wheat is like Osiris’, but they would have said the equivalent of ‘the wheat is Osiris’: their language would seem to us as pure poetry; their experience of the world poetic, mystic. But it was not meant as a deceit. It expressed a truth.’
Tolkien nodded in agreement and poured each of the men more tea. How wonderful it was to hear this man talk. He was eloquent and intelligent – such a waste that he should have become a lawyer and not an academic! He has the best mind of all of us, Tolkien thought. Lewis’s attention, however, seemed to be on the man at the petrol pumps.
Barfield continued: ‘We no longer see that way because we have fallen from that original Edenic state – Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and becoming aware of their nakedness is a metaphor for mankind losing that state of participation with nature and realising his difference from the animals; his expulsion from Eden is brought about by the development of his sense of self-consciousness - which alienates us from nature – to use the image of the dismembered corn-god, our modern mind is like the evil brother Seth who divides and separates the divine world into disconnected objects, tearing it limb from limb: a world once experienced as divine is divided up, categorised, its former connectivity broken, the divinity killed; but the poet is one who can, like the goddess Isis, re-assemble the pieces of this dismembered god and bring him back to life: to literally re-member the god, the original state of pre-fall unity, where every object sang out with its participation in the divine; so that man is once more at one with the birds, beasts, fish and trees…’ Barfield’s voice had risen to a crescendo of excitement, his hands emphasising every word. ‘…for mankind still abides in Eden – indeed he never left it – for Eden is around us, but we do not see it!’ he brought his palm down hard on the table-top to emphasise each of the last six syllables, rattling the tea-set and causing the people on the nearby table to look round again, nervously.
Tolkien stared into Barfield’s ecstatic face – I’m sure you see it, Owen, he thought – as the latter gazed open eyed with rapture at the dance of the windblown corn. He had never seen Owen so animated, so energised; stirred up, no doubt by memories of youth and love. Tolkien cleared his throat, a little wary of breaking the spell his friend had fallen under.
‘You know, Owen, that one of my poetic creations, Tom Bombadil, whose adventures I recall reading to you all at an Inklings a few years back now, I’d imagine – well, I didn’t say it at the time but Bombadil, who is really the spirit of our fast disappearing Oxford and Berkshire countryside, a kind of genius loci, was in no small measure influenced by your theories. He speaks in verse, for he exists before the fall of language, before speech became prose; he is the Eldest; he speaks to the badgers and the trees and the barrow-wights; I imagine Bombadil to possess what today man can only glimpse in myth and poetry; he can talk to the birds, like Siegfried who gains that ability by drinking the blood of the dragon Fafnir...’
Barfield nodded. ‘When I try to picture that original state of unity, I always imagine Orpheus with his magical lyre that could tame the wild beasts and make the trees and even the stones dance about him in a circle.’ Barfield suggested. ‘Orpheus, like Osiris, is torn to pieces, yet his head goes on singing – you see, despite being rent apart the voice of the god can still be heard, singing of the unity of all things, remembering Eden before the Fall, if men but listen…. Poets hear it…. lovers hear it…’
‘This mystic state of unity, you know - it all sounds rather like being drunk.’ Lewis commented with a wink; suddenly back in the conversation now the vehicle and its dapper driver had pulled away.
Tolkien smiled.
‘You have a point, Jack: think of all those Norse legends that tell of drinking the mead or ale of poetry; for in intoxication man achieves something akin to that sense of belonging, does he not, and forgets his alienation? Behind every alcoholic, I suspect, lays a poet!’
‘Well, the reverse is certainly the case!’ said Lewis.
‘Yourself included?’ asked Barfield.
Lewis didn’t seem amused by Barfield’s quip, instead his eyes seemed to pale a little.
‘Sadly I think I gave up the urge to become a poet long ago. I now seek solace in my cups.’ He smiled weakly. ‘The blood of John Barleycorn gives me courage bold, not inspiration.’
Tolkien understood, now, why Lewis had seemed so uninterested in what Barfield had been saying; it was like rubbing salt into a wound – here was Lewis who in his youth had wished to be a poet above all things, but who had not received the recognition he had really deserved, and who was now reduced to writing prose – while Barfield was extolling the virtues of the poetic vision; Lewis must have felt somehow unworthy.
‘In which case,’ Lewis was continuing, ‘let us hope the beer at the Red Lion isn’t varnish!’
‘Hear, hear!’ Barfield laughed, ‘Though if it’s too good the long road to Calne will begin to lose its appeal…’
‘Well,’ Lewis said, ‘if the stones of Avebury circle begin to dance about us like they’ve been enchanted by Orpheus’s lyre we’ll know it’s time to down our cups and move on…’
Tolkien was nodding. ‘It’s funny; I had this image in my head then, when Owen was speaking: I had initially thought it was the dismembered body of Orpheus on the banks of the river Hebrus and his severed head floating down the river - but instead of some Mediterranean stream all I could see was the Kennet and instead of Orpheus’s head bobbing amongst the sticklebacks it was the image of a woman – her hair spread out like Ophelia. It was so persistent that I’m sure my mind was trying to tell me something: I’m sure it has something to do with this landscape, though quite what I don’t yet know…’
‘Well let us pray the mead of poetry inspires an answer, Tollers!’ Lewis beamed, used to Tolkien’s ‘flights of fancy’. ‘For myself that tea has restored my vigour; I’m a little too full for climbing the hill, now, if I’m honest – but a constitutional to Orpheus’s dancing stones itself seems a fair prospect.’
Chapter Eight: Shenandoah
With a second pint in hand Conall strode blinking out of the pub to the tables arranged on the flagstones fronting the road. The main lunchtime rush was over and there was now the odd spare seat here and there, though no totally empty tables. He raised his glass and took a large sip of beer, contemplating whether to squeeze in amongst the hippies gathered around the folk band, the archaeologists or the bikers, or whether to just cross the road and go and sit amongst the stones. Still a little sunblind and squinting he moved aside to let someone past him into the pub. But they stopped.
‘Conall?!’
He turned, confused at the mention of his name. A woman stood beaming up at him, dressed in a simple faded red t-shirt under a suede jacket, pale blue jeans and black boots, a bag slung over one shoulder - but it was only when she removed her sunglasses and hugged him and he found himself with his nose and mouth pressed against the top of her head, breathing the scent of her sun-warmed long dark hair, that it fully sunk in who this was.
‘What the hell are you doing here?!’ she said, grinning as she pulled away, her brows creased in a deep frown.
Conall stood speechless, his mind screaming with a car-crash of conflicting thoughts and emotions.
‘Shen?!’ he said aware of the colour draining from his face.
‘Why are you here? Are you down here for long? You’re not leaving yet?’ Shenandoah asked, all at once.
Con shook his head. No words seemed to want to come.
‘No. Good. Look - I’m just going to drop something off in here,’ she said, motioning towards the door of the pub with her head, ‘but – you got time – I mean can I join you for a drink? Quick, grab us those seats then we’ll talk!’ she said, and then was gone, but not before looking back and smiling again, shaking her head.
Some of the archaeologists had just got up, leaving a table free, to which Conall walked, seating himself facing the sun. It was only when he picked up his pint that he realised his hand was shaking. The chances that he should meet her again, here, and now, seemed to him so astronomically slim he could only lift his eyes skywards, questioning whatever power might have arranged such a bitter-sweet coincidence. When he had met her here last year she had only been here for a matter of days, to visit her granddad - for she had long since moved away from Wiltshire; but Her Granddad had died shortly after, and anyway, since then all contact between Conall and her had ceased... She had no reason to be here, he thought; and yet here she was. Why? Why did he have to see her now? Could I, he asked himself, just slip away? All this was going through Conall’s mind, but behind it all was a more constant and more appealing image from their past: of her dark eyes looking up at him and closing as he leaned in to kiss her; and then a wave of sadness and guilt swept through him, and an image appeared in his mind’s eye - a line of Coleridge’s poetry savagely underlined in red biro:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw…
And beside those words others in a shaky, wild hand:
I go to the river to die…
Behind him, following a burst of applause, the folk band had begun another song, and a strong female voice had started to sing.
There was three kings into the east,
Three kings both great and high,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn should die.
They took a plough and plough'd him down,
Put clods upon his head,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn was dead.
Just then the woman’s voice was joined by that of a man coming from the opposite side of the forecourt, deep, with a strong northern accent. Con turned – the man was shaven headed with a goatee beard, his wiry arms blue with tattoos – each forearm emblazoned with a spiralling serpent, the heads of which flicked their forked tongues across the back of his hands.
They've let him lie for a very long time,
'til the rains from heaven did fall
And little Sir John sprung up his head
and so amazed them all
The man had risen and was making his way from his seat near the door of the pub, past the folk singers, towards the road.
They've let him stand 'til Midsummer's Day
'til he looked both pale and wan
And little Sir John's grown a long, long beard
and so become a man.
He bowed to the group, grinning broadly and as he passed Con he winked at him mischievously before heading off across the road to the circle, his pint glass in his hand. Behind him the woman’s voice continued, and Con turned back and drank some more beer.
They've ta’en a weapon, long and sharp,
And cut him by the knee;
Then tied him fast upon a cart,
Like a rogue for forgerie.
‘Wake up, John-a-dreams!’
Conall looked up and met Shen’s dark-brown eyes, looking out from the curtain of her dark straight hair. She was holding a large glass of what looked to be coke, and a pint for him.
‘How come you’re here?’ Conall asked, dry mouthed. Shen bit her lip. Her eyes glistened and she forced a smile. ‘I’ve been here sorting Granddad’s things out since March; he left me the house in his will. I couldn’t sell it; just couldn’t. Oh, and there’s something he left for you, too. I meant to…’
‘No matter…. I was sorry to hear about your Granddad. I’ve just left some tobacco on his grave.’ Conall said, matter-of-factly. ‘… I don’t know if it’s a Blackfoot tradition or not, but it seemed kind of appropriate.’
‘That’s kind of you.’ She said.
‘I saw the flowers there, too – I didn’t for a second think they would have been from you… So you’re living here now?’
‘Partly; it’s taking a while to get the business off the ground here and I still have the house on Scilly, but I’m renting that out over the summer as a holiday cottage; I’m probably going to sell it. I was never comfortable there; the sea can be so oppressive…Anyway… what about you?! What are you up to?’. Her smile seemed genuine, if a little strained. ‘How are you doing?’
Conall looked down, frowning, thinking of what to say, the words of the song distracting him.
They laid him down upon his back,
And cudgell'd him full sore;
They hung him up before the storm,
And turn'd him o'er and o'er.
They filled up a darksome pit
With water to the brim,
They heav'd in John Barleycorn-
There, let him sink or swim!
Con shivered at the image of a pale body floating in dark water that had risen in his mind’s eye.
‘Con? Hello!? Earth to Con…’
He half-smiled and shrugged. ‘Well I’m writing the odd article,’ he said, speaking louder than usual to be heard over the singing, ‘giving the odd lecture here and there...’ he took another sip to buy himself time while he struggled to rein in his emotions.
‘You know what I meant.’
Conall stared at his pint.
‘Yeah, I’m okay. I’m doing better.’ He smiled, gently, unconvincingly.
‘I thought about you.’ She suddenly said. Conall raised his eyes to hers in genuine surprise.
‘Likewise’ was all he could muster; he looked into her eyes, but she didn’t hold his gaze for long, lowering her eyes and picking up her drink.
‘I don’t really know what to say.’ Shen said, ‘I would have written again… but you said not to…’
She looked across at him again, fleetingly, with a slight hint of awkwardness.
He felt like he should say something to explain, but the words weren’t there. ‘Look, I'm sorry. I was in a bit of a shit place...’
'It's okay, Con. I know. God, you don’t need to apologise.'
‘But thanks for letting me know about Alfred…’ he mumbled.
She had been looking down at her small hands, fiddling with a jade and silver ring, but now she looked up.
‘It’s all so shit, isn’t it? And I knew Granddad was ill… I had time to prepare… but you…’
Conall shrugged again and smiled weakly, not wanting her to go on.
It was strange for them both to be sitting here in silence, after all the laughter and incessant talking they had enjoyed the last time they had met. It seemed so long ago. When they had parted it had all been good between them; but to meet again now, like this, perhaps it might have been better had he not seen her. Con sipped his pint in silence, and turned his head to watch the folk band finish their song.
They wasted, o'er a scorching flame,
The marrow of his bones;
But a miller us'd him worst of all,
For he crush'd him between two stones.
And they hae taen his very heart's blood,
And drank it round and round;
And still the more and more they drank,
Their joy did more abound.
John Barleycorn was a hero bold,
Of noble enterprise;
For if you do but taste his blood,
'Twill make your courage rise.
'Twill make a man forget his woe;
'Twill heighten all his joy;
'Twill make the widow's heart to sing,
Tho' the tear were in her eye.
The crowds applauded and Con and Shen joined them, politely. When Con looked back at Shen, she was regarding him anxiously, feeling the same tension as him.
‘Well, this is awkward.’ She said. ‘God, Con, let’s not be off with each other, it’s not like we see each other every day…’. He nodded, smiling at her directness.
‘So did you ever work it out, your lost star myth – the dragon thing?’ she asked, seeming to relax a little.
He smiled. ‘I think so. It’s kind of changed a bit, not massively but a bit. It’s why I’m here,’ he half-lied, ‘the sky’s supposed to be clear for the next few days. You just can’t see any sky in London.’
‘It was always a bit beyond me, you know, your theorising.’ She shrugged. ‘But I loved the stories. Granddad did too. I loved it that night when you showed me which stars were which, and the tales behind them all.’
It had been on that night that he had first told her that he could really fall for her. Had that really happened? He felt himself redden. Was she remembering that too? But it had also been that night that the other thing had happened; not that Shen knew. Neither did he at the time; he had to wait a few more days for that news, and then everything had changed.
…They filled up a darksome pit
With water to the brim…
He cast the unwanted image from his mind, clenching his hand into a fist. ‘It’s the stories that are the key Shenandoah… they hold all that information, I’m sure of it. But it’s like a code that needs cracking… it was an intuition, that’s all – but I never had time to follow it up. Not until recently. And now, well… it makes sense, but I just don’t know if I’m right or if I’m seeing things…’
‘And you’re still at the uni?’ she asked.
‘Not anymore; I quit.’.
‘Quit? Why?’
He shrugged. ‘Long story.’ He sipped his drink.
‘How long’s long?’ she smiled.
‘Too long for now; I don’t want to bore you.’
‘Well, you’d better quit now then; it is probably very boring.’ She joked.
In the more companionable silence that followed he relaxed and was able to take her in; sitting with her back to the sun, her broad-high cheek-boned face in shadow, it was clear that she owed her looks to a more exotic ancestry than her hyphened part-Irish surname, Mac Govan-Crow, suggested. Con recalled a scene from their previous meeting, when, sitting upon West Kennet Long-Barrow, he had stuck the owl feather she had given him in her hair and told her she now looked like her great-great grandmother whose photo she had showed him on her granddad’s dresser… the same feather he had stuck in his hat not an hour before…
‘That’s my granddad’s dad, George, as a baby, and his parents, Kills Crow and Medicine Smoke Woman.’ she had said, pointing at the sepia image.
‘You look like her.’ He had said, his eyes on her rather than the photo. A silence had passed between them then. The truth was that she looked almost more native than her grandfather had done; her long straight dark hair especially, and her cheekbones that seemed to push her eyes into heavily lidded crescents; their colour somewhere between chocolate and black, depending on the light.
‘I guess Shenandoah is a Native name?’ he had said then.
She had smiled, ‘Well, it is, it’s a native river name - but that’s not why I’m called it – it’s after the song, my granddad sang it to me just after I was born, he liked the Jimmy Stewart film, and it stuck – thank God – I think my parents had been toying with Derdriu.’
‘Derdriu?’ he’d laughed.
‘Don’t laugh – it’s a family name, and it’s still my middle name.’
‘Ok, Deirdre.’
‘Shenandoah Derdriu Mac Govan-Crow… fuck me, that’s a mouthful!’ he had laughed.
A year and a world later Con took his tobacco from his pocket and rolled a cigarette, offering Shen one. She looked about her guiltily, with a voiced indrawn breath. ‘Oh god! Don’t!’
‘You given up?’
‘Kind of. My boyfriend doesn’t really like me smoking.’
Conall felt the smile freeze on his face. Boyfriend; of course: someone like Shen would never stay single for long, he reasoned. He felt a strange sense of deflation, but then she smiled at him and he felt somehow better; relieved even. Too much had changed.
‘Go on, have one. Blame the smell on me.’ Conall said with a wink, pushing the tobacco her way.
She hesitated, stared at the proffered tobacco, looked up at Con and then relented.
‘Who’s the lucky man?’ Conall asked, handing her the papers and rolling himself another.
‘He’s from Swindon…’
‘Oh I’m sorry…’ Con joked.
Shen narrowed her eyes and continued ‘– he’s called Hayden; been seeing him since last summer. He’s a fireman,’ she said, as he lit her cigarette.
‘Has that got anything to do with the no smoking? If he catches you will he turn the hose on you out of habit?’ Conall asked. She shook her head, smiling. ‘Uh huh, he’s a bit of a health nut. You need to be fit in that line of work…. God that’s good’ she said, exhaling and looking down at the cigarette. ‘I’ve got half an hour before I’m meeting him – time for some of the smell to fade, I hope. I can always get some gum.’
Conall eyed his two thirds full second pint and full third pint and wondered if he could down both in less than half an hour. But at least if he, what was his name? Hayden, turned up they wouldn’t have to talk about what had happened since he’d last seen Shen. Again, the image of that manic handwriting beside the printed poem rose to consciousness: I go to the river to die… as if to punish him for this moment of levity.
‘You’ll have to see what I’ve done to the cottage. How long are you down for, again?’
‘A few days, not sure really.’
‘Well, unfortunately with the protest I’ve let my spare rooms out for the next few days, otherwise I’d have put you up.’
‘What protest?’ Conall asked.
‘Over the bones in the museum.’
He shook his head.
‘They’re bringing some new bones here that had been stored away in Devizes museum, and putting them in this swanky new display here; the museum’s been shut for a month or so while they’ve been renovating it; the Chairman of English Heritage is going to be here on Wednesday to visit the excavations and to open the new exhibit; there’s going to be a group of protesters there to meet him, pagans, who don’t think he should be on display. The head of them, Wolf, is lodging at Granddad’s. Granddad’s has kind of become unofficial protest HQ… if you’re around tonight we’ll be here in the pub – at half eight… you’ll be most welcome. Oh, and…’ she said, fumbling about in her bag; She took a card from out of her purse and handed it to him. Shenandoah Mac Govan Crow - Tarot card readings – individuals and parties catered for; followed by a mobile number and an email address.
‘Spread the word. Business is picking up – I mean, there’s loads of stuff like this down in Glastonbury, but not here.’
‘So will you read my cards?’ he asked. ‘You promised to last time but didn’t.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah, course I will! I read Wolf’s last night; it was fun.’
He felt a twinge of jealousy over this Wolf character…
‘And did the cards say they would win the protest?’
Shen shrugged. ‘Yes and no, strangely; they wouldn’t win but would get what they wanted.’
‘Hmm. Helpfully vague.’ Con grinned.
A beeping noise sounded from her handbag and she dug around until she had found her phone. Mouthing sorry she pressed to answer the call.
‘Hello? Hi! No, I’m at the pub…just dropped in some more cards…’ It’s Hayden, she mouthed at Conall. ‘Why don’t you come up?... No? Ok. Suit yourself…’ she raised her eyes skywards as if to say ‘whatever’ ‘…I’ll be down soon.’ She put the phone back in her bag.
‘He’s already let himself in.’ she explained, ‘I’d better head off in a minute. He’s been on nights… grumpy as hell!’ She said. Suddenly her face dropped. ‘Shit! Do you have any chewing gum or anything?’ she asked, suddenly dropping the unfinished cigarette into the ashtray.
‘Nope’ said Conall, ‘sorry’.
‘Bugger. Oh well, he’ll probably be too grumpy to kiss me for a while anyway.’ She said, rising to her feet.
‘One for the road?’ Conall joked, offering her the packet of cigarette papers. She stuck out her tongue sarcastically.
She breathed into her hand and sniffed. ‘Oh, that’s not too bad.’ She said. Then she looked down at Conall and smiled, putting out her hand as if she were about to ruffle his hair, and touching him on the cheek instead.
‘I still can’t believe you’re here! I’m glad Con. I’m glad I got to see you again.’
‘Didn’t the cards tell you I would be here again?’ he asked, to which she half smiled half snorted; ‘not the cards, no’ she said enigmatically.
‘You’ll be here tonight then? The meeting?’ she asked.
‘Half eight!’ he said, nodding, and then she was gone.
After a few seconds there was only her mostly empty glass and her half-smoked cigarette smouldering in the ashtray to evidence she had been there at all. He lifted her glass and downed the coke, surprised at the taste of brandy in it, then finished her cigarette, but not before silently lifting it heavenwards, offering the first smoke to Itsipaiitapio’pah, the Great Spirit, as her grandfather had taught him.
‘Fuck,’ was all he could think to say. ‘Fuck!’
Chapter Nine: The Marmalade Man
Avebury village was small and picturesque in parts; its short high-street, half of which lay within the circle, was pretty enough, with stone cottages lining one side opposite the church; as one entered the earth embankments one passed the village shop, and here grander houses appeared on the other side of the road, behind which, secluded in trees, lay the Manor House – but as one reached the centre of the circle, passing the cross-roads on which stood the Red Lion, then followed the road east past more houses on each side of the narrow road, the village soon petered out in a few huddles of small cottages, a mess of wooden shacks, allotments, pig sties, chicken pens and overgrown copses of trees. Choked with refuse and abandoned farm machinery.
The small car park and forecourt of the pub was filled with an assortment of vehicles; the strange half-tank half-car that had stopped at the garage earlier, and a number of large trucks bearing the insignia ‘E H Bradley; building works, Swindon’ on their sides. Around these vehicles, strewn on the cobbles of the forecourt and sat upon muddy tyre tracks, were several crates and sacks, spades, ropes.
‘Hmm. Hardly the English idyll I remember’ grumbled Lewis.
‘I’m sure it’s fine inside, Jack,’ Owen said, ‘This will all be something to do with the excavations.’ He explained, waving his hand at the mess before them. Nevertheless, he felt a strong urge to draw their attention elsewhere to lighten his friend’s mood. ‘It’s not quite lunchtime, so let’s walk some of the circle.’ He suggested.
The men had approached Avebury from the west, the direction of Beckhampton and had entered the circle along the high street – so now Barfield led them back a few hundred yards and turned south off the street through a wooden gate to where the banks and ditch of the great circle could be seen, curving far out of sight.
The remains of the circle itself still impressed: it would have taken one at least half an hour to have walked the circumference of the ditch with its towering external bank that marked the bounds of the monument. Even though in places it was choked with trees and scrubby bushes the great earthwork remained imposing, despite having been weathered by over four thousand years of Wiltshire winters.
The three friends strolled along the south-western quarter of the circle, which was divided into four segments by the roads that entered the village from each of the cardinal points, near enough, roads that respected the original entrances of the circle. The grass in the south-western quarter was being kept low by the numerous sheep that roamed here. Along this entire stretch there lay just one standing stone, though mounds along the inner edge of the ditch suggested where more lay beneath the surface, as if sleeping under grassy blankets.
The single remaining stone was larger than any of the men there present, gnarled, unworked and slightly twisted like the trunk of a storm blasted tree; and each took time to touch its rough, lichen-covered skin, warm to the touch at first, but soon yielding to a deep coolness, the heart of the stone yet to be warmed by the growing sun.
‘I don’t know why but I had imagined the stones like those at Stonehenge – taller and dressed; this is far more earthy, somehow, more wild…’ Lewis said.
‘I thought you had seen them before?’ remarked Tolkien.
‘No – we made a dash for the Red Lion in the rain and when we had emerged again it was quite dark.’
‘Imagine how it would have looked when all the stones were standing…’ Barfield said.
Lewis nodded. ‘Where did the rest go?’
‘Some were buried,’ Barfield said, gesturing at the humps dotted about the inner edge of the ditch, ‘others destroyed – heated by fires built around them and then dowsed in cold water so they broke apart.’ Barfield added.
‘Damn puritans!’ Lewis said, winking at Tolkien.
‘Were they pulled down by religious zealots or by farmers wanting decent material for their dry-stone walls, I wonder?’ Tolkien mused. He ran his hand over the stone; it seemed so alone now that its fellows were gone or lying nearby under the turf. An image crossed his mind of the sleeping stones waking and casting off their green covers on some magical future dawn, rough faces creased against the light of the rising sun on the Day of Judgement. Would the rocks and stones themselves be held accountable for what ancient man had done in ignorance here at their feet, or would they shout hosanna and be exalted when the crooked was made straight and the rough places plain?
‘This is one of the smaller of the remaining stones, however.’ Barfield said, gesturing them onwards.
Crossing the road into the south-eastern quarter the friends arrived before two leviathans of stone that had once marked the southern entrance.
‘I’ve lived in smaller houses than this!’ Lewis said, walking around the first of the stones. It stood twice as tall as a man, and he guessed ten men could stand side by side along its width. It was angular rather than rounded, set aslant so that no side, save the front and back faces, seemed level. Halfway along its southern side lay a fissure with a ledge upon which a man could have easily sat.
‘My word! It simply dwarfs any other stone circle I’ve ever seen!’ Lewis exclaimed.
‘Careful which way you walk, Jack…’ Barfield scolded. ‘This is the Devil’s Chair: if you walk three times around it anti-clockwise the Devil appears.’
Lewis tried it, to no avail.
‘Maybe it has to be at midnight? These things usually are…’ Tolkien suggested, as Lewis finished his final circumnavigation.
‘Or at full moon, or midsummer.’ Lewis proposed, slightly breathless. ‘Is it full moon?’
‘No – just past the new, we may be treated to a beautiful crescent later.’ Tolkien said, secretly thinking how sad it was that most people had no idea what phase the Moon was at.
The three friends continued their stroll along the top of the ditch, which in this quarter was choked with bushes and trees – until they crossed into the north-east section, having passed a large number of mature trees on the outer bank, their roots entwined like thousands of serpents pouring down into the ditch below; as they continued they stopped at the few remaining stones until they had nearly completed the entire circuit of the monument. They had reached its northernmost point, where the road to Swindon cut through the banks, here another huge marker stone remained, on the opposite side of the circle from the Devil’s chair they had seen earlier. They were admiring this massive diamond of rock from across the road when at that moment a great boom sounded, accompanied by shouts, from beyond the stone; a boom that made Tolkien wince in memory.
‘What on earth was that?’ Lewis asked.
They crossed the road and passed the stone in its cove of trees, approaching a large group of individuals who they could now see assembled in a far section of the quadrant, who were gazing up at the tree-lined banks ahead. One of the men turned, and, spotting the three friends, hastened towards them.
The man was stocky, with creased friendly eyes and gingery brown hair, greying at the temples, swept over his forehead, but from his long pale overcoat and cap he was recognisable as the gentleman who they had seen at the tea-rooms earlier, re-fuelling the strangely military-looking car.
‘Afternoon gentlemen!’ he beamed, in a clipped, upper class voice, with only slight traces of a Scots accent. ‘A word of warning: we’re blasting the tree roots from the banks, and so if you wouldn’t mind keeping your distance from that part of the path, we wouldn’t want you to be caught in the falling debris.’ he smiled broadly. There was something of the schoolboy in his manner.
‘Is this to do with the excavation?’ Barfield asked.
‘Excavation? Yes, yes! Are you interested in archaeology?’ he asked, his eyes lit up with boyish enthusiasm.
‘Well, yes...’ Replied Barfield, but before he could qualify the statement the man had grinned and continued.
‘Alexander Keiller,’ he said, extending his hand, ‘I’m heading the excavations here; please let me show you what we’re up to!’
Introducing themselves to their excitable guide as they walked the three friends followed Keiller towards the assembled group, some smartly dressed, others clearly labourers in their shirtsleeves, dirty from their work, but before they reached the main group Keiller turned and beckoned to the three friends to join him at the edge of the ditch; here it had been excavated far below its present level – incredibly so – if the present ditch was the depths of two men, the excavated section, with its crisp straight sides in blazing white chalk, was another six men deep.
Young workmen in caps and waistcoats, their shirtsleeves rolled up, were digging the dirty chalk from the ditch; and shoring up the sides of the vast trench with wooden revetments noisily being hammered into place. In one place on the floor of the ditch a large bone stuck out of the soil, and beside it the unmistakeable smooth polished curve of a yellowed skull.
‘The original ditch, before time silted it up – was some forty feet in depth! And the bank, too, we suppose, much, much higher than it appears today. In short this feature would have been absolutely impenetrable!’
Lewis was shaking his head. ‘My word! That is truly astounding – one would never have guessed!’
‘No, quite! It shocked us, too – we kept on thinking we had reached the bottom, but no! This site is the most spectacular prehistoric circle in the world… and it’s my dream to restore it to its former glory… already we’ve located many of the stones that were buried, and we can erect them once more. The ditches and banks can be cleared of trees, which just leaves the…’ and he waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the edge of the village with its shanty building and animal pens.
Just then the group gathered to the south edged back from the ditch as a man further up the bank opposite shouted a warning, and ran back round along the top of the bank to a safe distance. A few seconds later another boom rang out and a fountain of earth and debris was thrown into the air, pattering down into the ditch and leaving a smoking crater from which the gnarled and blasted remnants of a tree root poked.
A cry rang out and a tall dark-haired young man clutched at his head then bent over to retrieve his glasses that had been knocked off by a piece of falling matter. A couple of those nearby rushed over to see if he was okay, and he nodded that he was fine.
Keiller whooped with delight. ‘Ha! Piggott!’ he shouted over ‘It’s good for you younger men to know how we felt in the trenches in 1916!’ He winked and laughed heartily.
Lewis rested his hand on Tolkien’s arm, seeing the latter pale at the explosion.
‘I’m okay, Jack.’ He said. Besides, he thought, I’m thinking of them, not me - and the bloody mess happening in Germany right now. What if these ditches they’re digging here are just practice? I’m thinking of my sons…
Keiller turned to the friends, gesturing them to follow him towards the main group. Piggott didn’t look impressed. He held out the piece of wood that had hit him towards Keiller– not a large piece but big enough for him to dab a handkerchief in his dark hair and examine it for any signs of blood.
‘You’ll live, my boy – I’d keep that as a souvenir! Look: it looks like they’ve found some more human remains in the ditch…’ he said, guiding Piggot away, but not before turning to the three friends.
‘I really must dash – very nice to have met you! Always nice to meet fellow enthusiasts… you’d be surprised at how many consider this the height of time-wasting and folly.’ Keiller beamed, before disappearing with the dazed and frowning Piggot towards the white chalk ditch.
‘Now there’s a man with vision.’ Remarked Lewis as they approached the car park of the Red Lion.
‘Let’s hope it’s the same one our ancestors had, if he’s hoping to rebuild what was here.’ Barfield said.
‘It’s easier to have a vision when you have the money to back it up.’ Tolkien said.
‘Yes, I suppose. Where do you think his money is coming from?’ Lewis asked.
‘It’s Keiller, Jack. As in Keiller’s Dundee marmalade,’ said Barfield.
‘Ah, yes! The marmalade millionaire!’ Lewis laughed. ‘I have a jar at the Kilns! Warnie will be most impressed!’
He suddenly stopped and laughed again. ‘He certainly seemed to be possessed with a real ‘zest’ for his subject…’ Lewis proposed, grinning.
Tolkien chuckled. ‘Who better, then, to preserve the past?’
Barfield shook his head. ‘Do you think he’ll want to rename this place Scone-henge?’
‘For that appalling pun, Owen, you’re buying the first round’ Lewis said, opening the door to the Red Lion.
Chapter Ten: The Dream
Conall’s walk back to the camper had been a gloriously drunken affair; clutching a large bottle of water he’d bought at the Avebury post-office as he left the village, he had staggered back along the avenue, smiling at the stones and greeting the blackbirds and sheep with hellos; he had attained, so it seemed to him, a glimpse into the state of, if not Mankind before the Fall, at least himself before the events of the last year had overshadowed him; the words of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill, his favourite poem, formed an internal soundtrack to his stumbling;
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold
And the Sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams
Conall stood in the Avenue, arms wide, and recited the poem to the sky.
It was all shining, It was Adam and Maiden.
Maiden… maiden. Just the mere word sent a primal and visceral quiver through his chest…Oh Shenandoah…
I long to see you! Away, you rolling river!
Such a state was a rare and precious occurrence in any man, let alone Conall for whom the last year had offered little respite from unhappiness. Three hours driving and three swift pints were no doubt part of the recipe on this occasion (though such recipes were doomed to failure if consciously repeated) but the role his meeting with Shenandoah Mac Govan-Crow had played in inducing this state would have been impossible for him to fathom; quite why his initial shock and disquiet had given way to this unexpected upwelling of joy eluded him. And his reaction was not to question it too closely lest this flimsy shell of happiness cracked. It did not even seem to lie wholly in the unlikely possibility that last year’s sentiments might once more be resurrected; subsequent events had put pay to that possibility, as had the presence of, what was his name again? Hayden. Perhaps then, after all, it was simply the peace of the place and the alcohol, and the memory of happiness reminding him that the emotion still lived, though sleeping deep, within him?
Alcohol; that wonderful poison! It numbed the brain from the outside in – and as the outermost part of this organ was the youngest evolutionary speaking, and which contained our so-called civilised side, our inhibitions and social niceties, these were the first qualities to vanish when the poison started working… Con remembered an image he’s seen of a brain in a textbook, sliced in half and its different areas shaded; like the rings of a tree, the deeper you went in, the older the organ became; on the outer surface was the neo-mammalian brain, shared by us and other developed mammals – beneath that lay the palaeo-mammalian brain and within that, towards the core, lay the reptilian brain – a level of brain we shared with lizards and fish; indeed, as an embryo in the womb we had gills and a tail and went through the whole of evolution in nine months, from fish to hairless ape; he thought of his own mother’s womb with the twin fish swimming aside each other, like Yin and Yang. Perhaps this was why when we drink we feel closer to the animals, Con reasoned, we’re sloughing off our humanity, that thin, filmy outer surface of the brain, and we’re thinking instead (if thinking was an apt word, which he doubted) with our deeper animal brains; and if we drank so much, or if we could perhaps somehow go all the way back, why… we’d be like snakes or fish - primal sea serpents – what kind of knowledge would we then possess – knowledge of our ancient selves – what kind of deep primeval memories might lie stirring in our deep serpentine brains? He wondered. If we could but think those thoughts and shut off all the noise of the later brains! An image arose in his mind from one of Wagner’s operas he’d once been forced to watch (and had grown to enjoy) where Siegfried slew the dragon and drank his blood and could understand the language of the birds. The dragon’s blood clearly gave access to that primal reptilian knowledge, older than man – locked within our psyches – usually never heard or heeded, save perhaps when we lie basking in the warmth of the sun; yet our most basic functions are controlled from this part of the brain – breathing, regulation of temperature… was this why wisdom was often depicted in serpentine form? The entwined snakes on the caduceus of Hermes or the staff of Asclepius?
The sun was still high above Waden Hill, the shadows of the stones short; the farthest stones visible of the southern end of the Avenue danced in the heat; all seemed still; no birds were flying. The archaeologists had ceased digging and were sat with their backs to the sun in the shadow of two stones. Con was pissed enough to wonder over to them.
‘Found anything?’ he asked, dumbly.
A middle-aged man with a short silver goatee beard ran his fingers through his hair and swallowed the mouthful of sandwich he had been eating, and looked up at Con, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand.
‘Well… we were looking to see if the stone was in the right place – the circle was partly rebuilt in the 30’s; this one had been put back in place with concrete, and so we’re looking to see if we can find traces of the original stone-hole… but we’re also looking at the original ground-surface…’
He stood. ‘See the compacted chalk, here?’
Con nodded, looking at a smooth and pristine square of exposed white earth, inches below the topsoil with its long pale grass.
‘We’re looking to see if it’s more worn and compacted between the stones or outside of them…’
‘So, you can gauge if people were processing along them or not?’ Con asked.
‘Precisely. It tells us just as much if we find out that they weren’t…’
Con looked puzzled.
‘This site is part of a henge,,,’ the archaeologist said, ‘basically a big circular ceremonial structure, and we know henges are ceremonial as they have a bank on the outside of the ditch…’ he waved loosely in the direction of the huge henge bank over his shoulder that ringed the village, the trees that lined it still visible at this distance.
‘That would be useless as a defensive feature – where you’d ideally put the bank on the inside…’
Con knew all of this but was nodding anyway, wondering where the archaeologist was heading, and suddenly needing to piss…
‘But what if they were defensive, but from the inside? What if they were keeping something in?’ He raised an eyebrow, grinning.
‘What, like animals? Herds of cows?’ Con asked. Or bulls? He wondered, suddenly seeing the henge as a great bullring, ringed with cheering crowds.
The man shrugged. ‘We’ll see. If you’re here over the next couple of days, we may find out. We might find foot or hoofprints along the avenue… or we may find evidence of footfall outside of the Avenue… as it may have been it wasn’t meant for mortals to walk on at all.’
‘A kind of ghost road?’ Con asked.
‘Yes, something like that. Perhaps the stones represented ancestors or spirits.’
‘Keep me posted.’ Con said, wanting to stay and talk but increasingly needing to pee.
Once over the hill and out of view of the archaeologists he lent with an unsteady hand on a stone and pissed against its base - returning nitrogen to the soil, he reasoned, yet feeling slightly uneasy, remembering what the archaeologist had said about the stones; nevertheless, it was with a lighter step that he marched down the slope to where his camper lay parked beside the road.
The inside of the camper was like an oven; he closed the curtains, slid open the windows on the opposite side, and cleared the heap of clothes off the sofa-bed; Con took a large tepid draught from his water bottle and lay down, eyes closed. His plan was to re-hydrate himself and snooze for a while so that he wouldn’t spend the night at the pub with a blinding headache sipping orange juice.
For a moment he swooned into a deep, dark, state of relaxation, but a few seconds later his feet seemed to be rising above his head sickeningly, and so he sat upright and drank a little more water until the van stopped moving skywards. I’m such a lightweight, he thought. Three pints and I’m pissed. His eyes began to close, and the room fell away again; he felt nauseous. Fuck, fuck, fuck; the ancient reptile within was rebelling against the poison; the alcohol had changed the viscosity of the liquid in his inner ear, making him feel he was moving when he was still; the primal serpent, basically an alimentary canal on legs, was attempting to rid itself of the poison that was threatening its life. But Con was able to summon enough outer brain to fight this urge.
It took a further twenty minutes of attempting, and failing, to keep his eyes closed without feeling dizzy before the motion of passing cars rocking the camper lulled him into a half-doze. He dozed on and off, drinking some more water when he remembered, until finally the urge to sleep left him.
Sitting up he felt the first dull twinges of headache. He searched the drawers above the hob and sink for an ibuprofen. He couldn’t find the bloody things, and instead he reached higher and took the Collected Coleridge from the bookshelf; he didn’t open it, just held it to his chest, lost in thought. He was thinking of a dream he had had some twenty years before whose meaning had eluded him at the time but which had somehow become connected to all of this… to this place, to her; he had shaken it from his mind earlier but now in his half-aware state he allowed himself to remember.
The dream was simple yet profound:
He was walking through a spring landscape, at some unspecified date long ago in the past – deep in prehistory - on the site, though no monument was yet present, of some future circular earthwork or henge. In the distance there was a mountainous expanse with a great chasm in its side. Continuing to walk he had found himself beside a gently meandering stream on the banks of which were three white cows with red ears, grazing, and beside them a stately woman, no, a goddess, in a long blue robe, her face hidden by a hood. She approached the stream and placed one end of the wand she was carrying into the water, whereupon the river turned milky white. Conall removed his clothes and walked into the water, then knelt and submerged himself in the cool depths three times… after the last submersion he turned to see a white horse with a shining crescent moon set between its brows standing on the river bank beside him. He walked out of the water and kissed it between her brows but instead of leaping on to its back, as it gestured him to do, Conall walked beside it, still naked…
The dream imagery had stuck with him far longer than any normal dream; it had had the clarity of a vision; it had seemed to suggest rebirth, a new start- but only now was he starting to understand it – images within it which had remained a mystery had started to make sense over the past couple of years; clues within it had been instrumental – more than instrumental – vital – in his academic work investigating these ancient sites; and details that had meant nothing at the time had come to seem more than coincidental, as if the dream had been prophetic – and it’s tied to this place, thought Con, I know it.
When he had been here last spring, he had returned to his camper one evening after seeing Shen at the cottage, feeling restless, uneasy, like he wanted to run or shout or smash something; it was a feeling of a joyous rage, of intoxication. It was as if a fire had been lit within him; like he wanted to roar with the life he felt. Remembering the dream, he had gone to the Kennet that night, wishing to act it out; it seemed madness at the time – what did he think he was doing? This, he had reasoned, is how rituals must start – with the physical acting out of a vision. He had felt compelled to go – the dream image kept rising in his mind, relentless, hypnotic in its quiet insistence; the thought of entering those cool waters promised not a dampening or cooling of his ardour, but a transformation of it. Maybe I’m ready, he had thought, to start anew; he remembered how he had felt in the dream, slick from the water, his hair plastered back from his forehead, like a new born; he’d felt like a young god, like the kouros of Poseidon rising from the some primal amniotic fluid – but he hadn’t gone through with it. He had just stared into the inky waters feeling empty and suddenly wary and had returned to the camper, mute and deflated.
Why that night of all nights, he now wondered? Had he somehow known? Not that there was any way he could have – even if twin quantum particles could affect each other though separated millions of light years apart in space – how would it be remotely possible that he could somehow intuit what she had been doing at that very moment? Because it had been then, he knew in his heart of hearts. But he had felt a sense of renewal, not of fear. And surely, he should have felt her fear?
I go to the river to die…
But there had been no connection; it was coincidence, that’s all; it was all in his head; it was a door into madness to think otherwise. And yet he would have rushed headlong through that door if it meant, for a single precious moment, that the connection had been there - a hint that the entanglement had been real; that somehow, beyond time and space, they had always been, and therefore always would be, together.
But he had not known her anguish. There was no quantum entanglement; no tie; no hope; just mute nothingness and an old book, bent out of shape and disfigured by the desperate scribblings of her pain, which now mercifully had ended. He was too shocked to close his eyes and try to sleep again; and too hurt to cry. He drew aside the curtain facing the Avenue; the field with its double line of stones lay empty. Likewise, out of sight, the tourists in the main circle to the north were slowly departing, leaving it to its ghosts. Long past its zenith the sun was gilding the edges of the stones and the trees that crested the hills, but Con was immune to its beauty. The fine shell of happiness had cracked.
Chapter Eleven: Mac Govan-Crow
Tolkien and Barfield sat at the small table beside the window, relieved to have at last reached the Red Lion and un-shouldered their heavy packs. Lewis was at the bar, where he was talking to the barman as the latter poured beer from a jug into three pint mugs.
The room was busy and filled with smoke; in one corner two men in caps played at dominoes; in the other corner, far from the patch of sunlight in which Tolkien found himself sitting, sat a solitary figure, puffing on his pipe and eyeing Tolkien with dark heavy lidded eyes. Tolkien looked away hurriedly and smiled at Barfield.
‘Jack’s on top form.’ he said, on hearing the barman laugh at one of Lewis’s witticisms. Owen nodded, but his eyes suggested something different than the smile that briefly played over his lips.
‘I find Jack somewhat, I don’t know, flat of late.’ he said.
‘Flat?’
‘His arguments lack conviction. It’s as if some of that fire he once had has left him. I suppose it was the part of him that was searching… but now he has found God it’s as if the search is over and that hunger has somewhat abated. His opinions have become fixed.’
It was clear from his expression that Barfield had found this change in his friend painful. ‘I did so used to enjoy seeing him fired up.’ He smiled sadly and blinked a few times. ‘Did you see his face when he said about no longer being a poet? That’s all that used to drive him. He seems lost, for having become found.’
Tolkien looked away, unsure of how to respond to his friend’s observation, and found himself once more under the gaze of the swarthy man in the corner. Having had his gaze met Tolkien decided he could not be rude and look away for a second time and so he touched his cap in greeting. Slowly, the man in the corner responded, touching his cap with stubby, dirty fingers, his eyes remaining still fixed on the pair at the window, midst the blue cloud of pipe smoke.
Unnerved, Tolkien fidgeted in his waistcoat pocket for his own pipe, filled the bowl and then laid it on the table, then changed his mind and put it in his mouth unlit, then took it out to speak.
‘He seems little altered to me, Owen; but you have known him longer, I suppose. Perhaps what you’re observing is the mellowing of a man in his middle years, as we all are, no doubt?!’
Owen smiled. ‘Perhaps you are right, Ronald.’
‘Time ever marches on.’ Tolkien said, striking a match and lifting to his pipe. ‘Unlike us. I think it’s a good decision to stay here tonight,’ he said; they had reached this decision moments before. What had appeared during their planning a decent spot to pause had, in truth, appeared more attractive in the flesh, so to speak; Calne could wait.
Lewis returned to the table with the foaming mugs in his hands. He was frowning.
‘No room at the Inn, I am sorry to say – nor, it seems, at the other place across the road… all been booked up by that archaeologist Keiller, but all is not lost...’ He said enigmatically and he returned to the bar.
Tolkien sipped at the foam of the beer. ‘I do hope so. I don’t really fancy walking much further today. I thought the idea was to break us in slowly, not kill us off on day one.’ A fleeting smile played across his lips. ‘I dare say there should be room still at Calne if it should come to that...’
Just then the barman, with whom Lewis was talking, turned and raised his voice.
‘George?’
At this, the dark-complexioned man in the corner who had been watching Barfield and Tolkien, set down his drink and headed for the bar, where he was seen to engage Lewis in conversation. Tolkien eyed the pair, noting the man’s long-hair bound in a ponytail, like some tinker or gypsy, he thought. A moment later the two men were walking towards the table. Tolkien and Barfield stood to greet the stranger.
‘This is Mr Mac Govan-Crow,’ Lewis said, ‘and it seems he has a couple of rooms to rent in the village, which is excellent news.’
Mr Mac Govan-Crow once again touched his hand to his cap.
‘He has invited us to see the rooms, but I’ve assured him that I am sure they will be more than suitable; shall we bring our packs along after our lunch?’ he asked the newcomer.
Mr Mac Govan seemed to be eyeing the three gentlemen with veiled amusement, much to Tolkien’s discomfort. ‘’Tis no bother, sirs. I’ll take your luggage now; if you come after you’ve eaten, I shall provide you with a key.’ His accent was pure West Country, even if his swarthy, aquiline looks with their black eyes like crescents over high cheekbones, were not. He effortlessly shouldered Lewis’s pack, despite his short stature, then picked up the other two in his hands and exited the pub.
‘Good god he must be as strong as an ox!’ exclaimed Tolkien. ‘Mac Govan-Crow, eh? If he’s a Celt, then I’m a Zulu!’
‘Yes. I know. Listen to this. He's a full-blooded Red Indian by all accounts, so the barman told me! ‘Hawkeye, Last of the Mohicans’ the landlord called him.’ Lewis said.
‘Hawkeye?! People can be so uneducated!’ Tolkien scowled.
Lewis nodded.
‘Everyone knows that the last of the Mohicans was Uncas! Hawkeye was a white man!’ Tolkien explained.
Lewis suddenly laughed. ‘My dear Tollers! There was I agreeing over what I thought was your annoyance over a racial stereotype whereas your real annoyance was over the fact the barman didn’t know his Fennimore-Cooper well enough!’
Tolkien smiled. ‘Both rankle with me –ignorance is ignorance, I suppose. And if you’re stupid enough to cast about racist nicknames you’re also stupid enough not to know you’ve chosen a character of the wrong race to begin with! I was brought up reading the Leatherstocking tales; I used to fantasize about living in the forests, hunting with a bow…this is absolutely marvellous! I wonder if he speaks any Native languages…?’ Tolkien asked, his eyes lighting up. ‘How on earth did he end up in Wiltshire?!’ he continued. ‘What tribe is he?’
‘I don’t care, as long as he can cook a good English breakfast.’ Lewis quipped, and sipped his pint. But Tolkien wouldn’t let the subject drop.
Owen had spread his ordnance survey map out across the table – and the friends spent a few minutes looking closely at the finer details, while thirstily emptying their glasses.
‘So, the question is whether we take a walk back to Silbury now and climb it before dinner – or, seeing is we are now staying the night, we save that until tomorrow.’
Tolkien was looking at the map in silence.
‘Just look at the number of ancient features – dozens more burial mounds than I suspected; and look at that…’
‘What is it?’ asked Lewis.
‘That hill – Windmill hill on Stukeley’s map – there’s some kind of square enclosure on top and here the hill is called Waden hill.’
‘Waden? And what do you deduce from that?’ Lewis asked, downing his pint.
‘And the spring…’ he continued, not pausing to answer Lewis’s question, ‘the Kennet spring, is here named Swallowhead! Swallow. Well I never! Suilo. It seems my vision of that lady floating in the waters of the Kennet was probably correct…if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the book over the last few days I would’ve had time to do some research, I had no idea… the hill’s named after the spring…not vice versa…’
‘Explain!’ Lewis said, annoyed at his friend’s seemingly random muttering
‘Only if you get in another jug, this is going to be thirsty work!! We need the ale of inspiration!’
Chapter Twelve: Adversity
Once more seated at the table by the window of the Red Lion Conall was swirling his glass of diet coke so that the large effervescent paracetamol and codeine tablets he’d dropped into it would dissolve more quickly. The fizzing finally stopped, and he swallowed the resulting bittersweet liquid with a grimace. He had left his campervan dehydrated with his head threatening to burst with every heartbeat making the walk to the pub nauseatingly painful and arduous. Now faced with a veggie lasagne with onion rings he looked down at the plate and wanted to heave, but he dipped a ring into a large heap of mayonnaise and persevered. Then he ate like a starving dog.
At the bar sat the wiry, shaven-headed man who had joined in with the folk singers earlier that day; he had greeted Conall with ‘y’alright?’ as he’d ordered his meal and Conall had done his best to nod, noticing the piercing in the man’s bottom lip above a greying goatee beard constrained in a leather thong, and the heavily tattooed arms. Now seated by the window Conall couldn’t help but listen to the man, who was speaking in a thick Yorkshire accent, talking to the pretty barmaid who had taken his food order earlier. The man’s words, like his accent, were strong – liberally peppered with swearing. He was showing the barmaid something he had on a lace about his neck that she was regarding with interest.
A little later the shaven-headed man left for a smoke and Conall took his now-empty plate to the bar; he ordered a Jack Daniels and coke and repaired to his seat. His headache had abated somewhat, but still hang around his temples; perhaps the shot would help, he thought, optimistically. He suddenly realised he was rocking back and forth on his seat like a caged animal, and so made a conscious effort to stop, only to find his fingers rapping on the tabletop. It was through these physical expressions that Conall realised just how nervous he was about seeing Shen. There, at that very bar, he had first talked to her, all those months ago. He had been less nervous then. He couldn’t imagine doing it now. My fire has left me, he thought bitterly.
The door creaked open and Conall’s pulse shot up, but it was not Shen. It was a man in a biker’s jacket, tall, well-built, with a shock of red-blond hair and short fiery beard and blue eyes; Con breathed a sigh of relief, but it caught in his throat as he spied Shen walking in after him; she leant up and said something to him, then glanced about for Conall.
Shen smiled and lifted a hand, but before she could walk over the shaven-headed man had walked back in and had greeted her with a bear hug; turning, he shook Hayden’s hand and the two men headed for the bar.
‘What would you like to drink?’ Shen asked, walking over to Conall, her eyes smiling. ‘A beer; Green King – same as earlier’ he said. But rather than stay sitting waiting to be introduced to the others Conall rose and approached the bar with her.
‘Conall, this is Wolf Jones, he’s staying at the cottage, and this is Hayden…’ Wolf’s handshake was friendly and vigorous, and accompanied by the same ‘Y’alright?’ as earlier; Hayden’s grip was firm and he glanced at Conall with a lack of scrutiny that suggested either Shen had said nothing about their past (not that there was much to tell, he thought), or Hayden was not the kind of bloke to be troubled by such things.
‘A bitter drinker, eh?’ he said, his voice deep with a strong West Country tang. ‘That’s what we like to see! You here for the protest?’
‘I didn’t know it was happening, to be honest – I just needed to get away from London.’ Con stated.
‘Where are you staying?’ Hayden asked.
‘In my campervan ‘, he began, and when Wolf raised his eyebrows in interest he continued ‘I’m parked down by the avenue.’ Conall replied.
‘Silver fiat Scudo?’ Wolf said, ‘I think I saw it at the Sanctuary earlier. Nice little conversion – I’d love to have a poke around’ Wolf cut in. Conall tried to recall if he’d seen anyone there, ‘I was in my van just up from you – big black bastard with wolves on t’side.’ He chuckled.
‘Yeah, I saw your van.’ Conall said, trying not to think of the van rocking…
Shen and Wolf took their drinks over to the table while Conall waited for his own to be poured. He stood in silence next to Hayden who was tapping in his pin number into the card reader. Conall made an offer to pay for his pint but the other refused, and so Conall took both his and Hayden’s pints back to the table. Wolf had sat opposite Shen, leaving Conall to decide whether to sit next to Wolf or next to Shen; either way he’d have to sit opposite Hayden. He decided to sit beside Wolf – at least that way he’d be able to look Shen in the face.
‘Shen says you’re doing some research on the henges?’ Wolf asked.
‘Something like that…’ Con answered, dismissively.
‘It’s a cool place; the energy here is amazing. I was up at West Kennet this morning drumming…’ he closed his eyes and exhaled ‘…it was a beautiful sunrise.’
Hayden had arrived and nestled in beside Shen.
‘Did I hear you say drumming? Another fucking weirdo!’ He laughed.
‘I’ll pick you up at 5am tomorrow then, Hayden? I’ve got a spare drum…’
Hayden raised a sceptical eyebrow and smiled.
‘Such a shame, mate – I’ll be leaving for work before that… maybe next time.’ He said, winking. ‘You see it all here – drums, didgeridoos… croppies’ he swigged his pint.
‘Joking aside, you should try it.’ Wolf suggested, with sincerity.
‘Nah. Not my thing.’ He placed his hand over Shen’s, ‘I’m kind of a bit too practical for all that shit; but live and let live – it don’t bother me.’
Conall had so far remained silent, trying desperately hard to find something to say.
‘What’s a croppy?’ he asked
Hayden nodded towards a group on a table by the fire – long haired for the most part and sporting various types of facial hair, but these were not the usual hippy types dressed in colourful loose clothes – these seemed more techno-nerds, in blacks and dark greens – close-fitting, camouflaging - who were currently sharing images on their mobile phones and laughing.
‘Circlemakers.’
‘What – crop circles? These guys make them?’
‘Well, you can be sure little green men don’t – this lot are behind most – though they’ll not admit it; it’s all part of the mystique, apparently.’
‘I think I’d tell people – I’d be well proud.’ Wolf laughed.
‘They make a shit load of money, too – corporate branding etcetera – media and businesses pay these guys to stick advertising in fields – there was one a couple of years ago advertising Shredded Wheat – or film promos. If they let on they did them all they’d ruin the mystery and then no one would pay them to do it; it pays for them to keep quiet.’
Con continued to look over at them; they looked unassuming - perhaps, he thought, they derived some nerdish glee from pulling the wool over people’s eyes - drinking beer then going and playing practical jokes in a Wiltshire cornfield on a balmy summer’s night and gleefully listening to the speculation here the next day seemed a fairly innocuous hobby; it was all mercurial, childish fun. But perhaps he was doing them a disservice; perhaps they really were really faceless artists speaking up for the earth.
Another pint drunk, Conall was finding his tongue beginning to loosen.
‘So do you let Shen read your cards?’ he asked Hayden.
Hayden laughed and shot him a look that said ‘are you serious?’
‘It’s bollocks – I mean, a tarot card can no more tell my future than this beer mat; You know what I think? It’s more to do with her reading the people and then making the cards fit, don’t you think? She’s bloody good at reading people.’ He turned to Shen. ‘I mean it – you should go into psychology, or something. Use your skills properly. Or even the police, CID or something. This stuff’s okay, and people lap it up round here, but you could do something proper with it….’
Shenandoah looked up at him, her eyes wide. Conall couldn’t read what she was thinking.
‘I’m happy how it is, Hay. It’s starting to pay its way. And I can fit it in around my painting…’
‘Yeah, it is babe, but I just think you could be doing something better with it, that’s all.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘You’re wasted doing that.’
She looked up again and shrugged.
She met Con’s gaze for an instant, smiled weakly and then sipped her brandy and coke. He remembered her laughter from last year. She looked different now, kind of beaten down, or maybe she was just biting her tongue for the sake of the group. Besides, he guessed she could say the same of him – he felt uncomfortable here, a ghost playing at living, a cartoon character amongst flesh and blood men. Why can I never think of anything to say?! He berated himself.
‘So what do you do, Colin?’
‘Conall. Well, up ‘til recently I was a lecturer, in astrophysics.’
‘At last, a scientist!’ Hayden laughed and put out his hand for Con to shake. Conall shook his hand but felt like an idiot in doing so; Hayden’s hands were large and calloused; his own felt like a child’s in comparison.
‘til recently, you say?’
‘Yeah – I’m looking to lecture independently, and write – articles and stuff; I’m just fed up of London.’
‘He who is tired of London is tired of life’ – who said that?’ Wolf asked.
‘Samuel Johnson; well I guess I’m tired of life. I hate cities. I think mankind made a massive mistake in ever leaving the countryside.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you lived here; it’s fucking dead!’ Hayden laughed.
Con shrugged. ‘We’re not adapted for city life – we evolved in the Savannah, moving in small groups, close to nature; in a city we see more people in ten seconds than your average prehistoric man would have seen in a lifetime; I just don’t think we’re adapted for it – I think we miss it.’
Hayden snorted. ‘How can we miss what we’ve never had?’
Con shrugged.
‘I read once of an experiment where generations of finches were brought up in a secluded lab, yet despite never having been outside nor seen a predator, when a plastic hawk was passed overhead they all crouched and tried to hide… they’d never seen a hawk yet felt fear. It’s instinct. The yearning for nature is an instinct, too. We can miss the world our ancestors knew.’
I miss it, he thought; that ancient sense of belonging, of living in harmony with Nature; not barricading her outside of the city gates. I don’t feel at home among other people; I sleep better under the stars than in any bed…
‘Yeah, I do get where you’re coming from, but you can’t turn back the clock.’ Hayden said. ‘Or stop the march of progress.’
‘More’s the pity,’ said Wolf. ‘I’m sure there’s a correlation between stress and cruelty and the way cities depersonalize you… look at what happened when the Native Americans formed cities – human sacrifice on a mass scale.’
‘You can’t blame that on cities,’ Hayden re-joined ‘– that was just due to plain barbarism. 84,000 people sacrificed over 2 days, so the Spanish Chroniclers said.’
‘Exactly, Spanish Chroniclers – sooo trustworthy and unbiased….’ said Shen, chagrined.
‘Well,’ continued Hayden in what must have been a perennial argument between them, given the withering look on her face ‘it just goes to show the Indians were just as brutal as the Europeans – this crap people spout nowadays about the poor tree-hugging natives is just bullshit – Aho! It’s a good day to die!!! your ancestors were just as bloodthirsty as mine.’
Shen pouted. ‘One - The Aztecs weren’t my ancestors; you can’t lump a whole continent of peoples together like that. There’s a bit of a distance between Mexico and Canada, you know? And two - that’s like me blaming your Scottish ancestors for the Holocaust just because you’re European.’
In the half hour or so of conversations that followed Conall found himself still silent and increasingly morose; that mercurial spark of drunken vision he had known earlier had vanished; his second beer that night was, like the first, tackled more out of duty than enjoyment, and he was remaining resolutely and unfortunately sober. Having lost its control momentarily earlier his outer brain was not willing to relinquish its command so easily again. His social niceties and insecurities had snapped back in force. Sitting opposite Hayden he found that his view of Shen was mostly blocked by both Wolf and Hayden, as it was these two who were doing most of the talking, and both kept leaning forward over their drinks. Wolf would now and again ask Conall a question, but Hayden seemed to ignore Conall and Shen as he alternately clashed swords with Wolf or joined the other in raucous laughter. Now and again Conall would catch her eye and she’d raise an eyebrow. Eventually out of frustration Conall stood up and went and sat between her and Wolf at the end of the table.
‘You ok?’ he asked.
She smiled too broadly and said she was.
‘So what do you charge for a tarot reading?’ he asked, deliberately choosing the topic Hayden had been so dismissive of.
‘Well, if there’s a group of four or five, and I get a lot of groups, I’ll charge £100 for the evening.’
‘And individually?’
‘£25 to £30 I suppose. It’s tiring, though.’
‘I think it’s good, what you’re doing.’ He said.
She smiled again but looked sad. She looked at him, but he couldn’t read what was behind the look.
‘And the painting?’
‘So so. I’ve just got too much to do what with doing the house up, and the card readings; plus, it’s hard to find the time – as in I need space, you know, when I’m doing it. And…’ she hushed her voice ‘certain people don’t like me spending all my time concentrating on it and not them; I get a fair few interruptions…’
They smiled conspiratorially.
She sipped at her brandy and coke.
‘I really shouldn’t have any more; I’m such a light-weight these days!’
She held his gaze and her eyes creased in a smile.
‘I’m glad you’re here. Avebury, I mean – not the pub – not just the pub; sorry. I wondered how you were doing.’
‘Life goes on.’ Con said.
‘Yes, it does.’
Wolf, meanwhile, was explaining to Hayden about the protest, telling how when the archaeologist Stuart Piggott had excavated West Kennet Long-Barrow in the 1950’s most of the bones found in the chambers had been taken to Devizes museum. But recently a researcher had re-discovered the most important of these remains – a full skeleton (rare, as most of the bones in the mound had been leg bones) in the bowels of the museum stores and these remains were being moved into a new display in the museum here at Avebury. Why, Wolf was arguing, could they not be repatriated?
‘This man is one of our ancestors; why should he be put on display in a museum to be gawped at?’ Wolf said.
Hayden had been listening to this preamble without saying a word, but now began to speak.
‘Unless they do DNA testing on the bones he can’t really be claimed as an ancestor; besides – the bones are of scientific interest. What’s important is what the bones tell us about how people lived back then; their diet, their diseases.’
‘Yeah, that’s interesting – but what if it was your granddad being put on display?’ Wolf said.
Conall tried not to look at Shen.
‘He’s not, though,’ replied Hayden, ‘nor is he anyone’s granddad that’s alive today. You’re just being sentimental and giving the bones a value they don’t possess.’
‘What of the wishes of the man himself? He would want to be with his people, not in a glass case in a museum.’
‘Well, to be frank, we can’t ask him his wishes, can we? It just all seems a bit phoney.’ Hayden continued.
‘It would be different if he had been buried a Christian, though, wouldn’t it?’ Wolf countered, ‘or these were some Saint’s relics? People are so bloody careful about not treading on the toes of Christians, Muslims or anyone else that might take offence, but the rights of Pagans and our Pagan ancestors are completely overlooked.’
‘Maybe that’s because there’s no continuity of tradition. You pagans are just using the bones to make a point; you’re trying to find a link to the past to justify your own beliefs. If you have ancestors you can see and touch then you have roots you can boast of. It’s possibly different if you’re a Red Indian and you can show the White Man has dug up your ancestral burial ground and taken the bones of an individual you can possibly name – but that’s not the case here. ’
Con looked aside at Shen to see if she would react to the rather derogatory term ‘Red Indian’ but she seemed distant, as if not listening to the argument between the two men. Remembering his PhD tutor’s comments Con bit his tongue and remained silent.
‘But even though we don’t know his name we can probably say that thousands of us are descended from him.’
‘Which is why when he’s on display in the museum it’ll be interesting and informative. How can we learn from him when he’s stuck back up in West Kennet or buried up on Windmill Hill, is it, as you’re proposing?’
‘It’s not about learning, it’s about respect.’ Wolf said. ‘And you tell me the principal reason for him being on display is scientific? Is it bollocks! It’s entertainment. It’s about numbers through the door and selling more fookin’ guidebooks. It’s getting kids to gawp at a skeleton for entertainment, not education. If it wasn’t going to make money they wouldn’t bother.’
Hayden took a mouthful of beer.
‘I know that’s how you feel, but the protest just seems pointless. It’s whimsical and would deprive us of any future attempts to use the bones for all types of analyses we’ve yet to discover, despite what you think about it not really being scientific. Right, Colin? You’re a scientist; you understand the importance of this.’ Con just looked at Hayden without changing his expression, not that Hayden seemed to notice, for he continued speaking without pause: ‘Why should the greater part of mankind lose out just to satisfy the weird beliefs of a handful of hippies? Why should these few individuals lay claim to these bones when, as you say, thousands of us are descended from him?’
Con shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
‘Anyway…’ Hayden continued, ‘I’ve never been a fan of ineffective protests – and this is a waste of yours and everyone’s time; they’ve built the bloody display now – printed the new guidebooks, mugs, postcards, keyrings – and all manner of tat… what are they going to do? Say you’ve got a point and burn it all?’
Wolf paused, and instead of reacting he held his hand up and smiled; instantly any tension that had been building up around the table dissipated.
‘Well, we’ll agree to disagree on this.’ He said, taking out a pouch of tobacco and rolling himself a cigarette. He offered the pouch to Shen, who refused, with a furtive look at Conall. Hayden shook his head, but Conall took the proffered pouch from Wolf and rolled himself one.
Outside the pub, under the thatched eaves strung with outdoor lights, Wolf lit Conall’s fag, then his own.
‘That was very noble of you to bite your tongue.’ Conall offered.
Wolf blew out a long cloud of smoke, shaking his head.
‘I’ve heard it all before – but when I was talking about respect, I meant it. We have to respect the wishes of the person we’re putting on display... The way he was buried; the special treatment of his body as opposed to the others – he wasn’t the same; he had a special role; and we need to honour that…Putting him on display just isn’t right. It’s disrespectful. and to argue that we might lose out on future scientific discovery is just bullshit! Is this all he is – some science experiment? So, they cut up the bones and find out he ate 5% more wheat than a similar skeleton from France – so fucking what?’
Conall nodded. ‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘What does it say about modern man that he puts science before humanity? Hayden talks about value, but fails to see that surely the greatest value the bones possess isn’t the abstract facts we can glean about his life from them but from the very fact they were part of a living human being – that surely is where their true value lies... ’
‘So you’re with us? Hehe!’ Wolf said, grinning, and slapped him on the back. ‘You should’ve said that back in there… but I can tell you’re not much of a talker, are you? Besides, I’m not doing it because I’m a Pagan – I bloody hate most Pagans – you know, the weekend witch types; I know that it’s what the ancestors want.’ And he fixed Conall with a sidelong look.
‘I’m not interested in any religion that may or may not be made up, and a lot of modern paganism is, I’m talking about the spirits of the land, and those spirits are just as present today as they were thousands of years ago. You just have to have the humility to listen to them.’
He looked southwards over the stones, now cloaked in darkness.
‘You see, it’s not about the past – about turning back the clock, despite what Hayden thinks; it’s about remembering what we need NOW. That’s why I get fed up with people who moan on about the good old days - they have lost sight of the potential of the present… and we only have the present; we can change the direction our species is travelling in, but not backwards.’
Con nodded in agreement.
‘Do you know Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’?’ he asked his shaven-headed companion;
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”’
Now. It has to be now. He thought; the past is no more sacred than the now… only I find it hard to see it, damaged as I am by guilt.
‘There’s no going back, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from the past; all these progressives are so fucking dumb…’ Wolf spat. ‘I hate their self-serving greed– it’s all for the good of man, this myth of progress… some Jetsons future where all disease is cured and we’re all in flying cars; and what have we done to get there? Analysed all the bones, cut up all the animals; cut down all the trees... but it’s ok because it was done in the service of man. It’s bollocks. If you were walking in city and you realised you’d strayed into a shit neighbourhood you wouldn’t blindly carry, you’d bloody well turn back round and choose another route. That’s where we’re at, Con, or should I say Colin?’ he laughed ‘as a species we’ve taken a wrong turn, and we need the humility to accept we need to change our path,’
Conall looked at this strange mixture of a man; his tattoos, piercings, wiry strong arms, wickedly glinting, predator-like pale eyes. There was no pretence about him, nothing done for effect; he was as he was.
‘Civilization is not the be all and end all. Civilizations have come and gone and will do again; I just don’t want to be part of the civilization that took the whole world with it when it fell…’ Wolf said. Un-beckoned the image of a vast wave sweeping over towns and cities rose in Con’s mind…of lightning in a blackened, churning sky, and the view of collapsing cliffs viewed from a violently lurching boat… where the hell did that come from? He wondered, bemused. I know that scene…
‘The ancestors - they are saying remember us.’ Wolf was saying. Con, roused from his disturbing yet weirdly familiar reverie glanced out to where Wolf was gesturing, towards the stones whose giant hunched silhouettes were slowly becoming visible against the pallid night sky as their eyes became used to the darkness; And can you hear their voices? Con wanted to ask. Is this some poetic metaphor or can you really hear the voices of the dead? Can you hear her?
‘So, are you a pagan?’ Wolf asked.
Con shrugged.
‘I’m not a fan of labels; I sometimes think I’m close to a Taoist or a Buddhist – but a lot of their philosophy seems very life-negating – the universe is a veil of tears and delusion and we need to jump off it…’
Wolf nodded. ‘You know, I’m the same – some of the basic tenets I love, but I agree – life is to be lived; it’s not fucking easy – but it’s not meant to be easy; it’s certainly not meant to be thrown away.’
‘It can be fucking cruel.’ Con commented.
Wolf pulled a face.
‘Depends on your perspective; what if it’s not so much cruel as not making things easy?’
‘That implies intention – you can’t say that there’s some great cosmic being who intends for the world to be this way – babies dying in Africa, kids with cancer; earthquakes, hurricanes, murder…’
‘No, mate – I look at it on a smaller scale than that – what if there was a part of ourselves, not some great cosmic force, but something in us that somehow stage managed our lives? It could be part of that greater force, just not all of it. It’s like when you dream – you’re in the dream, talking to someone who isn’t you – yet when you wake up it’s all been in your own head, so that other person WAS you, you just couldn’t see it from within the perspective of the dream. What if life is like that dream, and really, we’re the stage manager and the actors – we just don’t have the perspective right now…I’m not saying I believe this, but I do sometimes wonder. If there was a greater part of me controlling things beyond my reach, I wouldn’t expect it to make things easy for me – for me to win the lottery or have a string of birds on my arm 24/7 – because if it was easy you wouldn’t try, and it’s through trying that you grow. Fortune favours the brave, and to be brave you need adversity.’
Adversity, thought Con. I’ve had my fair share…
‘There’s something that Krishna says in the Mahabaratha – love your enemies as they give you your destiny…’ Wolf said, then, changing tack, turned and looked directly at Con. ‘What do you think of Hayden?’
Conall shrugged, knowing any answer he gave wouldn’t be without bias.
Wolf smiled; ‘I don’t agree with his views, but he’s no fool. He’s a brave fucker: He was telling me last night about a rescue he was involved in on the M4 last year; I suppose you have to be no-nonsense and practical to deal with that kind of stuff; and have a certain amount of emotional distance. No room for sentimentality.’ Wolf grinned. ‘Hmm. Did you hope I was going to say he was a twat?’
Conall laughed. ‘Maybe. Maybe I wanted him to be one – I mean a fucking tall blond fireman. It’s like sitting opposite Thor.’
Wolf laughed. ‘What’s the story, then, with you and the lovely Shenandoah?’
Conall inhaled then blew the smoke out his nose with a shrug.
‘I met her down here last year. Spent a few days with her; we got on really well, but then something happened…’
Wolf gazed at him, unflinching. ‘She told me, you know… about your twin sister’s accident; I hope you don’t mind. I suppose she didn’t want me to put my foot in it or anything.’
Conall shook his head, both surprised she had mentioned it to Wolf, and that he didn’t mind she had done so.
‘Were you identical – you know, as I suppose a man and a woman can be?’
Con smiled. ‘No – different sex twins come from two eggs, actually - fertilised at the same time; we didn’t share an egg but we shared a womb – but yeah, she had the same hair as me – poor girl; but blue eyes.’
‘Same beard…?’ Wolf grinned. ‘Well, if you ever need to talk…I know that sounds lame, but it’s a genuine offer…’
Con paused as the laughing group of croppies exited the pub and walked into the dark.
‘Thank you. I think it’s all been said, though.’ He took a final drag off the cigarette, looking out over the field of stones across the road from the pub.
Wolf once more fixed him with his pale, predator’s eyes.
‘I very much doubt that. I get the feeling you’ve not even begun to talk about it. And you know that, too.’
‘It won’t bring her back.’ Conall said, through a cloud of smoke.
Wolf was quiet for a moment before he spoke.
‘No. But it might you.’
Chapter Thirteen: An Eye for an Eye
‘So are you going to enlighten us, now?’ Lewis asked, returning to the table with a jug of beer.
Tolkien was smiling. He took a sip of beer and lit his pipe.
‘Yes. That strange image I had of the lady floating down the Kennet like Ophelia… you see, I thought that had come about from our discussions of the dismembered vegetation god, or of Orpheus, but in fact I now see that it had its roots in what we had been discussing earlier, at Silbury. Remember I had argued that ‘Sil’ had come from the Welsh ‘Sul’, as in sun? Well, the word had been going round my head, clamouring for attention…’ he took another sip of beer – ‘but it was only just now when I saw the name of the spring, Swallowhead, that I understood what I was being shown…’
He scratched his chin, his eyes seeming to focus on a point far in the distance.
‘You see, Silbury and Swallowhead must both be derived from the same root word, which can’t be ‘sol’, Jack, as linguistically ‘sol’ could not become ‘swall’ – so we’re not looking at a derivation from the Latin, but from something much earlier. They both, in fact, come from a very ancient word that predates both the Latin and the Welsh form, that was closer to ‘sawol’; now in Irish this ancient word became ‘suil’ meaning ‘eye’… the sun being the eye in the heavens, one supposes – the divine eye.’
‘As in Ancient Egypt – where the eye of Ra, or of Horus, was the sun?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Exactly, Jack. This would make Silbury the ‘bury’, that is barrow, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘bearw’ - so mound of the eye’; and the Swallowhead spring would be the spring of the eye. As Swallowhead preserves the older form of Sawol, I would suggest it, and not the hill, was named first, though I may be wrong…’
‘If you don’t mind me asking, Ronald, whether derived from sun or eye, or whether the name of the spring predated the hill, what is the connection to your Ophelia?’ Barfield asked.
‘If one follows the old Roman road that goes past Silbury,’ Tolkien continued, ‘which follows a much older track-way, you find yourself at Bath – which as you know was known as Aquae Sulis the ‘waters of the goddess Sulis’; Sulis-Minerva was the goddess of the healing springs there, and her name shares the same etymology so it seems highly possible to me that she is also implicated here at Avebury.’
‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Lewis. ‘It hadn’t even entered my thoughts to link Silbury to Sulis. ’
‘Nor mine,’ Tolkien conceded ‘until I saw the name Swallowhead on this map – it was the connection of the word Sul to the waters of the spring rather than the hill that suggested it.’
‘I now have a rather incongruous image of Minerva, half submerged in the Kennet in a Greek chiton dress, a spear in one hand and an owl perched on her shoulder… ‘ Lewis said, laughing. ‘But the image of the eye and the spring, and a goddess of the waters is, as you know, an old Celtic trope… it’s found in the Irish legend of the origin of the river Boyne in Ireland.’
‘Remind me.’ Said Barfield.
He lit a cigarette and began;
‘The Boyne, Owen, was named after the goddess Boann who was a princess of the Tuatha De Danann, the people of the Goddess Danu, that is the Sidhe, the fairy folk; and her abode was the fairy mound of Newgrange. Now Boann had a husband named Nechtan who owned a magical spring. The spring was surrounded by nine hazel trees and the hazel nuts would fall into the water and be eaten by the speckled salmon who lived therein – and as the nuts contained all knowledge whoever drank of the waters of that well or ate of the salmon would become knowledgeable of all there was to know, had ever been known, and ever would be known...’
Jack’s eyes glistened; he enjoyed the telling of tales immensely.
‘…Only Nechtan and his three cupbearers could drink of the well; but out of curiosity Boann one day approached the well, wishing to drink for herself, and walked about it three times counter-clockwise… but the waters of the well rose up, creating a rushing river that pursued Boann to the coast, and it was said that the water erupted with such power that it ripped a leg, an arm and a single eye from her body, and that she drowned in the flood of waters that became the river which today bears her name.’
Tolkien nodded. ‘Given the number of river names in Europe associated with ancient Goddesses,’ he stated, ‘we can assume that the river was the goddess; so I think we can suggest that a similar legend once existed here at Avebury concerning that same goddess of the eye and/or sun, named Sulis – who perhaps drowned at the Swallowhead, or at least transformed into those waters.’
‘And the name Waden Hill…’ Jack offered, ‘comes from Woden? He, too lost an eye at a well…’ he stubbed out his cigarette on the table and let the butt fall onto the floor.
‘It’s a similar myth, Jack, but the name is sheer coincidence - Waden means hill of the idol – weoh-dun – that square enclosure on the map may once have been a shrine housing a heathen image.’ Tolkien said, ‘But you’re right about Woden and the eye. Wishing to gain knowledge of all things, he journeys to the well of Mimir in order to drink from it; but as we know, the price is high – for he has to forfeit one of his eyes to take a draught. – just as Boann loses an eye when she drinks of the well.’
‘Aha! I see,’ Lewis said, ‘…. pardon the pun. But what on earth does it mean? Why the loss of an eye in return for the gaining of wisdom?’
Tolkien frowned for a moment.
‘Well, that is the question! The losing of the eye is an act of sacrifice, to prove how much the gaining of knowledge meant, a kind of bartering: one gives up vision in this world to gain vision in another…an eye for an eye…but I’m not sure… After our talk earlier at the tea-rooms a very different answer springs to mind: Surely, to drink of the waters of knowledge should increase one’s visionary faculties, not deplete them; so in what way could losing an eye been seen as a gain? Well it suddenly seems blindingly obvious, pardon my pun, that what is gained through drinking from the spring is the unified mystic vision Owen was celebrating earlier - where all is seen as connected, no longer separate. What better way of depicting this than by making the wisdom seeker one-eyed? Two eyes suggest duality, division, normal everyday vision - but the one eye suggests the undivided vision of the poet!
‘But I think this is all later metaphysical speculation and that the original myth of the losing and gaining of an eye is rooted in mankind’s experience of the natural world – I think (and note, I’m not espousing some all-pervasive solar-theory a la Max Muller, when I say this) that it’s probably solar. Forget the later metaphysics – it’s a seasonal myth – it’s about the loss and return of the sun at winter.’
Tolkien looked up from his drink to find the eager eyes of his friends willing him to continue; for a moment, motes of dust hung suspended in the golden light pouring in from the window.
‘Think of the myth of Orion, the great hunter; he is blinded, but then he journeys across the sea bearing Kedalion, the servant of Hephaestus the Smith, on his shoulders, like St Christopher, and reaches the eastern horizon and regains his vision from Helios, the sun god.’
‘Like Wade carrying Wayland the smith across the Groenasund?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Precisely… and Thunor carries Orvandel across the icy Elivogs river in a basket on his back…’ Tolkien added; ‘Obviously the mythical Orion is linked to the constellation; now, the sun rises near this constellation in the spring, but by the autumn Orion has moved to the other side of the sky at daybreak, so has ‘lost’ the sun; clearly all this marching to the east to regain his eyes from Helios is really an image of the constellation regaining of the sun, the solar eye, in the spring.
‘As for the icy river…’
‘…it’s the Milky Way?’ Barfield suggested. ‘So this Sulis, this goddess, was she also a constellation?’ he asked.
Tolkien scratched his chin in thought.
‘Did you know,’ Lewis said, while Tolkien sat pondering, ‘that in the Old Irish stories Druids were known to cast spells standing on one leg and with one eye closed – it was seen as a magical stance – it’s exactly the same symbolism as Boann in the river, deprived of an arm, leg and eye. That same one-eyed figure appears in other Celtic myths, you know – he is one who can summon the animals, a kind of wild man. The master of animals, they call him.’ Lewis added.
‘Like Orpheus.’ Barfield said.
‘Or Bombadil.’ Tolkien re-joined.
‘Are these, then, constellations, too?’
Tolkien cleared his throat, and took out his pipe, methodically packing it as he considered the questions that had been put to him.
‘Oh, and can you also explain, while you’re at it, given all this sun and eye symbolism, why the river Kennet is named after a dog?’
Tolkien seemed about to answer when the door of the pub opened and Mr Mac Govan-Crow strode in, heading straight for their table.
‘Begging your pardon. My wife is wondering if you would like to eat with us at the house tonight. You would be most welcome.’
The three friends nodded in agreement.
‘We shall eat around six, but feel free to return when you wish; I’ll let you get back to your drinks.’ he said, smiling and leaving as promptly as he had arrived.
‘Excellent!’ Lewis said, ‘tonight we dine on venison!’
‘Jack!’ scolded Barfield.
‘What? It’s not me who called him Hawkeye!’ referring to the latter’s epithet of Deerslayer.
The three men laughed. ‘Actually, it would be quite an adventure, being led off into the wilds with Hawkeye…through forests and waterfalls, sleeping under the stars…’ Lewis said.
‘Hunted by the Huron? Idyllic indeed!’ Barfield said, sarcastically.
Tolkien smiled. ‘You know, Jack, for all your romanticism you would hate it! Mac Govan-Crow wouldn’t let you stop for a cup of tea, you know! With the Huron on our heels there wouldn’t be time for a decent pint of beer, either.’
Tolkien tuned to Barfield. ‘Imagine how he’d grumble, Owen!’ he said, nodding towards Lewis.
‘It would be unbearable.’ Barfield agreed ‘We could leave him for the Huron, but I doubt even they would want him…’
‘Why so?’ asked Jack, frowning.
‘–nothing to scalp!’ Barfield laughed, pointing at Jack’s bald crown.
Chapter Fourteen: Tarot
It was strange to think only eleven hours had passed since Con had last been in this self-same spot, outside Church cottage opposite the lych-gate on the narrow high-street, a few minutes' walk west of the pub outside the circle; it already seemed like another day, far further back in time. The only difference from earlier, however, was the presence of Hayden’s large motorbike parked outside on the road, and the scent of the large, almost luminous, white-petalled Nicotiana, their buds now open, tumbling from the window box. Then he had thought Shen to be long gone from this place, but here he was, a few hours later, following her into the cottage. Never presume you know where you’re going, he thought to himself. Life often has different plans from those we envision…
While Conall followed Wolf into the kitchen to grab a drink Shen set about preparing the small living room for the reading; she lit a joss stick and a few tea lights on the coffee table in front of the cast-iron fireplace, and turned the overhead light off, though the small table lamp by the fireside was left on so that Hayden could sit and read the magazine he’d nonchalantly picked up.
‘Get us a beer, Shen,’ he said, not bothering to look up. ‘And put some toast on.’
‘Get it yourself, you lazy bugger, I’m setting up.’ She smiled. Hayden muttered something about working all day and slumped into the kitchen.
‘You having your cards read?’ Conall asked, tongue in cheek, emboldened from drinking.
Hayden looked at him witheringly, took a beer from the fridge and walked back out.
‘I take it that’s a no!’ whispered Wolf to Con, snorting.
Shen had moved the sofa forward for Conall and Wolf to sit on, but she herself sat cross-legged on the wooden floor opposite them in front of the fire place, over which hung a long Native American wooden flute with feathers and beads hanging off it on a cord; Alfred’s flute. He’d heard him play it once in this very room; a room that had cluttered with photographs and the detritus of a long life –a room heady with the scent of pipe tobacco. She must really miss him, he thought, watching as Shen took a sip of her drink and handed the cards to Wolf.
‘Shuffle them then give them back.’ she said.
‘Look at you being all professional!’ Conall quipped; Shen stuck out her tongue at him and giggled.
Wolf shuffled the cards and handed them back to Shen, who spread them face down in a perfect arc on the coffee table. Wolf was instructed to take three cards. When he had chosen them, Shen took them from him and placed these cards face down, and then turned them one by one. For a moment she said nothing. Conall leaned forward and looked at the cards. The first depicted five youths in tunics and tights holding staffs in their hands, which they seemed to be either waving at each other or fighting with; the second was the knight of swords, boldly leaping forward on a pale horse; the final card showed, again, a figure on horseback, but crowned with a wreath, and holding a staff, similarly crowned –in the background seemed to be the same gaggle of youths from the first card, but now holding their staffs straight. Shen looked up at Wolf, who was leaning forward and tapping his knees with his hands excitedly;
‘You wanted to know about the protest again. Well…five of wands; that’s disorder –it means nuisances, bad luck –see how the men are at odds with each other? There’s tension there, confusion –conflict even. A load of hassle.’
‘But the Knight of swords –he’s someone that is campaigning for what is right. He has strong values and will stand up for them. The last card, the six of wands sees order forming out of the disorder that preceded it; it has connotations of recognition; of praise for a job well done.’
Shen looked up nervously at Wolf. ‘So, it’s like I saw yesterday,’ she continued, ‘there’s bad luck, but somehow things will turn out well. I can’t see anything more than that. I can’t say I understand it.’
Wolf nodded and thanked her, but left unspoken any thoughts that were crossing his mind. Taking up his cards Shen placed them back in the pack and began to shuffle. Conall felt his pulse quicken…I wonder what she’ll see, he thought; but Shen did not hand him the cards, instead she seemed to be about to consult them herself. Again, she placed the cards in an arc, and picked her selection.
‘What are you asking?’ Conall asked. Shen shrugged;
‘Just looking.’ she said, but Conall had caught her giving a sideways glance towards Hayden as she spoke, so fleeting perhaps Shen herself was unaware that she had done it. The three cards she had selected were quickly placed back in the pack. Once more Shen sipped her drink, then took up the pack and handed them to Conall.
‘Your turn. Shuffle them, then take six cards.’
‘Six?’
‘Yeah, I’ll do your full reading.’
The cards were large and slightly unwieldy; Conall found it hard to shuffle them, and at one point nearly let them spill onto the floor; but persevering he shuffled them a few more times for good measure and gave them back. Shen smiled and nodded, spread the cards, and Conall took six cards from the table. As Shen turned the cards over Conall, just as Wolf had a few minutes before, leaned forward in expectation.
The first showed a tower being struck by lightning with people falling from it; the second showed the skeletal figure of Death astride a white horse; the third card was less grave –a robed woman with a strange white crown and the moon at her feet: the high Priestess; next, another woman, the queen of cups, enthroned and holding a strange elaborate vessel; the next card showed a row of vessels and a red-hooded figure holding one and offering it to a diminutive white haired woman. The last card was also in the suit of cups: ten cups shone radiantly against the arc of a rainbow, while below a dark haired man and woman stood arm in arm, while beside them children played.
‘Those look cheery.’ Conall said, glancing at the first two cards. Shen coloured and waved a hand over the cards, not looking up at Conall.
‘Look, Conall – Death isn’t normally literally…death;’ she looked up apologetically, ‘…in fact the tower is more likely to foretell death or change than Death itself... You start off with some kind of ego crisis; could be a breakdown, or a sudden change…so in this context I would say that what is dying is some old and outmoded way of being; it’s a rebirth, really.’
Con nodded. I bloody need it, he thought. ‘Is that happening now?’
‘Yes; or imminently.’
Con looked across at her –her eyes were black in this light; exotically slanting, serious; gone was the seeming awkwardness and weakness he’d thought he’d seen in the pub.
‘The High priestess…and the queen of cups…hmm…these suggest someone in your life who is, um, a healer, or a psychic, and the priestess links her with knowledge or wisdom.’
Shen didn’t look at Conall as she said this, but it seemed obvious to him from her muted reaction that she was referring to herself. Or was he just imagining that?
‘Now the six of cups; that’s to do with nostalgia, looking backwards –but in a positive way –it seems that something from the past is going to influence you –it will be of great benefit to your future –something forgotten will turn up and will change the way you look at things; because look –the ten of cups –that’s contentment, achievement…’ but her fingers, flitting across the card, seemed not to point at the cups in the sky but at the two dark-haired figures, arm in arm below them. Then the card was gone as Shen swiftly gathered them together.
‘Did that make any sense?’ she asked, not looking up.
‘I’m not sure it did –I think maybe I’m tired.
’Conall was nodding slowly, still trying to take it in.
‘No –it all seemed fine - Breakdown; rebirth –a psychic and something from the past leading to happiness.’ he summarised. She nodded and their eyes met again for a moment. What are you thinking? He wondered. Something from the past…is that you, Shen? Something forgotten turning up? He felt suddenly drunk and he swallowed. Can you read my thoughts? He mused. Do you know how lovely you are? Do you know about that night, what really happened? ‘
Are you going to do yours?’ he asked. Shen held his gaze. ‘I could do, maybe.’
But she didn’t, instead she put the cards away in a cloth, which she placed on the bookcase by the window; she paused for a second and then looked at Conall with a half-smile on her face.
‘I have something for you.’ she said, turning to the fireplace and taking down the wooden flute from its hook above the fireplace. She handed it to him without ceremony. He took it and turned it in his hands, not understanding.
‘My grandfather wanted you to have it.’ Conall was speechless; he held the instrument close, examining the faded feathers and beadwork, and the small carved owl that jutted out from above the finger-holes.
It was Wolf who broke the silence. ‘That is awesome!’
Con was frowning. ‘The flute? I –I can’t take this, Shen, it belonged to your Grandfather. It belongs to you! It should be yours, surely?’
She was smiling sadly and shook her head.
‘He wanted you to have it; he wrote it in his will –to give the flute to the young man who told him about the stars, in thanks for reuniting brother and sister. What did he mean by that, Con?
’Long story.’ Conall said, abashed at the attention from all three people in the room. ‘I can’t take this Shen.’ Con stammered.
Shen frowned. ‘It was his wish, Con.’
‘But he told me it had been in his family for generations!
’I know. And it was his to give to whoever he chose; and he chose you.’
Conall didn’t voice the question racing across his mind. Why me? I hardly knew him! A few times, we met, that was it –over those four fateful days.
‘It’ll save me dusting it.’ Shen joked, trying to break the awkward silence.
‘Oh my God, Shen. Thank you.’ and then, looking into the fire, he said ‘Thank you Alfred.’
Hayden yawned loudly from his chair in the corner, and announced he was off to bed.
‘Laters’ he said, his hand in the air, and disappeared from the room.
‘I suppose I should be going, too’ Con said, suddenly feeling the need to be away from here, to have space to think. ‘Shall I leave it here for now?’ Shen shook her head.
‘No, I’d rather it was gone now.’ she said sadly. ‘If you’re at a loose end tomorrow I’ll be around; send me a text.’
She took the flute from his hands and, taking a cloth from the sideboard, wrapped the flute in the cloth and handed it back.
‘Take care of it Con.’ she said.
‘This is the most precious gift I’ve ever been given; Of course I’ll take care of it.’ And he smiled back at her as she opened the door and he walked out into the clear, Nicotiana-scented, summer night.
Chapter Fifteen: Bear-Skin Woman
‘If you don’t mind me asking, George, what brought you to England?’ Tolkien asked.
They had just finished a meal prepared for them by George Mac Govan-Crow’s wife, Shona, in the small kitchen of their house at Church Cottage and had moved through to the sitting room, where George was busy preparing a fire now the evening had grown cooler. Tolkien sat in a chair by the fire, nursing a whiskey, while Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms to unpack; on the couch against the wall Shona sat, her young son Alfred half sleeping in her arms, lulled by his mother’s gentle rocking.
George smiled.
‘My parents,’ he said, taking down a photo frame from the mantelpiece and handing it to Tolkien, ‘were part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s ‘Wild West Show’ and had been touring Europe, but my mother was pregnant with my brother and they ‘jumped ship’ here when the tour came to Swindon as she was very ill during the pregnancy. They didn’t want to take a baby back on tour or risk the journey back to Canada with a babe in arms, and her health still poor; I was 4 at the time and had been travelling with them. My first memories are of the buffalo hunt, and of watching my father Kills Crow sing the victory song and shout the war whoop over the body of Custer!’ He laughed. ‘That was from the show. Had I been brought up on the reservation I’d have probably never seen a buffalo, never heard the victory songs. I understood that when I went back to visit my people one time. We were enacting a life that had already vanished. It was all show, but it was at least something.’
Tolkien looked at the photo – obviously staged, with the young George strapped to his mother’s back on a cradle-board, and his father in buckskins with feathers in his hair, against a poorly painted background showing wagons and cactuses and tall desolate flat-topped mesas. The eyes of the figures were sharp, lost. The man was very like George, but half of his face was picked out in a bright paint; the woman flat-faced, young, beautiful yet stern; earthy.
My father was Saul Fine Gun, of the Canadian Blackfoot, the Siksikawa; but he was given the name Kills Crow for the show; and in turn when he settled here he chose to keep Crow as a surname, and was known as Saul Crow. My parents reasoned their children might be better off here than if they had gone back to Canada; life had been hard for them on the reservation. It was never the same after the buffalo had gone…’
‘Do you have a name in Blackfoot?’ Tolkien asked.
George remained kneeling, placing more kindling on the fire, and then blowing at the embers until they roared into life. For a moment Tolkien thought he would not answer but staring into the fire he began to speak.
‘Ipisowaasi. It’s the name of the Morning Star.’
‘Ipis…?’
‘Ipisowaasi.’
‘Ipiso-wa-asi.’ Tolkien repeated.
‘And you have had the fortune to visit your father’s people, you said?’
‘My people.’ George corrected. ‘Yes. After the War, my family took the boat to Canada and I spent many months with them. My brother and mother stayed. My father, you see, was killed in the war; he volunteered to fight; he was a cavalryman in the Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars.’
For the second time that day Tolkien was reminded of the dead horses he’d seen scattered across no-man’s-land in France. An incongruous image arose in his mind, of George’s father, Kills Crow, astride his horse, charging through the machine-gun fire, raising the war whoop with his painted face and eagle feathers in his hair. The Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars… Queer Objects on Horseback the regular troops had laughingly called them…
‘I am sorry to hear about your father. I was a signalling officer in the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers.’ A brief expression of pain flashed across his features.
George nodded slowly and held the other’s gaze, then continued.
‘I couldn’t stay in Canada. I was 21 by that time. My home was here, and my Shona was here.’ He looked over and smiled at his wife.
‘Two exiles together!’ she said, in her broad Irish accent, her cheeks flushed.
Tolkien lifted his glass and sipped at his whiskey. After what seemed an eternity of silence George spoke again. He stood up from before the fire, replaced the photograph and took down from where it hung above the mantelpiece a wooden instrument, handing it to Tolkien.
‘This was my mother’s flute, and she had it from her mother, and she had it from who knows where.’
Tolkien took the object, hung with beadwork and feathers; he turned it in his hands, admiring its craftsmanship.
‘It’s alder wood; and the feathers are of the owl.’
Tolkien handed it back to George with a smile. ‘It’s beautiful. Can you play it?’
George put it to his lips and played a short melody. This playing seemed to provide a musical prologue to what happened next.
‘I said I would tell you one of our tales; listen, this is how it was told to me by my father.’
The room was silent save for the cracking and popping of the twigs on the fire. Shona’s face was distracted, serene; George replaced the flute on the wall and took a seat in the other leather chair opposite Tolkien, his own face, in contrast, serious – severe even. For a moment, in the flickering copper firelight, it took on the proportions of a story-book Indian from Tolkien’s childhood; that wild, untamed, frightening yet romantic form of the Red Man – the Noble Savage – a man of the ancient earth… and then it was gone, and he was George again, a west country gardener.
George picked up his pipe and pinched a clump of tobacco from his tin; silently he threw a small part of this into the fire; mouthing words whose sense eluded Tolkien - Itsipaiitapio’pah - and then filled his pipe and lit it.
‘There was once a maiden named Bear-Skin-Woman who had many suitors but who would not marry. She had seven brothers and a younger sister, and because her mother had died the youngest sister would look after the smallest brother, because he was still a baby, and carry him on her back on a cradle-board.
‘Each day the six eldest brothers would go out hunting, and the little sister with her baby brother would remain at home with their older sister. Every day, Bear-Skin-Woman would leave to collect wood – but she never returned with very much wood and the younger sister began to wonder if she was not really collecting wood in the forest, but meeting with a man.
‘One day, when her sister had left to collect wood from the forest the little sister crept out of their lodge and followed her through the trees until she saw her go into the cave where the bear lived. She followed her and she saw that the bear and her sister were lovers.
‘That night the younger sister told her father what she had seen; and her father said, ‘So this is why my daughter refuses to marry!’ He went into the village to let his people know that they had a bear as a relation, and that they should follow him into the forest and kill the bear. This the people did.
‘Bear-Skin-Woman for a while hated her younger sister, but in time they were friends again. The young sister one day asked that they play at being bears, and the older sister agreed, saying ‘I shall be the bear but you must promise not to touch me above the kidneys or there will be evil.’ Her sister promised but, in their play, she forgot, and touched her elder sister above the kidneys and she turned into a real bear because she was a powerful medicine woman. Taking up her little brother, the younger sister ran back and hid in the lodge in fear. The older sister ran into the village and killed many, many people. The younger sister was relieved when her sister came home, transformed back into her human form. Still a-feared, the little sister ran to where her brothers were hunting and warned them of what their elder sister had done to their relatives in the village, and that she even now would be coming to kill her remaining siblings.
‘Sure enough through the wood they spied their sister, Bear-Skin-Woman, in the shape of the bear hunting for them, and so they ran. As she was just about to snap them up one of the brothers cast down a handful of water which became a vast lake, around which the bear had to run. As she came close once more another brother threw back a comb onto the ground and there a great thicket of bushes sprung up which delayed the bear for a little longer.
‘Eventually Bear-Skin-Woman was at their heels and so they climbed a great tree; but the bear shook the tree and four brothers fell out and died.
‘A bird flew about the tree and it sang to the eldest brother, telling him to shoot the bear in the head; and so he took his bow and he put an arrow through the bear’s head and killed it.
‘The remaining three brothers and the young sister were grieved on seeing their four dead brothers; but the youngest took the eldest of the dead brother’s bow and shot an arrow into the air. When it landed one the dead brother stirred and came to life. This he did again until all the dead brothers were alive.
‘’Where shall we go?’ they asked ‘seeing as our relatives are all dead and we have no family to return to?’
‘’Let us go the sky’ they said, and they closed their eyes and they rose up to the heavens as stars.
‘The littlest brother became the North Star, and his six brothers and little sister became the Great Bear. And the young sister is the closest star to the North Star, as she looked after her baby brother on earth so she does in the sky.’
George stared into the fire and puffed a few times on his pipe.
‘George…Ipisowaasi…’ Tolkien began, ‘Thank you.’ His voice was measured, and polite, but his mind, below this calm exterior, was sparking and cracking like the fire that illuminated the both of them; so many questions… but Tolkien sensed that George was not a man who enjoyed being bothered by questions.
Nevertheless, he began again:
‘It’s fascinating that the Blackfoot have this image of the woman who becomes a bear; the image of the human becoming a bear is found in myths and legends from Europe, too…’ George’s seeming blank expression caused Tolkien to halt and stammer. 'The Vikings had warriors named Berserkers who would change into bears during battle. Berserker means bear-shirt or bear-skin...' he paused, and then began to talk once more.
‘Do you know about Callisto?’ he ventured. George shook his head.
Tolkien cleared his throat.
‘The Greek Goddess Artemis, the virgin huntress… she, it was said, expected her companions to be as chaste as she herself, but one day, noticing her companion, the nymph Callisto, was with child after being seduced by none other than the great God Zeus, Artemis turned Callisto into a bear – whereon she gave birth to a son, Arcas. Artemis sent her hounds to chase and to kill them. Eventually having hunted down the nymph and the boy, Artemis killed them with her bow and arrow; But Zeus, taking pity on Callisto and her boy, lifted them up to the heavens and placed them amongst the stars where she became Ursa Major – the Great Bear – and Arcas, Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.’
Tolkien picked up his glass and sipped a little more whiskey, then lit his pipe and sat smoking in seeming calm before, to George’s evident surprise, Tolkien leapt up from the chair and began pacing in front of the fire, talking in great haste and using his pipe stem as a pointer to punctuate his remarks.
‘…it’s remarkable!’ he stammered, ‘on face value these are two very different tales; but underneath there are clear similarities: the transformation of a woman into a bear, and the killing of that self-same bear with a bow and arrow following a hunt; the placing of a young boy in the constellation of Ursa Minor…’
George was looking up at Tolkien in stunned silence. He looked over at Shona who had a half smile on her face. Tolkien, unaware of the effect of his performance on the two adults present, continued his lecture.
‘Of course we then not only have the fact that both stories are about bears but pertain to be a foundation stories for Ursa Major – something we might put down to sheer coincidence were it not for the fact that the Great Bear looks nothing like a bear! Don’t you find?’
It was George’s turn to stammer and clear his throat. ‘I suppose, so. It does look more like a saucepan, granted. As to whether it looks like a bear; not explicitly so, no.’
‘Exactly!’ Tolkien said, pointing at him with his pipe stem. ‘The main feature of Ursa Major is the handle of the saucepan as you put it – or as it is drawn on star maps, the tail of the bear. But bears do not have long tails!’ he flashed a grin.
‘This means the figure of the bear that links these two stories is not suggested by the form, the shape, of the stars themselves - we are not, then, looking at independent invention based on the shape of the constellation... the earliest maps of the heavens drew on the myths of the bear already associated with those seven stars, and tried to make them look like a bear – rather badly! And, what’s more, we can immediately discount direct borrowings from one culture to another – had the Blackfoot learned the tale from European settlers sometime after Columbus then the form of the story would be much closer to that of the original Greek; clearly the Blackfoot version, if it is related to the Greek tale – it is through a common, and very ancient ancestor!’
On the couch the toddler Alfred had begun to snivel and cry in his mother’s arms at the staccato ramblings and eccentric gesturing of this odd little stranger who had invaded his home.
Tolkien hesitated and smiled apologetically.
‘Do you see what I’m driving at Mr Mac Govan-Crow? Scholars believe that the American Indian reached the New World many thousands of years ago by crossing the Bering straits when they were iced over; the story you have just told could be very old indeed, for if both stories sprang from a common ancestor, as seems the case, that common ancestor would have to be at least 10,000 years old, the date the Americas separated from Eurasia after the Bering ice-bridge had melted! A tale from ancient Ice Age Europe now spread across the whole globe!’
In the silence that followed Tolkien finally allowed himself to sit down and slow his breathing.
‘It is strange, Sir.’ said George. ‘Only my people, the Siksikawa, maintain that we didn’t come from anywhere else except the ‘New World’ as you put it, which is not ‘new’ to us. Have you ever considered that perhaps the white man may have learned the story from the Red, those thousands of years ago?’ he lifted an eyebrow in challenge.
If George Mac Govan-Crow had expected to see Tolkien chastened, or defensive, he was to be disappointed; for Tolkien was staring intently into the flames of the fire, and when he turned to Ipisowaasi of the Siksikawa it was with utter humility and honesty that he spoke:
‘My friend, nothing would surprise me less than to discover that. There are many truths that have been lost to us over the passage of time – who knows what tales were spread, and how, in past ages, when the very face of the earth as we know it was different; before fire and flood changed the shape of the coasts, and sent lands once proud of the sea into its depths..?’
As he spoke an image rose in his mind…a recurring nightmare of a great wave sweeping over green fields, destroying all in its path…
George nodded. And for the first time since they had met, Tolkien saw the wariness and mistrust fall from the man’s eyes; George Mac Govan-Crow smiled.
Chapter Sixteen: On Waden Hill
Conall Astor was still drunk; he had left Shen’s and crossed the stone circle, passing close by the Devil’s chair stone, to which he had bowed in greeting, before continuing along the Avenue for the fourth time that day, his path winding this way and that as he looked heavenwards at the constellations, so clear in the absence of street-lights. The night was warm and just the gentlest of breezes was present, carrying with it the scent of grasses and hedgerows.
Conall fumbled with the keys of the camper, entered, and gathered up the bedding from the couch; he proceeded to walk to his favourite stone and dumped the pile on the side facing away from the road. He retraced his steps and picked up the remnants of the bottle of water from earlier, then sat on the tailgate and brushed his teeth in the moonlight.
After he had rinsed his mouth, he lit the hurricane-lantern that hung from a hook on the van’s ceiling and unrolled the alder-wood flute from the cloth Shen had wrapped it. The flute was beautifully carved, and the wood warm to the touch; just below the mouthpiece but above the finger-holes there was a carving of an owl, secured to the main body with twine, from which a couple of faded feathers and beads were hanging. Traces of stained patterns were visible along the instrument. A faint smell of wood smoke, incense and pipe tobacco rose from it. Conall held it up before him.
‘Thank you, Alfred.’
He had no idea of the age or provenance of the flute; for all he knew it could have been many hundreds of years old… predating the arrival of the White Man. He felt both proud and abashed that such a precious item should have been entrusted to him; maybe he shouldn’t have taken it; maybe he should have left it with Shen. But he supposed it was the old man’s wish. He held it close, not daring to play it; not here, by the road, not without ceremony. He wasn’t tired; he should walk somewhere, and do it honour…
Leaving his bedding in the care of the stone, Conall took the footpath that led away from the Avenue westwards up over the brow of Waden hill. The hill was steep but soon he had crested it, and he stood for a moment taking in the view. Behind him, the way he had come, Hakpen hill rose on the other side of the road, while to his south was the spread of the Kennet valley, and beyond the river the roll of the downs as they rose up to the soft peaks of Tan and Milk Hill. But from his vantage point atop Waden Hill, Conall could glance over at the bowl of Silbury to the south west as it stood majestically proud of the valley within its moat, now iridescent in the low, nearly full moonlight.
Conall dug into his jacket pocket and took out his tobacco; sitting on the long grass he took some from the packet, and as earlier crumbled some onto the ground. Itsipaiitapio’pah, he muttered, Great Spirit, as Alfred had taught him, and as his father George had taught him before…. He then rolled and placed a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, then lifted it to the sky, then to the ground, and exhaled upwards, repeating the Blackfoot phrase.
When he had finished, he unwrapped the flute from its cloth and held it up to the sky. Son of Ipisowaasi, thank you. Great spirits, I am honoured to accept this gift, he said. Then nervously he put the wooden mouthpiece to his lips and breathed softly into it. A warm, hollow note sounded clearly, filling the still night. Conall felt anyone walking in the surrounding valleys or hills would have been able to hear it… nevertheless, emboldened by alcohol, he continued, moving his fingers slowly and inexpertly, but feeling almost as if the flute was playing itself. He played to the stars; he played to the memory of Alfred, he played to the memory of his sister; but mostly he played for Shen, wondering if from her room in Church cottage, she might hear the sound of her Grandfather’s flute playing; it wasn’t her fault, none of it; but if I hadn’t been here…no, it was surely too late by then anyway…
When the urge to play had left him, he stood, gazing skywards again, north to the Great Bear, and he began to spin, his arms outstretched, and then sweeping back round like a swooping eagle, turning, turning, treading out a flat circle in the grass; and as he span the Bear span above him in turn around the still central point of the heavens; and he bowed his back, squared his shoulders, rhythmically turning, imagining himself the bear, mouthing silent meaningless words; and even though miles from the nearest human being his voice remained a whisper so that this guttural chanting that arose from some deep part of his psyche ended at his lips and went no further; yet still he danced under those seven burning brothers and their sister who had escaped to the sky in the story Alfred had told him a year before…
…
…Conall had listened to the tale and they had both stood a while in thought looking up at the Great bear from the back-garden of Church cottage; he had considered not saying anything, but his curiosity compelled him to speak.
‘Alfred?’ he had begun. The old man had nodded for him to continue. ‘You say four brothers were dragged out of the tree and killed?’
‘Yes, that is how my father told it me.’ The old man said, sucking on the stem of his pipe.
‘Wouldn’t it make sense if the four stars there were the brothers?’ he had asked, pointing at the rectangular body of the Great Bear. Alfred had looked up quietly.
‘I see why you might think that; but the sister needs to be one of them so she can be close to her young brother, who is the northern star, there.’ He had pointed to the Little Bear.
Conall had smiled to himself.
‘There are seven brothers and one sister, yes? Now what if there was a way that they could all be together in the Great Bear, and the little brother not all the way over there in the Little Bear?’ he had asked. Alfred shrugged.
‘That would be pleasing, I suppose. But there are only seven stars in the Great Bear’ He had said, rubbing the back of his neck.
‘Alfred – look at the second star from the end of the tail, closely.’
‘What am I looking for?’ he said, through a cloud of smoke.
‘How many stars do you see?’
For a while there had been silence as the old man squinted at the stars, and then a low chuckle had escaped him.
Conall had laughed along with him.
‘That’s right. Most people don’t notice it, but that second star is a double star – it has a smaller, fainter companion, riding on its back. So, there’s your younger sister, and there, still riding on the cradleboard on her back as in life, her baby brother!’
‘So the family is together again. Brother and sister united. That’s good.’ Alfred had said. And this is what he had meant in the will when he had gifted the flute to Con for re-uniting brother and sister…
…
On the hillside Conall looked up and held the sister star in his gaze and remembered his sister Melissa and himself, as children, her carrying him piggy-back across their garden, laughing, as he swished at her with a small twig ‘Giddy up, horsey! Giddy up!’ his hand gripping a great mass of her dark curly hair, identical to his own. Identical. Two particles once joined, linked forever...
And he imagined those same two particles spinning in space, once joined but now separate, shooting apart into the void… and one shining, spinning particle faltering, flickering, dying, yet the other carrying on unaffected…
And he thought of the dream of the horse on the riverbank – and how it was on such a night as this that he’d walked to the Kennet last year because the dream was burning in his head – and how one particle, spinning in space, had chosen not to go into that water, while the other had done so, never to rise again…
At last he cried out, finding his voice:
‘I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry! Melissa! I’m sorry!!! I didn’t know – why didn’t I know?!’
Chapter Seventeen: The Lady of the Lake
After a brief nightcap by the fire, Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms, but Tolkien was not yet sleepy; he had gone outside to the small garden of the cottage to take in the cool night air, and when Alfred had been lulled to sleep by her singing, Shona Mac Govan-Crow had stepped outside to join him.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ she said, ‘when you were talking over dinner about Boann and the well - I didn’t feel it was my place to say but it reminded me of something. And since you later mentioned the stars…’
‘No, please, tell me, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow.’ Tolkien insisted.
‘Shona, please’ she insisted. Shona pointed upwards at the sky to the pale band of stars that bisected the heavens.
‘It’s just that I always think of Boann when I see the Milky Way.’
‘Why so?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Bothar Bo Finne is the Gaelic name for it,’ Shona said, ‘’Path of the White Cow’’ Boann means white cow.’
Tolkien lifted his brows in delight.
‘Thank you. I never knew that.’
Shona remained gazing upwards at the Milky Way. ‘Sometimes I come out here and look up at the stars and feel like I’m home. There’s my beloved Boyne. I wonder which was named first, though, the river on earth or the one in the sky?’
Tolkien tapped his pipe-bowl against the low garden wall and sat on its top, touching a small pile of white rocks clustered on the wall top, beside which stood a couple of burned out snubs of old candles.
‘It’s her dog I feel most sorry for.’ Shona smiled, as she turned to go.
‘Her dog?’
‘Yes; Boann’s lapdog. Dabilla was its name; poor mite was washed out to sea and drowned with her. I had a dog named Dabilla as a child, I named it after Boann’s dog…’
Tolkien looked up at the stars, open mouthed and flushed – and then laughed out loud at his own ignorance.
‘Ha! You’re a dunce, Ronald!’ he chuckled. Shona looked a little taken aback.
‘If that’s the Boyne in the sky then there’s your lost dog, safe and sound!’
Tolkien gestured skywards to the pale celestial river and there on its banks he pointed out to Shona the constellation of Canis Major, the Great Dog, not hard to see for its brightest star, Sirius, the ‘dog-star’ as it was known, was the brightest star in the entire northern sky.
Why hadn’t he seen it earlier? All the clues were there! Where else should one look for a ‘bright dog’ but the star Sirius, the brightest star, the dog-star, pacing beside the river in the heavens? Tolkien berated himself. So many legends had been writ large upon the heavens in antiquity – just as the siblings in Mr Mac Govan-Crow’s bear story had been transferred to the heavens so too in the west – many heroes of myth had been afforded the same privilege; the sky was populated by heroes and gods – so why not the characters of British myth, too? Orion, the hunter, had been the subject of their discussion earlier – and they’d agreed the icy river he was crossing to regain, somehow, his solar eye, was the Milky Way, but Tolkien had not quite grasped the final part of the image - Orion’s hunting dog, following its master, trotting alongside the Milky Way, had in all probability inspired the name of the Kennet… ‘bright dog’ - meaning the Kennet, like the Boyne, was somehow the earthly equivalent of the river of stars in the sky. The presence of Dabilla in the Irish tale had made it a near-certainty that a version of the Boann myth had existed here – there was the river of the dog, and the well-head of the eye, linked by name to the nearby goddess of the waters at Bath.
I should have known after all our talk earlier, he thought…It was there all along in ‘Pearl’ - under the nose of this dim-witted philologist for years and I never saw it! He softly intoned the verses of this medieval lyric, so close to his heart, the meaning of the stone-strewn river separating the poet from his deceased child suddenly clear:
In the depths stood dazzling stones aheap
As a glitter through glass that glowed with light,
As streaming stars when on earth men sleep
Stare in the welkin in winter night
Like the river in the poem, the Kennet’s depths were stippled with small pebbles of chalk that shone white like stars in the winter sky. And remembering the stone he had picked up earlier he put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the small piece of chalk. The river of the poem was the river that divided Paradise from mortal realms – the same as the Greek Styx on whose banks the three-headed dog Cerberus roamed; the river and the dog; now of course its stones twinkled like stars, for they were stars! He wondered if the poet had drawn on some older tradition when he had written these lines, unbeknown of their meaning, or whether he had known all along of what he was writing, and Tolkien just hadn’t seen it: The river of paradise was the heavenly river – the Milky Way, across which the souls of the dead might pass…
‘I’m ever so sorry, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow, but would it be overly rude if I went for a short walk? I have some thinking to do…’ he said, his voice shaking with repressed excitement.
…
Tolkien had retraced the route they had walked earlier back past where the road curved about Silbury, and along to a gate in the field below the hill on whose easternmost point West Kennet rose, and where Barfield had earlier pointed out a copse of trees at the far side of the field in which the Swallowhead spring was hidden. Taking the path towards the trees Tolkien continued until he reached a still pool, crossed by a handful of large sarsen steppingstones. Beyond the stones, in a hollow cradled by the hillside, stood two willow trees, and from between them the waters of the Kennet bubbled from the earth. He strolled around the trees, noticing a small stone cut in the hillside beyond; here, he guessed, in the winter, the waters would rise, but already, in April, the flow had lessened to emerge from the earth closer to the pool.
Tolkien returned to the brook and sat on one of the large, flat stones that forded the stream; he sat gazing into its clear depths.
There, to the north, was the shadow of the domed Silbury hill against the pale starlight, and at his feet the chuckling water, one part silvered now by the light of the crescent-moon; all was quiet, save the lilting of the water, though in the distance an owl hooted, two, three times.
How long had men come here to worship or seek solace at the wisdom-giving waters of the eye, he wondered, here beneath the stars at this holy stream?
This flashing silver river that seemed to divide the world of the dead from the living; the river of the bright dog…
Tolkien knelt, and cupped a clear handful of the cool water, and let it flow back through his fingers. And as he did so he lifted his head, and lo! There above him on the rim of the south-western sky, as if summoned, the jewel-like Sirius still hung in the heavens, flashing a purplish blue, just on the point of sinking down below the hillside to follow its master Orion into the lands below the horizon, but it would rise again in the east as herald of the new dawn. And in the east at this late hour lay Vega, glinting blue in the Lyre, and to its left, Deneb, the tail of the swan - and rising to a gentle arch across the back of the swan in the northern sky was the milky waters of the heavenly river aping the flow of the Kennet on the ground.
Was this pool once ringed with hazel, he wondered? Did the salmon of wisdom swim here, silver beneath the moon?
The reflection of the crescent-moon, like a curved barque sailing between the horns of Taurus, seemed to traverse the waters before him, casting a bright shifting path across the water, that trembled then broke into many pieces before reconstituting; forming then dissolving, trembling and breaking, the crescent becoming a lidded white eye, a curved back of a silver salmon; it broke apart, re-forming, shivering, pulsing and morphing into wild patterns and shapes; a crescent, boat; a lidded eye again; a dancing cool white flame; a trail of flowers, of stars, of sparks, of fish; once more a sliver of moon …
It was hypnotising, lulling, and Tolkien, tired from the days walk and the whisky found himself drifting somewhere between thought and sleep. The waters of the river seemed to rise and swirl; churning to a white starry foam; lifting, breaching their banks; a dual stream of liquid shooting forth to land and sky; one flooding the land and creating a broad river on earth, the other rising to the sky and forming the milky river of stars… the primal waters divided into above and below.
Into these waters Tolkien stared entranced… and there, at the heart of the black mirror, the reflected flash of the moon like a pale severed head in the ripples of the stream lay as if suspended from the branches or caught in the roots of a shining tree that joined earth and heaven… But it shifted and flashed, became distorted into an eye, first a barely-open white eye, then the burning eye of the sun, yellow like a cat’s; and it seemed to him that the eye looked across time and space from a place that knew neither, and that somehow the one eye was wise but possessive… wishing to hide its precious treasure from the unworthy, from those who would steal it… it became the eye of Fafnir the dragon, hiding the ring that would be stolen from him by Siegfried… the eye of Smaug guarding the cup that Bilbo Baggins would steal; and the eye of Nechtan jealously guarding the waters of knowledge from Boann… or the lamp-like pale eye of the creature Gollum…
Then, in the reflecting waters, it seemed he saw, in that eternal moment between two thoughts, the lady of the waters, the fairy princess, lady of the white cows; Sulis-Minerva, mistress of magic – the poet’s daughter who in the Pearl poem lay across the river of death on the shores of Paradise - about her head a silvery-gold corona of stars; now rising from the waters and straddling the river. She bent over the waters, seeming to pour the glimmering flashes of moonlight into the pool; her pale beauteous face lifted high amid the stars, and she bridged the earth and the heavens like a pallid rainbow, the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia her nourishing breasts, a white-shadow arching over the sleeping men of earth; blessed; snow-white, queen of stars....
All in white she was, her hair loose about her shoulders, soft as the owl’s feather; wise beyond years, and about her throat a pendant or phial of rock crystal, lit by an inner fire; the reflected light of the star shining from on the western horizon; and she seemed to peer down into the mirrored surface of the waters…no, she WAS the waters, and the stars combined, and one flowed into the other… a face below and a face above, their gaze meeting; two but yet one.
There she arched above and below, this maid of the Sidhe, this Elven princess, this lady of the lake; her white track streaming behind her… a track of flowers, of stars, of chalk pebbles in the holy stream, of the shimmering ripples caused by the moonlight on the waters… and it seemed to him that she had come from a far distant land, a land that was beyond the reach of mortal man… from Paradise… But the water! Flooding over the low, green land! The terror of the approaching waves! The burning, baleful eye…blazing over the flood… … and then there was a dark-haired girl floating in the water surrounded by flowers and shining stones and then flames and the sound of gunfire and shells exploding… the past, or shadows of what might yet come to pass?
Then at last this shifting reflection calmed and resolved once more into a mirrored form of distant figure standing on the far, green, shore; a kind, sad, face, and his heart leapt… Mother? … his heart cried out… Mother?! Unthinking he reached forward, seeking to grasp her reflection, his hand plunging into the cool water so that the image atomised into fragments and disappeared.
When the void closed the sparkling water resolved to mirror the moon-ship sailing across the heavens above; the vision that had come unbidden left him as swiftly as it had arrived. The moon on the water, though, still shifted and trembled, but now through the prism of his tears; in the distance the owl once more called, once, twice, three times….PART ONE: The Well of Knowledge
Handsome is the yellow horse,
But a hundred times better
Is my cream-coloured one,
Swift as the sea mew
Taliesin, Cad Goddeu (The Battle of the Trees)
Accursed be the damsel,
Who, after the wailing,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging deep
Accursed be the maiden,
Who, after the conflict,
Let loose the fountain of Venus, the raging sea
Taliesin, Seithenin
Chapter One: The White Horse
(Wed 14th April 1937)
On a warm mid-April morning in 1937 three gentlemen, two Oxford dons and a solicitor, were beginning their customary annual walking tour that this year was to be a ‘literary pilgrimage’ from the pretty market town of Marlborough in Wiltshire to Porlock in the Quantock Hills of Somerset where in 1797 the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge, intoxicated with opium, had written the famously obscure and unfinished verse ‘Kubla Khan’. Their plan was to walk the nearly 100 miles to Porlock over a leisurely eight or nine days, taking in the ancient sites of Wiltshire, before crossing into Somerset and reaching their goal via the Cathedral of Wells and the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey.
Having left Marlborough at nine in the morning, the three friends had taken the path westwards across the Downs, climbing slowly for about a mile and then turning northwest at the hamlet of Rockley, to the Hakpen horse – one of Wessex’s famous white-horses carved into the chalk hills of the Downs. Here they had decided to stop for a few minutes to enjoy the view before turning south and taking the prehistoric track-way known as the Ridgeway to Overton down, where they would join the Marlborough to Bath road close to their first proper stop, the village of Avebury, a small unassuming village that stood within the bounds of what was the largest prehistoric stone circle in the world. The intention of the three hikers was to take lunch in the Red Lion, the pub that lay at the centre of the circle, before walking the last few miles to Calne, where Coleridge had stayed in 1814-16, and where they aimed to spend that night. From then on they would take a bus to Wells and walk the rest of the way to Porlock, all going well.
Clive Staples Lewis, who his friends knew as ‘Jack’, dark, balding and thickset, was presently leading the other two men down the gentle slope of the hill on which the Hakpen horse had been carved a century before. Behind him strode Owen Barfield, lean, tall and well-built with a full head of dark hair, above a handsome, elfin face – who was struggling to keep up a conversation with his friend who kept striding forward out of earshot. Their physical differences had always amused the third member of the party, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, who, like Lewis, was a fellow of the school of English at the University of Oxford. This kind, if serious-faced man, the shortest and the eldest of the three by 6 years being now in his mid-forties, and who seemed to wear a perpetual frown as if always chewing over some deep problem, watched the ill-matched pair walk ahead and disappear over the brow of the hill vanishing out of sight.
Damn their route-march! Tolkien thought. This was a supposed to be a leisurely hike, not a military exercise! Well… let them march on! He thought, letting his heavy pack fall from his shoulders.
The April sun was pleasing; Tolkien, who had already removed his tweed jacket on the climb out of Marlborough, now rolled up his shirtsleeves and took off his hat, wiping his now-greying dark fringe where it had stuck to his brow. Then, fishing into the pocket of his plain brown waistcoat for his pipe and tin of Navy Cut tobacco, he began to fill his pipe, tamping the tobacco down with a thumb and then scrabbled about in his trouser pocket for a box of matches.
As he smoked Tolkien felt himself relax for the first time in what seemed months. The spring term at Oxford had not been any busier than normal, but all his spare time had been taken up since before Christmas correcting the proofs of his book. He had tried, not wholly successfully, to remain unruffled at the errors the type-setters had made, but at least correcting their mistakes had allowed him the opportunity to add some new material and to iron out some minor inconsistencies he had discovered in his tale. You think a book is done and dusted, but writing it is only the beginning! He had said in frustration to Lewis over a half a glass of beer in Lewis’s rooms in Magdalen college two days before. He had just returned from the Post Office having sent his publisher, Stanley Unwin, an illustration for the dust-jacket, showing the dragon Smaug flying out of the Lonely Mountain; it was, to Tolkien’s eye, a little amateurish, but preferable to what some professional artist with no real idea of the story might dream up. Jack had raised his glass to the success of the book, but Tolkien had shrugged. ‘I’m happier celebrating that the bloody thing is finally out of my hands, Jack. It had become, alas, like a guest who outstays his welcome. No doubt in time I will miss his company, but for now I’m happy to be free once more.’. ‘Freedom, Tollers, is one of those invisible qualities one fails to appreciate until it is taken from oneself. Like a fish only appreciates water when dangling from the angler’s hook…’.
‘When I was in Flanders…’ Tolkien said, ‘I thought a simple glass of beer, in a quiet country pub, would be a joy forever. And so it was, for a time; but then came the time I just downed the drink and thought no more of it; the tragedy of mankind is his ability to forget…’
‘Then may we ever be sent…’ said Lewis, raising his glass, ‘adversity, so that we may never tire of freedom.’
…
Now distanced from the demands of not only book, but also family and work, Tolkien let out a happy sigh. After Mass that morning he had left his stack of papers on his desk at Northmoor Road and had left for the station determined not to even think of Hobbits or dragons until he returned home late the following week. He hoped, now, that this was the end of the matter; and standing here looking out over the valley he felt a sudden sense of freedom welling up within him, that escaped as a chuckle; this was a new start – no longer constrained by ‘The Hobbit’ he could return to his languages and mythology.
Above him skylarks were singing, invisible against the pale sky; he stood in the long grass, watching as industrious bees flitted from cowslip to cowslip. Below him, out of sight, he could hear Jack laughing, and so he walked on to join his companions who were now sat on the sloping ground close to the carved horse’s head.
On first sight the Hakpen horse was a strange looking beast, more reminiscent of a dog than a horse, Tolkien thought, thin legged and barrel bodied, though he conceded one was meant to see it from a distance away not upside down from above its back.
‘You’ll know, Tollers... Why do you imagine these horses were carved?’ Lewis turned and asked Tolkien as the latter approached the seated pair.
‘This one is a century old, as I recall – and I believe was cut to commemorate the coronation of Queen Victoria; but as for the others - why do people ever feel the need to mark the landscape?’ he replied, seating himself beside his companions, and refilling his pipe.
Lewis looked down over the valley for an answer – the only marks he could see were the lines of hedges and field boundaries; a small road ran north to south at the bottom of the valley, with a single motorcar heading along it.
‘To show land ownership: “This land is mine!” I suppose?’ He suggested, his slight Belfast accent adding a tuneful lilt to the words.
‘Spot on, I would say.’ Tolkien replied. ‘They were originally, I would think, a stamp of ownership of the local landowner; it’s like hanging a Stubbs above your fireplace – the Uffington horse, for instance, was undoubtedly a territorial marker for the tribe that lived in the hill-fort above it.’ His own words tumbled out quickly and slightly incoherently, somewhat staccato and punctuated with quick flashes of a smile.
The Uffington horse, to which Tolkien referred, was the most striking, as well as being the oldest, of all the Wessex horses. It’s sinuous, streamlined form had graced the Berkshire Downs from time immemorial; once believed to have been carved by Alfred the Great to celebrate a victory over the Vikings at Ethandune in 878 AD, its curved, abstract, and almost skeletal shape, three times the size of the Hakpen horse, had always suggested to Tolkien an origin much further back in prehistory.
‘But why a horse? What has a horse to do with territory per se?’ Lewis continued, lighting a cigarette.
‘Everything – to a prehistoric tribesman. Think, Jack! As a tribesman, how do you defend your land?’
‘Earthworks; arrows; swords.’ He said, exhaling a cloud of blue smoke that drifted lazily away.
‘Now how large is your territory going to be?’ Tolkien prodded.
Lewis shrugged. ‘As large as you can defend, I suppose, within a few hours walk from your camp.’ Their view over the edge of the Wiltshire Downs presented such a territory – it would take them a good few hours to reach the distant slopes above Cherhill, to their west; it was a rich land; worth defending; worth planting and settling on; worth fighting for.
‘Well think how much more territory you could defend on horseback than on foot. The first tribes to ride horses possessed a marked superiority over their contemporaries: they could not only possess more land, and defend it, but also embark on taking that of others – taking their land and their resources – their herds of cattle...’
Tolkien looked down at the carved face, dulled with age; overgrown with grasses and moss.
‘This one may be relatively new, but the white horse of Uffington… well, it’s is still galloping possibly thousands of years after it was carved, still claiming that land for a tribe who have long since journeyed beyond that vale to another...’ he drew on his pipe and peered out over the valley.
‘So you agree with Chesterton that it’s old?’ Lewis said, meaning the Uffington Horse.
Tolkien nodded. Chesterton’s poetry rose in his mind and he gave voice to his words over the crudely cut body of the chalk steed below:
Before the gods that made the gods
Had seen their sunrise pass,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was cut out of the grass.
Before the gods that made the gods
Had drunk at dawn their fill,
The White Horse of the White Horse Vale
Was hoary on the hill.
Age beyond age on British land,
Aeons on aeons gone,
Was peace and war in western hills,
And the White Horse looked on.’
He flashed a quick smile at his companions; although on the surface he often appeared shy, there was something of the bard about this man, and, when encouraged, enjoyed such recitations.
Lewis let out a sigh. ‘I must read the ballad again, Tollers. It has some beautiful parts – how does that verse go?:
For the end of the world was long ago,
When the ends of the world waxed free,
When Rome was sunk in a waste of slaves,
And the sun drowned in the sea.’
Lewis turned to the hitherto silent Barfield, who had been consulting his map.
‘Listen, Owen. Did I tell you? Tollers, Warnie and I walked to Uffington last summer and we were at the pub in the village, discussing why the hill beside the horse had been named Dragon Hill. Well, Warnie and Tollers were talking about dragons in general, sadly commenting on how they were all dead and gone when some local workman pipes up ‘They are not! I seen ‘em myself!!’
Lewis roared with laughter.
‘So why does it bear the name of Dragon Hill?’ Barfield asked, smiling at his friend’s jollity.
‘Local legend says it’s where St George slew the Dragon.’ Tolkien answered. ‘But I wonder just how old the name is - the Dragon-slaying myth is really very ancient indeed, so I doubt Good Old Saint George had much a part to play in it! One only has to think of Apollo slaying the Python at Delphi to see that it’s really a myth about new cults and new gods overcoming the old, and in many cases taking over their holy sites.’
‘Ah, so you think the older British cults, like the Greek, were represented by the dragon or the serpent?’ Barfield asked. ‘That is interesting; I’m not overly familiar with ancient British beliefs but wait until we get to Avebury: I’ll show you something that I think might interest you.’
Lewis yawned.
‘Yes, Avebury… Delightful as this view is, I can’t help feeling we’re wasting precious drinking time at the Red Lion by being here. Horses and dragons aren’t really part of the Coleridgean theme of this holiday, after all…’
‘No?’ Barfield said, an eyebrow raised on his boyish face, ‘You may have a point about dragons, but not horses: think of Kubla Khan… is it not said that he owned ten thousand white horses? And was not the milk of these beasts only to be drunk by the Khan himself? Perhaps this milk was even the Milk of Paradise of Coleridge’s poem? I would say the white horse is extremely Coleridgean!!’
Lewis conceded the point to his friend and rose, shouldering his pack and waving his walking stick in the air with a cry of ‘Onward! Ale awaits!’ Tolkien remained seated for a moment, looking out over the pale landscape, to where the distant downs fading to blue were crested by the spike of the Cherhill monument, marking the end of that day’s proposed walk. He narrowed his eyes in the bright morning sun and muttered a few more lines of Chesterton before he rose to follow the others:
And the great kings of Wessex
Wearied and sank in gore,
And even their ghosts in that great stress
Grew greyer and greyer, less and less,
With the lords that died in Lyonesse
And the king that comes no more.
This image of the white horse stayed with Tolkien for the hour it took to walk along Hakpen hill to the edge of the downs at Overton. Here, at the point where the path met the Marlborough to Bath road, the hillside was crowned with a line of large round hillocks: the burial mounds of long-forgotten prehistoric kings; Lewis slowed his pace momentarily to survey these grass-covered tombs, four thousand years in age, but did not stop. Tolkien, however, paused and then ambled across from the path into the meadow to the middle one of the three ancient and time-weathered graves, now strewn with grasses, dandelions and other meadow flowers.
Tolkien climbed atop the steep rise of the barrow, and took a deep breath of the warm, spring scented air. Before him stretched the Kennet valley; running east to west, the Downs rising on both sides, steeper to the north where he sat, more gentle to the south, rising in soft folds of palest green, interrupted here and there by a copse of trees or lines of hedgerow, before fading to a lilac wash against the sky.
Tolkien re-lit his pipe and let his mind sink into the deep past. How might this gently undulating valley have looked when the kings whose bones lay beneath these once chalk-white burial mounds had first climbed this rise thousands of years before? He could almost hear the thumping of their horses’ hooves, see their pale hair blowing in the wind; hear their strange voices calling out even stranger names… their bronze spears glinting in the sun, striking fear into the small dark men with their flint blades who had lived in this place before them, and who stood cowering in the trees on seeing these tall mounted warriors arriving from the east. Did they see them, he wondered, as the Aztecs had seen the Spanish Conquistadors – as dreadful hybrid beasts, never having seen a horse and thinking man and steed were a single animal? What prehistoric Cortez or Pizarro rode this ridge so long ago, and did he accept the peace of the painted tribesmen who prostrated themselves before him or did he like the Conquistadors turn these green hills into a sea of blood?
It was these newcomers, Tolkien mused, who having overcome the native cults were perhaps the first to carve the shape of their steeds into the green hillsides of Wessex… a white horse on a field of green as a sign of victory; (why did that phrase always arise in his mind, he wondered?). But the Uffington horse, at least, was a strangely emaciated beast of victory, with a beak-like muzzle. He shuddered at a memory: the half-rotted body of a horse he had marched past on the way to the trenches of the Somme twenty years before, left hanging, bloated and rotting on a barbed wire fence, its body moving with rats, its head eyeless and lipless – the bleached bones of the muzzle protruding from the flyblown jaw … Tolkien blanched at the recollection. For four thousand years the horse and rider had dominated warfare but times had changed and no cavalry could match the artillery and machine gun fire of the modern battlefield.
The words of an Old English poem arose in his mind:
Hwær cwom mearg? Hwær cwom mago?
Hwær cwom maþþumgyfa?
Hwær cwom symbla gesetu?
Hwær sindon seledreamas?
Eala beorht bune!
Eala byrnwiga!
Eala þeodnes þrym!
Hu seo þrag gewat,
genap under nihthelm,
swa heo no wære….
Where is the horse gone? Where the rider?
Where the giver of treasure?
Where are the seats at the feast?
Where are the revels in the hall?
Alas for the bright cup!
Alas for the mailed warrior!
Alas for the splendour of the prince!
How that time has passed away, dark under the cover of night,
As if it had never been.
Gently he twisted a blade of grass around a finger. The memory of the decaying horse had made him uncommonly anxious, but perhaps that was as much to do with what Barfield had been talking about over breakfast at Marlborough that morning after they had alighted from the Oxford bus: the damned war in Spain; and that ignoramus Hitler sending troops there to support the fascists; and France extending its defences along its border with Germany…
Tolkien drove the thought from his mind. Such speculation not only solved nothing, but also cast a cloud over what was a beautiful spring day. And it was beautiful - the sky cloudless; his book was finished and his time his own; the grass smelled sweet, and the peace of the day only disturbed by the sound of an automobile wending its lonely way along the road back to Marlborough; his eyes were becoming heavy… maybe, he thought, he should just rest a bit longer…
Chapter Two: Sanctuary
(29th June 2012)
Eighty five years later, over the same stretch of hill on which the barrows of the prehistoric Kings ran like humps on the back of some giant half-submerged sea-creature, on a road now wider and heavy with speeding traffic, Conall Astor’s campervan lurched to a sudden halt causing a number of unsecured objects to crash into the back of his seat. Behind his van the driver of a pristine black Audi that had been tailgating him all the way from Marlborough screeched to a stop, sounded his horn and gesticulated wildly. Conall put his arm out the window and stuck up his middle finger as the Audi veered around him.
‘Fucking wanker!’ the driver yelled, so Conall changed his gesture, lifting up a curled little finger in the sign for ‘small dick’. To his immense relief the car carried on.
The cause of Conall’s sudden halt seemed oblivious to the accident it had nearly produced: the hare in the centre of the road fixed Conall with a golden eye before lolloping nonchalantly towards the grass verge. It’s angular, cat-like beauty was entrancing - like an emissary from an older world out of place on the burning tarmac – it’s indifference seemed to suggest that it, and not the road and its dirty machines, had precedence; my kind were here before yours, it seemed to say.
‘You take your time, lady!’ Conall shouted, sarcastically. The hare reached the roadside grass sat for a few seconds then was gone, leaving some flattened grass-stems as the only witness to its presence.
Restarting his van, and lifting a hand to the queue of vehicles that had formed behind him, Conall drove onwards a few yards and then signalled and turned into a small open area on the right of the road where a number of cars and vans were parked; and having found a space, the camper shivered once more to a silent halt.
For a few moments Conall sat still, gazing ahead at the rolling landscape of pale wheat and sheep-dotted insipid grassland, relieved that the three hour drive had ended; then with a nervous glance he took off his sunglasses and turned to inspect the damage in the back of the camper. Coffee was splashed up the back of the seat and lay in a puddle on the floor in which a number of books, papers, empty tobacco packets and diet coke bottles were scattered. Shit. He’d forgotten about the coffee cup. He picked up a dripping black notebook, wiped it on the seat next to him, and leaned across and shoved it into the crowded glovebox, whose contents promptly tumbled out into the foot-well.
‘Fuck it.’
A small cardboard packet had tumbled out, spilling its contents, a few blister packs of green and cream capsules, onto the floor. It was three weeks since he’d taken the last tablet, and already he had felt a sense of the old him returning; a sharpening of edges long dulled, slivers of happiness felt for the first time in many, many months; cold washes of grief, too – real grief, not the numb dumb-show the anti-depressants had afforded him for the last year. He didn’t know why he’d bothered to bring them. Weakness, he supposed; a prop, in case it all went horribly wrong again. Wrong again? That implied things had got better, and they hadn’t; it was time, that was all – not that one could put a time limit on grieving, no – but it was time to try to start living again, he supposed. At least he had the choice. She didn’t; but she wouldn’t have wanted him to give up.
I should just throw these into the first bin I find, he thought, leaving them where they had fallen.
The drive down from London had been uneventful; he had begun it with a vague sense of stress, and had been half tempted to turn around and head for home, but having reached Fleet services on the M3, he had sat on the bank of the car park with a coffee and a cigarette, and had felt that the old lightness of spirit might yet return if he relaxed and gave it a chance. Wasn’t that the whole reason for coming here? To mark a new start by returning to a place where in the past he had always been happy, but which had become slighted in his memory by those dark, tragic events of the previous year? He took a deep breath.
It had been over a year since he had last been here; and in that time his life had changed utterly and irrecoverably. Coming back here was an attempt to put it all in perspective; to draw a line under the past; not to forget it, but to try to move on from it, to lay a ghost to rest. This place had been somewhere where he had immediately felt at home, where he could just be. Might it now welcome him home like a prodigal son, past misdemeanours waiting, if he was fortunate, to be forgiven? But just now such a hope seemed a pipe-dream; all seemed flat to him, dull – the world was leaden, and he seemed to lack the means to shake off the veneer of greyness that seemed to coat everything like a fine ash. A walk should help, he mused; and a beer.
Conall leaned out of the window and looked at himself in the wing-mirror; a tired, unshaven, face looked back at him from beneath dark curls. He looked away. Still, a year on, he couldn’t hold his own gaze for long. Conall was, in his own words, ‘pushing forty’, and for the first time in his life he felt his age. He was dreading the day itself; all his life there had been two cakes – two sets of presents; last year it hadn’t mattered as they had all been too numb with the shock, but this year – with only a couple of months to go, and it being a ‘biggy’, as she had used to call such occasions, the idea of celebrating it alone, with her not there, was unthinkable.
Conall opened the door and stepped into the heat of the early July afternoon. The majority of the cars around him were empty; though muffled music was coming from a large converted minibus a little further up the path; it was painted black, with tinted windows, and howling wolves and a giant full-moon airbrushed on its side.
Though he was still a mile or so from the main village, he had decided to stop here knowing that on such a gorgeous day the main car parks that served Avebury village and the stone circle that surrounded it would already be full; besides, he reasoned, he wished to walk into the village the old way, from the Sanctuary and along the Avenue. And he wanted to walk after spending such a long time behind the wheel. Besides, he could leave the van here and return later in the evening and camp the night; the main car park shut at seven and he would only have to move the van again – and to do that he’d need to be sober; something he had no intention of being.
Behind him, beyond the fence, and reached by a path in the long grass, lay the Bronze Age barrows; for a moment he had the urge to go and climb them but his goal for the moment lay to the immediate south of the road he had just turned off, and so locking his camper (not that, he imagined, anyone in their right mind would attempt to steal it or any of its coffee-stained contents) he headed for the road.
The road, where it crossed the brow of the hill, was steep and curved so that Conall was more reliant on his hearing to gauge a gap in the traffic than his sight. After a minute or so of waiting as cars, lorries, coaches and motorcycles roared past Conall ran across the road, a few yards from where the hare had crossed minutes before. Something furred but flat and dry coated the road, maybe once a fox or a hare. He grimaced and felt a wave of sadness.
Despite the large number of cars that had been in the lay-by Conall found the meadow in which the Sanctuary lay bereft of tourists. The only signs of life were three jackdaws poking around the long grass looking for insects, seemingly unconcerned with the roar of the traffic a few feet away. As ancient monuments went the Sanctuary, Conall thought, was singularly unimpressive. Concentric rings of concrete markers now showed where the great posts of a prehistoric structure had once stood lending to this circular meadow the feel of a badly conceived modern art installation; but its view was serene: to the east in the distance lay the cragged teeth-like stones that marked the façade of a large prehistoric tomb known as West Kennet long-barrow; and to its right the strangely rounded form of Silbury hill could be seen over the shoulder of the intervening hilltop. All lay bathed in a haze that bleached the distant rises of Milk hill and Tan hill into a uniform ridge of cyan – bluer than the sky itself which was almost colourless and hurt Conall’s eyes now he had taken his sunglasses off. The wheat field next to the long-barrow was marked with a huge crop circle, a vast circle of flattened wheat with radials of increasingly smaller circles spinning counter-clockwise from the centre. These crop glyphs still amazed him however many times he’d seen them; the work, he supposed, of guerrilla artists rather than extra-terrestrials they nevertheless still possessed a certain mystery, perhaps born of their anonymity, their perfection and their elusive meaning.
Conall walked to the central concrete ring, sat himself on one of the posts, and took a pack of American Spirit tobacco out of his shirt pocket. First taking a pinch, he crumbled the already powdery tobacco onto the earth before him. Itsipaiitapio’pah, Great Spirit, he mumbled under his breath, a habit he had picked up on his last visit here from an old man who had since returned to the Ancestors - at least he was old, Conall thought, thinking of the old man; it’s easier to deal with then – a good innings as they say, trite though it may be; no one could have said it of her though: a good innings. Thirty-eight years old. She’ll always be thirty-eight... they shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old: Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. It’s not just the years that condemn, Con thought; survivors guilt; or just plain guilt – there’s a pretty fucking hefty dose of condemnation there.
He inhaled and breathed out the smoke in the direction of the swifts that were screaming and tumbling overhead beneath the criss-cross of vapour trails that divided up the sky. Not so long ago he would have looked up jealously, wishing he had been jetting off to somewhere other than where he was; somewhere where he couldn’t be reminded of things. But today Conall Astor knew that he had to stop running away.
Alone, in the circle, he put a hand over his face. Then, straightening and wiping his eyes, he drew a deep breath on his cigarette. ‘Well, I’m back!’ he said.
Chapter Three: The Serpent’s Head
‘Tollers?!’
Tolkien looked up from where he had lain down on the mound a few minutes earlier. Lewis had crossed back over the road and was leant over the fence to the barrow field.
‘Come on, man. We’re in need of tea! What are you doing?’
‘You miss so much with your marching, Jack!’ Tolkien muttered, standing up somewhat awkwardly and replacing his hat.
Lewis’s already sunburned head turned away and he headed back over the road to the field opposite where Barfield was slowly walking in a wide circle, eyes to the ground. Tolkien reluctantly shouldered his pack, and descended from the barrow, turning back for a moment to bow to the bones of the unknown king whose tomb it had been, sweeping off his hat and uttering words of farewell.
A few yards from the road in the direction of another great barrow lay a flat circular expanse of ground, its short grass studded with a number of pristine concentric circles of short concrete posts of varying sizes.
‘This place,’ Barfield, who had been circling the posts, said as he approached the others ‘is the Sanctuary – it was excavated a couple of years back – and it seems that it was originally some kind of circular wooden structure – these concrete posts mark where the wooden poles once stood - and it was probably roofed. And then at some point it was all surrounded by a ring of sarsen stones… they’ve all gone now - destroyed by pious locals since the 1700’s though the antiquarian Stukeley drew them in a sketch he made here in the 1720’s…’
‘What was it, Baedeker Barfield – a temple?’ Lewis asked.
Barfield shrugged, digging around in his backpack. ’Possibly, or a mortuary-house, I think someone suggested – where the bodies of the dead were left to rot before they were put in the tombs, the long-barrows. But you know what Stukeley called it?! The hakpen, the snake’s head. It’s after this structure that the whole ridge from here to the horse seems to have been named. Now, with what you were saying earlier about the Old Religion, Tollers, and the defeat of the serpent cults…’
Lewis looked down at the rings of posts in un-characteristic silence; seemingly nonplussed. ‘I suppose this was just an empty field when we were last here.’ He said, looking at Barfield.
‘I guess so. We must have walked past here, but I don’t recall much about it – except the rain.’
‘Ha! And the ride back, do you remember?!’ Lewis laughed. ‘Hitching a lift to Marlborough on that cart?’
Barfield smiled with affection. ‘Yes, in the dark and the rain, and Harwood singing!’
Tolkien felt oddly touchy at their reminiscing; he had hardly known Lewis back then. I do hope this trip doesn’t turn into a nostalgic reverie for those two, he thought gruffly. He bristled at his own jealousy. Was it jealousy, though, he wondered? Yes, in part, but not for Lewis and his cronies; it was, perhaps, more sadness he had not been able to make such memories himself with those he should have been here with. But stoically he cast such thoughts from his mind.
‘So, I guess the ridge is the back of the snake and this hill that marks the end of the ridge is its head?’ Tolkien asked.
Barfield turned. ‘No. It heads north-west from here; Stukeley believed the whole of the Avebury monument was the serpent… it’s a serpent writ large in stone…’ Having found the volume he had been searching in his rucksack he opened it out on a folded-over page that showed an old black and white hand-drawn map; it was Stukeley’s plan of the monuments.
‘Look, here’s the head, where we are now, at Overton Hill’ he said, pointing at the right-hand side of the drawing to a circular feature, ‘…and then an avenue of stones, the beast’s neck, snakes its way to the main circle at the centre, in which two smaller stone circles are to be found… though each of them was as big as Stonehenge, which gives one some idea of just how huge the main circle is! Then the tail, if you will, is another avenue leaving the circle on its western side and heading towards Beckhampton. You must admit it is rather snakelike. The naming of hakpen hill, then, is more than coincidental… it seems to support Stukeley’s theory.’
Tolkien looked up from the page. From their current viewpoint the main stone circle and village within was still obscured by the rise of what Stukeley’s plan called ‘Windmill hill’ to the northwest. Hakpen. But on what authority, Tolkien wondered, had it been so named, or just in Stukeley’s imagination?
‘And here’s where we’ll find the pub!’ Lewis said, pointing to the centre of the circle. ‘Fiendishly clever of them to build a pub right at the heart of the circle!’ He joked. ‘Obviously, the avenues were for guiding them home on dark nights when they were worse for wear with drink! How long until we get there? An hour? You know, I know it’s ten years on, but I really don’t recall much of this at all.’
‘Three-quarters of an hour, I would think.’ Barfield said. He looked at his pocket watch. ‘It’s eleven already, too early for lunch, really. But there is a tearoom down there beside the road near Silbury Hill’ he said, pointing to a flat-topped rise just visible above the trees, ‘and we could perhaps stop there for tea and then eat properly at the pub later. We have all day.’
‘Well, you have the map and we’ll trust your judgement.’ Lewis said, not looking up from the plan.
Tolkien paused and looked up at the skylarks, his own choice would have been, as they were already at the so-called ‘serpent’s head’, to skip tea and continue down its throat into its belly down the Avenue, the route the people of Avebury would have no doubt taken four and a half thousand years earlier.
Lewis, still looking at the plan – pointed a nicotine stained finger at the central feature - a great domed hill with a flattened top, so perfect in its shape that it was quite obviously man-made. Then peering up from the plan to the western horizon saw the same flat-topped mound in the flesh, peeking over the intervening hills.
‘Rather a fitting start to our Coleridge homage, wouldn’t you say?’ Barfield said, ‘the great hill of Silbury - the stately pleasure dome in the valley of the sacred river Kennet,’ lifting lines from Coleridge’s poem. ‘It’s old – the Romans had to curve their otherwise straight road to Bath around it in order to avoid it.’
‘It’s always struck me as looking like a huge steamed pudding,’ remarked Lewis; ‘All this walking has made me hungry. Do you think there might be steak and kidney pudding at the Red Lion?’
‘Shall we climb it?’ Barfield said, ignoring Lewis’s comment.
Lewis looked at the steep sides of the hill and scratched at his chin in thought.
‘I’m in two minds. It would possibly be better, if we are to attempt the feat, to climb it now before the day gets too warm; but my stomach is disagreeing with me. Still, we could have a pot of tea and then decide.’
‘I climbed it myself years ago, before our last visit!’ The solicitor’s face lit up with a puckish smile. ‘And we danced on the summit!’
‘Why did they build it, Owen? Is it a tomb, like the Pyramids?’ Lewis asked.
‘No – no burial has been found, despite the local legends…’
‘Don’t mention legends, Barfield… we’ll never get our tea…see how Toller’s ears picked up like a hound?’ Jack quipped.
Tolkien held a match to his pipe and puffed away, grinning. ‘I already know them, Jack.’ He said through pipe-clenched teeth, ‘Despite crossing the county border this is still, you know, my neck of the woods mythologically speaking. A King Zel is supposed to be buried in the hill, on horseback, in golden armour…’
‘Golden armour, indeed!’ Jack mocked. ’There’s the mark of a modern myth, surely; gold armour would be practically useless against a bronze or iron blade.’
‘Unless the gold is a symbol for the sun?’ Suggested Barfield.
‘Perhaps.’ Lewis conceded. ‘What if Silbury were derived from the Roman Sol? The Hill of the Sun?’
He looked towards Tolkien, but the latter seemed deep in contemplation.
‘Possibly; that argument has merit….’ Tolkien answered, ‘but Sil is closer to the Welsh word for the sun, Sul…’ (he pronounced it, correctly, as ‘seel’) ‘…If, if, the Celtic place-name hakpen has survived here then why not Sul?’
It seemed strange in this beautiful English setting to hear the echoes of the old Celtic tongue now long driven from these Downs; it was almost as if such ancient places were reluctant to let them go, or perhaps the newcomers, bound by fear or superstition, had thought it unwise to change the names. It lent the place a feeling of timelessness; as if some relic of a dark pagan Celtic past had broken through the veneer of England, like a long buried celandine from an ancient forest floor pushing up through a lawn in spring, long after the trees of the forest had been cleared to make way for the garden. Words could be vehicles for such feelings; passports into a different reality, or worlds long passed, Tolkien had always thought.
As Tolkien looked across the landscape England faded as if into a mist; and an ancient place emerged; he stood no more on Overton hill, or Hakpen ridge facing towards Silbury – he stood on the head of the serpent temple gazing on the hill of the sun, in the heart of a land that bore other names, names now only remembered in legend: Ynys Prydein, the Isle of the Mighty; Clas Myrddin: Merlin’s enclosure; Logres; Albion …
The temple of the Dragon, he thought. Was it possible or just the over-ripe imaginings of that antiquarian Stukeley - a man who had later claimed to be a druid and to have divined Biblical numbers in the measurements of Stonehenge? As he stood in thought the unsolicited image of a grinning dragon crossed, unwanted, into his consciousness. Smaug! How am I meant to forget my book when all around I’m surrounded by dragons?! He thought, suddenly annoyed at the obtrusion of work, of deadlines, of editorial queries into his reverie. Be gone, foul slitherer and leave me be! In his mind he saw the hero of old, his bow drawn back, shooting at the heart of the dragon; the incoming heroes on their white steeds, come to crush the serpent of gods of the older religion and their worshippers, and take from them their land and their women. A couple of verses from his beloved Genesis welled up in his mind:
‘And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust thou shalt eat all the days of thy life: And I shall put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise they head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’
He ground his heel into the ground of the Hakpen, banishing Smaug from his thoughts, determined that no more would his book intrude on his holiday; a resolution that would stand no chance of remaining kept.
Chapter Four: The Book and the Feather
Conall had returned to the campervan, and was taking a few moments to mop the remnants of the spilled coffee from the floor with a dirty t-shirt, and to replace the rest of the fallen objects (and others that had already been on the floor) to their proper place – stuffed under the sofa-bed. Most of his stuff had, in fairness, been properly packed away, but the decision to come here had been last-minute and so he had thrown a number of items on to the sofa-bed wrapped in a duvet, hoping they would be ok. The coffee had been a mistake, though. He’d wedged the unfinished cup between a pile of fairly heavy books and a lever-arch file on the small kitchen worktop behind the driver’s seat– and it would have been okay there, or so he told himself, if it hadn’t been for the hare…
The file, marked PhD, with the words ‘unfinished’ scrawled on the label lay half-open, and he collected a number of hand-written pages, star-maps and photocopies of ancient artefacts, statues and inscriptions that had cascaded from out of it. A few of the sheets were wrinkled and brown with coffee, but he gathered them up all the same and pushed them carelessly into the pile – pages of sketches of little clay figurines copied from Marija Gimbutas’ books on ‘Old’ Europe, with lozenge shapes and zig zags marked in black pen; carved cow-horns from Iberian tombs; print-outs of stellar alignments, some highlighted in red pen and exclamation marks. He didn’t need them now anyway. He snorted at the memory: a conversation from a few months before and the words of his then-tutor: ‘Astronomy is supposed to be science! Your original subject, on evidence for astronomy in prehistory was fine, if a little loose; but to start delving into these myths, well, Con, you’re on very shaky ground. If it’s not Indian myth, it’s Red Indian myth… I know you’ve had a very, very difficult time of late. But these subjects are simply not tenable, and I really cannot support your continued study of them, I’m sorry!’
‘Red Indian? That’s not very PC, is it?’ Con had answered. His tutor had just blinked at him and waved it off with a motion of his hand as irrelevant. Behind the tutor’s head was a large poster of stars being created in Orion’s belt as imaged by the Hubble telescope, and above this a poster of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN near Geneva including an image of an atom with electrons flying about the nucleus like billiard balls; the great and the small; was this guy so focussed on these extremes that he couldn’t see the everyday world, Con had thought? Surely what was interesting about stars and atoms was that we were made of both: the very substance of our being were atoms forged in those great stellar furnaces, matter that was, the closer you looked at it, just energy seeming to flit into being from out of some mysterious and timeless zero energy field… physics surely was supposed to allow one look at the world in wonder – not to ignore it.
Conall had often waxed-lyrical about this to anyone who would listen: on a quantum level space and time were illusory; changing the energy state of a single atom here changed every single other atom in the cosmos; alter the course of a pair of particles once joined and the other would move, too – even if it was thousands of millions of miles away – even though according to science nothing moved faster than light-speed – something between these particles carried that information in an instant. How could that be – that a pair of particles once joined were forever linked?! Modern physics was mystical, magical and it had returned the stuffy academic that Con had once been in danger of becoming into a would-be mystic, something closer to how he had been as a child; an image of Tao, the yin-yang symbol, now hung on a string around his neck, his hair, at least then, long. But his tutor remained unaware of any of this magic, un-awakened by its import – and had failed to see its importance to his student.
‘You’re a scientist Con. This research is NOT science.’
‘You accepted my proposal. I clearly stated that I’d be investigating ancient myths…’ Con retorted.
‘Look – every PhD proposal needs tweaking – we had hoped you’d come to realise that this kind of research is currently frowned upon in the academic community and that perhaps other aspects of the subject might take precedence in your research. You’re a physicist at heart; get this ‘Tao of physics’ rubbish out of your system and grow up.’
‘It’s pronounced Dao’ was all Con could muster in reply as he left the office.
Con had driven home from this meeting fuming; by the time he had reached his house and sat down at his computer his anger had not abated. He had typed the shortest email of his life. ‘I quit.’ He had wanted it to be twice as long but decided to leave ‘you wanker’ unwritten. But in writing the email he had quit not just a PhD, but its associated lectureship in astrophysics; and he wasn’t sorry. The fire he had once had for the subject had left him since she had gone, and lecturing without fire was a mere dumb-show; thirty pairs of eyes, open like the mouths of chicks screaming to be fed, and he not able to even feed himself. He would not miss that. Besides, he had been told to rein in too many times; to leave the ‘new age’ nonsense out of the class. He was fed up of being told what he should or should not believe. As if truth was something you could measure.
Two particles once joined, linked forever... but the truth was she had died, and he had carried on living; and he had not known, not at the time; not unless you counted that dream – but how could you count that dream? He daren’t even go there, daren’t even begin to think... The dream… the river of milk, the horse on its banks…. No! He cast it from his mind. It was impossible; it was madness. It was okay for microscopic particles in the world of quantum reality to behave that way – to be entangled – twinned - but in the real world, the world of Newton, and television, and water bills? If it were true, if they had been linked and the dream had been some kind of warning, surely, he would have known; he would have felt her fear?
Without any real thought he put his folder to one side and reached for a book on the dresser shelf above the worktop. It had been hers and her name was scribbled inside the front page in a felt-tip pen: Melissa Astor; oldest and best of the Astor twins. It was an edition of the collected of poems of Coleridge, its cover faded by sunlight, its pages heavily thumbed, many turned down at the corner. It opened naturally at a well-worn page, the poem ‘Kubla Khan’, underlined and annotated in a small, hurried hand, the same as had written the name at the start. He half-read the notes, half-remembered them, so many times had he poured over them in the last year. He sat down on the sofa-bed with the book in his hands and read for a few moments more. The handwriting was legible, if rushed, little circles dotted the ‘i’s, and triple lines underlined words in the printed poem, often followed by a barrage of exclamation marks; the handwriting of someone excited, alive. But there they hid the truth.
Kubla Khan. Her favourite poem: their favourite – they’d learned it by heart just for the fun of it. He looked out of the window at nothing in particular and recited the first verse.
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.
A white barn-owl feather, edged with cream and smoky brown stripes, that had been placed in the back pages, fell onto the mattress of the sofa-bed; he picked it up gently, twisting it between his fingers; brushed it against his lips; and thought of the dark-haired girl who had given it to him, not the same girl who had once owned this book, but one now equally lost to him, it seemed. The feather brought back a memory of this other girl and of her grandfather; of a conversation a year earlier in a garden not two of miles from where Con now sat, with the frail white-haired man over the best soil for roses:
‘I don’t think he’s that interested in roses, granddad,’ the dark-haired girl had laughed.
‘Well he should be! If he learns the patience to cultivate a rose, he’ll have patience to cultivate a life with my beautiful grand-daughter’ the old man had replied, with a slow wink that creased the whole of his already much-lined face. Both Conall and the girl had coloured at this. ‘Granddad!’ she had said, abashed, and had mouthed a silent ‘sorry’ to Con.
Conall would go and lay tobacco on this old man’s grave tomorrow, at the Church in Avebury village, speaking the words the elder had taught him – Itsipaiitapio’pah - Great Spirit… he wondered if anyone laid flowers there now that his dark-haired granddaughter, his only surviving relative, would have returned home. Placing the book back on the shelf he continued with cleaning the van. A book from one girl, and a feather from another, he mused; it was a shame they had never met. It was tragic that they now never would. If I hadn’t been here… he began to think, but angrily cast the thought from his mind.
When the tidying was done Conall stepped outside and wrung the spilled coffee from his t-shirt then threw it back inside. The van up the way with the howling wolves on its side, curtains closed, music blaring, was gently rocking rhythmically on its squeaky suspension. He stared for a moment then quickly looked away, suddenly understanding. Lucky bastard, he thought to himself. Then imagining a night of this music and squeaking wheels he decided he would have to find another spot, closer to the circle, to camp.
Chapter Five: The River of Death
The three friends, having left the Sanctuary at the top of the ridge behind them, had descended into the valley bottom down a path beside the road, edged with lush new grasses, to where the lazy river Kennet was beginning its meandering journey through Wiltshire on its way to joining the Thames at Reading.
Another half mile walk along the snaking river brought them to the farm cottages of West Kennet on the curve of the Bath road, where they crossed the stone bridge and continued through fields lined with early blossoming whitethorn bushes in which a cuckoo could be heard, a herald of summer’s approach; ahead the companions could now see, unobscured by intervening hills for the first time, the majestic rise of Silbury Hill. At this point the Kennet turned to their left, to the south, to its source, as Barfield informed them, at the ‘Kennet spring’, as it was named on Stukeley’s plan; while another small tributary, its origins further to the north, swung around and skirted past the bottom of the hill, which was casting a great shadow over the water-logged meadow in which it lay.
While Barfield and Lewis gazed in wonder at the mound Tolkien had idled a few paces away towards the sedge covered banks of the slow, clear, river, where he gazed a while on the sticklebacks flitting in and out of the rills of dark green weed swaying in the glassy shallows. Above him a pair of crows were cawing as they circled, then flew off to the south.
He crouched, gazing into its clear depths, its shallow bottom, in the dappled shade from the water weeds, flecked here and there with pieces of chalk. He removed his boots and socks, rolled up his trouser bottoms and dipped a tentative foot into the water; it was icy cold, but before long he had grown used to it, and he sat on the bank, moving his feet hither and thither, stirring up a milky cloud of sediment that floated gently away downstream.
‘Enlighten us Tollers’ Lewis said, striding over to where Tolkien was seated, ‘The river name, Kennet, means what?’ he looked back and winked at Barfield.
‘I know what you’re getting at, Jack, and I happen to disagree with that particular vulgar etymology!’ Tolkien leaned forward amongst the rushes and dipped his hand into the cool water.
‘The earliest record is Cunnit, but we’re not looking at a Saxon profanity –beyond Marlborough is a place named Mildenhall called Cunetio by the Romans, no doubt after the river. The name cannot therefore be Saxon if it was here centuries prior to the Adventus…’. The adventus Tolkien was referring to was the Adventus Saxonum, the coming of the Saxons, which tradition dated to AD 430, some 20 years after the last of the legions had left Britain for good. The conversations between these gentlemen were always peppered with such terms – Latin and Greek phrases, snippets of poetry from all ages, used not to impress, but as a kind of scholarly shorthand. A casual listener might be forgiven for wondering if they were often talking in code.
‘Cut to the chase, Tollers – Kennet means…?’ despite his seeming briskness Lewis was smiling. His shadow moved across the water, scattering the sticklebacks.
Tolkien nevertheless bristled at being cut short.
‘The first part is from Cuno the old British word for dog…’
‘The river Dog?’ Lewis roared with laughter. ‘What a strange name!’
‘That’s rich coming from you, Jacksie!’ said Barfield, referring to the fact that since childhood Lewis had insisted he be called after the name of his favourite dog rather than his given name, Clive.
Tolkien ignored their quips.
‘The second element stems from dagos,’ Tolkien continued, ‘linked to our word ‘day’, but it stems from an older word meaning bright; and so ‘bright-hound’ is my preferred translation. Cunodagos, Cunetio, Kennet – it’s the same name. Shining dog. Bright hound.’ He turned back to watch the waters plashing over his milk-white feet. It was an odd name. Something to do with the chalk, perhaps? But why hound?
Lewis, still amused, nevertheless tried to suppress his mirth for the sake of Tolkien who could be touchy about his subjects.
‘The river of the bright hound…That, I concede, makes some sense if we think in terms of this place as a funerary landscape; after all, the Greeks imagined the river Styx that separated the land of the living from that of the dead as guarded on its far bank by the three headed dog Cerberus… could he be the dog?’
Tolkien frowned, weighing up the possibility in his mind.
Barfield, looking across the valley, offered support for Lewis’s observation, ‘Actually, the idea of the river as a dividing line between the realm of the dead and of the living could work here - West Kennet Long Barrow… there,’ he said, pointing to a rise on the crest of the hill to their south ‘the burial place of the builders of Avebury, stands on that side of the river, and the stone circles lay on this. I’ve always thought of the circle as an expression of life…’
‘So, like the Roman, you think they buried their dead away from the settlements? A river is as good a barrier as any…’ Tolkien said.
‘So luckily any hellhound guarding this river would be on that side!’’ Lewis observed, looking aslant at opposite bank of the bubbling waters, where in a nearby copse the cuckoo was still calling. Nothing could seem more incongruous on this beautiful spring day than the idea that this vale of green, spotted with the yellows and blues of meadow flowers and the creamy masses of whitethorn bushes fat with blossom could in any way be associated with death. All seemed alive, burgeoning with vitality and renewed growth.
Tolkien lent over the edge of the stream, where pieces of chalk and river rolled flints could be seen poking above the muddy depths of the clear water. He lent forward and plunged his hand into the cool depths, taking a stone from the bottom – a smooth river-rolled chalk pebble, and began to recite a few lines of verse:
In the depths stood dazzling stones aheap
As a glitter through glass that glowed with light,
As streaming stars when on earth men sleep
Stare in the welkin in winter night’
‘That’s beautiful,’ said Barfield. ‘It’s from The Pearl is it not?’
Tolkien nodded. ‘We have no recourse to rush to the Greeks to find mention of the River of Death, when our own poets express it so eloquently.’ He said, holding the white pebble between his thumb and forefinger and examining it closely, before placing it in his waistcoat pocket.
Jack nodded, more serious now. ‘I was always touched by that scene – one of the most haunting in any medieval lyric, I would say; and I suppose that poem is more fitting, for it is the garden of Paradise that lies over the river, not some dark hell inhabited by bat-like souls that one finds across the Styx in the Classical traditions.’ He gazed out over the fields; his eyes narrowed against the sun. The poem, which told of the dream of a grieving father in which he spies his deceased daughter, the Pearl of the title, across the river of death, had been read aloud by Tolkien on one of their Thursday nights at Magdalen at the tail end of the previous year.
‘But the river was wide, I durst not swim’ Tolkien quoted, touching the chalk in his pocket.
‘…I durst not swim…’
Tolkien’s voice was tinged with melancholy, and Barfield wondered what his quiet friend was thinking as he gazed across the river to the ruinous tomb on the crest of the hill, what pallid ghost he was seeing in his mind’s eye in place of the lost daughter of the poem, whose words continued to flow from his lips, but now in a whisper.
Barfield turned and once more took the path that headed westwards between the river and the road; and soon Jack was beside him, striding forward.
‘Is Ronald okay?’ Owen asked. ‘He seems distant; preoccupied.’
‘Oh don’t mind Ronald; he’s had his head in his books for so long he’s just taking a while to remember how to relax.’ He looked back to where Tolkien stood looking across the river.
‘But there is always something of the melancholic in him;’ Lewis continued ‘I think he pines for something; if I could put it in a nutshell I’d say he was homesick – homesick for a place he’s never been; nor perhaps ever could have, save in his imagination.’
‘The imagination is a powerful thing.’ Barfield said.
‘It is.’ Jack said. ‘But ultimately it is fancy, not blood and stone; not real.’
Barfield shook his head. ‘What is real?’ he asked.
‘My grumbling stomach is real, Owen. Spare me your metaphysics until I at least have a cup of tea inside of me!’
Chapter Six: The Avenue
Opening the side door of the camper van, now re-parked a few minutes’ drive from the Sanctuary in a lay-by of the narrow road that ran alongside the Avenue, Conall took a enamel tin mug from its hook in the cupboard and piled a large spoonful of instant coffee into it, and then put his kettle on to boil.
While the kettle was heating he sat with his legs out of the side-door, enjoying the heat of the mid afternoon sun; then he stood and walked over to the wooden fence that divided the Avenue from the road. The stones of the Avenue stood pale and silent in the long grass that trembled slightly in the warm breeze; each stone stood taller and wider than a man – and were arranged in pairs, a few metres apart – as if a procession of giants, two by two, had, by some long-forgotten spell, been turned to stone while shuffling towards the circle that lay over the hill, out of sight. The Avenue snaked its way, in this fashion, to the southern entrance of the henge, a good quarter of an hour walk away from where Conall now stood, eyes closed, leaning against the fence, - the heat of the sun somehow melting the lead of his earlier sadness.
A steady rising whistle from the van alerted him to the fact the kettle was boiling, and so returned to the cool shade of the kitchenette and poured the steaming water into his cup. He blew on, and then took a sip of, the black liquid; coffee was perhaps too generous a description of this scorching, bitter, brew; a splash of cold water and a couple of sugars made it slightly more palatable.
He picked up an old and battered wide-brimmed straw hat from the seat and placed it on his head; then in a moment of inspiration took down the Collected Coleridge, removed the owl feather and stuck it into the rim of the hat. In memory of you both, he thought.
Setting the cup aside he rolled a cigarette, hung it from his lips and then, coffee in hand, pulled shut the camper door and walked over to the gate that lead into the avenue.
The grass in between the stones had been recently mowed, though the stones themselves stood in small islands of long grass where the mower had not been able to reach. Conall walked towards the centre of the Avenue – sipping his drink, and peering to where, some 500 yards distant, the stones disappeared over the brow of the slight hill. There, near the brow, a dog was sniffing about one of the stones, and he could hear the distant voice of its owner calling it back; it disappeared back over the hill, leaving Conall once more alone.
From this position at the centre of the Avenue it was plain to see that the stones had been arranged in some kind of order: those to his left were thin and pillar-like, while those to his right, bordering the road, were squatter, wider, almost diamond shaped. Male and female, others had reasoned; but archaeologists often lacked imagination, he thought, taking his lighter from his pocket and lighting his cigarette.
He idled over to the first of the ‘male’ stones and laid a palm on its side. These stones had, in the same way that old trees had, a kind of brooding physicality that gave them a sense of character; and this particular stone held special connotations for Conall – last spring when he had visited the Avebury circle for the first time, he had slept up against it, protected from the view of the road with its passing traffic by its width; a stone headrest against which he’d lain, gazing up at the night sky. Though he had a van to camp in, the desire to sleep here, under the stars, protected by this ancient sentinel, was stronger than the call of the sofa-bed.
‘Hello, old friend’ he muttered, breathing out a plume of smoke. ‘Do you remember me, stone?’ he whispered. Then removed his hat and he leant forward so that his forehead was pressed against the rough cool pillar, scabbed with lichen – beaming his thoughts into its heart. So much has changed, stone. But I’m back.
Just then voices in the distance alerted him to the approach of a group of walkers. Conall walked around the stone and sat down on the grass about its feet, on the sunlit southern facing side of the stone that hid him from the road and Avenue. The walkers came and went, and he settled back, the sun hot on his cheeks, and lighting up the inside of his closed eyelids with a blood-red glow until he pulled the rim of the hat down to shade them. He could hear the distant ratcheting churring of a magpie, the hoo-hoooo-hoo of the doves, and the bleating of the sheep in the next field. These sounds relaxed him, and the crackle of his cigarette as he inhaled helped this feeling along. Time seemed to slow, became irrelevant; a quarter of an hour or so he sat here, drinking in the sounds and smells of this Wessex paradise. His mind began to drift…
Which sense, he had often been asked, would you lose if you had to? Sat here, the smell of the warm mowed grass, cigarette smoke, and sheep shit seemed as vital to the world as vision – more so, perhaps. Perhaps he would choose to lose his sight. No books though, part of him countered – but what good were books anyway? Homer, after all, was blind, so they said. Had he always been blind? Did he never actually see rosy-fingered dawn or the wine-dark sea? Imagine never having seen the sea, or a tree, or a blade of grass? Imagine never having seen the face of a beautiful woman; if I was blind – what would beauty be to me? Where would beauty reside if the eye of the beholder were blind? I mustn’t fall asleep, he said to himself, shaking his head, aware his mind was beginning to wander – or I’ll wake up sunburned.
Rising, he moved away from the stone, but fleetingly touched its side as he did so. See you later; he whispered.
Having made sure his van was locked Conall set off along the Avenue, intent on reaching the circle and grabbing something to eat in the pub that stood at its centre. The heat of the day was increasing rather than abating, and he removed his shirt and tied it about his waist; the heat of the sun on his skin felt good. As he crested the hill he saw, in the distance, a small group of people in bright yellow visi-vests huddled about a small area of stripped soil at the foot of one of the male stones besides which a small tent had been erected; he passed them with a ‘hello’ - not stopping to ask what these archaeologists scraping at the sun-baked soil were trying to uncover; he didn’t envy them lying out in this heat, with their white hard-hats on. A few minutes later, having crested another rise, he stopped to take in the vista that now spread before him – a sight that never usually failed to stir him, though today its effect was bittersweet: the great circle of stones of Avebury; so vast one could not take it in from any single viewpoint – set within a staggeringly impressive circular bank and ditch, once some 40 feet deep. From his present viewpoint he could see only the southern half of the circle – the southern entrance lay before him, through which now passed the road to Swindon, cutting through its mighty banks. To the right these same banks were crowned with great trees, but the section on the left was clear, giving one an unimpeded view of the massive sweep of stones around which visitors were treading, many picnicking in their shade, and the line of buildings beyond which were part of the village of Avebury. There, where the Swindon road met the village high street at a staggered cross-road, was the Red Lion, a large two-storey building under a heavy thatched roof, its forecourt that bordered the road spread with wooden tables, crammed full with people enjoying a drink in the sun. Conall suddenly felt very thirsty.
Leaving the avenue Conall entered the circle itself, passing between the huge stones that once marked the southern entrance; roughly angled, these stones dwarfed him as he stepped through them; but he did not stop to admire them, nor the smaller circle of stones, again, one of a pair, that he walked through. He would have time to admire the stones later, he reasoned.
The pub forecourt was busy and loud with laughter; an eclectic mix of new-age types with long hair and loose clothes, bikers in their leathers and families here for a day out crowded the tables. There, in one corner, sat a group of young people in visi-vests; more archaeologists, Conall assumed, probably university students on their summer dig; while on a table nearest the car-park a folk-group in white shirts decorated with coloured ribbons were taking musical instruments from out of their black cases. From all around the smell of fried food and cigarette smoke reached his nose. He hadn’t expected it to be so busy, but he supposed last year he had been here in April, after the Easter holidays had finished, and although the place had not been quiet, it wasn’t anything like as crowded as today.
No, he thought, turning away from the pub, I have something to do first.
He walked westwards past the pub and along a narrow road, past a small group of shops selling souvenirs, and a row of Bed & Breakfasts, until he had left the banks of the circle, and the street grew quieter; the street narrowed to a row of small brick cottages on the left, and on the right was the wall of the churchyard.
A cottage stood opposite the lych gate, a window box below the window thick with Nicotiana, its pendulous white flowers still closed; its doorway, newly painted, bore the name Church Cottage, and the small porch had been fixed-up by the new occupants; but the old occupant lay a few feet away across the road, as his granddaughter’s letter had informed him; the memorial plaque was simple:
In loving memory Alfred John Mac Govan-Crow 1935–2011
Con found it easily thanks to a posy of nicotiana placed on the grave; someone, then, in the village, still cared.
He knelt beside the plaque and removed the pouch of tobacco from his pocket. He took a pinch and crumbled it on the soft grass:
Itsipaiitapio’pah – he said.
Bless you, Old Man, he mumbled. May the Great Spirit protect you... and those you love.
The inside of the Red Lion was cool and dark after the glaring heat outside, and Conall suddenly remembered he was shirtless; putting the shirt back on and removing his hat he waited for a gap to appear at the bar; after a couple of minutes the pretty barmaid smiled at him and he asked for a pint of Green King bitter, and while he waited for it to be poured he grabbed a menu and hungrily poured over the choices. There was no chance of nabbing a table outside, he reasoned, but a small table stood free in the corner opposite the bar, so Conall told the barmaid he’d be sitting there. She gave him a table number scrawled in marker pen on a wooden spoon and he sat down with his pint.
A shaft of sunlight bisected the table like a wall of fire; and for a while Conall sat entranced at the dance of the particles of dust illuminated by it, while outside the folk-group were playing accompanied by claps from the crowd. Then he raised his pint, delighting in that first cool mouthful, the bitter tang of hops, and felt himself begin to relax. And now what? He thought.
What happened was not what he had expected.
Chapter Seven: Orient and Immortal Wheat
The tea-rooms Barfield had mentioned were in a wooden bungalow with a veranda, one of a number of small wooden buildings beside an unsightly petrol station on the north side of the road, just past Silbury hill. Despite their inauspicious appearance the bungalow, at least, was welcoming, and it wasn’t too long before the three friends found themselves ensconced in a sunny spot looking over the road and the green fields of newly sprouted wheat opposite, and enjoying a pot of tea.
A couple of farm labourers and another small group of walkers were the only other clientele on the veranda, though there were other workmen seated in the shaded part of the building, laughing and playing cards.
Barfield sipped his tea and looked longingly out over the forecourt.
‘I used to stop here for tea on my trips down to Cornwall when still a student.’ He said. ‘Those were lovely times; if only I’d appreciated how lovely at the time; I’m sure I did, but I think it takes a period of hard work and drudgery to give these things perspective.’ His face had dropped at the mention of drudgery.
‘What took you to Cornwall?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Folk dancing…’ Barfield smiled again, seeming to drift off in to some lovely memory, ‘and unrequited love…’
‘Ah,’ Lewis said, with a wink; ‘the one love I didn’t dare mention in ‘The Four Loves’’
‘Blissful torture, at the time, I can assure you. But I learned a great lesson from it, probably one of the greatest of my life!’ Barfield said, stirring his tea.
‘Being?’ asked Tolkien.
‘Well. When you have been in love, and given so much of yourself, and that love hasn’t been returned you have two choices: you can pine after the girl forever, or you do something rather more pragmatic, like sublimate those feelings into something else… you see, looking back on it I can see that my love for the girl was, I suppose, a love of life, really – or at least the possibilities life had still to offer me. I was stricken for a good while – very low – not really able to move on – it was a great blow at the time - until I had this moment of realisation that I could fall in love again; and I did; with nature, with life – with the world!’
‘With Maud?’
‘Yes…’ Owen said, haltingly, at the mention of his wife’s name. He seemed to shift uncomfortably in his seat for a second, before he resumed:
‘I do wonder whether anyone who’s never been in love can really fully appreciate the ecstasy that comes from it. I’m talking of that sense of sheer awe one feels in the presence of the beloved. Love, I suppose, romantic love, is a force of nature that just sweeps all else away. It is a primordial, magical, experience!’
‘But ultimately illusory.’ Lewis said, dunking a biscuit into his cup.
‘Why so?’ Barfield countered.
‘Because it is transient; I believe it almost a trick of nature to capture a man and fool him into marriage.’
‘So says an unmarried man’ observed Tolkien, wryly.
Barfield arched an eyebrow. ‘Does Nature perform tricks, Jack? Your attitude is typical of modern man’s distrust of Dame Natura which sees himself not only as separate from Her, but above Her, believing that She is some evil temptress!’
He took a hasty sip of tea and continued.
‘To reduce Romantic love to a biological ‘trick’ is to demean one of the most liberating of emotions. Look at the art that love has produced: would we have ‘The Divine Comedy’ if Dante had never seen Beatrice? Are you dismissing The Inferno because it was founded on love?’
Lewis was frowning. ‘Founded on love it may have been,’ he said, swallowing his mouthful of biscuit, ‘but not Romantic love. Romantic love, my dear Owen, cannot be separated from sex, and sexual desire is transitory...Beatrice Portinari was 9 years old when Dante first saw her, if you think this was based on romantic, which is sexual, love then we are on dangerous ground… ’
A couple on a nearby table seemed to shift uncomfortably at Lewis’s words.
‘…Dante’s work was not based on lust;’ Lewis continued ‘Beatrice for him was a spiritual ideal rather than a flesh and blood woman.’
‘Absolute poppycock, Jack!’ Barfield snorted, ‘For one, Dante himself was the same age as her when they met – so let’s not sully his love with any hints of paedophilia - and for another, Beatrice was precisely who she was and no other, not a symbol, nor an allegory for some ‘higher’ or ‘purer’ state of caritas: she was simply a beautiful green-eyed Florentine girl who turned the head of an intelligent and sensitive young man, and thereby opened his eyes to the beauty of the world!’
‘Are you talking about Beatrice or your green-eyed Cornish girl?’ Jack said, playfully, seemingly amused by Barfield’s fervour that had brought a flush to the taller man’s smooth cheeks.
‘Both! What is this delight of being in love but an experience of joy, of connection with the world? And what is poetry but the communication of such rapture?! One cannot read Dante, or any other great poet, without feeling it!’ Barfield’s eyes flashed with passion, seeming to drink in the landscape which no doubt was fuelling his ideas with nostalgic memories.
He paused to take another sip of tea, expecting a rebuff from Lewis that never came. The latter merely shook his head slowly, at a loss to even attempt to argue against what he thought as erroneous, and took another biscuit from the plate.
Just then a rumbling outside the veranda announced the arrival of a vehicle; the workmen in the shadows of the café looked and murmured to each-other as a strange machine, seeming half car and half tank, with caterpillar tracks for back wheels pulled up at the garage forecourt a little past the tea-house.
One of the workmen on the nearby table muttered to his colleague; and his companion guffawed at what must have been a private joke. A small, handsome man in a long and well-tailored pale overcoat and cap could be seen chatting animatedly to the petrol attendant.
Tolkien pushed his empty cup away from him and leaned across the table,
‘I like your view, Owen, that the poet is one who sees the rapture of existence and seeks to tell of it to his blinkered fellow man.’
Barfield smiled appreciatively at Tolkien’s attempts to steer the conversation back on line.
Tolkien carried on: ‘…that poetry is like some magical potion that allows you to see things differently, to see things shining with qualities otherwise hidden from us…’
‘It’s as I’ve said before,’ Barfield replied, ‘the poet sees the world as others do not, and he seeks to communicate his experience in the only way now available to him: poetic metaphor.’
‘Why won’t prose suffice?’ Lewis asked, his eyes flitting from the strange vehicle momentarily back to Barfield.
‘You’re being deliberately obstinate now, Jack – we’ve talked about this. many times before! Prose is the language of the modern everyday world, a world at odds with the poetic vision. The use of poetic metaphor restores man to his original state of participation in nature. Think of Traherne’s beautiful phrase ‘orient and immortal wheat’…’
He waved his hand in the direction of the sun-drenched sloping hills on the opposite side of the road, green with freshly sprung blades of new-born wheat still not yet much more than a foot in height.
‘When I think of those lines I see things differently; it’s as if I’m no longer looking at a field of corn, a few weeks old; what was pleasant greenery newly sprung from the soil becomes something terrible and sublime: for those shoots grow from a buried seed, and those seeds in turn were the ears upon last year’s shoots… where does one begin and the other end? The answer is that surely, they are somehow one. And if last year’s corn sprouted from the ears of the previous years, and so on, ad infinitum, we are left with the startling truth that yon green field thither is not covered in fresh new life, but a life thousands upon thousands of years old, which each year takes on a new skin, as it were, and at the end of each year casts it off so that what the farmers fill their barns with at harvest is but the sloughed skin, really, of an organism far, far older than mankind himself. Those plants, there, are in reality the same plants that were brought here from the Near East by the first farmers thousands of years ago, whose form has remained constant, though the substance through which that form is expressed has changed: Orient and immortal indeed.’
Tolkien stared at the verdant hillside, baulking at Barfield’s musings – and for a moment he saw, literally saw, a difference – what was a rolling peaceful green valley was suddenly transformed so that its sides were no longer inert, seeming dead compared to the skylarks that flew over them, but alive in a way he had never before perceived – the leaves of the wheat became upward-thrusting scales of a giant plumed serpent which covered the entire valley, scales that would be sloughed off at harvest, only to grow anew… a serpent that had wended its way to this valley some 6,000 years ago having travelled thousands of miles from its birthplace in the river valleys of the Near East… ancient, orient, immortal… dying each winter, buried in the black earth then rising again in the spring…
Barfield lit his pipe and continued. ‘That is what Traherne’s poetic phrase suggests to me, and carries far more meaning than the single word ‘corn’ or ‘wheat’ could ever do – for in it we start to get a glimpse of what early man must have seen when he was still close to Nature, not alienated from Her as he is today.’
‘A sense of the true nature of things?’ Tolkien suggested.
‘A sense of the divinity of things!’ Barfield replied, ‘for ancient man the corn was the body of a god – not in a quaint symbolic way such as our folk image of ‘John Barleycorn’ but as something real and experienced; to the Egyptians the crops were the green-skinned Osiris, torn apart, buried and resurrected each year – later echoed in Jesus as the Bread of Life, dying and rising again…’
Lewis coughed. ‘No, Owen; those earlier vegetation gods were a pre-figuration of Christ; Christ’s life was the metaphor made fact, the earlier vegetation gods were the echo…’
Owen waved his hand dismissing his friend’s interruption. ‘We’re getting away from my point – what I’m saying is that to ancient man corn was an expression of a divinity immanent in all things, man included; if you think about it, the very idea of a vegetation god presents a view of reality worlds apart from our own: this wasn’t a world where the Creator was separate from his creation, and mankind created as a lord above all other animals – no – this was a world in which nature itself was the body of the god, and man, kin to all other creatures, was part of this divinity too. If we saw all as Holy we would be less prone to trivialise, exploit and destroy our world…’
He stopped for a moment while a waitress came and leaned over and refilled their tea-pot with boiling water, avoiding all eye contact with these strange university types, friends, perhaps, of the ‘Marmalade Man’, she thought, her eyes flitting to the dapper gentlemen at the petrol pump. She coloured, feeling suddenly awkward. Maybe these were some of those friends? The ones the Red Indian gardener had told her about, with their strange rituals and the women they shipped in for the night and packed off to London by taxi the next day…
‘Imagine a world where each and every word you uttered expressed the divinity inherent in all things…’ Barfield continued, adding a mouthed a thank you to the waitress, who smiled back awkwardly and left the table; ‘how different would we look at that field if we called wheat ‘Osiris’ or ‘Persephone’ and saw, really saw, it as divine? Well this is exactly what the ancients saw; we dwell in a world where one says ‘the wheat is like Osiris’, but they would have said the equivalent of ‘the wheat is Osiris’: their language would seem to us as pure poetry; their experience of the world poetic, mystic. But it was not meant as a deceit. It expressed a truth.’
Tolkien nodded in agreement and poured each of the men more tea. How wonderful it was to hear this man talk. He was eloquent and intelligent – such a waste that he should have become a lawyer and not an academic! He has the best mind of all of us, Tolkien thought. Lewis’s attention, however, seemed to be on the man at the petrol pumps.
Barfield continued: ‘We no longer see that way because we have fallen from that original Edenic state – Adam and Eve eating the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge and becoming aware of their nakedness is a metaphor for mankind losing that state of participation with nature and realising his difference from the animals; his expulsion from Eden is brought about by the development of his sense of self-consciousness - which alienates us from nature – to use the image of the dismembered corn-god, our modern mind is like the evil brother Seth who divides and separates the divine world into disconnected objects, tearing it limb from limb: a world once experienced as divine is divided up, categorised, its former connectivity broken, the divinity killed; but the poet is one who can, like the goddess Isis, re-assemble the pieces of this dismembered god and bring him back to life: to literally re-member the god, the original state of pre-fall unity, where every object sang out with its participation in the divine; so that man is once more at one with the birds, beasts, fish and trees…’ Barfield’s voice had risen to a crescendo of excitement, his hands emphasising every word. ‘…for mankind still abides in Eden – indeed he never left it – for Eden is around us, but we do not see it!’ he brought his palm down hard on the table-top to emphasise each of the last six syllables, rattling the tea-set and causing the people on the nearby table to look round again, nervously.
Tolkien stared into Barfield’s ecstatic face – I’m sure you see it, Owen, he thought – as the latter gazed open eyed with rapture at the dance of the windblown corn. He had never seen Owen so animated, so energised; stirred up, no doubt by memories of youth and love. Tolkien cleared his throat, a little wary of breaking the spell his friend had fallen under.
‘You know, Owen, that one of my poetic creations, Tom Bombadil, whose adventures I recall reading to you all at an Inklings a few years back now, I’d imagine – well, I didn’t say it at the time but Bombadil, who is really the spirit of our fast disappearing Oxford and Berkshire countryside, a kind of genius loci, was in no small measure influenced by your theories. He speaks in verse, for he exists before the fall of language, before speech became prose; he is the Eldest; he speaks to the badgers and the trees and the barrow-wights; I imagine Bombadil to possess what today man can only glimpse in myth and poetry; he can talk to the birds, like Siegfried who gains that ability by drinking the blood of the dragon Fafnir...’
Barfield nodded. ‘When I try to picture that original state of unity, I always imagine Orpheus with his magical lyre that could tame the wild beasts and make the trees and even the stones dance about him in a circle.’ Barfield suggested. ‘Orpheus, like Osiris, is torn to pieces, yet his head goes on singing – you see, despite being rent apart the voice of the god can still be heard, singing of the unity of all things, remembering Eden before the Fall, if men but listen…. Poets hear it…. lovers hear it…’
‘This mystic state of unity, you know - it all sounds rather like being drunk.’ Lewis commented with a wink; suddenly back in the conversation now the vehicle and its dapper driver had pulled away.
Tolkien smiled.
‘You have a point, Jack: think of all those Norse legends that tell of drinking the mead or ale of poetry; for in intoxication man achieves something akin to that sense of belonging, does he not, and forgets his alienation? Behind every alcoholic, I suspect, lays a poet!’
‘Well, the reverse is certainly the case!’ said Lewis.
‘Yourself included?’ asked Barfield.
Lewis didn’t seem amused by Barfield’s quip, instead his eyes seemed to pale a little.
‘Sadly I think I gave up the urge to become a poet long ago. I now seek solace in my cups.’ He smiled weakly. ‘The blood of John Barleycorn gives me courage bold, not inspiration.’
Tolkien understood, now, why Lewis had seemed so uninterested in what Barfield had been saying; it was like rubbing salt into a wound – here was Lewis who in his youth had wished to be a poet above all things, but who had not received the recognition he had really deserved, and who was now reduced to writing prose – while Barfield was extolling the virtues of the poetic vision; Lewis must have felt somehow unworthy.
‘In which case,’ Lewis was continuing, ‘let us hope the beer at the Red Lion isn’t varnish!’
‘Hear, hear!’ Barfield laughed, ‘Though if it’s too good the long road to Calne will begin to lose its appeal…’
‘Well,’ Lewis said, ‘if the stones of Avebury circle begin to dance about us like they’ve been enchanted by Orpheus’s lyre we’ll know it’s time to down our cups and move on…’
Tolkien was nodding. ‘It’s funny; I had this image in my head then, when Owen was speaking: I had initially thought it was the dismembered body of Orpheus on the banks of the river Hebrus and his severed head floating down the river - but instead of some Mediterranean stream all I could see was the Kennet and instead of Orpheus’s head bobbing amongst the sticklebacks it was the image of a woman – her hair spread out like Ophelia. It was so persistent that I’m sure my mind was trying to tell me something: I’m sure it has something to do with this landscape, though quite what I don’t yet know…’
‘Well let us pray the mead of poetry inspires an answer, Tollers!’ Lewis beamed, used to Tolkien’s ‘flights of fancy’. ‘For myself that tea has restored my vigour; I’m a little too full for climbing the hill, now, if I’m honest – but a constitutional to Orpheus’s dancing stones itself seems a fair prospect.’
Chapter Eight: Shenandoah
With a second pint in hand Conall strode blinking out of the pub to the tables arranged on the flagstones fronting the road. The main lunchtime rush was over and there was now the odd spare seat here and there, though no totally empty tables. He raised his glass and took a large sip of beer, contemplating whether to squeeze in amongst the hippies gathered around the folk band, the archaeologists or the bikers, or whether to just cross the road and go and sit amongst the stones. Still a little sunblind and squinting he moved aside to let someone past him into the pub. But they stopped.
‘Conall?!’
He turned, confused at the mention of his name. A woman stood beaming up at him, dressed in a simple faded red t-shirt under a suede jacket, pale blue jeans and black boots, a bag slung over one shoulder - but it was only when she removed her sunglasses and hugged him and he found himself with his nose and mouth pressed against the top of her head, breathing the scent of her sun-warmed long dark hair, that it fully sunk in who this was.
‘What the hell are you doing here?!’ she said, grinning as she pulled away, her brows creased in a deep frown.
Conall stood speechless, his mind screaming with a car-crash of conflicting thoughts and emotions.
‘Shen?!’ he said aware of the colour draining from his face.
‘Why are you here? Are you down here for long? You’re not leaving yet?’ Shenandoah asked, all at once.
Con shook his head. No words seemed to want to come.
‘No. Good. Look - I’m just going to drop something off in here,’ she said, motioning towards the door of the pub with her head, ‘but – you got time – I mean can I join you for a drink? Quick, grab us those seats then we’ll talk!’ she said, and then was gone, but not before looking back and smiling again, shaking her head.
Some of the archaeologists had just got up, leaving a table free, to which Conall walked, seating himself facing the sun. It was only when he picked up his pint that he realised his hand was shaking. The chances that he should meet her again, here, and now, seemed to him so astronomically slim he could only lift his eyes skywards, questioning whatever power might have arranged such a bitter-sweet coincidence. When he had met her here last year she had only been here for a matter of days, to visit her granddad - for she had long since moved away from Wiltshire; but Her Granddad had died shortly after, and anyway, since then all contact between Conall and her had ceased... She had no reason to be here, he thought; and yet here she was. Why? Why did he have to see her now? Could I, he asked himself, just slip away? All this was going through Conall’s mind, but behind it all was a more constant and more appealing image from their past: of her dark eyes looking up at him and closing as he leaned in to kiss her; and then a wave of sadness and guilt swept through him, and an image appeared in his mind’s eye - a line of Coleridge’s poetry savagely underlined in red biro:
A damsel with a dulcimer
In a vision once I saw…
And beside those words others in a shaky, wild hand:
I go to the river to die…
Behind him, following a burst of applause, the folk band had begun another song, and a strong female voice had started to sing.
There was three kings into the east,
Three kings both great and high,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn should die.
They took a plough and plough'd him down,
Put clods upon his head,
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn was dead.
Just then the woman’s voice was joined by that of a man coming from the opposite side of the forecourt, deep, with a strong northern accent. Con turned – the man was shaven headed with a goatee beard, his wiry arms blue with tattoos – each forearm emblazoned with a spiralling serpent, the heads of which flicked their forked tongues across the back of his hands.
They've let him lie for a very long time,
'til the rains from heaven did fall
And little Sir John sprung up his head
and so amazed them all
The man had risen and was making his way from his seat near the door of the pub, past the folk singers, towards the road.
They've let him stand 'til Midsummer's Day
'til he looked both pale and wan
And little Sir John's grown a long, long beard
and so become a man.
He bowed to the group, grinning broadly and as he passed Con he winked at him mischievously before heading off across the road to the circle, his pint glass in his hand. Behind him the woman’s voice continued, and Con turned back and drank some more beer.
They've ta’en a weapon, long and sharp,
And cut him by the knee;
Then tied him fast upon a cart,
Like a rogue for forgerie.
‘Wake up, John-a-dreams!’
Conall looked up and met Shen’s dark-brown eyes, looking out from the curtain of her dark straight hair. She was holding a large glass of what looked to be coke, and a pint for him.
‘How come you’re here?’ Conall asked, dry mouthed. Shen bit her lip. Her eyes glistened and she forced a smile. ‘I’ve been here sorting Granddad’s things out since March; he left me the house in his will. I couldn’t sell it; just couldn’t. Oh, and there’s something he left for you, too. I meant to…’
‘No matter…. I was sorry to hear about your Granddad. I’ve just left some tobacco on his grave.’ Conall said, matter-of-factly. ‘… I don’t know if it’s a Blackfoot tradition or not, but it seemed kind of appropriate.’
‘That’s kind of you.’ She said.
‘I saw the flowers there, too – I didn’t for a second think they would have been from you… So you’re living here now?’
‘Partly; it’s taking a while to get the business off the ground here and I still have the house on Scilly, but I’m renting that out over the summer as a holiday cottage; I’m probably going to sell it. I was never comfortable there; the sea can be so oppressive…Anyway… what about you?! What are you up to?’. Her smile seemed genuine, if a little strained. ‘How are you doing?’
Conall looked down, frowning, thinking of what to say, the words of the song distracting him.
They laid him down upon his back,
And cudgell'd him full sore;
They hung him up before the storm,
And turn'd him o'er and o'er.
They filled up a darksome pit
With water to the brim,
They heav'd in John Barleycorn-
There, let him sink or swim!
Con shivered at the image of a pale body floating in dark water that had risen in his mind’s eye.
‘Con? Hello!? Earth to Con…’
He half-smiled and shrugged. ‘Well I’m writing the odd article,’ he said, speaking louder than usual to be heard over the singing, ‘giving the odd lecture here and there...’ he took another sip to buy himself time while he struggled to rein in his emotions.
‘You know what I meant.’
Conall stared at his pint.
‘Yeah, I’m okay. I’m doing better.’ He smiled, gently, unconvincingly.
‘I thought about you.’ She suddenly said. Conall raised his eyes to hers in genuine surprise.
‘Likewise’ was all he could muster; he looked into her eyes, but she didn’t hold his gaze for long, lowering her eyes and picking up her drink.
‘I don’t really know what to say.’ Shen said, ‘I would have written again… but you said not to…’
She looked across at him again, fleetingly, with a slight hint of awkwardness.
He felt like he should say something to explain, but the words weren’t there. ‘Look, I'm sorry. I was in a bit of a shit place...’
'It's okay, Con. I know. God, you don’t need to apologise.'
‘But thanks for letting me know about Alfred…’ he mumbled.
She had been looking down at her small hands, fiddling with a jade and silver ring, but now she looked up.
‘It’s all so shit, isn’t it? And I knew Granddad was ill… I had time to prepare… but you…’
Conall shrugged again and smiled weakly, not wanting her to go on.
It was strange for them both to be sitting here in silence, after all the laughter and incessant talking they had enjoyed the last time they had met. It seemed so long ago. When they had parted it had all been good between them; but to meet again now, like this, perhaps it might have been better had he not seen her. Con sipped his pint in silence, and turned his head to watch the folk band finish their song.
They wasted, o'er a scorching flame,
The marrow of his bones;
But a miller us'd him worst of all,
For he crush'd him between two stones.
And they hae taen his very heart's blood,
And drank it round and round;
And still the more and more they drank,
Their joy did more abound.
John Barleycorn was a hero bold,
Of noble enterprise;
For if you do but taste his blood,
'Twill make your courage rise.
'Twill make a man forget his woe;
'Twill heighten all his joy;
'Twill make the widow's heart to sing,
Tho' the tear were in her eye.
The crowds applauded and Con and Shen joined them, politely. When Con looked back at Shen, she was regarding him anxiously, feeling the same tension as him.
‘Well, this is awkward.’ She said. ‘God, Con, let’s not be off with each other, it’s not like we see each other every day…’. He nodded, smiling at her directness.
‘So did you ever work it out, your lost star myth – the dragon thing?’ she asked, seeming to relax a little.
He smiled. ‘I think so. It’s kind of changed a bit, not massively but a bit. It’s why I’m here,’ he half-lied, ‘the sky’s supposed to be clear for the next few days. You just can’t see any sky in London.’
‘It was always a bit beyond me, you know, your theorising.’ She shrugged. ‘But I loved the stories. Granddad did too. I loved it that night when you showed me which stars were which, and the tales behind them all.’
It had been on that night that he had first told her that he could really fall for her. Had that really happened? He felt himself redden. Was she remembering that too? But it had also been that night that the other thing had happened; not that Shen knew. Neither did he at the time; he had to wait a few more days for that news, and then everything had changed.
…They filled up a darksome pit
With water to the brim…
He cast the unwanted image from his mind, clenching his hand into a fist. ‘It’s the stories that are the key Shenandoah… they hold all that information, I’m sure of it. But it’s like a code that needs cracking… it was an intuition, that’s all – but I never had time to follow it up. Not until recently. And now, well… it makes sense, but I just don’t know if I’m right or if I’m seeing things…’
‘And you’re still at the uni?’ she asked.
‘Not anymore; I quit.’.
‘Quit? Why?’
He shrugged. ‘Long story.’ He sipped his drink.
‘How long’s long?’ she smiled.
‘Too long for now; I don’t want to bore you.’
‘Well, you’d better quit now then; it is probably very boring.’ She joked.
In the more companionable silence that followed he relaxed and was able to take her in; sitting with her back to the sun, her broad-high cheek-boned face in shadow, it was clear that she owed her looks to a more exotic ancestry than her hyphened part-Irish surname, Mac Govan-Crow, suggested. Con recalled a scene from their previous meeting, when, sitting upon West Kennet Long-Barrow, he had stuck the owl feather she had given him in her hair and told her she now looked like her great-great grandmother whose photo she had showed him on her granddad’s dresser… the same feather he had stuck in his hat not an hour before…
‘That’s my granddad’s dad, George, as a baby, and his parents, Kills Crow and Medicine Smoke Woman.’ she had said, pointing at the sepia image.
‘You look like her.’ He had said, his eyes on her rather than the photo. A silence had passed between them then. The truth was that she looked almost more native than her grandfather had done; her long straight dark hair especially, and her cheekbones that seemed to push her eyes into heavily lidded crescents; their colour somewhere between chocolate and black, depending on the light.
‘I guess Shenandoah is a Native name?’ he had said then.
She had smiled, ‘Well, it is, it’s a native river name - but that’s not why I’m called it – it’s after the song, my granddad sang it to me just after I was born, he liked the Jimmy Stewart film, and it stuck – thank God – I think my parents had been toying with Derdriu.’
‘Derdriu?’ he’d laughed.
‘Don’t laugh – it’s a family name, and it’s still my middle name.’
‘Ok, Deirdre.’
‘Shenandoah Derdriu Mac Govan-Crow… fuck me, that’s a mouthful!’ he had laughed.
A year and a world later Con took his tobacco from his pocket and rolled a cigarette, offering Shen one. She looked about her guiltily, with a voiced indrawn breath. ‘Oh god! Don’t!’
‘You given up?’
‘Kind of. My boyfriend doesn’t really like me smoking.’
Conall felt the smile freeze on his face. Boyfriend; of course: someone like Shen would never stay single for long, he reasoned. He felt a strange sense of deflation, but then she smiled at him and he felt somehow better; relieved even. Too much had changed.
‘Go on, have one. Blame the smell on me.’ Conall said with a wink, pushing the tobacco her way.
She hesitated, stared at the proffered tobacco, looked up at Con and then relented.
‘Who’s the lucky man?’ Conall asked, handing her the papers and rolling himself another.
‘He’s from Swindon…’
‘Oh I’m sorry…’ Con joked.
Shen narrowed her eyes and continued ‘– he’s called Hayden; been seeing him since last summer. He’s a fireman,’ she said, as he lit her cigarette.
‘Has that got anything to do with the no smoking? If he catches you will he turn the hose on you out of habit?’ Conall asked. She shook her head, smiling. ‘Uh huh, he’s a bit of a health nut. You need to be fit in that line of work…. God that’s good’ she said, exhaling and looking down at the cigarette. ‘I’ve got half an hour before I’m meeting him – time for some of the smell to fade, I hope. I can always get some gum.’
Conall eyed his two thirds full second pint and full third pint and wondered if he could down both in less than half an hour. But at least if he, what was his name? Hayden, turned up they wouldn’t have to talk about what had happened since he’d last seen Shen. Again, the image of that manic handwriting beside the printed poem rose to consciousness: I go to the river to die… as if to punish him for this moment of levity.
‘You’ll have to see what I’ve done to the cottage. How long are you down for, again?’
‘A few days, not sure really.’
‘Well, unfortunately with the protest I’ve let my spare rooms out for the next few days, otherwise I’d have put you up.’
‘What protest?’ Conall asked.
‘Over the bones in the museum.’
He shook his head.
‘They’re bringing some new bones here that had been stored away in Devizes museum, and putting them in this swanky new display here; the museum’s been shut for a month or so while they’ve been renovating it; the Chairman of English Heritage is going to be here on Wednesday to visit the excavations and to open the new exhibit; there’s going to be a group of protesters there to meet him, pagans, who don’t think he should be on display. The head of them, Wolf, is lodging at Granddad’s. Granddad’s has kind of become unofficial protest HQ… if you’re around tonight we’ll be here in the pub – at half eight… you’ll be most welcome. Oh, and…’ she said, fumbling about in her bag; She took a card from out of her purse and handed it to him. Shenandoah Mac Govan Crow - Tarot card readings – individuals and parties catered for; followed by a mobile number and an email address.
‘Spread the word. Business is picking up – I mean, there’s loads of stuff like this down in Glastonbury, but not here.’
‘So will you read my cards?’ he asked. ‘You promised to last time but didn’t.’
She nodded. ‘Yeah, course I will! I read Wolf’s last night; it was fun.’
He felt a twinge of jealousy over this Wolf character…
‘And did the cards say they would win the protest?’
Shen shrugged. ‘Yes and no, strangely; they wouldn’t win but would get what they wanted.’
‘Hmm. Helpfully vague.’ Con grinned.
A beeping noise sounded from her handbag and she dug around until she had found her phone. Mouthing sorry she pressed to answer the call.
‘Hello? Hi! No, I’m at the pub…just dropped in some more cards…’ It’s Hayden, she mouthed at Conall. ‘Why don’t you come up?... No? Ok. Suit yourself…’ she raised her eyes skywards as if to say ‘whatever’ ‘…I’ll be down soon.’ She put the phone back in her bag.
‘He’s already let himself in.’ she explained, ‘I’d better head off in a minute. He’s been on nights… grumpy as hell!’ She said. Suddenly her face dropped. ‘Shit! Do you have any chewing gum or anything?’ she asked, suddenly dropping the unfinished cigarette into the ashtray.
‘Nope’ said Conall, ‘sorry’.
‘Bugger. Oh well, he’ll probably be too grumpy to kiss me for a while anyway.’ She said, rising to her feet.
‘One for the road?’ Conall joked, offering her the packet of cigarette papers. She stuck out her tongue sarcastically.
She breathed into her hand and sniffed. ‘Oh, that’s not too bad.’ She said. Then she looked down at Conall and smiled, putting out her hand as if she were about to ruffle his hair, and touching him on the cheek instead.
‘I still can’t believe you’re here! I’m glad Con. I’m glad I got to see you again.’
‘Didn’t the cards tell you I would be here again?’ he asked, to which she half smiled half snorted; ‘not the cards, no’ she said enigmatically.
‘You’ll be here tonight then? The meeting?’ she asked.
‘Half eight!’ he said, nodding, and then she was gone.
After a few seconds there was only her mostly empty glass and her half-smoked cigarette smouldering in the ashtray to evidence she had been there at all. He lifted her glass and downed the coke, surprised at the taste of brandy in it, then finished her cigarette, but not before silently lifting it heavenwards, offering the first smoke to Itsipaiitapio’pah, the Great Spirit, as her grandfather had taught him.
‘Fuck,’ was all he could think to say. ‘Fuck!’
Chapter Nine: The Marmalade Man
Avebury village was small and picturesque in parts; its short high-street, half of which lay within the circle, was pretty enough, with stone cottages lining one side opposite the church; as one entered the earth embankments one passed the village shop, and here grander houses appeared on the other side of the road, behind which, secluded in trees, lay the Manor House – but as one reached the centre of the circle, passing the cross-roads on which stood the Red Lion, then followed the road east past more houses on each side of the narrow road, the village soon petered out in a few huddles of small cottages, a mess of wooden shacks, allotments, pig sties, chicken pens and overgrown copses of trees. Choked with refuse and abandoned farm machinery.
The small car park and forecourt of the pub was filled with an assortment of vehicles; the strange half-tank half-car that had stopped at the garage earlier, and a number of large trucks bearing the insignia ‘E H Bradley; building works, Swindon’ on their sides. Around these vehicles, strewn on the cobbles of the forecourt and sat upon muddy tyre tracks, were several crates and sacks, spades, ropes.
‘Hmm. Hardly the English idyll I remember’ grumbled Lewis.
‘I’m sure it’s fine inside, Jack,’ Owen said, ‘This will all be something to do with the excavations.’ He explained, waving his hand at the mess before them. Nevertheless, he felt a strong urge to draw their attention elsewhere to lighten his friend’s mood. ‘It’s not quite lunchtime, so let’s walk some of the circle.’ He suggested.
The men had approached Avebury from the west, the direction of Beckhampton and had entered the circle along the high street – so now Barfield led them back a few hundred yards and turned south off the street through a wooden gate to where the banks and ditch of the great circle could be seen, curving far out of sight.
The remains of the circle itself still impressed: it would have taken one at least half an hour to have walked the circumference of the ditch with its towering external bank that marked the bounds of the monument. Even though in places it was choked with trees and scrubby bushes the great earthwork remained imposing, despite having been weathered by over four thousand years of Wiltshire winters.
The three friends strolled along the south-western quarter of the circle, which was divided into four segments by the roads that entered the village from each of the cardinal points, near enough, roads that respected the original entrances of the circle. The grass in the south-western quarter was being kept low by the numerous sheep that roamed here. Along this entire stretch there lay just one standing stone, though mounds along the inner edge of the ditch suggested where more lay beneath the surface, as if sleeping under grassy blankets.
The single remaining stone was larger than any of the men there present, gnarled, unworked and slightly twisted like the trunk of a storm blasted tree; and each took time to touch its rough, lichen-covered skin, warm to the touch at first, but soon yielding to a deep coolness, the heart of the stone yet to be warmed by the growing sun.
‘I don’t know why but I had imagined the stones like those at Stonehenge – taller and dressed; this is far more earthy, somehow, more wild…’ Lewis said.
‘I thought you had seen them before?’ remarked Tolkien.
‘No – we made a dash for the Red Lion in the rain and when we had emerged again it was quite dark.’
‘Imagine how it would have looked when all the stones were standing…’ Barfield said.
Lewis nodded. ‘Where did the rest go?’
‘Some were buried,’ Barfield said, gesturing at the humps dotted about the inner edge of the ditch, ‘others destroyed – heated by fires built around them and then dowsed in cold water so they broke apart.’ Barfield added.
‘Damn puritans!’ Lewis said, winking at Tolkien.
‘Were they pulled down by religious zealots or by farmers wanting decent material for their dry-stone walls, I wonder?’ Tolkien mused. He ran his hand over the stone; it seemed so alone now that its fellows were gone or lying nearby under the turf. An image crossed his mind of the sleeping stones waking and casting off their green covers on some magical future dawn, rough faces creased against the light of the rising sun on the Day of Judgement. Would the rocks and stones themselves be held accountable for what ancient man had done in ignorance here at their feet, or would they shout hosanna and be exalted when the crooked was made straight and the rough places plain?
‘This is one of the smaller of the remaining stones, however.’ Barfield said, gesturing them onwards.
Crossing the road into the south-eastern quarter the friends arrived before two leviathans of stone that had once marked the southern entrance.
‘I’ve lived in smaller houses than this!’ Lewis said, walking around the first of the stones. It stood twice as tall as a man, and he guessed ten men could stand side by side along its width. It was angular rather than rounded, set aslant so that no side, save the front and back faces, seemed level. Halfway along its southern side lay a fissure with a ledge upon which a man could have easily sat.
‘My word! It simply dwarfs any other stone circle I’ve ever seen!’ Lewis exclaimed.
‘Careful which way you walk, Jack…’ Barfield scolded. ‘This is the Devil’s Chair: if you walk three times around it anti-clockwise the Devil appears.’
Lewis tried it, to no avail.
‘Maybe it has to be at midnight? These things usually are…’ Tolkien suggested, as Lewis finished his final circumnavigation.
‘Or at full moon, or midsummer.’ Lewis proposed, slightly breathless. ‘Is it full moon?’
‘No – just past the new, we may be treated to a beautiful crescent later.’ Tolkien said, secretly thinking how sad it was that most people had no idea what phase the Moon was at.
The three friends continued their stroll along the top of the ditch, which in this quarter was choked with bushes and trees – until they crossed into the north-east section, having passed a large number of mature trees on the outer bank, their roots entwined like thousands of serpents pouring down into the ditch below; as they continued they stopped at the few remaining stones until they had nearly completed the entire circuit of the monument. They had reached its northernmost point, where the road to Swindon cut through the banks, here another huge marker stone remained, on the opposite side of the circle from the Devil’s chair they had seen earlier. They were admiring this massive diamond of rock from across the road when at that moment a great boom sounded, accompanied by shouts, from beyond the stone; a boom that made Tolkien wince in memory.
‘What on earth was that?’ Lewis asked.
They crossed the road and passed the stone in its cove of trees, approaching a large group of individuals who they could now see assembled in a far section of the quadrant, who were gazing up at the tree-lined banks ahead. One of the men turned, and, spotting the three friends, hastened towards them.
The man was stocky, with creased friendly eyes and gingery brown hair, greying at the temples, swept over his forehead, but from his long pale overcoat and cap he was recognisable as the gentleman who they had seen at the tea-rooms earlier, re-fuelling the strangely military-looking car.
‘Afternoon gentlemen!’ he beamed, in a clipped, upper class voice, with only slight traces of a Scots accent. ‘A word of warning: we’re blasting the tree roots from the banks, and so if you wouldn’t mind keeping your distance from that part of the path, we wouldn’t want you to be caught in the falling debris.’ he smiled broadly. There was something of the schoolboy in his manner.
‘Is this to do with the excavation?’ Barfield asked.
‘Excavation? Yes, yes! Are you interested in archaeology?’ he asked, his eyes lit up with boyish enthusiasm.
‘Well, yes...’ Replied Barfield, but before he could qualify the statement the man had grinned and continued.
‘Alexander Keiller,’ he said, extending his hand, ‘I’m heading the excavations here; please let me show you what we’re up to!’
Introducing themselves to their excitable guide as they walked the three friends followed Keiller towards the assembled group, some smartly dressed, others clearly labourers in their shirtsleeves, dirty from their work, but before they reached the main group Keiller turned and beckoned to the three friends to join him at the edge of the ditch; here it had been excavated far below its present level – incredibly so – if the present ditch was the depths of two men, the excavated section, with its crisp straight sides in blazing white chalk, was another six men deep.
Young workmen in caps and waistcoats, their shirtsleeves rolled up, were digging the dirty chalk from the ditch; and shoring up the sides of the vast trench with wooden revetments noisily being hammered into place. In one place on the floor of the ditch a large bone stuck out of the soil, and beside it the unmistakeable smooth polished curve of a yellowed skull.
‘The original ditch, before time silted it up – was some forty feet in depth! And the bank, too, we suppose, much, much higher than it appears today. In short this feature would have been absolutely impenetrable!’
Lewis was shaking his head. ‘My word! That is truly astounding – one would never have guessed!’
‘No, quite! It shocked us, too – we kept on thinking we had reached the bottom, but no! This site is the most spectacular prehistoric circle in the world… and it’s my dream to restore it to its former glory… already we’ve located many of the stones that were buried, and we can erect them once more. The ditches and banks can be cleared of trees, which just leaves the…’ and he waved a dismissive hand in the direction of the edge of the village with its shanty building and animal pens.
Just then the group gathered to the south edged back from the ditch as a man further up the bank opposite shouted a warning, and ran back round along the top of the bank to a safe distance. A few seconds later another boom rang out and a fountain of earth and debris was thrown into the air, pattering down into the ditch and leaving a smoking crater from which the gnarled and blasted remnants of a tree root poked.
A cry rang out and a tall dark-haired young man clutched at his head then bent over to retrieve his glasses that had been knocked off by a piece of falling matter. A couple of those nearby rushed over to see if he was okay, and he nodded that he was fine.
Keiller whooped with delight. ‘Ha! Piggott!’ he shouted over ‘It’s good for you younger men to know how we felt in the trenches in 1916!’ He winked and laughed heartily.
Lewis rested his hand on Tolkien’s arm, seeing the latter pale at the explosion.
‘I’m okay, Jack.’ He said. Besides, he thought, I’m thinking of them, not me - and the bloody mess happening in Germany right now. What if these ditches they’re digging here are just practice? I’m thinking of my sons…
Keiller turned to the friends, gesturing them to follow him towards the main group. Piggott didn’t look impressed. He held out the piece of wood that had hit him towards Keiller– not a large piece but big enough for him to dab a handkerchief in his dark hair and examine it for any signs of blood.
‘You’ll live, my boy – I’d keep that as a souvenir! Look: it looks like they’ve found some more human remains in the ditch…’ he said, guiding Piggot away, but not before turning to the three friends.
‘I really must dash – very nice to have met you! Always nice to meet fellow enthusiasts… you’d be surprised at how many consider this the height of time-wasting and folly.’ Keiller beamed, before disappearing with the dazed and frowning Piggot towards the white chalk ditch.
‘Now there’s a man with vision.’ Remarked Lewis as they approached the car park of the Red Lion.
‘Let’s hope it’s the same one our ancestors had, if he’s hoping to rebuild what was here.’ Barfield said.
‘It’s easier to have a vision when you have the money to back it up.’ Tolkien said.
‘Yes, I suppose. Where do you think his money is coming from?’ Lewis asked.
‘It’s Keiller, Jack. As in Keiller’s Dundee marmalade,’ said Barfield.
‘Ah, yes! The marmalade millionaire!’ Lewis laughed. ‘I have a jar at the Kilns! Warnie will be most impressed!’
He suddenly stopped and laughed again. ‘He certainly seemed to be possessed with a real ‘zest’ for his subject…’ Lewis proposed, grinning.
Tolkien chuckled. ‘Who better, then, to preserve the past?’
Barfield shook his head. ‘Do you think he’ll want to rename this place Scone-henge?’
‘For that appalling pun, Owen, you’re buying the first round’ Lewis said, opening the door to the Red Lion.
Chapter Ten: The Dream
Conall’s walk back to the camper had been a gloriously drunken affair; clutching a large bottle of water he’d bought at the Avebury post-office as he left the village, he had staggered back along the avenue, smiling at the stones and greeting the blackbirds and sheep with hellos; he had attained, so it seemed to him, a glimpse into the state of, if not Mankind before the Fall, at least himself before the events of the last year had overshadowed him; the words of Dylan Thomas’s Fern Hill, his favourite poem, formed an internal soundtrack to his stumbling;
And green and golden I was huntsman and herdsman, the calves
Sang to my horn, the foxes on the hills barked clear and cold
And the Sabbath rang slowly
In the pebbles of the holy streams
Conall stood in the Avenue, arms wide, and recited the poem to the sky.
It was all shining, It was Adam and Maiden.
Maiden… maiden. Just the mere word sent a primal and visceral quiver through his chest…Oh Shenandoah…
I long to see you! Away, you rolling river!
Such a state was a rare and precious occurrence in any man, let alone Conall for whom the last year had offered little respite from unhappiness. Three hours driving and three swift pints were no doubt part of the recipe on this occasion (though such recipes were doomed to failure if consciously repeated) but the role his meeting with Shenandoah Mac Govan-Crow had played in inducing this state would have been impossible for him to fathom; quite why his initial shock and disquiet had given way to this unexpected upwelling of joy eluded him. And his reaction was not to question it too closely lest this flimsy shell of happiness cracked. It did not even seem to lie wholly in the unlikely possibility that last year’s sentiments might once more be resurrected; subsequent events had put pay to that possibility, as had the presence of, what was his name again? Hayden. Perhaps then, after all, it was simply the peace of the place and the alcohol, and the memory of happiness reminding him that the emotion still lived, though sleeping deep, within him?
Alcohol; that wonderful poison! It numbed the brain from the outside in – and as the outermost part of this organ was the youngest evolutionary speaking, and which contained our so-called civilised side, our inhibitions and social niceties, these were the first qualities to vanish when the poison started working… Con remembered an image he’s seen of a brain in a textbook, sliced in half and its different areas shaded; like the rings of a tree, the deeper you went in, the older the organ became; on the outer surface was the neo-mammalian brain, shared by us and other developed mammals – beneath that lay the palaeo-mammalian brain and within that, towards the core, lay the reptilian brain – a level of brain we shared with lizards and fish; indeed, as an embryo in the womb we had gills and a tail and went through the whole of evolution in nine months, from fish to hairless ape; he thought of his own mother’s womb with the twin fish swimming aside each other, like Yin and Yang. Perhaps this was why when we drink we feel closer to the animals, Con reasoned, we’re sloughing off our humanity, that thin, filmy outer surface of the brain, and we’re thinking instead (if thinking was an apt word, which he doubted) with our deeper animal brains; and if we drank so much, or if we could perhaps somehow go all the way back, why… we’d be like snakes or fish - primal sea serpents – what kind of knowledge would we then possess – knowledge of our ancient selves – what kind of deep primeval memories might lie stirring in our deep serpentine brains? He wondered. If we could but think those thoughts and shut off all the noise of the later brains! An image arose in his mind from one of Wagner’s operas he’d once been forced to watch (and had grown to enjoy) where Siegfried slew the dragon and drank his blood and could understand the language of the birds. The dragon’s blood clearly gave access to that primal reptilian knowledge, older than man – locked within our psyches – usually never heard or heeded, save perhaps when we lie basking in the warmth of the sun; yet our most basic functions are controlled from this part of the brain – breathing, regulation of temperature… was this why wisdom was often depicted in serpentine form? The entwined snakes on the caduceus of Hermes or the staff of Asclepius?
The sun was still high above Waden Hill, the shadows of the stones short; the farthest stones visible of the southern end of the Avenue danced in the heat; all seemed still; no birds were flying. The archaeologists had ceased digging and were sat with their backs to the sun in the shadow of two stones. Con was pissed enough to wonder over to them.
‘Found anything?’ he asked, dumbly.
A middle-aged man with a short silver goatee beard ran his fingers through his hair and swallowed the mouthful of sandwich he had been eating, and looked up at Con, shielding his eyes from the sun with a hand.
‘Well… we were looking to see if the stone was in the right place – the circle was partly rebuilt in the 30’s; this one had been put back in place with concrete, and so we’re looking to see if we can find traces of the original stone-hole… but we’re also looking at the original ground-surface…’
He stood. ‘See the compacted chalk, here?’
Con nodded, looking at a smooth and pristine square of exposed white earth, inches below the topsoil with its long pale grass.
‘We’re looking to see if it’s more worn and compacted between the stones or outside of them…’
‘So, you can gauge if people were processing along them or not?’ Con asked.
‘Precisely. It tells us just as much if we find out that they weren’t…’
Con looked puzzled.
‘This site is part of a henge,,,’ the archaeologist said, ‘basically a big circular ceremonial structure, and we know henges are ceremonial as they have a bank on the outside of the ditch…’ he waved loosely in the direction of the huge henge bank over his shoulder that ringed the village, the trees that lined it still visible at this distance.
‘That would be useless as a defensive feature – where you’d ideally put the bank on the inside…’
Con knew all of this but was nodding anyway, wondering where the archaeologist was heading, and suddenly needing to piss…
‘But what if they were defensive, but from the inside? What if they were keeping something in?’ He raised an eyebrow, grinning.
‘What, like animals? Herds of cows?’ Con asked. Or bulls? He wondered, suddenly seeing the henge as a great bullring, ringed with cheering crowds.
The man shrugged. ‘We’ll see. If you’re here over the next couple of days, we may find out. We might find foot or hoofprints along the avenue… or we may find evidence of footfall outside of the Avenue… as it may have been it wasn’t meant for mortals to walk on at all.’
‘A kind of ghost road?’ Con asked.
‘Yes, something like that. Perhaps the stones represented ancestors or spirits.’
‘Keep me posted.’ Con said, wanting to stay and talk but increasingly needing to pee.
Once over the hill and out of view of the archaeologists he lent with an unsteady hand on a stone and pissed against its base - returning nitrogen to the soil, he reasoned, yet feeling slightly uneasy, remembering what the archaeologist had said about the stones; nevertheless, it was with a lighter step that he marched down the slope to where his camper lay parked beside the road.
The inside of the camper was like an oven; he closed the curtains, slid open the windows on the opposite side, and cleared the heap of clothes off the sofa-bed; Con took a large tepid draught from his water bottle and lay down, eyes closed. His plan was to re-hydrate himself and snooze for a while so that he wouldn’t spend the night at the pub with a blinding headache sipping orange juice.
For a moment he swooned into a deep, dark, state of relaxation, but a few seconds later his feet seemed to be rising above his head sickeningly, and so he sat upright and drank a little more water until the van stopped moving skywards. I’m such a lightweight, he thought. Three pints and I’m pissed. His eyes began to close, and the room fell away again; he felt nauseous. Fuck, fuck, fuck; the ancient reptile within was rebelling against the poison; the alcohol had changed the viscosity of the liquid in his inner ear, making him feel he was moving when he was still; the primal serpent, basically an alimentary canal on legs, was attempting to rid itself of the poison that was threatening its life. But Con was able to summon enough outer brain to fight this urge.
It took a further twenty minutes of attempting, and failing, to keep his eyes closed without feeling dizzy before the motion of passing cars rocking the camper lulled him into a half-doze. He dozed on and off, drinking some more water when he remembered, until finally the urge to sleep left him.
Sitting up he felt the first dull twinges of headache. He searched the drawers above the hob and sink for an ibuprofen. He couldn’t find the bloody things, and instead he reached higher and took the Collected Coleridge from the bookshelf; he didn’t open it, just held it to his chest, lost in thought. He was thinking of a dream he had had some twenty years before whose meaning had eluded him at the time but which had somehow become connected to all of this… to this place, to her; he had shaken it from his mind earlier but now in his half-aware state he allowed himself to remember.
The dream was simple yet profound:
He was walking through a spring landscape, at some unspecified date long ago in the past – deep in prehistory - on the site, though no monument was yet present, of some future circular earthwork or henge. In the distance there was a mountainous expanse with a great chasm in its side. Continuing to walk he had found himself beside a gently meandering stream on the banks of which were three white cows with red ears, grazing, and beside them a stately woman, no, a goddess, in a long blue robe, her face hidden by a hood. She approached the stream and placed one end of the wand she was carrying into the water, whereupon the river turned milky white. Conall removed his clothes and walked into the water, then knelt and submerged himself in the cool depths three times… after the last submersion he turned to see a white horse with a shining crescent moon set between its brows standing on the river bank beside him. He walked out of the water and kissed it between her brows but instead of leaping on to its back, as it gestured him to do, Conall walked beside it, still naked…
The dream imagery had stuck with him far longer than any normal dream; it had had the clarity of a vision; it had seemed to suggest rebirth, a new start- but only now was he starting to understand it – images within it which had remained a mystery had started to make sense over the past couple of years; clues within it had been instrumental – more than instrumental – vital – in his academic work investigating these ancient sites; and details that had meant nothing at the time had come to seem more than coincidental, as if the dream had been prophetic – and it’s tied to this place, thought Con, I know it.
When he had been here last spring, he had returned to his camper one evening after seeing Shen at the cottage, feeling restless, uneasy, like he wanted to run or shout or smash something; it was a feeling of a joyous rage, of intoxication. It was as if a fire had been lit within him; like he wanted to roar with the life he felt. Remembering the dream, he had gone to the Kennet that night, wishing to act it out; it seemed madness at the time – what did he think he was doing? This, he had reasoned, is how rituals must start – with the physical acting out of a vision. He had felt compelled to go – the dream image kept rising in his mind, relentless, hypnotic in its quiet insistence; the thought of entering those cool waters promised not a dampening or cooling of his ardour, but a transformation of it. Maybe I’m ready, he had thought, to start anew; he remembered how he had felt in the dream, slick from the water, his hair plastered back from his forehead, like a new born; he’d felt like a young god, like the kouros of Poseidon rising from the some primal amniotic fluid – but he hadn’t gone through with it. He had just stared into the inky waters feeling empty and suddenly wary and had returned to the camper, mute and deflated.
Why that night of all nights, he now wondered? Had he somehow known? Not that there was any way he could have – even if twin quantum particles could affect each other though separated millions of light years apart in space – how would it be remotely possible that he could somehow intuit what she had been doing at that very moment? Because it had been then, he knew in his heart of hearts. But he had felt a sense of renewal, not of fear. And surely, he should have felt her fear?
I go to the river to die…
But there had been no connection; it was coincidence, that’s all; it was all in his head; it was a door into madness to think otherwise. And yet he would have rushed headlong through that door if it meant, for a single precious moment, that the connection had been there - a hint that the entanglement had been real; that somehow, beyond time and space, they had always been, and therefore always would be, together.
But he had not known her anguish. There was no quantum entanglement; no tie; no hope; just mute nothingness and an old book, bent out of shape and disfigured by the desperate scribblings of her pain, which now mercifully had ended. He was too shocked to close his eyes and try to sleep again; and too hurt to cry. He drew aside the curtain facing the Avenue; the field with its double line of stones lay empty. Likewise, out of sight, the tourists in the main circle to the north were slowly departing, leaving it to its ghosts. Long past its zenith the sun was gilding the edges of the stones and the trees that crested the hills, but Con was immune to its beauty. The fine shell of happiness had cracked.
Chapter Eleven: Mac Govan-Crow
Tolkien and Barfield sat at the small table beside the window, relieved to have at last reached the Red Lion and un-shouldered their heavy packs. Lewis was at the bar, where he was talking to the barman as the latter poured beer from a jug into three pint mugs.
The room was busy and filled with smoke; in one corner two men in caps played at dominoes; in the other corner, far from the patch of sunlight in which Tolkien found himself sitting, sat a solitary figure, puffing on his pipe and eyeing Tolkien with dark heavy lidded eyes. Tolkien looked away hurriedly and smiled at Barfield.
‘Jack’s on top form.’ he said, on hearing the barman laugh at one of Lewis’s witticisms. Owen nodded, but his eyes suggested something different than the smile that briefly played over his lips.
‘I find Jack somewhat, I don’t know, flat of late.’ he said.
‘Flat?’
‘His arguments lack conviction. It’s as if some of that fire he once had has left him. I suppose it was the part of him that was searching… but now he has found God it’s as if the search is over and that hunger has somewhat abated. His opinions have become fixed.’
It was clear from his expression that Barfield had found this change in his friend painful. ‘I did so used to enjoy seeing him fired up.’ He smiled sadly and blinked a few times. ‘Did you see his face when he said about no longer being a poet? That’s all that used to drive him. He seems lost, for having become found.’
Tolkien looked away, unsure of how to respond to his friend’s observation, and found himself once more under the gaze of the swarthy man in the corner. Having had his gaze met Tolkien decided he could not be rude and look away for a second time and so he touched his cap in greeting. Slowly, the man in the corner responded, touching his cap with stubby, dirty fingers, his eyes remaining still fixed on the pair at the window, midst the blue cloud of pipe smoke.
Unnerved, Tolkien fidgeted in his waistcoat pocket for his own pipe, filled the bowl and then laid it on the table, then changed his mind and put it in his mouth unlit, then took it out to speak.
‘He seems little altered to me, Owen; but you have known him longer, I suppose. Perhaps what you’re observing is the mellowing of a man in his middle years, as we all are, no doubt?!’
Owen smiled. ‘Perhaps you are right, Ronald.’
‘Time ever marches on.’ Tolkien said, striking a match and lifting to his pipe. ‘Unlike us. I think it’s a good decision to stay here tonight,’ he said; they had reached this decision moments before. What had appeared during their planning a decent spot to pause had, in truth, appeared more attractive in the flesh, so to speak; Calne could wait.
Lewis returned to the table with the foaming mugs in his hands. He was frowning.
‘No room at the Inn, I am sorry to say – nor, it seems, at the other place across the road… all been booked up by that archaeologist Keiller, but all is not lost...’ He said enigmatically and he returned to the bar.
Tolkien sipped at the foam of the beer. ‘I do hope so. I don’t really fancy walking much further today. I thought the idea was to break us in slowly, not kill us off on day one.’ A fleeting smile played across his lips. ‘I dare say there should be room still at Calne if it should come to that...’
Just then the barman, with whom Lewis was talking, turned and raised his voice.
‘George?’
At this, the dark-complexioned man in the corner who had been watching Barfield and Tolkien, set down his drink and headed for the bar, where he was seen to engage Lewis in conversation. Tolkien eyed the pair, noting the man’s long-hair bound in a ponytail, like some tinker or gypsy, he thought. A moment later the two men were walking towards the table. Tolkien and Barfield stood to greet the stranger.
‘This is Mr Mac Govan-Crow,’ Lewis said, ‘and it seems he has a couple of rooms to rent in the village, which is excellent news.’
Mr Mac Govan-Crow once again touched his hand to his cap.
‘He has invited us to see the rooms, but I’ve assured him that I am sure they will be more than suitable; shall we bring our packs along after our lunch?’ he asked the newcomer.
Mr Mac Govan seemed to be eyeing the three gentlemen with veiled amusement, much to Tolkien’s discomfort. ‘’Tis no bother, sirs. I’ll take your luggage now; if you come after you’ve eaten, I shall provide you with a key.’ His accent was pure West Country, even if his swarthy, aquiline looks with their black eyes like crescents over high cheekbones, were not. He effortlessly shouldered Lewis’s pack, despite his short stature, then picked up the other two in his hands and exited the pub.
‘Good god he must be as strong as an ox!’ exclaimed Tolkien. ‘Mac Govan-Crow, eh? If he’s a Celt, then I’m a Zulu!’
‘Yes. I know. Listen to this. He's a full-blooded Red Indian by all accounts, so the barman told me! ‘Hawkeye, Last of the Mohicans’ the landlord called him.’ Lewis said.
‘Hawkeye?! People can be so uneducated!’ Tolkien scowled.
Lewis nodded.
‘Everyone knows that the last of the Mohicans was Uncas! Hawkeye was a white man!’ Tolkien explained.
Lewis suddenly laughed. ‘My dear Tollers! There was I agreeing over what I thought was your annoyance over a racial stereotype whereas your real annoyance was over the fact the barman didn’t know his Fennimore-Cooper well enough!’
Tolkien smiled. ‘Both rankle with me –ignorance is ignorance, I suppose. And if you’re stupid enough to cast about racist nicknames you’re also stupid enough not to know you’ve chosen a character of the wrong race to begin with! I was brought up reading the Leatherstocking tales; I used to fantasize about living in the forests, hunting with a bow…this is absolutely marvellous! I wonder if he speaks any Native languages…?’ Tolkien asked, his eyes lighting up. ‘How on earth did he end up in Wiltshire?!’ he continued. ‘What tribe is he?’
‘I don’t care, as long as he can cook a good English breakfast.’ Lewis quipped, and sipped his pint. But Tolkien wouldn’t let the subject drop.
Owen had spread his ordnance survey map out across the table – and the friends spent a few minutes looking closely at the finer details, while thirstily emptying their glasses.
‘So, the question is whether we take a walk back to Silbury now and climb it before dinner – or, seeing is we are now staying the night, we save that until tomorrow.’
Tolkien was looking at the map in silence.
‘Just look at the number of ancient features – dozens more burial mounds than I suspected; and look at that…’
‘What is it?’ asked Lewis.
‘That hill – Windmill hill on Stukeley’s map – there’s some kind of square enclosure on top and here the hill is called Waden hill.’
‘Waden? And what do you deduce from that?’ Lewis asked, downing his pint.
‘And the spring…’ he continued, not pausing to answer Lewis’s question, ‘the Kennet spring, is here named Swallowhead! Swallow. Well I never! Suilo. It seems my vision of that lady floating in the waters of the Kennet was probably correct…if I hadn’t been so preoccupied with the book over the last few days I would’ve had time to do some research, I had no idea… the hill’s named after the spring…not vice versa…’
‘Explain!’ Lewis said, annoyed at his friend’s seemingly random muttering
‘Only if you get in another jug, this is going to be thirsty work!! We need the ale of inspiration!’
Chapter Twelve: Adversity
Once more seated at the table by the window of the Red Lion Conall was swirling his glass of diet coke so that the large effervescent paracetamol and codeine tablets he’d dropped into it would dissolve more quickly. The fizzing finally stopped, and he swallowed the resulting bittersweet liquid with a grimace. He had left his campervan dehydrated with his head threatening to burst with every heartbeat making the walk to the pub nauseatingly painful and arduous. Now faced with a veggie lasagne with onion rings he looked down at the plate and wanted to heave, but he dipped a ring into a large heap of mayonnaise and persevered. Then he ate like a starving dog.
At the bar sat the wiry, shaven-headed man who had joined in with the folk singers earlier that day; he had greeted Conall with ‘y’alright?’ as he’d ordered his meal and Conall had done his best to nod, noticing the piercing in the man’s bottom lip above a greying goatee beard constrained in a leather thong, and the heavily tattooed arms. Now seated by the window Conall couldn’t help but listen to the man, who was speaking in a thick Yorkshire accent, talking to the pretty barmaid who had taken his food order earlier. The man’s words, like his accent, were strong – liberally peppered with swearing. He was showing the barmaid something he had on a lace about his neck that she was regarding with interest.
A little later the shaven-headed man left for a smoke and Conall took his now-empty plate to the bar; he ordered a Jack Daniels and coke and repaired to his seat. His headache had abated somewhat, but still hang around his temples; perhaps the shot would help, he thought, optimistically. He suddenly realised he was rocking back and forth on his seat like a caged animal, and so made a conscious effort to stop, only to find his fingers rapping on the tabletop. It was through these physical expressions that Conall realised just how nervous he was about seeing Shen. There, at that very bar, he had first talked to her, all those months ago. He had been less nervous then. He couldn’t imagine doing it now. My fire has left me, he thought bitterly.
The door creaked open and Conall’s pulse shot up, but it was not Shen. It was a man in a biker’s jacket, tall, well-built, with a shock of red-blond hair and short fiery beard and blue eyes; Con breathed a sigh of relief, but it caught in his throat as he spied Shen walking in after him; she leant up and said something to him, then glanced about for Conall.
Shen smiled and lifted a hand, but before she could walk over the shaven-headed man had walked back in and had greeted her with a bear hug; turning, he shook Hayden’s hand and the two men headed for the bar.
‘What would you like to drink?’ Shen asked, walking over to Conall, her eyes smiling. ‘A beer; Green King – same as earlier’ he said. But rather than stay sitting waiting to be introduced to the others Conall rose and approached the bar with her.
‘Conall, this is Wolf Jones, he’s staying at the cottage, and this is Hayden…’ Wolf’s handshake was friendly and vigorous, and accompanied by the same ‘Y’alright?’ as earlier; Hayden’s grip was firm and he glanced at Conall with a lack of scrutiny that suggested either Shen had said nothing about their past (not that there was much to tell, he thought), or Hayden was not the kind of bloke to be troubled by such things.
‘A bitter drinker, eh?’ he said, his voice deep with a strong West Country tang. ‘That’s what we like to see! You here for the protest?’
‘I didn’t know it was happening, to be honest – I just needed to get away from London.’ Con stated.
‘Where are you staying?’ Hayden asked.
‘In my campervan ‘, he began, and when Wolf raised his eyebrows in interest he continued ‘I’m parked down by the avenue.’ Conall replied.
‘Silver fiat Scudo?’ Wolf said, ‘I think I saw it at the Sanctuary earlier. Nice little conversion – I’d love to have a poke around’ Wolf cut in. Conall tried to recall if he’d seen anyone there, ‘I was in my van just up from you – big black bastard with wolves on t’side.’ He chuckled.
‘Yeah, I saw your van.’ Conall said, trying not to think of the van rocking…
Shen and Wolf took their drinks over to the table while Conall waited for his own to be poured. He stood in silence next to Hayden who was tapping in his pin number into the card reader. Conall made an offer to pay for his pint but the other refused, and so Conall took both his and Hayden’s pints back to the table. Wolf had sat opposite Shen, leaving Conall to decide whether to sit next to Wolf or next to Shen; either way he’d have to sit opposite Hayden. He decided to sit beside Wolf – at least that way he’d be able to look Shen in the face.
‘Shen says you’re doing some research on the henges?’ Wolf asked.
‘Something like that…’ Con answered, dismissively.
‘It’s a cool place; the energy here is amazing. I was up at West Kennet this morning drumming…’ he closed his eyes and exhaled ‘…it was a beautiful sunrise.’
Hayden had arrived and nestled in beside Shen.
‘Did I hear you say drumming? Another fucking weirdo!’ He laughed.
‘I’ll pick you up at 5am tomorrow then, Hayden? I’ve got a spare drum…’
Hayden raised a sceptical eyebrow and smiled.
‘Such a shame, mate – I’ll be leaving for work before that… maybe next time.’ He said, winking. ‘You see it all here – drums, didgeridoos… croppies’ he swigged his pint.
‘Joking aside, you should try it.’ Wolf suggested, with sincerity.
‘Nah. Not my thing.’ He placed his hand over Shen’s, ‘I’m kind of a bit too practical for all that shit; but live and let live – it don’t bother me.’
Conall had so far remained silent, trying desperately hard to find something to say.
‘What’s a croppy?’ he asked
Hayden nodded towards a group on a table by the fire – long haired for the most part and sporting various types of facial hair, but these were not the usual hippy types dressed in colourful loose clothes – these seemed more techno-nerds, in blacks and dark greens – close-fitting, camouflaging - who were currently sharing images on their mobile phones and laughing.
‘Circlemakers.’
‘What – crop circles? These guys make them?’
‘Well, you can be sure little green men don’t – this lot are behind most – though they’ll not admit it; it’s all part of the mystique, apparently.’
‘I think I’d tell people – I’d be well proud.’ Wolf laughed.
‘They make a shit load of money, too – corporate branding etcetera – media and businesses pay these guys to stick advertising in fields – there was one a couple of years ago advertising Shredded Wheat – or film promos. If they let on they did them all they’d ruin the mystery and then no one would pay them to do it; it pays for them to keep quiet.’
Con continued to look over at them; they looked unassuming - perhaps, he thought, they derived some nerdish glee from pulling the wool over people’s eyes - drinking beer then going and playing practical jokes in a Wiltshire cornfield on a balmy summer’s night and gleefully listening to the speculation here the next day seemed a fairly innocuous hobby; it was all mercurial, childish fun. But perhaps he was doing them a disservice; perhaps they really were really faceless artists speaking up for the earth.
Another pint drunk, Conall was finding his tongue beginning to loosen.
‘So do you let Shen read your cards?’ he asked Hayden.
Hayden laughed and shot him a look that said ‘are you serious?’
‘It’s bollocks – I mean, a tarot card can no more tell my future than this beer mat; You know what I think? It’s more to do with her reading the people and then making the cards fit, don’t you think? She’s bloody good at reading people.’ He turned to Shen. ‘I mean it – you should go into psychology, or something. Use your skills properly. Or even the police, CID or something. This stuff’s okay, and people lap it up round here, but you could do something proper with it….’
Shenandoah looked up at him, her eyes wide. Conall couldn’t read what she was thinking.
‘I’m happy how it is, Hay. It’s starting to pay its way. And I can fit it in around my painting…’
‘Yeah, it is babe, but I just think you could be doing something better with it, that’s all.’ He stroked her cheek. ‘You’re wasted doing that.’
She looked up again and shrugged.
She met Con’s gaze for an instant, smiled weakly and then sipped her brandy and coke. He remembered her laughter from last year. She looked different now, kind of beaten down, or maybe she was just biting her tongue for the sake of the group. Besides, he guessed she could say the same of him – he felt uncomfortable here, a ghost playing at living, a cartoon character amongst flesh and blood men. Why can I never think of anything to say?! He berated himself.
‘So what do you do, Colin?’
‘Conall. Well, up ‘til recently I was a lecturer, in astrophysics.’
‘At last, a scientist!’ Hayden laughed and put out his hand for Con to shake. Conall shook his hand but felt like an idiot in doing so; Hayden’s hands were large and calloused; his own felt like a child’s in comparison.
‘til recently, you say?’
‘Yeah – I’m looking to lecture independently, and write – articles and stuff; I’m just fed up of London.’
‘He who is tired of London is tired of life’ – who said that?’ Wolf asked.
‘Samuel Johnson; well I guess I’m tired of life. I hate cities. I think mankind made a massive mistake in ever leaving the countryside.’
‘You wouldn’t say that if you lived here; it’s fucking dead!’ Hayden laughed.
Con shrugged. ‘We’re not adapted for city life – we evolved in the Savannah, moving in small groups, close to nature; in a city we see more people in ten seconds than your average prehistoric man would have seen in a lifetime; I just don’t think we’re adapted for it – I think we miss it.’
Hayden snorted. ‘How can we miss what we’ve never had?’
Con shrugged.
‘I read once of an experiment where generations of finches were brought up in a secluded lab, yet despite never having been outside nor seen a predator, when a plastic hawk was passed overhead they all crouched and tried to hide… they’d never seen a hawk yet felt fear. It’s instinct. The yearning for nature is an instinct, too. We can miss the world our ancestors knew.’
I miss it, he thought; that ancient sense of belonging, of living in harmony with Nature; not barricading her outside of the city gates. I don’t feel at home among other people; I sleep better under the stars than in any bed…
‘Yeah, I do get where you’re coming from, but you can’t turn back the clock.’ Hayden said. ‘Or stop the march of progress.’
‘More’s the pity,’ said Wolf. ‘I’m sure there’s a correlation between stress and cruelty and the way cities depersonalize you… look at what happened when the Native Americans formed cities – human sacrifice on a mass scale.’
‘You can’t blame that on cities,’ Hayden re-joined ‘– that was just due to plain barbarism. 84,000 people sacrificed over 2 days, so the Spanish Chroniclers said.’
‘Exactly, Spanish Chroniclers – sooo trustworthy and unbiased….’ said Shen, chagrined.
‘Well,’ continued Hayden in what must have been a perennial argument between them, given the withering look on her face ‘it just goes to show the Indians were just as brutal as the Europeans – this crap people spout nowadays about the poor tree-hugging natives is just bullshit – Aho! It’s a good day to die!!! your ancestors were just as bloodthirsty as mine.’
Shen pouted. ‘One - The Aztecs weren’t my ancestors; you can’t lump a whole continent of peoples together like that. There’s a bit of a distance between Mexico and Canada, you know? And two - that’s like me blaming your Scottish ancestors for the Holocaust just because you’re European.’
In the half hour or so of conversations that followed Conall found himself still silent and increasingly morose; that mercurial spark of drunken vision he had known earlier had vanished; his second beer that night was, like the first, tackled more out of duty than enjoyment, and he was remaining resolutely and unfortunately sober. Having lost its control momentarily earlier his outer brain was not willing to relinquish its command so easily again. His social niceties and insecurities had snapped back in force. Sitting opposite Hayden he found that his view of Shen was mostly blocked by both Wolf and Hayden, as it was these two who were doing most of the talking, and both kept leaning forward over their drinks. Wolf would now and again ask Conall a question, but Hayden seemed to ignore Conall and Shen as he alternately clashed swords with Wolf or joined the other in raucous laughter. Now and again Conall would catch her eye and she’d raise an eyebrow. Eventually out of frustration Conall stood up and went and sat between her and Wolf at the end of the table.
‘You ok?’ he asked.
She smiled too broadly and said she was.
‘So what do you charge for a tarot reading?’ he asked, deliberately choosing the topic Hayden had been so dismissive of.
‘Well, if there’s a group of four or five, and I get a lot of groups, I’ll charge £100 for the evening.’
‘And individually?’
‘£25 to £30 I suppose. It’s tiring, though.’
‘I think it’s good, what you’re doing.’ He said.
She smiled again but looked sad. She looked at him, but he couldn’t read what was behind the look.
‘And the painting?’
‘So so. I’ve just got too much to do what with doing the house up, and the card readings; plus, it’s hard to find the time – as in I need space, you know, when I’m doing it. And…’ she hushed her voice ‘certain people don’t like me spending all my time concentrating on it and not them; I get a fair few interruptions…’
They smiled conspiratorially.
She sipped at her brandy and coke.
‘I really shouldn’t have any more; I’m such a light-weight these days!’
She held his gaze and her eyes creased in a smile.
‘I’m glad you’re here. Avebury, I mean – not the pub – not just the pub; sorry. I wondered how you were doing.’
‘Life goes on.’ Con said.
‘Yes, it does.’
Wolf, meanwhile, was explaining to Hayden about the protest, telling how when the archaeologist Stuart Piggott had excavated West Kennet Long-Barrow in the 1950’s most of the bones found in the chambers had been taken to Devizes museum. But recently a researcher had re-discovered the most important of these remains – a full skeleton (rare, as most of the bones in the mound had been leg bones) in the bowels of the museum stores and these remains were being moved into a new display in the museum here at Avebury. Why, Wolf was arguing, could they not be repatriated?
‘This man is one of our ancestors; why should he be put on display in a museum to be gawped at?’ Wolf said.
Hayden had been listening to this preamble without saying a word, but now began to speak.
‘Unless they do DNA testing on the bones he can’t really be claimed as an ancestor; besides – the bones are of scientific interest. What’s important is what the bones tell us about how people lived back then; their diet, their diseases.’
‘Yeah, that’s interesting – but what if it was your granddad being put on display?’ Wolf said.
Conall tried not to look at Shen.
‘He’s not, though,’ replied Hayden, ‘nor is he anyone’s granddad that’s alive today. You’re just being sentimental and giving the bones a value they don’t possess.’
‘What of the wishes of the man himself? He would want to be with his people, not in a glass case in a museum.’
‘Well, to be frank, we can’t ask him his wishes, can we? It just all seems a bit phoney.’ Hayden continued.
‘It would be different if he had been buried a Christian, though, wouldn’t it?’ Wolf countered, ‘or these were some Saint’s relics? People are so bloody careful about not treading on the toes of Christians, Muslims or anyone else that might take offence, but the rights of Pagans and our Pagan ancestors are completely overlooked.’
‘Maybe that’s because there’s no continuity of tradition. You pagans are just using the bones to make a point; you’re trying to find a link to the past to justify your own beliefs. If you have ancestors you can see and touch then you have roots you can boast of. It’s possibly different if you’re a Red Indian and you can show the White Man has dug up your ancestral burial ground and taken the bones of an individual you can possibly name – but that’s not the case here. ’
Con looked aside at Shen to see if she would react to the rather derogatory term ‘Red Indian’ but she seemed distant, as if not listening to the argument between the two men. Remembering his PhD tutor’s comments Con bit his tongue and remained silent.
‘But even though we don’t know his name we can probably say that thousands of us are descended from him.’
‘Which is why when he’s on display in the museum it’ll be interesting and informative. How can we learn from him when he’s stuck back up in West Kennet or buried up on Windmill Hill, is it, as you’re proposing?’
‘It’s not about learning, it’s about respect.’ Wolf said. ‘And you tell me the principal reason for him being on display is scientific? Is it bollocks! It’s entertainment. It’s about numbers through the door and selling more fookin’ guidebooks. It’s getting kids to gawp at a skeleton for entertainment, not education. If it wasn’t going to make money they wouldn’t bother.’
Hayden took a mouthful of beer.
‘I know that’s how you feel, but the protest just seems pointless. It’s whimsical and would deprive us of any future attempts to use the bones for all types of analyses we’ve yet to discover, despite what you think about it not really being scientific. Right, Colin? You’re a scientist; you understand the importance of this.’ Con just looked at Hayden without changing his expression, not that Hayden seemed to notice, for he continued speaking without pause: ‘Why should the greater part of mankind lose out just to satisfy the weird beliefs of a handful of hippies? Why should these few individuals lay claim to these bones when, as you say, thousands of us are descended from him?’
Con shifted uncomfortably in his seat.
‘Anyway…’ Hayden continued, ‘I’ve never been a fan of ineffective protests – and this is a waste of yours and everyone’s time; they’ve built the bloody display now – printed the new guidebooks, mugs, postcards, keyrings – and all manner of tat… what are they going to do? Say you’ve got a point and burn it all?’
Wolf paused, and instead of reacting he held his hand up and smiled; instantly any tension that had been building up around the table dissipated.
‘Well, we’ll agree to disagree on this.’ He said, taking out a pouch of tobacco and rolling himself a cigarette. He offered the pouch to Shen, who refused, with a furtive look at Conall. Hayden shook his head, but Conall took the proffered pouch from Wolf and rolled himself one.
Outside the pub, under the thatched eaves strung with outdoor lights, Wolf lit Conall’s fag, then his own.
‘That was very noble of you to bite your tongue.’ Conall offered.
Wolf blew out a long cloud of smoke, shaking his head.
‘I’ve heard it all before – but when I was talking about respect, I meant it. We have to respect the wishes of the person we’re putting on display... The way he was buried; the special treatment of his body as opposed to the others – he wasn’t the same; he had a special role; and we need to honour that…Putting him on display just isn’t right. It’s disrespectful. and to argue that we might lose out on future scientific discovery is just bullshit! Is this all he is – some science experiment? So, they cut up the bones and find out he ate 5% more wheat than a similar skeleton from France – so fucking what?’
Conall nodded. ‘It’s strange,’ he said. ‘What does it say about modern man that he puts science before humanity? Hayden talks about value, but fails to see that surely the greatest value the bones possess isn’t the abstract facts we can glean about his life from them but from the very fact they were part of a living human being – that surely is where their true value lies... ’
‘So you’re with us? Hehe!’ Wolf said, grinning, and slapped him on the back. ‘You should’ve said that back in there… but I can tell you’re not much of a talker, are you? Besides, I’m not doing it because I’m a Pagan – I bloody hate most Pagans – you know, the weekend witch types; I know that it’s what the ancestors want.’ And he fixed Conall with a sidelong look.
‘I’m not interested in any religion that may or may not be made up, and a lot of modern paganism is, I’m talking about the spirits of the land, and those spirits are just as present today as they were thousands of years ago. You just have to have the humility to listen to them.’
He looked southwards over the stones, now cloaked in darkness.
‘You see, it’s not about the past – about turning back the clock, despite what Hayden thinks; it’s about remembering what we need NOW. That’s why I get fed up with people who moan on about the good old days - they have lost sight of the potential of the present… and we only have the present; we can change the direction our species is travelling in, but not backwards.’
Con nodded in agreement.
‘Do you know Whitman’s ‘Leaves of Grass’?’ he asked his shaven-headed companion;
“There was never any more inception than there is now,
Nor any more youth or age than there is now;
And will never be any more perfection than there is now,
Nor any more heaven or hell than there is now.”’
Now. It has to be now. He thought; the past is no more sacred than the now… only I find it hard to see it, damaged as I am by guilt.
‘There’s no going back, but that doesn’t mean we can’t learn from the past; all these progressives are so fucking dumb…’ Wolf spat. ‘I hate their self-serving greed– it’s all for the good of man, this myth of progress… some Jetsons future where all disease is cured and we’re all in flying cars; and what have we done to get there? Analysed all the bones, cut up all the animals; cut down all the trees... but it’s ok because it was done in the service of man. It’s bollocks. If you were walking in city and you realised you’d strayed into a shit neighbourhood you wouldn’t blindly carry, you’d bloody well turn back round and choose another route. That’s where we’re at, Con, or should I say Colin?’ he laughed ‘as a species we’ve taken a wrong turn, and we need the humility to accept we need to change our path,’
Conall looked at this strange mixture of a man; his tattoos, piercings, wiry strong arms, wickedly glinting, predator-like pale eyes. There was no pretence about him, nothing done for effect; he was as he was.
‘Civilization is not the be all and end all. Civilizations have come and gone and will do again; I just don’t want to be part of the civilization that took the whole world with it when it fell…’ Wolf said. Un-beckoned the image of a vast wave sweeping over towns and cities rose in Con’s mind…of lightning in a blackened, churning sky, and the view of collapsing cliffs viewed from a violently lurching boat… where the hell did that come from? He wondered, bemused. I know that scene…
‘The ancestors - they are saying remember us.’ Wolf was saying. Con, roused from his disturbing yet weirdly familiar reverie glanced out to where Wolf was gesturing, towards the stones whose giant hunched silhouettes were slowly becoming visible against the pallid night sky as their eyes became used to the darkness; And can you hear their voices? Con wanted to ask. Is this some poetic metaphor or can you really hear the voices of the dead? Can you hear her?
‘So, are you a pagan?’ Wolf asked.
Con shrugged.
‘I’m not a fan of labels; I sometimes think I’m close to a Taoist or a Buddhist – but a lot of their philosophy seems very life-negating – the universe is a veil of tears and delusion and we need to jump off it…’
Wolf nodded. ‘You know, I’m the same – some of the basic tenets I love, but I agree – life is to be lived; it’s not fucking easy – but it’s not meant to be easy; it’s certainly not meant to be thrown away.’
‘It can be fucking cruel.’ Con commented.
Wolf pulled a face.
‘Depends on your perspective; what if it’s not so much cruel as not making things easy?’
‘That implies intention – you can’t say that there’s some great cosmic being who intends for the world to be this way – babies dying in Africa, kids with cancer; earthquakes, hurricanes, murder…’
‘No, mate – I look at it on a smaller scale than that – what if there was a part of ourselves, not some great cosmic force, but something in us that somehow stage managed our lives? It could be part of that greater force, just not all of it. It’s like when you dream – you’re in the dream, talking to someone who isn’t you – yet when you wake up it’s all been in your own head, so that other person WAS you, you just couldn’t see it from within the perspective of the dream. What if life is like that dream, and really, we’re the stage manager and the actors – we just don’t have the perspective right now…I’m not saying I believe this, but I do sometimes wonder. If there was a greater part of me controlling things beyond my reach, I wouldn’t expect it to make things easy for me – for me to win the lottery or have a string of birds on my arm 24/7 – because if it was easy you wouldn’t try, and it’s through trying that you grow. Fortune favours the brave, and to be brave you need adversity.’
Adversity, thought Con. I’ve had my fair share…
‘There’s something that Krishna says in the Mahabaratha – love your enemies as they give you your destiny…’ Wolf said, then, changing tack, turned and looked directly at Con. ‘What do you think of Hayden?’
Conall shrugged, knowing any answer he gave wouldn’t be without bias.
Wolf smiled; ‘I don’t agree with his views, but he’s no fool. He’s a brave fucker: He was telling me last night about a rescue he was involved in on the M4 last year; I suppose you have to be no-nonsense and practical to deal with that kind of stuff; and have a certain amount of emotional distance. No room for sentimentality.’ Wolf grinned. ‘Hmm. Did you hope I was going to say he was a twat?’
Conall laughed. ‘Maybe. Maybe I wanted him to be one – I mean a fucking tall blond fireman. It’s like sitting opposite Thor.’
Wolf laughed. ‘What’s the story, then, with you and the lovely Shenandoah?’
Conall inhaled then blew the smoke out his nose with a shrug.
‘I met her down here last year. Spent a few days with her; we got on really well, but then something happened…’
Wolf gazed at him, unflinching. ‘She told me, you know… about your twin sister’s accident; I hope you don’t mind. I suppose she didn’t want me to put my foot in it or anything.’
Conall shook his head, both surprised she had mentioned it to Wolf, and that he didn’t mind she had done so.
‘Were you identical – you know, as I suppose a man and a woman can be?’
Con smiled. ‘No – different sex twins come from two eggs, actually - fertilised at the same time; we didn’t share an egg but we shared a womb – but yeah, she had the same hair as me – poor girl; but blue eyes.’
‘Same beard…?’ Wolf grinned. ‘Well, if you ever need to talk…I know that sounds lame, but it’s a genuine offer…’
Con paused as the laughing group of croppies exited the pub and walked into the dark.
‘Thank you. I think it’s all been said, though.’ He took a final drag off the cigarette, looking out over the field of stones across the road from the pub.
Wolf once more fixed him with his pale, predator’s eyes.
‘I very much doubt that. I get the feeling you’ve not even begun to talk about it. And you know that, too.’
‘It won’t bring her back.’ Conall said, through a cloud of smoke.
Wolf was quiet for a moment before he spoke.
‘No. But it might you.’
Chapter Thirteen: An Eye for an Eye
‘So are you going to enlighten us, now?’ Lewis asked, returning to the table with a jug of beer.
Tolkien was smiling. He took a sip of beer and lit his pipe.
‘Yes. That strange image I had of the lady floating down the Kennet like Ophelia… you see, I thought that had come about from our discussions of the dismembered vegetation god, or of Orpheus, but in fact I now see that it had its roots in what we had been discussing earlier, at Silbury. Remember I had argued that ‘Sil’ had come from the Welsh ‘Sul’, as in sun? Well, the word had been going round my head, clamouring for attention…’ he took another sip of beer – ‘but it was only just now when I saw the name of the spring, Swallowhead, that I understood what I was being shown…’
He scratched his chin, his eyes seeming to focus on a point far in the distance.
‘You see, Silbury and Swallowhead must both be derived from the same root word, which can’t be ‘sol’, Jack, as linguistically ‘sol’ could not become ‘swall’ – so we’re not looking at a derivation from the Latin, but from something much earlier. They both, in fact, come from a very ancient word that predates both the Latin and the Welsh form, that was closer to ‘sawol’; now in Irish this ancient word became ‘suil’ meaning ‘eye’… the sun being the eye in the heavens, one supposes – the divine eye.’
‘As in Ancient Egypt – where the eye of Ra, or of Horus, was the sun?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Exactly, Jack. This would make Silbury the ‘bury’, that is barrow, from the Anglo-Saxon ‘bearw’ - so mound of the eye’; and the Swallowhead spring would be the spring of the eye. As Swallowhead preserves the older form of Sawol, I would suggest it, and not the hill, was named first, though I may be wrong…’
‘If you don’t mind me asking, Ronald, whether derived from sun or eye, or whether the name of the spring predated the hill, what is the connection to your Ophelia?’ Barfield asked.
‘If one follows the old Roman road that goes past Silbury,’ Tolkien continued, ‘which follows a much older track-way, you find yourself at Bath – which as you know was known as Aquae Sulis the ‘waters of the goddess Sulis’; Sulis-Minerva was the goddess of the healing springs there, and her name shares the same etymology so it seems highly possible to me that she is also implicated here at Avebury.’
‘Bravo!’ exclaimed Lewis. ‘It hadn’t even entered my thoughts to link Silbury to Sulis. ’
‘Nor mine,’ Tolkien conceded ‘until I saw the name Swallowhead on this map – it was the connection of the word Sul to the waters of the spring rather than the hill that suggested it.’
‘I now have a rather incongruous image of Minerva, half submerged in the Kennet in a Greek chiton dress, a spear in one hand and an owl perched on her shoulder… ‘ Lewis said, laughing. ‘But the image of the eye and the spring, and a goddess of the waters is, as you know, an old Celtic trope… it’s found in the Irish legend of the origin of the river Boyne in Ireland.’
‘Remind me.’ Said Barfield.
He lit a cigarette and began;
‘The Boyne, Owen, was named after the goddess Boann who was a princess of the Tuatha De Danann, the people of the Goddess Danu, that is the Sidhe, the fairy folk; and her abode was the fairy mound of Newgrange. Now Boann had a husband named Nechtan who owned a magical spring. The spring was surrounded by nine hazel trees and the hazel nuts would fall into the water and be eaten by the speckled salmon who lived therein – and as the nuts contained all knowledge whoever drank of the waters of that well or ate of the salmon would become knowledgeable of all there was to know, had ever been known, and ever would be known...’
Jack’s eyes glistened; he enjoyed the telling of tales immensely.
‘…Only Nechtan and his three cupbearers could drink of the well; but out of curiosity Boann one day approached the well, wishing to drink for herself, and walked about it three times counter-clockwise… but the waters of the well rose up, creating a rushing river that pursued Boann to the coast, and it was said that the water erupted with such power that it ripped a leg, an arm and a single eye from her body, and that she drowned in the flood of waters that became the river which today bears her name.’
Tolkien nodded. ‘Given the number of river names in Europe associated with ancient Goddesses,’ he stated, ‘we can assume that the river was the goddess; so I think we can suggest that a similar legend once existed here at Avebury concerning that same goddess of the eye and/or sun, named Sulis – who perhaps drowned at the Swallowhead, or at least transformed into those waters.’
‘And the name Waden Hill…’ Jack offered, ‘comes from Woden? He, too lost an eye at a well…’ he stubbed out his cigarette on the table and let the butt fall onto the floor.
‘It’s a similar myth, Jack, but the name is sheer coincidence - Waden means hill of the idol – weoh-dun – that square enclosure on the map may once have been a shrine housing a heathen image.’ Tolkien said, ‘But you’re right about Woden and the eye. Wishing to gain knowledge of all things, he journeys to the well of Mimir in order to drink from it; but as we know, the price is high – for he has to forfeit one of his eyes to take a draught. – just as Boann loses an eye when she drinks of the well.’
‘Aha! I see,’ Lewis said, ‘…. pardon the pun. But what on earth does it mean? Why the loss of an eye in return for the gaining of wisdom?’
Tolkien frowned for a moment.
‘Well, that is the question! The losing of the eye is an act of sacrifice, to prove how much the gaining of knowledge meant, a kind of bartering: one gives up vision in this world to gain vision in another…an eye for an eye…but I’m not sure… After our talk earlier at the tea-rooms a very different answer springs to mind: Surely, to drink of the waters of knowledge should increase one’s visionary faculties, not deplete them; so in what way could losing an eye been seen as a gain? Well it suddenly seems blindingly obvious, pardon my pun, that what is gained through drinking from the spring is the unified mystic vision Owen was celebrating earlier - where all is seen as connected, no longer separate. What better way of depicting this than by making the wisdom seeker one-eyed? Two eyes suggest duality, division, normal everyday vision - but the one eye suggests the undivided vision of the poet!
‘But I think this is all later metaphysical speculation and that the original myth of the losing and gaining of an eye is rooted in mankind’s experience of the natural world – I think (and note, I’m not espousing some all-pervasive solar-theory a la Max Muller, when I say this) that it’s probably solar. Forget the later metaphysics – it’s a seasonal myth – it’s about the loss and return of the sun at winter.’
Tolkien looked up from his drink to find the eager eyes of his friends willing him to continue; for a moment, motes of dust hung suspended in the golden light pouring in from the window.
‘Think of the myth of Orion, the great hunter; he is blinded, but then he journeys across the sea bearing Kedalion, the servant of Hephaestus the Smith, on his shoulders, like St Christopher, and reaches the eastern horizon and regains his vision from Helios, the sun god.’
‘Like Wade carrying Wayland the smith across the Groenasund?’ Lewis suggested.
‘Precisely… and Thunor carries Orvandel across the icy Elivogs river in a basket on his back…’ Tolkien added; ‘Obviously the mythical Orion is linked to the constellation; now, the sun rises near this constellation in the spring, but by the autumn Orion has moved to the other side of the sky at daybreak, so has ‘lost’ the sun; clearly all this marching to the east to regain his eyes from Helios is really an image of the constellation regaining of the sun, the solar eye, in the spring.
‘As for the icy river…’
‘…it’s the Milky Way?’ Barfield suggested. ‘So this Sulis, this goddess, was she also a constellation?’ he asked.
Tolkien scratched his chin in thought.
‘Did you know,’ Lewis said, while Tolkien sat pondering, ‘that in the Old Irish stories Druids were known to cast spells standing on one leg and with one eye closed – it was seen as a magical stance – it’s exactly the same symbolism as Boann in the river, deprived of an arm, leg and eye. That same one-eyed figure appears in other Celtic myths, you know – he is one who can summon the animals, a kind of wild man. The master of animals, they call him.’ Lewis added.
‘Like Orpheus.’ Barfield said.
‘Or Bombadil.’ Tolkien re-joined.
‘Are these, then, constellations, too?’
Tolkien cleared his throat, and took out his pipe, methodically packing it as he considered the questions that had been put to him.
‘Oh, and can you also explain, while you’re at it, given all this sun and eye symbolism, why the river Kennet is named after a dog?’
Tolkien seemed about to answer when the door of the pub opened and Mr Mac Govan-Crow strode in, heading straight for their table.
‘Begging your pardon. My wife is wondering if you would like to eat with us at the house tonight. You would be most welcome.’
The three friends nodded in agreement.
‘We shall eat around six, but feel free to return when you wish; I’ll let you get back to your drinks.’ he said, smiling and leaving as promptly as he had arrived.
‘Excellent!’ Lewis said, ‘tonight we dine on venison!’
‘Jack!’ scolded Barfield.
‘What? It’s not me who called him Hawkeye!’ referring to the latter’s epithet of Deerslayer.
The three men laughed. ‘Actually, it would be quite an adventure, being led off into the wilds with Hawkeye…through forests and waterfalls, sleeping under the stars…’ Lewis said.
‘Hunted by the Huron? Idyllic indeed!’ Barfield said, sarcastically.
Tolkien smiled. ‘You know, Jack, for all your romanticism you would hate it! Mac Govan-Crow wouldn’t let you stop for a cup of tea, you know! With the Huron on our heels there wouldn’t be time for a decent pint of beer, either.’
Tolkien tuned to Barfield. ‘Imagine how he’d grumble, Owen!’ he said, nodding towards Lewis.
‘It would be unbearable.’ Barfield agreed ‘We could leave him for the Huron, but I doubt even they would want him…’
‘Why so?’ asked Jack, frowning.
‘–nothing to scalp!’ Barfield laughed, pointing at Jack’s bald crown.
Chapter Fourteen: Tarot
It was strange to think only eleven hours had passed since Con had last been in this self-same spot, outside Church cottage opposite the lych-gate on the narrow high-street, a few minutes' walk west of the pub outside the circle; it already seemed like another day, far further back in time. The only difference from earlier, however, was the presence of Hayden’s large motorbike parked outside on the road, and the scent of the large, almost luminous, white-petalled Nicotiana, their buds now open, tumbling from the window box. Then he had thought Shen to be long gone from this place, but here he was, a few hours later, following her into the cottage. Never presume you know where you’re going, he thought to himself. Life often has different plans from those we envision…
While Conall followed Wolf into the kitchen to grab a drink Shen set about preparing the small living room for the reading; she lit a joss stick and a few tea lights on the coffee table in front of the cast-iron fireplace, and turned the overhead light off, though the small table lamp by the fireside was left on so that Hayden could sit and read the magazine he’d nonchalantly picked up.
‘Get us a beer, Shen,’ he said, not bothering to look up. ‘And put some toast on.’
‘Get it yourself, you lazy bugger, I’m setting up.’ She smiled. Hayden muttered something about working all day and slumped into the kitchen.
‘You having your cards read?’ Conall asked, tongue in cheek, emboldened from drinking.
Hayden looked at him witheringly, took a beer from the fridge and walked back out.
‘I take it that’s a no!’ whispered Wolf to Con, snorting.
Shen had moved the sofa forward for Conall and Wolf to sit on, but she herself sat cross-legged on the wooden floor opposite them in front of the fire place, over which hung a long Native American wooden flute with feathers and beads hanging off it on a cord; Alfred’s flute. He’d heard him play it once in this very room; a room that had cluttered with photographs and the detritus of a long life –a room heady with the scent of pipe tobacco. She must really miss him, he thought, watching as Shen took a sip of her drink and handed the cards to Wolf.
‘Shuffle them then give them back.’ she said.
‘Look at you being all professional!’ Conall quipped; Shen stuck out her tongue at him and giggled.
Wolf shuffled the cards and handed them back to Shen, who spread them face down in a perfect arc on the coffee table. Wolf was instructed to take three cards. When he had chosen them, Shen took them from him and placed these cards face down, and then turned them one by one. For a moment she said nothing. Conall leaned forward and looked at the cards. The first depicted five youths in tunics and tights holding staffs in their hands, which they seemed to be either waving at each other or fighting with; the second was the knight of swords, boldly leaping forward on a pale horse; the final card showed, again, a figure on horseback, but crowned with a wreath, and holding a staff, similarly crowned –in the background seemed to be the same gaggle of youths from the first card, but now holding their staffs straight. Shen looked up at Wolf, who was leaning forward and tapping his knees with his hands excitedly;
‘You wanted to know about the protest again. Well…five of wands; that’s disorder –it means nuisances, bad luck –see how the men are at odds with each other? There’s tension there, confusion –conflict even. A load of hassle.’
‘But the Knight of swords –he’s someone that is campaigning for what is right. He has strong values and will stand up for them. The last card, the six of wands sees order forming out of the disorder that preceded it; it has connotations of recognition; of praise for a job well done.’
Shen looked up nervously at Wolf. ‘So, it’s like I saw yesterday,’ she continued, ‘there’s bad luck, but somehow things will turn out well. I can’t see anything more than that. I can’t say I understand it.’
Wolf nodded and thanked her, but left unspoken any thoughts that were crossing his mind. Taking up his cards Shen placed them back in the pack and began to shuffle. Conall felt his pulse quicken…I wonder what she’ll see, he thought; but Shen did not hand him the cards, instead she seemed to be about to consult them herself. Again, she placed the cards in an arc, and picked her selection.
‘What are you asking?’ Conall asked. Shen shrugged;
‘Just looking.’ she said, but Conall had caught her giving a sideways glance towards Hayden as she spoke, so fleeting perhaps Shen herself was unaware that she had done it. The three cards she had selected were quickly placed back in the pack. Once more Shen sipped her drink, then took up the pack and handed them to Conall.
‘Your turn. Shuffle them, then take six cards.’
‘Six?’
‘Yeah, I’ll do your full reading.’
The cards were large and slightly unwieldy; Conall found it hard to shuffle them, and at one point nearly let them spill onto the floor; but persevering he shuffled them a few more times for good measure and gave them back. Shen smiled and nodded, spread the cards, and Conall took six cards from the table. As Shen turned the cards over Conall, just as Wolf had a few minutes before, leaned forward in expectation.
The first showed a tower being struck by lightning with people falling from it; the second showed the skeletal figure of Death astride a white horse; the third card was less grave –a robed woman with a strange white crown and the moon at her feet: the high Priestess; next, another woman, the queen of cups, enthroned and holding a strange elaborate vessel; the next card showed a row of vessels and a red-hooded figure holding one and offering it to a diminutive white haired woman. The last card was also in the suit of cups: ten cups shone radiantly against the arc of a rainbow, while below a dark haired man and woman stood arm in arm, while beside them children played.
‘Those look cheery.’ Conall said, glancing at the first two cards. Shen coloured and waved a hand over the cards, not looking up at Conall.
‘Look, Conall – Death isn’t normally literally…death;’ she looked up apologetically, ‘…in fact the tower is more likely to foretell death or change than Death itself... You start off with some kind of ego crisis; could be a breakdown, or a sudden change…so in this context I would say that what is dying is some old and outmoded way of being; it’s a rebirth, really.’
Con nodded. I bloody need it, he thought. ‘Is that happening now?’
‘Yes; or imminently.’
Con looked across at her –her eyes were black in this light; exotically slanting, serious; gone was the seeming awkwardness and weakness he’d thought he’d seen in the pub.
‘The High priestess…and the queen of cups…hmm…these suggest someone in your life who is, um, a healer, or a psychic, and the priestess links her with knowledge or wisdom.’
Shen didn’t look at Conall as she said this, but it seemed obvious to him from her muted reaction that she was referring to herself. Or was he just imagining that?
‘Now the six of cups; that’s to do with nostalgia, looking backwards –but in a positive way –it seems that something from the past is going to influence you –it will be of great benefit to your future –something forgotten will turn up and will change the way you look at things; because look –the ten of cups –that’s contentment, achievement…’ but her fingers, flitting across the card, seemed not to point at the cups in the sky but at the two dark-haired figures, arm in arm below them. Then the card was gone as Shen swiftly gathered them together.
‘Did that make any sense?’ she asked, not looking up.
‘I’m not sure it did –I think maybe I’m tired.
’Conall was nodding slowly, still trying to take it in.
‘No –it all seemed fine - Breakdown; rebirth –a psychic and something from the past leading to happiness.’ he summarised. She nodded and their eyes met again for a moment. What are you thinking? He wondered. Something from the past…is that you, Shen? Something forgotten turning up? He felt suddenly drunk and he swallowed. Can you read my thoughts? He mused. Do you know how lovely you are? Do you know about that night, what really happened? ‘
Are you going to do yours?’ he asked. Shen held his gaze. ‘I could do, maybe.’
But she didn’t, instead she put the cards away in a cloth, which she placed on the bookcase by the window; she paused for a second and then looked at Conall with a half-smile on her face.
‘I have something for you.’ she said, turning to the fireplace and taking down the wooden flute from its hook above the fireplace. She handed it to him without ceremony. He took it and turned it in his hands, not understanding.
‘My grandfather wanted you to have it.’ Conall was speechless; he held the instrument close, examining the faded feathers and beadwork, and the small carved owl that jutted out from above the finger-holes.
It was Wolf who broke the silence. ‘That is awesome!’
Con was frowning. ‘The flute? I –I can’t take this, Shen, it belonged to your Grandfather. It belongs to you! It should be yours, surely?’
She was smiling sadly and shook her head.
‘He wanted you to have it; he wrote it in his will –to give the flute to the young man who told him about the stars, in thanks for reuniting brother and sister. What did he mean by that, Con?
’Long story.’ Conall said, abashed at the attention from all three people in the room. ‘I can’t take this Shen.’ Con stammered.
Shen frowned. ‘It was his wish, Con.’
‘But he told me it had been in his family for generations!
’I know. And it was his to give to whoever he chose; and he chose you.’
Conall didn’t voice the question racing across his mind. Why me? I hardly knew him! A few times, we met, that was it –over those four fateful days.
‘It’ll save me dusting it.’ Shen joked, trying to break the awkward silence.
‘Oh my God, Shen. Thank you.’ and then, looking into the fire, he said ‘Thank you Alfred.’
Hayden yawned loudly from his chair in the corner, and announced he was off to bed.
‘Laters’ he said, his hand in the air, and disappeared from the room.
‘I suppose I should be going, too’ Con said, suddenly feeling the need to be away from here, to have space to think. ‘Shall I leave it here for now?’ Shen shook her head.
‘No, I’d rather it was gone now.’ she said sadly. ‘If you’re at a loose end tomorrow I’ll be around; send me a text.’
She took the flute from his hands and, taking a cloth from the sideboard, wrapped the flute in the cloth and handed it back.
‘Take care of it Con.’ she said.
‘This is the most precious gift I’ve ever been given; Of course I’ll take care of it.’ And he smiled back at her as she opened the door and he walked out into the clear, Nicotiana-scented, summer night.
Chapter Fifteen: Bear-Skin Woman
‘If you don’t mind me asking, George, what brought you to England?’ Tolkien asked.
They had just finished a meal prepared for them by George Mac Govan-Crow’s wife, Shona, in the small kitchen of their house at Church Cottage and had moved through to the sitting room, where George was busy preparing a fire now the evening had grown cooler. Tolkien sat in a chair by the fire, nursing a whiskey, while Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms to unpack; on the couch against the wall Shona sat, her young son Alfred half sleeping in her arms, lulled by his mother’s gentle rocking.
George smiled.
‘My parents,’ he said, taking down a photo frame from the mantelpiece and handing it to Tolkien, ‘were part of Buffalo Bill Cody’s ‘Wild West Show’ and had been touring Europe, but my mother was pregnant with my brother and they ‘jumped ship’ here when the tour came to Swindon as she was very ill during the pregnancy. They didn’t want to take a baby back on tour or risk the journey back to Canada with a babe in arms, and her health still poor; I was 4 at the time and had been travelling with them. My first memories are of the buffalo hunt, and of watching my father Kills Crow sing the victory song and shout the war whoop over the body of Custer!’ He laughed. ‘That was from the show. Had I been brought up on the reservation I’d have probably never seen a buffalo, never heard the victory songs. I understood that when I went back to visit my people one time. We were enacting a life that had already vanished. It was all show, but it was at least something.’
Tolkien looked at the photo – obviously staged, with the young George strapped to his mother’s back on a cradle-board, and his father in buckskins with feathers in his hair, against a poorly painted background showing wagons and cactuses and tall desolate flat-topped mesas. The eyes of the figures were sharp, lost. The man was very like George, but half of his face was picked out in a bright paint; the woman flat-faced, young, beautiful yet stern; earthy.
My father was Saul Fine Gun, of the Canadian Blackfoot, the Siksikawa; but he was given the name Kills Crow for the show; and in turn when he settled here he chose to keep Crow as a surname, and was known as Saul Crow. My parents reasoned their children might be better off here than if they had gone back to Canada; life had been hard for them on the reservation. It was never the same after the buffalo had gone…’
‘Do you have a name in Blackfoot?’ Tolkien asked.
George remained kneeling, placing more kindling on the fire, and then blowing at the embers until they roared into life. For a moment Tolkien thought he would not answer but staring into the fire he began to speak.
‘Ipisowaasi. It’s the name of the Morning Star.’
‘Ipis…?’
‘Ipisowaasi.’
‘Ipiso-wa-asi.’ Tolkien repeated.
‘And you have had the fortune to visit your father’s people, you said?’
‘My people.’ George corrected. ‘Yes. After the War, my family took the boat to Canada and I spent many months with them. My brother and mother stayed. My father, you see, was killed in the war; he volunteered to fight; he was a cavalryman in the Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars.’
For the second time that day Tolkien was reminded of the dead horses he’d seen scattered across no-man’s-land in France. An incongruous image arose in his mind, of George’s father, Kills Crow, astride his horse, charging through the machine-gun fire, raising the war whoop with his painted face and eagle feathers in his hair. The Queens Own Oxfordshire Hussars… Queer Objects on Horseback the regular troops had laughingly called them…
‘I am sorry to hear about your father. I was a signalling officer in the Royal Lancashire Fusiliers.’ A brief expression of pain flashed across his features.
George nodded slowly and held the other’s gaze, then continued.
‘I couldn’t stay in Canada. I was 21 by that time. My home was here, and my Shona was here.’ He looked over and smiled at his wife.
‘Two exiles together!’ she said, in her broad Irish accent, her cheeks flushed.
Tolkien lifted his glass and sipped at his whiskey. After what seemed an eternity of silence George spoke again. He stood up from before the fire, replaced the photograph and took down from where it hung above the mantelpiece a wooden instrument, handing it to Tolkien.
‘This was my mother’s flute, and she had it from her mother, and she had it from who knows where.’
Tolkien took the object, hung with beadwork and feathers; he turned it in his hands, admiring its craftsmanship.
‘It’s alder wood; and the feathers are of the owl.’
Tolkien handed it back to George with a smile. ‘It’s beautiful. Can you play it?’
George put it to his lips and played a short melody. This playing seemed to provide a musical prologue to what happened next.
‘I said I would tell you one of our tales; listen, this is how it was told to me by my father.’
The room was silent save for the cracking and popping of the twigs on the fire. Shona’s face was distracted, serene; George replaced the flute on the wall and took a seat in the other leather chair opposite Tolkien, his own face, in contrast, serious – severe even. For a moment, in the flickering copper firelight, it took on the proportions of a story-book Indian from Tolkien’s childhood; that wild, untamed, frightening yet romantic form of the Red Man – the Noble Savage – a man of the ancient earth… and then it was gone, and he was George again, a west country gardener.
George picked up his pipe and pinched a clump of tobacco from his tin; silently he threw a small part of this into the fire; mouthing words whose sense eluded Tolkien - Itsipaiitapio’pah - and then filled his pipe and lit it.
‘There was once a maiden named Bear-Skin-Woman who had many suitors but who would not marry. She had seven brothers and a younger sister, and because her mother had died the youngest sister would look after the smallest brother, because he was still a baby, and carry him on her back on a cradle-board.
‘Each day the six eldest brothers would go out hunting, and the little sister with her baby brother would remain at home with their older sister. Every day, Bear-Skin-Woman would leave to collect wood – but she never returned with very much wood and the younger sister began to wonder if she was not really collecting wood in the forest, but meeting with a man.
‘One day, when her sister had left to collect wood from the forest the little sister crept out of their lodge and followed her through the trees until she saw her go into the cave where the bear lived. She followed her and she saw that the bear and her sister were lovers.
‘That night the younger sister told her father what she had seen; and her father said, ‘So this is why my daughter refuses to marry!’ He went into the village to let his people know that they had a bear as a relation, and that they should follow him into the forest and kill the bear. This the people did.
‘Bear-Skin-Woman for a while hated her younger sister, but in time they were friends again. The young sister one day asked that they play at being bears, and the older sister agreed, saying ‘I shall be the bear but you must promise not to touch me above the kidneys or there will be evil.’ Her sister promised but, in their play, she forgot, and touched her elder sister above the kidneys and she turned into a real bear because she was a powerful medicine woman. Taking up her little brother, the younger sister ran back and hid in the lodge in fear. The older sister ran into the village and killed many, many people. The younger sister was relieved when her sister came home, transformed back into her human form. Still a-feared, the little sister ran to where her brothers were hunting and warned them of what their elder sister had done to their relatives in the village, and that she even now would be coming to kill her remaining siblings.
‘Sure enough through the wood they spied their sister, Bear-Skin-Woman, in the shape of the bear hunting for them, and so they ran. As she was just about to snap them up one of the brothers cast down a handful of water which became a vast lake, around which the bear had to run. As she came close once more another brother threw back a comb onto the ground and there a great thicket of bushes sprung up which delayed the bear for a little longer.
‘Eventually Bear-Skin-Woman was at their heels and so they climbed a great tree; but the bear shook the tree and four brothers fell out and died.
‘A bird flew about the tree and it sang to the eldest brother, telling him to shoot the bear in the head; and so he took his bow and he put an arrow through the bear’s head and killed it.
‘The remaining three brothers and the young sister were grieved on seeing their four dead brothers; but the youngest took the eldest of the dead brother’s bow and shot an arrow into the air. When it landed one the dead brother stirred and came to life. This he did again until all the dead brothers were alive.
‘’Where shall we go?’ they asked ‘seeing as our relatives are all dead and we have no family to return to?’
‘’Let us go the sky’ they said, and they closed their eyes and they rose up to the heavens as stars.
‘The littlest brother became the North Star, and his six brothers and little sister became the Great Bear. And the young sister is the closest star to the North Star, as she looked after her baby brother on earth so she does in the sky.’
George stared into the fire and puffed a few times on his pipe.
‘George…Ipisowaasi…’ Tolkien began, ‘Thank you.’ His voice was measured, and polite, but his mind, below this calm exterior, was sparking and cracking like the fire that illuminated the both of them; so many questions… but Tolkien sensed that George was not a man who enjoyed being bothered by questions.
Nevertheless, he began again:
‘It’s fascinating that the Blackfoot have this image of the woman who becomes a bear; the image of the human becoming a bear is found in myths and legends from Europe, too…’ George’s seeming blank expression caused Tolkien to halt and stammer. 'The Vikings had warriors named Berserkers who would change into bears during battle. Berserker means bear-shirt or bear-skin...' he paused, and then began to talk once more.
‘Do you know about Callisto?’ he ventured. George shook his head.
Tolkien cleared his throat.
‘The Greek Goddess Artemis, the virgin huntress… she, it was said, expected her companions to be as chaste as she herself, but one day, noticing her companion, the nymph Callisto, was with child after being seduced by none other than the great God Zeus, Artemis turned Callisto into a bear – whereon she gave birth to a son, Arcas. Artemis sent her hounds to chase and to kill them. Eventually having hunted down the nymph and the boy, Artemis killed them with her bow and arrow; But Zeus, taking pity on Callisto and her boy, lifted them up to the heavens and placed them amongst the stars where she became Ursa Major – the Great Bear – and Arcas, Ursa Minor, the Little Bear.’
Tolkien picked up his glass and sipped a little more whiskey, then lit his pipe and sat smoking in seeming calm before, to George’s evident surprise, Tolkien leapt up from the chair and began pacing in front of the fire, talking in great haste and using his pipe stem as a pointer to punctuate his remarks.
‘…it’s remarkable!’ he stammered, ‘on face value these are two very different tales; but underneath there are clear similarities: the transformation of a woman into a bear, and the killing of that self-same bear with a bow and arrow following a hunt; the placing of a young boy in the constellation of Ursa Minor…’
George was looking up at Tolkien in stunned silence. He looked over at Shona who had a half smile on her face. Tolkien, unaware of the effect of his performance on the two adults present, continued his lecture.
‘Of course we then not only have the fact that both stories are about bears but pertain to be a foundation stories for Ursa Major – something we might put down to sheer coincidence were it not for the fact that the Great Bear looks nothing like a bear! Don’t you find?’
It was George’s turn to stammer and clear his throat. ‘I suppose, so. It does look more like a saucepan, granted. As to whether it looks like a bear; not explicitly so, no.’
‘Exactly!’ Tolkien said, pointing at him with his pipe stem. ‘The main feature of Ursa Major is the handle of the saucepan as you put it – or as it is drawn on star maps, the tail of the bear. But bears do not have long tails!’ he flashed a grin.
‘This means the figure of the bear that links these two stories is not suggested by the form, the shape, of the stars themselves - we are not, then, looking at independent invention based on the shape of the constellation... the earliest maps of the heavens drew on the myths of the bear already associated with those seven stars, and tried to make them look like a bear – rather badly! And, what’s more, we can immediately discount direct borrowings from one culture to another – had the Blackfoot learned the tale from European settlers sometime after Columbus then the form of the story would be much closer to that of the original Greek; clearly the Blackfoot version, if it is related to the Greek tale – it is through a common, and very ancient ancestor!’
On the couch the toddler Alfred had begun to snivel and cry in his mother’s arms at the staccato ramblings and eccentric gesturing of this odd little stranger who had invaded his home.
Tolkien hesitated and smiled apologetically.
‘Do you see what I’m driving at Mr Mac Govan-Crow? Scholars believe that the American Indian reached the New World many thousands of years ago by crossing the Bering straits when they were iced over; the story you have just told could be very old indeed, for if both stories sprang from a common ancestor, as seems the case, that common ancestor would have to be at least 10,000 years old, the date the Americas separated from Eurasia after the Bering ice-bridge had melted! A tale from ancient Ice Age Europe now spread across the whole globe!’
In the silence that followed Tolkien finally allowed himself to sit down and slow his breathing.
‘It is strange, Sir.’ said George. ‘Only my people, the Siksikawa, maintain that we didn’t come from anywhere else except the ‘New World’ as you put it, which is not ‘new’ to us. Have you ever considered that perhaps the white man may have learned the story from the Red, those thousands of years ago?’ he lifted an eyebrow in challenge.
If George Mac Govan-Crow had expected to see Tolkien chastened, or defensive, he was to be disappointed; for Tolkien was staring intently into the flames of the fire, and when he turned to Ipisowaasi of the Siksikawa it was with utter humility and honesty that he spoke:
‘My friend, nothing would surprise me less than to discover that. There are many truths that have been lost to us over the passage of time – who knows what tales were spread, and how, in past ages, when the very face of the earth as we know it was different; before fire and flood changed the shape of the coasts, and sent lands once proud of the sea into its depths..?’
As he spoke an image rose in his mind…a recurring nightmare of a great wave sweeping over green fields, destroying all in its path…
George nodded. And for the first time since they had met, Tolkien saw the wariness and mistrust fall from the man’s eyes; George Mac Govan-Crow smiled.
Chapter Sixteen: On Waden Hill
Conall Astor was still drunk; he had left Shen’s and crossed the stone circle, passing close by the Devil’s chair stone, to which he had bowed in greeting, before continuing along the Avenue for the fourth time that day, his path winding this way and that as he looked heavenwards at the constellations, so clear in the absence of street-lights. The night was warm and just the gentlest of breezes was present, carrying with it the scent of grasses and hedgerows.
Conall fumbled with the keys of the camper, entered, and gathered up the bedding from the couch; he proceeded to walk to his favourite stone and dumped the pile on the side facing away from the road. He retraced his steps and picked up the remnants of the bottle of water from earlier, then sat on the tailgate and brushed his teeth in the moonlight.
After he had rinsed his mouth, he lit the hurricane-lantern that hung from a hook on the van’s ceiling and unrolled the alder-wood flute from the cloth Shen had wrapped it. The flute was beautifully carved, and the wood warm to the touch; just below the mouthpiece but above the finger-holes there was a carving of an owl, secured to the main body with twine, from which a couple of faded feathers and beads were hanging. Traces of stained patterns were visible along the instrument. A faint smell of wood smoke, incense and pipe tobacco rose from it. Conall held it up before him.
‘Thank you, Alfred.’
He had no idea of the age or provenance of the flute; for all he knew it could have been many hundreds of years old… predating the arrival of the White Man. He felt both proud and abashed that such a precious item should have been entrusted to him; maybe he shouldn’t have taken it; maybe he should have left it with Shen. But he supposed it was the old man’s wish. He held it close, not daring to play it; not here, by the road, not without ceremony. He wasn’t tired; he should walk somewhere, and do it honour…
Leaving his bedding in the care of the stone, Conall took the footpath that led away from the Avenue westwards up over the brow of Waden hill. The hill was steep but soon he had crested it, and he stood for a moment taking in the view. Behind him, the way he had come, Hakpen hill rose on the other side of the road, while to his south was the spread of the Kennet valley, and beyond the river the roll of the downs as they rose up to the soft peaks of Tan and Milk Hill. But from his vantage point atop Waden Hill, Conall could glance over at the bowl of Silbury to the south west as it stood majestically proud of the valley within its moat, now iridescent in the low, nearly full moonlight.
Conall dug into his jacket pocket and took out his tobacco; sitting on the long grass he took some from the packet, and as earlier crumbled some onto the ground. Itsipaiitapio’pah, he muttered, Great Spirit, as Alfred had taught him, and as his father George had taught him before…. He then rolled and placed a cigarette in his mouth, lit it, then lifted it to the sky, then to the ground, and exhaled upwards, repeating the Blackfoot phrase.
When he had finished, he unwrapped the flute from its cloth and held it up to the sky. Son of Ipisowaasi, thank you. Great spirits, I am honoured to accept this gift, he said. Then nervously he put the wooden mouthpiece to his lips and breathed softly into it. A warm, hollow note sounded clearly, filling the still night. Conall felt anyone walking in the surrounding valleys or hills would have been able to hear it… nevertheless, emboldened by alcohol, he continued, moving his fingers slowly and inexpertly, but feeling almost as if the flute was playing itself. He played to the stars; he played to the memory of Alfred, he played to the memory of his sister; but mostly he played for Shen, wondering if from her room in Church cottage, she might hear the sound of her Grandfather’s flute playing; it wasn’t her fault, none of it; but if I hadn’t been here…no, it was surely too late by then anyway…
When the urge to play had left him, he stood, gazing skywards again, north to the Great Bear, and he began to spin, his arms outstretched, and then sweeping back round like a swooping eagle, turning, turning, treading out a flat circle in the grass; and as he span the Bear span above him in turn around the still central point of the heavens; and he bowed his back, squared his shoulders, rhythmically turning, imagining himself the bear, mouthing silent meaningless words; and even though miles from the nearest human being his voice remained a whisper so that this guttural chanting that arose from some deep part of his psyche ended at his lips and went no further; yet still he danced under those seven burning brothers and their sister who had escaped to the sky in the story Alfred had told him a year before…
…
…Conall had listened to the tale and they had both stood a while in thought looking up at the Great bear from the back-garden of Church cottage; he had considered not saying anything, but his curiosity compelled him to speak.
‘Alfred?’ he had begun. The old man had nodded for him to continue. ‘You say four brothers were dragged out of the tree and killed?’
‘Yes, that is how my father told it me.’ The old man said, sucking on the stem of his pipe.
‘Wouldn’t it make sense if the four stars there were the brothers?’ he had asked, pointing at the rectangular body of the Great Bear. Alfred had looked up quietly.
‘I see why you might think that; but the sister needs to be one of them so she can be close to her young brother, who is the northern star, there.’ He had pointed to the Little Bear.
Conall had smiled to himself.
‘There are seven brothers and one sister, yes? Now what if there was a way that they could all be together in the Great Bear, and the little brother not all the way over there in the Little Bear?’ he had asked. Alfred shrugged.
‘That would be pleasing, I suppose. But there are only seven stars in the Great Bear’ He had said, rubbing the back of his neck.
‘Alfred – look at the second star from the end of the tail, closely.’
‘What am I looking for?’ he said, through a cloud of smoke.
‘How many stars do you see?’
For a while there had been silence as the old man squinted at the stars, and then a low chuckle had escaped him.
Conall had laughed along with him.
‘That’s right. Most people don’t notice it, but that second star is a double star – it has a smaller, fainter companion, riding on its back. So, there’s your younger sister, and there, still riding on the cradleboard on her back as in life, her baby brother!’
‘So the family is together again. Brother and sister united. That’s good.’ Alfred had said. And this is what he had meant in the will when he had gifted the flute to Con for re-uniting brother and sister…
…
On the hillside Conall looked up and held the sister star in his gaze and remembered his sister Melissa and himself, as children, her carrying him piggy-back across their garden, laughing, as he swished at her with a small twig ‘Giddy up, horsey! Giddy up!’ his hand gripping a great mass of her dark curly hair, identical to his own. Identical. Two particles once joined, linked forever...
And he imagined those same two particles spinning in space, once joined but now separate, shooting apart into the void… and one shining, spinning particle faltering, flickering, dying, yet the other carrying on unaffected…
And he thought of the dream of the horse on the riverbank – and how it was on such a night as this that he’d walked to the Kennet last year because the dream was burning in his head – and how one particle, spinning in space, had chosen not to go into that water, while the other had done so, never to rise again…
At last he cried out, finding his voice:
‘I’m sorry! I’m so, so sorry! Melissa! I’m sorry!!! I didn’t know – why didn’t I know?!’
Chapter Seventeen: The Lady of the Lake
After a brief nightcap by the fire, Lewis and Barfield had retired to their rooms, but Tolkien was not yet sleepy; he had gone outside to the small garden of the cottage to take in the cool night air, and when Alfred had been lulled to sleep by her singing, Shona Mac Govan-Crow had stepped outside to join him.
‘If you don’t mind me saying,’ she said, ‘when you were talking over dinner about Boann and the well - I didn’t feel it was my place to say but it reminded me of something. And since you later mentioned the stars…’
‘No, please, tell me, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow.’ Tolkien insisted.
‘Shona, please’ she insisted. Shona pointed upwards at the sky to the pale band of stars that bisected the heavens.
‘It’s just that I always think of Boann when I see the Milky Way.’
‘Why so?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Bothar Bo Finne is the Gaelic name for it,’ Shona said, ‘’Path of the White Cow’’ Boann means white cow.’
Tolkien lifted his brows in delight.
‘Thank you. I never knew that.’
Shona remained gazing upwards at the Milky Way. ‘Sometimes I come out here and look up at the stars and feel like I’m home. There’s my beloved Boyne. I wonder which was named first, though, the river on earth or the one in the sky?’
Tolkien tapped his pipe-bowl against the low garden wall and sat on its top, touching a small pile of white rocks clustered on the wall top, beside which stood a couple of burned out snubs of old candles.
‘It’s her dog I feel most sorry for.’ Shona smiled, as she turned to go.
‘Her dog?’
‘Yes; Boann’s lapdog. Dabilla was its name; poor mite was washed out to sea and drowned with her. I had a dog named Dabilla as a child, I named it after Boann’s dog…’
Tolkien looked up at the stars, open mouthed and flushed – and then laughed out loud at his own ignorance.
‘Ha! You’re a dunce, Ronald!’ he chuckled. Shona looked a little taken aback.
‘If that’s the Boyne in the sky then there’s your lost dog, safe and sound!’
Tolkien gestured skywards to the pale celestial river and there on its banks he pointed out to Shona the constellation of Canis Major, the Great Dog, not hard to see for its brightest star, Sirius, the ‘dog-star’ as it was known, was the brightest star in the entire northern sky.
Why hadn’t he seen it earlier? All the clues were there! Where else should one look for a ‘bright dog’ but the star Sirius, the brightest star, the dog-star, pacing beside the river in the heavens? Tolkien berated himself. So many legends had been writ large upon the heavens in antiquity – just as the siblings in Mr Mac Govan-Crow’s bear story had been transferred to the heavens so too in the west – many heroes of myth had been afforded the same privilege; the sky was populated by heroes and gods – so why not the characters of British myth, too? Orion, the hunter, had been the subject of their discussion earlier – and they’d agreed the icy river he was crossing to regain, somehow, his solar eye, was the Milky Way, but Tolkien had not quite grasped the final part of the image - Orion’s hunting dog, following its master, trotting alongside the Milky Way, had in all probability inspired the name of the Kennet… ‘bright dog’ - meaning the Kennet, like the Boyne, was somehow the earthly equivalent of the river of stars in the sky. The presence of Dabilla in the Irish tale had made it a near-certainty that a version of the Boann myth had existed here – there was the river of the dog, and the well-head of the eye, linked by name to the nearby goddess of the waters at Bath.
I should have known after all our talk earlier, he thought…It was there all along in ‘Pearl’ - under the nose of this dim-witted philologist for years and I never saw it! He softly intoned the verses of this medieval lyric, so close to his heart, the meaning of the stone-strewn river separating the poet from his deceased child suddenly clear:
In the depths stood dazzling stones aheap
As a glitter through glass that glowed with light,
As streaming stars when on earth men sleep
Stare in the welkin in winter night
Like the river in the poem, the Kennet’s depths were stippled with small pebbles of chalk that shone white like stars in the winter sky. And remembering the stone he had picked up earlier he put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and pulled out the small piece of chalk. The river of the poem was the river that divided Paradise from mortal realms – the same as the Greek Styx on whose banks the three-headed dog Cerberus roamed; the river and the dog; now of course its stones twinkled like stars, for they were stars! He wondered if the poet had drawn on some older tradition when he had written these lines, unbeknown of their meaning, or whether he had known all along of what he was writing, and Tolkien just hadn’t seen it: The river of paradise was the heavenly river – the Milky Way, across which the souls of the dead might pass…
‘I’m ever so sorry, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow, but would it be overly rude if I went for a short walk? I have some thinking to do…’ he said, his voice shaking with repressed excitement.
…
Tolkien had retraced the route they had walked earlier back past where the road curved about Silbury, and along to a gate in the field below the hill on whose easternmost point West Kennet rose, and where Barfield had earlier pointed out a copse of trees at the far side of the field in which the Swallowhead spring was hidden. Taking the path towards the trees Tolkien continued until he reached a still pool, crossed by a handful of large sarsen steppingstones. Beyond the stones, in a hollow cradled by the hillside, stood two willow trees, and from between them the waters of the Kennet bubbled from the earth. He strolled around the trees, noticing a small stone cut in the hillside beyond; here, he guessed, in the winter, the waters would rise, but already, in April, the flow had lessened to emerge from the earth closer to the pool.
Tolkien returned to the brook and sat on one of the large, flat stones that forded the stream; he sat gazing into its clear depths.
There, to the north, was the shadow of the domed Silbury hill against the pale starlight, and at his feet the chuckling water, one part silvered now by the light of the crescent-moon; all was quiet, save the lilting of the water, though in the distance an owl hooted, two, three times.
How long had men come here to worship or seek solace at the wisdom-giving waters of the eye, he wondered, here beneath the stars at this holy stream?
This flashing silver river that seemed to divide the world of the dead from the living; the river of the bright dog…
Tolkien knelt, and cupped a clear handful of the cool water, and let it flow back through his fingers. And as he did so he lifted his head, and lo! There above him on the rim of the south-western sky, as if summoned, the jewel-like Sirius still hung in the heavens, flashing a purplish blue, just on the point of sinking down below the hillside to follow its master Orion into the lands below the horizon, but it would rise again in the east as herald of the new dawn. And in the east at this late hour lay Vega, glinting blue in the Lyre, and to its left, Deneb, the tail of the swan - and rising to a gentle arch across the back of the swan in the northern sky was the milky waters of the heavenly river aping the flow of the Kennet on the ground.
Was this pool once ringed with hazel, he wondered? Did the salmon of wisdom swim here, silver beneath the moon?
The reflection of the crescent-moon, like a curved barque sailing between the horns of Taurus, seemed to traverse the waters before him, casting a bright shifting path across the water, that trembled then broke into many pieces before reconstituting; forming then dissolving, trembling and breaking, the crescent becoming a lidded white eye, a curved back of a silver salmon; it broke apart, re-forming, shivering, pulsing and morphing into wild patterns and shapes; a crescent, boat; a lidded eye again; a dancing cool white flame; a trail of flowers, of stars, of sparks, of fish; once more a sliver of moon …
It was hypnotising, lulling, and Tolkien, tired from the days walk and the whisky found himself drifting somewhere between thought and sleep. The waters of the river seemed to rise and swirl; churning to a white starry foam; lifting, breaching their banks; a dual stream of liquid shooting forth to land and sky; one flooding the land and creating a broad river on earth, the other rising to the sky and forming the milky river of stars… the primal waters divided into above and below.
Into these waters Tolkien stared entranced… and there, at the heart of the black mirror, the reflected flash of the moon like a pale severed head in the ripples of the stream lay as if suspended from the branches or caught in the roots of a shining tree that joined earth and heaven… But it shifted and flashed, became distorted into an eye, first a barely-open white eye, then the burning eye of the sun, yellow like a cat’s; and it seemed to him that the eye looked across time and space from a place that knew neither, and that somehow the one eye was wise but possessive… wishing to hide its precious treasure from the unworthy, from those who would steal it… it became the eye of Fafnir the dragon, hiding the ring that would be stolen from him by Siegfried… the eye of Smaug guarding the cup that Bilbo Baggins would steal; and the eye of Nechtan jealously guarding the waters of knowledge from Boann… or the lamp-like pale eye of the creature Gollum…
Then, in the reflecting waters, it seemed he saw, in that eternal moment between two thoughts, the lady of the waters, the fairy princess, lady of the white cows; Sulis-Minerva, mistress of magic – the poet’s daughter who in the Pearl poem lay across the river of death on the shores of Paradise - about her head a silvery-gold corona of stars; now rising from the waters and straddling the river. She bent over the waters, seeming to pour the glimmering flashes of moonlight into the pool; her pale beauteous face lifted high amid the stars, and she bridged the earth and the heavens like a pallid rainbow, the ‘W’ of Cassiopeia her nourishing breasts, a white-shadow arching over the sleeping men of earth; blessed; snow-white, queen of stars....
All in white she was, her hair loose about her shoulders, soft as the owl’s feather; wise beyond years, and about her throat a pendant or phial of rock crystal, lit by an inner fire; the reflected light of the star shining from on the western horizon; and she seemed to peer down into the mirrored surface of the waters…no, she WAS the waters, and the stars combined, and one flowed into the other… a face below and a face above, their gaze meeting; two but yet one.
There she arched above and below, this maid of the Sidhe, this Elven princess, this lady of the lake; her white track streaming behind her… a track of flowers, of stars, of chalk pebbles in the holy stream, of the shimmering ripples caused by the moonlight on the waters… and it seemed to him that she had come from a far distant land, a land that was beyond the reach of mortal man… from Paradise… But the water! Flooding over the low, green land! The terror of the approaching waves! The burning, baleful eye…blazing over the flood… … and then there was a dark-haired girl floating in the water surrounded by flowers and shining stones and then flames and the sound of gunfire and shells exploding… the past, or shadows of what might yet come to pass?
Then at last this shifting reflection calmed and resolved once more into a mirrored form of distant figure standing on the far, green, shore; a kind, sad, face, and his heart leapt… Mother? … his heart cried out… Mother?! Unthinking he reached forward, seeking to grasp her reflection, his hand plunging into the cool water so that the image atomised into fragments and disappeared.
When the void closed the sparkling water resolved to mirror the moon-ship sailing across the heavens above; the vision that had come unbidden left him as swiftly as it had arrived. The moon on the water, though, still shifted and trembled, but now through the prism of his tears; in the distance the owl once more called, once, twice, three times….