PART TWO: THE DRAGON
Chapter 18: The Milk of Paradise
Conall woke after a few hours’ sleep, curled up under a couple of dew-covered blankets, at the base of the stone in the avenue. The sky was almost light with the last of the stars fading in the west, and a soft mist floated about the stones. A barn owl, silent as a spirit on its moth-like wings danced from stone to stone. Conall sat and watched the owl for a few minutes until it flitted out of sight down the avenue.
He stood and stretched, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. He was thirsty, but not hungover, and he felt strangely at peace. Part of him felt as if yesterday had not happened; only the alder-wood flute, wrapped in its cloth beside the blankets at the base of the stone, suggested otherwise. The owl reappeared a hundred yards down the avenue, hovering then swooping into the grass beside one of the stones. Conall’s mind turned to the camper, and its kettle. Something felt wrong, though. His hand went to his neck. The familiar weight of his yin-yang pendant hanging on his chest was missing. Searching around the foot of the stone where he had slept revealed nothing. Then he remembered spinning on Waden hill the night before while looking up at the stars.
Forgoing breakfast for a spell, he retraced his steps up the path through the meadow, and sure enough, there lay his pendant in an area of flattened grass atop the hill. Relieved Conall sat down once more in the same spot as his nocturnal visit, now able to discern the exact position of West Kennet long barrow on the opposite ridge where before there had been but rolling vistas of shadow.
He smiled to himself; there, further along the field, close to the road near the Swallowhead stood a new crop circle: a ring of 30 small circles with a larger circle two toned and split in half at their centre. He remembered the croppies giggling into their mobile phones; he wondered if they’d been there in the dark while he played his flute, spinning in the wheat as he spun on the hill?
As he looked, he saw something that seemed to be a man walking briskly alongside the mound.
The dark shape was moving swiftly along the edge of the barrow, but it was only when it had passed the end, and not turned back to walk along the other side as he would have expected a visitor to do, that he realised something was amiss. For a start, the ‘man’ had traversed the length of the barrow, a good hundred and fifty feet in half a minute, about twice the speed of a walking man – but the shape wasn’t moving like man does when running. Then there was its height: it was shorter than the mound itself, yet the mound was only 5ft high. As it sloped away from the mound, continuing westwards towards the bottom of the valley Conall could see that the creature was only 3 or four feet tall, and long rather than tall. From the cows in the neighbouring field he estimated its size as that of a calf, yet it was jet black and moved fast – too fast for a cow, and with no deviations from its course… walking a straight line as if heading towards the new circle beyond the Swallowhead spring.
Conall tried to look harder but his eyes began to water with the effort. If he had to guess he would have said the creature was some huge black cat, like a puma, or perhaps a dog… but huge, and walking briskly in the one direction as if following an old long trodden path, not stopping to sniff, as dogs do. He watched it for two or three minutes until it entered the trees that bordered the field edge beside the Swallowhead spring.
The dog, or puma, or whatever it was did not re-emerge from the trees.
Conall felt odd; unnerved. He was glad he had been on this side of the valley. Clutching his pendant to him, realised that if he hadn’t dropped this, he would never have seen the animal, whatever it was.
Walking back over the hill a few minutes later Conall noticed a van now parked behind his own, and on closer inspection realised, from the airbrushed wolves on its side, that it was Wolf Jones’s van. He looked at the clock on his phone – it wasn’t yet half past seven. Wolf could be seen knocking on the windows of Con’s camper. Con shouted and waved, and eventually Wolf heard him and looked his way, waving and smiling.
‘Breakfast?’ Wolf shouted.
Ten minutes later both men were sat in the avenue, using a large female stone to break the slight breeze, huddled over a small gas-stove on which a frying pan was set, in which butter was spitting. Wolf expertly cracked four eggs into the pan while Conall ripped open some rolls and buttered them.
‘Thought you’d appreciate this after a night al fresco!’ Wolf grinned.
Conall nodded. ‘I’m just surprised you’re up.’ He said, sipping the coffee he’d just brewed in his van.
Wolf shrugged.
‘I’m an early riser, me. Besides, Hayden was up for work early and I asked him to give me a shout – I wanted to get to the long-barrow early.’
Con decided not to mention the animal he’d seen, wanting, for some reason, to cast it from his mind.
Wolf lifted the eggs, dripping in butter, into the rolls, then sprinkled them with salt; the two men ate in silence, save for grunts of appreciation from Wolf. Once finished they sat drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes.
‘Damn fine way to start a day!’ Wolf smiled. Con agreed. What would today bring, he wondered? The sighting of the animal seemed to suggest some kind of auspicious occurrence was in the offing, and already the day promised to be fine and hot. Of course, he had already resolved to text Shen and meet with her at some point, especially now he knew Hayden was off the scene; it might give him chance to talk, to explain.
‘Did you want another coffee?’ he asked. Wolf nodded.
‘That would be grand. Mind if I have a poke around your van?’ he added, grinning cheekily.
While Con set the kettle on to boil again Wolf sat on the sofa-bed, his head turned sideways looking at the books on the small shelf above the hob and sink.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked, taking down the PhD ‘unfinished’ file. Con shook his head, getting ready to try to explain exactly what he’s been studying.
‘You said you were a lecturer,’ Wolf said. ‘Is this the kind of stuff you taught?’
‘Kind of. I did a physics degree, and then an MSc in astrophysics but ended up lecturing in the history of astronomy, you know, Kepler, Hipparchus, Galileo, that kind of thing…’
‘What’s all this, though?’ Wolf asked, flicking through the loose pages of star-charts and plans of circular features.
‘I was looking at how far astronomy went back – I mean, my lectures went back to the Egyptians, but the more I looked into myths all around the world the more you got these shared images that suggested people knew about astronomy way, way back in prehistory…images that made no practical sense and were just bizarre until you interpreted them as astronomical images – constellations, eclipses, comets, stuff like that. Anyway – I did my Masters dissertation on Stonehenge – I was looking at the idea it was aligned on the summer solstice, and I wanted to see if it was true of the other henge sites, Avebury for instance…and it turns out it isn’t – it’s not even true for Stonehenge, I mean, there is evidence of an interest in the winter solstice – but not at all the sites; only a handful, really, so I started my PhD looking at what they were aligned on…’
‘Cool, man, sounds awesome. Why didn’t you finish it?’
‘I quit. I think they thought I was losing the plot; you see I came up with a theory, but then I started to look for proof of it in myth, and they said that myth was out of fashion....’
Wolf raised his eyes at that. ‘What was your theory?’ he asked.
Con hesitated for a moment. It was never easy knowing where to start. He paused, recalling his dream – the river being magically transformed into milk at the touch of the goddess’ wand, and the horse with the crescent moon between her brows appearing beside him on the bank – this was the real start… he wondered for a second whether he should tell Wolf, but decided against it. Instead, he fumbled through his notes and pulled out a plan; on it were two circles, each with a line drawn from the centre, out.
‘That’s Stonehenge…’ Con said; ‘you can see the entrance to the north-east – that’s the one aligned on the solstice, except it’s the winter, not the summer – they’re on the same alignment, but archaeologists have shown people were gathering there in the winter, standing outside the circle looking in – but that’s beside the point – look down here, here’s another entrance to the south and one to the south-south-west, that’s only on the first image, ok?’
Wolf nodded.
‘Now these entrances can’t be aligned on either sun or moon like the north-east one as they’re outside the rising and setting points of both; you never see the sun or moon rise exactly north or south, do you? So, I asked if the north-east entrance was astronomical, why not these others, too? Were they pointing, say, at a star or group of stars…’?
‘Fair enough.’ Said Wolf. ‘So, were they?’
Con paused; ‘Well…’ he gave a nervous smile ‘ – the first plan shows the orientation of the south-south-west entrance at about 3,100 BC, but this entrance was deliberately blocked a few hundred years later; then you get this corridor of posts being built that points through the southern entrance at nearly the same angle as the old south-south-west entrance… nearly being the key word: I wondered whether these two entrances were being aligned on the same thing, but something that had moved slightly over those few hundred years…’
Wolf was nodding, which Con took to be a good sign.
‘Now, there was a star, well, group of stars, that could be seen rising through the southern entrance, and setting through the south-south-west one, but which, after a few hundred years had moved so it could no longer be seen setting; that’s why that entrance was blocked, it had ceased to ‘work’. In its place the new avenue of posts was built pointing out of the south entrance towards the new setting point.’
‘Why did they move?’ Wolf asked.
‘Ever heard of the Precession of the equinoxes?’
‘Heard of it, but not looked into it.’ he said.
‘It’s a bit complicated to go into now, but basically the rising and setting points of the stars change slowly over time – so, for instance, the constellation against which the spring equinox sun rises these days is Pisces, it’s actually on the cusp of Aquarius, hence that song about the dawning of the age of Aquarius; but when Stonehenge was built it the spring equinox sun rose in Taurus, and before that Gemini… the position of the pole star changes too; it’s basically a wobble in the earth’s axis, and because of it the rising or setting point of a star changes by a degree every 72 years…so if you’ve aligned the entrance of your henge to a star, after a few hundred years it’ll no longer work…’
‘I’ll take your word for it – but which fucking stars was Stonehenge pointing at? Get to the bloody point man!’
‘It’s not just Stonehenge…’ Con was pulling A4 sheets from the folder and handing them to Wolf…
‘Avebury… Dorchester, Arbor Low, Thornborough, Woodhenge, the ring of Brodgar, Woodhenge…and loads more – about 60% of all the sites I looked at, and I looked at about 50 henges in detail, had some kind of alignment on this exact part of the sky…’
Con hesitated and took a pen from the shelf and drew a group of four dots on the one of the sheets of paper that Wolf was holding; a rectangle on its edge, with the bottom corner further from the centre than the rest, like a kite.
‘Join the dots’ Con asked, offering the pen. Wolf took the pen and drew a diamond.
‘Thank fuck for that.’ Laughed Con. ‘The stars are the Southern Cross – or Crux.’ He took out another sheet of paper that showed the constellation as part of a star-map ‘But as the name suggests, we tend to see the stars as a cross-pattern. But…’ Another flurry of printed sheets came Wolf’s way; all showing various diamond patterns inscribed on stones, on clay vessels; on carved and moulded figurines; pages and pages of the same… ‘the lozenge is a really important symbol in Neolithic art, and I think they would have seen it as a diamond, not a cross…’
‘I know 60% doesn’t sound a lot,’ he continued, ‘but just 5 of the 50 sites had midsummer alignments, so we’re looking six times as many with the Crux alignments, and that’s not the end of it…they’re part of a bigger pattern that increases the alignments to 85%...’ he began rooting through the folder, but in his hurry dropped the folder on to the floor.
‘Fuck’s sake…’ he muttered.
‘You need to write this down Con. You shouldn’t have stopped. Fook me – I can see why you were a lecturer; you’re like a different person when you’re explaining all that shit. It’s cool.’
Con played down the compliment.
‘But I don’t think I was in the right place to continue; it was only a few months after my sister…’ he said, dismissively, placing the roughly gathered sheets on to the sofa bed.
The kettle on the gas hob whistled and Con turned his attention to finishing the coffee.
‘If you don’t mind me asking – what happened? Shen just mentioned an accident…’ Wolf asked.
‘Did you ever hear of a band called Mellifluous? They were around in the nineties.’ Conall asked.
Wolf nodded; ‘Yeah, of course ’Damsel with a Dulcimer’ and all that? Electronic Folk-rock; well kooky. I’ve got that track on my iPod in fact, and ‘Milk of Paradise’.’
‘Melissa Astor, the lead singer… she was my sister.’ Con said simply.
‘Fuck, man. God, I remember. She…’
‘Drowned.’ Con finished. ‘Last May. She went swimming when drunk,’ Con said blankly, pouring the contents of the cafetiere into their cups. ‘It was around the last time I was here. Coming back here is a bit of an exorcism, really.’
Wolf was nodding, slowly.
‘She was your sister? Fuck, man! Mellifluous; I see it now – the hair! God, she had mad hair! I man, I was gutted. I mean everyone was. God, that is crazy!’
Con took a sip of coffee, then his eyes became fixed as he looked out of the windows to the mist on the horizon.
‘A damsel with a dulcimer, in a vision once I saw’…
Wolf, too, was singing from her song.
‘…For he on honeydew hath fed
and drunk the milk of Paradise’
‘Milk of Paradise was going to be the name of her next album…’ Con said.
‘She was a great singer, mate. I’m really sorry… I saw her at Glastonbury…when was that?’
‘Yeah – I was there, too. ’95... Want to see a bit of memorabilia?’
Wolf shrugged ‘Course!’
‘‘Damsel’ and ‘Milk’ were both based on Coleridge’s Kubla Khan;’ Con explained, rifling through the contents of the bookshelf, moving boxes of tea-bags, a phone-charger and cigarette-filters out of the way; ‘she was always very deep and, as you say, kooky!’ He tried to smile. He finally found, from where he had placed it the day before, the Collected Coleridge; he opened a particular page and handed it to Wolf. ‘There you go – the lyrics to Damsel with a Dulcimer.’
Wolf ran a finger down the heavily annotated page. ‘This is like music history, man!’ He said. Con nodded and took back the book, fumbling through some pages before finding what he was looking for:
‘This is where she was writing new lyrics;’ he said, matter-of-factly. Scrawled down one side of an already overly annotated page were two verses under a scribbled heading ‘Milk of Paradise’:
I seek for the Mother
To cry no more
to find where her cool white waters rise…
In the depths of the water
To sigh no more
Lie stones fallen from the skies
Wolf read them aloud and then went to turn the page but Con took it from him and closed the book, putting back in the gap on the shelf.
For a moment Wolf’s eyes remained on the creased spine of the volume and then he turned to Con.
‘Look – I’m meeting Ananda, you know, the barmaid from the Red Lion, up at West Kennet later to do some drumming. You’re free to come along.’
Con smiled. ‘I may wonder up later, yes, thank you. I’m probably going to try to meet Shen for lunch.’
‘Well, we’ll be up there this afternoon, I’d imagine.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘She’s a beauty, Ananda…’ Wolf smiled but then his expression turned serious.
‘I get a good vibe from you. I can see there’s life in you, deep down. Spring always follows winter, you know.’
Con held his gaze for a moment but had to look away.
‘When’s the last time you laughed, properly?’
Con looked into space.
‘I don’t remember. Not since Melissa. I mean, I’ve laughed – but it’s like I’m kind of trapped behind this glass screen. I’m here but I’m not, if that makes sense. I am trying. Maybe part of me died when she did.’
Wolf nodded. ‘Courage, my friend – that’s what you need; the courage to be angry, to feel again. When you hide your feelings to stop being hurt, you hide all of them – joy, love, not just the painful ones.’
‘Like I said – I’m trying.’ Con repeated, staring into his coffee. ‘It’s almost as if I’ve forgotten how. I want to open up again, but it feels like I’ve a bellyful of lead; the words are there but they just won’t come out….’
Wolf put down his cup and placed a hand on Con’s shoulder.
‘Words can be overrated. We tend to try and verbalise what we think; but sometimes thinking itself is the problem. Come to the Long-Barrow later, promise me?’
Con nodded.
Chapter 19: Hey Diddle Diddle
Tolkien was seated at the kitchen table, trying to write a letter to his wife Edith, but his mind was wandering; the smell of the sausages Mrs Mac Govan-Crow was frying was distracting him; he folded the letter and placed it to one side. Tolkien wasn’t tired despite having returned to the cottage well after midnight; he was used to such hours: when his lecture preparation and marking were done and the children and Edith had repaired to bed, he would often adjourn to his room and work on his stories and languages until the early hours. He had always managed on little sleep and this morning he had woken sharp at six thirty, and on rising had opened the curtains a few inches to find the world wrapped in thick white mist.
‘Morning Tollers!’ Jack had entered the kitchen, his cheeks red and shiny from shaving, and he walked over to the stove and warmed his hands.
‘Morning Mr Lewis’ said Shona.
‘Morning Jack. Did you sleep well?’
‘Extremely well, for it seems I’ve slept through summer and here we are at winter again!’ He frowned at the mist shrouded garden and shivered. ‘What would you like for breakfast?’ Shona asked. ‘Those sausages smell delicious, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow! I’ll have what the professor here is having! Where’s Owen, Tollers?’
‘He went into the village to get the morning paper with Mr Mac Govan-Crow; he said he’d not be long.’
‘And how did you sleep?’ Jack asked, pulling up the chair beside Tolkien, raising an eyebrow, and waving his fingers at Shona’s baby, Alfred, who sat in a highchair at the table’s end.
‘Well. I hope I didn’t disturb you; I went for a little walk after you had retired.’
Jack buttered some toast and raised an eyebrow again for Tolkien to continue.
‘To the Swallowhead. I had rather a moment of inspiration on the matter of the question you posed yesterday.’
‘Which question was that?’ Lewis asked, chewing.
‘Why in a landscape of dragons and one-eyed goddesses the river should be named after a dog. And it was Mrs Mac Govan-Crow here who helped provide the answer.’
Shona smiled as she approached the table and handed the men plates of sausages and fried mushrooms.
‘Bravo!’ said Lewis, grinning up at her. ‘And how did you help the professor?’ he asked her.
Shona smiled and shrugged. ‘I just told him a few things about Boann.’ She said, pouring Lewis a cup of tea.
‘Mrs Mac Govan-Crow,’ Tolkien explained, ‘kindly informed me that Boann, ‘white cow’ is referenced in the name of the Milky Way – which is ‘the path of the white cow’ and so I suddenly saw there might be a connection between the river on earth and that river of stars in the heavens...’
Lewis turned, a mushroom-laden fork poised before his lips; ‘You know, at college I had a rather splendid print of Tintoretto’s ‘Origin of the Milky Way’ in my rooms – you know the one, with the babe Heracles being pulled away from Hera’s breast and the milk from her bosom spurting up into the night sky; indeed a river of Milk!’ Lewis lifted the jug of milk from the table and poured it slowly, from a height, into his tea.
Lewis frowned. ‘… but where is the dog?’
Shona laughed. ‘Boann’s dog drowns with her when the river is formed. Ach! And you call yourself an Irishman?!’
Lewis coloured, much to Tolkien’s amusement.
‘The mention of the dog piqued my interest;’ Tolkien said, ‘if the Milky Way is an earthly reflection of the river Boyne, or vice versa, then Boann’s dog, and the bright hound of the Kennet must all somehow relate to the dog-star, Sirius, which stands guarding the banks of the Milky Way.’
Lewis smiled mischievously and turned to the babe Alfred sat in his high-chair and began to sing.
Hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle
The cow jumped over the moon
The little dog laughed to see such fun
And the dish ran away with the spoon
Alfred seemed mesmerised by the older man’s puckish grin.
‘Exactly, Jack! Exactly! How did we not see it?’ Tolkien had begun laugh.
Shona looked between the two men, puzzled.
Lewis turned to Shona.
‘You see, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow…’
‘Shona, please!’
‘Shona, it’s a sort of running joke between us – we’re interested, as you know, in the origins of things, words, legends, names – and one of the things we’ve often talked about are nursery rhymes: hey diddle diddle included, well, you see there was a scholar named Halliwell-Phillips who had the wool pulled over his eyes by some joker who convinced him that the rhyme was really Ancient Egyptian and that the cow was the cow-goddess Hathor and the little dog the star Sirius…’ Lewis was grinning broadly.
‘Well, Tollers and I were discussing this just last week in the Bird and Baby – the Eagle and Child, our local pub - we were talking of this very thing, the dog being the star! How did we miss it?!’
‘But what does it really mean?’ Shona asked.
Tolkien turned to her; ‘No one is sure; it’s probably just nonsense. The cat and the Fiddle has been said to come from Canton fidelis, who was an English official in Calais, or Catherine de fidelis, Catherine of Aragon – but the astronomical interpretation is just wishful thinking – you see if the cow is the constellation of Taurus then it could never work - Taurus is always below the path of the moon.’ He looked at Lewis and smiled broadly.
‘Unless?’ Jack said, winking.
Tolkien laughed.
‘Unless – and this was my latest tongue in cheek interpretation – well, imagine a sailor on an early voyage to the Antipodes... once you reach the southern hemisphere the sky changes: the cow DOES jump over the moon, because Taurus is now viewed upside down, and the spoon, which could be the great bear, the ‘big dipper’ (and the dish if that is perhaps crater) due to the southern locality, disappear from their ever-circling position in the night sky... they flee below the horizon unlike the north - they run away...
‘Given that diddle can mean to topple, and the first word of the rhyme was once high, not hey – might it mean:
The sky is overturned
Both Leo and Lyra
Taurus jumped over the moon
Sirius laughed to see such fun
And Crater ran away with the Big Dipper.’
‘The rhyme is in reality nonsense, but it hasn’t stopped people reconstructing it.… come, sing us your man in the moon poem!’
Tolkien reddened. ‘I won’t inflict that on the child, Jack.’
‘What if the cow isn’t Taurus but Boann – if her road is the Milky Way does that go over the moon?’ Lewis asked, suddenly serious, deep in thought.
‘The path of the moon crosses it once a month… I imagine if Boann were to be walking that road she might have to leap over it at some point!’
The two men eyed each other for a few seconds then burst into laughter again.
‘We’ll continue this another time – Halliwell-Phillips redeemed, imagine!’ Lewis said.
‘Would you like more toast, Mr Lewis, Mr Tolkien?’ she asked, bemused.
‘Indeed we would, thank you!’ He turned to Tolkien.
‘I still like my own interpretation – that the cow is jumping over a reflection of the moon in a puddle, like Thomas Traherne’s brother…
‘As he went tripping o’er the King’s high-way,
A little pearly river lay
O’er which, without a wing
Or Oar, he dar’d to swim,
Swim through the air
On body fair;
He would not use or trust Icarian wings
Lest they should prove deceitful things;
For had he fall’n, it had been wondrous high,
Not from, but from above, the sky:
He might have dropt through that thin element
Into a fathomless descent;
Unto the nether sky
That did beneath him lie,
And there might tell
What wonders dwell
On earth above. Yet doth he briskly run,
And bold the danger overcome;
Who, as he leapt, with joy related soon
How happy he o’er-leapt the Moon.
Tolkien laughed.
Just then the door opened and Owen Barfield entered the room, a newspaper under the crook of his arm, closely followed by George, in a collar-less shirt and cap.
‘That’s good timing, Owen! Did you smell the sausages?’ Lewis teased.
Owen smiled. ‘I think we’ll need a cooked breakfast; there’s little heat in the day; we were spoiled yesterday by the sun but I doubt if we’ll see it today through that mist.’
‘It may clear.’ said Shona.
‘If the wind changes.’ remarked George.
‘Well I hope it does – we aim to climb Silbury today; there seems little point if there’s no view.’ Lewis said. ‘You’ve just missed Toller’s solution to the Kennet question, by the way – it’s called the bright dog because it refers to Sirius – the Avebury landscape seems to be a mirror of the heavens!’
Owen raised his eyebrows at Tolkien.
George Mac Govan-Crow walked to the stove and dipped a crust of bread into the sausage fat and began chewing.
‘That’s also in our beliefs,’ he began. ‘‘We Blackfeet call the Milky Way the ‘Wolf Trail’ – there’s a tale that explains it, of course, but it’s a three-pipe tale and for another night! Strange that both tales include dogs, well, a wolf and a dog… the Blackfoot name for Sirius is ‘dog-face’ and he guards the road of the souls. To join the ancestors one must give him food so one may travel the road.’
When he realised the three guests were regarding him in stunned silence he stammered:
‘Did I say something amiss?’
Lewis had risen from the chair and was scratching his head.
‘Not amiss, my good man; puzzling – no…amazing! You see, that’s also what the Ancient Greeks believed, to cross the Styx one would have to bribe Cerberus with meat lest he should devour one’s soul. My word! How can the same story pop up on two different Continents – Continents not linked culturally until Columbus?’
‘Then they must have been linked before Columbus – but way back, before any of our recorded history.’ Tolkien said.
‘The same as the bear myths we talked of last night?’ George asked.
‘Precisely.’
‘Either that’ said George, ‘or some Blackfoot must have got in his canoe a few thousand years ago and come over to teach the Greeks a thing or two!’ he turned and winked at Tolkien, who smiled broadly in return.
Chapter 20: The Weave of Time
The midday heat was oppressive, and the steady flow of visitors around the circle was annoying Conall; for him the evening, when the car park would close and the day-trippers return to their homes, couldn’t come soon enough. He felt depressed; at a loss at what to do. He had sent a text to Shenandoah asking if she wanted to meet at the pub for lunch but had received no answer, and so had slept for a while in his van, only to awake and still find no reply on his phone. The thought of walking to Windmill Hill or up to West Kennet seemed foolhardy under this hot august sun. Perhaps, after all, a drink at the Red Lion was still in order, he decided, albeit alone.
He crossed the north-west quadrant of the circle, packed with picnickers and families kicking footballs, and muttered something under his breath about it being an archaeological site, not a fucking park. As he approached the towering stones of the cove across the road from the pub car park he was surprised to see Shenandoah sat on the grass against a stone with a book on her lap, her eyes shut.
‘Shen?’ she opened her eyes and smiled, wincing in the light.
‘Hello!’ she tapped the grass beside her. ‘I got your text – I ran out of credit though! Thought I’d just wait here, et voila!’
Con sat and took out his tobacco. He offered her a cigarette one and she accepted with no show of reluctance; she lay back against the stone, looking skywards with half open eyes, a contented smile on her face. Conall took the time to look at her; her shapely crow-black eyebrows arching above those dark creased eyes, that seemed to express such an innocent joy at being alive: an animal delight in the warm sun and the smoke.
‘Don’t tell Hayden.’ She said.
‘I wouldn’t.’ Con replied.
‘I know. It’s just he can be such a bore. Saving my life once isn’t enough for him…’
‘Saving your life?’ Con asked.
‘It’s how we met – I was bitten by an adder last summer on the path near Silbury, and he was here with some mates – he drove me to Savernake hospital.’
‘I don’t think you can die from an adder bite.’ Said Con, uncharitably.
Shen giggled. ‘Bloody hurt, though! I felt so sick and shaky. So you see – he’d have a go for me for voluntarily putting this poison in my system,’ she waved the cigarette, ‘when my life had nearly been claimed by another!’
She smiled at him and her whole dark face lit up.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked. ‘you look irritated.’
He breathed the smoke out through his nose. ‘Do you fancy a drink?’
The pub was busy, but they managed to find a free table in the large front dining room that bordered the road. Conall headed for the bar and bought a cold lager for himself and a half for Shen, who he had left to peruse the menu.
He brought the drinks back to the table.
‘You know what you’re having? I have to go back and order at the bar.’ He said.
Shen looked up and smiled at him, and Con felt an odd tightening in his stomach.
‘The fish; and garlic bread to start’ she cooed. ‘I fancy mussels and crusty bread, but they don’t do that here anymore.’
‘Since when did you eat fish?’ he asked.
‘I lapsed when I started seeing Hayden. Just seemed easier.’
‘Not for the poor fish…’
She looked up at him and at his already half-empty pint-glass.
‘It’s thirsty work all this doing nothing, you know!’ he grinned, by way of explanation.
‘I wouldn’t know, I was up at about four. Hayden wouldn’t let me sleep, so I got up and made us breakfast; I was going to do some housework but it was so nice out I just picked up my book and sat out there –‘
‘Four?! Fuck that… So, fish for you and…chips and salad for me.’
‘Still vegan, then? Puritan!’ she asked.
‘Ironically, yes.’
‘Why ironically?’
He laughed – ‘well it seems all the myths I’m studying are all about milk and cows and dairying…’
‘I won’t tell if you nick some of my salmon, you know…’
‘Halloumi I might be tempted by, but not fish! You’ll go back to it, you know…Shen?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Seeing as this is your local - could you tell me why there’s a well in the corner of the room?’ he laughed.
She grinned.
‘Apparently in the 1600’s the landlord pushed his wife down it – and you can sometimes hear her screams.’
‘Nice,’ Conall said. ‘Have you ever heard them?’
Shen shook her head and then looked at him, suddenly more serious.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked.
‘Maybe – can’t be sure. You?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Well go on then, tell me!’ Conall beamed.
‘Will you think I’m nuts?’
‘No more than I do already’. She pulled a face at him, then eyed him silently as if judging whether he could be trusted.
‘I sense more than see things; sometimes it might be a smell or even a taste…’
‘What kind of taste?’
‘Flowers; a kind of perfume…’
‘And do you sense anything now?’ he asked.
She shook her head and lifted her glass. ‘It’s just I don’t tell many people. People don’t understand.’ Con wondered if such people were tall and blond and fought fires.
‘I don’t blame you. Most people haven't got a fucking clue …’ he snorted. 'I’m convinced there's more to life than just flesh and bones.' he said.
'You think?' she said, brightening.
'I know. I mean - I look solid, yeah?' He said, and Shen nodded. '…But in reality, I'm more space than matter! The amount of matter in an atom is like a marble inside a football stadium - only it's moving so fast it seems to fill all the space... if you put all the actual matter in every person on the planet into one space do you know how big it would be?'
Shen shook her head.
Conall held out his fist. 'This big! - the rest is space! We're just energy, moving at such a fast speed we seem solid - but were not. It's an illusion. All is energy, some of which we’ve evolved to be able to perceive; but some we can’t. So why can't there be spirits or ghosts or fairies out there beyond our perception? Or other kinds of beings sharing this space with us that we just aren't tuned into? I mean, there’s billions of microscopic life forms on and in us that we can’t see unaided – there might be vast being striding across space we can’t see...or walking through the circle or through this pub.’
Shen looked at him open eyed.
'That’s weird. That’s how I kind of think of it. Think of all the phone and radio signals flying through the air at this moment. Can we hear them? No! But they're there! To hear them we need a proper receiver, and to be able to tune it to the right frequency.’
‘Exactly,’ Con said, ‘and maybe when you say you sense things it’s just that you can tune into frequencies that most people just can't - or have at least forgotten how to; maybe such abilities were bred out of us as we evolved, but they still exist in some of us.'
Shen smiled and briefly placed her hand over his. ‘Are you calling me a genetic throwback, Conall Astor?’ she teased. ‘I think as children we have that ability – to see beyond, somehow, but we lose it. Or some of us do. Maybe in the childhood of the human species we could see and hear such things too; talk to the plants and animals; how lovely would that be? I’ve not told anyone this before…’ she began., ‘you’ll think I’m mad…’
‘I hope so; the most interesting people I know are mad.’ He said.
‘Do you think there could be moments when you could see… into other times?’
‘Go on…’
She looked out of the window over the courtyard, as if something she had seen there had triggered a memory.
‘When I was in my late teens I used to hang around with this group of girls, and ‘cos I was the only one with a driving license I’d be the one who’d have to go to the shops and get booze for our nights in… but I’d always rope one of the others along to give me a hand…’
Shen looked at Conall, hesitantly.
‘Well… this one time, me and this other friend had gone to the supermarket – this was in Marlborough – and were driving back… and I suddenly noticed the sky was this kind of strange purple colour, and I looked over the hills and they were covered in trees, whereas usually they were fields. This friend starts shouting at me that I’d got us lost, which was impossible, because I hadn’t turned off the main road, but the road was now like a dirt track, with ruts in the side and the centre overgrown so it was scraping the bottom of the car…’
Shen looked at Conall again to check how he was reacting.
‘And I wanted to stop and get out, because the hedge at the side of the road was like overgrown, really tall, too – much taller than it usually is, and the hills were just covered in fir trees. My friend was shouting at me to keep driving, but I was just amazed, and I wanted to stop. I wanted to get out the car and look around. I was slowing down the car but she was literally screaming at me not to stop, to keep driving; but the weird thing was that it was like the car was see-through; I could see my hands gripping the steering wheel, but it was like the shadow of a wheel, transparent, and I could see the dirt track under the car.’
Conall was listening without comment.
‘And then we started to go up the hill, where the turning should be, and there’s a house on the corner of the turning, but it wasn’t there… and then as we drove on it was there! And the trees were gone, and the road was normal again, with houses on one side and no fir trees. Well, we got in and told our friends, and we were like really in shock, but the funny thing is she later denied it – she said I’d made it up, even though she’d confirmed everything and told them what she’d seen, too.’
Shen looked at Con for a reaction.
Conall held her gaze.
‘I can understand why she denied it. It didn’t fit in with her view of reality; and rather than expand that view and challenge the beliefs of a lifetime she chose to shut it out.’
‘So you believe me?’
‘Yeah, course. Why wouldn’t I? It sounds amazing – I’m just trying to think how far back you might have slipped… there was a road, at least, but it sounds like a cart-track…’
‘That’s what I thought. I’ve often thought I should try to find an old map and see if there was record of those hills being covered in trees and not farmed. I wish I’d stopped.’
‘Do you? There are plenty of legends about people getting trapped in faerie you know, and never coming back. I wonder how many missing persons have done what you didn’t – stopped and got trapped.’
‘I wanted to pick a leaf off the hedgerow.’
‘Maybe it would have turned to dust as you found yourself back in modern times…’
Just then their food arrived and they stopped talking until the waitress had left them.
‘I heard this story once,’ Shen continued ‘about these boys who wondered into this Iron Age village, and they kind of assumed it was a re-enactment, but they picked up these axes and when later they were carbon-dated they were two thousand years old…’
Con smiled. ‘That sounds dodgy, you can’t carbon date stone or metal, for a start, and even if you could surely the dates would have revealed the axes had been made recently? Unless they aged as they were brought forward in time?’
Shen looked a bit crestfallen, as if having been unmasked as overly gullible. But Conall wasn’t finished.
‘Have you heard about the time slip at Versailles?’ he asked. When she shook her head, he continued. ‘It was in 1901, two Oxford women were visiting the Palace at Versailles and they saw what they thought were modern people dressed up in costumes from Marie-Antoinette’s time; it was only when they returned years later and realised that they couldn’t find the bit of the gardens where they’d seen this ‘costume party’, that they looked into it a bit more and found they’d seen the gardens as they were over a century before... It freaks me out; I don’t get scared by horror stories or films, but stuff like that gives me the creeps – in a good way, though. I’m jealous of your experience.’
‘But why would that happen – would it be some kind of worm-hole or a crack in time?’ she asked, tearing off a piece of garlic bread, and offering some to Con, which he waved away.
Conall shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t see it like that; it’s not a door you walk through, more an expansion of your perception so you see things you normally wouldn’t. Tuning in, as I said, to another frequency – or widening your perception.’ She was looking at him quizzically.
‘We see time as flowing in one direction, but quantum physics suggests electrons can move back in time. Time, essentially, is an illusion – it seems to be moving forwards to us because we’re in it – it seems to be a function of consciousness, not a quality inherent in the cosmos. But if you could somehow step outside time… it’s as if everything that could ever happen has happened, as if you gain some kind of birds-eye view and you can see everything that not only was, but also could be.’
Shen shivered. ‘I don’t like that – it makes it sound like everything is fixed and we’re like a needle on a record player following a groove that’s already defined. It makes me feel like we have no free will.’
‘But I don’t mean it like that. If everything that has happened has been the result of free will, but you’re just looking back on it after the event, the you would be unable to affect it – like looking at an album of photos from your life. If you have that ‘birds-eye’ view you can choose to look at any photo at any point in time; you can look at them backwards and see yourself grow younger – but that wouldn’t affect the events of your life by doing that; you couldn’t alter those events; now imagine, and it’s hard because it goes against our ‘x causes y’ logic, that the photo-album exists not at the end of your life but in a timeless state outside of it. If you accessed it in a dream and it referred to an event that had already happened you’d just assume it was a memory… but if you dreamed of an event yet to happen, you’d not understand it as real as you’d not recognise it, and you’d just think it was a weird dream...but it might be it’s no more weird than the ‘memory’ type dream.’
‘So, you think people can see the future?’
‘If time is subjective, I don’t see why not.’
‘I wonder if someone sitting in this pub in the future may catch a glimpse of us in our old fashioned clothes and think we’re ghosts?’ Shen asked. ‘Or might be able to travel back and see exactly why Avebury was built? That would be quite a gift.’
‘It would certainly be a gift to me and my research!’ Con laughed. ‘But just imagine it - if you could float above the whole of history, from beginning to end, and see and know everything that was and will be, like this massive complex tapestry – you’d perhaps see patterns in it that we, on the ground, completely miss. You’d be like a god; you’d know everything!’
‘That’s scary.’ Shen said.
‘Yep. And probably why it doesn’t happen very often – or when it does, like your friend in the car, it’s immediately repressed and forgotten because it doesn’t fit in with their world view; but people like psychics and mystics who do see such thing always say the same thing: they see and know everything – but when they ‘wake up’ any specific knowledge, like who’s going to win the Grand National, has faded. They just know that they did see everything – and that it was good, and I mean morally good, like there was some kind of order, benevolence, in the Universe; that everything is linked, and all our trials and tribulations here on earth make sense and are made right when seen from that god-like perspective out of time.’
And will this be made right? He wondered. Will my trials and tribulations one day be made right when looked back on with the eye of divinity? He thought of Wolf’s testing god; the stage manager setting a road of trials for his apprentice…
‘When you do your cards, surely you’re seeing things from that perspective?’ Con added; ‘Catching a glimpse of the weave of the fabric of history? It’s not really a conscious thing – it can only be apprehended when your conscious mind is off guard, such as in a trance, or in dreams.’
‘Do you really think dreams can predict the future, then?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, or can tell you about things going on in the present you couldn’t physically know.’ He thought of his dream of the river of milk and the horse with the crescent between its brows; the mountains in the background with the gorge or valley cutting through the highest peaks, and quickly dismissed it from his mind. What was the point in such dreams if one could do nothing about the warning they gave?
‘Have you ever had a dream like that?’
‘No.’ he lied, the image of the river of milk flashing across his mind. It’s not as if the dream had told him she would drown, so it wasn’t wholly a lie, for it was him in the dream; what haunted him was why he had remembered the dream that specific night last year, at the same hour, so he believed, that she had gone into the water some 300 miles away from his own visit to the Kennet. Had she been calling out to him? But he had felt no fear – surely, he would have felt her despair and pain – but to feel nothing…
…But if that were all he might be able to just dismiss it as coincidence; but it didn’t end there: there was the image of the gorge in the mountains, and what his research had uncovered concerning it – a verifiable fact involving the location of the dream, and its revelation as a real physical location, the location of her death, no less - something that pointed to a level of truth within the dream that couldn’t just be brushed away…
‘Sometimes…’ he admitted, ‘I’ve dreamed things and they’ve provided answers to certain questions, you know, about my work…’
‘If time, as we know it,’ he stuttered, ‘is an illusion; that the ‘flow’ of time is just our experience of events that really exist out of time…’ he was fighting for words, trying to explain… ‘then just as events, past events, effect the future…’
He took a long drink and continued. ‘What if an event was so important, so drastic and powerful, that like a stone dropped in a pond it sent ripples in every direction… and by that, I mean into the past…’
He could see Shen’s brows knitted in concentration, trying to understand. He reiterated his point.
‘…if time isn’t real, as such, or can flow both forward and back, as quantum physics suggests is the case… then might a future event send ripples back in time…? Perhaps what we think of as precognition or prophecy is just a memory, but a memory of an event yet to occur?’
Her death, sending out ripples into the past, into the mind of his dreaming self, 20 years before, warning him, preparing him…hence the fact that details within it were verifiable, scientifically…the mountain cleft, the placement of the river and the sacred site that would later be built there… facts he had discovered 20 years later, and then projected back in time…
But before she could ask for specifics he continued,
‘I sometimes wonder if it’s possible to dream other people’s dreams – or to meet in dreams; or if in those ‘time-slips’ you actually see through some other person’s eyes from the past.’
‘So maybe I was picking up on someone who had walked, or been driving a wagon, down that road near Marlborough? Maybe it was me in some past life…’
‘All I know is that the world we think we live in isn’t half as strange as the world we do live in. We think we know everything, but we know nothing. But if there was a timeless part of us that did know everything… I wish it would appear to me and tell me that it’ll all be okay.’ he said, finishing his pint.
‘Maybe it tries, but subtly. I mean, if the ‘true’ you suddenly appeared to yourself and informed you that you were really immortal you’d think you’d gone nuts.’
‘It might be worth the risk.’ he laughed. ‘But if there is such a part of us, how would it explain itself to us? It would be like you trying to explain yourself to that bird.’ He said, nodding towards a sparrow picking at crumbs under one of the outside tables.
‘Well, maybe the universe uses other means to show us.’ she suggested.
‘Do you believe the universe is benevolent?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Yes, I do. And you?’
‘Maybe once I did. And maybe I will again. Perhaps this is just a rough part of the weave of the tapestry I’m crossing right now.’ He sighed. They sat for a while in silence. ‘It’s something Wolf said. The Universe isn’t bad – it just isn’t easy – that it makes us make an effort because it helps us grow.’
‘I thought about you.’ She suddenly said.
‘Likewise’ he toyed with his empty beer glass and said no more.
She looked at him, her face strained with a host of unasked questions.
‘I’m sorry, Con. About Melissa.’
‘I know. Everyone is.’
Chapter 21: The Font
It was on George Mac Govan-Crow’s suggestion that before heading for West Kennet Long-Barrow – their planned excursion that morning – his three houseguests should first visit the parish church that lay across the road from the cottage. It contained, he had told them, something that might interest them, or so he thought, after the conversations they had been having over breakfast that morning had veered from celestial dogs back to dragons and dragon-slayers.
Church Cottage, as the name suggested, lay directly across the narrow street from the lych-gate of St. James’s Church; it was a small building with a square belfry, set amid a well-kept graveyard – George Mac Govan-Crow being the gardener who kept it in check, being parish sexton as well as the gardener at Avebury Manor, in the employ of no less a person than the millionaire archaeologist Keiller.
The path led between the gravestones to the porch, and to a wooden doorway topped with a semi-circular Norman arch with toothed edges.
The three friends took in the architectural detail and commented on the prettiness of the building; before opening the door and stepping into the cool shade. The interior of the church was dim, and rather truncated – more a chapel than village church. Tolkien walked to the altar rail, crossed himself and knelt in prayer. Lewis merely nodded to the altar; Barfield paid it little heed, walking to the font that stood at the end of the aisle.
‘Ah, I see what he means, though these are wyverns…’
Barfield stood tracing the design carved on the side of the half-barrel shaped font with his fingers.
‘The man’s a gardener, Owen – to him a dragon is a dragon, you can’t expect him to have your pedantic knowledge of medieval bestiaries…’
‘I know that – I was just making a comment – definitely two legs and long tail, not a fish’s, so land, not sea-wyverns, if you want me to be pedantic…’
The font was ornately carved in a primitive style; a faceless figure formed the centre, in a flounced skirt, a snarling wyvern flanking him on either side… all set amid curling tendrils and above a crudely asymmetrical pattern of vaulted columns, all seeming to bend as if in a stiff breeze.
‘What is it, then? St Michael and the Devil, do you think?’ Lewis asked, approaching the font, and kneeling to take in the detail. ‘Or St. George and the dragon?’
‘No.’ Barfield reasoned. ‘That’s not a spear in his hand – it’s a crozier. He must be a bishop.’
‘What’s that in his other hand?’ Tolkien asked, having joined the others after finished his brief prayers.
‘A book, maybe – or a cup?’
‘Seems a little small for a book; a cup seems more likely.’ Tolkien commented. The cup, or whatever it was, was being held close to the figure’s chest, while his crozier, held out in his right hand, was being driven down onto the head of the wyvern on that side, who seemed to be biting the man’s foot.
Tolkien, reminded of his thoughts the previous day at the Sanctuary, quoted the verse out loud:
‘’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 thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’
He ran his fingers over the space where the face had once been – now flattened, with a metal hook protruding that once had fixed the carved features to the font.
‘It’s a shame the face has been lost.’ He remarked.
‘Indeed.’ Said Lewis.
‘It would have been interesting to see if originally he had but one eye…’
Lewis chuckled. ‘You think this is some pagan god in disguise?’ he asked.
Tolkien shrugged. ‘Don’t you find it odd that in this place, this serpent-temple as Stukeley imagined it, we find an image on this font of the subjugation of the mythical serpent? On one hand I can see this imagery as the church seeking to crush any signs of the old magic that might still have haunted these stones…using the Biblical imagery of the serpent; but equally…’ he continued, ‘might this image be a veiled reference to that older pagan tale of the defeat of the dragon and the imbibing of his blood or mead of knowledge? After all, if that is a cup…’
Lewis was still smiling.
‘You know there could be other explanations – more mundane.’
‘Of course.’
‘The two dragons, for instance - this could be a reference to the Great Schism of 1054 - since the Eastern Christian crosier is a staff with two dragons facing each other.’
Tolkien looked long at Lewis to see if he was being serious; the latter raised his eyebrows then winked, and walked off whistling.
Tolkien remained at the font, absentmindedly caressing the missing face with his thumb; it was hard to imagine in this placid setting, in the dim, cool sanctuary, with its scent of cold aged masonry blending with that of the flowers on the altar, that this font had possibly been attacked by some crazed puritan; and why not? The same fervour had seen most of the pagan stones of the circle burned and smashed to pieces; but this was different – this place was not some heathen temple.
The morning sun had moved so that a shaft of sunlight now blazed upon the altar cloths, and Tolkien felt a familiar sense of awe envelop him.
‘Bot Crystes mersy and Mary and John,
'Thise arn the grounde of alle my blisse.’
he muttered to himself, from the Pearl poem.
He felt a pang of compassion for those ancient men who had been born too early to know of the glory of Christ and the Saints… they must have had their signs, too – that salvation would come, like the light of the morning star presaging dawn…
‘What’s on your mind, Tollers?’ It was Lewis’s voice.
Tolkien smiled an apologetic smile and walked from the font, saying nothing. He had learned to keep his innermost religious feelings to himself, at least in the company of Jack.
Outside in the churchyard the sound of hedge-clippers could just be made out as George Mac Govan-Crow set about his task for the day, trimming back the yew tree hedge.
‘You seem to be bonding rather well with our host.’ Lewis remarked.
‘He’s an interesting man, Jack. He seems to be warming to us; at first I got the impression he was looking down at us, though I may have been wrong.’
‘Not looking down,’ Barfield suggested, ‘wary.’
‘Of strangers?’ Tolkien asked.
‘No. That we might be friends of Keiller.’ Barfield replied.
‘How so?’
‘It’s something he said when we were off to get my newspaper this morning. You see Keiller often has friends to stay at the manor – and something Mr Mac Govan-Crow said made me think that he doesn’t really approve of some of the goings on.’
‘Such as?’
‘He didn’t really say – except to explain that as a gardener one often is overlooked, and that people often talk about things in his earshot that they really should keep to themselves.’
Barfield cleared his throat.
‘He said that he sometimes wondered if Keiller’s vision of rebuilding Avebury was purely scientific… or whether he had some other purpose in mind.’
‘Good Lord.’ said Lewis. ‘What kind of purpose?’
‘He mentioned a statue of Pan in the grounds of the Manor, the plants about it trampled and dowsed in wine, he said.’
Tolkien stood looking down at the hacked-away face of the bishop or saint on the font; was Keiller somehow trying to overthrow the victory of the saintly serpent slayer? Was his vision one of restoring this heathen temple so that once more ancient rites might be performed here? He shivered at the thought. It wouldn’t be permitted. Couldn’t be. Those times are past and will not come again. The Great God Pan, as Plutarch reported, is dead – and ever should remain so!
Chapter 22: Letters
Pan, Herne, Osiris, Priapus
Ba'al, Dionysus, Apollo, Lugh...
The road to Church Cottage was busy with a throng of people in long robes, flowers and leaves in their hair, and singing and clapping to a beat from several drums as they walked towards the circle:
Pan, Herne, Osiris, Priapus
Ba'al, Dionysus, Apollo, Lugh...
the men chanted, and the women sang in reply:
Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate,
Demeter, Kali, Inanna...
‘I see the pagans are arriving’ Shen said, ‘Wolf will be pleased if they stay for the protest.’
‘Why else would they be here?’ Con asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s not a full or new moon. A Hand-fasting, maybe?’
The stretch of road near the church, however, was deserted, and as the noise of the chanting faded Shen and Con entered the cottage.
‘Was it a coffee or tea?’ Shen asked.
‘Coffee, please.’
‘Well go through to the sitting room and I’ll bring it through.’
A few minutes later Shen re-emerged from the kitchen.
‘Have you always been nosey?’
Conall, who was standing with his head tilted to the side perusing the large wooden bookshelf, looked back to where Shen was leaning against the kitchen door, two mugs of coffee in her hands.
‘I always look at people’s bookshelves.’ Conall said. ‘…says a lot about a person, what they read, and then what they choose to put on show.’
‘And if they have no books?’
‘I make my excuses and run.’ Conall winked. Shit. He was slightly more drunk than he anticipated.
‘And what do you mean by ‘Put on a show’? Isn’t a bookshelf just a bookshelf?’ Shen laughed.
‘God, no! You never done it? When you know someone you like is coming round… depends on the person… you know, if they’re intellectual you make sure you have some weighty tome by your bed, like a John Cowper-Powys. Or poetry – Whitman or Coleridge I find works, maybe a bit of Gary Snyder to be a bit edgy and ‘beat’; and something kind of quirky or humorous to show you’re not dull…oh, and a kid’s book to show you’re not too dry and boring… Moomins, or Susan Cooper…’
Shen was shaking her head, though whether in mock horror or not, Conall couldn’t tell.
‘That’s subterfuge. It’s deceitful.’ There was a twinkle in her eye as she said this. ‘It’s pretending to be something you’re not to lure someone in.’
Conall snorted.
‘Bullshit!’ he said. ‘Maybe if I’d not read the books, then yes – but it would be a pretty stupid thing to do if you hadn’t! It would be so easy to be caught out!’
Shen bit her lip to hide a smile.
‘You’re being very bolshie.’ She said. ‘Someone spike your drink?’
‘I don’t know, did you? And anyway…’ he continued, feeling spurred on at the challenge in her voice ’arranging books is no worse, and arguably a damn site more honest, than wearing make-up and push-up bras and hold-it-all-in-knickers’ he said, and laughed out loud.
She continued to shake her head, but still smiled.
‘What is it Hamlet says?’ he continued ‘"God gives you one face and you paint yourselves another". At least I have read the books I’m placing about my room – they won’t disappear with some cotton wool and make-up remover, or turn out to be an illusion of good corsetry.’
Though, if he was honest Shen was one of those women who did not require clothes or make-up to enhance her dark beauty; he remembered one evening the previous year, when he’d met her in the pub, and she’d come in a dark blouse and long-black coat, her hair straightened and her eyes lined; a black-ribbon about her throat; and he thought that he had never seen anyone more beautiful in his life; she had stunned him almost to silence.
‘You’ve the devil in you today Conall Astor!’
And she was right. For a moment, it seemed, the clouds had retreated, but for how long, he wondered? He was on borrowed time. The ancient serpent within was being allowed a brief time in the sun before his liver had removed the alcohol from his system and his civilised outer cortex woke from its numb slumber.
‘So what can you tell about granddad from his bookshelves then?’ Shen challenged.
‘Are these books his? I’d assumed they were yours.’ He said, pulling out a gaudily coloured paperback on the tarot.
She smiled. ‘Okay – mostly his!’
Conall turned his head to the side again and read the spines, stopping to pull out a couple without covers, only to return them.
There were books on Blackfoot mythology, culture, and beside them a small section on other Native American tribes and beliefs, including some volumes on Mesoamerica – the Maya and the Aztecs.
‘Were these your granddads?’ he asked.
‘Some – the early Blackfoot ones; the other ones are mine. Stop looking at the new ones!’ she laughed.
He skipped over the gardening and cookbooks – then he stopped and pulled out a faded hardback. His face had changed from wry amusement to something that could almost be taken for concern. He slowly opened up the cover and then turned to Shen slowly.
‘Your granddad was Alfred Mac Govan-Crow, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fuck me, Shen! This is a first edition copy of The Hobbit, with a dedication in the front by Tolkien himself! “To Alfred Mac Govan-Crow, on the occasion of your second Christmas, 1937. Best wishes J R R Tolkien”’
‘Yeah, it’s cool isn’t it?’ she said nonchalantly, sitting down at on the sofa with her coffee.
‘Cool?’ Christ! This is worth a fucking fortune, Shen!’ He wasn’t joking, either. First editions of the Hobbit passed hands for many thousands of pounds – but an inscribed one…
The cover showed the dragon Smaug flying over the mountains of Erebor; Con thought of the serpent brain within –guarding its primal memories like the dwarf-lords’ gold – if one could only venture in and steal that knowledge for the conscious mind - if one could integrate the entire brain without resorting to booze…
She walked over and took the book from him. ‘Look at this…’
She took the book out of his hand and turned to the inside back cover. Here, neatly enclosed within the fold of the dust jacket, were a number of yellowed handwritten pages.
‘Letters by Tolkien, to my great-grandfather, George - Alfred’s father.’
‘About what?’ he stammered, eyes open in shock.
Shen smiled, then laughed. ‘No idea. I’ve never read them properly – always meant to; have you seen the handwriting?!’
Conall looked into her smiling eyes, holding her gaze a little longer than he would normally have dared. She returned it, and it was Conall who looked away first, his pulse racing.
‘How did he know Tolkien?’ he asked, leafing through the thin handwritten sheets – there were, indeed, letters here addressed to George, but also one addressed to an Edith, and several sheets of what looked to be notes, with certain phrases underlined, including small diagrams which Con immediately recognised as sketches of some of the stones of the circle, and a swiftly drawn map of the entire site.
‘Tolkien stayed here for a few days when my Granddad was still a baby; my great-grandfather put him up as a lodger here. And C S Lewis, and Owen Barfield.’
Con looked at her in disbelief.
‘Here? At this house? Who’s Owen Barfield?’
Shen picked up a copy of a book that sat alongside The Hobbit - ‘He was one of the Inklings – Tolkien and Lewis’s literary group; The Silver Trumpet’ -he wrote this – this is inscribed to Alfred too.’
‘I’ve not heard of Barfield. I can’t believe this, though. Tolkien stayed here, seriously?!’
‘Seriously. And to say thanks he sent this signed copy of The Hobbit – that first letter there came with the book – I’ve read that one. Some of the others are to Tolkien’s wife, but there seems to be a few pages of notes; I don’t know why they’re there. Granddad couldn’t really tell me much; obviously, he was too young to remember anything.’
Con was trying to read the neat, fussy handwriting, faded now. He began to read out loud.
‘My Dear George, it is with immense pleasure and gratitude that I am able to send with this letter a copy of my ‘fairy-story’ which I have inscribed for Alfred, which though he is too young to read, one day yourself or Mrs Mac Govan-Crow may do me the honour of reading to him, to make up for the occasions when this enthusiastic stranger reduced him to tears through my nonsensical prattling!’
Con mumbled some more lines before turning the page.
‘The ideas I had surrounding the landscape at Avebury have taken, I am sad to say, somewhat of a back-seat for the time being, but I am trying to fit some of the insights I gained, thanks to you, concerning the great antiquity of these stories into something new I am working on, a time-travel book, which delves back into the distant past, and to the ‘Atlantis’ legend we talked of.’
Con looked at Shen. ‘What book is that?’
‘None I know of. Maybe he never finished it.’
Con nodded. ‘Yes, listen to this… “although my publishers are already suggesting I begin another ‘Hobbit’ book, as the reception to the book, in some quarters, has been very good.”’
‘The Lord of the Rings!’ both Shen and Con said together.
Con skimmed a bit more, then stopped and began to read aloud again.
‘As I write I can just make out Sirius over the Oxford rooftops, and it takes me back, on what is a cold winter’s night, to last spring in your wonderful county, and to the river of the ‘bright-dog’ of which I’ll always be reminded when I look at its companion in the sky.’ He paused. ‘What does he mean by river of the bright-dog?’ Shen shook her head.
‘You’re welcome to borrow them.’ She said. ‘Just don’t lose them or sell them.’ She smiled.
‘Thank you. Thank you!’ but he was already reading again.
He looked at Shen, a shocked grin on his face. She was looking at him, her head on one side, smiling.
‘Conall Astor wakes up again!’ she said. ‘Do you think one day you’ll be able to be enthusiastic about real things again, like people?’
‘Hmm?’ he said, looking up again from the letter, but only briefly.
Shen shook her head. ‘Don’t forget your coffee – I’m going to chuck you out in a bit as I’ve got housework to do, and I hoover naked.’
‘What?’
‘Just checking you’re listening! I mean it – take them with you. If there’s anything interesting in there let me know, or maybe write them out in a readable script!’
‘Okay. What are you up to later?’ he asked. Shen shrugged. ‘Hayden’s working today so he’s probably staying at his tonight – give me a call later.’
‘Tell you what. Get some credit and send me a text if you’re free.’ He laughed. She leant over and closed the book, forcing him to look up.
‘It’s a deal, if you don’t bring the book.’
Chapter 23: The Long-Barrow
No birds were singing, the skylarks and swallows of the day before were silent; all was quiet, cool, muted, softened as if the three men were making their way up through the fields towards West Kennet Long-Barrow were treading through cotton wool.
The Kennet valley was so thick with spring mist that Silbury hill had appeared only momentarily as they passed, a flat grey featureless hump visible for a moment when the slight breeze parted the mist, but it was soon obscured and left behind as the friends crossed the road and took the path towards West Kennet.
The grass was cool and wet, soaking the men’s shoes and trouser bottoms. Lewis was grumbling somewhere ahead; Tolkien was, as usual, lagging behind. He stopped for a moment to re-tie his sodden bootlace, squeezing the water from it, then while he was crouched down he paused to examine the flowers peeking through the grass: meadowsweet a speedwell.
He looked ahead to see the wraith-like shadowed forms of his friends merge into the whiteness and disappear; he felt suddenly alone…
Alone and palely loitering…. He thought to himself.
Tolkien felt no alarm; in fact he took a deep, slow breath, relieved to be alone for a spell; Lewis and Barfield had been in conversation since they had left the church, but Tolkien had been trying to think through the revelations of the night before; trying to organise his thoughts into some kind of order.
He stood upright and went to move onwards, suddenly not sure if he was facing in the same direction as he had been before he’d stopped to examine the flowers. Nevertheless, he knew he had been walking slowly uphill after they had crossed the small bridge over the Kennet, whose waters he was sure he could just make out chuckling behind him… so he strode forward.
There didn’t seem to be much of a path but nevertheless he continued through the thick grass and clover, knowing that the tomb that was their destination that morning, stood on the brow of the hill – but when he finally reached the crest the ground was flat; somehow he had misjudged his ascent – and so he called out to his friends; nothing was returned. The question now, he said to himself, is whether I am too far east or west of the tomb; he guessed west and so turned eastwards along the ridge.
The mist seemed to be moving slightly more up on the ridge; tearing past in odd eddies hardly strong enough to be called gusts; the grasses at his feet, a drab brown interspersed with fresh green shoots, gave no indication of a path, fading to wan a few metres each side. Tolkien’s steps quickened as he became more and more disoriented.
He called again and heard nothing;
I could be walking these hills a thousand years ago or more, he said; a delicious thrill went through him at the thought; he imagined a rider on a pale horse emerging out of the white rolling fog, and confronting him in a long lost tongue… but how would I know if I had encountered a ghost or if I had slipped back in time? He asked himself.
He noticed a slight rise in the ground and so began to climb, and found himself walking along the back of what he presumed could have been the long-barrow – so named from the comet-like train of earth set at the rear of the burial chambers; the earth was lumpy and the grass more patchy, and a vague depression along the ridge suggested a path.
‘Jack? Owen?’ he shouted. His own voice seemed to return as if the mist about him were the walls of some organic shifting prison; he had lost all sense of space and distance.
‘Where the devil are they?’ he said to himself, crossly, feeling an ever so slight sense of panic.
It definitely seemed to be a path he was on – but if this was the barrow it was immense – he seemed to have been walking along this rise for a few hundred yards, or maybe that was his sense of distance being confused by the fog, now eddying and swirling about him in an eerily conscious fashion; he baulked at what seemed to be a white shape, a figure, float past him on the left, but he turned and it dissolved into air.
Hurrying now he turned and strode forward, his heart hammering in his chest, his lips, almost against his will, starting to mouth the words of an ancient charm against enchantment, gripping his walking stick before him like a sword…
wið þane sara stice, wið þane sara slege,
wið þane grymma gryre,
wið ðane micela egsa þe bið eghwam lað,
and wið eal þæt lað þe in to land fare.
Sygegealdor ic begale, sigegyrd ic me wege,
wordsige and worcsige. Se me dege;
I encircle myself with this rod and entrust myself to God’s grace,
against the sore stitch, against the sore bite,
against the grim dread,
against the great fear that is loathsome to everyone,
and against all evil that enters the land.
A victory charm I sing, a victory rod I bear,
word-victory, work-victory. May they avail me;
And then he stopped in real alarm, gasping out loud as before him a huge grey form appeared in the mist, immense, wide, like a huge hooded figure towering over the back of the barrow… then another by its side… the vast blocking stones of the tomb along whose back he had, all this time, been walking.
He laughed to himself, glad he had found his goal; but where were his friends? He called again and it seemed far below him a weak strangled cry floated up through the earth from the depths of the tomb below. He walked forward and suddenly there beneath him was an open hole in the back of the barrow with a path leading down to one side… a large chamber of stones and a short dry-stone wall passage leading away from it towards the stones of the façade, and there, stood in the chamber, smoking a cigarette was Lewis; Barfield stood nearby running his hand over the lichen on the stones.
Lewis was leaning against the huge sarsen that made up the back of the chamber, but he flicked the butt away in disgust.
‘I’ve been calling you.’ Tolkien said.
‘Didn’t hear a thing.’ Lewis said and cleared his throat.
‘I’m cold and damp; this place is giving me the shivers; I almost thought you were some spirit when you peered over the edge then!’ Lewis visibly shivered.
‘I’m not happy here. The place seems somehow…’ he struggled to think of the words. ‘…haunted; no – lived in, perhaps, as if some spirit dwells here that never went away… It makes no sense; the chamber has been long empty, yet I still feel there are bones about… shall we go?’
‘We only just got here!’ Tolkien protested, walking around the hollow to the path that lead into the chamber.
‘It’s like winter has returned; dame kind is playing with us, gentlemen!’ he said, as a flurry of mist drifted over the chamber sending cool air downwards.
Barfield was investigating the eastern end of the passage;
‘It seems to continue this way – no doubt to the façade; and I suppose it was all once roofed as Stukeley seems to show it… but some treasure-hunter has dug in from the top in the intervening years, not able to move the facing stones…’
‘I wonder whether it was worth it? What ancient treasures were lurking here, do you think?’ Lewis asked. ‘Dragon-guarded gold?’
As if my some strange synchronicity at the mention of gold the pale disc of the sun suddenly appeared to the south, as the mist seemed to shift and change direction; it vanished again but a few moments later the disc appeared again, though now a pale silver, weak and powerless. The three friends looked round them as the chamber brightened, the creeping sense of dread having suddenly departed.
A few minutes later the friends were seated on the top of the barrow leaning against the facing stones as the mist thinned, borne away on an increasingly strong breeze; the sky was now blue above them and the sun too bright to directly look at; the grass around them had turned from a sickly acid green to a warm spring green, and, despite the breeze, the day was warming.
‘Oh I say, look!’ Barfield said, pointing to the north; above the mist the crest of Silbury stood proud in the sun, like a flat topped island in a sea of steaming milk; as they watched they noticed three figures emerge from the mist a few hundred yards down the path below the barrow. Heading the trio was Alexander Keiller, while behind him trod the young man with glasses and black hair who had received the blow on the head from the falling piece of tree root during the explosions in the henge ditch the day before; he was deep in conversation with a taller, heavily bearded man, who appeared to be in his seventies or eighties – his face heavily tanned, giving him the appearance of some Biblical patriarch – a sense compounded by the way the younger man, in his twenties, seemed to look up at him with a mixture of respect and awe.
‘We meet again!’ Keiller grinned as Tolkien, Barfield and Lewis clambered down from the mound to greet the new arrivals.
‘May I introduce you to my assistant, Stuart Piggott…’ the young man smiled broadly and proffered a hand to the friends.
‘…and Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie.’ The old man nodded, and shook their hands, peering under his heavy white brows, his face remaining stern.
‘My word!’ said Lewis. ‘This is a lucky coincidence. I was only last week reading of your discovery of the Merneptah Stele.’
If Lewis had expected a friendly conversation amongst peers to ensue he was to be disappointed, as Flinders-Petrie merely nodded his head in what might have been taken as a gracious acceptance of some compliment. Instead he turned to Piggott and addressed him on some obscure question of Bronze Age axe typology, seemingly the topic they had been engaged in on the walk up.
Keiller flashed his schoolboy-grin. ‘Sir Flinders-Petrie is taking time out of a series of talks in London specially to see the re-erection of the first stone in the north-west quadrant tomorrow; we’re very honoured to have him here. He’s been such an inspiration; I read his accounts of his excavations in Egypt and the Near East as a young man, and I can honestly say if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here today! Will you be here to see it?’ he asked the friends.
Tolkien looked towards his companions not sure how to answer. They had kind of left the question of walking schedules up in the air when they had left Church Cottage that morning, having decided that they hadn’t yet exhausted Avebury’s many attractions, and that The Red Lion served uncommonly good beer. Tolkien expected Lewis to answer, but the latter merely shrugged, cleared his throat, and announced it was a possibility.
The same high-colour lay on Lewis’s cheeks as at breakfast – perhaps not a shaving rash after all, and not sunburn; he seemed quite flushed, and now Tolkien thought about it, he had seemed less talkative since they had left the church.
‘Everything okay, Jack?’ Tolkien asked.
Jack forced a smile. ‘I think that last cigarette may have dried my throat a bit; I’m feeling a little hoarse; a bit off colour in general really, now I think of it. Perhaps we should stay another night.’
Barfield put a hand on his friend’s arm.
‘I’m sure a lunchtime beer would sort out that throat.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right. I don’t really feel like climbing Silbury Hill today. It’s something about this place, it’s put me out of sorts.’ and he visibly shivered.
Tolkien turned and looked up at the massive facing-stones, that stood like a row of jagged teeth along the front of the barrow. He felt Piggot approach.
‘These sarsen stones, used to seal the chamber are local, were dragged here from Marlborough, where there are great numbers of them still to be found.’ Piggott stated. ‘The chamber was excavated,’ he continued ‘at least partly, in the late 1800’s – though because of the blocking stones the excavator had to come in from the top, removing the capstones. There’s a single chamber at the western end of the passage, and the passage itself, made of drystone walling, is thought to continue up to the portal stones, which were put in position to block the passage when the grave fell out of use.’
‘And was anything found here?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Bones – from a number of individuals – disarticulated, and possibly brought from elsewhere.’
Lewis shivered again. ‘And is there anything left to be found?’
Piggot nodded. ‘It’s possible that behind the blocking stones are more chambers – we intend to dig here at some point in the future.’
‘And how do they relate to the round barrows up near the Sanctuary? Are these the same people?’ Lewis asked.
‘These are earlier – the long barrows predate the round mounds. They’re Stone Age – the occupants of the round barrows were the people who brought metalworking with them.’
‘Invaders?’ Lewis asked.
‘Very possibly. They seem to be different in stature than the long-barrow builders; a different race, perhaps.’
Piggott seemed to be choosing his words carefully, and talking not just for Tolkien and Lewis’s benefit but also for Petrie, whose Biblical form was standing on the mound nearby, brooding over the landscape. And then the great man spoke, like a man used to being listened to.
‘Invaders – yes; culture-bringers. We see the same in Egypt: a basic stone-age civilization supplanted by a far superior race.’
Tolkien bristled at the mention of superior races, but he didn’t get chance to voice his opinion as Petrie continued:
‘This type of barrow is ten-a-penny; what interests me is that’ he said, pointing his walking still back at the peak of Silbury, sailing like some green long ship on the sea of mist; ‘I am convinced there is still a burial to be found somewhere in that hill…maybe the overseer of the stone circle was buried there. After the war I excavated an area near its base, hoping, as I had in Egypt, to find some kind of subterranean passageway into the mound’s interior. When you’ve finished wasting your money on re-erecting stones, Keiller, I suggest you return to the mound.’
‘Maybe once the circle is finished.’ Keiller briskly replied, frowning.
‘The Stones themselves will tell you nothing; you’re merely undoing the work of previous generations who sought to destroy them; it’s not really archaeology at all; it’s a vanity project like Evan’s creations at Knossos... But that hill – surely the nearest thing on these isles to a pyramid – that is real archaeology; imagine what might lie there… maybe some evidence of a link between this part of the world and the Near East? Hmm?’
Tolkien was amused to see a combination of bashfulness and annoyance flash across Keiller’s face.
‘Perhaps a re-excavation of the hill would be in order, too, hey, Piggott?’ Keiller said, drawing the younger man into the discussion.
‘Indeed. But here, too.’ Piggot stammered, waving a hand at the long-barrow, ‘The earlier excavation was hardly complete, and perhaps some of the fallen stones here could be put back in place.’
Petrie stood prodding the mound with his walking stick, chewing his bottom lip – before once more turning towards Silbury and pointing at the hill, twice, emphatically before striding off along the length of the barrow.
‘A great man. A great man.’ Keiller said, his eyes watering. Then his frown lifted as he turned to the three friends. ‘Oh, and we are to lunch in the Red Lion on our return, and I would be honoured if you would join us.’ Keiller said. Tolkien received the distinct impression they were being asked to swell the numbers so that Keiller wouldn’t be left alone to burden the bear-like Petrie’s ill-humour.
It was Barfield who responded in the affirmative, which surprised Tolkien, as normally it was Lewis who would leap forward, stomach first, to accept such an offer. But Jack remained quiet, eyeing the stones with something akin to mistrust or even alarm.
Chapter 24: Old Man
Conall Astor was walking bare footed along the sun-baked dirt path that lead from the car park to the west of the village southwards to Silbury hill and on to the rise on which West Kennet Long-Barrow crouched.
The path was well trodden and wide, and he watched carefully to avoid stepping on the trails of ants that crossed it at various points; but he was also, after Shen’s story of the adder, on the lookout for snakes. The path followed the curve of the river, bordered by reeds and willows, under which Con sheltered every few minutes when the burning sun got too much.
Just north of Silbury Hill a small bridge traversed the stream and Conall took this, and followed the path as it curved about the hill until he reached the small car-park beside the Bath road that served the viewing platform for the hill. Here, just a few hundred yards across the road, lay the newly made crop circle; Conall debated for a few moments whether to look more closely at it but decided not to, already fearing he may have missed his appointment with Wolf.
From here he walked up the brow of the hill where the road rose beside it, and crossed it, taking the path towards the Swallowhead spring.
He sat for a moment on the sarsen stones that forded the spring to cool his dusty hot feet in the cold water. Further towards the source of the spring a family was sitting having a picnic, and he said hello as he passed, taking the path that cut diagonally across from West Kennet – the very path he had seen the large dog or cat taking that morning. He stopped and looked across the valley towards Waden hill at the spot where he had been sitting when he had seen the creature. It looked so far away. The hard-baked earth was free of any tracks that might have helped him discern if this creature had been flesh and blood rather than some spirit conjured from this sacred earth. He shivered, suddenly eyeing the trees down the slope to his left, wondering if some cool, dismissive canine eye was watching him. Then, like a punch in the gut he remembered what Tolkien in his letter had written – river of the bright dog…He stepped up his pace and headed for the barrow.
Having reached the summit of the hill, the breathless Con sat astride the back of this immense ancient tomb for a moment, lying flat on the grass and looking skywards to where the skylarks dipped and hovered; one of his arms cushioned his head like a pillow, while the other lay across his heaving chest, in his hand the owl’s feather which he had just removed from his hat-band. It was here that Shen had given him this gift all those many months ago.
Just twenty-four hours earlier he had strode back from the pub, adamant that his lightened mood had had nothing to do with the reappearance of this girl in his life; but now, letting the feather tickle the side of his face he saw that this had been a laughably naïve conclusion; clearly she hadn’t changed, and when he had left her a year ago he knew he was falling heavily for her. He had changed, though; and that wasn’t her fault – it was a fault of timing and circumstance.
He sat up and put the feather from him; but then turned and picked it up again, holding it to his chest, suddenly feeling as if he might cry out, remembering her beside him on the barrow, her warm, sonorous voice telling him he could kiss her if he wanted… and now she was with another, and it was all too late; and even if she were free, how could he ever allow himself to be happy with her after what had happened, knowing it was because of her he had stayed here, a few hundred miles too distant to do what Hayden had for Shen – too far to save that precious life.
He turned his head and looked towards the massive entrance stones of the barrow, following the line of sight to the Sanctuary on the brow of the hill where he had been this time yesterday; the crop circle in the field between the two points was harder to see from this lower angle, just ellipses of shadow in the corn. I can’t believe these are done with a rope and a plank of wood; he thought, the artists needed computer-precision to get such results; night-vision goggles, laptops, GPS devices - no doubt all were needed.
He thought of the group in the pub the night before: Croppies, Wolf had called them; it seemed hard to equate those boozed-up techno-hippies with this kind of art. But maybe that was the point; they relished their anonymity. It seemed strange, though – most young men would want to boast about what they had done; he thought about what he’d read concerning the Ancient Greek mysteries of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, how the life-changing ‘secret’ revealed to the thousands of celebrants over the many centuries it had been celebrated had never been revealed – never – no single participant willing to spill the beans, not for fame nor fortune. Perhaps croppies were made of the same stuff – bearers of an awe-induced silence because of the nature of their work… mouthpieces for Gaia. No, he smiled. Mouthpieces for Demeter, the barley-goddess, known to the Romans as Ceres, goddess of the crops, from whom the word cereal was derived. And cerveza, he thought, once again wishing he’d not drunk as much over lunch. Perhaps, he continued musing, the croppies rejected the fame of modern artists because they rejected the ego, the ‘I’ that separated them from nature – the crop circles’ designs seemed to speak in the language of mathematics, in Pythagorean numbers, of cosmic harmony – they were a symbolic of song of the summer earth, an echo of Eden, calling us back… that’s if they were man-made, and not some strange of exudation of mathematics into nature, or the work of elves or aliens…
‘I saw a fairy once’… Melissa’s sing-song voice.
He smiled at the memory. Of course, she would have...
Just then he felt a strange hollow quiver rising from the mound – then another; the distant beat of a drum – Wolf’s drum, he reasoned, and so he stood and walked to the stones that flanked the entrance of the tomb.
The portal stones that fronted the entrance were huge, and Con entered the tomb by walking behind the largest of them, whereon he was presented with a dark chamber leading straight into the mound. This inner chamber was made of other great sarsen stones, and here, on each side of the passageway, stood smaller chambers, two each side and one at the end, the latter illuminated by a modern glass roof-light – five separate chambers in which the bones of the dead had once been placed – and it was in the chamber to the immediate right of the passage that Wolf Jones sat on a deerskin hide, eyes closed, drumming.
From the opposite chamber, to the left of the passage, came a voice. It was Ananda Coombe from the Red Lion; she smiled in greeting. Con went and sat beside her, exchanging pleasantries in a hushed tone as Wolf continued to drum, with short, deep guttural sounds coming now and again from his throat – and the odd snatch of words:
Hen wyr y gwlad! Dewch!
The earth beneath Con’s hands was cold and dusty, with a coolness that made it feel damp; it was tight in the chamber, and he pressed his back against the stone that formed its back to give Ananda some space; her light hair was tied back in a ponytail and above her round glasses, between her brows, was the faded remnants of three white horizontal lines with a red dot at their centre; a slight hint of sandalwood masked some of the damp staleness exuded by the stones.
Presently the drumming stopped, and Con found himself fixed by cool predator eyes that suddenly creased with mischief.
‘Welcome to my humble abode’ Wolf grinned, waving a hand. ‘You’ve met the lovely Sat Chit Ananada…’
‘She’s served me a fair few pints since I’ve been here.’ Con blushed.
‘Indeed – she’s the amṛta-bearing Mohini… initiatrix into the wisdom of the East…’ he smiled.
Ananda raised her eyes to the sky, despairing. ‘He’s so full of shit, ignore him.’ she said to Con, with a wink.
‘It’s good you’re here, Con. I’m drumming to Old Man.’
Con must have looked blank as Wolf continued, with hardly a pause.
‘This chamber – this is where the bones of the old man were found – the man whose bones are being relocated to the museum tomorrow. They should be
here.’
Wolf explained how the bones had been removed some forty years ago, after Stuart Piggott had excavated the Long-Barrow in the 60’s, had found the previously unknown side chambers hidden within the drystone walls between the facing stones and the previously excavated back chamber.
‘They’d been filled with stone – literally packed solid with material,’ Wolf explained, ‘so it was just assumed there was nothing there – just wall.
‘It’s usually assumed that newcomers that did this – they wanted this place shut. It had been here for a thousand years – the bones of the dead were housed here and then removed for ceremonies in the circle or up on Windmill Hill - but the Bronze Age newcomers sealed it up and put those massive sarsen stones out the front, blocking the tomb, ending the communication between the living and the dead.’
‘Like locking the doors of a church?’ Con mused.
‘Or to stop things getting out – the ancestral spirits of the people they had overrun. You don’t want mardy ancestors on your hands, mate…For generations their nameless bones were put here – until the last burial. You see Old Man was buried whole – I think he was the last of his tribe – the last shaman of the stone-wielding people. He was killed and placed here and then the tomb was filled.’
He stopped and rolled himself a cigarette.
‘Killed?’.
‘It’s one theory; the newcomers didn’t arrive peacefully – Old Man was killed before he was put here – an arrowhead was found buried in his neck bones – he’d been shot in the throat. And in the chamber over there, three females – a maiden, a mother and a crone; priestesses of the old religion, perhaps; no arrowheads there – I think they were probably drowned or strangled.’
Con blanched at the word drowned…
Ananda shifted and picked up a handful of dust.
‘Of course, as Wolf knows, I don’t wholly agree…’ she said. ‘I think we could look further than just the defeat of an old shaman by incoming metalworkers. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of interpreting a mythical, ritual occurrence as history...’
Wolf slapped his own wrist in mock admonishment; ‘Ananda has a habit of trying to fit our prehistory into a Hindu framework,’ Wolf explained ‘Don’t you my dear?!’
Ananda shrugged. ‘I started off as a Hindu but then discovered druidism… and I’ve been trying to unite the two ever since. The Celtic and Hindu world were parts, albeit separated geographically, of the same cultural complex, the Indo-European language group… and I see no reason why both didn’t spring from a single root culture, a Neolithic predecessor - so why not use Eastern parallels to illuminate western? I run a class at the Hindu temple in Swindon on the subject…’
‘Tell him about the posset of milk.’ Wolf prompted.
‘Another time… I doubt he’s interested…’ she said, eyeing Con for signs of boredom.
‘No, please…’ Con prompted.
‘Have you heard the folk tradition that Silbury was raised in the time it took a posset of milk to boil?’
Con nodded. ‘I read it somewhere, yep.’
‘There’s a Hindu rite known as the pravargya rite, celebrated at dawn in which an earthenware pot filled with milk is heated over a fire, when then boils over it is supposed, through a kind of sympathetic magic, to bring about the dawn and sunrise. The milk, you see, is associated with the cow or cows of dawn in Hinduism, or a beautiful goddess named Uṣas; and the rite causes the cow or Uṣas to be released from her place of hiding or imprisonment under the horizon, or in the celestial river Rasā …the boiling milk pushes off the lid of the pot, which is supposed to echo Indra destroying the monster Vṛtra ‘the coverer’, who has previously stolen the dawn.’
‘We tried it this spring equinox. Fookin’ disaster’ Wolf cut in, ‘sat atop Silbury in the dark and rain; I’m crouched down trying to keep the wind from blowing out the fire, and when it did light the milk took about half hour to boil and then boiled over and put out the fire.’
‘Maybe next year’ Con said; Wolf and Ananda looked at each other briefly, something passing between them that Con missed.
‘So you think the Silbury folktale is a memory of a rite observed here that was similar to the Hindu one?’ he asked.
Ananda nodded.
‘A midwinter or spring rite, designed to release the sun imprisoned over winter.’ She said.
‘Like the Japanese Amaterasu myth?’ Con said.
Ananda lifted a brow in surprise, ‘indeed…’
‘Christ, here we go… thought this might happen… ‘, Wolf laughed… ‘welcome to University Challenge…and on our left we have Professor Astor, and on our right Guru Ananda Coombe’
Con laughed. ‘I researched a ton of midwinter solar myths when I was doing the PhD – trying to find a rite that might fit Stonehenge… the Amaterasu myth has the sun-goddess hiding in a cave and tricked out by a dancing goddess who exposes herself, making the other gods laugh – so Amaterasu peeks out to see what they’re laughing at and thereby the sun is released. That myth, as I recall, was probably derived from a Hindu original taken to Japan along with Buddhism.’ Ananda was nodding, so he continued; ‘But it misses the cave as serpent symbolism that you find in the Hindu and Indo-European myths… the cows stolen by the serpent which are then rescued by the hero – be that Indra or whoever, the forerunner of the whole dragon-slaying mythos.’
Ananda was still nodding. ‘Where did you find this one, Wolf? Someone who knows his eastern myth!’ she laughed.
‘The serpent, Vrtra – the concealer, the coverer…’ she continued, ‘he represents the static condition that prevents new growth - be that night, or winter… anything that conceals or dims the sun, fertility, or anything creative. He’s not evil, per se, he represents inertia…holding up the circle of creation.’ Ananda remarked, her voice echoing within the chamber… just like a stone cave, Con thought.
‘And he’s beheaded, as I recall, to release what he has captured?’ Con asked.
‘Beheaded, dismembered… or his throat simply cut, as often he has swallowed the sun, or cows, or Uṣas, or soma…the magical drink…and the wounding releases a stream of magic words that can grant immortality.’
‘And the man buried here…how does he fit into this?’
‘I think might have been enacting a similar kind of rite – the release of soma, or the sun, from the throat – so not necessarily the victim of racial or cultural attack…’ she said pointedly, looking at Wolf, who grinned in return.
‘So, he was the serpent Vritra, and this is his cave?’ Con asked, peering about him.
Ananda paused; ‘It’s not that simple…’ she began; ‘as I said, the serpent represents stasis, inertia; a state that needs to be ended, usually through violence; he's the dragon who hoards gold or virgins but has no use for either… hence the need of a hero to come and rescue what is imprisoned…’
Con thought of the letter of Tolkien’s he’d read earlier after leaving Shen’s:
‘What struck me was the font – and the cup in the hands of the headless figure; the cup I had Bilbo steal from Smaug; I, of course, got it from Beowulf… but it’s a common motif – the stealing of the vessel of immortality, the Holy Grail… the mead of knowledge…from the dragon…
‘– but it is a version of a much bigger theme,’ Ananda continued; ‘namely, the cosmogony, the creation. Now, there’s plenty of Celtic legends that have a hero or a saint being decapitated, and springs or wells appearing where the head falls – like St Winifred - in these cases the beheaded figures aren’t evil, as theirs is usually a willing sacrifice.’
Con was thinking deeply, drinking in what Ananda was saying; twisting it around in his mind in an attempt to understand why this man had been slain over five millennia earlier.
‘You think he was killed in a re-enactment of a creation myth?’
‘In some Hindu myths the universe comes about through the dismemberment of the primal man, Puruṣa; the force of creation is latent within him and he needs to be broken apart for it to be released; it’s the same image as the release of the sun from the serpent, only he’s not hoarding it negatively; he’s akin to the vegetation god who must be dismembered and planted so that he can be reborn.
Con thought of John Barleycorn, the sacrificed man, giving his lifeblood for the good of the people…snippets of the song he had heard at the pub with Shen the day before flashed through his mind:
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.
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.
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.
‘Basically…’ Ananda explained, ‘the cosmos is seen as stemming from an anthropomorphic being, be it the Puruṣa, the Cosmic man, of the Rigveda – or the Iranian Gayōmart, he holds the potential creation within him, locked away, so he is dismembered…and from him the world is formed.’
‘Like the giant Ymir in Norse mythology,’ Wolf chipped in, ‘who becomes the world –
From Ymir's flesh the earth was formed,
and from his bones the hills,
the heaven from the skull of that ice-cold giant,
and from his blood the sea…’
‘Yes, it’s the same image,’ Ananda agreed, ‘he literally becomes the earth, the sky – he is creation itself, formed through a world-creating sacrifice. Like the corn he is buried and new life sprouts from him. It’s an image that probably stems from planting myths, I would think…death precedes life.’ she mused.
Con creased his brow in confusion.
‘And this man buried here…’
‘…died in a re-enactment of that first creation;’ she re-iterated, ‘he’s what they call a foundation sacrifice; he’s the original first man, the primal ancestor – the sacrificed god – and his wound in the throat, opening him up at the neck, releasing the forces of creation....’
‘And why him? Why was he special?’
She answered:
‘He was already marked as special; he was lame, disabled by spina bifida, and he had a supernumerary toe… yet he’d lived until old age; he couldn’t hunt, or farm, certainly couldn’t fight. So, others in the community would have had to look after him; I think maybe he was a priest or shaman, as you suggested Wolf, he certainly had gifts that meant he was cared for, not left to die. Nature had already marked him out as different. That’s why I don’t think he was killed in a war between tribes. I don’t think he would have been fighting, for a start. It’s clearly a different death – a sacrifice, and when you look at all these old myths of throats being cut or beheading to release the powers of fertility, or the waters of rebirth, or the milk or mead of immortality… I think that explains the neck wound.’
‘His burial here creates the land, forms it; makes it fertile;’ Wolf said; ‘so you can see why I don’t want him stuck in a museum, divorced from the land he gave his life for.’
The chamber became suddenly cool and Con gazed about him at the drystone walls; the low ceiling formed from an immense capstone – feeling, for the first time, claustrophobic. Here, where he sat, the corpses of the dead had once been piled; reeking, flyblown, or perhaps browned sinewy limbs, desiccated from exposure elsewhere; and here, not in fiction or legend, but in truth, a poor man, lame and riddled with pain all his life, always an outsider, perhaps considered an oddity, a freak, perhaps feared, had been finally laid to rest, his throat gashed open by the killing arrow that had sailed so swiftly as to embed itself in his spine; he imagined the spill of crimson over the white curls of his chest, and the silent last gasps of his blood-flecked lips. For the first time he felt no sense of connection with those buried here – they had always been like himself, just older, in different clothes, like a costume drama… but now they seemed wholly alien; inhabiting world too far away to bridge, both temporally and culturally – like the ash-covered Saddhus he’d seen pictures of on the banks of the Ganges, with matted dreadlocks, sitting amongst the dead…
‘He’s the first man, the great ancestor;’ Wolf said, ‘the Old One; Eldest; stag and blackbird’s brother. His body is the land; the land is his body. And we are formed from him, too, in turn – from the flow of his magical words… released by the arrow-wound.’
In the beginning, thought Con, was the Word…
Silence followed as each thought over what had been spoken of, the ancient sacrifice that had been enacted on this very spot; the pent-up forces of creation released by such a violent act, making him, Old Man, holy, a martyr, even…
The silence was ended by a soft, rhythmic pulse as Wolf began to drum again…
Con closed his eyes and lay back against the cool sarsen stone that formed the back of the chamber; part of him excited, part of him hoping no visitors would walk in and see him like this.
Dub-dub-dub-dub
And then Wolf Jones began to sing in a deep voice:
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through blood and bone
And pelt and claw
Come and follow me
down to the ancient tree
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through ice and fire
And Thunders roar
Sons leave your childhood lands
Take your ash spears in your hands
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through red cap, white spot
Vision’s Door
Wolf-skin warrior
Stag and blackbird’s brother
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through voices of those
Who have gone before
Spirits of the land
Dance with the warrior-band
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Darkness; for a long time; Con shifted to get more comfortable… but the drumming had begun to lull him, and spaces began to lengthen between his thoughts…
Had he slept? Time seemed to have passed, but he remained still, the drum reverberating around the chamber, almost sickening in its intensity, causing a palpitation deep within his chest.
Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum
Seconds? Ages? past.
He opened his eyes, or at least his inner eyes, and saw willow trees arched above him, but billowing and morphing strangely, and he suddenly realised he was watching them through water…it’s only my imagination, he thought…
Beside the stream, above him, seen through the ripples, a wolf was pacing back and forth, with Wolf Jones’ eyes…
Dub-dub-dub-dub
And then Con was himself crouched beside the stream; looking down at his reflection – at a face red with blood or some kind of paint, and over his own eyes the amber eyes of the wolf, whose skin he wore over his shoulders, and whose boneless front limbs were tied in front of his breastbone. His hair long and curled hung from his brow and touched the water… and those eyes, predator’s eyes… his own… and something behind the eyes began to speak – a voice, again his own, but also Wolf’s; and there was Wolf Jones sat opposite against a great fir-tree, the skull and antlers of a stag on the trunk above his head…
‘If you do not make something of your life, little wolf…’
Then a long pause.
‘…I will take it from you…’
And then, he seemed to see, from afar, crouched in a dark cave formed from grey sarsen stones, set on the rise above the stream, a crooked man, grey bearded, and bent to one side; eyes glinting from a small fire over which sat a clay vessel, its contents frothing and boiling; and from his throat a golden light pouring down, like sunlight…on his brow antlers, no, the curled horns of a ram, no – just matted hair…
…From the beginning, Old Man is singing…
And he was grinning, strong white teeth under the matted hair, under antlers; face painted with red-earth, two meanders, serpents or rivers, down each cheek from temple to jaw; darkening as the stone above him seemed to lower, to crush down on him – yet still he smiled; under stone; under hill…
And the feeling of guilt welling up, repressed, of joy repressed threatening to burst… yet imprisoned within him; static, dead with inertia… and then a whistle and twang and the feeling of the flint blade of the arrow piercing his throat and lodging in his vertebrae, and the light bursting out of his wound, jolting him awake, his heart hammering, as fast as the drum…
Dub-dub-dub-dub dub dub dub
The tempo of the drum had changed and somewhere miles distant, a voice from some other time, Wolf Jones’s voice, was telling him to come back, to return.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da
How long had they sat like this? His body was stiff as if he’d slept for a long time… minutes? Hours? Wolf’s voice came again, closer this time, telling him to slowly stretch and to open his eyes when ready and to sit up slowly…
Con felt an odd sense of elation; and the need to tell Wolf what he had seen, but Wolf held up his hand.
‘What you saw is between you and Spirit’ he said. ‘Remember what you saw. It came to you from the ancestors, from Old Man who is within each of us – and behind him the animal powers all the way back to the first fish in the first oceans…’
Con sat in silence. Of course, it’s all imagination, he thought to himself; yet the stark warning remained in his mind; if you don’t make something of your life, I will take it from you; and the sense of discomfort in his throat, sharp, deep, yet offering the painful promise of release of feelings long imprisoned...
Chapter 25: The White Cow
The stone lay prone on the grass beside the hole that the next day would house it. It had been scrubbed clean of the dirt that had enclosed it for nearly half a millennia, buried by pious men seeking to undo the work of the devil; now, it had once more been brought to the light of day, and its original socket excavated. Beside it lay piles of large wooden poles and ropes with which it would be levered into place.
Sir Flinders Petrie cast a cold eye on the scene; crude stone and mud and damp; he shivered and pined for his home in Jerusalem. At least there’s no sand, he thought – recalling his own excavations in Egypt; sand that covered everything, got into your eyes, your hair, the food you were eating; and the infernal heat – but the stuff they had dug up – finely carved stone, bearing hieroglyphs, so much more advanced than this primitive temple, here on the remotest edge of the civilised world. And that idiot Keiller jumping around like an excited puppy; how could he get so excited about such a barbarian edifice? All his hangers on, jumping at his every word simply because he is rich. This one, though, he thought, isn’t impressed by him, this sallow-faced small man, Tolkien, I think he said his name was.
Tolkien too had approached the stone and laid a small hand on the brushed sarsen. He turned to Petrie, coughed, and began to mumble.
‘If you’ll excuse me, am I to understand that you excavated Silbury at some time in the past?’
Petrie nodded, and stroked his beard.
‘Indeed. In the hope of finding a tomb or such-like inside, but all we chanced upon was dirt.’
Tolkien hesitated before answering.
‘It’s a strange thing; the hill, I mean. Strange they should build something so immense and yet, empty…’
‘My thoughts exactly; I had, of course, dug many pyramids in Egypt before coming here, and crude though it was, I thought perhaps we might find that it was built in imitation of such colossal tombs… even that an emissary from the east had come and died here. But we are supposing a grandeur that simply was not present. The people who built these monuments were not civilized in the way you or I think of the Ancient Egyptians, for instance. No Cheops resides in Silbury Hill because, alas, these barbarians possessed no Cheops…’
Tolkien sniffed against the cooling late afternoon. And yet they possessed the wherewithal to build this immense circle, he thought, ‘Maybe civilization is not to be rated by its physical works, but by its artistic achievements, its stories, its myths…’
‘Yes, but where are the myths of the people that built this circle or the hill?’ Petrie scoffed. ‘Where is the artistry in these rude blocks of unworked stone, say, in comparison to the art of Egypt, to the temples of finely worked columns bearing inscriptions to the gods? No! Civilization was brought to such places at a later date… Egypt included – you think the height of pharaonic art the work of such primitives? No – they were brought in from outside.’
‘Egyptian civilization was foreign, not indigenous?’
‘Of course! Nothing of worth could have emerged from Black Africa; its peoples are lazy, primitive – no we are seeing the importation of civilization from further north, from Europe…what of worth ever came out of Africa?’
Tolkien reddened and bit his tongue. I came out of Africa, he thought, thinking of his first few years of life in Bloemfontein. Absolute poppycock! This was the sort of idea now breeding war in Europe, he thought angrily.
‘There’s a grandeur in Egyptian civilization that is absent from the primitive mind,’ Petrie was continuing, ‘and clearly has origins elsewhere. Do you imagine the shaven-headed priests watching for the rising of Sirius over their sublime temples to be on par with tribesmen living in their mud-huts as they still do today?’
‘Sirius?’
‘Sirius, yes, Sopdet, in the Egyptian tongue – there is one fact that stands out above all else – their astronomical sophistication; their reckoning of the year based on an accurately observed event…where is the accuracy here?!’ he scoffed, waving his stick around him. ‘Yet in Egypt, pin-point precision…’
‘Pray, go on…’
‘The Egyptian year began with the helical rising of Sirius, that is its first appearance in the sky after disappearing from view for some 70 days. This event was of acute importance as it heralded the flooding of the Nile.’
Tolkien forgot Petrie’s racism for a moment as these facts sank in. Sirius…the dog star… and the flood…. He thought of Boann and the flood that created the Boyne…of her dog, Dabilla, who drowned with the goddess, whose path across the sky was obviously a reflection of the river on earth.
Should I tell him, he wondered, that elements of his precious Egyptian myth are also found amongst such ‘primitives’ of prehistoric Britain?
‘And so, they built their temples oriented to the exact point of the rising of this star on that date…’ Petrie continued, ‘the herald of the Nile flood…which they saw represented in heaven as the Milky Way… beside which Sopdet majestically resides.’
‘And how was this Sop…?’
‘…Sopdet…’
‘Sopdet, depicted – a dog?’
Petrie chuckled. ‘A dog! No. Canis Major is the Roman name for the constellation. Sopdet, my good man, was depicted either as a female figure, usually interpreted as the goddess Isis, and otherwise a couchant white cow in a boat, such as depicted famously at Dendera.’
White cow… Boannd; Good Lord! Tolkien thought; as if the dog-star and flood wasn’t enough, here we find the Lady herself.
(author’s note: it wasn’t for another three decades after this event that archaeologists discovered Boann’s ‘dwelling’, the passage-grave of Newgrange, known in Irish as Brú na Bóinne, ‘womb of the white cow’, was aligned on the winter solstice sunrise and the rising of Sirius – this would have been even more ammunition for Tolkien…as would the date - most of these British sites pre-dated the Pyramids; West Kennet predated them by 1100 years...)
‘Interesting; white cow…’ he said, trying to prod Petrie for more information. ‘What would be the connection between the cow and the stars, then, I wonder?’
‘The cow is a very important symbolic image in Egypt, and often associated with the sky; Isis, I have mentioned; the goddess Nut, who is the Goddess of the Milky Way, is also often depicted as a cow stretched out over the heavens with stars along her belly, or with each of her feet in the four corners of the sky… or there is the Goddess Hat-Hor, they are all related, Hat-hor appears with cow's ears and horns, and is probably the cow-goddess Ashtaroth or Ishtar of Asia; she swallows the sun each night and gives birth to it each morning at daw; her very name means ‘house of Horus’, that is House of the Sun, roughly speaking; what else is the sky but this, a house for the sun?’ he said, the corner of his mouth curling, enjoying his own deduction.
At mention of the sun he turned his sun-brown face heavenwards, frowning at the pale disc that still offered little warmth through the mist that still clung to the circle and river valley.
‘… and so,’ Tolkien asked, trying to keep composed, ‘as you had hoped to find evidence that Silbury had some connection to Egypt, how would you have felt if there had been survivals of myth here, and you had been able to link these sites here with, say, the flooding of a river, and a white cow, linked to the Milky Way and Sirius?’
‘My good man, I would have felt justified in my assumptions, and it would have been of unprecedented importance in my theory that culture had been spread wide by what I term the ‘Dynastic race’! But there is no such link. No such myth. No Pharaoh, I fear, lies in state in Silbury awaiting discovery, for all the tales of gold-clad kings buried within – though I continue to hope. And for all Keiller’s enthusiasm over this crude circle, this is a site of little importance in the history of western civilization… granted it is of local interest, but compared to Neqada, or Abydos or Tanis…’ he grimly shook his head. ‘They couldn’t even align it properly north!’ he laughed, ‘it is skewed, as one might expect of such primitive work.’
Tolkien did his best not to smile as he bade Petrie adieu and shuffled away to re-join Lewis and Barfield.
‘Tell me, Jack’ he said, ‘is it wrong to withhold what one believes to be a fact of great importance if one believes that fact will be misused by the recipient?’
Jack shrugged and coughed.
‘I don’t know, and I don’t feel well enough to really think about it either. It’s grown very cold and I think I may have to repair to bed; my throat is agony!’
Barfield looked over at Petrie and smiled.
‘I take it you mean your discoveries about the Kennet?’
‘Indeed. I fear they would be used in this instance to justify a rather racist and inaccurate interpretation of the site.’
‘Then I would say you are at liberty to remain silent.’ He clapped Tolkien on the back, but Tolkien’s frown remained.
Walking a few yards behind Lewis, Barfield turned to Tolkien with a look of concern on his face.
‘What is it, Ronald? Did what he say bother you that much?’
Tolkien shook his head. ‘No, foolish opinions don’t bother me; it’s just I was thinking of my work… you remember a little while ago when I read my Eärendil poem at the Inklings?’
Barfield nodded.
‘And how I said it was an explanation of the appearance of a certain star – and how he came as a herald of a new birth to come, of hope after the flood…’
‘Yes, I recall that…the flood that drowned Numenor.’
Tolkien didn’t continue; he paused and prodded the ground before him with his walking stick
‘Ronald?’
‘It’s…it’s just… what when something you tell yourself is just a product of your imaginings…. rests on foundations…or seems to…’ he cleared his throat.
‘what if you were to invent a story only to discover it’s been told before, long ago, and not just once, but many times… what does that say about the source of your creativity, of the story? I mean it’s not exact – but the themes – the flood, the herald in the form of the star… even the star as a mariner…what if it’s not so much invention as uncovering, or remembering? Somehow hearing the distant echo of some ancestral voice?’
And Barfield suddenly understood Tolkien’s fraught expression was not so much that of concern but of bemused shock.
‘And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far; Ancestral voices prophesying war! Barfield said.
‘I think I need a pipe!’ Tolkien said. 'And a beer.'
Chapter 26: The Hollow Hill
The street was empty now of the tourist cars that had lined it earlier, and a sense of calm had descended within the circle. Conall stood for a moment at the junction of Church Street, fighting the urge to walk down to the cottage and see if Shen was in. He’d be seeing her later, he reasoned, and besides, what if Hayden had decided to come back after his shift? Despite telling himself he was okay with the situation, a wave of emptiness in his stomach showed him that this wasn’t really the case.
The strange twisted feeling inside strengthened his resolve to continue, as planned, to the Red Lion.
Shenandoah! He hadn’t been able to get her out of his thoughts this day. He had allowed himself to think of her more than he should have – it was like a good pain – like scratching an itch or a chilblain – pleasurable but painful at the same time.
He had gone back to his van and dozed for a while after visiting the Long-Barrow, but Shen had crowded into his thoughts and he had allowed himself the unimaginable – to remember in detail, despite having repressed the thought for so long, the events of that day the previous May when he’d walked with her to the Swallowhead spring and they’d sat on the stones in the stream and paddled their feet in the icy water.
...
The sight of her little white feet moving hither and thither in the brook had made him feel both strangely happy and weak at the same time; he’d longed for their feet to touch, but he hadn’t dared move closer to her; she had turned her head to one side and looked at him with an expression of curiosity and amusement which he’d not been able to read. Still her feet, small and delicate like a child’s, moved slowly, stirring clouds of chalk from the bottom of the stream. She seemed to be waiting for him to do something but a few moments passed and others had come and crossed the stones, and so they had continued up towards West Kennet with a silence between them and a growing tension, fuelled by unspoken and un-acted upon desire. The ground was covered in clover, and he wished he hadn’t put his boots back on – he longed to feel the earth under his bare feet, to feel connected to the being on which they trod, that fed them, and had ultimately brought them into being.
On the banks of the barrow they had sat, catching their breath under the warm sun; he had lain beside her in the long grass, the skylarks tumbling above them, as his heart beat wildly and his mouth became dry, and he wished he had the courage to do or say something – yet he lay there in a maddening state of torpor until she had smiled and said, simply, ‘You can kiss me, you know.’
He had smiled and refused, saying if he kissed her now she’d never know whether he’d done it because she had asked or because he had wanted to, to which she laughed, agreeing – but she had given him the go ahead, and the nervousness he had felt, which had been founded on doubt that she felt anything like the same as him, dissolved. And so a few minutes later, as she lay with her eyes closed against the high afternoon sun he leant over her, and brushed her mouth with his, his chest pounding with anxiety and happiness; and with a trembling hand he stroked her soft cheek. He had kissed her again, her hair in the breeze ticking the side of his face – he pulled back to move it aside, and she had said that it was annoying; ‘No, it’s beautiful’ he had replied.
After a while she had stroked his hair and then turned and lent on her elbows, and had pulled her bag towards her, telling Con she had something for him.
‘I found this yesterday when I was walking back from Silbury. I thought I might give it to you.’
It was a cream coloured feather with smudges of chocolate brown along the edge of one side - an owl’s feather. He took it in his hands and twirled it about, then had stroked her cheek with it and placed it in her hair, smiling.
‘Thank you’ he had said, ‘you look like one of your ancestors.’ and had held her gaze; different now that the tension had gone and he could look at her fully, still scared a little, still nervous of this beautiful woman; how lovely it had been to look into those chocolate eyes, that sometimes seemed almost black, sometimes amber; but now in the sunlight were like pale autumn leaves; and the joy he felt when they closed as she had moved towards him and kissed him again; a gentle brushing of the lips, no more, and his hand holding her hair against her cheek.
...
Such joy and promise – that it should have come to nothing; that it should have been tainted by his folly. That he should lose her; and find her again but too late, as she was with another; another for whom she would close her lovely eyes when they kissed…
The knot in the stomach was like a knife.
The beer was cold, and he took a few large gulps then carried it to his usual chair beside the window. Taking his notebook from his jacket pocket he opened it on the notes he’d made earlier that afternoon from a letter of Tolkien’s, now safely ensconced in his camper.
He’d not written out all of the letter – just the salient parts – the things he’d puzzled over; here, again, was a mention of the Kennet, but related to an old poem he’d not heard of before ‘The Pearl’ – but the imagery of which had sent shivers through him, with its talk of loss, and of the hope of finding again, in some future, those who had departed this world.
That image of stones glimmering like shining stars in the stream…
It had been the October before she died.
Melissa and her husband had bought an old cottage on the North Welsh hills above the River Ogwen, a few minutes’ drive out of Bangor where Melissa had begun to study for a degree in Celtic. There had been room in the house to stay but Conall had chosen to stay in the caravan in the garden – partly so he didn’t have to live under the same roof as that prick Anthony, but partly because here he could see the peaks of the Carneddau mountains; once, when they were turned copper by the setting sun he imagined they were peaks of a vast rising tidal wave, and felt a sudden thrill of panic.
Melissa had seemed happy then; dreamy, even. Anthony still argued and put her down, but she seemed not to rise to it; and one evening, when Anthony had got drunk and fallen asleep, Con and Melissa had driven to a destination she had teased would be something he would absolutely love...
They had crossed Menai bridge and headed south, parallel to the Menai Straits; after ten minutes or so they had turned north-west and had parked in a small lane in flat farmland. The sun had nearly disappeared, but there was enough light to cross the field and take the path beside a small stream. Melissa had called Con to the stream’s edge and taking off her shoes waded in and lent over, feeling the riverbed for something; smiling, she had come back to the bank with her treasure – a couple of quartz crystals.
‘This river – it’s the Afon Braint – named after a goddess! This is Holy Mother Brigantia, the High One, and look – here are her star-stones!’ she beamed at him.
Con had raised his eyebrows and smiled, watching her wading out of the water, her massed dark curls flopped over her face.
‘You seem happier.’
‘I am. The muse has returned…’ she said, her blue eyes flashing.
‘You’re writing songs again? No wonder Anthony is moody!’
‘Anthony doesn’t know.’ She said, shooting him a serious look that told him that he should not mention any of this to the absent man, who had never encouraged her musical ambitions, though had always been happy to enjoy the money it brought.
She had put her boots back on and lead Con away from the stream towards what appeared to be a low hillock in a field of short grass in a neighbouring field, not far from a number of farm buildings; a herd of cattle eyed them as they approached, lowing nervously. Walking closer, however, Con had soon seen that the mound was ringed by grey stones, set within a perfectly circular bank – and to its north east a stone lined squat doorway, leading into the dark interior of the green belly-like rise of the earth:
‘Bryn Celli Ddu – the mound in the dark grove – the womb of the mother…’ Melissa whispered.
‘Jesus, Mel! I wanted to find this place while I was up here!’
‘You’ve heard of it?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Course. I am doing my PhD on these sites, you know, you twat!’
‘Oh, I thought you were just doing henges…’
‘Yeah…duh! ‘, he said, pointing at an information board that stood near the perimeter fence. He gestured at a reconstruction of the building of the mound, with the first image clearly showing the site as a henge with a stone circle, before the later passage-grave, the mound, had been built.
‘Might help if you read these things,’ he said sarcastically, ‘it started as a henge.’
She spun on the spot. ‘I don’t want other people’s ideas crowding out my own,’ she grinned; ‘so, how old is it, Doctor?’
‘Oh, about four thousand years. And it’s aligned on midsummer sunrise.’
‘The passage? How fucking cool! I didn’t know that!’
‘No, they cunningly hide such information in books and on information boards.’ He mock-chided. ‘It is cool, but a bit of a pisser for me…’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m arguing that midwinter was more important date.’ He explained. ‘But it’s a later site, the mound at least, than some of the other sites I’ve looked at, so I’ll let the builders off… Newgrange, in Ireland, is just like Bryn Celli, but it points to the midwinter sunrise…’
Mel was twirling about pointing… ‘So that’s… south-east, yeah?’
Con nodded. ‘Whereas this chamber…’
‘Is north-east…’ she finished. ‘Does it still align? – I mean, I remember you mentioning the stars moving over time?’
‘It still aligns; the stars move, but not the sun, which is why Stonehenge is still aligned on the solstices.’
‘Fuck. Can you remember that solstice at Glasto?’ she laughed. They’d been camping on site the year she’d played – having refused to be put-up elsewhere and flown or driven in. Con had delighted in the kudos of being seen in the company of Mellifluous… but Mel herself had found it increasingly uncomfortable, the constant recognition. They’d gone to the purpose-built stone circle away from the main stages, and got hideously drunk, dancing in the firelight with the crusties to the sound of numerous drums; then some travellers tore down one of the main fences and hundreds broke in before security could stop them, and Con and Mel had gone back to their tents to find they had been broken into and half his stuff nicked. Rock ‘n’ Fucking Roll… bastards…
…
‘We’ll have to come here at midsummer, Con!’ she had cooed, approaching the twilit mound.
Bowing their heads they had gone inside the low passage, feeling their way in the dark, their hands either side on smooth, damp walls; crouching low they had reached an internal chamber, its back side was open to the sky where only half the mound had been reconstructed; originally they would have been at the heart of the mound, earth on all sides, but the modern rebuilding had left half open to lend light to the chamber. At its centre stood a stone the size of a grown man or woman, smooth, like a fossilised trunk of a tree; Melissa had placed her arms around the stone and kissed it.
‘Holy Mother Brigantia!’ she had said, and taking the quartz stones she had gathered from her pocket she had struck the two together – causing a spark – but no ordinary spark – a flash, like lightning within a storm cloud – but from inside the stones rather than outside. She did it again. A smell of acrid burning hit his nostrils.
‘Mother stones… stones of light…. Stars in river of the night…’ she had said. And all the while, the pillar, like Lot’s wife, stood before her, just visible in the half-light of evening. Con looked up through the gap in the chamber; the star Altair shone in the south, below the cross of Cygnus, taking flight through the faint blush of the Milky Way that had just begun to become visible above him, and a paleness to the east heralded the rising of the moon, still hidden behind the trees.
‘This is a palace of the Sidhe; a doorway to the fairy realm; the mother’s blessing, the bendith y mamau dwell here – and have done for all time…I saw a fairy once…’
Con had looked at the ecstatic look on her face. Kooky as ever, he had thought.
‘It wasn’t like Tinkerbell…’ she said, ‘it was in a field near here; it was like the earth, and was dancing in the field, kind of jumping around…somersaulting.’
‘Like the earth?’
‘Earthy, kind of reddish-brown… like one of those bog bodies they’ve found…not small, not tiny, I mean… 4 foot high or so? There’s an Irish folktale I read about, the tale of Selena Moor, where a woman is held captive by the fairies and explains to her human lover that the fairies were star-worshippers who lived long ago… I think they’re the spirits of the people who built these mounds and still dwell here…’.
‘As ghosts?’ Con had asked.
Mel had shrugged. ‘What is a ghost? I think it’s all consciousness on some level… maybe when you die you can become fixed to some part of the land – a tree, or hill, stream, maybe. Maybe you just blend into the consciousness behind everything; so, there’s no difference between ghost, human, spirit, fairy, whatever…’
She opened her blue eyes wide and stood, arms outstretched; the silver and blue dress she’d casually thrown on under a thick crochet cardigan hanging loose like the robe of some ancient priestess.
‘I call thee, beautiful ones, Lordly Ones, that dwell in the hollow hills. Inspire me; give me voice!’ and as she clashed the stones together above her head, causing them to flare, she began to chant, her voice high, ethereal, in words Con couldn’t understand.
‘Dewch Bendith y Mamau; dewch in mewn; I’r fryn yr hen bobl… ellyllon, ellyllon… dw’i’n eisiau bwyta… y pair dadeni…’ she half-sang, in the broken Welsh she was beginning to learn…
He had lit a cigarette and she had frowned, continuing to sing, but ushering him towards the gap in the chamber, wrinkling her nose.
And then the chamber lit up as the lights in the yard of the farmhouse in the next field went on, and Con and Melissa had stifled laughter, suddenly quiet.
‘That farmer’s going to think he’s heard the fairies!’ Con grinned. Then he frowned - ‘he’s not going to come in here with a gun, is he?’
‘This is Wales, you dick, not the Wild West!’
‘Mel, I’m pleased you’re happier.’ Con had said, when the light had been extinguished and the farmer gone back to the safety of his cottage.
Mel had looked at the floor, smiled and then raised her head.
‘I’m in love, Con.’
He didn’t have to ask if it was someone else – he knew it.
‘But Anthony mustn’t know, not yet. He’d do everything he could to ruin it and I can’t have that. I’m happy, Con! I’ll leave him in time, I just need more time.’
Time. One thing Melissa did not have. Six months later they’d found her face down in that same stream from which she’d plucked the quartz stones that night. Afon Braint. River of the Brigantia; the High One. Anthony had found out about her affair. He’d marched into the University and confronted the new man, a fellow in the Welsh Department – and put the fear of God into him, and threatened all kinds of stuff that had driven him to end it with Mel…
And she’d asked me to come up and help her sort it out and I hadn’t, thought Con.
They had left the mound to find the night scattered with stars; Jupiter was burning low in the south-east, while the moon sailed above the eastern horizon, between the horns of Taurus, bright, on its way to being full; and the three belt-stars of Orion had just appeared above the trees below it.
Mel had stopped Con, and pointed directly overhead ‘the Mother above, and below’ she had said. ‘The River in heaven, and river on earth – that’s Llys Don, court of Danu, the Mother,’ she said, pointing at the W-shaped stars of Cassiopeia; ‘Do you think that’s why they built the tomb here, beside her stream; they saw the stones in the water, the light-giving quartz shining in the dark, and thought they were fallen stars?’
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’
And she had quietly sung to herself a new song…
I seek for the Mother
To cry no more
to find where her cool white waters rise…
In the depths of the water
To sigh no more
Lie stones fallen from the skies
‘I think they believed that the heavenly river started here… it’s heaven on earth. It’s the crossing point.’
‘It seems familiar, Mel’ he had said; ‘but I can’t put my finger on it. Have we been here before?’
‘I hadn’t ‘til I moved here; I can’t see how you could have.’ She said, as twins they had an almost perfect knowledge of both their shared past, and subsequent travels.
But it was a feeling he couldn’t shake; and a few months later, after Christmas, he discovered, or so he thought, why.
He had been running ancient site alignments through his computer for his PhD. Having dispensed with the solsticial alignments of the main sites like Stonehenge and Avebury, and finding them rarer than he had imagined, he had started to look at other, less well-known sites. And he had begun, out of interest, with Bryn Celli, looking to model the summer solstice sunrise with new computer software he had at hand.
He had phoned her, shaken and excited.
‘Can you remember I said Bryn Celli was familiar? I know why. That dream I had years ago, with the horse and the river, remember?’ She had.
‘That was Bryn Celli?’
‘Yeah. Listen. Remember it as on a sort of henge site that hadn’t been built yet, yeah? And there was a river, with three cows, and beyond the river mountains with a cleft in.’
‘Yep, I do remember. But can you see the mountains from Bryn Celli? I can’t remember…’
‘Now you can’t – but that’s because there’s trees on the hill, but take the trees away… I’ve got this program called Horizon, and I can create a model of any horizon in the UK so I can plot the rising and setting points of the heavenly bodies … anyway – I put in Bryn Celli to find the summer solstice rising point, just to check it works, which it does – but then I looked at the horizon image and there was this massive cleft in the mountains! It’s the bloody Llanberis pass. It’s fucking identical Mel… I’ll email you an image; remember I did that painting after the dream? It’s identical.’
And it was. The vista of Snowdonia from Bryn Celli, with the river between the mound and the mountains, was precisely what he had painted all those years ago.
‘Jesus. That’s spooky, Con. And bloody cool… but what does it mean?!’
‘Oh, it gets waaay cooler,’ he said, laughing. ‘I looked at the alignment of the Llanberis pass – and from the site of Bryn Celli it marks the exact rising point of the midwinter sunrise.’
Mel had gone quiet.
‘I think,’ Con continued, ‘that they built the site there because it marked the point from which the midwinter sun could be seen rising from between the two highest peaks in Snowdonia; it can’t be a coincidence… Why the fuck did I dream it? And what does the river turning to milk mean?’
Mel spoke up – ‘if it’s the Braint, then the goddess in your dream must have been Brigantia.’
‘I suppose so, but why did I go into the water? What does it mean, ultimately?’
He didn’t know. But he knew something about the sun…
His research had already uncovered many examples of the imagery of the sun rising or setting between two peaks – in a number of ritual sites such as in Orkney, where the Hills of Hoy framed the setting of the midwinter sun as seen from the Stones of Stenness; it was a common theme; the sun rising out of twin hills was even found in Egyptian and Minoan art. Or the cave from which Amaterasu, the Japanese sun-goddess had been released; the walls of the cave, broken out of the earth… and the silhouette of the mountains as seen from this point on Anglesey was as perfect a rendition of this ancient symbol as one could hope to see…
The night after he had rung her again…
‘Mel, in the Bronze Age the sun was linked to the horse… there’s a bronze chariot from Denmark called the Trundholm sun chariot, and it’s pulling the sun along on, like, a small cart; it’s in Norse myth, too, the sun that bears the sun and moon – and in my dream – I look up at the cleft, get out of the river, and there’s a horse with a moon between its brows – it’s like it’s telling me to look at these old mythic images… it was there, 20 years ago, the cleft in the mountains of a site I’d never seen, being link to the astronomical or mythic imagery of the rising of the sun… and now I’m doing my doctorate on this stuff and the dream is coming true…what, Mel, is telling me these things, and why?’
‘So, what about the milk in the river?’ she had asked, ‘if the rest is true, then that ought to be, too. Maybe that’ll answer the question, or at least help.’
‘That’s what I need to look at next.’ he had said.
‘Speak to you tomorrow night!’ she had joked, but she didn’t have to wait that long; it was 7 the next morning when he rang her. He hadn’t slept; he had been awake all night, trawling through books, articles and the internet…
And then he told her he’d found it; if not the ‘why’, he had at least found what seemed to be a stunning parallel to the milk in the river image…but now, sitting in the Red Lion a year and a bit later, he wished to god he hadn’t ever looked at it; for what else had put the idea in her head about going back to the river and submerging herself in the water, than his insistence on the magical nature of the dream?
‘I’ve got it, Mel, I’ve found a story that fits the river of milk… like really fits it…a Celtic tale, Irish…’
…
The image from the Pearl poem flashed once more again in his mind’s eye: the gleaming stones in a river that separated this world from paradise; and on its other bank a girl –
Bot the water was depe, I dorst not wade.
But the water was deep, I dared not wade…
Not that deep, he thought, swallowing the last of his now lukewarm beer; mid-shin deep, he recalled; but deep enough to drown in if you have a belly-full of alcohol and a heart heavy with sorrow and a bag full of quartz stones to weigh you down.
Chapter 27: The Red Lion
The interior of the Red Lion had grown dark now that the day had become unexpectedly overcast, the breeze that had blown away the mist having brought with it rain from the west. It was shortly after four, but already the gas-lamps had been lit. Lewis sat frowning beneath the window, nursing a brandy, and Barfield sat in silence beside him while Tolkien was at the bar ordering another pair of half-pints for the two well men of the party.
Tolkien returned to the table, glasses in hand.
‘Dynastic race! Why must it all be about race?!’ Tolkien was muttering.
Barfield sipped his drink.
‘Race, per se, is not an issue. It’s the idea that certain races possess superiority.’ He said.
Tolkien nodded and lit his pipe.
‘It’s that same naivety I’ve been fighting against for years – the idea that the myths and literature of the Classical world are superior to those of the old pagan North… imagine what has been lost to us because of this!’
He glared down at his drink.
‘I’m thinking of our native bards silenced in their halls – first by their Norman lords who didn’t want to hear the hero tales of a people they had conquered… and then poets such as Chaucer deciding to tell of Troilus and Cressida rather than of Wade’s boat… and Shakespeare! What traditions was he heir to, yet spends his time on whimsical comedies and history plays, and does not tell us why Child Roland to the Dark tower came…and that’s why I…’
‘Why what, Ronald?’
Tolkien chuckled.
‘It’s a hard admission, Owen… you see in my naïve youth I imagined that perhaps I, that I could piece together the fragments we had – that I could rebuild what had been lost; that I could make a mythology for England!’ he laughed again, but as he did so he looked deep into Barfield’s eyes.
‘But you see,’ he continued ‘I never felt like I was imagining… I always felt like I was uncovering something true, not historically true as such, not necessarily – but something valid on another level.’
Barfield smiled. ‘Which is why…’
‘Yes,’ Tolkien continued, ‘which is why the legends of this place, that tie in so well with my own, have made me wonder about the source of my stories. What exactly am I uncovering? I feel like Keiller, digging up stones and trying my best to restore them to their proper place…’
‘You are, Ronald, an archaeologist of legends!’ he raised his pint.
‘Ha! A bungler, a treasure hunter, perhaps!’
Lewis. who had remained quiet through this exchange, was swilling his brandy around the glass in a cupped hand to warm it.
‘No, it’s no use. I shall have to retire.’ He announced; ‘This has done little to help my throat and only made me sleepier! I am off to Church Cottage to rest. I’m glad we decided to stay to watch the stone lifting tomorrow – I simply am in no fit state to walk any further today.’ And he rose, put on his hat and left the pub.
‘Poor Jack.’ Owen said simply once the other figure had gone.
‘Shall we?’ Tolkien said, pointing at a newly vacated pair of seats away from the window in front of the open fire.
‘Indeed!’
Their second half-pints had become a third when a windswept and wet George Mac Govan-Crow entered the bar and seeing the two men asked if he could join them.
‘That’s my jobs done for the day; I was only part way through trimming the hedge at the Manor but his lordship let me go early.’
‘Very generous of him’ said Owen, looking at the bedraggled figure.
‘Perhaps not generous. It has nothing to do with the rain – more to do with wanting me out of the way.’
Tolkien raised his eyebrows. ‘Why so?’
George drank deep and laughed.
‘He has guests.’
‘Aah,’ said Barfield. ‘Sir Petrie?’
George shook his head.
‘No – Sir Petrie is not staying at the Manor – he’s staying here. Mr Keiller’s guests are the London friends…’
‘The friends you originally mistook us for?’
‘The same.’ The two men shared a look and smiled.
Tolkien had the feeling he was missing out on some private joke.
‘Let me explain,’ said George, casting a discreet look about him to make sure he couldn’t be overheard.
‘The London friends come down every so often for what I might describe as some ‘entertainment’! They are usually followed by, how shall I put it, a woman of a certain profession… who then leaves discreetly the following morning.’
Tolkien sat open eyed in shock. Mac Govan-Crow had, he was sure, no reason to fabricate such a story.
‘No wonder you looked so amused on meeting us yesterday!’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ laughed George, ‘but initially I did wonder, even though you didn’t quite seem the usual type.’
‘I should hope not! Is there a type?!’
‘Yes. Rich and rude, mainly.’
‘Regrettably we are not the former, but I am glad not the latter.’ Barfield said.
‘They tend to arrive in motorcars, not by foot, and expect me to run around like a lackey or to take their coats and gloves, or clean the mud off their vehicles. And expect me to automatically know who they are and to use their proper titles…’
‘The Dynastic race!’ laughed Tolkien.
‘So Petrie has been excluded?’ he continued.
George shook his head.
‘He chose not to stay at the Manor; he makes no bones about seeing Mr Keiller as some rich young upstart; and Mr Keiller is all too effusive about his honoured guest. I think he knows.’
‘Yes, I got the impression earlier that Petrie wasn’t overly enamoured – at Keiller or his reconstructions.’
George nodded.
‘It’s the same with the locals – though opinion is divided. To some he’s a godsend; buying up their cold, damp houses and building them new ones outside the village; others don’t want to be moved – but they will be – when they’re given the right price… It’s caused some resentment. Some on church lane, whose houses fall outside the circle are rather embittered that others are being paid handsomely to move, while they have to stay. And of course, publicity is bringing people like yourselves to the village; the pub and guest houses are doing a roaring trade!’
The barman arrived and stoked the fire, casting a few more logs upon it.
‘And what do you think of Keiller’s reconstructions?’ Tolkien asked.
Mac Govan-Crow sipped his beer and then packed his pipe before answering; he took a pinch of tobacco and cast it on the fire, muttering under his breath.
‘A few years ago, before all of this, when the ditch was overgrown and littered, and the stones lay buried or cast aside… the place felt sad; neglected. I come from a tradition where the earth is sacred, and certain places put aside for that sanctity to be remembered. I believe this was once such a place, and to see the place gone to seed was not good for the soul. I’ve been to London and seen the rows upon rows of dirty houses; places that were once green and beautiful are now growing dirty; I think it no bad thing that this place should be kept, or rather, returned to how it was.’
‘Hear, hear!’ said Tolkien, raising a glass. ‘Though I did not enjoy watching trees being cut down atop the circle banks.’
George nodded.
‘True. He could have cleared out the mess that man had made and let nature remain where she had set her house. There was a yew tree in the Manor grounds that Mr Keiller told me to remove, but I did not. He said it was dead, but I told him that this was not the case, that this is how yews grew – and that it was hundreds of years old.’
‘And how did he take that?’
‘I told him if he wished it cut down he should ask another man to do it. He seemed annoyed for a while but then amused. Io Saturnalia was his response, which he had to tell me was an old Roman festival in which the servants became the masters.’
‘Ah, so a learned man, despite appearances?’ Barfield said.
‘A very well read man, and educated. If he was not the son of rich parents he would no doubt have been a scholar; but money can spoil a man – and loosen his morals if one needs not work and can afford to play –.’
‘A scholar of what?’ Tolkien asked.
‘He has an interest in old religions.’ George said. ‘Old cults.’
Tolkien looked surprised.
‘I may have to review my opinion of the man…on some levels.’ He said and flashed a quick smile. ‘And does Keiller realise he gives so much away to you?’
George laughed.
‘Oh, I think Mr Keiller knows I am not as dumb as I make out. I learn more from those around him than from Mr Keiller himself. There’s an advantage in being thought dumb. I am the eyes and the ears of the village at the manor, and Mr Keiller knows this – and he plays on it as much as I do. I’m the go-between. But to his guests I’m invisible; “The Indian”, and they speak to me slowly thinking I can’t understand.’
He raised his eyebrows and smiled.
‘Where is Dr Lewis?’ he asked.
‘Not well. He has a cold and has retired.’
‘As should we shortly, if you would like to eat with us again this evening?’
‘That would be marvellous.’ Said Barfield.
Mac Govan-Crow took out his pocket watch and put it away with a smile.
‘I’m being confused by the low weather. It seems later than it is. I think we have time for another drink before we need head back. Same again gentlemen?’
Anyone passing the Red Lion that spring evening would have been entertained by what they would have seen and heard through its leaded windows; for emboldened by the brown ale a usually shy and easily flustered professor of Anglo-Saxon would have been seen standing beside the fire, a ring of clapping workmen around him, pipe in his mouth, his foot stamping in rhythm as he shouted out the words of a poem he’d written a number of years before, a poem himself and Lewis had been discussing that very morning.
There is an Inn, a marry old Inn, beneath an old grey hill
And there they brew a beer so brown
the man in the moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill…
And with a whoop he leaped, and slipped into a laughing heap on the floor, where he was helped to his feet, smiling with embarrassment, by George Mac Govan.
…
Lewis was jolted awake from where he had been dozing in a chair by the fire by the sudden opening of the door and the intrusion of three laughing men.
‘Hey! Come derry-dol, merry-dol, Professor! How fares your throat and head in this inclement weather?’ Tolkien grinned, sweeping his hat from his head in a bow.
‘Good God man, are you drunk?’ Lewis croaked. ‘Have you been in the Lion all this time?’
Shona looked in from the kitchen and laughed. ‘Be sure not to disturb the patient!’ she mock scolded. ‘And I suppose you’ll all be wanting your supper?’ she said.
‘Yellow cream, honeycomb, white bread and butter!’ Tolkien said.
She laughed.
‘Then shall I discard the beef stew?’
Tolkien laughed and sat down beside Lewis, sobering slightly on seeing Jack’s red cheeks shining brow..
‘You look unwell, Jack.’
‘Hmm. I was okay until West Kennet; the walk must have been too much, though I can’t see why!’
‘Aah, the curse of the barrow-Wight – who knows what spirit you disturbed. Poor ill CSL, pale and cold he’ll make you!’
Lewis sniffed and glowered at Tolkien under clammy brows.
‘It’s no joking matter; I’m as fit as a fiddle all through term time, and I get a break and this happens! I can’t even enjoy a smoke, though I’ve tried!’
‘Then we must cast the spirit out!’ Tolkien smiled, his eyes twinkling.
‘Go out, shut the door, and never come back after!
Take away your gleaming eyes, take your hollow laughter!
Go back to grassy mound, on your stony pillow
Lay down your bony head, like Old man willow
Like young Goldberry, and badger folk in burrow
Go back to buried gold and forgotten sorrow!’
Lewis smiled despite himself. He cleared his throat.
‘Well let’s see if your spells work, Tollers; Perhaps I will have a small amount of stew Mrs Mac Govan-Crow, too. Build up my strength.’
‘Good man. Starve a cold - feed a fever’ She said, disappearing into the kitchen. ‘I shall need to feed the child first; why don’t you tell them a story, George, while you wait?’
‘Yes!’ said Tolkien, rising from his seat; ‘sit here and tell us a Blackfoot story!’
‘Yes,’ said Mac Govan-Crow. ‘But it is a very serious tale and so I need a respectful silence.’
Immediately Tolkien’s expression changed, though his eyes continued to glint.
‘It is a tale of Old man whom we call Na’api, and the bear.’ George said.
He stood and took down the flute and began to play a brief air, then replaced it on the wall and sprinkled tobacco into the fire.
‘Old man was walking through the forest when he spied bear digging amongst roots…’ George stopped and looked at Tolkien, disapprovingly.
‘You look like you might be laughing, friend.’ He said.
Tolkien shook his head. ‘No, no; carry on.’
‘Okay. And Old Man called out to the bear – “Oi, no-tail! You dirty-arsed bear!”’
Tolkien’s eyes opened wide and he hid a smile, badly. Then he laughed loudly. George returned his laughter and continued.
‘And the bear chased Old Man round and round a tree until a deep circular path had been worn away, and a buffalo horn, long buried, exposed, which Old Man put on his forehead, turned around and started chasing the now-frightened bear. In his shock the bear turned and defecated all over Old Man.’ George grinned. ‘That was a favourite tale of mine when I was, oh, five or six years old! My father would tell me to keep a straight face, but I never could!’
Tolkien was chuckling. ‘I love these types of tales; very grounded – not overly lofty like Greek and Roman myths! But in its own way, don’t you think, it has some serious meaning behind it…’
All eyes were on him.
‘The tree – that’s the world tree, the centre of the cosmos, the pole… and the bear, forever circling it as do the stars of Ursa Major… pursued by Bootes…’
‘Oh Tollers! Does your brain never stop!?’ cried Lewis, putting his head dramatically into his hands.
Chapter 28: The Devil’s Chair
The stone had seemed immense by day, but at night, bereft of light, it seemed even more so: a giant diamond of blackness against the pale night sky. Conall touched it and was surprised to feel it warm, still harbouring the heat of the long summer’s day. His hands stroked the smooth skin of the stone, lichens scratching against his fingers as they skimmed over depressions and holes; he felt his way around to its southerly facing front. Here, clear in the light of the full moon that hung above Waden Hill, was a natural fissure in the massive rock - a cove in which was set a natural seat - a great stone chair. He sat on this natural throne, four thousand years old.
He took the hipflask from his pocket and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey, with a grimace. Then he poured a little on the stone beside him. Slainte. He said.
The bells of the church rang out for half eleven; she would be here soon.
‘So, have you tried it?’ a voice from his right side asked. He jumped and turned to see Shen gesturing towards the Devil’s chair.
‘No. I was waiting for you. Do we walk clockwise or anti-clockwise?’
Shen shrugged. ‘Let’s try both – but I’d go for anti-clockwise first – it is the Devil we’re summoning! God, what if he does appear?!’ her eyes widened. Conall just shook his head.
The two figures traced a circuit around the great stone three times in silence – first one way and then the other.
Finally, their circuits complete, Shen turned to Conall and shrugged. ‘Any sign?’
Conall he raised his eyebrows. ‘Maybe he’s been here all along.’ He grinned.
‘Maybe she has’ countered Shen. She looked up at him, amused. ‘Have you got any tobacco? I’m gasping for a smoke.’
‘What have you done with Shen?! You want some whiskey, too?’ he asked. Shen pulled a face.
‘I’m never drinking again. I’ve still got a headache from lunch’ She said.
He lit her cigarette, then his own.
‘Sorry I couldn’t make it earlier; I don’t know why he came back to mine. He doesn’t usually when he’s worked an early.’
‘Did he mind you coming out?’ Con asked.
She took a long drag on the cigarette and shrugged; ‘He wasn’t awake.’
They stood against the stone, looking towards the moon.
‘Do you believe in past lives?’ she asked suddenly. Conall paused, taken aback.
‘I don’t know. I sometimes have feelings about certain times in history. Maybe they’re some kind of memory. Or I’ve had dreams that seem to suggest it.’
A flash in the sky captured his attention.
‘I just saw a shooting star’ he said.
‘Did you make a wish?’ she asked. ‘What was it?’
‘I can’t say – or it won’t come true!’
‘Give me a clue!’ she said, in a mock whine.
‘No!’ he laughed. ‘What about you – past lives…?’
‘Yeah. I think so’
‘Like?’
She shrugged, but didn’t offer any more to the conversation.
They walked to the rear of the stone – Shen moved forward and pressed herself against the stone, much as Conall had done minutes before.
‘I speak to the stones. I hug them; sometimes it feels as if they’re talking back, some kind of vibration or humming. Do you think I’m mad?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘I’ve never told anyone that before.’
‘Why are you telling me?’ Conall asked, flattered.
There was silence, but then Shen began,
‘I don’t know. I don’t feel you’d judge me.’
‘I don’t judge you.’
They stood in silence for a while. Then Shen sat down with her back to the stone, while Conall traced another half-circuit and sat once more in the devil’s chair.
‘Can you hear me?’ he asked.
There was no response, so he stood up and walked around.
‘Did you hear me?’ he asked.
‘No, what did you say?’
‘I was just asking if you could hear me.’ He explained.
‘No.’ she repeated. ‘This is weird! It’s a lovely night – the plough is so clear!’
He looked up.
‘People always say that looking at the stars makes them feel so insignificant, but I don’t feel that.’ Shen said.
‘Me neither. Did you know 40% of those stars are younger than life on earth? Life here is a bloody miracle – and as far as we know it’s the only life; this planet is ancient and its life is sacred, holy – we are far from insignificant – if the cosmos is about producing complex life as far as we know we’re as complex as it gets and that makes us fucking important. Insignificant my arse! We’re what it’s all about.’
He felt a great swelling of emotion inside of him. ‘And we are all made from stars. Everything around us is; we are stars, and older than the stars. What kind of miracle allows stardust to know it exists and to feel joy at being alive?’
They stood together eyes aloft; but their senses more open to the proximity of the other.
‘Which one is the northern star, again?’ she asked.
‘Right – you see the Great Bear, the plough, saucepan, whatever – look at the two stars on the right – not the tail or handle but the ‘saucepan’ bit… now they point up to the Little Bear – it’s like a mini plough…’
‘Yeah, I can see it.’
‘The north star is the end of its tail.’
‘Oh – it’s not very bright, is it? I always thought the north star was the brightest star in the sky.’
Conall smiled. ‘No – and the north star, Polaris, only marks the north pole of the heavens now… when Avebury was built a completely different star marked the pole.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘The position of the pole moves over time. Too slow to really notice, unless you lived to be a thousand or so, then you might notice it.’ He loved looking at the stars.
‘Which one?’ she asked.
‘Which one what?’
‘Was the pole star when the circle was built.’
‘Oh, it’s thuban in the constellation of Draco, the dragon – or serpent… but it’s hard to explain where it is, it’s not obvious. It’s kind of in the gaps between more obvious constellations.’
'Show me.’ She said, and he felt her hand slip into his.
Conall’s reticence was overruled by the soft pressure of her little hand; adamant not to lose that precious connection he stood beside her and pointed upwards.
‘Right – see that kind of diamond shape to the left of the plough? Well – to the left of the little bear, really.’
‘That bright one?’ Shen asked.
‘No…look’ and emboldened by her concentration he let go her hand and moved to stand behind her, extending his arm over her right shoulder and moved his face close to her own.
‘’There! Underneath that bright one… the diamond is its head…and you can see the rest of it going up, then to the right, and down and then back up – kind of separating the great and little bears, so the little bear is almost riding on its back…’ While Shen frowned at the sky in concentration Conall was only aware of one thing, the warmth of her cheek and her hair tickling the side of his face.
‘Why does it move? The Pole I mean.’
'It’s because the earth isn’t totally fixed like, say, a globe you get in a classroom – there’s a kind of wobble in its axis. What it means is that the earth doesn’t point to one exact point in the heavens but kind of moves in a small circle, over time - a long time – this corkscrewing actually is caused by the proximity of the moon and is very, very slow - 26,000 years for one full rotation actually. So, one day, in about 21,000 years the pole will be back near Thuban once more as it was 5000 years ago! Do you see?’
He felt her nod.
‘So what conclusion did you come to? With the PhD.’
‘You really want to know?’ he asked.
She nodded; her dark eyes open in anticipation.
‘It’s a bit boring.’ He said.
‘I’ll be the judge of that’.
He shrugged, turned and sat in the Devil’s Chair, and she sat cross-legged at his feet like a schoolchild.
‘You ever seen an Oliver Stone film?’ he said. ‘Like The Doors or JFK? There’s always a scene about halfway through that’s exposition heavy, to make sure the audience is on board with the import of what’s going on… it’s kind of lazy storytelling,’ he laughed; ‘You know, the bit where Kevin Costner is sitting on that bench near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and that bloke in a hat, Donald Sutherland, tells him about how the killing of JFK was an inside job by weapons manufacturers because he’d wanted to stop the Vietnam War; or the bit in The Doors when they’re walking along the beach and Ray Manzarak is telling Jim Morrison how people are ready for their kind of vision because, it’s the 60s, man, Vietnam’s out there…’
‘So you’re going to tell me how Avebury is linked to Vietnam, man?’ Shen quipped.
‘You’re Garrison – that’s Costner, and I’m the man in the hat, Mr X…’
‘Donald Sutherland.’ She said.
Con gave her the thumbs up.
‘So here we go…’
‘I mean in a nutshell – in a sentence…’ she joked.
Con flicked her his middle finger. ‘Ok then then, Mrs Soundbite – the sites were built to line up with the Milky Way.’
She looked above her, seeking the Milky Way above; but frowned at her failure, the bright moonlight making it impossible to see any traces of it.
‘How…?’ she began.
‘Ah, no more info – you just wanted the soundbite. Leave it at that.’
‘Oh go on then, give me the lecture.’
And so Con told the story of his research:
…
Having dismissed the solstice, the summer solstice, at least, as the main object of orientation of the henges and passage-graves, Con had turned his attention to the direction of the entrances set in their high earthen banks, and had found that a large proportion were oriented north and south; close enough to north and south to lead many archaeologists to dismiss them as just badly aligned on the poles; yet far enough from them to suggest to Con that they can’t have been that bad at orienting their structures. The off-set had to be intentional – part of the design.
As he had explained to Wolf the day before, he had discovered in many sites a preoccupation with an orientation south, which, given their impressiveness, seemed most likely to have been on the stars of Crux, no longer visible in the night sky above the British isles because of precession; these stars formed a diamond shape, one found reflected again and again on examples of megalithic art, stretching from the Balkans to Britain, everywhere the new ‘invention’ of farming had spread… and often associated with a female figure.
Here at Avebury, he now told Shen, the diamond shaped stones of the Devil’s chair, forming the southern entrance, once aligned on the rising of Crux over Waden Hill; these same stars set, when viewed from the so-called obelisk, a large stone at the centre of the southern inner circle, where Silbury Hill lay.
‘So Silbury is a marker for the stars?’ Shen asked.
‘It’s a theory; another suggests it was put there after precession had led to the stars disappearance – as a kind of memory, a monument.’
The more he had looked, he continued, the more other sites were revealed as aligning on Crux – either its setting or rising.
‘Why just not one or the other?’ Shen asked.
‘It depends,’ he said, ‘on the orientation of local rivers… the henge entrances tend to mirror the direction of local rivers – probably so the ‘river’ in the sky will align to that on earth.’
Shen looked confused.
‘River in the sky?’
‘Sorry – I’m getting ahead of myself. The question I should answer next is ‘why Crux’? That’ll bring us to the river…’
The answer to Shen’s question concerning the river was tied in with Con’s own obsessions… for he had been investigating all of this in the months after his conversations with Melissa following his trip to Wales, when he’d become obsessed with what his dream had seemed to reveal about the building of Bryn Celli Ddu in line with the winter solstice sun, an alignment suggested by the appearance of the white horse. He’d become equally, if not more, obsessed with the image of the river of milk in which he’d bathed, created by the wand of the goddess with the three cows… potentially the River Braint that Melissa had said was linked to the stars in the sky, especially the W-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia that she had called Llys Don, the ‘court of Don’, in Welsh.
‘Cassiopeia…’ he had said to her, in one of their conversations, of which over that winter there were many, ‘…is in the Milky Way… what if this Don, or
Danu in Irish, this Brigantia, was connected to the Milky Way? Might that be the river of milk in my dream?’
‘Jeez Con, I think it could be, couldn’t it?’
When the alignment of corridor of posts at Stonehenge turned out to be on Crux, a constellation also within the Milky Way he’d felt a giddy sense of inevitability; but it was also accompanied by panic – a sinking feeling he might be descending into magical thinking – into madness. But he was open-mouthed in wonder when he discovered that these two constellations, Cassiopeia and Crux, lay not only in the Milky Way but also at exact opposites of the sky – linked in a kind of see-saw motion that meant one rose as the other set, and vice versa. And just as the stars lay opposed, so too did the entrances of most henges.
The realisation and the possibility hit him in a single, beautiful, horrific moment: if certain henge entrances aligned on Crux then, as most henges tended to have opposing entrances, the northern-oriented entrances of these sites ought to align exactly on Cassiopeia… at the same moment in time! A few mad, manic, hours on his computer confirmed his intuition: the northern entrances aligned on Cassiopeia, Llys Don, the court of Danu, the w-shaped constellation whose pattern paralleled that, he now saw, the other most prominent Neolithic art motif aside from the lozenge: the zig-zag. Zig-zag and lozenge, Cassiopeia and Crux, opposed, rising and setting, and both within the Milky Way… he remembered excitedly emailing a picture to Melissa – of a standing stone from within the chamber of Barclodiad Y Gawres on Anglesey, further west than Bryn Celli Ddu, but a similar type of monument.
‘The chamber aligns on Cassiopeia, Mel, but looking in, from the outside, and you’re looking at Crux rising… and this carved stone sits in the passage!’
There, seeming to embody all he had discovered, was this anthropomorphic stone, with ‘W’s above diamond shapes – both mirroring the constellations the passage seemed to be referencing, combined into a single image, with an eye-like spiral above.
‘And in those days, before light pollution,’ he explained, ‘the Milky Way would have been brilliant; almost as bright as a full moon… like a great white path across the sky.’
‘So why not at Bryn celli?’ she had asked, puzzled as to why her favourite site didn’t overly fit the pattern.
‘But it does, the original henge, Mel – it’s oriented on the setting of Crux and rising of Cassiopeia.’ She had been delighted.
This sudden interest in the Milky Way had been further prompted by an Irish tale he’d stumbled upon, one that’s seemed to correspond to his dream, revolving, as it did, around 3 magical cows and a female who made a river turn into milk.
It was, to his mind, the key myth in all of this – the key to the henges…
He had told it to Mel that night. It was a legend called The Death of CuRoi. The tale recounted how a gigantic man (actually a demigod) named Cu Roi mac Dairi had aided the men of Ulster in a raid, but because he was not paid for his services he seized the chief plunder, namely a woman named Blathnat, meaning ‘flowers’, the three cows of luchna (that could each produce the milk of 30 cows) and a magical cauldron; and Cu Roi had fled back to his home in Kerry bearing the spoils. The Ulster hero Cúchulainn, lover of Blathnat, had pursued Cu Roi. He secretly met with Blathnat and together they arranged a ruse by which Cu Roi could be killed and Blathnat, her cows and her cauldron rescued. Blathnat advised Cu Roi that he should build an enclosure for his stronghold of standing-stones, accordingly he sent his men away to fetch building materials leaving his stronghold undefended. Blathnat had agreed that when Cu Roi was at his most vulnerable she would send a signal to Cúchulainn who was in hiding, by pouring the milk of her magical cows, gathered in her magical cauldron, down the river, henceforward named “Finnglas” - ‘White Flecked’, that ran through the stronghold. Blathnat bathed Cu Roi and bound his hair to his bedpost, then poured the milk in the stream and opened the stronghold doors. Cúchulainn entered, cut off Cu Roi’s head, and so regained the spoils lost to Cu Roi… the cauldron, the cows, and the flower-maiden…
‘Cu Roi’s fort is described in the tale ‘Bricriu’s Feast’ as revolving as swiftly as a mill-stone. It moves in a manner suggestive of the sky revolving around the pole.’ Con explained to her.
‘By extension, if the fort is the turning sky, or a site associated with the sky, and the tale itself suggests it is constructed of standing stones, then what else is the river of milk running through it but the Milky Way?’
The same imagery, he told her, appeared in the Welsh myth of Culhwch and Olwen, that concerned the rescue of the heroine Olwen from her giant father Yspaddaden, who was, like Cu Roi, beheaded at her release. Her name meant ‘white track’, and this was said to be because white trefoils sprung up where she trod – ‘But the white path is a visual trope,’ Con enthused; ‘it is arguably the same as the river of milk, an analogue of the Milky Way!’
But there was more, he said, his voice hoarse from talking… Amaterasu, the Japanese sun-goddess, she hid in a cave in the cosmic river to escape the insults of her brother, bringing about winter. The other gods assembled at the heavenly river to trick the sun-goddess out of hiding in hope of restoring life to the world: they began to dance and sing outside the cave until a goddess named Uzume exposed her genitals as she did so, causing other the gods to shake with laughter. Amaterasu, out of curiosity, peered round the door, whereon the gods held up a mirror, and seeing what she believed was a rival goddess outside, Amaterasu stepped out allowing her to be seized by one god, while another locked the cave door shut with string behind her.
Uzume’s dance was performed over the river of heaven, in other words, over the Milky Way, which she was later offered as a gift of thanks for helping release the sun; it was, then, in an astronomically-derived myth. The name Uzume meant ‘whirling heavenly woman’, and it seemed possible to Con that she was derived from an image of a female-formed Milky Way turning about the earth’s axis nightly, and so appearing to ‘dance’ in the heavens.
‘Like your Brigantia, Mel… with her star-stones in the river… Brigantia! The High One! You said she was in the stars!’
Con had gone on to suggest an original myth in which the ‘dance’ of the Milky Way Goddess in the night sky presaged the release of the sun goddess, who emerged on the horizon from her underworld prison. Uzume’s lewd dance, Con suggested, had an astronomical origin: it referred to the appearance of Crux, the diamond-shaped constellation that echoed the lozenge shape found on female images from the Near East to Britain, such as the stone from Barclodiad y Gawres, and always shown in relation to the womb – was Crux seen as a great cosmic starry womb or vulva, a diamond in the sky…Up above the world so high?
His subsequent research had uncovered something that suggested this was indeed the case – and, in the circle of Avebury this summer night, he stood from the Devil’s Chair before the cross-legged Shen, and began explaining it in his excitement.
…
‘You see, I think this myth, the release of the sun-maiden, goes right back to the start of farming in the Near East – and if we look at the sky back then, around 7000 BC in Anatolia,’ he said, his hand outstretched in the general direction of east, ‘then we find that the midwinter sun rises on the exact point on the horizon that Crux rises in that era! The sun rises from out of the womb of the Milky Way goddess! It’s the same image we find in Egypt where the sun is born every morning on the horizon from out of the womb of Nut or Hathor, the sky goddess who is both Milky Way and the river Nile!’ he was grinning like a fool, caught up in his ideas.
‘And Cassiopeia?’ Shen asked, also intrigued by his ideas, but more amused at his fervour, ‘what’s that?’
‘Her breasts.’ He said, pointing out the w-shape in the air with his finger. ‘Llys Don, the court of Danu… Danu comes from an old Indo-European word, it means ‘she who gives milk’…the whole of the Milky Way was a goddess, just as in Egypt, Shen. And she dances her revealing dance prior to the rising of the sun – you see, for most of the year the nights are too short to see both the rising and setting of the Milky Way, but at midwinter this isn’t the case – you can see the whole ‘dance’, and this acted as a signal that the solstice was near and the sun about to be reborn... the sun rises shorty after Crux sets. Hence the ‘sign’ given to Cuchulainn by Blathnat is of a milky river; it’s the same image it’s saying: look for the turning of the Milky Way in the heavens and be ready for the release of the sun.’
The river of milk… why had he dreamed this? What meaning did it have for him? Was something trying to communicate with him across time, and if so, then who or what? Or was it, as he had said to Shen earlier, a ripple caused from a future event… because of the tragedy he presumed the dream had caused?
‘You said something before about the entrances aligning to rivers on earth?’ Shen recalled.
He nodded. While some henge sites did, indeed, have rivers running through them (such as Marden), what the results of his research suggested was that what was being referred to in these tales was the ‘heavenly’ ‘milky’ river that ran ‘through’ the henges – in that the entrances align on the rising and setting points of this celestial feature – joining entrance to entrance in a shining band across the winter sky. A river running through the henge, albeit it a stellar river, like a starry rainbow, arching overhead. And in most cases the location of nearby earthly rivers seemed to influence the orientation of the entrances, choosing to orient on the rising or setting of the Milky Way to better align with the local rivers…one reflecting the other…
As above, so below.
‘Although it’s never that simple…’ he laughed;’ there’s more – there’s the fact that the situation was slightly different in sites in Orkney where Crux was no longer visible due to the latitude and where instead we see alignments on the star Sirius, which had taken on the former position of Crux at the rising point of the midwinter sun by 3000 BC. And there’s alignments on Orion; Orion is the hero Cuchulainn who saves the sun in the Blathnat myth; basically the myth refers to the fact that in the Neolithic period the spring sun rose on Orion’s shoulders, so he carried her from out of the underworld like St Christopher, carrying the sun, so it would have appeared, across the Milky Way, hence St Christopher carries Christ over a river…but I don’t want to bog you down in details,’ he said, unaware he’d already spent some 20 minutes babbling at her as if he’d mainlined twenty espressos.
‘But imagine…’ he said – arms spread wide… ‘on midwinter’s eve, just after sunset, the Milky Way rings the horizon, just as Crux rises and Cassiopeia sets… rings it in a circle, just as the chalk-white banks of the henge encircled the centre… probably where the whole idea of a circle came from… then later it rises, like the handle of a basket it joins entrance to entrance, like a rainbow… a river running through the henge… and to pass through the entrance is to enter the river in the sky! It’s a doorway to the stars – a star-gate, if you will! Like Jacob’s Ladder… perhaps…a place to ascend to the heavens or for the heavens to descend to the earth…’
All fell quiet within the circle. Con’s lecture was over, and he leant back against the Devil’s chair, spent.
’Does it make sense?’ he asked Shen, suddenly tentative, vulnerable for putting his ideas out to another; worried it all might be his twisted imaginings based on the misreading of a dream, given more worth than it should normally have had through its association with grief.
‘I’m no archaeologist, Con, but it seems to make sense, to hold together. So why doesn’t anyone else mention it? I mean, it seems obvious, so why hasn’t anyone seen it before?’
Con shrugged. ‘No one’s interested, maybe – or never seen the Milky Way! Or not interested in myth, I don’t know. I have wondered. Maybe after the whole summer solstice Stonehenge thing they just concentrated on the sun and moon, not expecting stars to have played a role in the sites.’
‘It’s basically, then, a calendar, then?’ she said. ‘To mark the return of fertility and the coming of Spring?’ She sounded slightly disappointed.
‘No! I don’t think it’s that simple.’ he said. ‘Most churches are supposed to orient on the spring equinox sunrise… and Easter is all about rebirth in the spring, but you wouldn’t say Christianity is basically calendrical - there’s always a spiritual component to such myths. You see in other cultures there were traditions known as the Mysteries – like those of Demeter and Persephone in which the rescue of the prisoner from underworld offered hope of rebirth to their followers – Those who die before they die do not die when they die… as the saying goes; and I mean offered a sense, an experience. of immortality. Imagine if Avebury had been the site of the British Mysteries – connected, at least somehow, to rebirth, be that experienced in life through some kind of mystery initiation, or in death…’
He paused. ‘A site for the dead, perhaps – I’ve not discounted that – that these sites were connected to the afterlife or to the post-mortem world; like the pyramids; not a tomb as such… but maybe a place for spiritual transformation; or place for spirits to congregate, rather than the living… like I said, it’s an interface between earth and sky – a crossing point; a star-gate… it’s just a hunch at the moment… this research, you know, it’s not finished… just started really; I’ve discovered what I believe they were aligned on – but not necessarily why… do you sometimes feel you’re trespassing here? Especially at night – that you don’t belong; that it belongs to the Dead?’
…
‘Which reminds me…The past lives thing,’ he said.
She nodded, encouraging him to go on.
‘When I was a kid I had this dream; there was a load of us on a boat, a wooden boat, and we were escaping from this coastline and I remember looking up and seeing flames and the sky lit up orange – there was lava, I think, and the cliffs were collapsing around us into the sea- and the boat was being tossed by the waves; I don’t know whether it was stormy or if it was just the collapse of the land around us; and then the next scene I was in a desert, I think – I was a man, a grown up, and there was a woman beside me and we were looking at a temple – like an Egyptian temple, rectangular with great columns - and I said to the woman we could rest now, now that we had preserved the knowledge that had been lost when the land in the sea had been destroyed…’
‘Woah. Really?’
‘Yeah – I mean it was a dream but if felt real – felt like a memory; the view of the destruction of the island was incredible; it was sublime; horrific.’
‘That’s so weird – I’ve got something to say but you mustn’t laugh…’
‘Try me.’
‘One of the reasons I was so happy to move here was because it’s high up and away from the sea… all the time on the Scillies I was overwhelmed with a fear of tidal waves; I’ve always had it. Even as a child when I saw a bank of cloud on the horizon I’d imagine it was a wave and it would scare the hell out of me; even the banks here, sometimes they feel like a wall of water rushing towards me, like a massive flood… do you think I’m mad?’
‘God no! There used to be this picture of a tidal wave in a book I had as a kid – there were people on the beach looking out, too late to run, and then this wall of water rushing towards them; it fascinated me and scared me and I linked it to this dream… I don’t know, maybe it’s a common fear; I would be worried if I lived in the Scillies – they’re supposed to be the last vestiges of a once great kingdom called Lyonesse that was lost to the sea.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Yes – they were once part of the mainland; there are prehistoric tombs under the water there that used to be on dry land. It’s said you can still hear the church bells ringing from beneath the ocean.’
Shen shuddered.
‘Who was the woman in your dream?’ She asked.
Con didn’t know how to say it; didn’t know if somehow recent events had laid some kind of pattern upon this ancient dream;
‘She was short, with long dark hair.’ He said. She was you, he thought, he hoped.
And she was close and looking up at him; he could almost feel the warmth from her face against his cheeks; in the distance the bells of the church began to chime midnight.
‘The bells of drowned Lyonesse.’ He said. A slight breeze lifted her hair; tumbled across her forehead, curling in the wind – his sister’s hair. He stepped back, smiling weakly; Shen looked distant all of a sudden.
‘Are you happy, Shen?’ He suddenly asked.
She shrugged. ‘I’m not unhappy.’ looking down at her feet. ‘I don’t know what I want. I don’t know where I belong. I sometimes think I should move away; even go to Canada and find my relatives there.’
‘What about Hayden?’
She shrugged. ‘What about him? I don’t love Hayden. Maybe I’ve never really loved anyone… I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’
‘Because I listen?’ he stammered, feeling her admission of never having loved as a personal, physical blow.
She looked as if she wanted to reply, but instead she looked away, frowning.
Then she returned to look up at him; and for a moment there seemed to be a connection, but he faltered, and his eyes flicked away, his feelings, like a ball of tension, a mixture of fear, hope, guilt, seemed to stick in his throat, stopping his breath; and he stepped back.
‘Look. It’s late. If Hayden wakes, he’s going to wonder where I am. I have to go; she said, her voice terse.
‘I’ll see you at the protest?’ he said as she walked away. She didn’t answer.
‘Shen?’
She waved without looking round. ‘I’m tired Con, I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Chapter 29: Pan
‘Poor Jack.’ Barfield sighed.
‘Poor us, he’s not the most patient of patients!’ Tolkien responded, and both men laughed.
Tolkien and Barfield had stepped outside for a last pipe before bed, and had decided to take a stroll down Church Lane to the stone circle; the rain showers that had dulled the afternoon had long gone, but the men wore their overcoats, the wind still being cool. Above them the clear spring air revealed a magnificent vista of stars.
They passed the pub, the gas-light still visible through the small leaded windows, and a few small voices still audible inside, and carried on past it, turning left at the crossroads, making for the elephantine Swindon stone that marked the old north entrance of the henge. They walked past the stone, touching its cool sides, and walked anticlockwise along the edge of the newly re-excavated ditch, the great bank beyond blotting out the stars on the horizon. Tomorrow this section would be teeming with men – workmen jostling the stone back in place, which now lay, bound in ropes, at the side of its hole – like a giant tooth waiting to be plugged back into a gaping hole in a jaw.
‘It seems so crude, these poles and pulleys…’ remarked Barfield. ‘I prefer the idea that some ancient sorcerer had them leap up and dance into place.’
Tolkien agreed. ‘Maybe the legends are closer to the truth.’
‘We both know they are. A more profound truth.’ Barfield said.
Tolkien looked at his friend with fondness. True, Owen had always been more Jack’s friend than his own, and of late his business had kept him more often than not away from the weekly gathering of the Inklings – but the two men had always had a mutual understanding; indeed their viewpoints converged a lot more often than they had ever openly spoken about – but circumstances had made it so that they had never really developed as close a friendship as either of them would have liked, a fact not aided by Tolkien’s more introverted, often shy, nature, and the presence of Jack, the organising principle behind the Inklings themselves, who though not consciously standing between the two men, was like the sun around whom the others revolved, their paths crossing infrequently.
Barfield’s comment had been correct; they both knew that in its own way legend could be closer to truth than nuts and bolt facts could manage.
‘I wonder what this place will be like when all the stones are back in place?’ Barfield mused.
Tolkien cleared his throat. ‘I can’t say I wholly agree with the reasons behind it – but I am intrigued, all the same. I doubt Keiller’s desire to recreate the past differs much from my own.’
‘Except yours is a literary endeavour, Ronald; a recreation of words, of splintered light, rather than solid stone.’
‘Words and splintered light. I like that.’ He refilled his pipe and continued.
‘Keiller has the easier job – he digs and finds a stone, and a socket, and matches them up. My stones are fragments, mostly lost – long shattered and disregarded.’
‘So you see your work as recreation rather than creation?’
‘Of course. And your own work has clarified this for me. I don’t know if I’ve ever thanked you in person for what your ‘Poetic Diction’ did for my thinking. I’d been working alone, you see – and when I read your book, I saw that others, too, saw the value of such an endeavour.’
Barfield smiled meekly. ‘Yes,’ he said ‘words are indeed fragments, splinters of the light – once complete and shining and now in disparate sherds, from a time when a word was full of potent magic; as we have become divorced from that original unity with the world, so have our words.’
They continued to walk along the steep edge of the ditch, the spray of the Milky way above their heads.
‘Not many people, Owen, would understand what I’m about to say…’ he looked up at Barfield, nervously.
‘You see, my languages, the elven languages – I started on them years ago, yet the more work I did on them the more I felt I was uncovering something true, something long lost – like Keiller’s buried stones. You see, the words demanded a history from out of which they had sprung – yet I did not invent the history as much as deduce it from the language. It was like uncovering a vast mosaic, hidden for aeons, a mosaic bearing a pattern, an image, fully formed, beautiful, whole.’ he lit his pipe and gazed upwards at where the Milky Way, rising out of the bank with its blasted trees, crossed the sky like a milky river.
‘And all from that line from the poem Christ – eala earendil, engla beorhtest, ofan middelgeard monnum sended – who, or what was Earendil? Why was this ‘brightest of angels’ bringing light to us dwellers in middle-earth? Was he a herald of the Light? I had to know, Owen, and so I began to seek an answer to those questions…’
He puffed on his pipe; his features narrowed with thought.
‘The men who built this circle… what were these stones to them? Not dead matter to be shunted with ropes and levers; Keiller and his men are moving dead husks of rock; the builders of Avebury were not. What word did they use for these stones? A word, I would imagine, rich in meaning, that meant stone, and bone and ancestor and spirit… they didn’t shift these into place with brute force – they sung them into place, danced them into a circle.’
Owen squinted at the stars. ‘Just as the stars circle about the pole star – yes – these stones danced too in a circle, to be fossilised into solidity with the rising of the sun – like your trolls!’
‘Yes. I simply had to put that in The Hobbit – I thought of the Merry Maidens, and of rings of stones said to be women caught dancing on the Sabbath; I wanted to express the idea that a stone wasn’t just a stone, but a being, caught in the first rays of the sun and entombed, enchanted. Surely these stones were seen as such – spirits caught, tamed, trapped, perhaps. Or perhaps they danced when no living man was present; like the fairies dancing in their circles, away from the voyeuristic eyes of mortals.’
Owen grinned. ‘I can imagine the builders laughing at Keiller and his workmen, straining to lift these rocks – when in their day an enchanter stood at the centre and sang as the stones danced about him under the wheeling stars; formed a circle that aped the motion of the moon above… what is the name Geoffrey of Monmouth gives to Stonehenge? – Yes, the Giants Dance, it’s the same idea… and this after they are levitated across the Irish sea by Merlin the enchanter. ’
Tolkien exhaled a smoke ring into the night air. ‘Merlin, yes, Owen. Indeed. Indeed. These rings remind me of Merlin’s observatory in the woods from the Vita Merlini with its 60 windows and doors; it’s the grove of dancing stones magicked into life by the lyre of Orpheus. I think our ancestors associated him with this place too.’
‘Merlin or Orpheus?’ asked Barfield.
‘Merlin. He supposedly built Stonehenge but I wonder about Avebury too – I mean, we are just a stone’s throw, pardon the pun, from Marlborough, and Marlborough means ‘Merlin’s mound’ after a similar mound to Silbury Hill that exists on the outskirts of the town. Strange that he should crop up here, so close to this circle, when we know he was associated with Stonehenge too.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ Barfield said.
‘I don’t know it, for sure; it is just a feeling, a hunch, but one I have only skimmed over and not had time to give my full attention.’
‘Time.’ Said Barfield, ruefully. ‘I wish I had time to think on such matters. Sometimes I hate my London life; I wish I had the opportunity to leave my career and just study and write. I feel split in two – the lawyer and the poet; but it’s necessary, I suppose – I simply would go mad were I not to divide myself thus – I’d forever be hankering to write, and so I force myself to forget it. The moment I walk into my office I am the lawyer, and I stoically bear it until I take my coat from the hat-stand at the door at the end of the day.’
‘I am luckier, I suppose, Owen. My daily work is at least on a topic that I love; but it’s the bureaucracy, the marking, the meetings – and then the demands of home life and the family; if I’m lucky I can sometimes start my work at eleven or midnight – and then I’ll write until 2 or 3 in the morning when tiredness overtakes me.’ The mention of his family brought on a sudden pang of homesickness. ‘I am lucky. Edith understands my writing.’
Owen looked down.
‘Hmm. Maud does not understand mine – indeed she has taken quite violently against some of my beliefs.’ His face contorted as he wrestled with some inner emotion. ‘She, I believe,’ and he paused, wondering if he was going too far, ‘is somewhat jealous of my spiritual leanings towards anthroposophy, and so soured are things between us because of it that I dare not mention this in her presence.’
Tolkien felt odd hearing this revelation from a man with whom fate had decreed an acquaintance rather than a friendship. He wondered if it might not have been better for him to speak to Jack of such matters – and then he knew that quite obviously he had, and that Jack’s own dislike of anthroposophy, the spiritual school headed by the Austrian mystic Steiner, had probably coloured his response. Who else did Barfield have to turn to?
‘The wishes of a wife must be heeded, Owen, for the sake of the family – but I have found it always better, if one disagrees and is adamant in one’s position, just to continue openly with that opposition than to hide one’s doings.’
Barfield nodded.
‘I shall not give up my beliefs, Ronald. They make me what I am. As I have said, I am sure Maud is more than a little jealous of my devotion to Steiner, and of the joy my beliefs bring me. What would she have me do – renounce them and be miserable? Would that make her happy, to limit me so she can say I am wholly her own?’ he looked up, distraught.
‘And Jack, of course, does not understand. How could he? He’s not a husband – not in any conventional sense, loth he is, after all, to clarify that strange business with the Moore woman…’
Tolkien blanched at this subject, taboo amongst Jack’s friends.
‘…and,’ Barfield continued, ‘he thinks little enough of Steiner to perhaps use this disagreement with Maud as a lever to push me back onto the straight and narrow of Protestantism…’
The two met each other’s gaze, momentarily, sharing an unspoken compliance in the face of Jack’s newfound and dogmatic faith.
‘Jack suffers, I would say, from a certain short-sightedness in that he does not seem, sometimes, to value the comfort that one’s beliefs can bestow;’ Tolkien said; ‘he thinks nothing of making a remark that often is aimed at one’s faith but lands on one’s heart – where faith, after all, resides. I once told him of my special devotion to St. John the Evangelist, and he laughed at me and said he couldn’t imagine a pair more unsuited than the saint and me. He took what was a dear thing to me and would have sullied it.’
Barfield stood at Tolkien’s side, then raised his hand and placed it on the other’s upper arm; an act of consolation, of comfort and of understanding. I know, it seemed to say, the pain of what you speak.
‘He’s a vast intellect that allowed, by grace, God to come in to his life,’ Tolkien continued ‘– but ever since his Christianity is analysed and presented with the same intellectual vigour. But my own beliefs, Owen, these are not intellectual concepts; they are the ground of all my bliss.’ At that moment, a shooting star fell above them, leaving a trail.
Owen chuckled.
‘What is it?’ Tolkien asked.
‘I shouldn’t laugh but it tickled me; before we left Mrs Mac Govan-Crow had left a jug of cold water for Jack to sip that she said was special. Well, I went into the kitchen and there was a milk pan on the stove with pebbles in it – quartz pebbles; well, I must have looked quizzical because Mrs Mac Govan-Crow came over and said to me that it is an old Irish folk remedy: you take nine crystals from a holy stream – she had these from back home, she said – and you boil them in water and then drink the water when cool! They’re called shining stones, cloch geala, or something, or milk stones, and they are supposed to be a cure-all, but especially for the loss of voice… these are the stones of the fairy folk, the Sidhe…’
Tolkien laughed. ‘How would Jack feel if he knew he was drinking pagan Holy Water?’ Holy shining stones from the river that borders Paradise, Tolkien thought, thinking of the Pearl poem.
The two men stood a while in companionable silence, gazing heavenwards, when their reverie was ended by the distant sound of breaking glass followed by raucous laughter.
‘One too many ales, I expect’ Barfield said with a wink.
‘No – it didn’t come from the pub...’ Tolkien replied, beginning to walk along the bank to where a path led down to the western side of the circle. Barfield followed, intrigued. They took the path which set them on the gravel roadway just north of Church Road – a path that lead to the Manor. The laughter was heard again, closer now.
Ahead, flickering lights could be seen through the hedge that ran around the Manor House, and voices heard. There were male voices, sounding as if they were trying to be hushed, sometimes breaking out in laughter; and all the while the orange flicker of naked flames - a number being seeming to be being carried about.
‘What on earth is going on?’ Barfield whispered to Tolkien.
‘I thought it might have been some local lads up to mischief, but I don’t think so now.’
Just then a high-pitched squeal broke out – followed by a laugh. A woman’s laugh.
‘My word. I think its Keiller and his friends.’ Barfield said. ‘You don’t suppose Mac Govan-Crow was right, do you?’
Tolkien raised a hand to silence his friend. ‘Listen!’
And the name Pan, intoned in deep voices, was sent towards them on the light spring breeze.
Pan! Pan! PAN!
‘Good God!’ muttered Barfield.
‘A god, yes’ Tolkien whispered, ‘but good?’.
Chapter 18: The Milk of Paradise
Conall woke after a few hours’ sleep, curled up under a couple of dew-covered blankets, at the base of the stone in the avenue. The sky was almost light with the last of the stars fading in the west, and a soft mist floated about the stones. A barn owl, silent as a spirit on its moth-like wings danced from stone to stone. Conall sat and watched the owl for a few minutes until it flitted out of sight down the avenue.
He stood and stretched, still wearing yesterday’s clothes. He was thirsty, but not hungover, and he felt strangely at peace. Part of him felt as if yesterday had not happened; only the alder-wood flute, wrapped in its cloth beside the blankets at the base of the stone, suggested otherwise. The owl reappeared a hundred yards down the avenue, hovering then swooping into the grass beside one of the stones. Conall’s mind turned to the camper, and its kettle. Something felt wrong, though. His hand went to his neck. The familiar weight of his yin-yang pendant hanging on his chest was missing. Searching around the foot of the stone where he had slept revealed nothing. Then he remembered spinning on Waden hill the night before while looking up at the stars.
Forgoing breakfast for a spell, he retraced his steps up the path through the meadow, and sure enough, there lay his pendant in an area of flattened grass atop the hill. Relieved Conall sat down once more in the same spot as his nocturnal visit, now able to discern the exact position of West Kennet long barrow on the opposite ridge where before there had been but rolling vistas of shadow.
He smiled to himself; there, further along the field, close to the road near the Swallowhead stood a new crop circle: a ring of 30 small circles with a larger circle two toned and split in half at their centre. He remembered the croppies giggling into their mobile phones; he wondered if they’d been there in the dark while he played his flute, spinning in the wheat as he spun on the hill?
As he looked, he saw something that seemed to be a man walking briskly alongside the mound.
The dark shape was moving swiftly along the edge of the barrow, but it was only when it had passed the end, and not turned back to walk along the other side as he would have expected a visitor to do, that he realised something was amiss. For a start, the ‘man’ had traversed the length of the barrow, a good hundred and fifty feet in half a minute, about twice the speed of a walking man – but the shape wasn’t moving like man does when running. Then there was its height: it was shorter than the mound itself, yet the mound was only 5ft high. As it sloped away from the mound, continuing westwards towards the bottom of the valley Conall could see that the creature was only 3 or four feet tall, and long rather than tall. From the cows in the neighbouring field he estimated its size as that of a calf, yet it was jet black and moved fast – too fast for a cow, and with no deviations from its course… walking a straight line as if heading towards the new circle beyond the Swallowhead spring.
Conall tried to look harder but his eyes began to water with the effort. If he had to guess he would have said the creature was some huge black cat, like a puma, or perhaps a dog… but huge, and walking briskly in the one direction as if following an old long trodden path, not stopping to sniff, as dogs do. He watched it for two or three minutes until it entered the trees that bordered the field edge beside the Swallowhead spring.
The dog, or puma, or whatever it was did not re-emerge from the trees.
Conall felt odd; unnerved. He was glad he had been on this side of the valley. Clutching his pendant to him, realised that if he hadn’t dropped this, he would never have seen the animal, whatever it was.
Walking back over the hill a few minutes later Conall noticed a van now parked behind his own, and on closer inspection realised, from the airbrushed wolves on its side, that it was Wolf Jones’s van. He looked at the clock on his phone – it wasn’t yet half past seven. Wolf could be seen knocking on the windows of Con’s camper. Con shouted and waved, and eventually Wolf heard him and looked his way, waving and smiling.
‘Breakfast?’ Wolf shouted.
Ten minutes later both men were sat in the avenue, using a large female stone to break the slight breeze, huddled over a small gas-stove on which a frying pan was set, in which butter was spitting. Wolf expertly cracked four eggs into the pan while Conall ripped open some rolls and buttered them.
‘Thought you’d appreciate this after a night al fresco!’ Wolf grinned.
Conall nodded. ‘I’m just surprised you’re up.’ He said, sipping the coffee he’d just brewed in his van.
Wolf shrugged.
‘I’m an early riser, me. Besides, Hayden was up for work early and I asked him to give me a shout – I wanted to get to the long-barrow early.’
Con decided not to mention the animal he’d seen, wanting, for some reason, to cast it from his mind.
Wolf lifted the eggs, dripping in butter, into the rolls, then sprinkled them with salt; the two men ate in silence, save for grunts of appreciation from Wolf. Once finished they sat drinking coffee, smoking cigarettes.
‘Damn fine way to start a day!’ Wolf smiled. Con agreed. What would today bring, he wondered? The sighting of the animal seemed to suggest some kind of auspicious occurrence was in the offing, and already the day promised to be fine and hot. Of course, he had already resolved to text Shen and meet with her at some point, especially now he knew Hayden was off the scene; it might give him chance to talk, to explain.
‘Did you want another coffee?’ he asked. Wolf nodded.
‘That would be grand. Mind if I have a poke around your van?’ he added, grinning cheekily.
While Con set the kettle on to boil again Wolf sat on the sofa-bed, his head turned sideways looking at the books on the small shelf above the hob and sink.
‘Do you mind?’ he asked, taking down the PhD ‘unfinished’ file. Con shook his head, getting ready to try to explain exactly what he’s been studying.
‘You said you were a lecturer,’ Wolf said. ‘Is this the kind of stuff you taught?’
‘Kind of. I did a physics degree, and then an MSc in astrophysics but ended up lecturing in the history of astronomy, you know, Kepler, Hipparchus, Galileo, that kind of thing…’
‘What’s all this, though?’ Wolf asked, flicking through the loose pages of star-charts and plans of circular features.
‘I was looking at how far astronomy went back – I mean, my lectures went back to the Egyptians, but the more I looked into myths all around the world the more you got these shared images that suggested people knew about astronomy way, way back in prehistory…images that made no practical sense and were just bizarre until you interpreted them as astronomical images – constellations, eclipses, comets, stuff like that. Anyway – I did my Masters dissertation on Stonehenge – I was looking at the idea it was aligned on the summer solstice, and I wanted to see if it was true of the other henge sites, Avebury for instance…and it turns out it isn’t – it’s not even true for Stonehenge, I mean, there is evidence of an interest in the winter solstice – but not at all the sites; only a handful, really, so I started my PhD looking at what they were aligned on…’
‘Cool, man, sounds awesome. Why didn’t you finish it?’
‘I quit. I think they thought I was losing the plot; you see I came up with a theory, but then I started to look for proof of it in myth, and they said that myth was out of fashion....’
Wolf raised his eyes at that. ‘What was your theory?’ he asked.
Con hesitated for a moment. It was never easy knowing where to start. He paused, recalling his dream – the river being magically transformed into milk at the touch of the goddess’ wand, and the horse with the crescent moon between her brows appearing beside him on the bank – this was the real start… he wondered for a second whether he should tell Wolf, but decided against it. Instead, he fumbled through his notes and pulled out a plan; on it were two circles, each with a line drawn from the centre, out.
‘That’s Stonehenge…’ Con said; ‘you can see the entrance to the north-east – that’s the one aligned on the solstice, except it’s the winter, not the summer – they’re on the same alignment, but archaeologists have shown people were gathering there in the winter, standing outside the circle looking in – but that’s beside the point – look down here, here’s another entrance to the south and one to the south-south-west, that’s only on the first image, ok?’
Wolf nodded.
‘Now these entrances can’t be aligned on either sun or moon like the north-east one as they’re outside the rising and setting points of both; you never see the sun or moon rise exactly north or south, do you? So, I asked if the north-east entrance was astronomical, why not these others, too? Were they pointing, say, at a star or group of stars…’?
‘Fair enough.’ Said Wolf. ‘So, were they?’
Con paused; ‘Well…’ he gave a nervous smile ‘ – the first plan shows the orientation of the south-south-west entrance at about 3,100 BC, but this entrance was deliberately blocked a few hundred years later; then you get this corridor of posts being built that points through the southern entrance at nearly the same angle as the old south-south-west entrance… nearly being the key word: I wondered whether these two entrances were being aligned on the same thing, but something that had moved slightly over those few hundred years…’
Wolf was nodding, which Con took to be a good sign.
‘Now, there was a star, well, group of stars, that could be seen rising through the southern entrance, and setting through the south-south-west one, but which, after a few hundred years had moved so it could no longer be seen setting; that’s why that entrance was blocked, it had ceased to ‘work’. In its place the new avenue of posts was built pointing out of the south entrance towards the new setting point.’
‘Why did they move?’ Wolf asked.
‘Ever heard of the Precession of the equinoxes?’
‘Heard of it, but not looked into it.’ he said.
‘It’s a bit complicated to go into now, but basically the rising and setting points of the stars change slowly over time – so, for instance, the constellation against which the spring equinox sun rises these days is Pisces, it’s actually on the cusp of Aquarius, hence that song about the dawning of the age of Aquarius; but when Stonehenge was built it the spring equinox sun rose in Taurus, and before that Gemini… the position of the pole star changes too; it’s basically a wobble in the earth’s axis, and because of it the rising or setting point of a star changes by a degree every 72 years…so if you’ve aligned the entrance of your henge to a star, after a few hundred years it’ll no longer work…’
‘I’ll take your word for it – but which fucking stars was Stonehenge pointing at? Get to the bloody point man!’
‘It’s not just Stonehenge…’ Con was pulling A4 sheets from the folder and handing them to Wolf…
‘Avebury… Dorchester, Arbor Low, Thornborough, Woodhenge, the ring of Brodgar, Woodhenge…and loads more – about 60% of all the sites I looked at, and I looked at about 50 henges in detail, had some kind of alignment on this exact part of the sky…’
Con hesitated and took a pen from the shelf and drew a group of four dots on the one of the sheets of paper that Wolf was holding; a rectangle on its edge, with the bottom corner further from the centre than the rest, like a kite.
‘Join the dots’ Con asked, offering the pen. Wolf took the pen and drew a diamond.
‘Thank fuck for that.’ Laughed Con. ‘The stars are the Southern Cross – or Crux.’ He took out another sheet of paper that showed the constellation as part of a star-map ‘But as the name suggests, we tend to see the stars as a cross-pattern. But…’ Another flurry of printed sheets came Wolf’s way; all showing various diamond patterns inscribed on stones, on clay vessels; on carved and moulded figurines; pages and pages of the same… ‘the lozenge is a really important symbol in Neolithic art, and I think they would have seen it as a diamond, not a cross…’
‘I know 60% doesn’t sound a lot,’ he continued, ‘but just 5 of the 50 sites had midsummer alignments, so we’re looking six times as many with the Crux alignments, and that’s not the end of it…they’re part of a bigger pattern that increases the alignments to 85%...’ he began rooting through the folder, but in his hurry dropped the folder on to the floor.
‘Fuck’s sake…’ he muttered.
‘You need to write this down Con. You shouldn’t have stopped. Fook me – I can see why you were a lecturer; you’re like a different person when you’re explaining all that shit. It’s cool.’
Con played down the compliment.
‘But I don’t think I was in the right place to continue; it was only a few months after my sister…’ he said, dismissively, placing the roughly gathered sheets on to the sofa bed.
The kettle on the gas hob whistled and Con turned his attention to finishing the coffee.
‘If you don’t mind me asking – what happened? Shen just mentioned an accident…’ Wolf asked.
‘Did you ever hear of a band called Mellifluous? They were around in the nineties.’ Conall asked.
Wolf nodded; ‘Yeah, of course ’Damsel with a Dulcimer’ and all that? Electronic Folk-rock; well kooky. I’ve got that track on my iPod in fact, and ‘Milk of Paradise’.’
‘Melissa Astor, the lead singer… she was my sister.’ Con said simply.
‘Fuck, man. God, I remember. She…’
‘Drowned.’ Con finished. ‘Last May. She went swimming when drunk,’ Con said blankly, pouring the contents of the cafetiere into their cups. ‘It was around the last time I was here. Coming back here is a bit of an exorcism, really.’
Wolf was nodding, slowly.
‘She was your sister? Fuck, man! Mellifluous; I see it now – the hair! God, she had mad hair! I man, I was gutted. I mean everyone was. God, that is crazy!’
Con took a sip of coffee, then his eyes became fixed as he looked out of the windows to the mist on the horizon.
‘A damsel with a dulcimer, in a vision once I saw’…
Wolf, too, was singing from her song.
‘…For he on honeydew hath fed
and drunk the milk of Paradise’
‘Milk of Paradise was going to be the name of her next album…’ Con said.
‘She was a great singer, mate. I’m really sorry… I saw her at Glastonbury…when was that?’
‘Yeah – I was there, too. ’95... Want to see a bit of memorabilia?’
Wolf shrugged ‘Course!’
‘‘Damsel’ and ‘Milk’ were both based on Coleridge’s Kubla Khan;’ Con explained, rifling through the contents of the bookshelf, moving boxes of tea-bags, a phone-charger and cigarette-filters out of the way; ‘she was always very deep and, as you say, kooky!’ He tried to smile. He finally found, from where he had placed it the day before, the Collected Coleridge; he opened a particular page and handed it to Wolf. ‘There you go – the lyrics to Damsel with a Dulcimer.’
Wolf ran a finger down the heavily annotated page. ‘This is like music history, man!’ He said. Con nodded and took back the book, fumbling through some pages before finding what he was looking for:
‘This is where she was writing new lyrics;’ he said, matter-of-factly. Scrawled down one side of an already overly annotated page were two verses under a scribbled heading ‘Milk of Paradise’:
I seek for the Mother
To cry no more
to find where her cool white waters rise…
In the depths of the water
To sigh no more
Lie stones fallen from the skies
Wolf read them aloud and then went to turn the page but Con took it from him and closed the book, putting back in the gap on the shelf.
For a moment Wolf’s eyes remained on the creased spine of the volume and then he turned to Con.
‘Look – I’m meeting Ananda, you know, the barmaid from the Red Lion, up at West Kennet later to do some drumming. You’re free to come along.’
Con smiled. ‘I may wonder up later, yes, thank you. I’m probably going to try to meet Shen for lunch.’
‘Well, we’ll be up there this afternoon, I’d imagine.’ His eyes sparkled. ‘She’s a beauty, Ananda…’ Wolf smiled but then his expression turned serious.
‘I get a good vibe from you. I can see there’s life in you, deep down. Spring always follows winter, you know.’
Con held his gaze for a moment but had to look away.
‘When’s the last time you laughed, properly?’
Con looked into space.
‘I don’t remember. Not since Melissa. I mean, I’ve laughed – but it’s like I’m kind of trapped behind this glass screen. I’m here but I’m not, if that makes sense. I am trying. Maybe part of me died when she did.’
Wolf nodded. ‘Courage, my friend – that’s what you need; the courage to be angry, to feel again. When you hide your feelings to stop being hurt, you hide all of them – joy, love, not just the painful ones.’
‘Like I said – I’m trying.’ Con repeated, staring into his coffee. ‘It’s almost as if I’ve forgotten how. I want to open up again, but it feels like I’ve a bellyful of lead; the words are there but they just won’t come out….’
Wolf put down his cup and placed a hand on Con’s shoulder.
‘Words can be overrated. We tend to try and verbalise what we think; but sometimes thinking itself is the problem. Come to the Long-Barrow later, promise me?’
Con nodded.
Chapter 19: Hey Diddle Diddle
Tolkien was seated at the kitchen table, trying to write a letter to his wife Edith, but his mind was wandering; the smell of the sausages Mrs Mac Govan-Crow was frying was distracting him; he folded the letter and placed it to one side. Tolkien wasn’t tired despite having returned to the cottage well after midnight; he was used to such hours: when his lecture preparation and marking were done and the children and Edith had repaired to bed, he would often adjourn to his room and work on his stories and languages until the early hours. He had always managed on little sleep and this morning he had woken sharp at six thirty, and on rising had opened the curtains a few inches to find the world wrapped in thick white mist.
‘Morning Tollers!’ Jack had entered the kitchen, his cheeks red and shiny from shaving, and he walked over to the stove and warmed his hands.
‘Morning Mr Lewis’ said Shona.
‘Morning Jack. Did you sleep well?’
‘Extremely well, for it seems I’ve slept through summer and here we are at winter again!’ He frowned at the mist shrouded garden and shivered. ‘What would you like for breakfast?’ Shona asked. ‘Those sausages smell delicious, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow! I’ll have what the professor here is having! Where’s Owen, Tollers?’
‘He went into the village to get the morning paper with Mr Mac Govan-Crow; he said he’d not be long.’
‘And how did you sleep?’ Jack asked, pulling up the chair beside Tolkien, raising an eyebrow, and waving his fingers at Shona’s baby, Alfred, who sat in a highchair at the table’s end.
‘Well. I hope I didn’t disturb you; I went for a little walk after you had retired.’
Jack buttered some toast and raised an eyebrow again for Tolkien to continue.
‘To the Swallowhead. I had rather a moment of inspiration on the matter of the question you posed yesterday.’
‘Which question was that?’ Lewis asked, chewing.
‘Why in a landscape of dragons and one-eyed goddesses the river should be named after a dog. And it was Mrs Mac Govan-Crow here who helped provide the answer.’
Shona smiled as she approached the table and handed the men plates of sausages and fried mushrooms.
‘Bravo!’ said Lewis, grinning up at her. ‘And how did you help the professor?’ he asked her.
Shona smiled and shrugged. ‘I just told him a few things about Boann.’ She said, pouring Lewis a cup of tea.
‘Mrs Mac Govan-Crow,’ Tolkien explained, ‘kindly informed me that Boann, ‘white cow’ is referenced in the name of the Milky Way – which is ‘the path of the white cow’ and so I suddenly saw there might be a connection between the river on earth and that river of stars in the heavens...’
Lewis turned, a mushroom-laden fork poised before his lips; ‘You know, at college I had a rather splendid print of Tintoretto’s ‘Origin of the Milky Way’ in my rooms – you know the one, with the babe Heracles being pulled away from Hera’s breast and the milk from her bosom spurting up into the night sky; indeed a river of Milk!’ Lewis lifted the jug of milk from the table and poured it slowly, from a height, into his tea.
Lewis frowned. ‘… but where is the dog?’
Shona laughed. ‘Boann’s dog drowns with her when the river is formed. Ach! And you call yourself an Irishman?!’
Lewis coloured, much to Tolkien’s amusement.
‘The mention of the dog piqued my interest;’ Tolkien said, ‘if the Milky Way is an earthly reflection of the river Boyne, or vice versa, then Boann’s dog, and the bright hound of the Kennet must all somehow relate to the dog-star, Sirius, which stands guarding the banks of the Milky Way.’
Lewis smiled mischievously and turned to the babe Alfred sat in his high-chair and began to sing.
Hey diddle diddle the cat and the fiddle
The cow jumped over the moon
The little dog laughed to see such fun
And the dish ran away with the spoon
Alfred seemed mesmerised by the older man’s puckish grin.
‘Exactly, Jack! Exactly! How did we not see it?’ Tolkien had begun laugh.
Shona looked between the two men, puzzled.
Lewis turned to Shona.
‘You see, Mrs Mac Govan-Crow…’
‘Shona, please!’
‘Shona, it’s a sort of running joke between us – we’re interested, as you know, in the origins of things, words, legends, names – and one of the things we’ve often talked about are nursery rhymes: hey diddle diddle included, well, you see there was a scholar named Halliwell-Phillips who had the wool pulled over his eyes by some joker who convinced him that the rhyme was really Ancient Egyptian and that the cow was the cow-goddess Hathor and the little dog the star Sirius…’ Lewis was grinning broadly.
‘Well, Tollers and I were discussing this just last week in the Bird and Baby – the Eagle and Child, our local pub - we were talking of this very thing, the dog being the star! How did we miss it?!’
‘But what does it really mean?’ Shona asked.
Tolkien turned to her; ‘No one is sure; it’s probably just nonsense. The cat and the Fiddle has been said to come from Canton fidelis, who was an English official in Calais, or Catherine de fidelis, Catherine of Aragon – but the astronomical interpretation is just wishful thinking – you see if the cow is the constellation of Taurus then it could never work - Taurus is always below the path of the moon.’ He looked at Lewis and smiled broadly.
‘Unless?’ Jack said, winking.
Tolkien laughed.
‘Unless – and this was my latest tongue in cheek interpretation – well, imagine a sailor on an early voyage to the Antipodes... once you reach the southern hemisphere the sky changes: the cow DOES jump over the moon, because Taurus is now viewed upside down, and the spoon, which could be the great bear, the ‘big dipper’ (and the dish if that is perhaps crater) due to the southern locality, disappear from their ever-circling position in the night sky... they flee below the horizon unlike the north - they run away...
‘Given that diddle can mean to topple, and the first word of the rhyme was once high, not hey – might it mean:
The sky is overturned
Both Leo and Lyra
Taurus jumped over the moon
Sirius laughed to see such fun
And Crater ran away with the Big Dipper.’
‘The rhyme is in reality nonsense, but it hasn’t stopped people reconstructing it.… come, sing us your man in the moon poem!’
Tolkien reddened. ‘I won’t inflict that on the child, Jack.’
‘What if the cow isn’t Taurus but Boann – if her road is the Milky Way does that go over the moon?’ Lewis asked, suddenly serious, deep in thought.
‘The path of the moon crosses it once a month… I imagine if Boann were to be walking that road she might have to leap over it at some point!’
The two men eyed each other for a few seconds then burst into laughter again.
‘We’ll continue this another time – Halliwell-Phillips redeemed, imagine!’ Lewis said.
‘Would you like more toast, Mr Lewis, Mr Tolkien?’ she asked, bemused.
‘Indeed we would, thank you!’ He turned to Tolkien.
‘I still like my own interpretation – that the cow is jumping over a reflection of the moon in a puddle, like Thomas Traherne’s brother…
‘As he went tripping o’er the King’s high-way,
A little pearly river lay
O’er which, without a wing
Or Oar, he dar’d to swim,
Swim through the air
On body fair;
He would not use or trust Icarian wings
Lest they should prove deceitful things;
For had he fall’n, it had been wondrous high,
Not from, but from above, the sky:
He might have dropt through that thin element
Into a fathomless descent;
Unto the nether sky
That did beneath him lie,
And there might tell
What wonders dwell
On earth above. Yet doth he briskly run,
And bold the danger overcome;
Who, as he leapt, with joy related soon
How happy he o’er-leapt the Moon.
Tolkien laughed.
Just then the door opened and Owen Barfield entered the room, a newspaper under the crook of his arm, closely followed by George, in a collar-less shirt and cap.
‘That’s good timing, Owen! Did you smell the sausages?’ Lewis teased.
Owen smiled. ‘I think we’ll need a cooked breakfast; there’s little heat in the day; we were spoiled yesterday by the sun but I doubt if we’ll see it today through that mist.’
‘It may clear.’ said Shona.
‘If the wind changes.’ remarked George.
‘Well I hope it does – we aim to climb Silbury today; there seems little point if there’s no view.’ Lewis said. ‘You’ve just missed Toller’s solution to the Kennet question, by the way – it’s called the bright dog because it refers to Sirius – the Avebury landscape seems to be a mirror of the heavens!’
Owen raised his eyebrows at Tolkien.
George Mac Govan-Crow walked to the stove and dipped a crust of bread into the sausage fat and began chewing.
‘That’s also in our beliefs,’ he began. ‘‘We Blackfeet call the Milky Way the ‘Wolf Trail’ – there’s a tale that explains it, of course, but it’s a three-pipe tale and for another night! Strange that both tales include dogs, well, a wolf and a dog… the Blackfoot name for Sirius is ‘dog-face’ and he guards the road of the souls. To join the ancestors one must give him food so one may travel the road.’
When he realised the three guests were regarding him in stunned silence he stammered:
‘Did I say something amiss?’
Lewis had risen from the chair and was scratching his head.
‘Not amiss, my good man; puzzling – no…amazing! You see, that’s also what the Ancient Greeks believed, to cross the Styx one would have to bribe Cerberus with meat lest he should devour one’s soul. My word! How can the same story pop up on two different Continents – Continents not linked culturally until Columbus?’
‘Then they must have been linked before Columbus – but way back, before any of our recorded history.’ Tolkien said.
‘The same as the bear myths we talked of last night?’ George asked.
‘Precisely.’
‘Either that’ said George, ‘or some Blackfoot must have got in his canoe a few thousand years ago and come over to teach the Greeks a thing or two!’ he turned and winked at Tolkien, who smiled broadly in return.
Chapter 20: The Weave of Time
The midday heat was oppressive, and the steady flow of visitors around the circle was annoying Conall; for him the evening, when the car park would close and the day-trippers return to their homes, couldn’t come soon enough. He felt depressed; at a loss at what to do. He had sent a text to Shenandoah asking if she wanted to meet at the pub for lunch but had received no answer, and so had slept for a while in his van, only to awake and still find no reply on his phone. The thought of walking to Windmill Hill or up to West Kennet seemed foolhardy under this hot august sun. Perhaps, after all, a drink at the Red Lion was still in order, he decided, albeit alone.
He crossed the north-west quadrant of the circle, packed with picnickers and families kicking footballs, and muttered something under his breath about it being an archaeological site, not a fucking park. As he approached the towering stones of the cove across the road from the pub car park he was surprised to see Shenandoah sat on the grass against a stone with a book on her lap, her eyes shut.
‘Shen?’ she opened her eyes and smiled, wincing in the light.
‘Hello!’ she tapped the grass beside her. ‘I got your text – I ran out of credit though! Thought I’d just wait here, et voila!’
Con sat and took out his tobacco. He offered her a cigarette one and she accepted with no show of reluctance; she lay back against the stone, looking skywards with half open eyes, a contented smile on her face. Conall took the time to look at her; her shapely crow-black eyebrows arching above those dark creased eyes, that seemed to express such an innocent joy at being alive: an animal delight in the warm sun and the smoke.
‘Don’t tell Hayden.’ She said.
‘I wouldn’t.’ Con replied.
‘I know. It’s just he can be such a bore. Saving my life once isn’t enough for him…’
‘Saving your life?’ Con asked.
‘It’s how we met – I was bitten by an adder last summer on the path near Silbury, and he was here with some mates – he drove me to Savernake hospital.’
‘I don’t think you can die from an adder bite.’ Said Con, uncharitably.
Shen giggled. ‘Bloody hurt, though! I felt so sick and shaky. So you see – he’d have a go for me for voluntarily putting this poison in my system,’ she waved the cigarette, ‘when my life had nearly been claimed by another!’
She smiled at him and her whole dark face lit up.
‘What are you thinking?’ she asked. ‘you look irritated.’
He breathed the smoke out through his nose. ‘Do you fancy a drink?’
The pub was busy, but they managed to find a free table in the large front dining room that bordered the road. Conall headed for the bar and bought a cold lager for himself and a half for Shen, who he had left to peruse the menu.
He brought the drinks back to the table.
‘You know what you’re having? I have to go back and order at the bar.’ He said.
Shen looked up and smiled at him, and Con felt an odd tightening in his stomach.
‘The fish; and garlic bread to start’ she cooed. ‘I fancy mussels and crusty bread, but they don’t do that here anymore.’
‘Since when did you eat fish?’ he asked.
‘I lapsed when I started seeing Hayden. Just seemed easier.’
‘Not for the poor fish…’
She looked up at him and at his already half-empty pint-glass.
‘It’s thirsty work all this doing nothing, you know!’ he grinned, by way of explanation.
‘I wouldn’t know, I was up at about four. Hayden wouldn’t let me sleep, so I got up and made us breakfast; I was going to do some housework but it was so nice out I just picked up my book and sat out there –‘
‘Four?! Fuck that… So, fish for you and…chips and salad for me.’
‘Still vegan, then? Puritan!’ she asked.
‘Ironically, yes.’
‘Why ironically?’
He laughed – ‘well it seems all the myths I’m studying are all about milk and cows and dairying…’
‘I won’t tell if you nick some of my salmon, you know…’
‘Halloumi I might be tempted by, but not fish! You’ll go back to it, you know…Shen?’
‘Hmm?’
‘Seeing as this is your local - could you tell me why there’s a well in the corner of the room?’ he laughed.
She grinned.
‘Apparently in the 1600’s the landlord pushed his wife down it – and you can sometimes hear her screams.’
‘Nice,’ Conall said. ‘Have you ever heard them?’
Shen shook her head and then looked at him, suddenly more serious.
‘Do you believe in ghosts?’ she asked.
‘Maybe – can’t be sure. You?’
‘Kind of.’
‘Well go on then, tell me!’ Conall beamed.
‘Will you think I’m nuts?’
‘No more than I do already’. She pulled a face at him, then eyed him silently as if judging whether he could be trusted.
‘I sense more than see things; sometimes it might be a smell or even a taste…’
‘What kind of taste?’
‘Flowers; a kind of perfume…’
‘And do you sense anything now?’ he asked.
She shook her head and lifted her glass. ‘It’s just I don’t tell many people. People don’t understand.’ Con wondered if such people were tall and blond and fought fires.
‘I don’t blame you. Most people haven't got a fucking clue …’ he snorted. 'I’m convinced there's more to life than just flesh and bones.' he said.
'You think?' she said, brightening.
'I know. I mean - I look solid, yeah?' He said, and Shen nodded. '…But in reality, I'm more space than matter! The amount of matter in an atom is like a marble inside a football stadium - only it's moving so fast it seems to fill all the space... if you put all the actual matter in every person on the planet into one space do you know how big it would be?'
Shen shook her head.
Conall held out his fist. 'This big! - the rest is space! We're just energy, moving at such a fast speed we seem solid - but were not. It's an illusion. All is energy, some of which we’ve evolved to be able to perceive; but some we can’t. So why can't there be spirits or ghosts or fairies out there beyond our perception? Or other kinds of beings sharing this space with us that we just aren't tuned into? I mean, there’s billions of microscopic life forms on and in us that we can’t see unaided – there might be vast being striding across space we can’t see...or walking through the circle or through this pub.’
Shen looked at him open eyed.
'That’s weird. That’s how I kind of think of it. Think of all the phone and radio signals flying through the air at this moment. Can we hear them? No! But they're there! To hear them we need a proper receiver, and to be able to tune it to the right frequency.’
‘Exactly,’ Con said, ‘and maybe when you say you sense things it’s just that you can tune into frequencies that most people just can't - or have at least forgotten how to; maybe such abilities were bred out of us as we evolved, but they still exist in some of us.'
Shen smiled and briefly placed her hand over his. ‘Are you calling me a genetic throwback, Conall Astor?’ she teased. ‘I think as children we have that ability – to see beyond, somehow, but we lose it. Or some of us do. Maybe in the childhood of the human species we could see and hear such things too; talk to the plants and animals; how lovely would that be? I’ve not told anyone this before…’ she began., ‘you’ll think I’m mad…’
‘I hope so; the most interesting people I know are mad.’ He said.
‘Do you think there could be moments when you could see… into other times?’
‘Go on…’
She looked out of the window over the courtyard, as if something she had seen there had triggered a memory.
‘When I was in my late teens I used to hang around with this group of girls, and ‘cos I was the only one with a driving license I’d be the one who’d have to go to the shops and get booze for our nights in… but I’d always rope one of the others along to give me a hand…’
Shen looked at Conall, hesitantly.
‘Well… this one time, me and this other friend had gone to the supermarket – this was in Marlborough – and were driving back… and I suddenly noticed the sky was this kind of strange purple colour, and I looked over the hills and they were covered in trees, whereas usually they were fields. This friend starts shouting at me that I’d got us lost, which was impossible, because I hadn’t turned off the main road, but the road was now like a dirt track, with ruts in the side and the centre overgrown so it was scraping the bottom of the car…’
Shen looked at Conall again to check how he was reacting.
‘And I wanted to stop and get out, because the hedge at the side of the road was like overgrown, really tall, too – much taller than it usually is, and the hills were just covered in fir trees. My friend was shouting at me to keep driving, but I was just amazed, and I wanted to stop. I wanted to get out the car and look around. I was slowing down the car but she was literally screaming at me not to stop, to keep driving; but the weird thing was that it was like the car was see-through; I could see my hands gripping the steering wheel, but it was like the shadow of a wheel, transparent, and I could see the dirt track under the car.’
Conall was listening without comment.
‘And then we started to go up the hill, where the turning should be, and there’s a house on the corner of the turning, but it wasn’t there… and then as we drove on it was there! And the trees were gone, and the road was normal again, with houses on one side and no fir trees. Well, we got in and told our friends, and we were like really in shock, but the funny thing is she later denied it – she said I’d made it up, even though she’d confirmed everything and told them what she’d seen, too.’
Shen looked at Con for a reaction.
Conall held her gaze.
‘I can understand why she denied it. It didn’t fit in with her view of reality; and rather than expand that view and challenge the beliefs of a lifetime she chose to shut it out.’
‘So you believe me?’
‘Yeah, course. Why wouldn’t I? It sounds amazing – I’m just trying to think how far back you might have slipped… there was a road, at least, but it sounds like a cart-track…’
‘That’s what I thought. I’ve often thought I should try to find an old map and see if there was record of those hills being covered in trees and not farmed. I wish I’d stopped.’
‘Do you? There are plenty of legends about people getting trapped in faerie you know, and never coming back. I wonder how many missing persons have done what you didn’t – stopped and got trapped.’
‘I wanted to pick a leaf off the hedgerow.’
‘Maybe it would have turned to dust as you found yourself back in modern times…’
Just then their food arrived and they stopped talking until the waitress had left them.
‘I heard this story once,’ Shen continued ‘about these boys who wondered into this Iron Age village, and they kind of assumed it was a re-enactment, but they picked up these axes and when later they were carbon-dated they were two thousand years old…’
Con smiled. ‘That sounds dodgy, you can’t carbon date stone or metal, for a start, and even if you could surely the dates would have revealed the axes had been made recently? Unless they aged as they were brought forward in time?’
Shen looked a bit crestfallen, as if having been unmasked as overly gullible. But Conall wasn’t finished.
‘Have you heard about the time slip at Versailles?’ he asked. When she shook her head, he continued. ‘It was in 1901, two Oxford women were visiting the Palace at Versailles and they saw what they thought were modern people dressed up in costumes from Marie-Antoinette’s time; it was only when they returned years later and realised that they couldn’t find the bit of the gardens where they’d seen this ‘costume party’, that they looked into it a bit more and found they’d seen the gardens as they were over a century before... It freaks me out; I don’t get scared by horror stories or films, but stuff like that gives me the creeps – in a good way, though. I’m jealous of your experience.’
‘But why would that happen – would it be some kind of worm-hole or a crack in time?’ she asked, tearing off a piece of garlic bread, and offering some to Con, which he waved away.
Conall shrugged. ‘I don’t know. I don’t see it like that; it’s not a door you walk through, more an expansion of your perception so you see things you normally wouldn’t. Tuning in, as I said, to another frequency – or widening your perception.’ She was looking at him quizzically.
‘We see time as flowing in one direction, but quantum physics suggests electrons can move back in time. Time, essentially, is an illusion – it seems to be moving forwards to us because we’re in it – it seems to be a function of consciousness, not a quality inherent in the cosmos. But if you could somehow step outside time… it’s as if everything that could ever happen has happened, as if you gain some kind of birds-eye view and you can see everything that not only was, but also could be.’
Shen shivered. ‘I don’t like that – it makes it sound like everything is fixed and we’re like a needle on a record player following a groove that’s already defined. It makes me feel like we have no free will.’
‘But I don’t mean it like that. If everything that has happened has been the result of free will, but you’re just looking back on it after the event, the you would be unable to affect it – like looking at an album of photos from your life. If you have that ‘birds-eye’ view you can choose to look at any photo at any point in time; you can look at them backwards and see yourself grow younger – but that wouldn’t affect the events of your life by doing that; you couldn’t alter those events; now imagine, and it’s hard because it goes against our ‘x causes y’ logic, that the photo-album exists not at the end of your life but in a timeless state outside of it. If you accessed it in a dream and it referred to an event that had already happened you’d just assume it was a memory… but if you dreamed of an event yet to happen, you’d not understand it as real as you’d not recognise it, and you’d just think it was a weird dream...but it might be it’s no more weird than the ‘memory’ type dream.’
‘So, you think people can see the future?’
‘If time is subjective, I don’t see why not.’
‘I wonder if someone sitting in this pub in the future may catch a glimpse of us in our old fashioned clothes and think we’re ghosts?’ Shen asked. ‘Or might be able to travel back and see exactly why Avebury was built? That would be quite a gift.’
‘It would certainly be a gift to me and my research!’ Con laughed. ‘But just imagine it - if you could float above the whole of history, from beginning to end, and see and know everything that was and will be, like this massive complex tapestry – you’d perhaps see patterns in it that we, on the ground, completely miss. You’d be like a god; you’d know everything!’
‘That’s scary.’ Shen said.
‘Yep. And probably why it doesn’t happen very often – or when it does, like your friend in the car, it’s immediately repressed and forgotten because it doesn’t fit in with their world view; but people like psychics and mystics who do see such thing always say the same thing: they see and know everything – but when they ‘wake up’ any specific knowledge, like who’s going to win the Grand National, has faded. They just know that they did see everything – and that it was good, and I mean morally good, like there was some kind of order, benevolence, in the Universe; that everything is linked, and all our trials and tribulations here on earth make sense and are made right when seen from that god-like perspective out of time.’
And will this be made right? He wondered. Will my trials and tribulations one day be made right when looked back on with the eye of divinity? He thought of Wolf’s testing god; the stage manager setting a road of trials for his apprentice…
‘When you do your cards, surely you’re seeing things from that perspective?’ Con added; ‘Catching a glimpse of the weave of the fabric of history? It’s not really a conscious thing – it can only be apprehended when your conscious mind is off guard, such as in a trance, or in dreams.’
‘Do you really think dreams can predict the future, then?’ she asked.
‘Yeah, or can tell you about things going on in the present you couldn’t physically know.’ He thought of his dream of the river of milk and the horse with the crescent between its brows; the mountains in the background with the gorge or valley cutting through the highest peaks, and quickly dismissed it from his mind. What was the point in such dreams if one could do nothing about the warning they gave?
‘Have you ever had a dream like that?’
‘No.’ he lied, the image of the river of milk flashing across his mind. It’s not as if the dream had told him she would drown, so it wasn’t wholly a lie, for it was him in the dream; what haunted him was why he had remembered the dream that specific night last year, at the same hour, so he believed, that she had gone into the water some 300 miles away from his own visit to the Kennet. Had she been calling out to him? But he had felt no fear – surely, he would have felt her despair and pain – but to feel nothing…
…But if that were all he might be able to just dismiss it as coincidence; but it didn’t end there: there was the image of the gorge in the mountains, and what his research had uncovered concerning it – a verifiable fact involving the location of the dream, and its revelation as a real physical location, the location of her death, no less - something that pointed to a level of truth within the dream that couldn’t just be brushed away…
‘Sometimes…’ he admitted, ‘I’ve dreamed things and they’ve provided answers to certain questions, you know, about my work…’
‘If time, as we know it,’ he stuttered, ‘is an illusion; that the ‘flow’ of time is just our experience of events that really exist out of time…’ he was fighting for words, trying to explain… ‘then just as events, past events, effect the future…’
He took a long drink and continued. ‘What if an event was so important, so drastic and powerful, that like a stone dropped in a pond it sent ripples in every direction… and by that, I mean into the past…’
He could see Shen’s brows knitted in concentration, trying to understand. He reiterated his point.
‘…if time isn’t real, as such, or can flow both forward and back, as quantum physics suggests is the case… then might a future event send ripples back in time…? Perhaps what we think of as precognition or prophecy is just a memory, but a memory of an event yet to occur?’
Her death, sending out ripples into the past, into the mind of his dreaming self, 20 years before, warning him, preparing him…hence the fact that details within it were verifiable, scientifically…the mountain cleft, the placement of the river and the sacred site that would later be built there… facts he had discovered 20 years later, and then projected back in time…
But before she could ask for specifics he continued,
‘I sometimes wonder if it’s possible to dream other people’s dreams – or to meet in dreams; or if in those ‘time-slips’ you actually see through some other person’s eyes from the past.’
‘So maybe I was picking up on someone who had walked, or been driving a wagon, down that road near Marlborough? Maybe it was me in some past life…’
‘All I know is that the world we think we live in isn’t half as strange as the world we do live in. We think we know everything, but we know nothing. But if there was a timeless part of us that did know everything… I wish it would appear to me and tell me that it’ll all be okay.’ he said, finishing his pint.
‘Maybe it tries, but subtly. I mean, if the ‘true’ you suddenly appeared to yourself and informed you that you were really immortal you’d think you’d gone nuts.’
‘It might be worth the risk.’ he laughed. ‘But if there is such a part of us, how would it explain itself to us? It would be like you trying to explain yourself to that bird.’ He said, nodding towards a sparrow picking at crumbs under one of the outside tables.
‘Well, maybe the universe uses other means to show us.’ she suggested.
‘Do you believe the universe is benevolent?’ he asked.
‘Yes. Yes, I do. And you?’
‘Maybe once I did. And maybe I will again. Perhaps this is just a rough part of the weave of the tapestry I’m crossing right now.’ He sighed. They sat for a while in silence. ‘It’s something Wolf said. The Universe isn’t bad – it just isn’t easy – that it makes us make an effort because it helps us grow.’
‘I thought about you.’ She suddenly said.
‘Likewise’ he toyed with his empty beer glass and said no more.
She looked at him, her face strained with a host of unasked questions.
‘I’m sorry, Con. About Melissa.’
‘I know. Everyone is.’
Chapter 21: The Font
It was on George Mac Govan-Crow’s suggestion that before heading for West Kennet Long-Barrow – their planned excursion that morning – his three houseguests should first visit the parish church that lay across the road from the cottage. It contained, he had told them, something that might interest them, or so he thought, after the conversations they had been having over breakfast that morning had veered from celestial dogs back to dragons and dragon-slayers.
Church Cottage, as the name suggested, lay directly across the narrow street from the lych-gate of St. James’s Church; it was a small building with a square belfry, set amid a well-kept graveyard – George Mac Govan-Crow being the gardener who kept it in check, being parish sexton as well as the gardener at Avebury Manor, in the employ of no less a person than the millionaire archaeologist Keiller.
The path led between the gravestones to the porch, and to a wooden doorway topped with a semi-circular Norman arch with toothed edges.
The three friends took in the architectural detail and commented on the prettiness of the building; before opening the door and stepping into the cool shade. The interior of the church was dim, and rather truncated – more a chapel than village church. Tolkien walked to the altar rail, crossed himself and knelt in prayer. Lewis merely nodded to the altar; Barfield paid it little heed, walking to the font that stood at the end of the aisle.
‘Ah, I see what he means, though these are wyverns…’
Barfield stood tracing the design carved on the side of the half-barrel shaped font with his fingers.
‘The man’s a gardener, Owen – to him a dragon is a dragon, you can’t expect him to have your pedantic knowledge of medieval bestiaries…’
‘I know that – I was just making a comment – definitely two legs and long tail, not a fish’s, so land, not sea-wyverns, if you want me to be pedantic…’
The font was ornately carved in a primitive style; a faceless figure formed the centre, in a flounced skirt, a snarling wyvern flanking him on either side… all set amid curling tendrils and above a crudely asymmetrical pattern of vaulted columns, all seeming to bend as if in a stiff breeze.
‘What is it, then? St Michael and the Devil, do you think?’ Lewis asked, approaching the font, and kneeling to take in the detail. ‘Or St. George and the dragon?’
‘No.’ Barfield reasoned. ‘That’s not a spear in his hand – it’s a crozier. He must be a bishop.’
‘What’s that in his other hand?’ Tolkien asked, having joined the others after finished his brief prayers.
‘A book, maybe – or a cup?’
‘Seems a little small for a book; a cup seems more likely.’ Tolkien commented. The cup, or whatever it was, was being held close to the figure’s chest, while his crozier, held out in his right hand, was being driven down onto the head of the wyvern on that side, who seemed to be biting the man’s foot.
Tolkien, reminded of his thoughts the previous day at the Sanctuary, quoted the verse out loud:
‘’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 thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.’
He ran his fingers over the space where the face had once been – now flattened, with a metal hook protruding that once had fixed the carved features to the font.
‘It’s a shame the face has been lost.’ He remarked.
‘Indeed.’ Said Lewis.
‘It would have been interesting to see if originally he had but one eye…’
Lewis chuckled. ‘You think this is some pagan god in disguise?’ he asked.
Tolkien shrugged. ‘Don’t you find it odd that in this place, this serpent-temple as Stukeley imagined it, we find an image on this font of the subjugation of the mythical serpent? On one hand I can see this imagery as the church seeking to crush any signs of the old magic that might still have haunted these stones…using the Biblical imagery of the serpent; but equally…’ he continued, ‘might this image be a veiled reference to that older pagan tale of the defeat of the dragon and the imbibing of his blood or mead of knowledge? After all, if that is a cup…’
Lewis was still smiling.
‘You know there could be other explanations – more mundane.’
‘Of course.’
‘The two dragons, for instance - this could be a reference to the Great Schism of 1054 - since the Eastern Christian crosier is a staff with two dragons facing each other.’
Tolkien looked long at Lewis to see if he was being serious; the latter raised his eyebrows then winked, and walked off whistling.
Tolkien remained at the font, absentmindedly caressing the missing face with his thumb; it was hard to imagine in this placid setting, in the dim, cool sanctuary, with its scent of cold aged masonry blending with that of the flowers on the altar, that this font had possibly been attacked by some crazed puritan; and why not? The same fervour had seen most of the pagan stones of the circle burned and smashed to pieces; but this was different – this place was not some heathen temple.
The morning sun had moved so that a shaft of sunlight now blazed upon the altar cloths, and Tolkien felt a familiar sense of awe envelop him.
‘Bot Crystes mersy and Mary and John,
'Thise arn the grounde of alle my blisse.’
he muttered to himself, from the Pearl poem.
He felt a pang of compassion for those ancient men who had been born too early to know of the glory of Christ and the Saints… they must have had their signs, too – that salvation would come, like the light of the morning star presaging dawn…
‘What’s on your mind, Tollers?’ It was Lewis’s voice.
Tolkien smiled an apologetic smile and walked from the font, saying nothing. He had learned to keep his innermost religious feelings to himself, at least in the company of Jack.
Outside in the churchyard the sound of hedge-clippers could just be made out as George Mac Govan-Crow set about his task for the day, trimming back the yew tree hedge.
‘You seem to be bonding rather well with our host.’ Lewis remarked.
‘He’s an interesting man, Jack. He seems to be warming to us; at first I got the impression he was looking down at us, though I may have been wrong.’
‘Not looking down,’ Barfield suggested, ‘wary.’
‘Of strangers?’ Tolkien asked.
‘No. That we might be friends of Keiller.’ Barfield replied.
‘How so?’
‘It’s something he said when we were off to get my newspaper this morning. You see Keiller often has friends to stay at the manor – and something Mr Mac Govan-Crow said made me think that he doesn’t really approve of some of the goings on.’
‘Such as?’
‘He didn’t really say – except to explain that as a gardener one often is overlooked, and that people often talk about things in his earshot that they really should keep to themselves.’
Barfield cleared his throat.
‘He said that he sometimes wondered if Keiller’s vision of rebuilding Avebury was purely scientific… or whether he had some other purpose in mind.’
‘Good Lord.’ said Lewis. ‘What kind of purpose?’
‘He mentioned a statue of Pan in the grounds of the Manor, the plants about it trampled and dowsed in wine, he said.’
Tolkien stood looking down at the hacked-away face of the bishop or saint on the font; was Keiller somehow trying to overthrow the victory of the saintly serpent slayer? Was his vision one of restoring this heathen temple so that once more ancient rites might be performed here? He shivered at the thought. It wouldn’t be permitted. Couldn’t be. Those times are past and will not come again. The Great God Pan, as Plutarch reported, is dead – and ever should remain so!
Chapter 22: Letters
Pan, Herne, Osiris, Priapus
Ba'al, Dionysus, Apollo, Lugh...
The road to Church Cottage was busy with a throng of people in long robes, flowers and leaves in their hair, and singing and clapping to a beat from several drums as they walked towards the circle:
Pan, Herne, Osiris, Priapus
Ba'al, Dionysus, Apollo, Lugh...
the men chanted, and the women sang in reply:
Isis, Astarte, Diana, Hecate,
Demeter, Kali, Inanna...
‘I see the pagans are arriving’ Shen said, ‘Wolf will be pleased if they stay for the protest.’
‘Why else would they be here?’ Con asked.
‘I don’t know. It’s not a full or new moon. A Hand-fasting, maybe?’
The stretch of road near the church, however, was deserted, and as the noise of the chanting faded Shen and Con entered the cottage.
‘Was it a coffee or tea?’ Shen asked.
‘Coffee, please.’
‘Well go through to the sitting room and I’ll bring it through.’
A few minutes later Shen re-emerged from the kitchen.
‘Have you always been nosey?’
Conall, who was standing with his head tilted to the side perusing the large wooden bookshelf, looked back to where Shen was leaning against the kitchen door, two mugs of coffee in her hands.
‘I always look at people’s bookshelves.’ Conall said. ‘…says a lot about a person, what they read, and then what they choose to put on show.’
‘And if they have no books?’
‘I make my excuses and run.’ Conall winked. Shit. He was slightly more drunk than he anticipated.
‘And what do you mean by ‘Put on a show’? Isn’t a bookshelf just a bookshelf?’ Shen laughed.
‘God, no! You never done it? When you know someone you like is coming round… depends on the person… you know, if they’re intellectual you make sure you have some weighty tome by your bed, like a John Cowper-Powys. Or poetry – Whitman or Coleridge I find works, maybe a bit of Gary Snyder to be a bit edgy and ‘beat’; and something kind of quirky or humorous to show you’re not dull…oh, and a kid’s book to show you’re not too dry and boring… Moomins, or Susan Cooper…’
Shen was shaking her head, though whether in mock horror or not, Conall couldn’t tell.
‘That’s subterfuge. It’s deceitful.’ There was a twinkle in her eye as she said this. ‘It’s pretending to be something you’re not to lure someone in.’
Conall snorted.
‘Bullshit!’ he said. ‘Maybe if I’d not read the books, then yes – but it would be a pretty stupid thing to do if you hadn’t! It would be so easy to be caught out!’
Shen bit her lip to hide a smile.
‘You’re being very bolshie.’ She said. ‘Someone spike your drink?’
‘I don’t know, did you? And anyway…’ he continued, feeling spurred on at the challenge in her voice ’arranging books is no worse, and arguably a damn site more honest, than wearing make-up and push-up bras and hold-it-all-in-knickers’ he said, and laughed out loud.
She continued to shake her head, but still smiled.
‘What is it Hamlet says?’ he continued ‘"God gives you one face and you paint yourselves another". At least I have read the books I’m placing about my room – they won’t disappear with some cotton wool and make-up remover, or turn out to be an illusion of good corsetry.’
Though, if he was honest Shen was one of those women who did not require clothes or make-up to enhance her dark beauty; he remembered one evening the previous year, when he’d met her in the pub, and she’d come in a dark blouse and long-black coat, her hair straightened and her eyes lined; a black-ribbon about her throat; and he thought that he had never seen anyone more beautiful in his life; she had stunned him almost to silence.
‘You’ve the devil in you today Conall Astor!’
And she was right. For a moment, it seemed, the clouds had retreated, but for how long, he wondered? He was on borrowed time. The ancient serpent within was being allowed a brief time in the sun before his liver had removed the alcohol from his system and his civilised outer cortex woke from its numb slumber.
‘So what can you tell about granddad from his bookshelves then?’ Shen challenged.
‘Are these books his? I’d assumed they were yours.’ He said, pulling out a gaudily coloured paperback on the tarot.
She smiled. ‘Okay – mostly his!’
Conall turned his head to the side again and read the spines, stopping to pull out a couple without covers, only to return them.
There were books on Blackfoot mythology, culture, and beside them a small section on other Native American tribes and beliefs, including some volumes on Mesoamerica – the Maya and the Aztecs.
‘Were these your granddads?’ he asked.
‘Some – the early Blackfoot ones; the other ones are mine. Stop looking at the new ones!’ she laughed.
He skipped over the gardening and cookbooks – then he stopped and pulled out a faded hardback. His face had changed from wry amusement to something that could almost be taken for concern. He slowly opened up the cover and then turned to Shen slowly.
‘Your granddad was Alfred Mac Govan-Crow, wasn’t he?’
‘Yes.’
‘Fuck me, Shen! This is a first edition copy of The Hobbit, with a dedication in the front by Tolkien himself! “To Alfred Mac Govan-Crow, on the occasion of your second Christmas, 1937. Best wishes J R R Tolkien”’
‘Yeah, it’s cool isn’t it?’ she said nonchalantly, sitting down at on the sofa with her coffee.
‘Cool?’ Christ! This is worth a fucking fortune, Shen!’ He wasn’t joking, either. First editions of the Hobbit passed hands for many thousands of pounds – but an inscribed one…
The cover showed the dragon Smaug flying over the mountains of Erebor; Con thought of the serpent brain within –guarding its primal memories like the dwarf-lords’ gold – if one could only venture in and steal that knowledge for the conscious mind - if one could integrate the entire brain without resorting to booze…
She walked over and took the book from him. ‘Look at this…’
She took the book out of his hand and turned to the inside back cover. Here, neatly enclosed within the fold of the dust jacket, were a number of yellowed handwritten pages.
‘Letters by Tolkien, to my great-grandfather, George - Alfred’s father.’
‘About what?’ he stammered, eyes open in shock.
Shen smiled, then laughed. ‘No idea. I’ve never read them properly – always meant to; have you seen the handwriting?!’
Conall looked into her smiling eyes, holding her gaze a little longer than he would normally have dared. She returned it, and it was Conall who looked away first, his pulse racing.
‘How did he know Tolkien?’ he asked, leafing through the thin handwritten sheets – there were, indeed, letters here addressed to George, but also one addressed to an Edith, and several sheets of what looked to be notes, with certain phrases underlined, including small diagrams which Con immediately recognised as sketches of some of the stones of the circle, and a swiftly drawn map of the entire site.
‘Tolkien stayed here for a few days when my Granddad was still a baby; my great-grandfather put him up as a lodger here. And C S Lewis, and Owen Barfield.’
Con looked at her in disbelief.
‘Here? At this house? Who’s Owen Barfield?’
Shen picked up a copy of a book that sat alongside The Hobbit - ‘He was one of the Inklings – Tolkien and Lewis’s literary group; The Silver Trumpet’ -he wrote this – this is inscribed to Alfred too.’
‘I’ve not heard of Barfield. I can’t believe this, though. Tolkien stayed here, seriously?!’
‘Seriously. And to say thanks he sent this signed copy of The Hobbit – that first letter there came with the book – I’ve read that one. Some of the others are to Tolkien’s wife, but there seems to be a few pages of notes; I don’t know why they’re there. Granddad couldn’t really tell me much; obviously, he was too young to remember anything.’
Con was trying to read the neat, fussy handwriting, faded now. He began to read out loud.
‘My Dear George, it is with immense pleasure and gratitude that I am able to send with this letter a copy of my ‘fairy-story’ which I have inscribed for Alfred, which though he is too young to read, one day yourself or Mrs Mac Govan-Crow may do me the honour of reading to him, to make up for the occasions when this enthusiastic stranger reduced him to tears through my nonsensical prattling!’
Con mumbled some more lines before turning the page.
‘The ideas I had surrounding the landscape at Avebury have taken, I am sad to say, somewhat of a back-seat for the time being, but I am trying to fit some of the insights I gained, thanks to you, concerning the great antiquity of these stories into something new I am working on, a time-travel book, which delves back into the distant past, and to the ‘Atlantis’ legend we talked of.’
Con looked at Shen. ‘What book is that?’
‘None I know of. Maybe he never finished it.’
Con nodded. ‘Yes, listen to this… “although my publishers are already suggesting I begin another ‘Hobbit’ book, as the reception to the book, in some quarters, has been very good.”’
‘The Lord of the Rings!’ both Shen and Con said together.
Con skimmed a bit more, then stopped and began to read aloud again.
‘As I write I can just make out Sirius over the Oxford rooftops, and it takes me back, on what is a cold winter’s night, to last spring in your wonderful county, and to the river of the ‘bright-dog’ of which I’ll always be reminded when I look at its companion in the sky.’ He paused. ‘What does he mean by river of the bright-dog?’ Shen shook her head.
‘You’re welcome to borrow them.’ She said. ‘Just don’t lose them or sell them.’ She smiled.
‘Thank you. Thank you!’ but he was already reading again.
He looked at Shen, a shocked grin on his face. She was looking at him, her head on one side, smiling.
‘Conall Astor wakes up again!’ she said. ‘Do you think one day you’ll be able to be enthusiastic about real things again, like people?’
‘Hmm?’ he said, looking up again from the letter, but only briefly.
Shen shook her head. ‘Don’t forget your coffee – I’m going to chuck you out in a bit as I’ve got housework to do, and I hoover naked.’
‘What?’
‘Just checking you’re listening! I mean it – take them with you. If there’s anything interesting in there let me know, or maybe write them out in a readable script!’
‘Okay. What are you up to later?’ he asked. Shen shrugged. ‘Hayden’s working today so he’s probably staying at his tonight – give me a call later.’
‘Tell you what. Get some credit and send me a text if you’re free.’ He laughed. She leant over and closed the book, forcing him to look up.
‘It’s a deal, if you don’t bring the book.’
Chapter 23: The Long-Barrow
No birds were singing, the skylarks and swallows of the day before were silent; all was quiet, cool, muted, softened as if the three men were making their way up through the fields towards West Kennet Long-Barrow were treading through cotton wool.
The Kennet valley was so thick with spring mist that Silbury hill had appeared only momentarily as they passed, a flat grey featureless hump visible for a moment when the slight breeze parted the mist, but it was soon obscured and left behind as the friends crossed the road and took the path towards West Kennet.
The grass was cool and wet, soaking the men’s shoes and trouser bottoms. Lewis was grumbling somewhere ahead; Tolkien was, as usual, lagging behind. He stopped for a moment to re-tie his sodden bootlace, squeezing the water from it, then while he was crouched down he paused to examine the flowers peeking through the grass: meadowsweet a speedwell.
He looked ahead to see the wraith-like shadowed forms of his friends merge into the whiteness and disappear; he felt suddenly alone…
Alone and palely loitering…. He thought to himself.
Tolkien felt no alarm; in fact he took a deep, slow breath, relieved to be alone for a spell; Lewis and Barfield had been in conversation since they had left the church, but Tolkien had been trying to think through the revelations of the night before; trying to organise his thoughts into some kind of order.
He stood upright and went to move onwards, suddenly not sure if he was facing in the same direction as he had been before he’d stopped to examine the flowers. Nevertheless, he knew he had been walking slowly uphill after they had crossed the small bridge over the Kennet, whose waters he was sure he could just make out chuckling behind him… so he strode forward.
There didn’t seem to be much of a path but nevertheless he continued through the thick grass and clover, knowing that the tomb that was their destination that morning, stood on the brow of the hill – but when he finally reached the crest the ground was flat; somehow he had misjudged his ascent – and so he called out to his friends; nothing was returned. The question now, he said to himself, is whether I am too far east or west of the tomb; he guessed west and so turned eastwards along the ridge.
The mist seemed to be moving slightly more up on the ridge; tearing past in odd eddies hardly strong enough to be called gusts; the grasses at his feet, a drab brown interspersed with fresh green shoots, gave no indication of a path, fading to wan a few metres each side. Tolkien’s steps quickened as he became more and more disoriented.
He called again and heard nothing;
I could be walking these hills a thousand years ago or more, he said; a delicious thrill went through him at the thought; he imagined a rider on a pale horse emerging out of the white rolling fog, and confronting him in a long lost tongue… but how would I know if I had encountered a ghost or if I had slipped back in time? He asked himself.
He noticed a slight rise in the ground and so began to climb, and found himself walking along the back of what he presumed could have been the long-barrow – so named from the comet-like train of earth set at the rear of the burial chambers; the earth was lumpy and the grass more patchy, and a vague depression along the ridge suggested a path.
‘Jack? Owen?’ he shouted. His own voice seemed to return as if the mist about him were the walls of some organic shifting prison; he had lost all sense of space and distance.
‘Where the devil are they?’ he said to himself, crossly, feeling an ever so slight sense of panic.
It definitely seemed to be a path he was on – but if this was the barrow it was immense – he seemed to have been walking along this rise for a few hundred yards, or maybe that was his sense of distance being confused by the fog, now eddying and swirling about him in an eerily conscious fashion; he baulked at what seemed to be a white shape, a figure, float past him on the left, but he turned and it dissolved into air.
Hurrying now he turned and strode forward, his heart hammering in his chest, his lips, almost against his will, starting to mouth the words of an ancient charm against enchantment, gripping his walking stick before him like a sword…
wið þane sara stice, wið þane sara slege,
wið þane grymma gryre,
wið ðane micela egsa þe bið eghwam lað,
and wið eal þæt lað þe in to land fare.
Sygegealdor ic begale, sigegyrd ic me wege,
wordsige and worcsige. Se me dege;
I encircle myself with this rod and entrust myself to God’s grace,
against the sore stitch, against the sore bite,
against the grim dread,
against the great fear that is loathsome to everyone,
and against all evil that enters the land.
A victory charm I sing, a victory rod I bear,
word-victory, work-victory. May they avail me;
And then he stopped in real alarm, gasping out loud as before him a huge grey form appeared in the mist, immense, wide, like a huge hooded figure towering over the back of the barrow… then another by its side… the vast blocking stones of the tomb along whose back he had, all this time, been walking.
He laughed to himself, glad he had found his goal; but where were his friends? He called again and it seemed far below him a weak strangled cry floated up through the earth from the depths of the tomb below. He walked forward and suddenly there beneath him was an open hole in the back of the barrow with a path leading down to one side… a large chamber of stones and a short dry-stone wall passage leading away from it towards the stones of the façade, and there, stood in the chamber, smoking a cigarette was Lewis; Barfield stood nearby running his hand over the lichen on the stones.
Lewis was leaning against the huge sarsen that made up the back of the chamber, but he flicked the butt away in disgust.
‘I’ve been calling you.’ Tolkien said.
‘Didn’t hear a thing.’ Lewis said and cleared his throat.
‘I’m cold and damp; this place is giving me the shivers; I almost thought you were some spirit when you peered over the edge then!’ Lewis visibly shivered.
‘I’m not happy here. The place seems somehow…’ he struggled to think of the words. ‘…haunted; no – lived in, perhaps, as if some spirit dwells here that never went away… It makes no sense; the chamber has been long empty, yet I still feel there are bones about… shall we go?’
‘We only just got here!’ Tolkien protested, walking around the hollow to the path that lead into the chamber.
‘It’s like winter has returned; dame kind is playing with us, gentlemen!’ he said, as a flurry of mist drifted over the chamber sending cool air downwards.
Barfield was investigating the eastern end of the passage;
‘It seems to continue this way – no doubt to the façade; and I suppose it was all once roofed as Stukeley seems to show it… but some treasure-hunter has dug in from the top in the intervening years, not able to move the facing stones…’
‘I wonder whether it was worth it? What ancient treasures were lurking here, do you think?’ Lewis asked. ‘Dragon-guarded gold?’
As if my some strange synchronicity at the mention of gold the pale disc of the sun suddenly appeared to the south, as the mist seemed to shift and change direction; it vanished again but a few moments later the disc appeared again, though now a pale silver, weak and powerless. The three friends looked round them as the chamber brightened, the creeping sense of dread having suddenly departed.
A few minutes later the friends were seated on the top of the barrow leaning against the facing stones as the mist thinned, borne away on an increasingly strong breeze; the sky was now blue above them and the sun too bright to directly look at; the grass around them had turned from a sickly acid green to a warm spring green, and, despite the breeze, the day was warming.
‘Oh I say, look!’ Barfield said, pointing to the north; above the mist the crest of Silbury stood proud in the sun, like a flat topped island in a sea of steaming milk; as they watched they noticed three figures emerge from the mist a few hundred yards down the path below the barrow. Heading the trio was Alexander Keiller, while behind him trod the young man with glasses and black hair who had received the blow on the head from the falling piece of tree root during the explosions in the henge ditch the day before; he was deep in conversation with a taller, heavily bearded man, who appeared to be in his seventies or eighties – his face heavily tanned, giving him the appearance of some Biblical patriarch – a sense compounded by the way the younger man, in his twenties, seemed to look up at him with a mixture of respect and awe.
‘We meet again!’ Keiller grinned as Tolkien, Barfield and Lewis clambered down from the mound to greet the new arrivals.
‘May I introduce you to my assistant, Stuart Piggott…’ the young man smiled broadly and proffered a hand to the friends.
‘…and Sir William Matthew Flinders Petrie.’ The old man nodded, and shook their hands, peering under his heavy white brows, his face remaining stern.
‘My word!’ said Lewis. ‘This is a lucky coincidence. I was only last week reading of your discovery of the Merneptah Stele.’
If Lewis had expected a friendly conversation amongst peers to ensue he was to be disappointed, as Flinders-Petrie merely nodded his head in what might have been taken as a gracious acceptance of some compliment. Instead he turned to Piggott and addressed him on some obscure question of Bronze Age axe typology, seemingly the topic they had been engaged in on the walk up.
Keiller flashed his schoolboy-grin. ‘Sir Flinders-Petrie is taking time out of a series of talks in London specially to see the re-erection of the first stone in the north-west quadrant tomorrow; we’re very honoured to have him here. He’s been such an inspiration; I read his accounts of his excavations in Egypt and the Near East as a young man, and I can honestly say if it wasn’t for him, I wouldn’t be here today! Will you be here to see it?’ he asked the friends.
Tolkien looked towards his companions not sure how to answer. They had kind of left the question of walking schedules up in the air when they had left Church Cottage that morning, having decided that they hadn’t yet exhausted Avebury’s many attractions, and that The Red Lion served uncommonly good beer. Tolkien expected Lewis to answer, but the latter merely shrugged, cleared his throat, and announced it was a possibility.
The same high-colour lay on Lewis’s cheeks as at breakfast – perhaps not a shaving rash after all, and not sunburn; he seemed quite flushed, and now Tolkien thought about it, he had seemed less talkative since they had left the church.
‘Everything okay, Jack?’ Tolkien asked.
Jack forced a smile. ‘I think that last cigarette may have dried my throat a bit; I’m feeling a little hoarse; a bit off colour in general really, now I think of it. Perhaps we should stay another night.’
Barfield put a hand on his friend’s arm.
‘I’m sure a lunchtime beer would sort out that throat.’
‘Yes, I’m sure you’re right. I don’t really feel like climbing Silbury Hill today. It’s something about this place, it’s put me out of sorts.’ and he visibly shivered.
Tolkien turned and looked up at the massive facing-stones, that stood like a row of jagged teeth along the front of the barrow. He felt Piggot approach.
‘These sarsen stones, used to seal the chamber are local, were dragged here from Marlborough, where there are great numbers of them still to be found.’ Piggott stated. ‘The chamber was excavated,’ he continued ‘at least partly, in the late 1800’s – though because of the blocking stones the excavator had to come in from the top, removing the capstones. There’s a single chamber at the western end of the passage, and the passage itself, made of drystone walling, is thought to continue up to the portal stones, which were put in position to block the passage when the grave fell out of use.’
‘And was anything found here?’ Tolkien asked.
‘Bones – from a number of individuals – disarticulated, and possibly brought from elsewhere.’
Lewis shivered again. ‘And is there anything left to be found?’
Piggot nodded. ‘It’s possible that behind the blocking stones are more chambers – we intend to dig here at some point in the future.’
‘And how do they relate to the round barrows up near the Sanctuary? Are these the same people?’ Lewis asked.
‘These are earlier – the long barrows predate the round mounds. They’re Stone Age – the occupants of the round barrows were the people who brought metalworking with them.’
‘Invaders?’ Lewis asked.
‘Very possibly. They seem to be different in stature than the long-barrow builders; a different race, perhaps.’
Piggott seemed to be choosing his words carefully, and talking not just for Tolkien and Lewis’s benefit but also for Petrie, whose Biblical form was standing on the mound nearby, brooding over the landscape. And then the great man spoke, like a man used to being listened to.
‘Invaders – yes; culture-bringers. We see the same in Egypt: a basic stone-age civilization supplanted by a far superior race.’
Tolkien bristled at the mention of superior races, but he didn’t get chance to voice his opinion as Petrie continued:
‘This type of barrow is ten-a-penny; what interests me is that’ he said, pointing his walking still back at the peak of Silbury, sailing like some green long ship on the sea of mist; ‘I am convinced there is still a burial to be found somewhere in that hill…maybe the overseer of the stone circle was buried there. After the war I excavated an area near its base, hoping, as I had in Egypt, to find some kind of subterranean passageway into the mound’s interior. When you’ve finished wasting your money on re-erecting stones, Keiller, I suggest you return to the mound.’
‘Maybe once the circle is finished.’ Keiller briskly replied, frowning.
‘The Stones themselves will tell you nothing; you’re merely undoing the work of previous generations who sought to destroy them; it’s not really archaeology at all; it’s a vanity project like Evan’s creations at Knossos... But that hill – surely the nearest thing on these isles to a pyramid – that is real archaeology; imagine what might lie there… maybe some evidence of a link between this part of the world and the Near East? Hmm?’
Tolkien was amused to see a combination of bashfulness and annoyance flash across Keiller’s face.
‘Perhaps a re-excavation of the hill would be in order, too, hey, Piggott?’ Keiller said, drawing the younger man into the discussion.
‘Indeed. But here, too.’ Piggot stammered, waving a hand at the long-barrow, ‘The earlier excavation was hardly complete, and perhaps some of the fallen stones here could be put back in place.’
Petrie stood prodding the mound with his walking stick, chewing his bottom lip – before once more turning towards Silbury and pointing at the hill, twice, emphatically before striding off along the length of the barrow.
‘A great man. A great man.’ Keiller said, his eyes watering. Then his frown lifted as he turned to the three friends. ‘Oh, and we are to lunch in the Red Lion on our return, and I would be honoured if you would join us.’ Keiller said. Tolkien received the distinct impression they were being asked to swell the numbers so that Keiller wouldn’t be left alone to burden the bear-like Petrie’s ill-humour.
It was Barfield who responded in the affirmative, which surprised Tolkien, as normally it was Lewis who would leap forward, stomach first, to accept such an offer. But Jack remained quiet, eyeing the stones with something akin to mistrust or even alarm.
Chapter 24: Old Man
Conall Astor was walking bare footed along the sun-baked dirt path that lead from the car park to the west of the village southwards to Silbury hill and on to the rise on which West Kennet Long-Barrow crouched.
The path was well trodden and wide, and he watched carefully to avoid stepping on the trails of ants that crossed it at various points; but he was also, after Shen’s story of the adder, on the lookout for snakes. The path followed the curve of the river, bordered by reeds and willows, under which Con sheltered every few minutes when the burning sun got too much.
Just north of Silbury Hill a small bridge traversed the stream and Conall took this, and followed the path as it curved about the hill until he reached the small car-park beside the Bath road that served the viewing platform for the hill. Here, just a few hundred yards across the road, lay the newly made crop circle; Conall debated for a few moments whether to look more closely at it but decided not to, already fearing he may have missed his appointment with Wolf.
From here he walked up the brow of the hill where the road rose beside it, and crossed it, taking the path towards the Swallowhead spring.
He sat for a moment on the sarsen stones that forded the spring to cool his dusty hot feet in the cold water. Further towards the source of the spring a family was sitting having a picnic, and he said hello as he passed, taking the path that cut diagonally across from West Kennet – the very path he had seen the large dog or cat taking that morning. He stopped and looked across the valley towards Waden hill at the spot where he had been sitting when he had seen the creature. It looked so far away. The hard-baked earth was free of any tracks that might have helped him discern if this creature had been flesh and blood rather than some spirit conjured from this sacred earth. He shivered, suddenly eyeing the trees down the slope to his left, wondering if some cool, dismissive canine eye was watching him. Then, like a punch in the gut he remembered what Tolkien in his letter had written – river of the bright dog…He stepped up his pace and headed for the barrow.
Having reached the summit of the hill, the breathless Con sat astride the back of this immense ancient tomb for a moment, lying flat on the grass and looking skywards to where the skylarks dipped and hovered; one of his arms cushioned his head like a pillow, while the other lay across his heaving chest, in his hand the owl’s feather which he had just removed from his hat-band. It was here that Shen had given him this gift all those many months ago.
Just twenty-four hours earlier he had strode back from the pub, adamant that his lightened mood had had nothing to do with the reappearance of this girl in his life; but now, letting the feather tickle the side of his face he saw that this had been a laughably naïve conclusion; clearly she hadn’t changed, and when he had left her a year ago he knew he was falling heavily for her. He had changed, though; and that wasn’t her fault – it was a fault of timing and circumstance.
He sat up and put the feather from him; but then turned and picked it up again, holding it to his chest, suddenly feeling as if he might cry out, remembering her beside him on the barrow, her warm, sonorous voice telling him he could kiss her if he wanted… and now she was with another, and it was all too late; and even if she were free, how could he ever allow himself to be happy with her after what had happened, knowing it was because of her he had stayed here, a few hundred miles too distant to do what Hayden had for Shen – too far to save that precious life.
He turned his head and looked towards the massive entrance stones of the barrow, following the line of sight to the Sanctuary on the brow of the hill where he had been this time yesterday; the crop circle in the field between the two points was harder to see from this lower angle, just ellipses of shadow in the corn. I can’t believe these are done with a rope and a plank of wood; he thought, the artists needed computer-precision to get such results; night-vision goggles, laptops, GPS devices - no doubt all were needed.
He thought of the group in the pub the night before: Croppies, Wolf had called them; it seemed hard to equate those boozed-up techno-hippies with this kind of art. But maybe that was the point; they relished their anonymity. It seemed strange, though – most young men would want to boast about what they had done; he thought about what he’d read concerning the Ancient Greek mysteries of the goddesses Demeter and Persephone at Eleusis, how the life-changing ‘secret’ revealed to the thousands of celebrants over the many centuries it had been celebrated had never been revealed – never – no single participant willing to spill the beans, not for fame nor fortune. Perhaps croppies were made of the same stuff – bearers of an awe-induced silence because of the nature of their work… mouthpieces for Gaia. No, he smiled. Mouthpieces for Demeter, the barley-goddess, known to the Romans as Ceres, goddess of the crops, from whom the word cereal was derived. And cerveza, he thought, once again wishing he’d not drunk as much over lunch. Perhaps, he continued musing, the croppies rejected the fame of modern artists because they rejected the ego, the ‘I’ that separated them from nature – the crop circles’ designs seemed to speak in the language of mathematics, in Pythagorean numbers, of cosmic harmony – they were a symbolic of song of the summer earth, an echo of Eden, calling us back… that’s if they were man-made, and not some strange of exudation of mathematics into nature, or the work of elves or aliens…
‘I saw a fairy once’… Melissa’s sing-song voice.
He smiled at the memory. Of course, she would have...
Just then he felt a strange hollow quiver rising from the mound – then another; the distant beat of a drum – Wolf’s drum, he reasoned, and so he stood and walked to the stones that flanked the entrance of the tomb.
The portal stones that fronted the entrance were huge, and Con entered the tomb by walking behind the largest of them, whereon he was presented with a dark chamber leading straight into the mound. This inner chamber was made of other great sarsen stones, and here, on each side of the passageway, stood smaller chambers, two each side and one at the end, the latter illuminated by a modern glass roof-light – five separate chambers in which the bones of the dead had once been placed – and it was in the chamber to the immediate right of the passage that Wolf Jones sat on a deerskin hide, eyes closed, drumming.
From the opposite chamber, to the left of the passage, came a voice. It was Ananda Coombe from the Red Lion; she smiled in greeting. Con went and sat beside her, exchanging pleasantries in a hushed tone as Wolf continued to drum, with short, deep guttural sounds coming now and again from his throat – and the odd snatch of words:
Hen wyr y gwlad! Dewch!
The earth beneath Con’s hands was cold and dusty, with a coolness that made it feel damp; it was tight in the chamber, and he pressed his back against the stone that formed its back to give Ananda some space; her light hair was tied back in a ponytail and above her round glasses, between her brows, was the faded remnants of three white horizontal lines with a red dot at their centre; a slight hint of sandalwood masked some of the damp staleness exuded by the stones.
Presently the drumming stopped, and Con found himself fixed by cool predator eyes that suddenly creased with mischief.
‘Welcome to my humble abode’ Wolf grinned, waving a hand. ‘You’ve met the lovely Sat Chit Ananada…’
‘She’s served me a fair few pints since I’ve been here.’ Con blushed.
‘Indeed – she’s the amṛta-bearing Mohini… initiatrix into the wisdom of the East…’ he smiled.
Ananda raised her eyes to the sky, despairing. ‘He’s so full of shit, ignore him.’ she said to Con, with a wink.
‘It’s good you’re here, Con. I’m drumming to Old Man.’
Con must have looked blank as Wolf continued, with hardly a pause.
‘This chamber – this is where the bones of the old man were found – the man whose bones are being relocated to the museum tomorrow. They should be
here.’
Wolf explained how the bones had been removed some forty years ago, after Stuart Piggott had excavated the Long-Barrow in the 60’s, had found the previously unknown side chambers hidden within the drystone walls between the facing stones and the previously excavated back chamber.
‘They’d been filled with stone – literally packed solid with material,’ Wolf explained, ‘so it was just assumed there was nothing there – just wall.
‘It’s usually assumed that newcomers that did this – they wanted this place shut. It had been here for a thousand years – the bones of the dead were housed here and then removed for ceremonies in the circle or up on Windmill Hill - but the Bronze Age newcomers sealed it up and put those massive sarsen stones out the front, blocking the tomb, ending the communication between the living and the dead.’
‘Like locking the doors of a church?’ Con mused.
‘Or to stop things getting out – the ancestral spirits of the people they had overrun. You don’t want mardy ancestors on your hands, mate…For generations their nameless bones were put here – until the last burial. You see Old Man was buried whole – I think he was the last of his tribe – the last shaman of the stone-wielding people. He was killed and placed here and then the tomb was filled.’
He stopped and rolled himself a cigarette.
‘Killed?’.
‘It’s one theory; the newcomers didn’t arrive peacefully – Old Man was killed before he was put here – an arrowhead was found buried in his neck bones – he’d been shot in the throat. And in the chamber over there, three females – a maiden, a mother and a crone; priestesses of the old religion, perhaps; no arrowheads there – I think they were probably drowned or strangled.’
Con blanched at the word drowned…
Ananda shifted and picked up a handful of dust.
‘Of course, as Wolf knows, I don’t wholly agree…’ she said. ‘I think we could look further than just the defeat of an old shaman by incoming metalworkers. It’s too easy to fall into the trap of interpreting a mythical, ritual occurrence as history...’
Wolf slapped his own wrist in mock admonishment; ‘Ananda has a habit of trying to fit our prehistory into a Hindu framework,’ Wolf explained ‘Don’t you my dear?!’
Ananda shrugged. ‘I started off as a Hindu but then discovered druidism… and I’ve been trying to unite the two ever since. The Celtic and Hindu world were parts, albeit separated geographically, of the same cultural complex, the Indo-European language group… and I see no reason why both didn’t spring from a single root culture, a Neolithic predecessor - so why not use Eastern parallels to illuminate western? I run a class at the Hindu temple in Swindon on the subject…’
‘Tell him about the posset of milk.’ Wolf prompted.
‘Another time… I doubt he’s interested…’ she said, eyeing Con for signs of boredom.
‘No, please…’ Con prompted.
‘Have you heard the folk tradition that Silbury was raised in the time it took a posset of milk to boil?’
Con nodded. ‘I read it somewhere, yep.’
‘There’s a Hindu rite known as the pravargya rite, celebrated at dawn in which an earthenware pot filled with milk is heated over a fire, when then boils over it is supposed, through a kind of sympathetic magic, to bring about the dawn and sunrise. The milk, you see, is associated with the cow or cows of dawn in Hinduism, or a beautiful goddess named Uṣas; and the rite causes the cow or Uṣas to be released from her place of hiding or imprisonment under the horizon, or in the celestial river Rasā …the boiling milk pushes off the lid of the pot, which is supposed to echo Indra destroying the monster Vṛtra ‘the coverer’, who has previously stolen the dawn.’
‘We tried it this spring equinox. Fookin’ disaster’ Wolf cut in, ‘sat atop Silbury in the dark and rain; I’m crouched down trying to keep the wind from blowing out the fire, and when it did light the milk took about half hour to boil and then boiled over and put out the fire.’
‘Maybe next year’ Con said; Wolf and Ananda looked at each other briefly, something passing between them that Con missed.
‘So you think the Silbury folktale is a memory of a rite observed here that was similar to the Hindu one?’ he asked.
Ananda nodded.
‘A midwinter or spring rite, designed to release the sun imprisoned over winter.’ She said.
‘Like the Japanese Amaterasu myth?’ Con said.
Ananda lifted a brow in surprise, ‘indeed…’
‘Christ, here we go… thought this might happen… ‘, Wolf laughed… ‘welcome to University Challenge…and on our left we have Professor Astor, and on our right Guru Ananda Coombe’
Con laughed. ‘I researched a ton of midwinter solar myths when I was doing the PhD – trying to find a rite that might fit Stonehenge… the Amaterasu myth has the sun-goddess hiding in a cave and tricked out by a dancing goddess who exposes herself, making the other gods laugh – so Amaterasu peeks out to see what they’re laughing at and thereby the sun is released. That myth, as I recall, was probably derived from a Hindu original taken to Japan along with Buddhism.’ Ananda was nodding, so he continued; ‘But it misses the cave as serpent symbolism that you find in the Hindu and Indo-European myths… the cows stolen by the serpent which are then rescued by the hero – be that Indra or whoever, the forerunner of the whole dragon-slaying mythos.’
Ananda was still nodding. ‘Where did you find this one, Wolf? Someone who knows his eastern myth!’ she laughed.
‘The serpent, Vrtra – the concealer, the coverer…’ she continued, ‘he represents the static condition that prevents new growth - be that night, or winter… anything that conceals or dims the sun, fertility, or anything creative. He’s not evil, per se, he represents inertia…holding up the circle of creation.’ Ananda remarked, her voice echoing within the chamber… just like a stone cave, Con thought.
‘And he’s beheaded, as I recall, to release what he has captured?’ Con asked.
‘Beheaded, dismembered… or his throat simply cut, as often he has swallowed the sun, or cows, or Uṣas, or soma…the magical drink…and the wounding releases a stream of magic words that can grant immortality.’
‘And the man buried here…how does he fit into this?’
‘I think might have been enacting a similar kind of rite – the release of soma, or the sun, from the throat – so not necessarily the victim of racial or cultural attack…’ she said pointedly, looking at Wolf, who grinned in return.
‘So, he was the serpent Vritra, and this is his cave?’ Con asked, peering about him.
Ananda paused; ‘It’s not that simple…’ she began; ‘as I said, the serpent represents stasis, inertia; a state that needs to be ended, usually through violence; he's the dragon who hoards gold or virgins but has no use for either… hence the need of a hero to come and rescue what is imprisoned…’
Con thought of the letter of Tolkien’s he’d read earlier after leaving Shen’s:
‘What struck me was the font – and the cup in the hands of the headless figure; the cup I had Bilbo steal from Smaug; I, of course, got it from Beowulf… but it’s a common motif – the stealing of the vessel of immortality, the Holy Grail… the mead of knowledge…from the dragon…
‘– but it is a version of a much bigger theme,’ Ananda continued; ‘namely, the cosmogony, the creation. Now, there’s plenty of Celtic legends that have a hero or a saint being decapitated, and springs or wells appearing where the head falls – like St Winifred - in these cases the beheaded figures aren’t evil, as theirs is usually a willing sacrifice.’
Con was thinking deeply, drinking in what Ananda was saying; twisting it around in his mind in an attempt to understand why this man had been slain over five millennia earlier.
‘You think he was killed in a re-enactment of a creation myth?’
‘In some Hindu myths the universe comes about through the dismemberment of the primal man, Puruṣa; the force of creation is latent within him and he needs to be broken apart for it to be released; it’s the same image as the release of the sun from the serpent, only he’s not hoarding it negatively; he’s akin to the vegetation god who must be dismembered and planted so that he can be reborn.
Con thought of John Barleycorn, the sacrificed man, giving his lifeblood for the good of the people…snippets of the song he had heard at the pub with Shen the day before flashed through his mind:
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.
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.
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.
‘Basically…’ Ananda explained, ‘the cosmos is seen as stemming from an anthropomorphic being, be it the Puruṣa, the Cosmic man, of the Rigveda – or the Iranian Gayōmart, he holds the potential creation within him, locked away, so he is dismembered…and from him the world is formed.’
‘Like the giant Ymir in Norse mythology,’ Wolf chipped in, ‘who becomes the world –
From Ymir's flesh the earth was formed,
and from his bones the hills,
the heaven from the skull of that ice-cold giant,
and from his blood the sea…’
‘Yes, it’s the same image,’ Ananda agreed, ‘he literally becomes the earth, the sky – he is creation itself, formed through a world-creating sacrifice. Like the corn he is buried and new life sprouts from him. It’s an image that probably stems from planting myths, I would think…death precedes life.’ she mused.
Con creased his brow in confusion.
‘And this man buried here…’
‘…died in a re-enactment of that first creation;’ she re-iterated, ‘he’s what they call a foundation sacrifice; he’s the original first man, the primal ancestor – the sacrificed god – and his wound in the throat, opening him up at the neck, releasing the forces of creation....’
‘And why him? Why was he special?’
She answered:
‘He was already marked as special; he was lame, disabled by spina bifida, and he had a supernumerary toe… yet he’d lived until old age; he couldn’t hunt, or farm, certainly couldn’t fight. So, others in the community would have had to look after him; I think maybe he was a priest or shaman, as you suggested Wolf, he certainly had gifts that meant he was cared for, not left to die. Nature had already marked him out as different. That’s why I don’t think he was killed in a war between tribes. I don’t think he would have been fighting, for a start. It’s clearly a different death – a sacrifice, and when you look at all these old myths of throats being cut or beheading to release the powers of fertility, or the waters of rebirth, or the milk or mead of immortality… I think that explains the neck wound.’
‘His burial here creates the land, forms it; makes it fertile;’ Wolf said; ‘so you can see why I don’t want him stuck in a museum, divorced from the land he gave his life for.’
The chamber became suddenly cool and Con gazed about him at the drystone walls; the low ceiling formed from an immense capstone – feeling, for the first time, claustrophobic. Here, where he sat, the corpses of the dead had once been piled; reeking, flyblown, or perhaps browned sinewy limbs, desiccated from exposure elsewhere; and here, not in fiction or legend, but in truth, a poor man, lame and riddled with pain all his life, always an outsider, perhaps considered an oddity, a freak, perhaps feared, had been finally laid to rest, his throat gashed open by the killing arrow that had sailed so swiftly as to embed itself in his spine; he imagined the spill of crimson over the white curls of his chest, and the silent last gasps of his blood-flecked lips. For the first time he felt no sense of connection with those buried here – they had always been like himself, just older, in different clothes, like a costume drama… but now they seemed wholly alien; inhabiting world too far away to bridge, both temporally and culturally – like the ash-covered Saddhus he’d seen pictures of on the banks of the Ganges, with matted dreadlocks, sitting amongst the dead…
‘He’s the first man, the great ancestor;’ Wolf said, ‘the Old One; Eldest; stag and blackbird’s brother. His body is the land; the land is his body. And we are formed from him, too, in turn – from the flow of his magical words… released by the arrow-wound.’
In the beginning, thought Con, was the Word…
Silence followed as each thought over what had been spoken of, the ancient sacrifice that had been enacted on this very spot; the pent-up forces of creation released by such a violent act, making him, Old Man, holy, a martyr, even…
The silence was ended by a soft, rhythmic pulse as Wolf began to drum again…
Con closed his eyes and lay back against the cool sarsen stone that formed the back of the chamber; part of him excited, part of him hoping no visitors would walk in and see him like this.
Dub-dub-dub-dub
And then Wolf Jones began to sing in a deep voice:
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through blood and bone
And pelt and claw
Come and follow me
down to the ancient tree
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through ice and fire
And Thunders roar
Sons leave your childhood lands
Take your ash spears in your hands
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through red cap, white spot
Vision’s Door
Wolf-skin warrior
Stag and blackbird’s brother
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Since the beginning
Old Man is singing
Through voices of those
Who have gone before
Spirits of the land
Dance with the warrior-band
Penbleidd, Ulfhednar
Wolf, Outlaw
Darkness; for a long time; Con shifted to get more comfortable… but the drumming had begun to lull him, and spaces began to lengthen between his thoughts…
Had he slept? Time seemed to have passed, but he remained still, the drum reverberating around the chamber, almost sickening in its intensity, causing a palpitation deep within his chest.
Dum dum dum dum dum dum dum dum
Seconds? Ages? past.
He opened his eyes, or at least his inner eyes, and saw willow trees arched above him, but billowing and morphing strangely, and he suddenly realised he was watching them through water…it’s only my imagination, he thought…
Beside the stream, above him, seen through the ripples, a wolf was pacing back and forth, with Wolf Jones’ eyes…
Dub-dub-dub-dub
And then Con was himself crouched beside the stream; looking down at his reflection – at a face red with blood or some kind of paint, and over his own eyes the amber eyes of the wolf, whose skin he wore over his shoulders, and whose boneless front limbs were tied in front of his breastbone. His hair long and curled hung from his brow and touched the water… and those eyes, predator’s eyes… his own… and something behind the eyes began to speak – a voice, again his own, but also Wolf’s; and there was Wolf Jones sat opposite against a great fir-tree, the skull and antlers of a stag on the trunk above his head…
‘If you do not make something of your life, little wolf…’
Then a long pause.
‘…I will take it from you…’
And then, he seemed to see, from afar, crouched in a dark cave formed from grey sarsen stones, set on the rise above the stream, a crooked man, grey bearded, and bent to one side; eyes glinting from a small fire over which sat a clay vessel, its contents frothing and boiling; and from his throat a golden light pouring down, like sunlight…on his brow antlers, no, the curled horns of a ram, no – just matted hair…
…From the beginning, Old Man is singing…
And he was grinning, strong white teeth under the matted hair, under antlers; face painted with red-earth, two meanders, serpents or rivers, down each cheek from temple to jaw; darkening as the stone above him seemed to lower, to crush down on him – yet still he smiled; under stone; under hill…
And the feeling of guilt welling up, repressed, of joy repressed threatening to burst… yet imprisoned within him; static, dead with inertia… and then a whistle and twang and the feeling of the flint blade of the arrow piercing his throat and lodging in his vertebrae, and the light bursting out of his wound, jolting him awake, his heart hammering, as fast as the drum…
Dub-dub-dub-dub dub dub dub
The tempo of the drum had changed and somewhere miles distant, a voice from some other time, Wolf Jones’s voice, was telling him to come back, to return.
Da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da-da
How long had they sat like this? His body was stiff as if he’d slept for a long time… minutes? Hours? Wolf’s voice came again, closer this time, telling him to slowly stretch and to open his eyes when ready and to sit up slowly…
Con felt an odd sense of elation; and the need to tell Wolf what he had seen, but Wolf held up his hand.
‘What you saw is between you and Spirit’ he said. ‘Remember what you saw. It came to you from the ancestors, from Old Man who is within each of us – and behind him the animal powers all the way back to the first fish in the first oceans…’
Con sat in silence. Of course, it’s all imagination, he thought to himself; yet the stark warning remained in his mind; if you don’t make something of your life, I will take it from you; and the sense of discomfort in his throat, sharp, deep, yet offering the painful promise of release of feelings long imprisoned...
Chapter 25: The White Cow
The stone lay prone on the grass beside the hole that the next day would house it. It had been scrubbed clean of the dirt that had enclosed it for nearly half a millennia, buried by pious men seeking to undo the work of the devil; now, it had once more been brought to the light of day, and its original socket excavated. Beside it lay piles of large wooden poles and ropes with which it would be levered into place.
Sir Flinders Petrie cast a cold eye on the scene; crude stone and mud and damp; he shivered and pined for his home in Jerusalem. At least there’s no sand, he thought – recalling his own excavations in Egypt; sand that covered everything, got into your eyes, your hair, the food you were eating; and the infernal heat – but the stuff they had dug up – finely carved stone, bearing hieroglyphs, so much more advanced than this primitive temple, here on the remotest edge of the civilised world. And that idiot Keiller jumping around like an excited puppy; how could he get so excited about such a barbarian edifice? All his hangers on, jumping at his every word simply because he is rich. This one, though, he thought, isn’t impressed by him, this sallow-faced small man, Tolkien, I think he said his name was.
Tolkien too had approached the stone and laid a small hand on the brushed sarsen. He turned to Petrie, coughed, and began to mumble.
‘If you’ll excuse me, am I to understand that you excavated Silbury at some time in the past?’
Petrie nodded, and stroked his beard.
‘Indeed. In the hope of finding a tomb or such-like inside, but all we chanced upon was dirt.’
Tolkien hesitated before answering.
‘It’s a strange thing; the hill, I mean. Strange they should build something so immense and yet, empty…’
‘My thoughts exactly; I had, of course, dug many pyramids in Egypt before coming here, and crude though it was, I thought perhaps we might find that it was built in imitation of such colossal tombs… even that an emissary from the east had come and died here. But we are supposing a grandeur that simply was not present. The people who built these monuments were not civilized in the way you or I think of the Ancient Egyptians, for instance. No Cheops resides in Silbury Hill because, alas, these barbarians possessed no Cheops…’
Tolkien sniffed against the cooling late afternoon. And yet they possessed the wherewithal to build this immense circle, he thought, ‘Maybe civilization is not to be rated by its physical works, but by its artistic achievements, its stories, its myths…’
‘Yes, but where are the myths of the people that built this circle or the hill?’ Petrie scoffed. ‘Where is the artistry in these rude blocks of unworked stone, say, in comparison to the art of Egypt, to the temples of finely worked columns bearing inscriptions to the gods? No! Civilization was brought to such places at a later date… Egypt included – you think the height of pharaonic art the work of such primitives? No – they were brought in from outside.’
‘Egyptian civilization was foreign, not indigenous?’
‘Of course! Nothing of worth could have emerged from Black Africa; its peoples are lazy, primitive – no we are seeing the importation of civilization from further north, from Europe…what of worth ever came out of Africa?’
Tolkien reddened and bit his tongue. I came out of Africa, he thought, thinking of his first few years of life in Bloemfontein. Absolute poppycock! This was the sort of idea now breeding war in Europe, he thought angrily.
‘There’s a grandeur in Egyptian civilization that is absent from the primitive mind,’ Petrie was continuing, ‘and clearly has origins elsewhere. Do you imagine the shaven-headed priests watching for the rising of Sirius over their sublime temples to be on par with tribesmen living in their mud-huts as they still do today?’
‘Sirius?’
‘Sirius, yes, Sopdet, in the Egyptian tongue – there is one fact that stands out above all else – their astronomical sophistication; their reckoning of the year based on an accurately observed event…where is the accuracy here?!’ he scoffed, waving his stick around him. ‘Yet in Egypt, pin-point precision…’
‘Pray, go on…’
‘The Egyptian year began with the helical rising of Sirius, that is its first appearance in the sky after disappearing from view for some 70 days. This event was of acute importance as it heralded the flooding of the Nile.’
Tolkien forgot Petrie’s racism for a moment as these facts sank in. Sirius…the dog star… and the flood…. He thought of Boann and the flood that created the Boyne…of her dog, Dabilla, who drowned with the goddess, whose path across the sky was obviously a reflection of the river on earth.
Should I tell him, he wondered, that elements of his precious Egyptian myth are also found amongst such ‘primitives’ of prehistoric Britain?
‘And so, they built their temples oriented to the exact point of the rising of this star on that date…’ Petrie continued, ‘the herald of the Nile flood…which they saw represented in heaven as the Milky Way… beside which Sopdet majestically resides.’
‘And how was this Sop…?’
‘…Sopdet…’
‘Sopdet, depicted – a dog?’
Petrie chuckled. ‘A dog! No. Canis Major is the Roman name for the constellation. Sopdet, my good man, was depicted either as a female figure, usually interpreted as the goddess Isis, and otherwise a couchant white cow in a boat, such as depicted famously at Dendera.’
White cow… Boannd; Good Lord! Tolkien thought; as if the dog-star and flood wasn’t enough, here we find the Lady herself.
(author’s note: it wasn’t for another three decades after this event that archaeologists discovered Boann’s ‘dwelling’, the passage-grave of Newgrange, known in Irish as Brú na Bóinne, ‘womb of the white cow’, was aligned on the winter solstice sunrise and the rising of Sirius – this would have been even more ammunition for Tolkien…as would the date - most of these British sites pre-dated the Pyramids; West Kennet predated them by 1100 years...)
‘Interesting; white cow…’ he said, trying to prod Petrie for more information. ‘What would be the connection between the cow and the stars, then, I wonder?’
‘The cow is a very important symbolic image in Egypt, and often associated with the sky; Isis, I have mentioned; the goddess Nut, who is the Goddess of the Milky Way, is also often depicted as a cow stretched out over the heavens with stars along her belly, or with each of her feet in the four corners of the sky… or there is the Goddess Hat-Hor, they are all related, Hat-hor appears with cow's ears and horns, and is probably the cow-goddess Ashtaroth or Ishtar of Asia; she swallows the sun each night and gives birth to it each morning at daw; her very name means ‘house of Horus’, that is House of the Sun, roughly speaking; what else is the sky but this, a house for the sun?’ he said, the corner of his mouth curling, enjoying his own deduction.
At mention of the sun he turned his sun-brown face heavenwards, frowning at the pale disc that still offered little warmth through the mist that still clung to the circle and river valley.
‘… and so,’ Tolkien asked, trying to keep composed, ‘as you had hoped to find evidence that Silbury had some connection to Egypt, how would you have felt if there had been survivals of myth here, and you had been able to link these sites here with, say, the flooding of a river, and a white cow, linked to the Milky Way and Sirius?’
‘My good man, I would have felt justified in my assumptions, and it would have been of unprecedented importance in my theory that culture had been spread wide by what I term the ‘Dynastic race’! But there is no such link. No such myth. No Pharaoh, I fear, lies in state in Silbury awaiting discovery, for all the tales of gold-clad kings buried within – though I continue to hope. And for all Keiller’s enthusiasm over this crude circle, this is a site of little importance in the history of western civilization… granted it is of local interest, but compared to Neqada, or Abydos or Tanis…’ he grimly shook his head. ‘They couldn’t even align it properly north!’ he laughed, ‘it is skewed, as one might expect of such primitive work.’
Tolkien did his best not to smile as he bade Petrie adieu and shuffled away to re-join Lewis and Barfield.
‘Tell me, Jack’ he said, ‘is it wrong to withhold what one believes to be a fact of great importance if one believes that fact will be misused by the recipient?’
Jack shrugged and coughed.
‘I don’t know, and I don’t feel well enough to really think about it either. It’s grown very cold and I think I may have to repair to bed; my throat is agony!’
Barfield looked over at Petrie and smiled.
‘I take it you mean your discoveries about the Kennet?’
‘Indeed. I fear they would be used in this instance to justify a rather racist and inaccurate interpretation of the site.’
‘Then I would say you are at liberty to remain silent.’ He clapped Tolkien on the back, but Tolkien’s frown remained.
Walking a few yards behind Lewis, Barfield turned to Tolkien with a look of concern on his face.
‘What is it, Ronald? Did what he say bother you that much?’
Tolkien shook his head. ‘No, foolish opinions don’t bother me; it’s just I was thinking of my work… you remember a little while ago when I read my Eärendil poem at the Inklings?’
Barfield nodded.
‘And how I said it was an explanation of the appearance of a certain star – and how he came as a herald of a new birth to come, of hope after the flood…’
‘Yes, I recall that…the flood that drowned Numenor.’
Tolkien didn’t continue; he paused and prodded the ground before him with his walking stick
‘Ronald?’
‘It’s…it’s just… what when something you tell yourself is just a product of your imaginings…. rests on foundations…or seems to…’ he cleared his throat.
‘what if you were to invent a story only to discover it’s been told before, long ago, and not just once, but many times… what does that say about the source of your creativity, of the story? I mean it’s not exact – but the themes – the flood, the herald in the form of the star… even the star as a mariner…what if it’s not so much invention as uncovering, or remembering? Somehow hearing the distant echo of some ancestral voice?’
And Barfield suddenly understood Tolkien’s fraught expression was not so much that of concern but of bemused shock.
‘And 'mid this tumult Kubla heard from far; Ancestral voices prophesying war! Barfield said.
‘I think I need a pipe!’ Tolkien said. 'And a beer.'
Chapter 26: The Hollow Hill
The street was empty now of the tourist cars that had lined it earlier, and a sense of calm had descended within the circle. Conall stood for a moment at the junction of Church Street, fighting the urge to walk down to the cottage and see if Shen was in. He’d be seeing her later, he reasoned, and besides, what if Hayden had decided to come back after his shift? Despite telling himself he was okay with the situation, a wave of emptiness in his stomach showed him that this wasn’t really the case.
The strange twisted feeling inside strengthened his resolve to continue, as planned, to the Red Lion.
Shenandoah! He hadn’t been able to get her out of his thoughts this day. He had allowed himself to think of her more than he should have – it was like a good pain – like scratching an itch or a chilblain – pleasurable but painful at the same time.
He had gone back to his van and dozed for a while after visiting the Long-Barrow, but Shen had crowded into his thoughts and he had allowed himself the unimaginable – to remember in detail, despite having repressed the thought for so long, the events of that day the previous May when he’d walked with her to the Swallowhead spring and they’d sat on the stones in the stream and paddled their feet in the icy water.
...
The sight of her little white feet moving hither and thither in the brook had made him feel both strangely happy and weak at the same time; he’d longed for their feet to touch, but he hadn’t dared move closer to her; she had turned her head to one side and looked at him with an expression of curiosity and amusement which he’d not been able to read. Still her feet, small and delicate like a child’s, moved slowly, stirring clouds of chalk from the bottom of the stream. She seemed to be waiting for him to do something but a few moments passed and others had come and crossed the stones, and so they had continued up towards West Kennet with a silence between them and a growing tension, fuelled by unspoken and un-acted upon desire. The ground was covered in clover, and he wished he hadn’t put his boots back on – he longed to feel the earth under his bare feet, to feel connected to the being on which they trod, that fed them, and had ultimately brought them into being.
On the banks of the barrow they had sat, catching their breath under the warm sun; he had lain beside her in the long grass, the skylarks tumbling above them, as his heart beat wildly and his mouth became dry, and he wished he had the courage to do or say something – yet he lay there in a maddening state of torpor until she had smiled and said, simply, ‘You can kiss me, you know.’
He had smiled and refused, saying if he kissed her now she’d never know whether he’d done it because she had asked or because he had wanted to, to which she laughed, agreeing – but she had given him the go ahead, and the nervousness he had felt, which had been founded on doubt that she felt anything like the same as him, dissolved. And so a few minutes later, as she lay with her eyes closed against the high afternoon sun he leant over her, and brushed her mouth with his, his chest pounding with anxiety and happiness; and with a trembling hand he stroked her soft cheek. He had kissed her again, her hair in the breeze ticking the side of his face – he pulled back to move it aside, and she had said that it was annoying; ‘No, it’s beautiful’ he had replied.
After a while she had stroked his hair and then turned and lent on her elbows, and had pulled her bag towards her, telling Con she had something for him.
‘I found this yesterday when I was walking back from Silbury. I thought I might give it to you.’
It was a cream coloured feather with smudges of chocolate brown along the edge of one side - an owl’s feather. He took it in his hands and twirled it about, then had stroked her cheek with it and placed it in her hair, smiling.
‘Thank you’ he had said, ‘you look like one of your ancestors.’ and had held her gaze; different now that the tension had gone and he could look at her fully, still scared a little, still nervous of this beautiful woman; how lovely it had been to look into those chocolate eyes, that sometimes seemed almost black, sometimes amber; but now in the sunlight were like pale autumn leaves; and the joy he felt when they closed as she had moved towards him and kissed him again; a gentle brushing of the lips, no more, and his hand holding her hair against her cheek.
...
Such joy and promise – that it should have come to nothing; that it should have been tainted by his folly. That he should lose her; and find her again but too late, as she was with another; another for whom she would close her lovely eyes when they kissed…
The knot in the stomach was like a knife.
The beer was cold, and he took a few large gulps then carried it to his usual chair beside the window. Taking his notebook from his jacket pocket he opened it on the notes he’d made earlier that afternoon from a letter of Tolkien’s, now safely ensconced in his camper.
He’d not written out all of the letter – just the salient parts – the things he’d puzzled over; here, again, was a mention of the Kennet, but related to an old poem he’d not heard of before ‘The Pearl’ – but the imagery of which had sent shivers through him, with its talk of loss, and of the hope of finding again, in some future, those who had departed this world.
That image of stones glimmering like shining stars in the stream…
It had been the October before she died.
Melissa and her husband had bought an old cottage on the North Welsh hills above the River Ogwen, a few minutes’ drive out of Bangor where Melissa had begun to study for a degree in Celtic. There had been room in the house to stay but Conall had chosen to stay in the caravan in the garden – partly so he didn’t have to live under the same roof as that prick Anthony, but partly because here he could see the peaks of the Carneddau mountains; once, when they were turned copper by the setting sun he imagined they were peaks of a vast rising tidal wave, and felt a sudden thrill of panic.
Melissa had seemed happy then; dreamy, even. Anthony still argued and put her down, but she seemed not to rise to it; and one evening, when Anthony had got drunk and fallen asleep, Con and Melissa had driven to a destination she had teased would be something he would absolutely love...
They had crossed Menai bridge and headed south, parallel to the Menai Straits; after ten minutes or so they had turned north-west and had parked in a small lane in flat farmland. The sun had nearly disappeared, but there was enough light to cross the field and take the path beside a small stream. Melissa had called Con to the stream’s edge and taking off her shoes waded in and lent over, feeling the riverbed for something; smiling, she had come back to the bank with her treasure – a couple of quartz crystals.
‘This river – it’s the Afon Braint – named after a goddess! This is Holy Mother Brigantia, the High One, and look – here are her star-stones!’ she beamed at him.
Con had raised his eyebrows and smiled, watching her wading out of the water, her massed dark curls flopped over her face.
‘You seem happier.’
‘I am. The muse has returned…’ she said, her blue eyes flashing.
‘You’re writing songs again? No wonder Anthony is moody!’
‘Anthony doesn’t know.’ She said, shooting him a serious look that told him that he should not mention any of this to the absent man, who had never encouraged her musical ambitions, though had always been happy to enjoy the money it brought.
She had put her boots back on and lead Con away from the stream towards what appeared to be a low hillock in a field of short grass in a neighbouring field, not far from a number of farm buildings; a herd of cattle eyed them as they approached, lowing nervously. Walking closer, however, Con had soon seen that the mound was ringed by grey stones, set within a perfectly circular bank – and to its north east a stone lined squat doorway, leading into the dark interior of the green belly-like rise of the earth:
‘Bryn Celli Ddu – the mound in the dark grove – the womb of the mother…’ Melissa whispered.
‘Jesus, Mel! I wanted to find this place while I was up here!’
‘You’ve heard of it?’ she asked, surprised.
‘Course. I am doing my PhD on these sites, you know, you twat!’
‘Oh, I thought you were just doing henges…’
‘Yeah…duh! ‘, he said, pointing at an information board that stood near the perimeter fence. He gestured at a reconstruction of the building of the mound, with the first image clearly showing the site as a henge with a stone circle, before the later passage-grave, the mound, had been built.
‘Might help if you read these things,’ he said sarcastically, ‘it started as a henge.’
She spun on the spot. ‘I don’t want other people’s ideas crowding out my own,’ she grinned; ‘so, how old is it, Doctor?’
‘Oh, about four thousand years. And it’s aligned on midsummer sunrise.’
‘The passage? How fucking cool! I didn’t know that!’
‘No, they cunningly hide such information in books and on information boards.’ He mock-chided. ‘It is cool, but a bit of a pisser for me…’
‘Why?’
‘Because I’m arguing that midwinter was more important date.’ He explained. ‘But it’s a later site, the mound at least, than some of the other sites I’ve looked at, so I’ll let the builders off… Newgrange, in Ireland, is just like Bryn Celli, but it points to the midwinter sunrise…’
Mel was twirling about pointing… ‘So that’s… south-east, yeah?’
Con nodded. ‘Whereas this chamber…’
‘Is north-east…’ she finished. ‘Does it still align? – I mean, I remember you mentioning the stars moving over time?’
‘It still aligns; the stars move, but not the sun, which is why Stonehenge is still aligned on the solstices.’
‘Fuck. Can you remember that solstice at Glasto?’ she laughed. They’d been camping on site the year she’d played – having refused to be put-up elsewhere and flown or driven in. Con had delighted in the kudos of being seen in the company of Mellifluous… but Mel herself had found it increasingly uncomfortable, the constant recognition. They’d gone to the purpose-built stone circle away from the main stages, and got hideously drunk, dancing in the firelight with the crusties to the sound of numerous drums; then some travellers tore down one of the main fences and hundreds broke in before security could stop them, and Con and Mel had gone back to their tents to find they had been broken into and half his stuff nicked. Rock ‘n’ Fucking Roll… bastards…
…
‘We’ll have to come here at midsummer, Con!’ she had cooed, approaching the twilit mound.
Bowing their heads they had gone inside the low passage, feeling their way in the dark, their hands either side on smooth, damp walls; crouching low they had reached an internal chamber, its back side was open to the sky where only half the mound had been reconstructed; originally they would have been at the heart of the mound, earth on all sides, but the modern rebuilding had left half open to lend light to the chamber. At its centre stood a stone the size of a grown man or woman, smooth, like a fossilised trunk of a tree; Melissa had placed her arms around the stone and kissed it.
‘Holy Mother Brigantia!’ she had said, and taking the quartz stones she had gathered from her pocket she had struck the two together – causing a spark – but no ordinary spark – a flash, like lightning within a storm cloud – but from inside the stones rather than outside. She did it again. A smell of acrid burning hit his nostrils.
‘Mother stones… stones of light…. Stars in river of the night…’ she had said. And all the while, the pillar, like Lot’s wife, stood before her, just visible in the half-light of evening. Con looked up through the gap in the chamber; the star Altair shone in the south, below the cross of Cygnus, taking flight through the faint blush of the Milky Way that had just begun to become visible above him, and a paleness to the east heralded the rising of the moon, still hidden behind the trees.
‘This is a palace of the Sidhe; a doorway to the fairy realm; the mother’s blessing, the bendith y mamau dwell here – and have done for all time…I saw a fairy once…’
Con had looked at the ecstatic look on her face. Kooky as ever, he had thought.
‘It wasn’t like Tinkerbell…’ she said, ‘it was in a field near here; it was like the earth, and was dancing in the field, kind of jumping around…somersaulting.’
‘Like the earth?’
‘Earthy, kind of reddish-brown… like one of those bog bodies they’ve found…not small, not tiny, I mean… 4 foot high or so? There’s an Irish folktale I read about, the tale of Selena Moor, where a woman is held captive by the fairies and explains to her human lover that the fairies were star-worshippers who lived long ago… I think they’re the spirits of the people who built these mounds and still dwell here…’.
‘As ghosts?’ Con had asked.
Mel had shrugged. ‘What is a ghost? I think it’s all consciousness on some level… maybe when you die you can become fixed to some part of the land – a tree, or hill, stream, maybe. Maybe you just blend into the consciousness behind everything; so, there’s no difference between ghost, human, spirit, fairy, whatever…’
She opened her blue eyes wide and stood, arms outstretched; the silver and blue dress she’d casually thrown on under a thick crochet cardigan hanging loose like the robe of some ancient priestess.
‘I call thee, beautiful ones, Lordly Ones, that dwell in the hollow hills. Inspire me; give me voice!’ and as she clashed the stones together above her head, causing them to flare, she began to chant, her voice high, ethereal, in words Con couldn’t understand.
‘Dewch Bendith y Mamau; dewch in mewn; I’r fryn yr hen bobl… ellyllon, ellyllon… dw’i’n eisiau bwyta… y pair dadeni…’ she half-sang, in the broken Welsh she was beginning to learn…
He had lit a cigarette and she had frowned, continuing to sing, but ushering him towards the gap in the chamber, wrinkling her nose.
And then the chamber lit up as the lights in the yard of the farmhouse in the next field went on, and Con and Melissa had stifled laughter, suddenly quiet.
‘That farmer’s going to think he’s heard the fairies!’ Con grinned. Then he frowned - ‘he’s not going to come in here with a gun, is he?’
‘This is Wales, you dick, not the Wild West!’
‘Mel, I’m pleased you’re happier.’ Con had said, when the light had been extinguished and the farmer gone back to the safety of his cottage.
Mel had looked at the floor, smiled and then raised her head.
‘I’m in love, Con.’
He didn’t have to ask if it was someone else – he knew it.
‘But Anthony mustn’t know, not yet. He’d do everything he could to ruin it and I can’t have that. I’m happy, Con! I’ll leave him in time, I just need more time.’
Time. One thing Melissa did not have. Six months later they’d found her face down in that same stream from which she’d plucked the quartz stones that night. Afon Braint. River of the Brigantia; the High One. Anthony had found out about her affair. He’d marched into the University and confronted the new man, a fellow in the Welsh Department – and put the fear of God into him, and threatened all kinds of stuff that had driven him to end it with Mel…
And she’d asked me to come up and help her sort it out and I hadn’t, thought Con.
They had left the mound to find the night scattered with stars; Jupiter was burning low in the south-east, while the moon sailed above the eastern horizon, between the horns of Taurus, bright, on its way to being full; and the three belt-stars of Orion had just appeared above the trees below it.
Mel had stopped Con, and pointed directly overhead ‘the Mother above, and below’ she had said. ‘The River in heaven, and river on earth – that’s Llys Don, court of Danu, the Mother,’ she said, pointing at the W-shaped stars of Cassiopeia; ‘Do you think that’s why they built the tomb here, beside her stream; they saw the stones in the water, the light-giving quartz shining in the dark, and thought they were fallen stars?’
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’
And she had quietly sung to herself a new song…
I seek for the Mother
To cry no more
to find where her cool white waters rise…
In the depths of the water
To sigh no more
Lie stones fallen from the skies
‘I think they believed that the heavenly river started here… it’s heaven on earth. It’s the crossing point.’
‘It seems familiar, Mel’ he had said; ‘but I can’t put my finger on it. Have we been here before?’
‘I hadn’t ‘til I moved here; I can’t see how you could have.’ She said, as twins they had an almost perfect knowledge of both their shared past, and subsequent travels.
But it was a feeling he couldn’t shake; and a few months later, after Christmas, he discovered, or so he thought, why.
He had been running ancient site alignments through his computer for his PhD. Having dispensed with the solsticial alignments of the main sites like Stonehenge and Avebury, and finding them rarer than he had imagined, he had started to look at other, less well-known sites. And he had begun, out of interest, with Bryn Celli, looking to model the summer solstice sunrise with new computer software he had at hand.
He had phoned her, shaken and excited.
‘Can you remember I said Bryn Celli was familiar? I know why. That dream I had years ago, with the horse and the river, remember?’ She had.
‘That was Bryn Celli?’
‘Yeah. Listen. Remember it as on a sort of henge site that hadn’t been built yet, yeah? And there was a river, with three cows, and beyond the river mountains with a cleft in.’
‘Yep, I do remember. But can you see the mountains from Bryn Celli? I can’t remember…’
‘Now you can’t – but that’s because there’s trees on the hill, but take the trees away… I’ve got this program called Horizon, and I can create a model of any horizon in the UK so I can plot the rising and setting points of the heavenly bodies … anyway – I put in Bryn Celli to find the summer solstice rising point, just to check it works, which it does – but then I looked at the horizon image and there was this massive cleft in the mountains! It’s the bloody Llanberis pass. It’s fucking identical Mel… I’ll email you an image; remember I did that painting after the dream? It’s identical.’
And it was. The vista of Snowdonia from Bryn Celli, with the river between the mound and the mountains, was precisely what he had painted all those years ago.
‘Jesus. That’s spooky, Con. And bloody cool… but what does it mean?!’
‘Oh, it gets waaay cooler,’ he said, laughing. ‘I looked at the alignment of the Llanberis pass – and from the site of Bryn Celli it marks the exact rising point of the midwinter sunrise.’
Mel had gone quiet.
‘I think,’ Con continued, ‘that they built the site there because it marked the point from which the midwinter sun could be seen rising from between the two highest peaks in Snowdonia; it can’t be a coincidence… Why the fuck did I dream it? And what does the river turning to milk mean?’
Mel spoke up – ‘if it’s the Braint, then the goddess in your dream must have been Brigantia.’
‘I suppose so, but why did I go into the water? What does it mean, ultimately?’
He didn’t know. But he knew something about the sun…
His research had already uncovered many examples of the imagery of the sun rising or setting between two peaks – in a number of ritual sites such as in Orkney, where the Hills of Hoy framed the setting of the midwinter sun as seen from the Stones of Stenness; it was a common theme; the sun rising out of twin hills was even found in Egyptian and Minoan art. Or the cave from which Amaterasu, the Japanese sun-goddess had been released; the walls of the cave, broken out of the earth… and the silhouette of the mountains as seen from this point on Anglesey was as perfect a rendition of this ancient symbol as one could hope to see…
The night after he had rung her again…
‘Mel, in the Bronze Age the sun was linked to the horse… there’s a bronze chariot from Denmark called the Trundholm sun chariot, and it’s pulling the sun along on, like, a small cart; it’s in Norse myth, too, the sun that bears the sun and moon – and in my dream – I look up at the cleft, get out of the river, and there’s a horse with a moon between its brows – it’s like it’s telling me to look at these old mythic images… it was there, 20 years ago, the cleft in the mountains of a site I’d never seen, being link to the astronomical or mythic imagery of the rising of the sun… and now I’m doing my doctorate on this stuff and the dream is coming true…what, Mel, is telling me these things, and why?’
‘So, what about the milk in the river?’ she had asked, ‘if the rest is true, then that ought to be, too. Maybe that’ll answer the question, or at least help.’
‘That’s what I need to look at next.’ he had said.
‘Speak to you tomorrow night!’ she had joked, but she didn’t have to wait that long; it was 7 the next morning when he rang her. He hadn’t slept; he had been awake all night, trawling through books, articles and the internet…
And then he told her he’d found it; if not the ‘why’, he had at least found what seemed to be a stunning parallel to the milk in the river image…but now, sitting in the Red Lion a year and a bit later, he wished to god he hadn’t ever looked at it; for what else had put the idea in her head about going back to the river and submerging herself in the water, than his insistence on the magical nature of the dream?
‘I’ve got it, Mel, I’ve found a story that fits the river of milk… like really fits it…a Celtic tale, Irish…’
…
The image from the Pearl poem flashed once more again in his mind’s eye: the gleaming stones in a river that separated this world from paradise; and on its other bank a girl –
Bot the water was depe, I dorst not wade.
But the water was deep, I dared not wade…
Not that deep, he thought, swallowing the last of his now lukewarm beer; mid-shin deep, he recalled; but deep enough to drown in if you have a belly-full of alcohol and a heart heavy with sorrow and a bag full of quartz stones to weigh you down.
Chapter 27: The Red Lion
The interior of the Red Lion had grown dark now that the day had become unexpectedly overcast, the breeze that had blown away the mist having brought with it rain from the west. It was shortly after four, but already the gas-lamps had been lit. Lewis sat frowning beneath the window, nursing a brandy, and Barfield sat in silence beside him while Tolkien was at the bar ordering another pair of half-pints for the two well men of the party.
Tolkien returned to the table, glasses in hand.
‘Dynastic race! Why must it all be about race?!’ Tolkien was muttering.
Barfield sipped his drink.
‘Race, per se, is not an issue. It’s the idea that certain races possess superiority.’ He said.
Tolkien nodded and lit his pipe.
‘It’s that same naivety I’ve been fighting against for years – the idea that the myths and literature of the Classical world are superior to those of the old pagan North… imagine what has been lost to us because of this!’
He glared down at his drink.
‘I’m thinking of our native bards silenced in their halls – first by their Norman lords who didn’t want to hear the hero tales of a people they had conquered… and then poets such as Chaucer deciding to tell of Troilus and Cressida rather than of Wade’s boat… and Shakespeare! What traditions was he heir to, yet spends his time on whimsical comedies and history plays, and does not tell us why Child Roland to the Dark tower came…and that’s why I…’
‘Why what, Ronald?’
Tolkien chuckled.
‘It’s a hard admission, Owen… you see in my naïve youth I imagined that perhaps I, that I could piece together the fragments we had – that I could rebuild what had been lost; that I could make a mythology for England!’ he laughed again, but as he did so he looked deep into Barfield’s eyes.
‘But you see,’ he continued ‘I never felt like I was imagining… I always felt like I was uncovering something true, not historically true as such, not necessarily – but something valid on another level.’
Barfield smiled. ‘Which is why…’
‘Yes,’ Tolkien continued, ‘which is why the legends of this place, that tie in so well with my own, have made me wonder about the source of my stories. What exactly am I uncovering? I feel like Keiller, digging up stones and trying my best to restore them to their proper place…’
‘You are, Ronald, an archaeologist of legends!’ he raised his pint.
‘Ha! A bungler, a treasure hunter, perhaps!’
Lewis. who had remained quiet through this exchange, was swilling his brandy around the glass in a cupped hand to warm it.
‘No, it’s no use. I shall have to retire.’ He announced; ‘This has done little to help my throat and only made me sleepier! I am off to Church Cottage to rest. I’m glad we decided to stay to watch the stone lifting tomorrow – I simply am in no fit state to walk any further today.’ And he rose, put on his hat and left the pub.
‘Poor Jack.’ Owen said simply once the other figure had gone.
‘Shall we?’ Tolkien said, pointing at a newly vacated pair of seats away from the window in front of the open fire.
‘Indeed!’
Their second half-pints had become a third when a windswept and wet George Mac Govan-Crow entered the bar and seeing the two men asked if he could join them.
‘That’s my jobs done for the day; I was only part way through trimming the hedge at the Manor but his lordship let me go early.’
‘Very generous of him’ said Owen, looking at the bedraggled figure.
‘Perhaps not generous. It has nothing to do with the rain – more to do with wanting me out of the way.’
Tolkien raised his eyebrows. ‘Why so?’
George drank deep and laughed.
‘He has guests.’
‘Aah,’ said Barfield. ‘Sir Petrie?’
George shook his head.
‘No – Sir Petrie is not staying at the Manor – he’s staying here. Mr Keiller’s guests are the London friends…’
‘The friends you originally mistook us for?’
‘The same.’ The two men shared a look and smiled.
Tolkien had the feeling he was missing out on some private joke.
‘Let me explain,’ said George, casting a discreet look about him to make sure he couldn’t be overheard.
‘The London friends come down every so often for what I might describe as some ‘entertainment’! They are usually followed by, how shall I put it, a woman of a certain profession… who then leaves discreetly the following morning.’
Tolkien sat open eyed in shock. Mac Govan-Crow had, he was sure, no reason to fabricate such a story.
‘No wonder you looked so amused on meeting us yesterday!’ he said.
‘I’m sorry,’ laughed George, ‘but initially I did wonder, even though you didn’t quite seem the usual type.’
‘I should hope not! Is there a type?!’
‘Yes. Rich and rude, mainly.’
‘Regrettably we are not the former, but I am glad not the latter.’ Barfield said.
‘They tend to arrive in motorcars, not by foot, and expect me to run around like a lackey or to take their coats and gloves, or clean the mud off their vehicles. And expect me to automatically know who they are and to use their proper titles…’
‘The Dynastic race!’ laughed Tolkien.
‘So Petrie has been excluded?’ he continued.
George shook his head.
‘He chose not to stay at the Manor; he makes no bones about seeing Mr Keiller as some rich young upstart; and Mr Keiller is all too effusive about his honoured guest. I think he knows.’
‘Yes, I got the impression earlier that Petrie wasn’t overly enamoured – at Keiller or his reconstructions.’
George nodded.
‘It’s the same with the locals – though opinion is divided. To some he’s a godsend; buying up their cold, damp houses and building them new ones outside the village; others don’t want to be moved – but they will be – when they’re given the right price… It’s caused some resentment. Some on church lane, whose houses fall outside the circle are rather embittered that others are being paid handsomely to move, while they have to stay. And of course, publicity is bringing people like yourselves to the village; the pub and guest houses are doing a roaring trade!’
The barman arrived and stoked the fire, casting a few more logs upon it.
‘And what do you think of Keiller’s reconstructions?’ Tolkien asked.
Mac Govan-Crow sipped his beer and then packed his pipe before answering; he took a pinch of tobacco and cast it on the fire, muttering under his breath.
‘A few years ago, before all of this, when the ditch was overgrown and littered, and the stones lay buried or cast aside… the place felt sad; neglected. I come from a tradition where the earth is sacred, and certain places put aside for that sanctity to be remembered. I believe this was once such a place, and to see the place gone to seed was not good for the soul. I’ve been to London and seen the rows upon rows of dirty houses; places that were once green and beautiful are now growing dirty; I think it no bad thing that this place should be kept, or rather, returned to how it was.’
‘Hear, hear!’ said Tolkien, raising a glass. ‘Though I did not enjoy watching trees being cut down atop the circle banks.’
George nodded.
‘True. He could have cleared out the mess that man had made and let nature remain where she had set her house. There was a yew tree in the Manor grounds that Mr Keiller told me to remove, but I did not. He said it was dead, but I told him that this was not the case, that this is how yews grew – and that it was hundreds of years old.’
‘And how did he take that?’
‘I told him if he wished it cut down he should ask another man to do it. He seemed annoyed for a while but then amused. Io Saturnalia was his response, which he had to tell me was an old Roman festival in which the servants became the masters.’
‘Ah, so a learned man, despite appearances?’ Barfield said.
‘A very well read man, and educated. If he was not the son of rich parents he would no doubt have been a scholar; but money can spoil a man – and loosen his morals if one needs not work and can afford to play –.’
‘A scholar of what?’ Tolkien asked.
‘He has an interest in old religions.’ George said. ‘Old cults.’
Tolkien looked surprised.
‘I may have to review my opinion of the man…on some levels.’ He said and flashed a quick smile. ‘And does Keiller realise he gives so much away to you?’
George laughed.
‘Oh, I think Mr Keiller knows I am not as dumb as I make out. I learn more from those around him than from Mr Keiller himself. There’s an advantage in being thought dumb. I am the eyes and the ears of the village at the manor, and Mr Keiller knows this – and he plays on it as much as I do. I’m the go-between. But to his guests I’m invisible; “The Indian”, and they speak to me slowly thinking I can’t understand.’
He raised his eyebrows and smiled.
‘Where is Dr Lewis?’ he asked.
‘Not well. He has a cold and has retired.’
‘As should we shortly, if you would like to eat with us again this evening?’
‘That would be marvellous.’ Said Barfield.
Mac Govan-Crow took out his pocket watch and put it away with a smile.
‘I’m being confused by the low weather. It seems later than it is. I think we have time for another drink before we need head back. Same again gentlemen?’
Anyone passing the Red Lion that spring evening would have been entertained by what they would have seen and heard through its leaded windows; for emboldened by the brown ale a usually shy and easily flustered professor of Anglo-Saxon would have been seen standing beside the fire, a ring of clapping workmen around him, pipe in his mouth, his foot stamping in rhythm as he shouted out the words of a poem he’d written a number of years before, a poem himself and Lewis had been discussing that very morning.
There is an Inn, a marry old Inn, beneath an old grey hill
And there they brew a beer so brown
the man in the moon himself came down
one night to drink his fill…
And with a whoop he leaped, and slipped into a laughing heap on the floor, where he was helped to his feet, smiling with embarrassment, by George Mac Govan.
…
Lewis was jolted awake from where he had been dozing in a chair by the fire by the sudden opening of the door and the intrusion of three laughing men.
‘Hey! Come derry-dol, merry-dol, Professor! How fares your throat and head in this inclement weather?’ Tolkien grinned, sweeping his hat from his head in a bow.
‘Good God man, are you drunk?’ Lewis croaked. ‘Have you been in the Lion all this time?’
Shona looked in from the kitchen and laughed. ‘Be sure not to disturb the patient!’ she mock scolded. ‘And I suppose you’ll all be wanting your supper?’ she said.
‘Yellow cream, honeycomb, white bread and butter!’ Tolkien said.
She laughed.
‘Then shall I discard the beef stew?’
Tolkien laughed and sat down beside Lewis, sobering slightly on seeing Jack’s red cheeks shining brow..
‘You look unwell, Jack.’
‘Hmm. I was okay until West Kennet; the walk must have been too much, though I can’t see why!’
‘Aah, the curse of the barrow-Wight – who knows what spirit you disturbed. Poor ill CSL, pale and cold he’ll make you!’
Lewis sniffed and glowered at Tolkien under clammy brows.
‘It’s no joking matter; I’m as fit as a fiddle all through term time, and I get a break and this happens! I can’t even enjoy a smoke, though I’ve tried!’
‘Then we must cast the spirit out!’ Tolkien smiled, his eyes twinkling.
‘Go out, shut the door, and never come back after!
Take away your gleaming eyes, take your hollow laughter!
Go back to grassy mound, on your stony pillow
Lay down your bony head, like Old man willow
Like young Goldberry, and badger folk in burrow
Go back to buried gold and forgotten sorrow!’
Lewis smiled despite himself. He cleared his throat.
‘Well let’s see if your spells work, Tollers; Perhaps I will have a small amount of stew Mrs Mac Govan-Crow, too. Build up my strength.’
‘Good man. Starve a cold - feed a fever’ She said, disappearing into the kitchen. ‘I shall need to feed the child first; why don’t you tell them a story, George, while you wait?’
‘Yes!’ said Tolkien, rising from his seat; ‘sit here and tell us a Blackfoot story!’
‘Yes,’ said Mac Govan-Crow. ‘But it is a very serious tale and so I need a respectful silence.’
Immediately Tolkien’s expression changed, though his eyes continued to glint.
‘It is a tale of Old man whom we call Na’api, and the bear.’ George said.
He stood and took down the flute and began to play a brief air, then replaced it on the wall and sprinkled tobacco into the fire.
‘Old man was walking through the forest when he spied bear digging amongst roots…’ George stopped and looked at Tolkien, disapprovingly.
‘You look like you might be laughing, friend.’ He said.
Tolkien shook his head. ‘No, no; carry on.’
‘Okay. And Old Man called out to the bear – “Oi, no-tail! You dirty-arsed bear!”’
Tolkien’s eyes opened wide and he hid a smile, badly. Then he laughed loudly. George returned his laughter and continued.
‘And the bear chased Old Man round and round a tree until a deep circular path had been worn away, and a buffalo horn, long buried, exposed, which Old Man put on his forehead, turned around and started chasing the now-frightened bear. In his shock the bear turned and defecated all over Old Man.’ George grinned. ‘That was a favourite tale of mine when I was, oh, five or six years old! My father would tell me to keep a straight face, but I never could!’
Tolkien was chuckling. ‘I love these types of tales; very grounded – not overly lofty like Greek and Roman myths! But in its own way, don’t you think, it has some serious meaning behind it…’
All eyes were on him.
‘The tree – that’s the world tree, the centre of the cosmos, the pole… and the bear, forever circling it as do the stars of Ursa Major… pursued by Bootes…’
‘Oh Tollers! Does your brain never stop!?’ cried Lewis, putting his head dramatically into his hands.
Chapter 28: The Devil’s Chair
The stone had seemed immense by day, but at night, bereft of light, it seemed even more so: a giant diamond of blackness against the pale night sky. Conall touched it and was surprised to feel it warm, still harbouring the heat of the long summer’s day. His hands stroked the smooth skin of the stone, lichens scratching against his fingers as they skimmed over depressions and holes; he felt his way around to its southerly facing front. Here, clear in the light of the full moon that hung above Waden Hill, was a natural fissure in the massive rock - a cove in which was set a natural seat - a great stone chair. He sat on this natural throne, four thousand years old.
He took the hipflask from his pocket and swallowed a mouthful of whiskey, with a grimace. Then he poured a little on the stone beside him. Slainte. He said.
The bells of the church rang out for half eleven; she would be here soon.
‘So, have you tried it?’ a voice from his right side asked. He jumped and turned to see Shen gesturing towards the Devil’s chair.
‘No. I was waiting for you. Do we walk clockwise or anti-clockwise?’
Shen shrugged. ‘Let’s try both – but I’d go for anti-clockwise first – it is the Devil we’re summoning! God, what if he does appear?!’ her eyes widened. Conall just shook his head.
The two figures traced a circuit around the great stone three times in silence – first one way and then the other.
Finally, their circuits complete, Shen turned to Conall and shrugged. ‘Any sign?’
Conall he raised his eyebrows. ‘Maybe he’s been here all along.’ He grinned.
‘Maybe she has’ countered Shen. She looked up at him, amused. ‘Have you got any tobacco? I’m gasping for a smoke.’
‘What have you done with Shen?! You want some whiskey, too?’ he asked. Shen pulled a face.
‘I’m never drinking again. I’ve still got a headache from lunch’ She said.
He lit her cigarette, then his own.
‘Sorry I couldn’t make it earlier; I don’t know why he came back to mine. He doesn’t usually when he’s worked an early.’
‘Did he mind you coming out?’ Con asked.
She took a long drag on the cigarette and shrugged; ‘He wasn’t awake.’
They stood against the stone, looking towards the moon.
‘Do you believe in past lives?’ she asked suddenly. Conall paused, taken aback.
‘I don’t know. I sometimes have feelings about certain times in history. Maybe they’re some kind of memory. Or I’ve had dreams that seem to suggest it.’
A flash in the sky captured his attention.
‘I just saw a shooting star’ he said.
‘Did you make a wish?’ she asked. ‘What was it?’
‘I can’t say – or it won’t come true!’
‘Give me a clue!’ she said, in a mock whine.
‘No!’ he laughed. ‘What about you – past lives…?’
‘Yeah. I think so’
‘Like?’
She shrugged, but didn’t offer any more to the conversation.
They walked to the rear of the stone – Shen moved forward and pressed herself against the stone, much as Conall had done minutes before.
‘I speak to the stones. I hug them; sometimes it feels as if they’re talking back, some kind of vibration or humming. Do you think I’m mad?’
‘No, not at all.’
‘I’ve never told anyone that before.’
‘Why are you telling me?’ Conall asked, flattered.
There was silence, but then Shen began,
‘I don’t know. I don’t feel you’d judge me.’
‘I don’t judge you.’
They stood in silence for a while. Then Shen sat down with her back to the stone, while Conall traced another half-circuit and sat once more in the devil’s chair.
‘Can you hear me?’ he asked.
There was no response, so he stood up and walked around.
‘Did you hear me?’ he asked.
‘No, what did you say?’
‘I was just asking if you could hear me.’ He explained.
‘No.’ she repeated. ‘This is weird! It’s a lovely night – the plough is so clear!’
He looked up.
‘People always say that looking at the stars makes them feel so insignificant, but I don’t feel that.’ Shen said.
‘Me neither. Did you know 40% of those stars are younger than life on earth? Life here is a bloody miracle – and as far as we know it’s the only life; this planet is ancient and its life is sacred, holy – we are far from insignificant – if the cosmos is about producing complex life as far as we know we’re as complex as it gets and that makes us fucking important. Insignificant my arse! We’re what it’s all about.’
He felt a great swelling of emotion inside of him. ‘And we are all made from stars. Everything around us is; we are stars, and older than the stars. What kind of miracle allows stardust to know it exists and to feel joy at being alive?’
They stood together eyes aloft; but their senses more open to the proximity of the other.
‘Which one is the northern star, again?’ she asked.
‘Right – you see the Great Bear, the plough, saucepan, whatever – look at the two stars on the right – not the tail or handle but the ‘saucepan’ bit… now they point up to the Little Bear – it’s like a mini plough…’
‘Yeah, I can see it.’
‘The north star is the end of its tail.’
‘Oh – it’s not very bright, is it? I always thought the north star was the brightest star in the sky.’
Conall smiled. ‘No – and the north star, Polaris, only marks the north pole of the heavens now… when Avebury was built a completely different star marked the pole.’
‘I don’t get it.’
‘The position of the pole moves over time. Too slow to really notice, unless you lived to be a thousand or so, then you might notice it.’ He loved looking at the stars.
‘Which one?’ she asked.
‘Which one what?’
‘Was the pole star when the circle was built.’
‘Oh, it’s thuban in the constellation of Draco, the dragon – or serpent… but it’s hard to explain where it is, it’s not obvious. It’s kind of in the gaps between more obvious constellations.’
'Show me.’ She said, and he felt her hand slip into his.
Conall’s reticence was overruled by the soft pressure of her little hand; adamant not to lose that precious connection he stood beside her and pointed upwards.
‘Right – see that kind of diamond shape to the left of the plough? Well – to the left of the little bear, really.’
‘That bright one?’ Shen asked.
‘No…look’ and emboldened by her concentration he let go her hand and moved to stand behind her, extending his arm over her right shoulder and moved his face close to her own.
‘’There! Underneath that bright one… the diamond is its head…and you can see the rest of it going up, then to the right, and down and then back up – kind of separating the great and little bears, so the little bear is almost riding on its back…’ While Shen frowned at the sky in concentration Conall was only aware of one thing, the warmth of her cheek and her hair tickling the side of his face.
‘Why does it move? The Pole I mean.’
'It’s because the earth isn’t totally fixed like, say, a globe you get in a classroom – there’s a kind of wobble in its axis. What it means is that the earth doesn’t point to one exact point in the heavens but kind of moves in a small circle, over time - a long time – this corkscrewing actually is caused by the proximity of the moon and is very, very slow - 26,000 years for one full rotation actually. So, one day, in about 21,000 years the pole will be back near Thuban once more as it was 5000 years ago! Do you see?’
He felt her nod.
‘So what conclusion did you come to? With the PhD.’
‘You really want to know?’ he asked.
She nodded; her dark eyes open in anticipation.
‘It’s a bit boring.’ He said.
‘I’ll be the judge of that’.
He shrugged, turned and sat in the Devil’s Chair, and she sat cross-legged at his feet like a schoolchild.
‘You ever seen an Oliver Stone film?’ he said. ‘Like The Doors or JFK? There’s always a scene about halfway through that’s exposition heavy, to make sure the audience is on board with the import of what’s going on… it’s kind of lazy storytelling,’ he laughed; ‘You know, the bit where Kevin Costner is sitting on that bench near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington and that bloke in a hat, Donald Sutherland, tells him about how the killing of JFK was an inside job by weapons manufacturers because he’d wanted to stop the Vietnam War; or the bit in The Doors when they’re walking along the beach and Ray Manzarak is telling Jim Morrison how people are ready for their kind of vision because, it’s the 60s, man, Vietnam’s out there…’
‘So you’re going to tell me how Avebury is linked to Vietnam, man?’ Shen quipped.
‘You’re Garrison – that’s Costner, and I’m the man in the hat, Mr X…’
‘Donald Sutherland.’ She said.
Con gave her the thumbs up.
‘So here we go…’
‘I mean in a nutshell – in a sentence…’ she joked.
Con flicked her his middle finger. ‘Ok then then, Mrs Soundbite – the sites were built to line up with the Milky Way.’
She looked above her, seeking the Milky Way above; but frowned at her failure, the bright moonlight making it impossible to see any traces of it.
‘How…?’ she began.
‘Ah, no more info – you just wanted the soundbite. Leave it at that.’
‘Oh go on then, give me the lecture.’
And so Con told the story of his research:
…
Having dismissed the solstice, the summer solstice, at least, as the main object of orientation of the henges and passage-graves, Con had turned his attention to the direction of the entrances set in their high earthen banks, and had found that a large proportion were oriented north and south; close enough to north and south to lead many archaeologists to dismiss them as just badly aligned on the poles; yet far enough from them to suggest to Con that they can’t have been that bad at orienting their structures. The off-set had to be intentional – part of the design.
As he had explained to Wolf the day before, he had discovered in many sites a preoccupation with an orientation south, which, given their impressiveness, seemed most likely to have been on the stars of Crux, no longer visible in the night sky above the British isles because of precession; these stars formed a diamond shape, one found reflected again and again on examples of megalithic art, stretching from the Balkans to Britain, everywhere the new ‘invention’ of farming had spread… and often associated with a female figure.
Here at Avebury, he now told Shen, the diamond shaped stones of the Devil’s chair, forming the southern entrance, once aligned on the rising of Crux over Waden Hill; these same stars set, when viewed from the so-called obelisk, a large stone at the centre of the southern inner circle, where Silbury Hill lay.
‘So Silbury is a marker for the stars?’ Shen asked.
‘It’s a theory; another suggests it was put there after precession had led to the stars disappearance – as a kind of memory, a monument.’
The more he had looked, he continued, the more other sites were revealed as aligning on Crux – either its setting or rising.
‘Why just not one or the other?’ Shen asked.
‘It depends,’ he said, ‘on the orientation of local rivers… the henge entrances tend to mirror the direction of local rivers – probably so the ‘river’ in the sky will align to that on earth.’
Shen looked confused.
‘River in the sky?’
‘Sorry – I’m getting ahead of myself. The question I should answer next is ‘why Crux’? That’ll bring us to the river…’
The answer to Shen’s question concerning the river was tied in with Con’s own obsessions… for he had been investigating all of this in the months after his conversations with Melissa following his trip to Wales, when he’d become obsessed with what his dream had seemed to reveal about the building of Bryn Celli Ddu in line with the winter solstice sun, an alignment suggested by the appearance of the white horse. He’d become equally, if not more, obsessed with the image of the river of milk in which he’d bathed, created by the wand of the goddess with the three cows… potentially the River Braint that Melissa had said was linked to the stars in the sky, especially the W-shaped constellation of Cassiopeia that she had called Llys Don, the ‘court of Don’, in Welsh.
‘Cassiopeia…’ he had said to her, in one of their conversations, of which over that winter there were many, ‘…is in the Milky Way… what if this Don, or
Danu in Irish, this Brigantia, was connected to the Milky Way? Might that be the river of milk in my dream?’
‘Jeez Con, I think it could be, couldn’t it?’
When the alignment of corridor of posts at Stonehenge turned out to be on Crux, a constellation also within the Milky Way he’d felt a giddy sense of inevitability; but it was also accompanied by panic – a sinking feeling he might be descending into magical thinking – into madness. But he was open-mouthed in wonder when he discovered that these two constellations, Cassiopeia and Crux, lay not only in the Milky Way but also at exact opposites of the sky – linked in a kind of see-saw motion that meant one rose as the other set, and vice versa. And just as the stars lay opposed, so too did the entrances of most henges.
The realisation and the possibility hit him in a single, beautiful, horrific moment: if certain henge entrances aligned on Crux then, as most henges tended to have opposing entrances, the northern-oriented entrances of these sites ought to align exactly on Cassiopeia… at the same moment in time! A few mad, manic, hours on his computer confirmed his intuition: the northern entrances aligned on Cassiopeia, Llys Don, the court of Danu, the w-shaped constellation whose pattern paralleled that, he now saw, the other most prominent Neolithic art motif aside from the lozenge: the zig-zag. Zig-zag and lozenge, Cassiopeia and Crux, opposed, rising and setting, and both within the Milky Way… he remembered excitedly emailing a picture to Melissa – of a standing stone from within the chamber of Barclodiad Y Gawres on Anglesey, further west than Bryn Celli Ddu, but a similar type of monument.
‘The chamber aligns on Cassiopeia, Mel, but looking in, from the outside, and you’re looking at Crux rising… and this carved stone sits in the passage!’
There, seeming to embody all he had discovered, was this anthropomorphic stone, with ‘W’s above diamond shapes – both mirroring the constellations the passage seemed to be referencing, combined into a single image, with an eye-like spiral above.
‘And in those days, before light pollution,’ he explained, ‘the Milky Way would have been brilliant; almost as bright as a full moon… like a great white path across the sky.’
‘So why not at Bryn celli?’ she had asked, puzzled as to why her favourite site didn’t overly fit the pattern.
‘But it does, the original henge, Mel – it’s oriented on the setting of Crux and rising of Cassiopeia.’ She had been delighted.
This sudden interest in the Milky Way had been further prompted by an Irish tale he’d stumbled upon, one that’s seemed to correspond to his dream, revolving, as it did, around 3 magical cows and a female who made a river turn into milk.
It was, to his mind, the key myth in all of this – the key to the henges…
He had told it to Mel that night. It was a legend called The Death of CuRoi. The tale recounted how a gigantic man (actually a demigod) named Cu Roi mac Dairi had aided the men of Ulster in a raid, but because he was not paid for his services he seized the chief plunder, namely a woman named Blathnat, meaning ‘flowers’, the three cows of luchna (that could each produce the milk of 30 cows) and a magical cauldron; and Cu Roi had fled back to his home in Kerry bearing the spoils. The Ulster hero Cúchulainn, lover of Blathnat, had pursued Cu Roi. He secretly met with Blathnat and together they arranged a ruse by which Cu Roi could be killed and Blathnat, her cows and her cauldron rescued. Blathnat advised Cu Roi that he should build an enclosure for his stronghold of standing-stones, accordingly he sent his men away to fetch building materials leaving his stronghold undefended. Blathnat had agreed that when Cu Roi was at his most vulnerable she would send a signal to Cúchulainn who was in hiding, by pouring the milk of her magical cows, gathered in her magical cauldron, down the river, henceforward named “Finnglas” - ‘White Flecked’, that ran through the stronghold. Blathnat bathed Cu Roi and bound his hair to his bedpost, then poured the milk in the stream and opened the stronghold doors. Cúchulainn entered, cut off Cu Roi’s head, and so regained the spoils lost to Cu Roi… the cauldron, the cows, and the flower-maiden…
‘Cu Roi’s fort is described in the tale ‘Bricriu’s Feast’ as revolving as swiftly as a mill-stone. It moves in a manner suggestive of the sky revolving around the pole.’ Con explained to her.
‘By extension, if the fort is the turning sky, or a site associated with the sky, and the tale itself suggests it is constructed of standing stones, then what else is the river of milk running through it but the Milky Way?’
The same imagery, he told her, appeared in the Welsh myth of Culhwch and Olwen, that concerned the rescue of the heroine Olwen from her giant father Yspaddaden, who was, like Cu Roi, beheaded at her release. Her name meant ‘white track’, and this was said to be because white trefoils sprung up where she trod – ‘But the white path is a visual trope,’ Con enthused; ‘it is arguably the same as the river of milk, an analogue of the Milky Way!’
But there was more, he said, his voice hoarse from talking… Amaterasu, the Japanese sun-goddess, she hid in a cave in the cosmic river to escape the insults of her brother, bringing about winter. The other gods assembled at the heavenly river to trick the sun-goddess out of hiding in hope of restoring life to the world: they began to dance and sing outside the cave until a goddess named Uzume exposed her genitals as she did so, causing other the gods to shake with laughter. Amaterasu, out of curiosity, peered round the door, whereon the gods held up a mirror, and seeing what she believed was a rival goddess outside, Amaterasu stepped out allowing her to be seized by one god, while another locked the cave door shut with string behind her.
Uzume’s dance was performed over the river of heaven, in other words, over the Milky Way, which she was later offered as a gift of thanks for helping release the sun; it was, then, in an astronomically-derived myth. The name Uzume meant ‘whirling heavenly woman’, and it seemed possible to Con that she was derived from an image of a female-formed Milky Way turning about the earth’s axis nightly, and so appearing to ‘dance’ in the heavens.
‘Like your Brigantia, Mel… with her star-stones in the river… Brigantia! The High One! You said she was in the stars!’
Con had gone on to suggest an original myth in which the ‘dance’ of the Milky Way Goddess in the night sky presaged the release of the sun goddess, who emerged on the horizon from her underworld prison. Uzume’s lewd dance, Con suggested, had an astronomical origin: it referred to the appearance of Crux, the diamond-shaped constellation that echoed the lozenge shape found on female images from the Near East to Britain, such as the stone from Barclodiad y Gawres, and always shown in relation to the womb – was Crux seen as a great cosmic starry womb or vulva, a diamond in the sky…Up above the world so high?
His subsequent research had uncovered something that suggested this was indeed the case – and, in the circle of Avebury this summer night, he stood from the Devil’s Chair before the cross-legged Shen, and began explaining it in his excitement.
…
‘You see, I think this myth, the release of the sun-maiden, goes right back to the start of farming in the Near East – and if we look at the sky back then, around 7000 BC in Anatolia,’ he said, his hand outstretched in the general direction of east, ‘then we find that the midwinter sun rises on the exact point on the horizon that Crux rises in that era! The sun rises from out of the womb of the Milky Way goddess! It’s the same image we find in Egypt where the sun is born every morning on the horizon from out of the womb of Nut or Hathor, the sky goddess who is both Milky Way and the river Nile!’ he was grinning like a fool, caught up in his ideas.
‘And Cassiopeia?’ Shen asked, also intrigued by his ideas, but more amused at his fervour, ‘what’s that?’
‘Her breasts.’ He said, pointing out the w-shape in the air with his finger. ‘Llys Don, the court of Danu… Danu comes from an old Indo-European word, it means ‘she who gives milk’…the whole of the Milky Way was a goddess, just as in Egypt, Shen. And she dances her revealing dance prior to the rising of the sun – you see, for most of the year the nights are too short to see both the rising and setting of the Milky Way, but at midwinter this isn’t the case – you can see the whole ‘dance’, and this acted as a signal that the solstice was near and the sun about to be reborn... the sun rises shorty after Crux sets. Hence the ‘sign’ given to Cuchulainn by Blathnat is of a milky river; it’s the same image it’s saying: look for the turning of the Milky Way in the heavens and be ready for the release of the sun.’
The river of milk… why had he dreamed this? What meaning did it have for him? Was something trying to communicate with him across time, and if so, then who or what? Or was it, as he had said to Shen earlier, a ripple caused from a future event… because of the tragedy he presumed the dream had caused?
‘You said something before about the entrances aligning to rivers on earth?’ Shen recalled.
He nodded. While some henge sites did, indeed, have rivers running through them (such as Marden), what the results of his research suggested was that what was being referred to in these tales was the ‘heavenly’ ‘milky’ river that ran ‘through’ the henges – in that the entrances align on the rising and setting points of this celestial feature – joining entrance to entrance in a shining band across the winter sky. A river running through the henge, albeit it a stellar river, like a starry rainbow, arching overhead. And in most cases the location of nearby earthly rivers seemed to influence the orientation of the entrances, choosing to orient on the rising or setting of the Milky Way to better align with the local rivers…one reflecting the other…
As above, so below.
‘Although it’s never that simple…’ he laughed;’ there’s more – there’s the fact that the situation was slightly different in sites in Orkney where Crux was no longer visible due to the latitude and where instead we see alignments on the star Sirius, which had taken on the former position of Crux at the rising point of the midwinter sun by 3000 BC. And there’s alignments on Orion; Orion is the hero Cuchulainn who saves the sun in the Blathnat myth; basically the myth refers to the fact that in the Neolithic period the spring sun rose on Orion’s shoulders, so he carried her from out of the underworld like St Christopher, carrying the sun, so it would have appeared, across the Milky Way, hence St Christopher carries Christ over a river…but I don’t want to bog you down in details,’ he said, unaware he’d already spent some 20 minutes babbling at her as if he’d mainlined twenty espressos.
‘But imagine…’ he said – arms spread wide… ‘on midwinter’s eve, just after sunset, the Milky Way rings the horizon, just as Crux rises and Cassiopeia sets… rings it in a circle, just as the chalk-white banks of the henge encircled the centre… probably where the whole idea of a circle came from… then later it rises, like the handle of a basket it joins entrance to entrance, like a rainbow… a river running through the henge… and to pass through the entrance is to enter the river in the sky! It’s a doorway to the stars – a star-gate, if you will! Like Jacob’s Ladder… perhaps…a place to ascend to the heavens or for the heavens to descend to the earth…’
All fell quiet within the circle. Con’s lecture was over, and he leant back against the Devil’s chair, spent.
’Does it make sense?’ he asked Shen, suddenly tentative, vulnerable for putting his ideas out to another; worried it all might be his twisted imaginings based on the misreading of a dream, given more worth than it should normally have had through its association with grief.
‘I’m no archaeologist, Con, but it seems to make sense, to hold together. So why doesn’t anyone else mention it? I mean, it seems obvious, so why hasn’t anyone seen it before?’
Con shrugged. ‘No one’s interested, maybe – or never seen the Milky Way! Or not interested in myth, I don’t know. I have wondered. Maybe after the whole summer solstice Stonehenge thing they just concentrated on the sun and moon, not expecting stars to have played a role in the sites.’
‘It’s basically, then, a calendar, then?’ she said. ‘To mark the return of fertility and the coming of Spring?’ She sounded slightly disappointed.
‘No! I don’t think it’s that simple.’ he said. ‘Most churches are supposed to orient on the spring equinox sunrise… and Easter is all about rebirth in the spring, but you wouldn’t say Christianity is basically calendrical - there’s always a spiritual component to such myths. You see in other cultures there were traditions known as the Mysteries – like those of Demeter and Persephone in which the rescue of the prisoner from underworld offered hope of rebirth to their followers – Those who die before they die do not die when they die… as the saying goes; and I mean offered a sense, an experience. of immortality. Imagine if Avebury had been the site of the British Mysteries – connected, at least somehow, to rebirth, be that experienced in life through some kind of mystery initiation, or in death…’
He paused. ‘A site for the dead, perhaps – I’ve not discounted that – that these sites were connected to the afterlife or to the post-mortem world; like the pyramids; not a tomb as such… but maybe a place for spiritual transformation; or place for spirits to congregate, rather than the living… like I said, it’s an interface between earth and sky – a crossing point; a star-gate… it’s just a hunch at the moment… this research, you know, it’s not finished… just started really; I’ve discovered what I believe they were aligned on – but not necessarily why… do you sometimes feel you’re trespassing here? Especially at night – that you don’t belong; that it belongs to the Dead?’
…
‘Which reminds me…The past lives thing,’ he said.
She nodded, encouraging him to go on.
‘When I was a kid I had this dream; there was a load of us on a boat, a wooden boat, and we were escaping from this coastline and I remember looking up and seeing flames and the sky lit up orange – there was lava, I think, and the cliffs were collapsing around us into the sea- and the boat was being tossed by the waves; I don’t know whether it was stormy or if it was just the collapse of the land around us; and then the next scene I was in a desert, I think – I was a man, a grown up, and there was a woman beside me and we were looking at a temple – like an Egyptian temple, rectangular with great columns - and I said to the woman we could rest now, now that we had preserved the knowledge that had been lost when the land in the sea had been destroyed…’
‘Woah. Really?’
‘Yeah – I mean it was a dream but if felt real – felt like a memory; the view of the destruction of the island was incredible; it was sublime; horrific.’
‘That’s so weird – I’ve got something to say but you mustn’t laugh…’
‘Try me.’
‘One of the reasons I was so happy to move here was because it’s high up and away from the sea… all the time on the Scillies I was overwhelmed with a fear of tidal waves; I’ve always had it. Even as a child when I saw a bank of cloud on the horizon I’d imagine it was a wave and it would scare the hell out of me; even the banks here, sometimes they feel like a wall of water rushing towards me, like a massive flood… do you think I’m mad?’
‘God no! There used to be this picture of a tidal wave in a book I had as a kid – there were people on the beach looking out, too late to run, and then this wall of water rushing towards them; it fascinated me and scared me and I linked it to this dream… I don’t know, maybe it’s a common fear; I would be worried if I lived in the Scillies – they’re supposed to be the last vestiges of a once great kingdom called Lyonesse that was lost to the sea.’
‘Is that true?’
‘Yes – they were once part of the mainland; there are prehistoric tombs under the water there that used to be on dry land. It’s said you can still hear the church bells ringing from beneath the ocean.’
Shen shuddered.
‘Who was the woman in your dream?’ She asked.
Con didn’t know how to say it; didn’t know if somehow recent events had laid some kind of pattern upon this ancient dream;
‘She was short, with long dark hair.’ He said. She was you, he thought, he hoped.
And she was close and looking up at him; he could almost feel the warmth from her face against his cheeks; in the distance the bells of the church began to chime midnight.
‘The bells of drowned Lyonesse.’ He said. A slight breeze lifted her hair; tumbled across her forehead, curling in the wind – his sister’s hair. He stepped back, smiling weakly; Shen looked distant all of a sudden.
‘Are you happy, Shen?’ He suddenly asked.
She shrugged. ‘I’m not unhappy.’ looking down at her feet. ‘I don’t know what I want. I don’t know where I belong. I sometimes think I should move away; even go to Canada and find my relatives there.’
‘What about Hayden?’
She shrugged. ‘What about him? I don’t love Hayden. Maybe I’ve never really loved anyone… I don’t know why I’m telling you this.’
‘Because I listen?’ he stammered, feeling her admission of never having loved as a personal, physical blow.
She looked as if she wanted to reply, but instead she looked away, frowning.
Then she returned to look up at him; and for a moment there seemed to be a connection, but he faltered, and his eyes flicked away, his feelings, like a ball of tension, a mixture of fear, hope, guilt, seemed to stick in his throat, stopping his breath; and he stepped back.
‘Look. It’s late. If Hayden wakes, he’s going to wonder where I am. I have to go; she said, her voice terse.
‘I’ll see you at the protest?’ he said as she walked away. She didn’t answer.
‘Shen?’
She waved without looking round. ‘I’m tired Con, I’ll see you tomorrow.’
Chapter 29: Pan
‘Poor Jack.’ Barfield sighed.
‘Poor us, he’s not the most patient of patients!’ Tolkien responded, and both men laughed.
Tolkien and Barfield had stepped outside for a last pipe before bed, and had decided to take a stroll down Church Lane to the stone circle; the rain showers that had dulled the afternoon had long gone, but the men wore their overcoats, the wind still being cool. Above them the clear spring air revealed a magnificent vista of stars.
They passed the pub, the gas-light still visible through the small leaded windows, and a few small voices still audible inside, and carried on past it, turning left at the crossroads, making for the elephantine Swindon stone that marked the old north entrance of the henge. They walked past the stone, touching its cool sides, and walked anticlockwise along the edge of the newly re-excavated ditch, the great bank beyond blotting out the stars on the horizon. Tomorrow this section would be teeming with men – workmen jostling the stone back in place, which now lay, bound in ropes, at the side of its hole – like a giant tooth waiting to be plugged back into a gaping hole in a jaw.
‘It seems so crude, these poles and pulleys…’ remarked Barfield. ‘I prefer the idea that some ancient sorcerer had them leap up and dance into place.’
Tolkien agreed. ‘Maybe the legends are closer to the truth.’
‘We both know they are. A more profound truth.’ Barfield said.
Tolkien looked at his friend with fondness. True, Owen had always been more Jack’s friend than his own, and of late his business had kept him more often than not away from the weekly gathering of the Inklings – but the two men had always had a mutual understanding; indeed their viewpoints converged a lot more often than they had ever openly spoken about – but circumstances had made it so that they had never really developed as close a friendship as either of them would have liked, a fact not aided by Tolkien’s more introverted, often shy, nature, and the presence of Jack, the organising principle behind the Inklings themselves, who though not consciously standing between the two men, was like the sun around whom the others revolved, their paths crossing infrequently.
Barfield’s comment had been correct; they both knew that in its own way legend could be closer to truth than nuts and bolt facts could manage.
‘I wonder what this place will be like when all the stones are back in place?’ Barfield mused.
Tolkien cleared his throat. ‘I can’t say I wholly agree with the reasons behind it – but I am intrigued, all the same. I doubt Keiller’s desire to recreate the past differs much from my own.’
‘Except yours is a literary endeavour, Ronald; a recreation of words, of splintered light, rather than solid stone.’
‘Words and splintered light. I like that.’ He refilled his pipe and continued.
‘Keiller has the easier job – he digs and finds a stone, and a socket, and matches them up. My stones are fragments, mostly lost – long shattered and disregarded.’
‘So you see your work as recreation rather than creation?’
‘Of course. And your own work has clarified this for me. I don’t know if I’ve ever thanked you in person for what your ‘Poetic Diction’ did for my thinking. I’d been working alone, you see – and when I read your book, I saw that others, too, saw the value of such an endeavour.’
Barfield smiled meekly. ‘Yes,’ he said ‘words are indeed fragments, splinters of the light – once complete and shining and now in disparate sherds, from a time when a word was full of potent magic; as we have become divorced from that original unity with the world, so have our words.’
They continued to walk along the steep edge of the ditch, the spray of the Milky way above their heads.
‘Not many people, Owen, would understand what I’m about to say…’ he looked up at Barfield, nervously.
‘You see, my languages, the elven languages – I started on them years ago, yet the more work I did on them the more I felt I was uncovering something true, something long lost – like Keiller’s buried stones. You see, the words demanded a history from out of which they had sprung – yet I did not invent the history as much as deduce it from the language. It was like uncovering a vast mosaic, hidden for aeons, a mosaic bearing a pattern, an image, fully formed, beautiful, whole.’ he lit his pipe and gazed upwards at where the Milky Way, rising out of the bank with its blasted trees, crossed the sky like a milky river.
‘And all from that line from the poem Christ – eala earendil, engla beorhtest, ofan middelgeard monnum sended – who, or what was Earendil? Why was this ‘brightest of angels’ bringing light to us dwellers in middle-earth? Was he a herald of the Light? I had to know, Owen, and so I began to seek an answer to those questions…’
He puffed on his pipe; his features narrowed with thought.
‘The men who built this circle… what were these stones to them? Not dead matter to be shunted with ropes and levers; Keiller and his men are moving dead husks of rock; the builders of Avebury were not. What word did they use for these stones? A word, I would imagine, rich in meaning, that meant stone, and bone and ancestor and spirit… they didn’t shift these into place with brute force – they sung them into place, danced them into a circle.’
Owen squinted at the stars. ‘Just as the stars circle about the pole star – yes – these stones danced too in a circle, to be fossilised into solidity with the rising of the sun – like your trolls!’
‘Yes. I simply had to put that in The Hobbit – I thought of the Merry Maidens, and of rings of stones said to be women caught dancing on the Sabbath; I wanted to express the idea that a stone wasn’t just a stone, but a being, caught in the first rays of the sun and entombed, enchanted. Surely these stones were seen as such – spirits caught, tamed, trapped, perhaps. Or perhaps they danced when no living man was present; like the fairies dancing in their circles, away from the voyeuristic eyes of mortals.’
Owen grinned. ‘I can imagine the builders laughing at Keiller and his workmen, straining to lift these rocks – when in their day an enchanter stood at the centre and sang as the stones danced about him under the wheeling stars; formed a circle that aped the motion of the moon above… what is the name Geoffrey of Monmouth gives to Stonehenge? – Yes, the Giants Dance, it’s the same idea… and this after they are levitated across the Irish sea by Merlin the enchanter. ’
Tolkien exhaled a smoke ring into the night air. ‘Merlin, yes, Owen. Indeed. Indeed. These rings remind me of Merlin’s observatory in the woods from the Vita Merlini with its 60 windows and doors; it’s the grove of dancing stones magicked into life by the lyre of Orpheus. I think our ancestors associated him with this place too.’
‘Merlin or Orpheus?’ asked Barfield.
‘Merlin. He supposedly built Stonehenge but I wonder about Avebury too – I mean, we are just a stone’s throw, pardon the pun, from Marlborough, and Marlborough means ‘Merlin’s mound’ after a similar mound to Silbury Hill that exists on the outskirts of the town. Strange that he should crop up here, so close to this circle, when we know he was associated with Stonehenge too.’
‘I didn’t know that.’ Barfield said.
‘I don’t know it, for sure; it is just a feeling, a hunch, but one I have only skimmed over and not had time to give my full attention.’
‘Time.’ Said Barfield, ruefully. ‘I wish I had time to think on such matters. Sometimes I hate my London life; I wish I had the opportunity to leave my career and just study and write. I feel split in two – the lawyer and the poet; but it’s necessary, I suppose – I simply would go mad were I not to divide myself thus – I’d forever be hankering to write, and so I force myself to forget it. The moment I walk into my office I am the lawyer, and I stoically bear it until I take my coat from the hat-stand at the door at the end of the day.’
‘I am luckier, I suppose, Owen. My daily work is at least on a topic that I love; but it’s the bureaucracy, the marking, the meetings – and then the demands of home life and the family; if I’m lucky I can sometimes start my work at eleven or midnight – and then I’ll write until 2 or 3 in the morning when tiredness overtakes me.’ The mention of his family brought on a sudden pang of homesickness. ‘I am lucky. Edith understands my writing.’
Owen looked down.
‘Hmm. Maud does not understand mine – indeed she has taken quite violently against some of my beliefs.’ His face contorted as he wrestled with some inner emotion. ‘She, I believe,’ and he paused, wondering if he was going too far, ‘is somewhat jealous of my spiritual leanings towards anthroposophy, and so soured are things between us because of it that I dare not mention this in her presence.’
Tolkien felt odd hearing this revelation from a man with whom fate had decreed an acquaintance rather than a friendship. He wondered if it might not have been better for him to speak to Jack of such matters – and then he knew that quite obviously he had, and that Jack’s own dislike of anthroposophy, the spiritual school headed by the Austrian mystic Steiner, had probably coloured his response. Who else did Barfield have to turn to?
‘The wishes of a wife must be heeded, Owen, for the sake of the family – but I have found it always better, if one disagrees and is adamant in one’s position, just to continue openly with that opposition than to hide one’s doings.’
Barfield nodded.
‘I shall not give up my beliefs, Ronald. They make me what I am. As I have said, I am sure Maud is more than a little jealous of my devotion to Steiner, and of the joy my beliefs bring me. What would she have me do – renounce them and be miserable? Would that make her happy, to limit me so she can say I am wholly her own?’ he looked up, distraught.
‘And Jack, of course, does not understand. How could he? He’s not a husband – not in any conventional sense, loth he is, after all, to clarify that strange business with the Moore woman…’
Tolkien blanched at this subject, taboo amongst Jack’s friends.
‘…and,’ Barfield continued, ‘he thinks little enough of Steiner to perhaps use this disagreement with Maud as a lever to push me back onto the straight and narrow of Protestantism…’
The two met each other’s gaze, momentarily, sharing an unspoken compliance in the face of Jack’s newfound and dogmatic faith.
‘Jack suffers, I would say, from a certain short-sightedness in that he does not seem, sometimes, to value the comfort that one’s beliefs can bestow;’ Tolkien said; ‘he thinks nothing of making a remark that often is aimed at one’s faith but lands on one’s heart – where faith, after all, resides. I once told him of my special devotion to St. John the Evangelist, and he laughed at me and said he couldn’t imagine a pair more unsuited than the saint and me. He took what was a dear thing to me and would have sullied it.’
Barfield stood at Tolkien’s side, then raised his hand and placed it on the other’s upper arm; an act of consolation, of comfort and of understanding. I know, it seemed to say, the pain of what you speak.
‘He’s a vast intellect that allowed, by grace, God to come in to his life,’ Tolkien continued ‘– but ever since his Christianity is analysed and presented with the same intellectual vigour. But my own beliefs, Owen, these are not intellectual concepts; they are the ground of all my bliss.’ At that moment, a shooting star fell above them, leaving a trail.
Owen chuckled.
‘What is it?’ Tolkien asked.
‘I shouldn’t laugh but it tickled me; before we left Mrs Mac Govan-Crow had left a jug of cold water for Jack to sip that she said was special. Well, I went into the kitchen and there was a milk pan on the stove with pebbles in it – quartz pebbles; well, I must have looked quizzical because Mrs Mac Govan-Crow came over and said to me that it is an old Irish folk remedy: you take nine crystals from a holy stream – she had these from back home, she said – and you boil them in water and then drink the water when cool! They’re called shining stones, cloch geala, or something, or milk stones, and they are supposed to be a cure-all, but especially for the loss of voice… these are the stones of the fairy folk, the Sidhe…’
Tolkien laughed. ‘How would Jack feel if he knew he was drinking pagan Holy Water?’ Holy shining stones from the river that borders Paradise, Tolkien thought, thinking of the Pearl poem.
The two men stood a while in companionable silence, gazing heavenwards, when their reverie was ended by the distant sound of breaking glass followed by raucous laughter.
‘One too many ales, I expect’ Barfield said with a wink.
‘No – it didn’t come from the pub...’ Tolkien replied, beginning to walk along the bank to where a path led down to the western side of the circle. Barfield followed, intrigued. They took the path which set them on the gravel roadway just north of Church Road – a path that lead to the Manor. The laughter was heard again, closer now.
Ahead, flickering lights could be seen through the hedge that ran around the Manor House, and voices heard. There were male voices, sounding as if they were trying to be hushed, sometimes breaking out in laughter; and all the while the orange flicker of naked flames - a number being seeming to be being carried about.
‘What on earth is going on?’ Barfield whispered to Tolkien.
‘I thought it might have been some local lads up to mischief, but I don’t think so now.’
Just then a high-pitched squeal broke out – followed by a laugh. A woman’s laugh.
‘My word. I think its Keiller and his friends.’ Barfield said. ‘You don’t suppose Mac Govan-Crow was right, do you?’
Tolkien raised a hand to silence his friend. ‘Listen!’
And the name Pan, intoned in deep voices, was sent towards them on the light spring breeze.
Pan! Pan! PAN!
‘Good God!’ muttered Barfield.
‘A god, yes’ Tolkien whispered, ‘but good?’.