Pillars of Light (4 page)

“Never scorn the faith of believers, John. But it’s true that a scapula is not ideal.”

At last he uncovered an arm, the bones pitted with age but still intact. I thought
—one day my arm will look like this
—and shuddered. He brushed earth away. Still clutched in the weird fingers was the crossguard of a hilt decorated with twining beasts, leading to a long, lean blade.

I had never held a sword before. He passed it to me, and as I held it, it was as if power flowed through the metal into my arm. It made me feel like a king. Yes, just like a king …

“Careful, John.” The Moor stepped back as I flourished the weapon clumsily.

“Behold the bones and sword of good King Arthur, saviour of the English!” I said. “The hero who drove the heathen from our shores, before falling in the Last Battle.” The locals had told us this was the site of the battle of Camlann, where the English army had made its last stand against the invading Saxons.

The Moor looked thoughtful. “This King Arthur is not a saint, though. Will monasteries pay good money for parts of a dead king?”

“Everyone loves the hero of Monmouth’s tales, from the poorest ploughboy to the richest knight. They’ll queue for miles to touch his bones. The monks en’t fools—they’ll take popularity over sanctity any day of the week if it brings in trade.”

The Moor sighed. “It is the same the world over, John.”

FESTIVAL OF ALL HALLOWS 1ST NOVEMBER, 1187

T
he Moor tilted his head to examine the complex carvings above the door of the chapel. “Just three years to create this. Remarkable.”

I gazed up, smelling in the air the scent of winter: woodsmoke and cold earth.

The old church, originally raised by Joseph of Arimathea, had burned down; they’d built this Lady Chapel with almost miraculous speed. We had arrived in time for the consecration. All Hallows is when the saints are at their strongest and can hold back Satan’s power.

Word had travelled far and wide of the marvellous relic making its way to Glastonbury: King Arthur’s arm, still clutching the sword that saved England. Spurred on by curiosity, desperation and hope, some of the pilgrims had made journeys of more than a hundred miles to see it. There was a huge crowd milling about, waiting for the procession to complete its circuit.

“What’ll they do to us if they realize it’s a fake?” I had asked over and over as we trudged through Devon and into Somerset. But the Moor had just laughed. It didn’t reassure me.

A chill breeze came out of nowhere and I ran a hand over the unfamiliar baldness on the top of my head. I hated having a tonsure, but the Moor had insisted: we had to play our part. I was wearing a white robe given to me by the abbey’s monks, the traditional colour for the All Hallows mass. Used to Benedictine black, I felt exposed. The Moor, on the other hand, was in startling Pentecostal red. “I stick out like a sore thumb as it is,” he had said as he put on the vestments. “People will remember a black man no matter what he wears, but they are less likely to question a black cardinal.”

Quiet had fallen for the arrival of the guests of honour. First, the justiciar, Ranulf de Glanvill, known as the King’s Eye since he watched over the kingdom when Henry was in France. I hoped that eye wouldn’t fall upon me. Beside him, his brother, Geoffrey. He had the face of a butcher, red and fleshy, and the meaty fists of a born bully. The justiciar had eyes of winter-blue, sharp and penetrating. They grazed me and came to rest on the scarlet Moor, and my heart stopped. But the Moor just nodded, equal to equal, and the two men passed on.

Behind them, with a head of grey woolly hair, like a sheep in purple robes, was the Bishop of Bath, Reginald de Bohun. We had already met; he looked at us, then quickly—too quickly—looked away.

The lesser gentry were in overly bright clothing, flaunting their fortune and lack of taste. Wealthy merchants’ wives displayed their flashiest jewels to advertise their husbands’ success. I thought:
Ned and Quickfinger will have their eye on those
.

Quickfinger we’d found in Launceston. I’d watched him disappear under a trestle table where people were busy eating a harvest feast. When they rose to go they found they were all wearing
mismatched shoes. While I was laughing, I saw how Quickfinger moved among them, quietly robbing a purse here and there. I nudged the Moor. He grinned and nodded, having seen it all for himself, and shortly after that, Quickfinger became the first member of our troupe. He was from the north.

“York?” I remember asking him.

“Farthern tha’.” Quickfinger had pointed up into the air as if to suggest he fell from Heaven.

His accent was so impenetrable that I couldn’t always understand him, and he’d claim the same of me, mocking my West Country vowels with such a mangling imitation that I’d want to knock him down. Twice we’d nearly come to blows, but he was as fast on his feet as he was with his hands. Then he’d grin and grin as if touched in the head. It was an act he’d developed to distract people. You don’t tend to make a lot of eye contact with someone who grins in such a lunatic way. And that was when he’d rob you, take your purse or your belt-knife or whatever else he could lay hands on. Life was a huge joke to Quickfinger. It made him likeable and dislikeable in equal parts.

Ned was small and dark and rat-like enough to pass for the cripple he pretended to be. He’d fastened himself on to the growing troupe as we passed through Tavistock. I did not much want his company, for he had a sly, weaselly look, but he showed us tricks that were breathtaking: producing gold from the Moor’s ear, and fitting himself into a tiny hole in a tree you’d think not even a cat could squeeze into before disappearing altogether and reappearing on a branch above our heads.

Tricksters and thieves—impossible to trust at the best of times. I felt my skin prickle.

On the outskirts of the congregation, the servants, smiths and rustics, penitents and cripples gathered, looking overawed. Kept at a safe distance by the constables, their hideous faces hidden by
hoods, clutching their clappers and bells, were the lepers from St. Mary Magdalene’s, poor souls suffering Purgatory on Earth, let out of the lazar house to seek the only known cure for their affliction: a miracle.

The procession reappeared, led by a monk carrying a great jewelled cross worth a king’s ransom. Then came the prior bearing the Corpus Christi, and a line of canons cradling the relics that had survived the fire. After this came the big oak-and-silver box containing “Arthur’s” arm and sword. The doors to the chapel were thrown open and in they went, commemorating Christ’s triumphant entrance into the Holy City of Jerusalem, and the sacristan waved us to follow.

Inside, the Lady Chapel was pitch-black, the thick darkness and animal smell oppressive. There began at once a cacophony of unearthly howls, the clanging of metal. The Glastonbury monks banged and stamped and screeched, playing their parts as Hell’s minions. It was the one time in the year when the disciplined quiet of the Benedictine life could be set aside and they could behave as badly as they liked, reminding the congregation of the demonic punishments that awaited their sorry, sinning souls in the afterlife if they didn’t do what they were told and give Mother Church all their money. Those who’d never before experienced the Ceremony of Light shouted in terror.

I turned and saw the Moor grinning in the darkness, revelling in being a Saracen, a heretic, an intruder among the enemy, a wolf in the sheepfold. His grin did not fill me with confidence. If all this went wrong, we’d never get as far as being hanged, I thought. They’d rip us apart. I added my own voice to the demonic choir: it was a relief to howl out my terrors.

At last the windows were unshrouded, candles lit. The Lady Chapel was flooded with light. Hell was banished for another year. In its place, pillars bursting with carved foliage, arcades decorated
with crimson, gold and blue. The sun and moon together, defying the natural order, hovered above the head of a smiling Virgin Mary, the Christ child cradled in her arms. Bright friezes of saints, martyrs and apostles gazed down. I felt their eyes on me.

I looked out over the congregation. Somewhere amongst the merchants was the rest of our troupe: Red Will; Hammer and Saw; and Plaguey Mary, farther back among the peasants.

Hammer and Saw were twins, small and dark and wiry. They spoke a shared language when in their cups that none of the rest of us could understand. We’d seen them in a village on the edge of Dartmoor, juggling. We later discovered they were out-of-work carpenters, clever with their hands. Quickfinger soon taught them to pick pockets.

Red Will and Plaguey Mary we’d found on the outskirts of Exeter. Will was playing a flute, badly, and Mary was laughing at his lack of skill. She gave us an assessing look. We soon disabused her of the idea we might be customers. Despite the name she went by, Mary was a hale and healthy whore, one possessed of a robust sense of humour and a ready laugh. We passed them by, but Mary came after us, sensing a better opportunity than her usual trade, and Will followed.

Travelling players, a terrible minstrel, jugglers, out-of-work carpenters, pickpockets, a whore—how I enjoyed their company after the mealy-mouthed monks and the mean novices and their snide violence. We laughed and shared stories, and soon I felt for the first time as if I was part of a family, and not the runt of the litter, and that by our ruses and clever tricks I was taking some sort of revenge on Mother Church for all I had suffered at her hands.

From the edge of Dartmoor to the Somerset Levels, our ragtag band had gone from church to chapel, priory to abbey to marketplace, faking a cure here, a resurrection there, gaining renown
and money along the way. People were so willing to believe. They wanted miracles to exist. And the clergy we approached were all too happy to play along. Miracles brought money in, in the form of offerings, but Canterbury had been piling up its gold in the thirteen years since Thomas à Becket’s canonization, leaching away funds from all the other saints. We were rarely turned away when offering our authentications and testaments. This grand fraud here in Glastonbury was to be our swan song, after which we would disband and go our separate ways, once the abbey’s bursar had divided up the spoils with us.

At least, that was the plan …

During the sermons, one of the fettered mad folk started to cry out like a squallyass and had to be removed next door, into the patched-up ruins of the nave. The prior, sensing he was losing his audience, declared: “
Miraculum magna videbis!
” “Now miracles will be seen!”

The relics were announced: from Saint Aidan and the Lindisfarne saints, Saint Indracht and Saint Beonna, Saint Patrick of Ireland … the list went on and on. We’d been told at dinner the previous night that before the canonization of Thomas à Becket, Glastonbury was the richest in relics, with twenty-two entire saints (well, almost entire—a half of Saint Aidan was claimed by the monks of Iona, and another bit was in Durham, but almost half of such a powerful saint was better than a whole minor martyr), and so its coffers used to overflow. But following the rise of the cult of Saint Thomas, and the great fire, Glastonbury’s fortunes had been on the wane. And you could see how the congregation hung back, dissatisfied with the array of worn-down saints, waiting as the reliquaries were disposed about the chapel under the watchful eye of the warden. Pilgrims had been known to try to steal a souvenir here and there; one man got caught with a mouthful of Saint Beonna after bending to kiss the bones.

Finally, out came the ornamented box that our clever carpenters, Hammer and Saw, had made. Amazing that tin, shined up right, could look so much like silver.

The canons opened the reliquary so that the pilgrims could view the bones of Arthur’s strong right arm. All round the Lady Chapel there was a great intake of breath. Rumours of the cures the hero-king had brought about, all the way from Cornwall to the Somerset moors, had been reaching them for weeks. At Newton St. Cyres a dead boy who had fallen down a well was restored to life. In Ottery St. Mary a pox-struck woman was instantly cured. In Chard a deaf man was suddenly granted the gift of angel-song. In Charlton Mackrell all manner of ailments had been cured by the drinking of water that was run over the bones. Agues and poxes, quinsy and falling sickness: all banished by the king’s sword-arm.

And so here they were, the hopeless and helpless: those for whom doctors had achieved nothing but a miraculous lightening of the wallet; those who had tried remedies, from boiled snails to dog spit and everything in between; who’d been bled and leeched and covered in foul-smelling poultices; who’d prayed to all the saints for babies, for straight limbs, a stiff prick or a cure for baldness, all to no avail. Now it was down to King Arthur.

The pilgrims poured forward. Squabbles broke out. The Moor made a signal, and a twisted little man who had been pushing himself around on a wheeled trestle with hands shod in wooden pattens suddenly untwisted his distorted limbs, got up from his handcart on legs that now appeared sound and walked into the crowd. People touched him for luck, the next best thing to the holy bones being someone in whom the mana ran strong.