The Salisbury Manuscript (2 page)

He put the lamp on the ground and lifted the skull up from its place near the ribcage. The space was cramped and airless. It would have been easier to work here if he cleared the bones but he was curiously reluctant to disturb them further. Behind the spot where the skull had been the rock was relatively smooth. Using a trowel from his bag, the man scraped away the mud which he himself had plastered there on his last visit. His arms and legs bumped against the remains of his underground companion but he was so absorbed in his work that he hardly noticed them or the small sounds behind his back – that grey scuttling creature, no doubt.

Soon his efforts revealed a low rock face. This far end of the burrow was composed of small slabs of stone, square or oblong, almost wall-like in their overall effect. They didn’t fit quite snugly together but, like the entrance and the sides of the burrow, they had certainly been created by human hand.

When he had cleared a large enough area, the man used his gloved hands to grasp at the edges of a rectangular slab in the centre of the wall. It came away easily enough and he placed it on the ground. The resulting space was like the mouth of a post-box. He removed another slab. Then he reached in and groped around the recess that lay at the end of the burrow. His fingers closed round familiar objects and he breathed a sigh of relief. His secret was safe.

He brought the first of the items into the warm glow from the lamp. Its feel and weight were well known to him, likewise the dull sheen of the thing. Once again, he marvelled at the intricate workmanship. Let no one say that he was a common despoiler of graves, unable to appreciate beauty when he saw and handled it!

Swiftly he retrieved all the objects from the recess, piling them next to the bones of the skeleton. Using the lamp, he made a final examination of the recess. The light showed a roughly rectangular cavity lined with stone which had been cut to the same primitive finish as the exterior. Nothing remained inside. The cupboard was bare. He debated for an instant replacing the stone blocks but what would be the point? Anyone was welcome to visit the place now. But some instinct did cause him to return the stones to their position in the wall after all, the same instinct that had made him reluctant to disturb more of the bones than necessary.

The man, sweating from his efforts and his hunched posture and the confined space, now proceeded to wrap up the objects from the hidden recess. He had brought fragments of cloth in his bag for this purpose. Otherwise the bag had been empty, apart from the lamp and the trowel. Returning, it would be full. He loaded the bag and hefted it a few inches from the ground. It was heavier than he expected. He contemplated sitting out the hours of darkness here and sneaking back with the first glimmers of light from the east.

Dragging the bag with him, he moved into the more spacious area of the burrow near the entrance. He suddenly felt weary, not simply from the physical effort of emptying the stone cavity within the burrow but from the tension and concealment of the last few weeks.

The man had discovered the burrow revealed by the fallen beech tree in late summer. It wasn’t the first time he had tramped over the area of Todd’s Mound within sight of the cathedral spire, tramped without success. He persisted because his researches had shown that there should be something here on this flank of the hill. But it was only during one fine September afternoon that he observed the stone blocks above the great bole of the tree. A cursory inspection of the stones revealed that they had been shaped to serve some purpose, an entrance to an underground chamber.

Feeling slightly foolish, he crawled inside the triangular ‘door’ and found himself in the larger space beyond. He carried no light with him but, when his eyes adjusted to the gloom, he was just able to discern a skeleton laid out at the far end. He assumed the bones were the remains of some large animal. He crawled closer and, working by touch rather than sight, quickly established that they were human. But more than that he couldn’t discover although the dark chamber seemed to offer some kind of promise. Surely it must conceal more than a pile of bones?

The very next day he returned with a lamp, pick, hammer and other tools in a leather bag. The weather had turned and the wind was gusting. He was wearing a long black coat, half as protection, half as disguise. This time he was conscious of moving more surreptitiously than on previous expeditions, conscious of playing a part. He crossed the sunken plateau on top of the hill. Anyone watching would have wondered exactly what business brought him to this isolated place. But there was no one to witness him disappear, like a rabbit wearing a greatcoat, into the hillside.

On this, his second visit, he operated methodically, lighting the lamp, unpacking the pick and the rest of the things from his bag before examining the interior of the burrow. Only to be disappointed. The sides were composed of chalky soil held back in places by stone slabs. There were no hidden recesses. It was not until he reached the area at the back of the chamber occupied by the skeleton that his straining eyes made out, beneath a veneer of muddy slime, a feature that seemed more promising. Slabs of stone arranged like large irregularly sized bricks.

The man shifted a portion of the skeleton and scraped away the mud. Soon he was prising away a block that offered the most purchase to his eager fingers. It was difficult work. He was on his knees, leaning forward, encumbered by his black coat. He raised the lamp so that it illuminated the cavity beyond. His heart banged in his chest when the lamp beams reflected off a mound of objects. He reached in and drew out the nearest. It was an elaborate neck-piece or collar, heavy and ungainly to modern eyes, perhaps, but most attractive to him. He placed it respectfully on the dirty ground and fumbled inside the recess for the next item.

Later he returned all the objects to the cavity and replaced the slab. Then he smeared mud back over the stones. He positioned the skull just below the slab against a smaller stone. He retreated to the outer part of the burrow and sat in thought. Then he gathered up three bones and arranged them near the entrance in the style of the letter H. He could not laugh at his little joke but he did smile slightly. He packed up his implements and doused the lantern.

He returned to the outside world. The wind had dropped but autumn was in the air. He looked down and observed clots of mud and streaks of chalk on his coat. He wiped them off and then used his spittle and a handkerchief to clean his hands and face as best he could. After that, he retraced his path uphill and so through the back entrance to the hill settlement, across the plateau and down the gentler slope on the western side.

For the next few weeks he remained in a fog-like state of indecision, wrestling with his conscience. Could he – or rather should he – go back and retrieve the items which he had unearthed in the burrow? The man had always regarded himself as an honest, even honourable, individual. He read widely and thought about things, even though he occupied a position where neither reading nor thinking was expected of him. He argued with himself. Didn’t he have a right to goods which had been uncovered through his own ingenuity and labours? He was depriving no one else by his find. The long-dead had no use for them. If he hadn’t almost stumbled across the cavity sheltered by the base of the beech tree, the objects in the burrow might have rested there until the end of time, to no one’s benefit.

At one point the man set off with his bag, intending to return to the burrow and take the hoard. But his nerve failed him and he had hardly got to the halfway stage between the city and Todd’s Mound when he turned back, irresolute. He attempted to bend his mind to his daily work in the cathedral and to forget about his discovery below the hillfort.

But it was in the cloisters of the cathedral that enlightment or guidance of a sort came to him. There was a memorial tablet on the inner wall of the covered walk of the cloisters which included a quotation from Ecclesiastes:
and if the tree fall toward the south, or toward the north, in
the place where the tree falleth, there it shall be
. He’d noticed the inscription before without paying much attention to it or wondering greatly at its meaning. But, one morning, walking briskly down the cloister, he stopped and read the words on the tablet more carefully and saw how they had an odd application to his discovery.

The inscription was from Chapter 11 of Ecclesiastes. When he got back to his house, the man wrote out the inscription from memory. He stared at it for a long time. He realized that the verse provided not only a strange allusion to his discovery but an even stranger one to himself. The man wasn’t especially superstitious but he’d grown into the habit of looking for little signs and markers. It was enough to determine his course. He would go back to Todd’s Mound and open up the cavity in the burrow once more and bring out the objects.

As soon as he was free of duties – the next afternoon as it transpired – he slipped out of the cathedral close and, once on the edge of the city, he donned the rough coat and hat which might cause him to be mistaken for an itinerant labourer and walked rapidly into the surrounding country. The sky was overcast and he was glad that there were few people about. The only person who had taken any notice of him was the shepherd striding downhill on the western slope of Todd’s Mound.

Now, a couple of hours later when it was dark outside, he sat in the stuffy burrow by the light of the oil lamp, hefting the sack which contained the treasure hoard. He took another swig from his flask. He had almost forgotten that someone, or something, had intruded on the burrow in his absence. Then the sight of the bones casually thrown to one side reminded him that the burial chamber had been visited. The idea of waiting for first light was not an appealing one.

He prepared to leave, looking round to make sure that he’d gathered up all his implements. He doused the oil lamp. He waited while his eyes adjusted to the near-absolute dark inside the burial-chamber. The entrance showed as a slightly less dark shape in the gloom. He unscrewed the flask for a final draught. Whether it was that he was no longer so absorbed in his task or whether the absence of light had somehow sharpened his senses, the man abruptly stopped in the action of returning the flask to his pocket and listened.

What was that sound from outside? A kind of rushing noise. The wind, no doubt. And that flicker of movement across the mouth of the burrow, like a curtain being drawn? The man scrabbled to get clear of the confined space as if afraid that the entrance was about to be sealed up for ever. He emerged into the open on his hands and knees, drawing in lungfuls of cold air. Still crouching, he looked from side to side. Nothing to see beyond the great bulk of the beech tree on the slope below him and the blotted shapes of the yews. The rain had stopped and the sky was clear apart from some scudding clouds and the starlight which shone stronger in the absence of the moon. He gazed up at the rapidly shifting sky and there came to him another line from Ecclesiastes, Chapter 11:
he that regardeth the clouds
shall not reap
.

The man reached back into the burrow and dragged out the bag containing his spoils. He stood up, momentarily unsteady on his feet after being confined for so long. He looked out at the few scattered lights of the city and the silhouette of the cathedral spire. He put the bag over his shoulder. It was heavy. He would be exhausted by the time he got back to the security of the close. He would have to take care returning through the town even though he would be threading its streets in the dead hours of morning. And he knew its streets and alleys well.

The man was still standing near the entrance to the burial chamber. A few feet to his left was the branch which he had earlier thrown to one side. He was reluctant to leave the burrow exposed so he shuffled across to lay hold of the branch and tugged it back to conceal the entrance. Breathing deeply from the effort he turned about to begin his progress uphill, guided by starlight and the contour of the slope. He glanced at the area above the burrow. There was something up there he hadn’t seen before. A darker shape squatting against the sky. For an instant he thought it was a tree with two branches splayed out in queer symmetry, one on either side. But the tree began to move. It seemed to grow higher. The branches became arms. Then it left the ground altogether and launched itself at the man. He was too shocked to move. He received the flying shape full force in his chest and tumbled backwards down the flank of Todd’s Mound.

The breath was knocked out of him and an object in the bag – the trowel or an item taken from the burrow – stabbed him painfully in his back. There was another duller pain in his left leg, as though in falling down he might have injured himself. But the man was scarcely aware of any of this. Instead from where he was lying, his head lower than his feet, he saw the tree-shape once more raise itself further up the slope of the hill. Like him, the shape was breathing hard. Both of its arms were extended and it was jigging and swaying as if to keep balance. In one of the outstretched hands the man made out a metallic glint, a knife blade. If he stayed very still he might pass unnoticed. Irrelevantly, out of the depths of his mind there sprang a name, a strange name. It was that of Atropos, one of the old Greek Fates, the one who wields her shears like a blade and who cuts off the thread of life. It had all been explained to him.

Seeing the outline of the figure waver uncertainly as if it didn’t know what to do next, the man remained where he was, stock still. After what seemed an interminable length of time, the black shape turned about as though it intended to make its way uphill, away from him. Yes, it was moving
away
. Without thinking, the man on the ground raised himself slightly so as to relieve the stabbing pressure from the bag at his back. As he did this, a much worse pang seized his left leg like a hot wire cutting into the flesh. He must have broken something in falling, broken an ankle, perhaps a leg-bone. He heard a suppressed groan and wondered who was making it. Another groan, louder this time, before he realized that the noise had come out of his own mouth.