Witchfall (24 page)

‘Yes, yes,’ he muttered. ‘Mercury rising. And here,
Caput
Draconis
.’ He stood and looked up at me, his light-coloured eyes narrowed to bright slits. ‘The Head of the Dragon, auspiciously placed for divination. No infortunes applying, and although it is the dark of the Moon, yet this may work in our favour for such dark and secret matters. Tell me, girl, when did you last eat?’

‘Pardon?’

‘Did you break your fast this morning? Answer truthfully, for it is important. To avoid evil influence, the stomach must be empty and the body cleaned for conjuration.’

I had to think. ‘I took a little ale, but no food. I was not hungry after last night’s excitement.’

He nodded to Richard. ‘Prepare her,’ he muttered, and turned to a saddlebag on the floor behind the table, bending to retrieve various wrapped objects which he began to place on the table.

‘What’s going on?’ I whispered to Richard.

Dee’s apprentice did not smile. I had been right. He was angry that I was taking his place as seer.

‘My master wishes to test your visions,’ he said coolly, and poured water from a flask into a bowl. Into this he stirred what smelled like a mixture of ground herbs and spices – I caught a hint of pine, nutmeg, sage, and something exotic I could not place – then carried the bowl to me. When I merely raised my eyebrows, he gestured to the stool. ‘Sit, I need to wash you.’

I repressed a giggle, and he grew even more stern.
‘Forgive me,’ I managed. Trying to look serious, I held out my hands and watched in fascination as Richard dipped each finger in the odd-smelling concoction one by one, then dried them afterwards on a red cloth. As each finger was dipped into the water, he muttered in Latin, ‘
Sanus
,’ and then ‘
Gratius ago
,’ as he dried it.

When Richard came to the finger with the missing nail, its skin still red and puckered, he glanced at me but said nothing, drying it more carefully than the others.

Master Dee stooped to burn a handful of incense on a platter. The small hut filled with a strange, sweet-smelling smoke that left me a little light-headed. The astrologer then lit four candles and placed one ceremoniously at each corner of the table, in a way that was very reminiscent of my own casting of the circle.

‘Thou shalt honour the North, the South, the East and the West,’ I muttered. This I could understand.

Richard’s hard gaze lifted to my face. ‘Head back,’ he said softly, then dipped his finger in the bowl and drew a wet line down from my forehead to my chin, then across from one cheek to the other. He’s making the sign of the cross, I realized, and was surprised by it.

Master Dee was now chanting in Latin. The chanting went on for some time. He swung a black hooded cloak about his shoulders and pinned it with a gold and red brooch which glinted in the firelight. The centre of the table he draped with a black silk cloth, on which he placed a greying
ram’s skull with curved horns, a quill and an inkpot containing red ink.

At least, I hoped it was red ink.

Raising his hands to the ceiling like some priest about to say Mass, John Dee cried out, ‘Hear us, O Mars, great lord of battle and feverish visions, in whose name all blood is spilt. Grant that our seer Meg Lytton may call on you for strength through this talisman of your power, the Ram.’

As I watched, he dipped the quill in the red ink and drew on the ram’s skull the spidery shape of a conjoined circle and cross on the skull, then topped this symbol with a crescent curving upwards.

‘O Mercury, swift and cunning ruler of petitions and messengers, may your bright wings guide us in this endeavour, you whom the Romans called the god Mercurius and the Persians the lord Tyr.’ He touched his forehead to the table three times, then pointed at me. ‘I conjure you, O Mercury, to bring this girl to a place where she may speak with that spirit which troubles us, and learn its will.’

‘You know,’ I whispered to Richard, ‘I managed to summon Anne Boleyn without any of this nonsense.’

Richard’s mouth twitched, but he did not reply. He merely took away the bowl of scented water he had used to wash my hands and face, and returned with a comb. Carefully, he unpinned my white cap and set it aside, then began to comb out my hair.

He paused, frowning down at me. ‘Why is your hair so short?’

‘I fell asleep in a field and a goat ate it,’ I replied.

‘You are a very strange girl, Meg,’ he commented, then went back to combing my hair with short, careful strokes.

He was not to know that my hair had been chopped off by Marcus Dent at our last encounter, and had not yet fully regrown. But the brutal memory stung and I stiffened under his touch. I found it disturbing that John Dee and Marcus Dent had known each other at university, and shared an interest in astronomy and mathematics.

What else had Marcus shared? Dee’s fascination with magick, perhaps, and not merely as a witch-hunter?

There was a threatening rumble of thunder overhead. Rain began to fall more violently, drumming on the weak roof and smashing against the shuttered window. Water leaked through the cracks and ran down the walls. The broken door banged in its frame as the wind started to rise, as though at any moment it might suddenly fly open. I hoped that Alejandro had sensibly taken Richard at his word and gone back to the house until dusk fell. But I knew he would not have left me here alone and might be sheltering nearby, probably in a thorn bush. If so, he’d be drenched by now.

Master Dee lifted one of the candles and sketched the sign of the cross in flame. Long shadows bobbed uneasily with the flame, then settled again into wavering darkness.

‘Let us pray to the Lord,’ Dee announced, much to my
amazement. He bent his head and began to mutter, ‘Our Father, who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy name . . .’

Richard knelt at my side and joined in with the Lord’s Prayer, his voice cool and calm. I had not been told to kneel so stayed where I was on the stool, but bent my head and repeated the Lord’s Prayer along with them, long-familiar words I had learned as a child from my horn book.

I had to stop myself gaping like a fool. But it was the oddest magickal act I had ever witnessed. If my demure white cap had not been removed, and I had not been sitting eyeball to eye socket with a horned skull covered with symbols drawn in blood, I might almost have been at a Church Mass.

The howl of the wind grew so loud, it began to drown out our words. The rain was lashing down, hammering at the roof, bubbling under the door, trying to get in. That was how it felt, anyway.

‘Amen,’ Dee finished triumphantly, bowing to the horned ram’s skull as though the table was an altar.

‘Amen,’ we echoed.

Richard stood and also bowed to the skull. He looked sideways at me as he straightened, half mocking, half in deadly earnest.

I’m not bowing to a skull, I thought defiantly, and stayed upright on the stool.

Dee pitched another handful of incense on the platter and set fire to it, beginning another invocation in Latin, this time to the Moon. My eyes stung with the acrid smoke and
I could feel my hunger now like a dizziness that threatened to overwhelm me. As Dee moved and swayed with the ritual, his tall hooded figure seemed to merge with the shadows behind him, until he was part of the darkness, himself one of the shadows.

I began to feel a little sick.

Uncomfortable, I shifted on my stool, an icy trickle running down my spine as though the roof above me was leaking. How much longer would this ludicrous ritual take?

John Dee crossed himself, muttering, ‘Let it be done in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.’

He dropped a thin, coiled cord in front of us on the table, and a neatly folded length of black silk. His voice was hard as flint.

‘Bind the witch’s hands behind her back, Richard, then blindfold her. It is time.’

I knew the place. I had seen it before in my dreams and in the scrying bowl, and once, in a prison cell with John Dee. John Dee. The name seemed to mean something to me. I struggled to retrieve the information but already it had gone, flitting away like a bat into the darkness.

It was nearly dusk in my vision and I was standing on the edge of a high place. At my back I could hear the wind blowing. Was I on a cliff? A tower?

Below me lay a kind of wilderness, stretching to the horizon. Stunted yellowing trees, straggling bushes, lichened boulders strewn here and there in the rough grasses, hills and valleys under the touch of autumn. On one of the hilltops opposite I could see markings and mounds in the grass where an ancient stone circle must once have stood, long since dismantled, its greatest stones carted away to build new monuments and temples – or left for the grasses to cover up.

A bird screeched overhead and, instinctively, I glanced up at its wheeling shadow. A hawk. Just like every other time.

Of course, he was there when I lowered my gaze. Marcus Dent. In his hand was the ribboned and gleaming axe I had seen before, its thick shaft wound with gleaming holly almost down to the grip.

‘You again,’ I said wearily. ‘I should have known.’

My enemy looked back at me, unsmiling, unspeaking. This time there was something different about the dream.

Then he turned his head slightly, as though to stare out into the wild air, and I realized what had changed. Marcus had an ugly scar running across his face now, and one of his eyes was coloured silver as though it was blind. So reality had caught up with my dreams.

I crooked an eyebrow. ‘Lost for words, Marcus? This is where you say, “On your knees, witch, and die!” Or something like that.’

Marcus Dent hefted the great axe in the air, grunting with the weight of it. “On your knees, witch, and die!’

This was where my visions had always ended in the past. Sweet and safe, with me waking up and wondering what that strange dream of the high place and the axe was all about.

But to my alarm, this time I did not wake up. This time, my legs buckled and I found myself kneeling before him on the hard ground.

‘No, no, this isn’t what’s supposed to happen,’ I muttered, trying to get up again.

His hand forced me down. ‘Your neck,’ he growled hoarsely. His breath sounded like a blade being sharpened. ‘Bare your neck to my axe, witch.’

‘Wake!’ I exhorted myself in Latin.

He was fumbling with my hair, drawing it back to expose my neck. I had a sudden memory of Richard gently combing
my hair. Richard, the astrologer’s apprentice, preparing me to speak to the spirits. The smoky little hut where I had been sitting on a stool when suddenly a spell had been cast upon me. A spell of candles and incantations, then the ringing of a bell, once, twice, three times, and then I was here, kneeling before Marcus Dent, my old enemy, my executioner.

‘This is just another vision,’ I told myself frantically, but kept struggling just in case I was wrong.

Marcus was strong. Far stronger than I was. I could not seem to get up. His voice was in my ear. ‘What is your name?’

‘You know my name!’ I spat bitterly.

‘Rise up and answer me. What is your name? What planet rules you? Are you of air or water?’

My face was in the dirt. I could not breathe, I was choking on the foul earth of this place. I remembered how Marcus had tried to drown me, my body succumbing to the murky cold depths of the water, and wondered if he had actually succeeded that day in Woodstock village, if everything since then had been a dream after death, an imagined life from beyond the grave, and I was in truth dead. Dead and cold, my heart stopped, my body lost to breath, my love for Alejandro buried with me, and the Spanish novice grieving over my tombstone.

Not for long though. Soon Alejandro will take ship for Spain and meet another woman there, a beautiful dark-skinned Spanish bride, and marry her instead.

I struck out with my whole being and cried, ‘Banish!’

My face was still in the dirt, but suddenly I could smell flowers. Roses, thyme, fragrant jasmine, the tall spikes of purple-headed lavender, a sweet knot of herbs in a formal garden to my left, camomile springing soft under my cheek.

‘Look up,’ a voice whispered, close to my ear.

I lifted my head. I was standing in a garden, a beautiful garden, with red brick walls and high towers above me. The sky was blue and the air was warm.

A man was standing beside me. He was tall and muscular, and stood on the grass barefoot. His body was wrapped in a yellow glittering cloth, like starfire, and as I turned to see him properly, I realized he was holding a small child in his arms.

‘Who are you?’ I asked. ‘What is your name?’

‘My name is Raphael,’ he replied.

I looked into his face and found that I could not see him properly, for all about his head was a glowing fire, emitting golden beams in all directions like a beaten image of the sun.

‘Why am I here, Raphael?’

‘You came to seek the name of the spirit who troubles you.’

With a shock, I remembered John Dee making the sign of the cross with his candle flame, then my hands being bound, my eyes covered with black silk, and the sound of a bell ringing.

‘Yes,’ I managed. My mouth was dry. ‘What is that spirit’s name?’

Raphael put the small child into my arms, saying, ‘Seek not that which is not thine to seek, but look to the one star still shining. There is thine own salvation and the salvation of Albion. Repeat these words.’

I repeated them, stumbling a little as I spoke. Then I looked down into the face of the small child in my arms. It was a girl with reddish-gold hair and small solemn dark eyes.

When I raised my head, the angel had disappeared.

‘What do you see?’

It was John Dee’s voice in my head. I stared about myself. There were shouts from the far end of the garden. Men in armour running towards me. The child was wriggling in my arms.

I lifted her up and called, staring up at the open casement above me, ‘Your daughter! Look on your daughter, my lord King!’

There was a man staring down at us. He was broad-chested and large-bellied, his face reddened with wine. There were jewels on his cap and on his large hands that clutched at the wooden frame of the casement. Then I looked into his eyes, so unexpectedly familiar, narrowed in hatred as he stared at me, and I knew in that instant who he was.