Flying to Nowhere: A Tale (6 page)

‘Strangely enough, I think it is consoling. I have a great love of comfrey. And I loved Brother Matthew.’

The Abbot felt at that moment that he was the true inheritor, not only of the defunct Brother Matthew’s role on the island, but of all the arts and failings of Apollo.

On his return he continued with his dissection. Being meticulous, he observed and made notes upon every aspect of the corpse worthy of such observation, as though chronicling the whole history and culture of a dead civilization.

‘A large breast. Lungs not fungous, but sticking to the ribs and distended with much blood. A lividness in the face, as if he had a difficulty of breathing a little before his death.’ Institutions, laws, council-chambers, all deserted as by a plague, opened to the knife.

‘Heart great, thick, fibrous and fat. The blood in the heart blackish and dilute.’

Roads, fields, prisons, factories, analysed on a table from which the liquids gathered and were channelled back into the corpse-pit.

‘The cartilages of the sternum not bony, but flexile and soft. The viscera very sound and strong, especially the stomach.’

Every now and then the knife had to be resharpened on an oiled stone, and while it was being sharpened the same question played in the Abbot’s head: ‘Where is the private chamber of the ruling spirit?’

He supposed that the body was, as usual, that of a pilgrim. Perhaps it belonged to the departed soul of William Evans of Chester. Was it the last repository of all the human affection its earthly motions had warranted? Where now was the love of his dead wife for this grey, wet shape? And what had happened to the articulated flesh of the woman herself, loved in its turn?

He thought of the two souls, disembodied, in bliss. And experienced a wave of revulsion from a notion so palpably difficult to encompass. On to the conarium!

His investigation was interrupted by the ringing of the abbey bell, as if for divine service. It was not such an hour, he knew, and he suspected (rightly) the officious demands of Vane.

‘Is there no other way to reach you, except by the great bell?’ stormed Vane, when the Abbot appeared.

‘I suppose not,’ said the Abbot. ‘Though no one except you would think of so peremptorily demanding me.’

Vane told him of their discovery of the dead pilgrim in the well. To the Abbot, who had only a moment before been cutting up a body that he presumed belonged to a pilgrim, such news was not sensational. But he listened with every appearance of attention and concern. The novice stood by, rapt in a contemplative silence beyond any possible division of loyalties.

‘Isn’t it clear,’ asked Vane, ‘that all my suspicions are justified? The well does not cure—far from it—and you do not bury your dead.’

‘Brother Matthew once analysed the water from Lleuddad’s well,’ said the Abbot. ‘He told me that there were substances that he could not identify. My opinion is that its properties are mysterious and inestimable.’

‘It could not keep a pilgrim alive,’ retorted Vane, ‘let alone cure him.’

‘If a man inhales water,’ said the Abbot, simply, ‘by being submerged in it, for a period of time, then there is very little that can cure him.’

‘A period of time?’ said Vane. ‘You admit, then, that this man has been drowned for a period of time without rescue or burial?’

‘It would appear so,’ said the Abbot. ‘Although you must understand that the well is not permanently supervised.’

‘Why not?’

‘The abbey cannot authorise worship at the well. It is not an altar.’

‘But its sanctity is established. It has the Bishop’s authority.’

‘Indeed,’ smiled the Abbot. ‘I believe the twenty-sixth canon of Saint Anselm is of particular significance on this point, for it decreed in 1102: “Let no one attribute reverence or sanctity to a dead body or a fountain without the bishop’s authority.” Yes. We look to the Bishop to sanctify wells.’

‘So?’

‘Now you question its sanctity. You say it does not cure. It seems to me that the Bishop must make up his mind.’

Vane grasped the edge of the table with both his hands until the knuckles whitened.

‘That,’ he said icily, ‘is precisely why I am here.’

‘Oh, I understand that well enough,’ returned the Abbot. ‘But I am attempting to distinguish between well and altar. The Bishop has few doubts about altars, I imagine?’

Vane had no desire to continue debating with the Abbot. He had for some time reached the conclusion that he was not serious, and had decided that the best course was to humour him, and to remain watchful. He demanded that the Abbot make up a party to ride up to the well and to bring back the body of the dead pilgrim. There was some fuss about finding a third donkey which irritated him further, and he dispensed Geoffrey from further duties that afternoon, since he felt that one session with the corpse had been quite enough for the boy. Geoffrey went off gladly in the direction of the harbour, for dead bodies did not worry him and there was one, not human, for which he cared and for which he hoped that something, perhaps in the way of exequies, might even now be done.

When the party reached the shoulder of the mountain, and hurried into the well-house, they found the well empty.

‘Trickery!’ shouted Vane. He did not bother to wipe away the sweat which trickled down his face and gathered at his nose like rheum, as he leaned on the rim of the well and stared into the waters.

‘The body was clinging to the side, you say?’ mused the Abbot. ‘And you dislodged it?’

Vane grunted assent.

‘The well is much deeper at one end than you suspect,’ continued the Abbot. ‘In fact, no one quite knows how deep it is.’

Vane ignored him.

‘The body must have been removed,’ he said.

‘Perhaps it has been resurrected,’ countered the Abbot, himself now exasperated at the temper and obtuseness of the Bishop’s officious minion. ‘You may report a wondrous and unexpected efficacy of the healing liquids of the well.’

Vane merely looked at him in blank wonder. The proposal, being of a totally different character from the suspected legerdemain on the Abbot’s part, could not be entertained. But the Abbot’s words for a moment entered his mind and did not seem ridiculous. They had a force beyond human argument, as would a voice from the rocky peak above them or, perhaps, tiny neighings in the grass.

The novice as usual stood apart by the doorway, converting the scene into a meditation for his book. As Vane and the Abbot peered into the water he thought to himself: ‘The unknown trader, marooned once again after exhausting adventures and chained to the island by a malign invisible power, removes himself at will through native cunning and the borrowed influence of a magic fountain.’

Although the island was ringed with the blue of eyes, shaded here and there with elusive streaks of a darker colour, but altogether, as seen from the mountain, of a brightness to impel the gaze; nonetheless, at the sea’s edge its appearance was oily, umber, repellant. The rocks that the tide periodically covered were smooth and humped, clad in skins of a slippery gelatinous weed. Between them the clefts swirled with the movement of longer tendrils in black water that never seemed still. A little further up the shore the boulders that were free of the attentions of the tide were baked paler by the sun and covered with lichens in random scribbles: ochre-splashes and larger bisecting rings of bronze. This colouration, on grey slabs of varying sizes, had the strange consistency and persistence of a pattern. As he climbed over the rocks, Geoffrey picked at the crusty rings of dried fronds and crumbled them in his fingers.

He had seen Saviour’s head and shoulders from the headland in just the same position as on the previous evening. From that distance the posture looked natural, even relaxed, as though the horse were sitting at ease and looking down the shore. Geoffrey was seized with a sudden hope that he might, after all, not yet be dead, and had made his way down to the rocks where the beast had leapt and fallen.

As he approached, he could hear above the lapping of the sea another, stranger, sound, like the wind in the tops of trees— only there was no wind. It came from the body of the horse which Geoffrey could now see was quite dead, for its haunches were already decomposed, leaving the spine arched like a flying buttress. Beneath it, heaped and massed within the collapsing bulk of the animal, was an army of maggots the volume of a broken sack of meal. He came closer and watched them with a sickened respect for this ferocious process of corruption: each maggot writhed and flopped in its effort to struggle free of the mass and to secure for itself a scrap of the decaying flesh to feed on, half of each white coiled body twisting blindly and reaching above the others for a hold that the air could not provide. Their movement was indistinct and hypnotic, for the eye, in attempting to observe the motion of every individual, failed to see more than the general heaving. It was like watching a single flake in a snowfall, and their sound was now like the gentle hissing of frying bacon.

The months that he had been in Vane’s service seemed tedious and overlong, but those same months had seen the comparatively brief custody of Vane’s horse. That friendship was now irrevocably ended, but the bondage to Vane stretched before him like a limitless sea in which there was only the vaguest chance of beaching on some redeeming and friendly island.

The pain of his loss of the horse now seemed to require some answering sacrifice, and his curiosity about the radical metamorphosis of death to require some ritual expression. Without forethought, Geoffrey thrust his spread hand into the heaving maggots.

For a moment the incredible warmth, like that of a freshly-baked loaf, was satisfying. The mysterious depths of the stirring mass, half-flesh, halkmaggot, held and almost drew in his fingers as though they were spread drowsily beneath a downy pillow. But within a few seconds Geoffrey realised what he had done and withdrew his hand in disgust.

The maggots dripped from his fingers until he shook off the crawling glove in three whip-like movements away from him. Even then one or two still adhered to the skin, and one waved, crushed, from a fingernail. He daubed it on to a rock.

After that, he had to leave the place. He walked along the headland in a fury, thinking of all that he had left behind: his father, who could shoe a horse in fourteen minutes and who sometimes, when he was happy, sang after supper and danced stiffly on his toes behind the kitchen door; his mother, who could comb her hair out all round her head so that you could hardly guess where her hidden face was; his elder brother, who could catch a fish with his fingers; his younger brother, adept at beautiful selfish arguments.

His last memory was of him urinating dangerously in a patch of nettles and having to be carried to him to say goodbye, since Frobisher was in haste to get his cart to Hereford, and would not stay. ‘Goodbye, Geoffrey.’ The wet kiss had been planted on his nose, and months of service to the dry and energetic Vane had not replaced the memory of it. He had stopped writing letters home, because no one in his family could read, and the letters written for his mother by the curate bore no resemblance at all to her voice.

From the cliff he could now and then see small pebbly inlets, sometimes with caves, where the sea was able to lap the shore more gently than on the rocky promontories that predominated on the island’s rough coast. He was surprised to discover one which had what looked like over a hundred yards of sand and a shelving beach where the tide curled idly, as if with relief at not being required to shoulder pillars of granite, or grunt and slobber over tiers of boulders. His first thought was to wonder why the boat from the mainland couldn’t have beached here; then he saw the rocks ranged right across the mouth of the bay, crowding thickly like the heads of farmers at a fair gathered to watch the main event of the afternoon. And on the sand, as if in response to such expectation, there were four brown cows.

Geoffrey had not seen cows on the island before. These were of such a rich sandiness, sandier than the sand itself, as though by placidly standing on it they had drained it of all colour, that they had the air of belonging wholly to the little cove. They formed a small procession, ambling through the foam that seeped away at the crest of each wave and leaving steaming dumps of their dung at intervals.

At their head, dancing before them, leading them with arms raised as though they were on invisible ribbons, was a girl dressed in grey. There was a lightness in her bare feet and a carelessness in her manner that somehow set her apart from the animals in her charge.

Geoffrey thrilled to see this theatre of cows and descended from the cliff along little brambly rabbit paths to get a better view. The girl continued her dance as if she had not seen him.

Sometimes she faced them, walking backwards on her toes and directing their movements. Sometimes she ignored them, striding ahead with her arms raised sideways, head down, observing the pad’pad of her feet and the momentary space of her toe prints in the wet sand. Geoffrey cautiously walked up and followed, like a fifth cow.

The girl spoke:

‘Mulican, Molican, Malen, Mair,

Dowch adre’r awrhon ar fy ngair.’

‘What did you say?’ called Geoffrey from behind the ambling rump of the last cow. But the girl made no answer.

‘Are you a fairy?’ he asked, with a respectful grin.

She darted him a quick, interested, warning glance while at the same time pretending not to have noticed him.

‘Where are you taking these cows?’ he called.

She laughed.

‘Into the sea!’

‘Do they live in the
sea?
’

She laughed again, and twirled round on one foot.

‘Do
you
live in the sea?’

At this, she looked directly at him with real amusement. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘At the bottom of the sea.’

They walked on together in silence, and when she suddenly turned and walked back through the following cows, Geoffrey followed at her side.

‘Then you
are
a fairy,’ he claimed.