Flying to Nowhere: A Tale (9 page)

Remember that uttering strange words that drift in the wind is an attempt to fly. A man who cannot keep his silence is a man who tries to fly. The sounds emerge as from a wood which to enter were to be lost for an afternoon.

Therefore, brothers, I say remember the soil, and be secret, tread soberly and know not women. Be mindful in this of our Saint of blessed memory, Lleuddad, whose bones in the soil nourish our life on this island. Let his example then be a beacon to this novice, our brother, who lies here before us. He has announced his kinship with the dust, and on the dust he is prone. He figures the worm that is in each of us, our beginning and our ending. Amen.

When he had finished his sermon, the Abbot was ashamed, because he knew he had lied. ‘It is no wonder,’ he said to himself, as the women led the novice away for his trial, ‘that I am misunderstood. I hardly understand myself, for that is not what I meant to say at all.’ He was disrobed, and then returned to his study where he sat quite silently in the dark, the sweat dampening the fringes of his beard.

Beneath him, working without light in the dank heat of a narrow stone space which was neither vertical nor horizontal, neither cellar nor foundations, was Vane. He slithered on stone slabs that were slimy with calcification, and waded in troughs that disappeared into walls so shallow that the space seemed all flooded ceiling. It scraped his stooping back and dropped sodden scales and blisters of distilled stone into his hair.

And all the while the spring water from the mountain ran in a determined current round his ankles. ‘It’s flowing here on purpose,’ thought Vane. ‘It’s as though the Abbot’s house was built here to receive its tribute of corpses.’

He did not believe that the Abbot was a cannibal but nor could he explain what happened to the bodies of the pilgrims. His investigation had rapidly turned into a particular investigation of the Abbot, against whom many charges could, it seemed, be made. The mismanagement of the well now looked like being the least of these. There was, for example, the rumour of his relationship with a woman at the farm, and of heresy in his doctrines. But Vane did not understand the Abbot’s remarks, and suspected him of being an idler, whimsical in his isolation from any true religious discipline, or from any congregation that looked to his word. And where indeed was the community that Vane had expected to find? There was a handful of novices only, scarcely more than boys, no older than the girls who worked on the farm and probably their brothers. Were there no ordained monks? Were there no men of experience, wisdom and probity? Ordinations took place, he knew, for there was to be one that very day.

At least, it appeared to be intended to be an ordination, though from all accounts the forms of the ceremony were very strange. He had just begun to speculate on the fate of the island’s novices and to try to link it in some logical way (it seemed to insist itself strangely, to propose itself almost as a puzzle) with the fate of the island’s pilgrims, so near solution, when his foot met not slippery stone, shelving beneath a foot or two of water, but more water. Suddenly without warning he was up to his chest. Reaching for a handhold in the stone he found none, and could not keep his balance. Scrabbling in panic beneath the water he found himself clutching (could it be?) limbs, hair, fingers. In his alarm, reaching for the nonexistent hold that would keep him upright, he lost his balance in the water entirely and was attracted to the soft bodies in the corpse pit, wafted and bumping down to them as though the well gathered and guarded its treasure in assemblies and lodges; drifting, sleeping, wrinkled shapes. Trying to push away from them only drew him nearer, his palms repelling surfaces that attracted and lingered, rolling over as if for the inspection of his shut eyes, till his breath gave out and he became a corpse himself. The question of the unordained novices remained open. He was transformed, but unblessed.

Geoffrey, instructed to guard the entrance of Vane’s excavations against the inquisitiveness of the novices, now that secrets seemed close to being revealed, heard nothing of these events. He sat on a warm stone in the evening light, and the few monks near him told their beads as they faced the challenging mysteries of their brother’s ordeal in the chamber above, mysteries cast by lamps lit early, in shadows, at the blank window. Geoffrey looked up, too, and wondered what was being required of the young man who had so silently and assiduously conducted them about the island during the past few days. He had asked Tetty, who at first pretended to keep a secret, but had at last admitted that she did not know. The older women were forbidden to talk of it, and the girls’ games, which frequently centred on the ordeal, were muddled compilations of fiction and rumour. From one corner of the room to the other, an epic diagonal, without touching the floor, but clinging to the walls, on bedrails, chests, eaves, anything; in contrary motion, passing at the window, giggling, bodies against bodies; perched for rest, sweating, legs kicking and dangling; in whispers in cupboards: ‘I’d like to die with them.’

When the novice’s chest was unbound, the burrs and knots of grasses unfolded on the skin, the tight stalks springing free, falling away as the sweat dried, dropping to the bed sheets. The ulcers stood shyly on his body, like mouths about to speak. New candles burned in the room, sweet steady light in the still air illuminating the comings and goings of the women, casting shadows on the bed curtains. Gweno was washed, and laid in the bed; the cords were arranged across their bodies; water was sprinkled.

They might have been corpses there, or models for funeral effigies. Only Gweno’s eyes, swivelling as if by ingenious clockwork in her otherwise still face, betrayed the ordinary curiosity of life. All else was stasis and resignation as the women strewed the chamber with herbs, drew the curtains and left on noiseless feet. What was the ordeal? Was it in, or was it out of, the bodies so laved and arranged together? To what was the body a challenge? For what absent lord did the tenant guard the house in his care?

The novice moved one finger against the sheet, as if to test his ability to control his limbs. His eyes became used to the darkness. ‘The real nature of a test,’ he reflected, ‘is that we do not know what is required of us. And yet would the false hero, unable to drag the sword from the stone, survive the ordeal through knowing his inability to perform the task and therefore not attempting it? Only the basest villain, common beyond the escapist dreams of a threatened king, would pass by the stone in sublime ignorance.’

Within the linen cube of the bed-space the living shapes of the present made the demands that always belong to the present. A cheek, neck and shoulder claimed their exclusive right to measure the unbearably slow passing of time, insisting that their power over the attention was incomparable with any such power once possessed, or to be possessed. The novice knew, also, from instruction, that the ordeal belonged to the present; that its character was of a requirement of decisions and performance of the moment; that knowledge of the appropriate time of the test was a natural faculty of the prepared novice, not foreseen, but patent in its own natural course. If he shut one eye, the novice could see twenty toes and the bed hangings; if he opened that eye and shut the other, he could see the hill of bosom, the spread of hair and the whites of eyes looking at him in wonder. He lay still as an island, shutting first one eye and then the other. Gweno giggled, and turned the giggle into a hiccup. The air was close in the bed. A drop of sweat ran down the novice’s cheek from his temple and settled in his collar-bone. The presence of the girl stirred half-realised memories of childhood, when night was at once a threat to the nest and a huddled shelter from that threat, when the sky rolled above in its courses and sleep was content to resign the human will to the moon and stars, which thundered silently in the heavens, mysteriously planned, icy, mechanical, alight, untouching.

In the morning the women returned to the chamber. It may be that experience told them what they would find, for they came with bowls of hot water and with folded cloths. The eldest of the women carried a small knife and a stone, and she hummed an old tune to herself as she crossed the chamber. Light raised beams of dust from the tiny windows. The only sounds were of the women’s clogs on the rushes, the cloths being dipped in the water and squeezed out and the barely audible tune, half hummed, half whistled between the teeth and the lower lip, not varying much from the monotone:

‘Ble caiff nhad gysgu?

Caiff gysgu yn gwely’r morwynion.’

When they drew the curtains of the bed, they found the novice shaking in terror.

Tetty and Geoffrey had decided they must enter the Abbot’s house. It was not the first time that Tetty had stood outside, pulling at the bell foolishly while nothing happened, and Geoffrey felt enough concern for the fate of his master not to behave like a polite visitor. The door was not locked, so they went inside.

In such a house it was not easy to find the occupant, though known to be there. Room after room bore evidence of his recent presence: the robe in which he had delivered his sermon lying across a table, papers half-written on, a bowl with food in it (which proved to be, when Tetty looked more closely, some sort of uncooked offal in a strange liquid like vinegar).

They went down corridors, knocking on doors. They left rooms that they found empty by other doors than they had come in by. They went upstairs, and then down again by different staircases. Tetty was clutching a fragment of paper which she had cut out herself with a pair of scissors from the recipe book under instructions from Mrs Ffedderbompau, and on which Mrs Ffedderbompau had written a message to be delivered to the Abbot when she was dead. The message had been sealed with infinite pains—pointlessly, since Tetty could not read. She did not bother to think of what it might contain.

Since Mrs Ffedderbompau’s death she had been thinking continually of what Geoffrey had eagerly proposed to her almost as soon as they had met, that she should leave the island with him when Vane’s work was done, and that they should marry and live together until they were old people with memories and married children of their own. She had laughed then, and told him tales of boys who were deceived into marrying fairies. And Geoffrey had laughed, too, and they had looked for mushrooms together, he finding none and she knowing as if by magic where they had sprung up overnight. She wondered if all overnight changes were as fragile as these nude pink uncurling creatures, which so shortly blackened and spoiled if not taken up quickly, and knew from the buds of her own body that some were not. Still, fairy or not, particularly not, she felt a yearning to be gathered. And wondered at Geoffrey’s ignorance as he pounced with pride on stones, wool tufts, sheep bones, daisie, anything white to the eye at the distance of a house.

She had left the other farm girls talking about what should be done now that Mrs Ffedderbompau was dead. The season constrained them to carry on with harvest; cutting, plucking, garnering. The work would be done. Next season’s work would be organised. But for Tetty something had snapped in the life of the farm itself, and now she was ready to leave.

Geoffrey’s news that his master had not emerged from the watery foundations of the Abbot’s house, and that the channel now appeared to be quite flooded and impassable, had not entirely displeased her.

‘Then he must be drowned,’ she had said. ‘Now we can leave the island, can’t we?’

But Geoffrey felt the pull of duty, and was determined to find out if Vane had made his way into the cellars of the Abbot’s house and avoided drowning after all. Tetty dismissed the idea as they searched the house for the Abbot:

‘If we can’t find the Abbot himself, how should we find your master?’ she said. ‘It must be the Saint’s vengeance upon him for tearing up his sacred well.’

‘Dear Tetty,’ said Geoffrey, with his hand at her cheek. ‘Saints don’t take revenge. That’s why they are saints.’

‘Then you are a saint, too, for caring for the man who killed your horse.’

‘I don’t
care
for him at all,’ Geoffrey replied.

‘Neither do I,’ exclaimed Tetty. ‘So when we have given the Abbot the letter we can leave, can’t we?’

‘I suppose we can.’

‘And you can leave the service of such a destroying man.’

‘Perhaps I can.’

‘Finally, you see,’ persisted Tetty, ‘he has destroyed himself, in the very waters that should revive him.’

The debt to Vane cancelled by such an argument, they sealed their pact to make a new life together. And as if the house had until that moment of decision been hiding the Abbot away from them so that they should be forced to search in their own minds as well as through its empty rooms until they finally and certainly found what they were looking for, they straight away came upon him in his dissecting chamber.

The Abbot greeted them without rebuke or surprise, and were it not for the absent and distracted air he wore might have seemed almost eager, intruders as they were in such a place, to have them corroborate the discovery he had made.

‘Look here,’ he said, lifting up the grey arm of the corpse that lay half-covered on the slab in the centre of the chamber. ‘Look!’

He took hold of the corpse’s fingers, straightening them out one by one.

Tetty did not wish to look much, and Geoffrey could only think, appalled at what they saw, that Vane had been right after all, and that the Abbot was mad and dangerous. How could he as a man of God be found slopping about in an inch of filthy water, his sandals breaking the gouts and ribbons of black blood and skidding on flaps of skin? His hair was awry, and in one hand he held a saw.

‘The fingernails have grown,’ said the Abbot. ‘The waters not only preserve but revive!’

The young pair were abashed in his presence, all they had come for forgotten. When he asked them, it took them a moment to remember. The Abbot took Mrs Ffedderbompau’s letter and held it in wonder as he had held the fingers of the corpse.