Summon the Bright Water (12 page)

Some of this I had from the major who informed me that many of the beliefs could be contained within the early Christian heresy of Gnosticism. He was shocked by his old friend Simeon, but not as exasperated as an agnostic snorting at so much nonsense. After all, the Church accepts or did once accept angels and evil spirits, though I rather think it draws the line at spirits who are neither one nor the other, invisibly leading happy lives of their own.

When he did not turn up at Marrin’s funeral I hoped that the only reason was religious objection to the possible rites of sending the defunct on to godhead; but it could be that he was suffering from a sense of guilt and on the verge of confession. I called his home number to see if he was there. His housekeeper – no doubt of canonical age – said that so far as she knew he was still at Broom Lodge. So it seemed likely that my knight errant from the Horse Guards had gone off on pilgrimage to Glastonbury or some other Arthurian site, meditating stirrups or the Grail.

Myself, I did attend the funeral; a meeting of the whole commune with the usual speeches and unusual prayers. Marrin was then carted off and conventionally cremated without any further service at all. Let him rest in peace. He was a superb craftsman. The police had raised no objection to cremation, so I could hope that the fracture of the back of the skull had been ascribed to natural causes for the time being. Microscopic examination may have shown fragments of identifiable rock.

So long as I avoided curiosity and possible suspicion by showing myself too often in the neighbourhood of Broom Lodge there was no reason why Personality No. 1 should not move freely, apart from the difficulty of changing into him; nor was Elsa accountable to anyone for her absences. So a luxurious double room was booked at Thornbury, safely across the river, for Mr & Mrs Piers Colet and for the first time we were free to make love with abandon, sleep in each other’s arms, eat and drink and laugh together. ‘Get me out of here!’ she had begged me immediately after her uncle’s death, but now she was hesitant, and all she would say in answer to my insistence was, ‘Wait, my darling!’ I supposed that she was moved by a reluctant feeling of duty to the commune. But we were not yet so accustomed to each other that I could make a good shot at the cause of occasional reticence.

While we were walking in the hotel garden, putting off as long as possible the moment of parting, she suddenly asked me:

‘Why do they go to Wigpool?’

‘I think for iron ore, unless they are just having fun underground.’

‘It couldn’t be for iron,’ she said. ‘Uncle Simeon bought the supplies for the blacksmith’s shop. It’s all full of rods and plates already.’

But all the same it could be for the ore. In one way Marrin was no fraud. It was all very well to learn to handle iron, but that scanty remnant of humanity, reborn into the neolithic culture which he foresaw, would not know how to get the raw material.

‘I’m prepared to bet anything that they are mining the iron ore with pick and shovel,’ I said, ‘and somewhere in the Forest are smelting it with coal. Or better! Smelting it with charcoal on the off-chance that our descendants think coal is only useful for chucking at chickens.’

‘Well, they do try to smelt it.’

‘At Broom Lodge?’

‘No. Somewhere in the Forest. I remember he had some leaflets printed inviting schoolchildren to watch a demonstration. It seemed quite innocent and good propaganda for the commune. I did wonder if it had anything to do with their silly sacred ingots, but they come from Wigpool, I think.’

‘What sacred ingots?’

‘They are on a table by the entrance to the lab, and the initiates bless them when they pass. I wish I knew what they are doing at Wigpool.’

‘Easy! I’ll find out and tell you.’

‘But if they find you hanging about?’

‘They won’t. Don’t you bother!’

‘Piers, where are you living?’

‘You know I am always travelling.’

‘Just one hotel to another?’

‘That’s it.’

‘And all of them smell of coal?’

‘Darling, what did you say to me? Wait!’

‘Don’t take risks, Piers!’

‘In search of what? The golden cauldron?’

‘You were taking risks long before that disappeared.’

‘Diving with your uncle?’

‘Where’s his second suit, Piers?’

‘Offered to Nodens, I expect.’

‘They do offer things to somebody,’ Elsa said.

‘How do you know?’

‘Piers dear, I don’t know how I know. I watch their faces as I’ve watched yours. And I wonder. And when things are missing I ask questions and get answers I don’t believe.’

‘What sort of things?’

‘Animals and flowers and … diving suits?’

‘And you think the altar is at Wigpool? Then they have the cauldron there!’

‘They might have. But, Piers, please, no!’

When we had gone our separate ways, I recrossed the Severn Bridge and left my car in a public car park at Chepstow. With such a number of tourists on their way to and from South Wales or the valley of the Wye the park was always full of cars, and mine was safely lost among them. In any case no one at Broom Lodge except Elsa knew its number. I then took a bus into the Forest and so by footpaths across country to my den.

I had been underrating Elsa’s powers of observation, partly because she was so young, partly for her lack of interest in the religious aspects of Broom Lodge. But she was ageless woman all through, sensitive to discordancies of collective mood or individual deviations from the norm, even if as slight as a change of wind in woodland. She was content to notice without seeking, as I would, at once to explain.

Nodens had turned up several times as if he were a patron saint of the colony. Natural enough. His temple dominates the Severn and the Forest, and I am surprised that early British bishops did not build a church on the hill top and dedicate it to St Nodentius, martyr and miner, whose head was cut off by the prefect of the port, kippered in salmon oil and thereafter able to heal the sick.

In fact the inscriptions show that he was greatly honoured by the Romans, who always recognised a useful god when they saw one. The river and the Forest were his, and his specialities were healing and finding lost property.

Writing those words has suddenly illuminated that curious incident of the lost watch. Carver was perhaps not looking up to heaven to see if there was a magpie in the branches above him; he could have been sending up a prayer of thanks to Nodens.

I have some sympathy for what was genuine in Marrin. Nodens could well have been an ancestral hero, older than Romans or Celts, who in time became a god. It’s a pleasant thought (for which I have no evidence whatever) that he might have been the marine engineer who planned the voyage of the great stones of Stonehenge all the way round Wales, across the Severn estuary and up the Avon.

Such practical details of life in the past fascinated Marrin as they do me. That is why we got on easily together. It is also why he desperately wanted me out of the way. Our interests were close enough – though his crazily extended from past into the future – for him to be afraid that my specialised knowledge might expose the secret of how he financed his colony.

The smelting of iron ore seemed a good point at which to start investigation. So next day I decided to be a private eye and play the major’s game of calling at pubs on the northern side of the Forest. In order to appear businesslike I used my car and Personality No. 1, carrying 2’s outfit in case of need. What I wanted to know was where I could buy a quantity of charcoal. At the big factory, I was told, which supplied the chemical industry. But did anybody still burn charcoal by the old method? Yes, two enterprising ex-miners were hard at it and coining money, though you wouldn’t think it to look at ’em. They had developed a new and profitable market: the suburbs of the larger towns within easy reach where families had fallen for the new craze of outdoor barbecues.

And so to the fairy-tale scene of a charcoal burner. The pyramid of wood smouldered under its bee-hive cover of turf and clay, pouring out trickles of smoke from the vent holes. Alongside the oven were stacks of beech and oak, and a hut where one of the partners was always on duty day and night. Apparently a charcoal pit is more of a nuisance than a baby. It must be inspected every two hours in case it bursts into flame; and there is only one way to build the shallow pit which contains the bee-hive. That is to learn it from your father who learned it from his father.

All this the burner on duty told me, a cheerful grin splitting his black-dusted face, evidently pleased to have company. I arrived at the point which interested me by saying that I couldn’t understand how charcoal could produce enough heat to melt iron from the ore, and got the most suprising answer.

‘Cor! Shouldn’t a believed it meself! But now ‘ee canst go see it done. Customers of mine they are. ‘Eathen Mohammedans, I’m told, but no ‘arm in ’em. All live together and do everything as it ain’t done no more. Now, if ’ee ‘urries –’ he pulled out a printed sheet from his pocket and consulted it. ‘Aye, there’s frying today! Nip on down to Flaxley Woods, and you’ll catch ’em at it twixt road and stream.’

I knew exactly where he meant and hurried, after changing in the car to Personality No. 2. Car and 2 were not supposed to be seen together, but the risk was small and any future developments seemed likely to call for No. 2 and his feet. Not far off the road was a quarter circle of low cliff left by ancient diggings, and below it open grass where time and the rains had smoothed spoil from the mine into a bumpy amphitheatre. There a furnace had been built of uncut stones mortared with clay. Near it was the Broom Lodge van containing sacks of charcoal.

A huge pair of bellows projected from the bottom of the kiln, worked by Raeburn stripped to the waist with the sweat pouring down his chest. Ballard was holding a mould in tongs, about to catch the drip from the furnace. Three small groups were watching: one of children and a schoolmaster, another of passers-by, and a third of four middle-aged and scholarly-looking men who might have been social historians or assistant directors of a folk museum.

They were getting their iron on the spot. At the back of the hollow and at the foot of the low cliff a band of ore showed plainly, which probably petered out too soon to have been of interest to a miner. A better demonstration for schoolchildren I cannot imagine. There was the whole process from the rock to the ingot.

One question, however, puzzled me. The home-made ingots were far from commonplace, but why should they be sacred? I guessed at a very tentative answer. The whole set-up could be a most ingenious blind like Marrin’s alchemy. Since there was no easy method of smelting iron secretly, he had decided to do it publicly. It was certainly ore from the surface rock which was being extracted, but if ore from quite another source (say, their revered Wigpool) went into the furnace, no onlooker would be any the wiser.

After returning to my car and driving it further between the trees, I slipped back to the free show. I wanted to know what the pair of metallurgists would do when they knocked off, and I had discovered a satisfactory lair from which to watch. There miners of unknown ancestry and language had been ruthless in chasing the ore, leaving behind a landscape of miniature crags which reminded me – though the sweeping, green shelter of a great oak confirmed that I was in England – of some painting of cypresses hanging in a grey Mediterranean gorge. A branch of the oak could be reached from a sharp pinnacle or rock. I climbed the tree and between the leaves had a perfect view of the furnace and the open ground.

The spectators drifted away, the high-brows remaining to the last and asking questions of Raeburn and Ballard, who were visibly impatient. Left alone, the two ran off the little remaining iron and cleared the slag. They showed no respect for the stuff and threw it into a pit. No suggestion of sacred ingots there! They then recharged the furnace with charcoal.

After satisfying themselves that no one was watching, they unloaded from their truck two little bags of a powdered mineral which looked like a very shiny coal and loaded the furnace with it. Raeburn, the bellows operator, swore. That was most irreverent in view of what followed but even devout Druids must be human.

‘God damn the bloody tin!’ he said, and turned again to the bellows.

So that was the metal of the sacred ingots. At first sight all that deception just to get a few slugs of tin seemed unnecessary. But one must remember that no smelting could be done secretly in the Forest, for the fire watchers would have been down at the first plume of smoke or the glare of the furnace by night; nor could it be done underground in the Wigpool workings. Ventilation would be a problem, especially if using charcoal.

But why not at Broom Lodge, teaching the craft to the whole commune instead of to the inner circle only? The answer lies in the mysteries of their creed, the confusion of past and future which also attracted the major, though he managed to find it compatible with Christianity. To Marrin and his followers those earliest workable minerals, gold, tin and copper, were to be venerated, and the process of ore to ingots was more sacred still. They were re-enacting the magic whereby the wizards of the tribe transmuted stones to arrowheads.

No doubt Marrin’s end-product was going to be bronze. Somewhere he had a source of the sacred tin. Copper he would have to buy – cheating, but it was most unlikely that he would ever find a vein of ore. Probably he was producing the alloy by means of his electric furnace, pending the elaboration of some more traditional method, to be occulted by oak grove, river mist or cave.

When dusk was beginning to fall the tin was flowing from the charcoal into the mould, enough for a small ingot of not more than three cubic inches. With ritual bows they set it aside to cool and solidify, and then retired to the cab of the truck to eat and drink.

I felt the presence of Nodens. I can only put the miracle down to him for I am not mischievous – at least not often. I decided to give these pagan puritans something to think about: an ingot really deserving veneration containing the protest of a happy neolithic hunter against distasteful industry. Inspired by a little chip of flint exposed at the foot of my oak, neat and thin enough to be an arrow head, though I don’t think it was one, I slid down quietly from the tree, spat on it for luck, rubbed it clean in my handkerchief and dropped it into the centre of the ingot so that it remained like a gem floating on the surface. Nodens was amused. Together we had created a myth. He is obviously a god whose divine nature it is to rejoice in the improbable. A finder of lost property could be nothing else, especially if he had stolen it in the first place.