Summon the Bright Water (16 page)

We put the windlass into operation, one of us on each handle, and it was hard work at that. The dredge brought up silt and fine gravel. No glint of gold or copper and no bones of glyptodont. Specks of iron and minerals unknown to me there were, including a few scraps of the same shiny black ore with which the furnace had been loaded and which I had heard was tin. I don’t know whether it could be smelted as it was, or whether it had first to be treated in Marrin’s laboratory. I am sure that when he set up his dredge, using suit and aqualung to fasten pulley and guide to the bottom, he hoped for gold – enough to give him cover for his real source. What he did find and recognised was cassiterite, the ore of tin: an unexpected and significant gift from Gwyn ap Nudd or his spirit deputy in charge of Wigpool.

We hung up the dredger exactly as we found it, and left at our ease for the entrance. It was shut. Only one of us could reach the underside of the pit props at a time, and it was impossible to move them. In case our voices could be heard outside, we retired down the gallery to the major’s former prison to discuss what we could do. There he seemed to have left behind him an atmosphere of tranquillity. Reasoning took over from panic.

‘They don’t know whether there is anybody down here or not, old boy,’ the major said, ‘because they haven’t looked. The pit props, now. Could have been removed by someone who had watched their comings and goings and was curious. Say, one of them goes by on some other business. Sees shaft is open. Won’t go in all alone. Closes up. Runs home to report. How’s that?’

It seemed unlikely. In that case we could expect the arrival in force of the regular churchgoers after dark.

‘We could stand where their entrance opens out into the gallery and bonk each one over the head as he appears,’ I suggested.

‘No right to use violence, Piers. Don’t know if they have any evil intent. Why should they have? We have done them no harm.’

I found it hard to believe that they would be so tolerant. After all, they had been lawless enough to kidnap the major, hide his car and shut him up just to make him confess why he did not believe that the burglar had taken the cauldron. It was probable that they had no more objection to violence than Marrin.

‘Or they may think I managed to move the pile of timber and escape,’ the major said.

I replied that they must know damn well that it was impossible, even if his strength was as the strength of ten, because his heart was pure. Clearly somebody else had unblocked the entrance and might or might not have persuaded him to leave.

‘But which somebody else? You?’

No, I said, not necessarily me. They had no reason to believe that I was anything but a friend of Marrin and a casual visitor to Broom Lodge, pretty certainly attracted by Elsa.

‘Splendid! Hadn’t remembered that! Then you can easily escape while I keep ’em occupied. That, Piers, is your duty to the Grail. Preserve it from them! You are unsuspected.’

‘If you can see any earthly way of escape it’s good for both of us,’ I replied.

‘Ha! I can! My story when I am detained will be that a person – I shall not mention his name, I’ll let ’em think there is a traitor among the faithful – came down to persuade me to leave. That, I am glad to say, is no lie. Two days ago you did. I refused to leave and he returned to the surface. A simple
ruse de guerre
. The enemy – if I may call them so – is advancing with no clear objective. I make him think that we are weaker than we are and his demonstration of force walks into trouble.’ He paused triumphantly. I was not impressed.

‘But where am I while you are being detained?’

‘You have swum out of sight under the lip of rock and will remain there until you can perhaps intervene.’

I objected that there could be no suprise intervention since I should be seen swimming back and that meanwhile I should have died of cold. However his idea could be improved. If I entered the mouth of the stream I could hide inside and watch developments. It was not a wide open recess so conspicuous that it invited exploration. They might not bother with it if the major’s story deceived them completely and made them sure he was alone.

‘To defend the approach, a long lance…’ he began.

‘Don’t forget the stirrups, Denzil! And I thought you had ruled out violence.’

‘In battle against the pagan, it is permissible not to turn the other cheek,’ he pronounced.

I doubted if the law would take that point of view. In a world less romantic than Arthur’s there was no reason why pagans should not call in the police; they were not committing any crime by opening up the old Wigpool workings and erecting an altar. The major and I were the aggressors who had interfered, or could easily be made to appear so.

We went back to have another look at the blocked entrance. No sound was to be heard outside. There was nothing to do but wait. It was not so chilly as in the forbidding depths, and faint strips of light coming through the pit props seemed to give us comforting but futile contact with the warm evening outside. I remember some snatches of empty conversation, and the major snoring and struggling with the infidels in his sleep, and an endless silence through which I myself may have dozed, for only one strip of light was left and that was grey. My watch said that it was after half-past eight, when I should have been at the rendezvous with Elsa. I hoped that she would not have appealed to the police. I tried to feel confident that we could deal with the four chief druidicals provided that there were no more of them and that they were not armed with bronze spears or bows and arrows.

‘And all for a quid’s worth of tin!’ I exclaimed.

‘Metals, Piers, metals To get their own. That was the point. And Wigpool an obvious choice.’

‘But which came first? Religion or metals?’

‘Both. You don’t understand ’em, old boy. Re-enacting the past for the sake of the future – you got that much. Think of the chap who first smelted a stone and found it poured out a liquid. Put it down to his gods, didn’t he? But you and I would say he had a bright idea or a lucky accident. Simeon believed that his bright ideas were inspired. You’ll admit he had some reason to. And he thought there was a something which inspired, same as the chap who put it down to the gods. Underwater, underground. Searching and worshipping. That was Simeon. It paid off if he really did find the cauldron in the Severn. Paid off here, too, from his point of view.’

He was silent for a moment shaking his head in the way he had, as if one self were rejecting the arguments of another self.

‘Visons of the past, old boy. Can’t explain them. Not reincarnation. It’s just that all time is one. You can’t get out of that if you believe in eternal life. I’ve had visions of the past myself. Can’t explain. Only last for a flash or two, but don’t know what world I’m in. Give you an example. When I was taking pictures of Simeon’s glyptodont, I knew at once that it was a pet. So bloody unlikely that I couldn’t have invented that for myself.’

‘Whose pet?’ I asked.

‘Don’t know. Like a dream. Pet and bright water. And a great blank something.’

He was most impressive there in the dark. I refrained from asking him whether the pet was Arthur’s and lived in the cauldron. And bright water was a pleasant dream when there was a chance that we both might finish up in black.

The first we heard of them was a dragging of timber, and we hurried down the shaft. The major entered his private recess and returned to his mattress. I ran on, crossing the pool and, when I reached the far side, taking care to shake the drips off shoes and trousers over the edge so that no fresh sparkle of water should give away my passage. For the rest of the route there were enough old footprints for my own to be muddled.

I found that the stream, after it flowed out of the side wall of the cavern and on to the lake, was shallow and ran in a bed worn down about a couple of feet below the level of the floor. In wading it I was only wet below the knees, but to enter the low mouth I had to crouch down and accept a soaking. The water, however, was not so cold as I expected, possibly descending from the divine warmth of midsummer rills down to the realm of Gwyn ap Nudd. Inside the channel Gwyn came into his own. It was riven and irregular, some of the rocks smooth with deposit and suggesting the rounded backsides of burrowing beasts, some jagged and fallen or seeming about to fall from roof and sides. Round a dark corner the passage became high and narrow. I took station just short of it, ready to retire into the cleft before a searching beam could reach me.

The party were long in arriving and had left Evans behind. There were six of them, all in white robes and each carrying a red and smoky torch: the three master druids – if that’s what they called themselves – whose names I knew, plus the others who had been at the forest ceremony. One of these looked thoroughly dangerous, like a heavyweight boxer who had been converted and found salvation.

The major was unaccountably absent. A good sign, I thought. They had got no more out of him, and he had no business at the hallelujah party. On the other hand, why was there a party at all since they had only come down to find out how and by whom the entrance had been opened? Very soon I had proof that they were not sure the major had told the truth. Ballard walked over to check the mouth of the stream. He didn’t like it. He took the cold-water treatment like a man, but he was going no further. That hole, once you were beyond the entrance, was a fitting home for the nastier spirits of the underworld. He was perfectly right to be content with shining a light inside. At the corner was waiting the werewolf, but it lay flat behind a boulder and had no intention of appearing till stepped on.

Ballard returned to his fellows and I to the mouth of the channel. For a moment there was such a silence that the faint ripple of the stream seemed to echo back from the walls of their cathedral. Then the dark tunnel of the approach road was faintly illuminated, and the congregation lined itself up, three on one side of the altar and three on the other.

Evans made his dramatic entry in Marrin’s blue robe, but without his dignity. He was leading the major by a light chain looped round his neck. Denzil seemed submissive, as if he were an animal destined for sacrifice, though whether because he was busy accepting martyrdom or whether any tug on the chain was painful I could not tell. Having arrived in front of the altar, Evans placed him at the centre of the circle, lifted the chain and substituted a wreath of yew. I never admired Denzil more. He took this sinister mummery as impassively as a recruit accepting a slight adjustment of the helmet. His eyes looked proudly into a past known only to him.

On each side of Evans and the major was a line of three, holding their torches so that the whole scene was enveloped in a thin red mist. All eyes were on Evans and the altar. Though one line faced me, I thought I could take a risk in the prayerful concentration of hocus-pocus. I slipped out into the bed of the stream and crawled down it, hidden by the edge of the cavern floor, until I reached the lake. It was quite shallow where it met the rock and I continued crawling, very gently without making any wash, up to a point where I was below and behind the altar. If Evans went round it or leaned across it he was bound to see me, but so long as he was officiating I was safe.

I had the impression that these raised arms and murmured prayers were a preliminary to something more serious. Preliminary to what? Human sacrifice of course went through my head, but I couldn’t believe it. The object of all this was more probably to dedicate the major to the divinity of the altar and so involve him in the mysteries that his religion rather than his body was sacrificed. If so, they underrated their man They knew that he had a limited sympathy for Broom Lodge faith, though distrusting Marrin and very far from accepting membership. They were also aware that he did not wholly reject – and that’s putting it mildly – the conception that the golden cauldron, whether found or materialised by Marrin, could be the Grail. What they did not realise was that he possessed two impregnable fortresses of resistance: that of the trained, sane, devoted Guards officer and a spiritual courage worthy of the Guardian of the Grail.

The prayer meeting broke up. Time passed. Nothing happened. I hugged the sheer bank of the lake below the altar, in deeper shadow now that the torches had moved away. Evans was standing by the windlass erect and silent, his right hand resting on the tail of the dredge, his left napoleonically thrust into his robe. A group of three were strolling and muttering like monks in a cloister. Two others were away towards the far end of their temple. The seventh was near the junction of stream and lake, and if he had looked to his left he must have seen me or at least a lump where there shouldn’t be a lump. Fortunately he walked towards the dark mouth of the stream and stared into it, doubting, I think, if Ballard had done a proper job of exploration.

Still nothing happened. The absence of tension was itself nerve-racking because one dreaded what the climax of the service would be when it was resumed. They might be waiting for midnight or some other propitious hour, or possibly for some sign from the major himself. I was again reminded of Mithraic ritual. In that case Denzil was being subjected to the Trial of Fortitude. Would he break down and scream because nobody was paying any attention to him? Would he rush out of the circle and attack the nearest officiant? He stood quite still within the spiritual wall. To the believers the apparent hypnotism may have been impressive magic, but in fact there was no magic about it. Denzil could gain nothing by moving. Escape, one against seven, was impossible. Meanwhile, among the unbounded number of places where he might choose to stand, the circle was the most obvious and most dignified.

Time went on and on until I found that my own fortitude was being severely tested. To lie, cold and motionless as a corpse in the black lake, to do nothing, absolutely nothing, while waiting to observe blood sacrifice or physical torture or the madness of hallucination was torment, and I doubt if I would have had patience if I had not appreciated that all this seemingly casual idleness was a most effective technique not only for softening up the victim but for provoking the observer – if there was one – into giving his presence away.