‘Who are you to tell me—?’
‘What Siôn Ceddol does,’ I said, ‘religion has no bearing upon it.’
‘Religion has a bearing on everything. Are you a fool as well?’
‘As well as what?’
Standing at the top of the steps, where Siôn Ceddol had sat, my breath was coming harder. If a place of healing is a place of inherent power, there was no sense of healing here now. Only the power, and that was a cold power with none of the promise of transcendence implied by an old sacred site. Within the quaking mist, I was aware of an ancient conflict, shafts of darkness and light twisting like blades.
‘As well as what?’ I said quietly. ‘Say it.’
‘I shall not. You know what you are and appear to live with it. But I don’t have to. I do not have to tolerate your presence here. Get yourself away from my church, conjuror.’
‘There,’ I said. ‘That wasn’t so hard, was it?’
‘Get out of here!’
His narrow body jerking in fury, elongating like a shadow.
‘No,’ I said. ‘Not before I tell you the truth about Siôn Ceddol.’
He’d turned away from me, so that I was speaking to his back.
‘How much do you know about water divining?’
‘Of the devil,’ he told the fog.
I shook my head with confidence.
‘A human faculty, known since early times, which may soon be explained by science. But only now are scholars finding it can be applied to more than the finding of water. Though the fact that Siôn Ceddol can find water as well as bones is surely proof—’
‘That he’s riddled with demons. Don’t waste my time.’
I would not give up. Spoke to the rector’s back about the great natural philosophers – Paracelsus, whom he’d have heard of as a healer, even if he disapproved. And the German, Georgius Agricola, of whom he probably would be ignorant.
‘This is the man who’s become the best known diviner in Europe. Who began with water, but then extended his art to finding metals and ore for mining. Using the same fork of hazel, which twisted and turned in his hands when he stood over an underground spring.’
I’d learned about Agricola at Louvain and, of course, had tried it myself, to no avail, before sending a report on it to Cecil, suggesting he might strike a bargain with one of the German experts to establish a mining enterprise in England. Cecil had seemed interested, but I’d heard nothing since and assumed he’d dispatched spies to Europe in the hope of acquiring the knowledge for no cost.
‘You don’t see it, do you?’ Daunce said. ‘You do not see the obvious. A demon enters a man and gives him knowledge he could not otherwise possess. Causing his limbs to move on their own. Snatching his body from the reins of his mind. I’ve watched that creature, seen its eyes go white as its hands burrow in the earth to bring up the dead.’
‘It’s becoming known that the mind can be attuned to whatever it needs to unearth.’
‘And what if there is no mind?’ His rage throwing him back to face me. ‘The brain of that monstrous boy will ever be in ruins, and ruins are where demons walk unchecked.’
Turning away his head again, in contempt. It was like talking to the rocks. But at least I’d told him what I believed to be the truth; maybe he’d think about it.
Though probably, he wouldn’t.
I said wearily, ‘What are you doing here, Daunce? You hate this place. You distress its people. They’re not theologians eager to embrace the rigid tenets of Lutherism. They’re not going to change their ways with a snap of the fingers.’
‘The word of God will change their ways.’
It had long seemed to me that the word of God as filtered through a Puritan’s rigid liturgy would change nothing for the better.
I thought of the boy who hanged himself because he could see no future here. Who might normally have gone to his priest for advice. And the old man who did go to Daunce, with his fears of night walkers and was told it was the devil making him see what was not there.
I said, ‘Does Bishop Scory know of your… way of thinking?’
But if I thought to put him in fear…
‘Scory? That heretic? A man who worships the lewd and the sacrilegious in a secret chamber in the Cathedral itself?’
I realised he must mean Scory’s treasured map of the world, Scory himself having said some canons had been in fear of it and wanted it burned. Daunce, unsurprisingly, must have been one of them. I didn’t pursue this, but I’d not give up.
‘What progress can we ever make if we put everything we don’t understand at the door of the devil? If a man sees the ghost of his dead wife and we tell him, that was not your wife, that was an image wrought by the devil to torment you…’
‘The truth is not always easy to face,’ he said calmly. ‘But faced it must be.’
‘And there can be no ghosts of the dead because the Lutheran faith has decided there’s no purgatory?’
‘All papist myth and must be revealed as such. Stripping away these fondly held archaic beliefs is bound to cause a small period of pain, before the clear light is seen.’
Well, of course, he’d see it as a challenge, a mission. Slicing through all the layers of the place with the clean, cold butcher’s blade of the new Puritanism.
I glanced at the statue of the Virgin in her grotto in the rocks above the water, marking the green slime on her brow and her robes all smirched with slug-trails and dead insects. Whatever power was here now, the Virgin was no longer the source of it.
‘You can’t be said to have taken care of her, Rector.’
He didn’t look at the shrine. Or I don’t think he did; his eyes were no more than smudges in the fog.
‘A papist conceit, perpetuating an old evil. I’d have it smashed. Maybe I will. I’ll certainly be erecting a barrier to keep people away. Let the brambles and thorns do the rest.’
‘Isn’t she the reason for this church? Our Lady of Pilleth?’
A silence, and then he eyed me, a slight smile on his dry, pale lips.
‘And who is she? Who is the lady?’
‘Who do you think she is?’
‘Can you not feel her?’
I said nothing.
‘I’ve never felt her so strongly. Our Lady of Slime.’
Dear God.
‘I found here a long tradition of dark worship which had never been challenged. This well was made by the old Britons, doubtless in veneration of some predatory water goddess. They would have performed sacrifice here, thrown the heads of their enemies into the pool.’
I could only nod. This married with my own findings from old English manuscripts.
‘The papists take a pagan well,’ Daunce said, ‘and claim it for the Virgin and nothing changes… because the practices of the Catholic Church, like those of the heathens, like those of the Druids, are founded upon magic and sorcery. You, of all people, should know that.’
Well, of course I knew that. Bishop Scory knew that. The Queen herself would acknowledge that high magic was a ceremonial gateway to knowledge.
And was a simpler magic so wrong for a place like this, the valley of the river of the god of light, dotted with ancient mounds, scattered with the remains of the violently killed? A place where a careful balance must needs be maintained?
‘I presume you know that Owain Glyndwr worshipped here before the battle,’ Daunce said. ‘In his desperate need for a great victory. But did he worship at the church? No, he burned it down. He worshipped here, at the pagan shrine. Glyndwr invoked the heathen goddess – the devil, in other words.’
I said nothing. Given Owain Glyndwr’s knowledge of magic and that he or Rhys Gethin appeared to have chosen this site for the conflict, I’d come to a not entirely dissimilar conclusion myself. But was disinclined to voice agreement with anything this man came out with.