The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman

possess unrivalled accounts of the wisdom of the ages.
    Awe and stupor.
Christ, I knew this feeling so well, and the tingle it aroused in me felt near to sinful. What if elements of this library yet survived in the town?
    Another reason, beyond the bones of Arthur, to venture there.
    I stilled my heart through a steadying of breath and laid my head upon an arm on the boardtop, all thoughts calmed now by a quiet joy, choosing not to dwell on the fact that, for several years before his death, John Leland had been mad.

     
    A barn owl shrilled close to the window, and I lifted my head into air that seemed scented, for a moment, with summer roses.
    A candle guttering.
    Must have fallen asleep across the board.
    And dreamed. For some time now, I’ve kept diaries of my dreams to look back on, years hence, to see what they might have foretold, what patterns they revealed.
    I would set down no record, however, of this one, having dreamed of fair-haired Catherine Meadows, all naked in my arms in her pallet; who, when I gently brushed aside her hair, had become…
    I stared, wide-eyed, into the frail flame, horrified at the pressure within my hose. Dear God… in my arms in all her majesty? Two hours in the dangerous company of Robert Dudley, and what am I become?
    Shook myself, tried to smile. Deciding that my phantasy woman had only turned into the Queen because the Queen, more than any woman, was so far beyond the likes of me. As far beyond as Guinevere was to Merlin. And therefore, in my sorry state, safe to entertain in dream.
    One of the cats was brushing my ankles and in my head the Queen still laughed, punching my arm, ginger curls on white forehead.
    Are you yet equipped to call upon the angels, John?
    Only in my imagination, shaped by the reading of a thousand books and manuscripts, the absorption of others’ thoughts, others’ ideas, others’ divine inspiration. Equipped, in truth, for little. I wished that Dudley had bothered to snatch a copy of the peacock man’s pamphlet so that I might at least know what visions I was supposed to be having.
    The last log had died in the fireplace, and the room was as cold as a dungeon. Was a sudden cold not an indication of the impending appearance of an unquiet spirit?
    Only in my dreams. Some were endowed with abilities like to the angels and some could see the dead. But not me.
    I brought the base of my left fist down on the board to scare away the numbness in the arm on which I’d lain my head and to fragment the dangerous pictures lodged therein.
    Dudley was right.
    If the bones of Arthur were to be found upon the Isle of Avalon, then
we
must find them.

Without the Walls
     
    O NCE YOU ’ VE SMELLED roasting flesh – human meat – you never forget it.
    Oh, I’ve seen men burn. Held there by the frenzy of the crowd when all I wanted was to be far away. Seen the hideous moment of hell’s halo, when the hair catches frizzling fire and the mob’s fever explodes with a great bull-roar and a score of pickpockets make their move.
    But even the sight of that horror has faded in the mind’s eye before the smell departs the nostrils… a smell of throat-searing sweetness which seemed to find me again this day, as I was shown in by one of the canons.
    Shown not, this time, to the bishop’s sumptuous receiving room, but to a small, stone-walled chamber down amongst the servants’ quarters at his East London palace.
    ‘Welcome,’ Bonner said, ‘to my cell.’
    He’d always laughed a lot, this roly-poly priest, who’d sent so many to the stake in the darkest of Mary’s days. Once a lawyer, a clever man, a worldly man, now… what?
    There was a single high, barred window, a low and narrow bed – little more than a pallet. A chest with a ewer and looking glass. A bookshelf high on the wall bearing maybe twenty volumes. A chair and board, a jug and a stoneware cup, and the sweetness I could smell… was probably wine.
    He gestured me to the only chair, lowering himself to a