Fire in the Abyss Read online

  “Then your cellular point of view is wrong!” I said, and fled. Science is admirable, but it cannot answer people. You won’t get me back there again, I can assure you! Nor are you going to persuade me back to Devon again!

  It’s a wonder you got me there at all. Perhaps I felt I owed it. I found your “lost secret tunnel” for you. Yes, you organised it well, calling the National Trust with your cock-and-bull tale of the astrologer Maplet’s newly found diary and its coded directions to vital documents hidden, yes, in a lost tunnel at Compton. You played your prestige, and won, and along I went on your dangerous game, as a “research assistant”—though to the Castle caretaker who supervised us that horrid wet day you confided I was a dowser. Maybe you also told him I am a little cracked. I see you had to tell him something, for I was upset by ghosts as soon as we got there. And nothing was the same, inside or out. But I found your tunnel. I knew its line, toward Berry Pomeroy, in relation to a hill in the east. After much anxious casting-about I located a place inside, at one end of a hall full of eighteenth-century portraits, and mounted muskets, shields, swords and so forth. “H-h-here!” I stuttered like a man in a fit, which I was, “T-t-try here!”

  Yet I could not help you prise the flagstone up. I stood there mumbling and shivering as the pair of you sweated and strained—and then the flag burst up, and there it was, descending, a black hole with a dead smell that struck me faint with vertigo even as I glimpsed it. Memory flooded me with a nauseous intensity. I could not look. You took photographs while I walked up and down and the caretaker stared at me as if I might be dangerous. “No… no… no…” I was mumbling, or something of the sort.

  You pretended you sensed nothing wrong with me.

  “Well, I think we should get down in here!” you declared with a jarring false heart. “Humf, do you have the lamp handy?”

  “There’s nothing down there!” I shouted, “Nothing!”

  “Damn queerest dowser I ever seen!” the caretaker muttered to himself, but I heard him, my senses are of great acuteness when I am nervous; I heard him, it was the straw that broke my back.

  “Sir, I am no dowser!” I snapped at him. “I am Sir Humphrey Gilbert, I have been kidnapped through time by the U.S. Military and their cursed Project Vulcan! You will have heard it rumoured on TV! I escaped America, sir, and as to my identity, sir, I am who I am, and here I lived at Compton four hundred years ago! That is how I know about this tunnel!”

  “Right, mister, that’s right!” He was younger than I am, in a grey uniform, with sleek parted hair. “I like a good laugh meself.” He backed off until the gaping tunnel-pit lay between us. “But mister, you can’t be right about living here, everyone knows it was Sir Walter lived here, and…”

  “Damn you, Raleigh!” I roared, red with rage, and I leapt over the pit and grappled with this silly knave who thus abused me with his ignorance. Raleigh! They say he lived at Greenway, they say he lived at Compton, they say colonising was his idea, they say everything I did was his idea!

  Well, you had to drag me off the idiot. You were furious. Yes, I’m not proud of it. You placated the man, and paid him, and then for the sake of appearances you had to crawl down the tunnel, to find only an utter caving-in after some yards. I would not go down or even watch: I waited outside in the twilight fog until you came out, covered in the shit and mildew of five or six centuries. The horrid stench turned me dizzy again, and I had to walk away, insulting you to greater anger. Like an officer you seized me by the shoulder and marched me to your car. I know not why I suffered this: when you climbed in with your stink of buried history I rolled down the window. You roared the engine. “Humphrey!” you snapped, “We’re not on the high seas, nor in America! Please roll up that bloody window! You can’t go about assaulting people who offend you! What if he goes to the Press?”

  “Well and good if he does!” I snapped back as you drove off in lurches that almost broke my back as well as my patience, “I am not your jackanapes! I am done with lies!”

  “Humphrey, if you start attacking government officials and ranting about being a DTI, that’s it! We’re finished! I might as well ring the Daily Mirror and say I’ve got a UFO at the bottom of my garden, and a man from Betelgeuse in my guestroom!”

  “UFO! DTI!” My dignity was icy as you drove like a madman down the narrow winding misty lane. You drove as wild as Herbie did that night we took our leave of Horsfield. “Is that all I am to you, sir? A Distressed Temporal Immigrant? A category of research? Michael, if you want to be rid of me, and my risk, then stop the car, now, and let me go! I promise you’ll see me no more!”

  You slowed down. You did not stop. You tried to soothe me. “Soon we’ll have enough to go before the U.N. Human Rights people!” you said. “We must be patient!” Michael, what sort of game do you think this is? I shut my mouth and sat in silence all the way back to York. You had a great row with your wife about me, then your Chancellor called. You took the call in your study and came out furious and tightmouthed, and it was next day you suggested I should come up here on my own for a while to get myself in order until things have cooled down a hit.

  Michael, you are a clean man, a good man, but you know nothing about the big bad world, and I fear for you.

  Now, the cunning man.

  4. A Farthing for His Fate at Eton Fair

  In the year 1549 I saw terrible sights. Guns and the sword broke many poor bodies and the gibbet broke more. The land was blighted, with only a boyking, and Warwick at Protector Somerset’s neck for the power, and all preaching licences suspended, and mass uprisings against Cranmer’s Prayer Book and reforming ordinances. It was in the west, in Devon, that the poor folk rose first; in fact it is how Raleigh of Hayes got the fame that met him with my mother. He was seized and shut in the parish church by the rebels for bluntly telling an old woman that her beads were idolatrous and now illegal; he was held in great danger until the commotion was bloodily ended, four thousand rebels being slain near Exeter by the Royal Army.

  In our parts the sailors and merchants and privateering families like ours were Reformed; we had no love for Spain and the Pope, and we thought the rebels dangerous fools, abandoning their lives for a Mass and likely to turn us all over to Spain should Mary ever become Queen. It was a great confusion while it lasted. Adrian and I should have been at Eton, which he had attended one year, and I for two, but outbreak of plague had shut the College, so we were in Devon when Sir Peter Carew’s “conciliatory” measures turned isolated riots into general revolt. After Raleigh was seized, Uncle kept us to the house, though himself he was out continually riding patrols with others during the week the robbing ranting hordes poured through our area on their way to Exeter. I thought them fools, but was uneasy, the more so when our stableboy Thom went with the rebels, saying he must do it for his soul. We never saw him again, but a week after the slaughter, as Adrian and I went by guarded train back to Eton, to loyal Windsor, we saw hundreds of the broken poor limping fearfully home: a miserable sight… yet not as dreadful as the one that met our eyes months later when we came coaching home for Christmas through the snowy dark land. Every mile along the road we met a gibbet with chained bones still dangling. The sight moved me with a panic fear that infuriated me. “Why are the poor folk so stupid they’ll die rather than give up their old ways?” I demanded, and Adrian giggled, for he was young, and the gibbet-bones disturbed him too. “To feed the Old God of Crows?” he suggested, and I could not answer, I clutched my Seneca and my new-printed copy of Cranmer’s Breviary more tightly, and I thought about the sea.

  As for Eton, it is an achievement I never ran away, as many did, and forever after it was a question on my mind: how to improve education, so that much later, during my idle Limehurst years, I wrote a treatise giving all necessary detail for a new sort of Academy. I prescribed new subjects, and the salaries and duties of the professors, requiring them to publish their study-results, and also requiring every printer in the land to supply the Academy with one copy of
every work they printed. I went deep into it, for in my time what passed as education for sons of gentry was barbarity and waste, producing bullies and good-for-nothings. But my effort was ignored. After it I wrote a treatise of a different sort, on how to pillage Spain and seize the West Indies. This was received with enthusiasm, and won me my Charter.

  I was a Foundation scholar, living in College. Life was easier as an oppidan, in outside lodgings, but Mother would not pay for it, saying I must learn some facts of life. This I did In College we slept in huge chambers, freezing in winter. Each morning at five a praepostor came about, bellowing “Surgite!” If you didn’t surgite fast enough, well, Friday was flogging day. Each morning we rose and dressed and made our beds, all the time reciting prayers in verses alternating between one side of the chamber and the other. If you fumbled a line, or anything else… yes, I think you understand the principle.

  It did much to form the English character. “Untruss your points, boy!”—the continual flogging command, for it was held that knowledge is best beaten in. Thus to our days: Lily’s Grammar; the Eclogues of Baptista Mantuanus; the Zodiacus Vitae inflicted on the world by Palingenius; the hornbooks and parsings, declensions and floggings, the food and other things I’ll not mention. As for our famous headmaster, well, Nick Udall wasn’t a bad sort: he wrote and produced plays in which he had us act, I remember Ralph Roister Doister and Ezechias; and if he also mounted private productions with the prettier of us in his bed, so, at Eton buggery was part of the curriculum vitae along with grammar and the floggings. Yes, I broke virginity with another boy; it was after a class on Ovid. Quid non? There were no doxies to be had unless you risked the town stews, which usually meant Pox Romana, leading to discovery and expulsion. Some thought this the best way out, most made the most of it, for we had hardly more than a month of freedom each year, save in summers when plague flared worse than usual. We got but eighteen days at Christmas, twelve at Easter, and nine at Whitsun. Thus for eleven months a year and for four years I had opportunity to study the making of English gentlemen, always in good Latin. And it is true that in general I was seen as a mild fellow, often deep in his books but not likely to rat.

  The cunning man? Yes. Good friend Simon got us into that.

  It was like this. On our birthday we got pleasure of an afternoon out of College with the friend of our choice, and could also get cake and such sent by our families. But I wasn’t sure of my birthday, though I said it was April the ninth, and in any case Mother would never send me cake, saying it would make me soft. Instead often she sent books, chiefly by the Greeks, for which I was grateful, but my lack of cake and ignorance of my birthday were a joke to my friends, particularly to Simon Speke, a big and ruddy tow-haired lad from Nottingham, my friend from our first term.

  The day we met the cunning man was beautiful, turning May, the world blossoming again, and frightful gibbet-winter behind us. It was Simon’s birthday, and he asked me to share his afternoon out of College with him. He told me what he had in mind, and I gladly said I’d chance it. So out we went, and at the gate told the praepostor, the senior boy on duty, that we would walk along the Thames, then through the woods towards Windsor Castle. He believed it, for Simon and I were not thought daring. But it was spring, when even mice will dare, and so, after walking some way into the woods to be sure nobody followed, we turned to a forbidden part of town—the Fair.

  All year round there was trading in a wide and muddy marketplace that verged on the fields between Eton and Windsor. Here there was villainy, drinking, and prigging of pockets, and often enough fights and murder. But this day we went to the Fair, Simon’s birthday, was six days after St. George’s Day, and two before Mayday: we were amid a week of sport and play, with many more folk in town than usual all come to enjoy the processions, the dancing, the preparations for the festivities round the Maypole—how could we not go to the Fair? So out of the woods we came, and cautiously along a filthy alley past the stinking workshops of dryers and soapboilers, our eyes sharp for praepostors, with bells ringing, and suddenly Simon, laughing, said:

  “Well, if your mother cannot or will not tell you the hour you were born, perhaps here we’ll find a wizard who can!”

  He was joking, or thought he was, for there were laws against all such arts, people being so readily moved to revolt by prophecies and magical utterances, as we had seen the year before during the Risings in north and west. And the flogging given to scholars caught having truck with magicians was severe, so that I too thought I was joking when I laughed back and said:

  “Yes, and perhaps he’ll tell my future too!”

  On we went round comers, past drunkards mumbling in the ooze, and dim holes where rough men diced, and a warty old mother sitting with petticoats in the mire who shrieked with laughter at us. “Ey! What’s this? Young gentry making like commons?”—so we hurried on with burning cheeks, wishing we’d muddied ourselves up better when we’d stopped in the woods to hide our scholar-cloaks. But then we were round another comer and into the bellowing jovial babble of the Fair itself, and we forgot our fears. “Duds for the quarroms! Duds for the quarroms!”—we were among higgledy-piggledy leather-walled booths, deafened by the barkers all ranting arid pitching for the wares—clothes, food, drink, love-charms, false remedies. Simon set his eye at a pretty farmer’s lass in red lace and green kirtle who was trying on new yellow gloves; she disdained him, her pert nose up in the air like Milady of Muck; we laughed, and at an ale-stall put out a ha’penny for two pots; then, dizzy, stuffing sweetmeats into our mouths, on past stock-pens where cattle bawled and kine squealed to a crowded green where folk danced to music and others laughed at a drunk wife calling down curses on Cranmer and Ridley.

  “Rogues everywhere!” muttered Simon, unsteady on his feet as we pushed on through the joshing jostle, meaning to see the bear baiting, and he was right, for in this part the mob was thick with chapmen and queans, and tawny rascals swigging from their skins of bene bouse, and twisted poxy little rufflers looking for pockets to cut, and then a big man all unbuttoned came shoving and gasping past, he was chased from a tent by a screaming woman as undone as he: her bubs free and bouncing and black hair flying as she pursued him, a knife in one hand and a jug in the other, and as she went by us she paused to throw the jug, which shattered against the back of his head, stopping him, but with her knife at his back he staggered on, howling, until the crowd swallowed them from us.

  Yes, rogues, and I had also begun to notice, here and there, a cunning man or woman going about their trade, safe in the mob—here, a man in shabby clerk’s dress selling amulets of arsenic, quicksilver, dried toads; and there, a woman peddling bits of paper with magic writing she said would put out fires and keep lightning away—and here again, by a red-and-blue striped tent, a wizened old man who held a farmer’s rough hand, studying it, and as we passed we heard him mutter hoarsely about “the harmoniacal correspondences of all parts of the body with the spheres above,” but then we were gone, thinking no more of it, in fact thinking not at all, except to keep our hands on our pockets, for we were giddy with drink and the day.

  But soon after, finding the bear-baiting was not yet, Simon turned to me with a strange light in his eyes.

  “Well,” he said. “That was your man.”

  “What man?” But I knew what he meant.

  “That cunning man by the tent. Perhaps he’ll tell the day you were born, and your future too!”

  “They’re all charlatans!” I said, most uneasy, with a laugh.

  “Are you scared?” he demanded, his eyes too bright. And at that moment I almost hated him, and wished we hadn’t come.

  “I’ll try it if you will!” I said angrily.

  “But I know my birthday already!”

  “Perhaps, but you do not know your fate!”

  So we trapped each other into it. But when we returned to the red-and-blue tent, the man was gone. I felt great relief.

  “That’s that!” I said. “Now we should go!”


  “Yes.” Simon agreed.

  But that very moment the cunning man hobbled out of the crowd and started across an open space before us. Simon gasped. The old man stopped, and stared at us, and we stared back, for how long I know not, for he was utterly ugly and ancient, hairless and toothless and wrinkled, in rags, with scabs and sores, and a cast in one eye, so it was his left eye alone that held us, entirely, until of a sudden he scratched himself, and giggled.

  “What is this?” he whispered, spraying us with stink of raw onion. “Two young scholars out for what they cannot find in school? Would they dare their fate from one cursed with Knowledge?”

  “My friend wants to know the day he was born,” piped Simon in a quick, high-pitched voice, “and something of his fate to come, and I too would… like to know… for myself… if you truly can?”

  The cunning man eyed me again, and I felt icy-cold.

  “Two pennies,” he hissed, “and Old Will will do your will!”

  “Much too much!” I said angrily, “A farthing apiece is enough!”

  “You rate your fate at a farthing?” The madman giggled, and held out his gnarly claw. “Give me your price, and your hand.”

  “We should go behind a booth in case we’re seen,” said Simon anxiously, but though I heard him I could not respond. I was in a dream, the Fair faded far away. I gave the old man my farthing, my right hand. He bent to study the lines, tracing them with his paper finger, and I stared, frozen, at his scabby skull.

  “You are of the ram,” he muttered unexpectedly, “you were born the first week in April. And there is more! You will…”

  “April, yes!” I said, suddenly rebelling, and tried to pull my hand away. “It’s all I want to know!”

  He held onto me. He looked up sharp. Again I was iced.

  “You’ll fly far,” he said abruptly, “but fall short.”

  “What?” I was disbelieving. “How can I fall short?”