the henge-village in the Kennet valley, encircled — except for the church — by a ditch and the remains of the greatest Stone Age temple in the world.
The stones of Avebury were shaped by the Earth Herself. Each is an individual organism — here a lion, here a human head, a fist, a gnarled penis, a woman’s pocked and scarred torso and upper thighs with a tightly clenched vulva. One can almost see them all flexing, pulsing, breathing, and he wanted immediately to offer a sacrifice. However, the problem with Avebury is the modern community at its heart. And the tourists. With their children, dogs, cameras, ice creams.
Always people. Their vulgarity and their ignorance. Even at dead of night, when this act of sacrilege was, presumably, carried out.
The affected stones had been covered ignominiously in sacking by the National Trust people.
To hide the abomination.
Dozens of disgusting, pseudo-cabalistic symbols had been scrawled over two of the outlying sarsens, in white emulsion and black bitumen paint. The megaliths defaced from top to bottom, so that when the paint was cleaned off, the sensitive skin of mosses and lichens would also be scrubbed away, leaving the stones flayed and aching, as bald as housebricks.
Who was responsible?
So-called New Age travellers, perhaps, the itinerant vagrants who live on social security and consider ancient shrines to be their inheritance.
He was reminded yesterday of the eighteenth-century farmer who went around massacring megaliths and rejoiced — literally rejoiced — in the name ‘Stonekiller’ Robinson. The Green Man does not know how the stonekiller had died but he hopes it was a long and exceedingly painful death.
Through the sacking, he heard the stones calling out to him in their pain and, from beneath his feet, the Earth shrieking for revenge.
Knowing then that he had been sent for, that he was to be the instrument.
Parking his car for the night on the outskirts of Marlborough, he walked to the Ridgeway and joined a line from the Avebury circle and walked on until he found the place.
They always turn out to be marked in some way, these sacred sites, but sometimes the marker is far from obvious and takes time to discover. It might be a small stone hidden in a wood or obscured by tufts of moorland grass. Or lost among buildings, because sometimes the place will be in the middle of a village, even a large town.
For instance, earlier this year, the Green Man slept in a hollow in the ramparts around an Iron Age fort contoured into the summit of a holy hill. There were pine trees here, as well, and through his dreams galloped the spectral figure of the Knight of Swords, from the Tarot. The Knight was riding down from a hill with stark pines upon it. His sword was raised. He was on a mission of vengeance.
There was no denying the command.
At first light this day, the Green man followed an obvious alignment from the hill to a church steeple in the centre of the town below. The church was locked, the churchyard deserted. He walked on. The town was empty, there was very little traffic. Following the line, he arrived at the stump of an old market cross, a familiar marker. The line followed a paved, pedestrianized area into a small shopping arcade, where the frontage of one shop jutted out beyond its neighbours into the middle of the line.
The shop was … an ironmonger’s.
The first sign.
In its doorway was a large cardboard box. Inside it was a young vagrant.
The box was not quite long enough to accommodate him, so he had protected his feet from the cold by encasing them in another, smaller box. On it was a line-drawing of a carving knife and one stencilled word.
MEATMASTER
All the confirmation the Green Man needed. Putting down his rucksack in the silent, newly cobbled arcade, he located the serrated-edged sheath knife he sometimes used to skin rabbits.
He remembers how the vagrant awoke with half his throat open, that soundless liquid scream again.
The remains of the Barber-Surgeon are on display in Avebury’s small museum.
The skeleton was found under Stone Number Nine in the henge circle.
His profession was suggested by the implements discovered on the body — scissors and what was believed to be a medical probe. The dates on the coins he carried suggested he died in the early 1320s. Surgeons, in those days, needed no more qualifications than those required for cutting hair.
It seems likely that the Barber-Surgeon was involved in a medieval assault on the stones at the instigation of the Christian Church, attempting to stamp out pagan rituals still carried on there.
Tragically — ha — he appeared to have died when the stone toppled upon him.
This is possible. There are many tales of foolhardy country people who tried to dig up ancient menhirs provoking thunderstorms, even being struck by lightning.
During his dream below the pines last night, the Green Man learned the truth: that the Barber- Surgeon had been abducted by the guardians of the stones and given in sacrifice. Bludgeoned to death and placed beneath the stone.
In his dream, the Green Man was kneeling under the pines in a dense mist which sliced off the tops of the trees. He had held out his hands and into them was placed something grey and misty but quite heavy.
When he awoke, he found, not fifteen yards from where he’d slept, a single stone, about eight inches long and three to four inches wide.
This dawn arrives wearing a mist as fine as lace, the sun tossed carelessly in its loose folds.
Too bright. He will have to thicken the mist.
This is quite easy. Most people can learn to do it. However, most people would do it in reverse; they teach themselves to shift clouds and dissolve them by pure concentration. A simple example of the way human consciousness can learn to interact with nature. With practice, the clouds can almost be blown away in seconds. Pffft!
Actually, producing clouds, adding density to the atmosphere, is more interesting and far more powerful.
Close the eyes, imagine (create!) cold in the body. This is done, initially, through the feet, the cold drawn up from the dark places of the earth (best achieved when standing on stone) and sent to the base of the spine to form an icy ball around the spinal chakra. Slowly, the cold is drawn — through breathing — into each of the body’s seven power-centres, and then projected into the aura. Finally, often in a fit of shivering, the command is given.
It is easier at dawn, when the sun is vulnerable and unsure of itself. From the pines, he watches it fade. The Earth senses the commitment and he feels radiant in Her trust.
The stand of pines, on its small hill, is surely as old as the great stones three miles to the south. This can be felt. These trees and generations of their ancestors, sturdy and aloof, taller than many a church steeple.
But the power of this site is probably unknown. Except to the Green Man.
They have been priming the place, he and the Earth, through the hours of the night, he lying supine under the harvest stars or sitting cross-legged and straight-backed in meditation among the needles and the brittle cones. The weight of anticipation kept him awake, the certainty that someone would be sent. And, of course, the special energy of the site itself. Once, there was sex: his penis summoned aloft by the thrusting pines, Earthen lips exquisitely cold around it.
And then came the dream. The dream of the Barber-Surgeon. The dream sent to him from the great stones of Avebury in their agony.
