Abi sat staring down at the rock crystal ball which lay in her lap. She was sitting on the bench near the ruins, feeling the warm autumnal sun on her face, her hair stirring slightly in the gentle wind. Her vision gone, she was staring out across the garden towards the orchards. From here she couldn’t see the Tor. Her stomach was churning; her brain was making connections which filled her with dismay.
‘Caesarea. The Roman province of Judea. A wandering healer. A teacher. A man with gentle eyes. A Jew. It couldn’t be him. It just couldn’t!’
She was frowning with concentration, thinking back to her studies when she was at theological college and before that, to her history degree. As far as she could remember they had been told that there had been numbers of itinerant teachers and healers and miracle workers wandering around the Holy Land at the time of Jesus. He had in a sense at first been one of many. One of the great unsolved mysteries of his story was what had he done and where had he been in the ‘missing years’ between his childhood and the start of his ministry. Of course she had heard the legends. Who hadn’t? The story that Joseph of Arimathaea had come to the West Country and that maybe he had brought the boy Jesus with him. There were other stories too. Some of these claimed that Jesus had travelled elsewhere in those hidden years, when no-one knows where he was. She remembered her tutor’s smile as he had recounted some of the most outrageous claims. The legends that he had gone to India or Tibet. And come back to the Glastonbury he had visited as a child, to study with the druids.
As if!
Nonsense!
She found she was holding the ball so tightly that her fingers had gone white; her hands were sweating. Her mother’s voice echoed in her ears for a moment:
Why? Even if this was – Jesus – her mind balked at even framing the word, why had this story destroyed her faith?
Because it would prove that he was just an ordinary young man travelling in his gap year? That he wasn’t the son of God? Because the Serpent Stone had lifted him off the altar and put him on a windy hillside and given him muddy feet and all too human emotions?
But he had to have been somewhere. Why not here?
She shook her head slowly.
No, this was ridiculous. She was inventing the whole thing. She had allowed herself to be overwhelmed with all that had been happening to her and now, being here in Glastonbury, her brain was working overtime to slot everything into a convenient mould. The stone. Her mother. Her mother’s death. Her faith and the strange things that had happened in Cambridge. It all had to be part of some brain fever. She didn’t need counselling so much as hospitalisation and some hefty doses of anti-psychotic drugs.
She put the stone down beside her on the wooden slats of the bench and rubbed her hands up and down on her jeans with a shiver. She had to stop this. Now. It had gone far enough. Cal was making lunch. In ten minutes she would come to the kitchen door and call her. She must stand up, go back in and that would be that. No more. Put away the stone. Hide it. Bury it. Throw it into the pond. Go back to Ben and ask him – ask him what? She stood up and leaving the stone on the bench walked over to the ruins, pushing her hands deep into the pockets of her jacket. She should pray. But how could she pray now when that young man’s face would come to her, between her prayers and Jesus Christ?
She stared down the garden towards the orchard. The old apple trees, lichen-covered and bent, their branches knotted and thickened like arthritic limbs, were starting to shed their leaves, but there were still apples on them, small knobbly apples of some ancient species. She watched a blackbird pecking at one. It stopped as she spotted it and flew off startled to perch on the top of the tree. A movement at the corner of her eye caught her attention and she turned. Mora was standing near her, watching her.
‘No!’ She stepped back. ‘No! This is not happening!’
The blackbird flew squawking its alarm and disappeared over the hedge. Mora had gone.
‘Abi!’ Cal’s voice echoed down the garden. ‘Lunch!’
It wasn’t until she was sitting opposite Cal at the kitchen table that she realised she had left the Serpent Stone on the bench.
Mat looked at his brother and raised an eyebrow. ‘So, how do you think Abi is getting on?’ They were sitting at a corner table in the Black Lion, each with a pint and a ploughman’s before them.
‘OK.’ Ben’s reply was guarded.
‘Can’t talk about her?’
Ben shook his head. ‘Not much. Anyway, she has to work a lot of this stuff out for herself.’
‘With God’s help?’
Ben nodded. ‘Exactly.’
‘It’s just, all this ghost stuff. It’s weird how she’s stirred it up.’
Ben nodded again.
Mat grinned. ‘Apparently one of the ghosts came into the kitchen while she and Cal were talking. Did she tell you?’
Ben reached for his glass and took a sip. ‘She did mention it, yes.’ He wiped froth off his upper lip.
‘Cal was stunned. She didn’t see anything, but she said Abi’s reaction was interesting!’
‘Ah.’ Ben pulled his plate towards him. ‘This whole business is interesting!’
The little church was shadowy and very quiet. Abi let herself in and walked thoughtfully to a chair about halfway along the aisle. Sitting down she stared up at the east window. Her mind was a blank. She hadn’t been able to eat much lunch and her conversation had been non-existent when Cal tried to chat to her, glancing every now and then at her in concern.
In the end Abi gave up pretending. ‘I’m sorry. I’m not very good company. I think I need to go and think about things on my own for an hour or two. I might go over to the church.’
Cal had smiled and moved the plates without comment. ‘Take your time,’ she said as Abi walked out into the sunshine.
Old churches always had an atmosphere. A combination of worship and prayer, pain and sorrow, alternated with long periods of quiet and emptiness as the stone absorbed the emotions of the men and women who had come there with their supplications. Old churches like this one and St Hugh’s, medieval churches, had been built, she had once read, incorporating special long-forgotten mystical techniques to ensure the processing of pain and the constant gentle broadcasting of peace and love and prayer. They were, in effect, prayer machines. She gave a wistful smile remembering how she had tried to tell Kier as much. Maybe it was rubbish, but it was alluring rubbish and it was working now. The place was gently radiating peace and reassurance. She was, she realised, avoiding looking at the east window with its ancient depiction of the man on the cross. Her Lord. Jesus.
Could he really be Yeshua? A living, breathing young man with intense brown eyes, with all the compassion and gentleness which she would expect and yet a young man who was wandering round this countryside with a druid priestess, who clearly fancied her, who had doubts and worries and -
She stood up abruptly and walked up to the altar, staring up at the window. ‘What am I thinking?’ she asked out loud. ‘What on earth is going on? It can’t be you. It just can’t. This is nonsense. Nobody believes you came here. Nobody! The thought makes historians fall about laughing, theologians become apoplectic and mutter about the New Age and atheists take it as proof that everyone is mad!’ Her voice rang out in the silence and was absorbed by the limestone walls. ‘Well? Say something! Come on. Explain what is going on!’ She rested her hands on the altar, frowning up at the window. On the great slab of carved wood beneath her fingers were two brass candlesticks and a wooden cross. The slab was cold to the touch. Above her the glass in its soft lead framing was rippled and flawed, the colours gently muddy, throwing a warm wash of insipid light across the chancel as she stared into the face of the man on the cross. His skin was pasty, almost green, his loin cloth the colour of raw linen, his head streaked with blood from the enormous thorns on the woven twigs wedged down on his brow. His eyes were closed, his face serene. She shook her head. ‘This is not happening to me!’ Turning on her heel she walked swiftly back to the door and let herself out, closing it behind her with a bang before diving out into the sunshine. Almost running, she headed down through the churchyard into the orchard and stood there panting, trying to push the image of the man on the cross out of her mind.
Flavius returned at dusk. Throwing the reins of his horse to one of the boys working in the granary with a
