passing the remnants of the chapel and the great kitchens where oxen were once roasted whole for the many friends of the lords of the isle. Gaining the highest point the visitor sees the tower walls still reaching above, fretted with windows and galleries and the remnants of stairs; but no feet have walked them now for many years except the feet of birds…
He’d come on the hoverferry from Bourne Mouth, landed at Studland in a booming shower of sand and flung spray. He was tall, slim-limbed and long-jawed, with dark blond hair cropped close to the skull. He wore tan trews and shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbows; over one arm he carried a light waterproof jacket, on his back was a bulky canvas pack. His eyes were striking, a deep sea blue; they scanned the road ahead as he walked, it seemed anxiously.
He saw the place suddenly, looming between the shoulders of two hills. He stopped as if startled, stood staring up at it, lips slightly parted and the breath hissing slow between his teeth. Then he walked on towards it. As he moved it seemed the shell or ruin grew, towering into the sky. He sucked his breath again, wincing against the brilliant sun. Sat on a grass bank noisy with insects, and smoked a cigarette. Nothing he’d read had quite prepared him for this.
He saw a grey village, old and rambling, wavy roofs crusted with a vivid orange lichen. The houses seemed still to watch for the approach of danger; their windows were furtive and narrow, their doors set at a height above the paths the better to resist assault. Over them, monstrous, out of scale, loomed a ravaged face; the castle, a ragged-crowned skull, a thousand-year anger of stone. Brooding out across heath and sea, ancient, unappeasable.
He walked again steadily. Somehow it seemed in spite of the shock of the huge image his mind was not wholly unprepared. As if the place fitted a niche already existing in his consciousness. But that was absurd.
He reached the great grassy prow of the mound. The road wound by it, up into the village square. He followed it. Or rather he was borne without volition on some strange earth-tide of memory. A memory not of the brain, but of the blood and bones. He shook his head, half angry at himself, half amused. He asked himself, how could a man come home, to a place he’d never seen?
He moved on slowly. Through broken archways, past spurs and shattered groins of stone, up to where he could feel again the fresh wind from the heath. Sat in the shadow of the Great Keep, feeling the stone cool against his flesh. From that height the reactors of Poole Power Station were visible, gleaming silver in the sun. Far out in the purplish haze of the sea white dots showed where the hovercraft boomed over the waters of the Channel.
He became aware, by slow degrees, of the Mark. It hung there frozen on the stone, deep-carved, level nearly with his face. The voices of the tourists below seemed momentarily to fade; he moved forward to it in a cold dream. Touched the carving, fingers tracing over and again its smoothness. Big it was, a full yard across; the symbol, enigmatic and proud, the circle enclosing a crab-network of triangles and crossing lines. Over it the cloud shadows moved, birds flapped and cawed in the sky above; its outline echoed the shapes of the reactors, its configuration stirred deepest roots of memory. His lips moved, soundless; one hand went unconsciously to his throat, touched the thin gold chain, the medallion beneath his shirt. The symbol he had always worn, the tiny copy of the thing here on the wall.
He climbed back slowly. Crossed the baileys to the lower gate, turned to see the castle watching down. He held the strangeness to himself. The symbol like a time-charm stirred depths of Self and memory, started strange vast images that shadowed away and were lost quicker than the mind could grasp. Brought coldness in their wake and a sadness, a sorrowing for things lost and unknown, gone beyond recalling.
A group of local girls passed staring, eyes appraising and frank. He was unaware of them. He shivered slightly in the bright, hot sun.
There was a churchyard. He eased aside the old gate that swung and creaked behind him. The place was overgrown, shaded by yews long since run to such a riot of branch and foliage he had to force his way beneath. There was an open space of tall grass; through it the shafts of crosses gleamed grey and smooth. Over it, above the housetops, the face of the castle loomed; the monorailers whispered by it through their cutting in the chalk, on their way to Studland and the sea. He sat a long while and smoked and watched. The voices of children came to him insect-small, half lost in the rustling as the wind swayed the great grasses with their tasselled purple heads. He gripped the medallion; the pulse thumped in his fingers till it seemed the thing throbbed there like a second tiny heart.
Before he left the place he had seen again the Mark, peering like a chiselled eye from the pale square of a headstone.
He drank beer in the big white inn built across the castle approach. Ate sandwiches and cheese and watched the tourists thronging the bars. He left when the place closed. The castle still waited, warm and vast in the sun.
A little path ran down beside the mound. It led beneath arching bushes and trees, the coolness from the wet ditch rising alongside. Beyond the branches the flank of the motte was a tilted plain of sun-dried grass. He chose a path and began to climb. There were goats tethered; their bleating came to him softly, underlaid by the husky voices of the monorail.
High on the mound, below the broken outer wall, was a hollow shaded by a clump of trees. Stonework jutted massively from the grass; he leaned his back against it, looking up through the dancing of the leaves. The great face peered above the hillside. This was the place, and this the time.
He undid the pack he carried. Carefully, with lean, grass-coloured fingers. Hefted the thick packet, staring at the old seals. The Mark was stamped in the wax. He cracked the seals, smoothed out the stiff pages. He already half knew what he would see; the line on line of close-packed, neatly sloping writing, the hand he knew and remembered very well. He began to read. The pack of cigarettes lay unnoticed on the grass.
From far off, along the Wareham Road, came the bumbling of traffic; endless and quiet, like the noise of bees. The new midsummer hum. The sun moved in the sky; the shadows of trees swayed and shifted, lengthening. Folk passed laughing on the path below; red-faced men and children, white-shirted boys, girls in bright frail dresses. He turned the pages slowly, pausing now and again to worry out an archaic spelling. The noise from the village, the bustling and voices, rose and fell and quietened; the tea-lawns emptied, pubs propped open their doors. He seemed poised outside of Time; for him ancient winds blew, ruffling the grass. The noise of old guns mumbled in the hills. The western sky became a burning copper shield. The ruins seemed now bird-tall, ghosts half lost in a harsh sandy-red pouring of light. The shadows crept in the valley, darkening with dusk, and the road was quiet.
There was a final envelope. Again sealed. He opened it slowly, angling the paper to read.
My Dearest John,
By now you may have guessed a little of my purpose in sending you so far to this place you had never seen. Some, but not all; for there is much that neither you nor I may ever understand. Now mark me well. For words fade, becoming dust and less than dust; let my voice remain within you, and let it be as the voice of the wind that blows forever. Here, in this place, began that strange Revolt of the Castles; and here too, as you read, it ended. Here began the freedom of the world; if freedom is a proper word to use. The feudal world of Gisevius the Great was shattered; and with it fell the Church that had conceived it and perpetuated it and brought it to its flowering.
When the grip of that Church seemed strongest, it was at its most slack. Within ten years of the breaking of these walls the Newworld colonies had torn themselves free from Rome. The uprisings that began all over the Western world had their seeds in that time of the Revolt. Australasia was lost, the Netherlands, most of Scandinavia; and King Charles took his chance, with the Pope locked in the final struggle with Germany, to secede from the Church. So Angle-Land became again Great Britain; without bloodshed, and without sacrifice. Internal combustion, electricity, many other things, were waiting to be used; all had been held from us by Rome. So men spat on her memory, calling her debased and evil; for many years yet this will be true.
Now understand, John. See clearly and without malice. Read an ancient mystery, the thing that appalled the Church a thousand years before you were born…
Fumbling with one hand, eyes on the letter, he took from round his neck the medallion he wore. Covered the lower part of the disc with his finger. There were two arrows.
He moved his hand, concealing the upper part of the circle. Two more.
Two arrows point outward [ran the letter]. Two point in, towards each other. This is the end of all Progress; this we knew when we first carved the mark many centuries ago. After fission, fusion; this was the Progress the Popes fought so bitterly to halt. The ways of the Church were mysterious, her policies never plain. The Popes knew,
