Free Relics by Pip Vaughan-Hughes Page A

madness, his game finished too. And the end of any hope for me. I had no doubt that these new corpses would be laid to my account. Night was coming in, and I felt Death, like an old friend, settle down beside me to keep the long vigil until dawn.

    The water-meadows were ravishingly lovely in the dawn. They wore a shimmering silver cloak, dew clinging to festoons of spiders' webs, bright points of colour glowing through the sweet grass. The big red cattle grazed oblivious as they waded through the spectral veil. I must have slept: the spiders had woven me a glimmering winding-sheet of my own. The city-was close: much less than a mile lay between me and the last hovel of the tannery quarter.

    Still, the black mood of last night had lifted a little, and I no longer felt brim-full of despair. It might be worth living a little while longer, perhaps, if for no other reason than to give Will's death some meaning. I had been skulking here for too long already. I took stock of myself. I had the golden hand, and the clothes I stood up in, which were dryish but by no means magnificent. Save for my tonsure, I looked like a farmer who had taken to sleeping in hedgerows - and there I had it. I was a farmer's son, sent up to one of the Midlands fairs with a load of wool, on my way home. I had fallen among thieves, and must needs go on foot. So it seemed I was going home - or at least towards it. I found I did not have the stomach for London now. Some linen torn from my gaiters made a passable head-cloth, and as I covered up my shaven scalp it came to me. There was one person left in the world who could help me. I turned to the west and set out on the long road back to Brother Adric.
    There was much country between us. The Mendips, Sedge-moor, the Blackdown Hills. I travelled by starlight when there were people about, by day when I moved through empty country. It was a long journey, and a hard one, but there is little to tell of it. I ate berries, fish from streams, small beasts I could trap. I was a Dartmoor child - I would not go hungry outdoors. And luck paid me a visit in the guise of a halfwit carter who let me ride on his rickety old wain amongst a load of oakum bound for the shipyards of Plymouth. The man did not want money, which was fortunate. Carrying superstition about him like heavy armour, he took me for a wandering demon, I believe, and helped me in order to forestall any mischief I might work on him. We met at a crossroads outside Cullompton, and he carried me almost to the threshold of my destination.
    So I was alone with my thoughts for the two weeks it took me to cross Somerset and half of Devon. I had little I wished to dwell upon from the immediate past, but still I worked the nightmare over in my mind endlessly until the colours and the horror had receded a little. It seemed as though not a minute passed when I did not think of Will, and how we should be sharing this adventure - although there was nothing adventurous about my condition now - and every such thought was a knife thrust. His death, and I suppose the likelihood of my own, followed me like ragged shadow and brought with it the chill of the grave. To escape it I thought about the past. I was a young man who, out of the blue, had lost his future, had been stripped of the life he knew. I had nothing left but my story, and I told it to myself, for it gave me comfort when hope felt stretched as thin as spider-webs wafting in the mist of an uncertain dawn.

    The young man in this story is myself, but then again, he is as different from myself as the worm is to the butterfly. Although what I am today - worm or butterfly - is not so clear to me. Enough. The eyes, squeezed shut against the summer sun, preserve an image of the world that lasts for an instant and then changes, becomes grotesque, a shifting field of darkness and glowing patterns that mock reality. I wish to preserve that first moment, before the grotesqueries of the present blot out my past.

    I was born