John Dee 1 - The Bones of Avalon by Phil Rickman

Author:Phil Rickman
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Mystery
Publisher: Corvus
Published: 2010-01-03T23:00:00+00:00

XXVI

Le Fay

THESE THINGS I purport to create, with all my astral charts and maps of the Zodiac, my pages of calculing and configuration… have I ever once been able to state, this will happen?

And those who do – which books have they read which are not available to me? Is there some holy grail of revelatory knowledge passed from hand to furtive hand? I don’t know. That’s the worst of it. I, who despise ignorance, do not know.

‘Who wrote this prophecy, John?’

Dudley’s face aglow with new sweat in the candlelight. I’d taken the letter to his bedside, and he’d bade me read it out again, but I repeated only those key lines.

Her nights are tormented and daytimes fraught. She will have no peace from Morgan le Fay until such time as her heroic forefather be entombed in glory.

‘All right then,’ Dudley said, ‘who might have written it?’

‘Could be one of ours, could be from abroad. There’s a seer on every corner in London. Europe’s thick with prophets. Especially after what happened with the King of France.’

Dudley leaned into the light.

‘You were there, weren’t you? In France, when that happened.’

‘No. But I had an account of it sent to me.’

By a student who’d attended one of my lectures in Paris. He’d sent it together with a faithful script of the horoscope said to have been sent from Rome – the one warning King Henri to avoid all single combat in an enclosed field, especially around his forty-first year. The one making reference to a head wound which would cause blindness.

‘Rome?’ Dudley said. ‘I thought it was all down to this fellow Nostradamus, at the French court.’

‘No, it was an Italian, Luca Gaurico. Not personally known to me any more than is Nostradamus – he was asked by the Queen of France to investigate Gaurico and his prophecy. This was after the King chose to laugh and ignore it. I find the whole thing doubtful in the extreme.’

‘Oh, well, of course. We all know, John, that you merely indicate the moods of the universe… and would never be so foolhardy as to forecast injury or death.’

‘And mistrust those who would.’ I let the sarcasm go, folded Blanche’s letter. ‘I’d understood that was what the Queen found useful in me – an ability to see through the fakery, offer informed advice. Apparently not. It seems she has a secret craving for the sensational.’

‘Of course. That’s why she’s so fond of me. But what would you have said about this fellow from Rome… had he heralded her demise? Not possible?’

I thought of the wax effigy in its coffin in the alley by the river. Had I been too dismissive of that and its power to do harm to the Queen? Did I continually dismiss what I, with all my scholarship, could not think to accomplish?

‘I think… that it is possible, but not likely. I believe there are some who see the same stars as I do, draw the same charts and then… either God

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