by Robert Ward
Pepsi Cola
'Bogus architect. Bogus archaeologist. Bogus
medium, now, is it? I don't know why in heaven we take notice
of him.' The American academic swept the hair back from her face and secured it
with a hairband. Yet there he was, in front of the abbey, the wizard of the west
and darling of the media, staking out the territory in front of the main west
door with pegs and with string, instructing the impressionable youths where to
start digging, telling the T.V. crew where to point their cameras. The
production team lapped it up and the youngsters set to with
gusto.
'The voices are quite specific,' he was telling them.
'There is treasure to be unearthed here... and there....and somewhere over
there, under the forecourt in front of the Great West Door. What kind of
treasure? Well that depends, of course... we might consider worthless what to
the men of the Middle Ages seemed quite beyond price. Tread carefully, they tell
me, you know: we may be treading on their dreams.'
Dr. Hubermaier snorted. 'Hardly likely,' she said, out
of the corner of her mouth. 'That's a twentieth-century quote, for starters.
Just how all-knowing were
these monks? Omniscient, like their
God?'
'Here... and here,' he'd marked out a dozen paces from
the west doorway, and then a dozen further on. 'And there
from north to south, and there from
north to south, two trenches. You can see them in the aerial photography, and at
night, if you look, by the floodlights. Two water courses, this side of the
roadway running past the abbey, north to south. Drainage channels saving the
church and the lay brothers' quarters from this water underfoot, and more than
that, concentric spiritual defences, protecting the holy from the
profane, the unclean from the clean: guarding both the Holy of Holies right up
there.' He waved an arm towards the east end of the church. 'From the people down there. ' The other arm flailed to the passing
road and beyond. 'And protecting the people out there. ' The flailing arm again - 'Against an over-energetic
outburst of the holy from in
here.'
'Where does he get it from, all this?' the doctor
cried, in exasperation, and a little too loudly, as it happened.
The Mad
Professor clearly overheard, because 'Madam,' he said, drawing himself up to his
full height, 'it's all to be found in the scriptures. The Book of Leviticus. The
Holiness Code, if you care to look. And in 2 Chronicles, where the servant of
David reaches out a hand to steady the Ark and is struck down by the power of
the Holy. It's all there.' He looked quite injured, all the more so as the
American woman scoffed at him and turned on her heel.
The trouble was that on
the following day, about noon, a student methodically following the lines marked
out by the Professor struck metal with a trowel. Metal on metal, unmistakeably.
And what they uncovered was lead. Not just a piece of broken pipe, but swathes
of soft, dark lead, a few feet below the surface, where it had been stowed away
four hundred and fifty, four hundred and seventy years before.
1537. Could it really be?
The noise of demolition, the tumbling rafters: the
crackle and spit of the flames in the nave consuming the woodwork, the stalls,
the panelling... and the lead from the roofs, reduced to molten metal, laid out,
pressed and cooled.
'What's to be done?' asked the foreman of the works of
spoliation. 'King's orders is to get all this to London, but the winter's coming
on. Ah, I can feel it in the air. There'll be snow by midnight,
likely.'
'Bury it!' barked Horner, steward of the abbey lands
for twenty years. 'Out there, beyond the Galilee, in the drainage channel. Cover
it over. Block the ends with stone...'
Truth was, all was done in haste. Everything had been
delayed, set back, by the rising in the summer. The local populace had marched
on the abbey, forcing the monks and the abbot to renege on their earlier
agreement to surrender the monastery easily to the King. The locals were
aggrieved at so craven a deal and insisted that the abbot head their march to
the capital and that the community should retrench, dig in and bar the doors to
the King's commissioners.
All in vain. All they had won was a staying of the axe,
only for it to fall at the last more savagely, the abbot taken to the Tower, the
leading monks treated shamefully, the rest of the community dispersed: but by
then three months had passed and the time for easy travel on the roads was long
gone. Hence the hurry, hence the dishevelment, hence the opportunities for the
unscrupulous to seek to profit in the midst of other men's woes. The floods came
up: the winter freezes came down. Before the thaws and the spring had come all
had changed again. The King's men departed and in the spring they had fallen,
too: suspected of profiteering, keeping back some of the proceeds of the sale.
Who then was to know what had been secreted where, and by whom? And so the
treasures lay, until the coming of quite another community, and the dawning of
quite another spring.
After dark and under the floodlights, the site took on
a different aspect. The ridges and the trenches, the outlines of the walls,
stood out like the bare bones of a skeleton. Behind them the interplay of the
flood lights' glare upon the stone and the inky wells of blackness in between,
where the windows gaped, deceived the eye, as though lightning quivered behind
or a Son et Lumiere played out, somewhere beyond. The Bogus Professor grew
excited and gathered such students as would listen in front of the ruins to
witness the spectacle- not the northern lights, said he, but the emanations from
a far from spent source, a thousand years in the making. And it was true, as
they looked up as directed. The quality of the darkness did appear to shift and
to switch as they looked from window to window: behind it all, looking to the
sanctuary, the sunrise and the east, some illusion of a power source, partially
glimpsed, imperfectly realised, elusive, inconclusive, but alluring and
compelling nonetheless. A forge; a smithy; such as the monks or their servants
kept alight in many a community, and why not this one? Beating out white-hot raw
material, just as on the anvils of their altars they hammered out the world that
was to come: this, to quote a scholar bishop not of the medieval centuries but
of the twentieth, 'the hot-spot of the new creation.'
Bogus architect. Bogus archaeologist. Bogus medium,
perhaps. Yet on this perception, this experience, his new community would at
length be founded, to re-enchant the world.
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