Chapter Thirty
The Life of Saint Ke,
a rare medieval Cornish-language play, had many
lost sections in its sixteenth-century manuscript. High on a
clifftop outside the little fishing village of Porth Bay, the
Plain-an-Gwarry Players were filling these gaps with verve and wild
imagination.
The tiny
outdoor theatre space was packed. The crowd had overflowed from the
car-tyre seats in the amphitheatre into the meadows around – Porth
Bay villagers, parents and kids, surfers catching the very end of
the season. The local vicar, whose translation of the play the
actors were using, was looking nervously on, and even the village
doctor and the local air-sea rescue chief had turned out for the
entertainment, both of them ridiculously handsome in the evening
light. From time to time Sasha thought the two were holding hands,
but that seemed an embarrassment of riches.
He
returned his attention to the stage. This was a ten-foot-square
platform enclosed by the keel of a boat. Beneath the arch formed by
the prow leaned wicked King Teudar, a piratical-looking fellow with
a scar beneath one cheekbone and an air of infinite villainy stored
up in the cant of one dark brow. Not only had holy Saint Ke given
shelter to a stag he had been hunting, but when Teudar had sorted
out a punishment to fit the crime by impounding Ke’s oxen, the stag
had called up its friends from the forest to plough Ke’s fields for
him.
The saint was a strapping dreadlocked surfer, the stags a
bunch of kids from the local primary school, ash-twig antlers that
were proving just as dangerous as the real thing strapped to their
over-excited heads. The Plain-an-Gwarry Players were popular in
West Cornwall and probably would have called up a good crowd
anyway, on a bright September evening with a soft breeze off the
Celtic Sea. Once news had gone out that Laurie Fitzroy, London
theatrical prodigy and Devlin Steele from the greatest
Blood Moon film never
made, would be there for a one-night performance, the numbers had
doubled then tripled. The various charities the Players supported
were sorted out for this season.
Despite all this, or possibly because of it, King Teudar was
very cross indeed. He leaned more eloquently on his boat-keel arch.
He lowered the canted eyebrow, paused for a second then tilted the
other, somehow with that gesture sending a wave of hilarity through
the crowd. He was very handsome despite the scar. His blue eyes
shone with sea-lights as he sought out Sasha in the crowd. Still,
he was wicked, and the little children squealed obligingly when he
stepped down off the platform, arms folded, an ominous cloud on his
brow. “I now have no stag to hunt, it seems,” he rumbled – cue for
the smallest of the antlered children to rush out and begin a
mocking dance behind his back. “Bad enough, but now this wretched
hermit sneers at my justice!” He paused. This was one of the gaps
in the Bewnans Ke manuscript, and he was way off-piste anyway. His audience was
cracking up. He spread his hands in broad appeal. “What’s a wicked
king to do?”
The
Players were well used to extempore. After the tide of reactive
laughter had died down, one of Teudar’s courtiers suggested, as if
it were the most reasonable step in the world, “You could slaughter
a virgin, Your Highness.”
“A splendid idea, minion.” Teudar scanned the crowd. “But where
am I to find one in a village such as this?” It was a dreadful
panto line, but one that never failed. The adults creased up, the
kids joining in after a second, laughing – Teudar hoped – just
because everyone else was. He looked off stage to the left. There’d
been some sounds of frantic struggle from behind the makeshift
wings. “A virgin!” Teudar repeated loudly. “Where am I to find one,
after closing hours in this benighted spot?”
West Cornwall had another legend, connected to Teudar but not
recounted in the Life of Saint Ke.
This was the story of Saint Ia, an Irish lady of
great virtue who had missed the boat supposed to bring her on her
mission to Cornish shores. Nothing daunted, she had stepped onto
the nearest floating leaf, which had grown into a boat around her
and borne her off safely to the harbour that would one day be named
after her, St Ives. The details of her life were patchy after that
until her martyrdom by wicked Teudar, making her a good candidate
to fill in a gap in Ke’s story. The Plain-an-Gwarry players always
tried to combine modern cultural symbols with their historical
tales, and in this case had decided that the saint should travel on
a delicate arrangement of three surfboards, draped in leaf-green
fabric and carried aloft by a retinue of half a dozen fine young
Christian men.
The idea
had just barely worked in rehearsal. Teudar watched apprehensively
as Saint Ia emerged from the wings. Cries of delight rose from the
crowd. The boys were magnificent, poising the three draped boards
upon their naked shoulders with careless ease. As for the saint
herself, she had come rather young to her task but looked
thoroughly ready for it, sitting serenely upon her miraculous boat.
She raised one hand to shower blessings on the noble hermit Ke, who
rushed to adore her. Then she poked a minatory finger in Teudar’s
direction. “Wicked Pagan infidel!”
Teudar
rather thought that if anyone deserved to be called Pagan, it was
the saint who could call the creatures of the forest to do his
bidding and the one who had floated in a leaf across the Celtic
Sea, but that was the beauty of the old Cornish faith. The
missionaries blended in legend with the sea gods and the wind gods,
the goddesses of earth and sky. To stand in an ancient West Country
church was to feel the electrifying sanctity of five thousand years
in wind-song vortex all around.
Saint Ia
threw a handful of holy water. Teudar cringed as expected, while
someone behind the scenes made convincing popping and sizzling
noises. Ia was a good shot. She was taking delight in her target,
too, a large unsaintly grin spreading from ear to ear. Her third
attempt to soak the wicked king was so enthusiastic that she made
her central surfboard lurch. Its fins locked with those of the
board next to it and the whole construction tilted sideways. Saint
Ia gave a shriek and one of the good Christian lads stumbled over
the edge of the drapery. “Shit!” he bellowed, as his holy burden
catapulted off the boards.
She
landed on the turf at the feet of the crowd. Sasha, who’d made sure
of a front-row seat for this unique performance, was in the right
place at just the right time. He held out a hand to her. She
grabbed it like a tow cable, sprang upright, let him go with a
grateful flash of a smile. The boys were in a heap behind her.
After a glance to make sure that nobody was hurt, Saint Ia faced
the crowd. Her tinsel-and-wire halo was dented beyond repair and
tilting off one side of her head. She leapt up onto pointe: made a
perfect five-turn pirouette, then sank to the ground in a
dying-swan curtsey Pavlova might have envied.
The
audience roared. Teudar leaned against the boat keel in relief—it
was a lot easier for him to martyr his virgins if they hadn’t
already broken their necks. A grand Cornish riptide of laughter and
applause was filling the auditorium. Unable to help himself, Teudar
joined in. Even the strait-laced vicar, who’d asked the Players to
treat the story with respect, was doubled up, his handkerchief
pressed to his eyes.
After
that, the performance proceeded more smoothly. Teudar appeared to
mellow out in his old age and granted Saint Ke all the land he
could walk around while Teudar was having his bath. Saint Ke and
Saint Ia put their heads together to come up with a potion that
made the old monster stick to the sides of his tub, and set off on
a wild, hooting run around the amphitheatre to claim their new
territory. Teudar was wheeled off in his bathtub, ranting and
raving. That signalled a break in the performance, and Sasha made
his way through the crowd to the tiny curtained-off backstage area.
He leaned cautiously on a cardboard wall and smiled at King Teudar.
“All right, Your Majesty?”
Laurie had retained his underwear to please the vicar and
stripped off the rest to please everyone else. He stared up at
Sasha, wide-eyed. He had been out of hospital for a week. His hair
was tousled, his collarbones and ribs standing newly stark beneath
his skin. “I’m fine,” he said. “It’s just that I really
can’t get out of this
sodding bath.”
“Potion must have been good.” Sasha reached into the old enamel
tub. One of Teudar’s soldierly retinue appeared at the other side,
frowning in concern. Between them they reached in and hoisted
Laurie out. Sasha met the boy’s eyes and nodded gratefully. “I
think your leading man might have overdone his first day back on
the job.”
“Is he okay?”
“I think so. Can somebody cover for him for the next act,
though?”
“Sure. We swap parts around all the time. And it’s just a
backlit sequence where he murders Clara – we do it in silhouette so
as not to scare the kiddies.”
Laurie
was beginning a breathless protest. He wasn’t convincing, though –
naked and shivering, clutching at Sasha for support while the
soldier boy threw a blanket around him. Sasha placed a gentle hand
over his mouth. “No. Shut up. You’ve given this your all. I’d like
a bit of you now, okay?” He smiled at the soldier. “I’ll have him
back in time to take his bow.”
***
The
clifftop campsite lay in the shelter of a Cornish hedge, one of the
huge barricades formed by two granite drystone walls, turf-topped
and packed with mud, and over the centuries subsumed in greenery.
Brambles and blackthorns flourished along it. Ivy-wreathed
hawthorns gave shelter to the blackbirds now bidding farewell to
the sun, and the omnipresent magpies hopped and loped about on the
turf, competing with the seagulls for any scraps left by the
campers.
The