Chapter One – Two Quests

To be honest, I had forgotten all about the crystal sword - and I only found what I had written about it by accident. It happened like this: one morning I was staring out of the window at the pool in front of my house, watching a thin veil of rain sweep across it, obscuring the mountains and the sun, making the sheep stare plaintively at me, as if I were to blame for their damp disgruntlement. I felt a strong desire to return to bed and bury myself in a thick novel about criminal gangs in India.
But I decided I must not give in to this bad mood. I would make coffee, I would check emails, I would do the admin chores which I had been putting off. So I brewed up a pot of best Arabica, and sat down at my computer to make a start. After looking at the BBC news (recession worse and worse) and weather (rain and then more rain with wind), I checked my emails and found one from a friend, Kerry, asking me to write a reference for her – urgently – today in fact. ‘Can you make me sound experienced and wise?’ she asked. I sighed. I hate writing references. Then I recalled writing another one for her, a year or two before, and thought if I could find it, I could use it again, thus saving myself a tedious effort. I started trawling through old files, turning up all sorts of aborted projects and ideas. I did not find the reference but, way back in a ten year old file marked ‘Writing Projects’ I did find a document named ‘The Crystal Sword’. I opened it and began to read:

A while ago, at a talk I was giving about the British Mysteries (about the six ancient Houses of Britain), I met a young man – let us call him Francis - who asked me if I would repeat the talk to his Pagan group. I agreed and arrived on the day to find Francis was not there. I gave the talk to the five people who had turned up and forgot about Francis. However a week later he rang me up in a state of great agitation.
“I’m sorry I missed your talk,” he said, “but I had to go to Glastonbury, on urgent business.”
I felt sceptical about the urgent business and was ready to end our call curtly, but Francis would not let me go.
“I’m feeling really rattled by it,” he continued. “I need to tell someone and you seem like the right person. I don’t know why.”
Francis told me he had been approached by a man – let’s call him Andrew Astley -‘a sort of medium-stroke-magician’ - who invited him to come on a ‘special trip’ into the countryside around Glastonbury. Francis said he couldn’t spare the time, or the money, but Andrew Astley insisted: he needed Francis to witness ‘something important which was due to happen.’ He would pick the young man up in his car, he would pay for him to stay in a nice hotel. ‘What is this important thing?’ asked Francis. ‘Wait and see,’ was the reply.
The following weekend Francis found himself motoring around the countryside near the Isle of Avalon in the company of several ladies of varying ages past forty, a couple of older men and Andrew Astley himself, a middle-aged man with a firm jaw, a hairy tweed jacket and a talent for keeping his mouth shut. They visited sacred sites, and then, after dinner at the hotel on Saturday night, they set off again, in two cars, to drive around the lanes in the gathering dusk. It seemed they were looking for a particular field. Francis was beginning to feel fed up. This was not his idea of an interesting weekend. The ladies were all too old to be worth flirting with and he felt that the whole thing was poorly organised. Francis had his fingers in many new-age pies and loved to be involved with anything sensational or thrilling, but this was turning out to be just plain dull. He wondered how soon he could leave the next day.
Finally the leading car swung off the main road and headed down a narrow lane across the low-lying fields. It stopped under a big oak tree and everyone got out. There was a three-quarters moon so you could see quite well, said Francis, including, in the distance, Glastonbury Tor, a dark hump on the now moon-lit horizon. The little group set off across a muddy field of grass, some of the ladies exclaiming in dismay at how wet it was. AA told them to be quiet and just listen. As they walked Francis noticed that the ground seemed to be ascending slightly, and the Tor on the horizon to his left seemed to be getting nearer. It certainly looked bigger anyway. Then he began to hear a high-pitched whine. ‘Can you hear that?’ he asked. The ladies nodded. Andrew Astley said ‘aha, good’ but refused to answer questions. They continued on their way, wondering where on earth the sound was coming from.
They reached a low grassy knoll and climbed it without effort. AA had them stand around in a tight circle. He placed a fat lady opposite himself, with Francis to his right and a quiet, skinny old lady with bright white hair called Enid to his left. The high-pitched noise grew louder, becoming painful to the ears. Francis started to fidget and then he noticed AA staring at the centre of the circle. ‘Look!’ he exclaimed and Francis saw that there was something glimmering on the grass in front of them. AA put his hand out and pulled it up from the ground. He was holding the handle and hilt of a sword made of glass or crystal, its blade stopping abruptly about six inches past the handle, as if it had been broken off. Francis swore that it had not been on the grass when they first arrived at the place and that it would have been impossible for AA to produce it from his sleeve.
‘He was just wearing a scruffy old jacket, and he didn’t carry a bag. I tell you the thing materialised in front of us. We all broke off a piece and took it. I’ve got it at home if you want to see.’
‘But what was the point of this?’ I asked. Francis annoyed me with his butterfly, sensation-seeking mind. I felt that anything he was involved with was bound to be dodgy.
‘I don’t know,’ he replied, ‘I think he just wanted us to be there to see. Maybe he wanted us to tell people about this broken crystal sword. I don’t know.’
Wanted him to tell people? This made a kind of sense. Francis sure knew a lot of people. If you wanted something to be spread around, he was the ideal person to tell. I never saw his fragment of the sword, because not long after this he let me down rather badly again, and I broke off relations with him. But the story of the crystal sword stayed with me, I told it to several people and they seemed to be affected in the same way as me. It caught a nerve, rang a bell, struck a note.

The story ended abruptly here. I had completely forgotten about this bizarre event, but recalling it now produced the same mixture of irritation and fascination which I had felt at the time. Had I embroidered the story when I wrote it down, or stuck to the facts? I could not remember. But I did remember having a niggling feeling that there was something important about the event and the broken sword, even if it was just a cheap trick.