The Winchester Codex

By Frances Spurrier

Books can be dangerous. Fitz believes he is guardian of one of the most dangerous of all - The Winchester Codex was responsible for wiping out the entire draconic race, of which he is one of the last vestiges. Caught in a trap from the deep time of history, the dragon had vowed to protect the book’s author. Yet in the 21st century, what relevance does this ancient manuscript have? He hides the codex in his attic and tries to forget about it.

A surprise visit from a friend leads to one last quest, forcing them both to confront their past.

In Swansea, Fitz and his friend Perceval happen upon a temporarily homeless teenager who joins them on a walk around the coast of Wales to raise funds for charity and records everything on social media.

But not all their followers are benign. Someone wants the codex that has lain neglected in Fitz’ attic for centuries and wants it badly. What started as a simple walk, ends with a journey into darkness and to the gates of death.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Troubador Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Jan 28, 2024
• ISBN: 9781805147572

Frances Spurrier

Frances Spurrier is a poet, essayist and blogger. She holds an MFA in Creative Writing and is a Fellow of the Higher Education Academy. Her first poetry collection, The Pilgrim’s Trail, won the Cinnamon Press Collection Award. Her poetry has been widely published and anthologized. The Winchester Codex is her first novel.

Book preview

Contents

Acknowledgements

Prologue

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Anna’s Diary

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

Sixteen

Seventeen

Eighteen

Nineteen

Twenty

Twenty-One

Twenty-Two

Twenty-Three

Twenty-Four

Twenty-Five

Twenty-Six

Twenty-Seven

Twenty-Eight

Twenty-Nine

Thirty

Thirty-One

Thirty-Two

Thirty-Three

Thirty-Four

Thirty-Five

Thirty-Six

Thirty-Seven

Epilogue

References

About the Author

Acknowledgements

A number of people have travelled around Wales with me – actually or metaphorically – in pursuit of the ideas and locations in this story. I would like to acknowledge the help of the following for their support on these travels:

Bianca, James and Annabel for photography, encouragement and moral support. Charlie for brilliant illustrations and bringing my characters to life. Thank you to Neil for being my beta reader and just about everything else. Morgan Sinton-Hewitt – you saw Fitz first; Andy White and Ian Beck for reading and helpful suggestions; Charlie Peschardt for advice on all things helicopter; Steve and Paul Emberson; Ellie Owen of Rowanvale Books.

Before Fitz there was poetry. Thank you to Jan Fortune at Cinnamon Press who published The Pilgrim’s Trail and to Mike, James, Mel and Kate who joined me on the journey. I am indebted to Graham Fawcett for sharing his boundless knowledge of all things poetic over many years.

Finally, my gratitude to the staff of Troubador Publishing.

Prologue

This was a place of half-light, already ancient in the time of Arthur, silent, secretive, peopled by saints and ghosts of saints, hermits, holy men. She felt their spirits pressing round as the mare picked her way through the bracken and wooded hills. On the lower slopes they could move quite quickly but the pace slowed as the ground rose steeply where the treeline ended, giving way to bare hillside.

She came to a small circle of stunted trees near the stone cross, below which lay Issui’s well. Here Meghan dismounted. She heard the soft gurgling of a stream running down the hillside to a small hollow where the silver waters filled a basin carved from stone, before running over the lip to join the other places of the earth. In this place, legend had it, the sainted hermit had once dwelled and nearby been murdered.

Meghan had wrapped her precious folios carefully against this, their last journey. Now she took the parcel down from the mare’s saddlebag as well as her small harp. Drinking thirstily from her flask of water, she poured a few of the last drops into the basin as a libation for the saint. Soon there would be no more need of water.

She threw herself down on the ground, sounded a few pure notes from the harp, listened to the sweet music as it drifted away on the wind. Waited. Later she slept. In febrile and anxious dreams she saw him, Arawn, ancient as time, father of all dragons, coming to rest nearby with barely a sound.

BOOK ONE

One

MUSEUM PIECE, 2017

When he surfaced from the Tube he realised with a jolt of panic that no-one had given him directions to the museum entrance. Or he’d forgotten to print out the email. Find phone, he thought, grappling for his mobile in his rucksack. Find email. The arrangement was for two interviews, one in the morning and one in the afternoon, plus he was to be wheeled out for some guest appearances among the exhibits. The traffic as ever was dense and impatient. How could anyone think straight in all this noise and busy-ness? Already he felt a headache coming on.

He stood with a crowd of people waiting to cross at the lights. Curious stares surrounded him, as they always did. Yeah, I’m a dragon. There’s still some left. So get over it.

Exhibition Road. The right place, at least. A queue already? That was gratifying. A young child with a pink parasol and gumboots patterned with yellow ducks stared at him, apparently unperturbed by the sight of a live dragon wandering down Exhibition Road. The child called out, ‘Hey, dinosaur. Are you lost?’

Kind of.

‘Sshhh! Gracie,’ the young woman with the child looked embarrassed. ‘Sorry – so sorry…’

‘Not at all, it’s a common confusion.’

‘About being lost? Or about being a dinosaur?’

‘Both.’

‘Could I have your autograph – for my daughter?’

‘Of course.’ Fitz tried to hide his secret delight and signed with a flourish, proud of his dexterity in holding the pen – a skill he’d worked on for years. This brought requests from others in the queue. Suddenly he found himself facing a sea of exhibition programmes, odd scraps of paper, iPads, writable screens, even arms and hands were presented to Fitz for him to sign. For a moment he felt like a rock star, Freddie or Michael. Eventually his moment of stardom was taken away from him by a young man dressed in black shirt and trousers wearing a security badge on a lanyard. ‘Perhaps you could help me?’ Fitz said, ‘I’m being interviewed at the History of Dragons exhibition. I’m not sure which entrance to use.’

‘This is the Science Museum, mate – you want the Natural History Museum, back that way!’

*

When he finally found the right person at the right entrance to the right museum, he was taken through to a jumble of back rooms behind the exhibition area, given tea and introduced to a lady called Sara, his guide and interviewer for the day. Sara looked a bit tight-lipped.

‘Were the trains a nightmare this morning? Poor you. I hope your journey was OK. Thank you for coming, Odo.’

Sara was quite short, with bobbed dark hair and huge earrings shaped like Celtic harps, but everyone looked quite short to Fitz, who was a bit taller than the average human, although very small for an Orcadian red dragon. It had taken him several hundred years to live down the ‘runt of the litter’ title awarded to him at birth.

‘This way, please.’ Sara steered him through several rooms full of glass cases containing what looked like bits of bone.

‘Please call me Fitz,’ he said. ‘Everyone does.’ They stood back to let a school party through. The young people were chattering and laughing and sounded completely carefree. The dragon felt quite envious.

‘Thank you for inviting me to be interviewed today,’ he said.

He chatted on nervously, although he realised reticence was better. ‘I hope you won’t ask me too much about dragon mythology and history,’ he said. ‘It might sound odd but I’m not very strong on those anymore. You see, these days my interests are mostly…’

‘We’ll stick to day-to-day stuff, shopping, travel, hobbies, that sort of thing, if that’s OK with you,’ the woman replied rather curtly.

‘And my book?’ he added, giving what he hoped was a self-deprecating laugh, although it sounded more like a cough. ‘As you may know, my book, The Bee Friendly Glade Beyond Your Back Door, is out …’

Sara looked bored. ‘Gardening? Right! We’ll touch on it but remember the exhibition is about dragonlore.’

‘Gardening is more important than ever in these days of climate change and soil erosion. You see, people’s combined garden spaces make up a substantial land mass that could be made more accommodating to…’

But Sara wasn’t listening. It was, she said, time for the first interview. They had arrived at the main exhibition area, where metre-high letters printed on a white banner hung above gigantic double doors read:

DRAGONLORE

Animatronic Models

Flight Skills Simulator

Celebrity Guest:

Odo de Fitzwalter of Manorbier

‘The Last Known Dragon’

He suspected this was a marketing ploy for selling more tickets. ‘Actually, I’m not the last dragon…’ he started to say but was told to wait to one side – between a pillar and a giant model of a Russian black dragon with savage-looking teeth and an evil glint in its eye – until he was introduced.

Central to the animatronic models and standing glass cases, a stage had been set with two chairs and two mics. Between the chairs stood a small coffee table with a vase containing red and yellow plastic flowers. The audience were seated in a semi-circle on uncomfortable-looking chairs. A sizeable audience had gathered. Helpers were bringing extra chairs; their lines of grey stretched away into the gloom of the outer regions of the exhibition space. Because of the lighting, he could sense rather than see how many faces there were out there. Fitz felt extraordinarily nervous, lost and out of place. Archaic was the word; it came to him suddenly. He was a real museum piece. Why on earth had he agreed to this interview? He was used to feeling out of place, he told himself. Small too, standing here next to this giant plastic animatronic model of a Russian black dragon.

Sara took her seat on the stage, to a smattering of applause and started the introduction. ‘Ladies and gentlemen. Thank you so much for being here today. Around you will see exhibits, relics, runes, bones, descriptions and artefacts of dragonhood going back as far as a thousand years. Please enjoy the exhibition and the astounding replicas that have been created for us by our in-house artists, and don’t forget you can buy illustrated books, models and dragon toys in the shop, which you pass through on the way out. Also the cafeteria will be open for the sale of drinks and light meals until 5pm. This fantastic exhibition, the History of Dragons, will tell you everything you could need to know, but – and I’m just so excited about this I can hardly speak right now!’

Really? Who knew?

‘Did you know, ladies and gentlemen,’ Sara continued, ‘that there is still a remnant of this curious civilisation left living among us? Not only that but he has agreed to come here today to speak to us and tell us what it’s like to be him, so, ladies and gentlemen, please give it up for none other than Odo de Fitzwalter of Manorbier, aka the Last Dragon!’

There was loud applause plus a mixture of cheers and whistles when Fitz stepped to the stage. He narrowly avoided knocking over the red plastic flowers with his tail.

‘So, Fitz, thank you so much for joining us today,’ Sara said, smiling cheerfully at him, indicating that he should sit in the chair opposite her. It was a small moulded office chair, unsuitable for a dragon to sit on. There was a microphone hanging down between them but it had been set to Sara’s level so was too low for him. Fitz shuffled about on his plastic chair and tried to slide a bit lower to get his snout more on a level with the suspended mic, which resulted in him looking odd and getting backache. Someone in the audience started to giggle.

‘Again,’ said Sara brightly, ‘thank you so much for joining us today. First, can you tell us a little bit about yourself? How old are you?’

This wasn’t a good start.

‘I’m sorry, I’m not exactly sure.’

‘Well, where do you live? You know that, right? Haha.’

‘A place called Llangennlys. In the Black Mountains of Wales.’

‘Is that an unusual place for a dragon to choose to live?’

‘Unusual? No. Although it was by accident that I came to live in Wales.’ As soon as he started to tell the story, he knew it was a mistake. He was pretty much babbling with nerves. ‘I was on my way to Gibraltar to meet up with a friend – but I was involved in a collision and one of my wings was damaged.’

‘A collision?’ There were gasps. Sara and the audience seemed to enjoy the gratuitous chance to appear shocked by someone else’s apparent derogation of duty. ‘A collision with what?’

A white-tailed eagle. ‘Er… a helicopter,’ Fitz lied. Just thinking about it made him even more embarrassed. That’s what comes of using a mobile mid-flight.

Sara looked suitably horrified, although whether on his behalf or on behalf of the mythical helicopter crew he wasn’t sure. It must have been more than apparent, he thought, that his stature was too small to withstand a collision with a chopper.

‘Anyway, I crash-landed in the Black Mountains. A local vet and blacksmith combined their knowledge in order to fix me. I couldn’t fly for six months. In fact, I still have difficulty flying.’

‘Then what?’

‘By the time it all got sorted out, I had rented a cottage and felt at home there in the Black Mountains. I was too late for my appointment with… my friend, so I stayed.’

Sara nodded encouragingly; her gold harp earrings bounced and threw reflected light like electric sparks. ‘So now you are retired? I understand you have written a book.’

This was more like it… a chance to promote his book. ‘Yes.’ Fitz nodded enthusiastically. ‘Yes, indeed. It’s a book on sustainable gardening. You see, I’m actually very interested in lavender and rosemary cultivars for garden use and oil production. There’s a rare lavender – Lavandula aristibracteata – from Northern Somalia, which the bees adore and—’

‘Fantastic! Can’t wait to read it! Well, moving on, some say dragons are related to snakes and lizards. Do you consider yourself a member of the lizard family?’

He was taken aback. It was considered extremely rude within the community to refer to the draconic race as lizards or worms. Fitz felt the interviewer should have known that if she’d done her research.

‘Definitely not. Lizards are a different species.’

He spoke on quickly before the interviewer could interrupt him again. ‘Dragons mean different things in different places. Most cultures,’ he said, ‘have some sort of dragon mythology. In Japan, for example, they were thought to bring rain. Rain is beneficial, vital for the survival of life. The dragon in that scenario is a bringer of fortune and life-giving sustenance, rather than destruction, as so many storytellers like to pretend. Chinese dragons are often interpreted as serpent-like – you see them at festivals – but those are just artists’ interpretations. The point I’m making is that dragons and humans can live in harmony and benefit each other. They just sometimes need to remember that. We are certainly not lizards.’

‘When was the last time you flew?’

‘Last Friday.’

‘And where were you going on that occasion?’

‘To the supermarket. I’d run out of satsumas.’

This brought laughter and applause from the audience, which seemed to irritate the interviewer.

‘Dragons eat satsumas? Don’t you gnaw the bones of dead trolls or something?’

‘No, I don’t. I eat a vegan diet. And the trolls are online these days.’

Another laugh from the audience. This was good. But then he overplayed his hand.

‘Mushroom stroganoff is a personal favourite. I have a great recipe given to me by a young friend of mine.’ The audience found the idea of a dragon eating stroganoff almost as amusing as satsumas and it took several uncomfortable minutes for the hilarity to die down.

‘Now,’ said Sara, ‘I’d like to chat more about how you spend your days. I mean, can you explain how your daily life reflects the heritage of your race?’

‘The heritage of my race? I don’t think I understand quite what you mean,’ he said haughtily, although he worried that he understood only too well. ‘I spend my days writing and gardening… as I’ve said, my book is out and—’

‘Well, for instance,’ she interrupted, ‘how much time do you allocate to your gardening hobby and how much to fire-setting, terrorising children, that sort of dragon behaviour thing?’

He wasn’t going to dignify that odious question with an answer so he just sat there under the lights, glaring.

Eventually Sara called time and Fitz was freed from the misery of the interrogation.

He went to wander disconsolately round the exhibition, looking at pictures of Orcadian reds. These were his people; the upright standing stance, foreshortened front limbs, finely tapered digits and claws (later to prove useful for holding mobile phones), the family line from which he was himself descended and he couldn’t help feeling proud.

The description on the card beneath read:

The Orcadian red dragon was first identified in South America and parts of Southern Europe. It has been known as a breed in Great Britain since shortly before the reign of King Ethelred. Given to haunting the coasts of west Wales and parts of Scotland, the Orcadian red dragon is a type noted for its peaceful attitudes and love of learning, especially botany. This dragon has an upright stance and appearance, short, stubby tail and ochre-ish scales mixed with emerald tinge and short wings.

The confusion over a green dragon being termed red appears to date back to long-wave light and short-wave light, as well as linguistic distinctions in ancient times. This dragon represents an attractive if ungainly species, sometimes known to have difficulties with sustained flight. They were once believed to make good pets, although there is only one known recorded case of an attempt being made to domesticate this breed of dragon, by Reynard de Winkville, a good citizen of Ghent, in the 14th century.

Pets? Ungainly? Domesticated? It was hardly a curriculum vitae of excellence. The emphasis seemed on dragon inadequacies rather than achievements. But included in the exhibition case there was a fantastic photograph – a vision of dragonly hauteur in flight above the stone ramparts of a castle, which reminded Fitz of his grandfather. Perhaps indeed it was old Longclaw himself.

Leaving this hall, Fitz took himself off to another room.

He came across an impressive-looking black painted urn or flask from 340 BC with white calligraphy and a human figure shown with wings. What had the artist seen, Fitz wondered, that would make him draw such a winged being, long before the advent of Christianity? The vessel was described as an oil flask. He stood for a long while in front of the urn, longed to touch it. But two security guards were already looking at him suspiciously: a dragon with a swishy tail and flopping wings standing near priceless urns? Just his presence unsettled people. Humans tolerated him but they didn’t feel they had to like him.

He had a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach. He reminded himself that he was being paid well for the day, that he needed the money and had seen it as an opportunity to promote his book. He shouldn’t feel dispirited, yet he did.

No-one was interested in animatronics when there was a real dragon wandering around the exhibition. That should have been a positive thing. At the same time, he seemed to be a massive disappointment to them. All the questions he had been asked related to stereotyping. Do you breathe fire? No? What sort of a dragon are you that doesn’t breathe fire? You don’t fly much, do you. Just to the supermarket? What sort of a dragon are you if you only fly to the supermarket? Etc.

Fitz wandered disconsolately among the exhibits for a few moments more before alighting on a collection under glass described as ‘Dragon Fossils’. The collection consisted of bits of aggressive-looking teeth, large bones and some delicately traced prints embedded in rock. He stopped to read the item description beneath the glass case.

Fossils from an archaeological dig in 1884 Valle de La Luna, Atacama Desert, Chile. Part of a skull, clavicle, femur and footprint of a Chilean Blue dragon thought to date from 430 bce. It was believed that dragon scales had magical properties and therefore were much sought-after. At the height of their global population, it was thought some forty thousand dragons existed across the South American continent, with several thousands more in Eastern Asia and Europe. Dragons were widely hunted for their scales, which at that time were believed to contain ingredients from which a successful elixir of youth could be produced. Like much mythology, the origin of such beliefs is difficult to trace. Despite some legal protections being granted and a ban on hunting in many countries in the first half of the 20th century, these belated protections were not sufficient to halt rapid population decline. Currently fewer than six dragons are thought to survive on the planet.

Fewer than six! What about Herbert in the Camargue? Fitz had heard no news of dragon deaths but who was there to bring him news?

What about Cousin Doris in Beddgelert? She would be elderly by now, even by dragon standards. It was incumbent upon him – as younger and more able – to check that she was still OK and finding enough to eat. He could, perhaps, take her a stock of his artichoke and mozzarella pizzas (they had sold exceptionally well at the Llangennlys Primary School Summer Fair last year).

Then an uncomfortable thought occurred to him. Had he become too involved in his garden, his environmental campaigning, the village, baking for cake sales, to bother with other dragons? He wasn’t being much of an ambassador for the race. In fact, he thought gloomily, staring at a stone statue which stared right back at him, to all intents and purposes he was a human now, just a green one with a tail and wings.

Fitz shuddered as if with a sudden cold draft, although the museum was quite stuffy and there were kids running round him in T-shirts and shorts. He suddenly felt every year of his considerable age; indeed, it seemed to him that he saw an empty plinth just waiting for him. He would be a museum piece, the new dinosaur. They would mummify him – or more probably these days make some dreary plastic replica and dump his bones in a vitrine with a label. ‘Here lies not quite the last dragon.’

It was all so depressing.

He stood there pretending to look at something in a vitrine but his eyes filled with somewhat self-pitying tears.

A school party in purple uniforms had detached itself from one exhibit and was moving amoeba-like to the next.

‘Look at this!’ A girl with blue hair dressed in the uniform of the visiting school, her skirt waistline surreptitiously rolled, stood right next to Fitz, held her phone up to take a selfie. She jumped back a metre and squealed when Fitz smiled into the camera.

‘Sorry to startle you.’

‘No worries,’ said the girl with blue hair. ‘I mean, you’re the real dragon. Wow!’ She showed him the