Adam’s Pilgrimage part 4: Birmingham and the Bull Ring, May 7th - 9th

as played via e-mail

 

Monday May 7th:

The next morning Adam wakes feeling much the worse for wear. There’s an ache in his bones and he’s caught a cold. He takes a cooked breakfast (as per Victor’s instructions for the first half of the pilgrimage for such circumstances before setting out), but really wishing he could stay in bed.

The weather is dry, thankfully, and Adam’s clothing has dried on the radiator overnight, but it is cold and breezy and Adam is feeling the cold badly. He takes the back roads to Bideford followed by the B439 and A46 to Alcester, which is where he stops after 12 miles.

 

Adam feels it’s been a rotten day; he feels awful, not at all spiritual. Victor does his best to raise his spirits but Adam feels further than ever from his spiritual goal.

 

Tuesday May 8th:

Adam gets up to the sound of rain beating against his window. He feels much as he did the day before but he forces himself (successful Psyche roll) to get up and get out with another cooked breakfast inside him.

 

It’s miserable weather, not as cold as yesterday but heavy rain pours down all day, after just four miles, Adam is feeling as if the rain is literally beating him in to the ground. He stops in Studley, on the A435, after little more than four miles. Still a day’s walk south of Birmingham.

 

Victor tells Adam not to be disheartened. His body is still trying to throw off a severe cold but Victor reckons you’re in great physical shape now and you’re still making progress despite all the vicissitudes.

 

Wednesday May 9th:

The weather still looks awful but Adam wakes to find his aches gone. Somehow he feels his found his spiritual way again. He makes fifteen miles to reach Birmingham town centre and finds a hostelry near the Bullring.

 

Amazingly, despite the incessant rain, despite hiking through a city centre and despite your recent cold, you feel in robust good health at the end of the day. Victor’s pleased; he feels you may have passed an important point in your journey. He warns that there will be more bad days ahead but you can now look back at the last two days and remind yourself that bad days can be weathered, both physically and spiritually.

 

You’re in a motel affair so you have eat out but you find an inexpensive eatery doing the sort of food approved of in Victor’s diet sheet for this period in your pilgrimage.

 

It’s on your way back to your motel, after dark, that you spy on the opposite side of the road a strangely familiar figure. It stands exactly opposite you, about where you’ll be crossing to when there’s a suitable break in the traffic.

 

You can’t quite place where you’ve seen him before but he’s definitely familiar.

 

Adam will use a combination of psychology (posture) and reading emotions to suss out how this person is feeling.

 

You find him very difficult to read indeed, though the conditions are far from perfect, of course, across a busy inner city street under artificial lighting. But you get the feeling he’s been waiting for you.

 

He turns and makes his way to the left but doesn’t go more than a few steps before pausing and half turning, to see if you’re following him. He’s right under a street light and the hood of his waterproof throws his face in shadow but you’re sure you’ve seen him before.

 

Adam will go and meet him.

 

As you start to cross the road, he turns and resumes walking. By the time you reach the curb, he’s already twenty yards away. His pace is steady but purposeful, as if he’s sure of where he’s going but relaxed about when he gets there.

 

Again you get a strong impression of familiarity. Do you want to catch him up?

 

No - I'll stick with the pilgrimage - I wasn't about to hide to avoid him but there's no need to chase after him either.

 

Fine! You follow him at a distance, remaining a dozen yards behind. At first he seems to be heading back to your motel but then he keeps going past that street and enters the Bullring, the indoor shopping precinct for which Birmingham is famous.

 

By this time, although the street lights remain bright, you notice a distinct lack of shoppers and the traffic seems to have vanished. You can hear traffic and the noise of a busy city at night, but as if from far away and receding further.

 

An eerie silence falls and you feel a dream-like quality as events unfold. Is this a dream? You wonder whether it would even be possible not to follow your guide; dreams so often seem to make these choices for us.

 

Your guide turns and waits not far inside the mall by an unremarkable utility door. You suspect the door conceals a floor polisher and other cleaning materials, hidden from the public.

 

By now your senses seem to have developed a preternatural clarity and as you approach him you get a clear look at your guide in the bright lights of the mall.

 

It’s you!

 

And yet not… the clothes are the same and you cannot believe you didn’t recognise the waterproof, but the face looks harsher, the eyes darker, the hair longer and unkempt. The skin is pale and much coarser.

 

You halt just out of arms reach and the two of you study each other. There’s still something about him and your special senses tell you that something is not like you and recognising it will reveal much about his nature.

 

Then he reaches for the door…

 

Adam will get the piece of glass from the church ready in case he feels he needs to use it - I'm guessing it's in one of his pockets. Meanwhile Adam speculates whether this is a version of himself that failed the pilgrimage?

 

The piece of church glass given him by Charles Walton slips easy in to Adam’s hand as his alter-ego slowly opens the door to reveal a short landing followed by stairs leading down. The lighting is much more subdued, from naked low-wattage light bulbs, and there’s an almost WWII feel to the descending passage. It’s clearly not intended for public access.

 

Your guide stands quietly, expectantly, ready to shut the door behind you. It’s unclear whether he intends to follow but he obviously expects you to go down the stairs.

 

His eyes dart briefly down to the hand holding the glass, still concealed, and back again; your senses tell you that he knows you have something and is apprehensive as to what it is.

 

Now Adam must be close enough for a reading emotions/psychology check. If he is convinced the other Adam has no ulterior/aggressive intentions he will head down the passage.

 

His face is impassive and what Adam reads in that face is ambiguous. He is not aggressive but that does not mean that he would not wish Adam ill and his stare has an element of hostility, yet Adam is sure he intends no overt harm.

 

As to ‘ulterior’ motives, obviously he wants Adam to take the stairs but Adam has no way to know why.

 

OK, Adam will indicate to the other Adam that he can go first - Adam will follow closely behind.

 

Your alter-ego pauses a moment; you think he’s considering whether to refuse and force you to make a choice to go down anyway, but then he makes up his mind and proceeds down the stairs with Adam following on his heels. With no one to hold it open the door swings to but not, Adam thinks, actually shut.

 

The eka-Adam keeps pausing, cocking his head slightly as if listening for something. By the third pause Adam is sure he’s checking that Adam is following.

 

Then he reaches the bottom of the stairs. They’re quite steep and moderately long; Adam estimates they must be around fifty feet under street level.

 

Your alter-ego throws open the lower door, twin to the first and steps aside to let Adam through. As you pass him, you get the unnerving feeling that an eye left a socket to follow you, just as in Beckhampton with ‘Hagrid’! You jump sideways, away from eka-Adam, even as you spin to face him, but he looks normal.

 

Eka-Adam remains impassive as he shuts the door behind you. You wonder whether you really saw what you think you saw but at some level within you realise this doesn’t matter as what’s important is that you saw it, real or not. It reveals a fundamental truth about your alter-ego.

 

You become aware of the hub-hub of a crowd. You’re standing at the edge of a huge cavern lit entirely by firelight. A crowd of perhaps a hundred or so surround some sort of arena. A few women but mainly men; all dressed in the style of ancient Rome, about equal numbers of legionaries in uniform and civilians in togas.

 

This can’t be real.

 

Adam will look around to see what is going on - is it some kind of ceremony?

 

It looks more like a sports event or perhaps a social occasion, quite possibly both. You move towards the arena, which is a circle of heavy wooden boards about five feet high around an enclosure covered in sawdust or sand. There are tiers of seats supported by wooden scaffolding rising to slightly above head height.

 

As you move forward, everyone starts taking their seats. A woman briefly smiles at you, offering her vacant front row seat, before moving away with a senior legionary to join his party.

 

There’s some sort of VIP box above a tunnel in to darkness, across the arena to your right. It contains an even mix of men and women, evidently local dignitaries, including a Roman officer in a very impressive uniform, complete with plumed helmet.

 

Two legionaries stationed either side of the VIP box with massive Roman tuba-like trumpets that entirely wrap around the musicians give vent to a fanfare marking the start of the festivities. The last few people find their seats and everyone stops wriggling.

 

A centurion steps in to the arena close by to your left, exactly opposite the VIP box and presumably begins to announce something, reading from a scroll. Unless Adam understands Latin, it means nothing to him.

 

At that moment Adam spies two familiar faces…

 

On the far side of the stands, close to the VIP box, is the Wild Man you recall from the Uffington White Horse, only now you also recognise him as eka-Adam, dressed in a blue toga, the same shade as your waterproof (which you’re still wearing, making you stand out against the entirely period dress around you). His gaze is levelled at you; he wants you to know he’s watching you. He seems not to interact with those about him.

 

Then, off to the left, sitting perhaps a quarter turn around the arena, you see the woman from the Uffington White Horse. She’s wearing a white toga and is smiling and talking with some friends but even in profile you recognise her; a very mannish face with a significant overbite, very far from beautiful, mars an otherwise orgasmic figure.

 

The men to either side nonetheless appear to find her captivating, despite her looks, and she does seem to radiate some sort of animal allure.

 

Adam will take a seat and watch events unfold (unless they directly involve him)

 

The centurion ends his oration, stands to attention and salutes. The Roman general gives an understated nod and the festivities begin with another blast from the tubas. The centurion leaves the ring and in his place strides a lithe athlete wearing a loin-cloth.

 

A wooden hinge creaks in the tunnel beneath the VIP box and a young bull emerges in to the arena. It looks like the type of bull used in Spanish bullfights, small, agile and bred for innate nastiness. Somehow it’s been dressed for the occasion with ribbons on its tail and horns (which look sharpened). It gazes once around the ring before lowering its head and advancing on the ‘bullfighter’.

 

Adam notices the ‘bullfighter’ is unarmed and instead of ‘fighting’ the bull, he starts teasing it by an extended game of chicken, remaining in place as the bull launches its charge only to dart aside at the last second.

 

The bull is clearly angered at the antics of its erstwhile victim but it learns from experience. Over the course of the next few minutes, it approaches ever more slowly, launching its final charge from ever closer. Time and again the bullfighter just slips away in time.

 

Sooner or later, the bull, boxing ever-clever, must catch its antagonist. Once more it closes and this time comes within arm’s reach before charging. This time the bullfighter snatches a red ribbon from one horn but gets tossed over the back of the bull for his pains.

 

Miraculously, the bullfighter somersaults over the bull and lands behind it on his feet, unharmed. He then repeats the process but this time dances aside, receiving a minor gash in one arm from a horn.

 

Another clash and he again somersaults over the bull, this time pulling the ribbon from its tail before dancing away, blood spattering the sawdust from his gashed arm but victorious. He vaults to safety out of the arena and another man steps forward to slaughter the bull with a sword, just like in Spain, but with no ceremony; he just kills it, dead. Once dead, a weasel of a man cuts away the bull’s penis and flings it to the victorious bullfighter, who catches it to cheers, and the carcase is hauled from the ring by two burly men.

 

This is repeated several times with new bulls and new bullfighters, not always with the same result. About half the bullfighters fail to recover all the ribbons or retire injured, one is thrown down and gored. These bulls are not killed but lured from the arena, back down the tunnel, presumably to fight another day.

 

Through all this, the Wild Man’s gaze, impassive, unnerving, malevolent, never leaves you.

 

Another bull enters the ring but something about this one is different. In size and shape it’s like all the rest but its eyes glint wickedly and the horns are longer, sharper. It also seems more unkempt than the others; there are no ribbons and the coat is rougher, shaggier. With no immediate opponent, it starts venting its rage on the arena walls.

 

And instead of a bullfighter, the horse-faced woman in the white toga gently brushes aside one of her coterie and enters the ring. Instead of cheers, as with previous bullfighters, the audience falls silent, as a mark of respect, Adam feels.

 

The woman deftly releases a broach on her shoulder and her toga falls to the floor, leaving her naked save for a loincloth. She really has a quite awesome figure.

 

The bull turns and bellows with rage, charging, but the woman calmly accepts two daggers from an accomplice outside the arena before cartwheeling out of harm’s way.

 

Wielding a dagger in each hand, she dances like all the other bullfighters, only more lithely and gracefully. Although armed, the contest seems far more even, as the bull seems almost supernaturally quicker and more powerful, turning on a sixpence and feinting in one direction only to slash with its horns in another.

 

They are very well matched indeed.

 

The duel has captivated everyone and for ten minutes you are aware of nothing else, but then a brief lull in the contest lets you glance at the Wild Man, to find his gaze still fixed on you but now with an expression of fierce elation, as if he feels some climax is at hand.

 

At the same time, the woman’s gyrations lead her to point exactly opposite with you, the bull, her and the Wild Man perfectly in line. At that precise moment, she pauses with her daggers held poised before her, panting in exultation, and her gaze, like the Wild Man’s, fixed on yours. This is the first time she’s shown any awareness of your presence.

 

And then, as is the way with dreams, you are the bull, glaring across the arena at her and the Wild Man.

 

Adam/bull will try to psyche the woman out by braying, staring at her, flaring his nostrils and scraping his hooves on the ground.

 

She doesn’t look ‘psyched’. She keeps her pose, almost as if dancing. She’s sweating from her exertions but smiling in exaltation, her daggers poised for use. You know she’s waiting for you to make a move and she is not afraid.

 

Then, over her head, you glimpse the Wild Man, eka-Adam; his expression is intensely fierce. You know he wants you to gore the woman, spill her blood in the sawdust and ruin her magnificent physique. But you can also see he’s afraid.

 

One of the flaws Adam took was pacifist so he will defend himself if attacked but isn't going to make the first aggressive move.

 

Since the transformation took place when the three were in a line Adam will move off to one side a bit to see if that changes anything, he will make out that he is circling his opponent.

 

Adam feels as though he’s at war with himself somewhere inside his head. Somewhere, a part of him wants to charge the woman, gore her, tear her flesh with his horns and feel her ribs crack under his hooves. The urge to attack is almost overwhelming but Adam’s innate pacifist nature tries to fight it down.

 

The struggle within is paralysing; Adam the Bull shudders and whimpers with the strain. Shaking his huge head from side to side, Adam falls to his knees and moans.

 

Dimly, Adam struggles to raise his head. The woman hasn’t changed her dancer’s pose; she looks like she’s waiting for something. But the eka-Adam/Wild Man has risen to his feet, furiously urging you to attack, but you can see he’s now very afraid indeed.

 

Then the woman seizes her chance and springs to attack. She springs past you to the right and you feel a hard blow to the side of your neck; the sawdust beneath you turns bright red.

 

Still struggling with your internal war, you feel your physical strength drain away. Looking up, eka-Adam/Wild Man stands amidst the crowd, clutching at his throat, which is pouring blood down his chest.