by Phil Rickman
‘ Listen…’
Gomer was standing by the half-open flap of the framed porch at the front of the tent. His ciggy was out, his face looked flushed. He’d taken off his glasses, like this improved his hearing.
‘ For us, the quad bike is just for getting to the location.’ Another voice, not Smiffy. ‘ After that, yow got to rely on your own power, look.’
Now Danny got it. He walked over, stood in the entrance. A flickering darkness inside; he could just make out rows of chairs, about twenty people watching a video on a big-screen TV, stereo sound turned up loud.
Danny stepped inside. On the screen, two men were bawling at each other across a moonscape: Smiffy Gill, with his kooky grin, and a wiry guy with a shaven head and a kind of circular beard like a big O around his lips.
Smiffy said, ‘So, Kenny, I’m guessing this is where the men get separated from the boys?’
A picture came up of a landscape that was nothing but rocks and shale, sloping down near-vertically to a roaring, spitting river. Two men in crash helmets were crossing the gorge on this unstable-looking rope bridge.
‘Give the lad a coconut,’ Kenny said.
Then heavy-metal music was coming up under the crashing of the river and Smiffy Gill’s laughter, and the temperature in Danny’s gut dropped a few degrees as he walked out to Gomer.
‘Shit,’ Danny said.
In his ears, the whoops of Smiffy Gill getting into his harness for his river crossing. In his head, the metallic rumble of a new JCB tractor with a snowplough attached. Gomer going:
This a hexercise, pal?
Then the long, cold silence. Then the short laugh, then:
Give the ole man a coconut.
56
The Beast Within
No more kitten.
‘So you think it’s happening now, do you?’ Athena White said. ‘And you think it’s happening here.’
‘In a way,’ Merrily said. ‘On some level. Yes, I do.’
Miss White had directed Lol to one of the book cupboards, a repository of information rather than a bibliophile store, with many books stacked horizontally to get more on the shelves. Shelf four, sixth from the bottom, flaking cover. Yes, that one… and the one below it.
She leafed through one of the stained tomes. It smelled of whisky.
‘Mithraism is still quite widely practised by pagans. Remind me of any ancient cult, I’ll show you its modern counterpart. Most of the contemporary groups, of course, are harking back to the original Persian Mithra – the sun god. The Lord of the Wide Pastures as he’s referred to in a cobbled-together but rather pretty ritual. All very green and comparatively bloodless. Some groups even let women in now.’
‘I don’t think that’s what we’re looking at,’ Merrily said. ‘How did it come to be a Roman religion?’
‘I don’t think anyone knows. Senior Romans, to begin with – emperors, generals, then spreading to lower officers, if not the ranks. The chaps most interested in promoting a state of mind conducive to warfare. Mithraists called one another brother. Fusing themselves together as supremely efficient fighting units.’
‘Like the SAS.’
‘I suppose. If it’s any small comfort, Watkins, one writer comments that the Roman cult of Mithras adopts the paganism of the original Persian cult without its apparent tolerance of other religions… and the harshness of Christianity without its redeeming qualities of love and mercy. A combination, therefore, of the least humane aspects of both Christianity and the original Mithraism.’
‘Does that suggest the Roman religion was, to an extent, manufactured?’
‘I’m sure it does. The Romans were such pragmatists, even the Vikings seem soppy in comparison. Even as magic, it’s considered to be a lower form, happy to trade with elementals and demons rather than with what you might call a spiritual source. Make of that what you will. But gosh, frightfully useful in a scrap.’
‘How widely did it spread in Britain?’
‘It’s not ubiquitous, but far from invisible. A very good example of a mithraeum – one of their temples – was found in London. Also a famous one at Hadrian’s Wall in Northumbria.’
‘What about this area?’
‘That’s what I was…’ Miss White lifted an old brown book, The Mithraic World ‘… attempting to discover. I don’t think so, actually. I think the nearest evidence of Mithraic worship is at Caerleon – which was linked to Hereford by a Roman road. But there’s probably a tremendous amount of Roman archaeology as yet undiscovered in the Credenhill area.’
‘So it wouldn’t be surprising if there was?’
‘It wouldn’t surprise me. The Romans often built shrines and temples in the shadow of Iron Age hill forts.’
With a pile of books accumulating at the side of her wheelchair, Miss White talked for some time of what little was known of Mithraic theology and a concept of the afterlife.
‘Nothing quite comparable to the risible Islamic promise of an unlimited supply of virgins for chaps martyred in the cause – that’s the stuff of men’s magazines. And yet there are similarities in the way it must have been used by the Romans. Those who died in battle were expected to have an untroubled afterlife, as a result of the rituals they’d practised and the degree of attainment.’
‘And the rituals were…?’
‘Well… following a baptism, you would have a series of grades or degrees. Spiritual ranks – raven, lion, soldier, and so on, each with an appropriate face-mask. Each an initiation to a higher level, through tests involving danger and suffering. We read of the “twelve tortures of Mithraism” – ordeals which might bring the candidate to the very brink of death. From which, obviously, they would emerge much strengthened. A universal concept. If you consider your chap’s forty days and forty nights in the wilderness, constantly exposed to psychic attack…’
‘Bit different, really…’
‘Not so different from the ordeals where recruits were made to sleep on frozen ground or in snow, or were branded and buried alive. Though I suppose the less savoury ones – like being compelled to eat animals which are still alive…’
Merrily was immediately reminded of one of the more repellent anecdotes in the late Frank Collins’s book. Where Collins, in North Africa or somewhere, was urged by a senior officer to carry out an ethnic custom involving biting the heads off live poisonous snakes and eating the still-threshing remains.
‘And they would be taken to the very edge of extinction,’ Miss White said gleefully, ‘in the sure belief that they are going to die. Pushed to the absolute limits of human endurance.’
Very SAS. It was all starting to make sense – how Byron Jones married Mithraic ritual to his own experiences in the Regiment. But how far had he practised it for real, in a ritual context?
Miss White was talking about haoma, a herbal drink, ingredients unknown, named after a pre-Mithraic Persian god but probably also adopted by the Romans because it stimulated the senses and induced an unstoppable aggression. A drug of war.
‘Athena…’ Lol had his OS map opened out on the Aztec bedcover. ‘Where might we be looking for a temple of Mithras?’ Tapping the putative ley lines issuing from Brinsop Church. ‘Have any been found under churches, in the same way you sometimes find a crypt built around a Neolithic burial chamber?’
‘Not unknown, Robinson, according to this book. The odd mithraeum has been found under a church – one in Rome, for example – but, again, I’m not aware of any inside British churches. But, you see, one could be anywhere. This whole area has been a military playground for two millennia. Interesting how it continues to attract the army and the MoD to this day. A landscape quietly dedicated to war.’
Miss White was pointing to a spot a few miles south of Brinsop, where it said Satellite Earth Station.
‘Satellite dishes collecting intelligence surveillance from all over the world and feeding it to GCHQ at Cheltenham – where, as it happens, I worked for a period in my civil-service years. Bloody place leaked
like a sieve.’
‘ Athena – you were a spook?’
‘Don’t be cheap, Robinson. And what did you do to your wrist?’
‘It got entangled in the barbed wire around a private military playground.’
‘Not sure I like the sound of that.’
Merrily sat back and thought about some implications.
‘What does a mithraeum look like?’
‘Like a public toilet,’ Miss White said. ‘Rectangular. Fairly basic and utilitarian, apart from a few astrological symbols and a representation of Mithras himself. And, of course, partly or entirely underground, to simulate a cave. Certainly no windows. And a channel down the middle, for the sacrificial blood.’
‘Oh.’
‘What did you expect?’
‘Are we talking about human sacrifice, or-?’
‘Bulls,’ Miss White said. ‘All the pictures of Mithras show him slitting the throat of a bull.’
***
Leaning across, a knee in the bull’s back, a hand hauling back its head, fingers in its nostrils – or so it seemed. Carnage where the sword or long knife went in.
The act performed dismissively. The perpetrator gazing away. Directly, as it were, into camera.
It was known as the Tauroctony. Athena White displayed a double-page illustration, sitting the big brown book on the blue blanket across her knees. ‘In all the sculptures and carvings and bas-reliefs, Mithras always looks away. In much the same way as the Greek hero Perseus, as he prepares to cut off the head of the Gorgon, averts his gaze.’
Merrily would rather have averted hers but kept on looking, frozen, registering all the detail, hearing Arthur Baxter at his kitchen table.
Unlikely to’ve been nicked for breeding purposes.
Lol was the first to find his voice.
‘They still do this? The modern followers of Mithras.’
‘If they do, it’s hardly mainstream. All a psychological exercise now. In the Roman myth, the slaying of the bull in the cave is seen as a creative act, releasing all manner of good things, positive energy, along with the blood. To the modern Mithraist, the bull tends to represent the ego which must be overcome – the beast within us. Cut him down – sacrifice that side of your essence – and don’t look back.’
‘But the Romans did it for real.’
‘Their temples clearly were designed for it. The bull might have been sedated before being butchered, torn apart, so that the initiate would be covered from head to foot with the blood.’
‘So it would be like an abattoir.’
Lol, sitting on a corner of the bed, looked unhappy. Unlike Miss White, who seemed stimulated by thoughts of blood-spatter.
‘One wonders precisely when blood sacrifice – that staple of the Old Testament – was brushed under the Christian carpet. For a while, certainly, Christianity and Mithraism were rivals, and then Christ appeared to have triumphed while Mithras simply disappeared – up the arse of Christianity. So who really triumphed? Did they take it this far at your college, Watkins?’
Merrily looked into Lol’s eyes. The room was awash with bland spring sunlight, bringing up the richness in the Afghan rugs.
‘So this is the summit,’ she said. ‘The final act. The last step to attain the highest grade, when the initiate takes on the persona of the god.’
Miss White put her hands together as if in prayer, although you never liked to think what she might be praying to.
‘What might it do to a person now, Athena? We have a man hardened up by lying in the snow, made braver by coming close to death. Where does he go next?’
‘Ah, Watkins, so much for you to dwell upon. That dark seam of masculine aggression, the spinal fluid of the Church. What might it represent? This insidious flaw in the very foundations of your poorly fabricated faith.’
‘I’m not talking about the Church, I’m talking about an individual practising a religion created in the days when he’d be expected to stroll through a village, torching dwellings and hacking the limbs off babies. Where would that level of aggression take him now? What kind of training would he need to control it?’
Down in the bowels of The Glades, a gong was banged.
‘Heavens,’ Miss White said. ‘Lunchtime already?’
Before the lift doors opened on the ground floor, she said, ‘Radical corruption of a religion… there’s always fall-out. It’s corrosive. A maxim worth remembering is if the worse can happen, the worst will.’
In the gilded opulence of Brinsop Church, they confronted the early-medieval sandstone tympanum. The mounted St George with his Roman soldier’s skirt, thrusting his spear between the dragon’s jaws.
‘More like a big snake than most dragons.’ Merrily stepped back. ‘But no way is it a bull.’
‘No, but…’ Lol pointed, with his good hand, to the frieze at the top of the slab ‘… that looks like a bull, doesn’t it?’ He bent, feeling the sandstone with both hands. ‘And these are definitely lions. Another of Athena’s degrees of Mithraism? Also the crow, raven…?’
‘Yes.’ There was also astrological symbolism here and there in the fabric of the church. ‘Are we suggesting there’s an element of Mithras embedded in this landscape?’
‘Maybe literally. It could be simply that the early-medieval artisans who made this slab copied images from Roman artwork that they’d found in the ground – in the remains of Magnis. Must’ve been quite a lot left in the eleventh and twelfth centuries.’
That made sense. Unfortunately, what also made sense was that if you wanted an aspect of Mithras acceptable to the Church, you might look no further than St George.
That was the trouble with churches. Full of Green Men and Sheela-na-gigs and all the wall-eyed mutants in the pagan directory. And now maybe a killer in saint’s armour.
Merrily watched Lol’s gaze panning slowly around the stained-glass light show. George was everywhere, even though much of it was down to Sir Ninian Comper working as recently as the 1920s. A window in memory of the ornithologist Herbert Astley, of Brinsop Court, had been signed by Comper with his emblem.
‘A strawberry plant,’ Lol said. ‘How prescient of him.’
‘Huh?’
‘Polytunnels?’
‘Oh… right.’
How much more of this? Merrily sat down in a chair at the end of the back row, feeling as though she’d been mugged. Fragments of faith scattered like credit cards in the gutter.
57
Arena
Early afternoon, Cornel found a slot for the Porsche on Corn Square in Leominster, and Jane followed him down the street and across to the Blue Note cafe bar. All period jazz and blues posters. Cellar-club darkness all day long, except it wasn’t in a cellar.
The wood where they’d parked was no more than four miles from the town and they’d come most of the way in silence, just one word stopping Jane from walking off to the bus station and never looking back.
The word was Savitch.
‘I thought everybody loved him in these parts.’ Cornel sugared his coffee. ‘Thought he was the village’s salvation. Brought the dump alive. Fairy godfather.’
‘Grim reaper’s closer.’
‘But then, I also thought you fancied me a little bit,’ Cornel said.
‘I have a boyfriend.’
Who, in a couple of hours, would be waiting for her in Hereford, under the clock in High Town. Actually, the last time she’d been in the Blue Note was with Eirion and they’d sat under a vintage Blind Lemon Jefferson poster, killing themselves laughing making up tasteless names for damaged old British blues singers, like Quadriplegic Cyril Hewlett and Morbidly-obese Dilwyn Lloyd-Williams. It was like a different lifetime, when she was young and free, and now she was thinking she might never get back to that.
‘I find it quite distressing, actually,’ Cornel said, ‘that you actually thought I might be planning to rape you.’
‘You were trying to take me upstairs the other night!’
‘Jane, I was legle
ss… and you played along. We all thought you were up for it. Anybody would. They were taking bets on it, for-’
‘ Bets? ’
‘Men out on a jolly tend to get childish.’
‘Cockfighting’s a jolly, is it?’
‘There was no cockfight that night. And anyway, if you don’t enjoy a good cockfight you’re hardly going to be up for the rest of it.’
‘The rest of what?’
‘Don’t totally trust you yet, Jane. Would you really expect me to?’
Even though Cornel’s face looked grey and creased in the dimness, she realized for the first time that he actually wasn’t that much older than her. Maybe twenty-four? She felt a rush of determination. For some reason he was no longer a supporter of Savitch, and she needed to roll with that. She brought her coffee cup to her lips, then put it down again.
‘OK, I told you a bunch of lies. My grandad… I lied about that. My grandads, one lives abroad, I don’t hear from the other. Neither of them breed gamecocks, far as I know. I got all that from a mate I took the cock to and he told me how he thought it had died. I hate cruelty, OK?’
He sat looking at her with… not respect, obviously, but he was probably more comfortable with this admission. In Cornel’s world, women would always have to be a bit shocked at what men did.
Jane picked up the coffee cup again, took a long, slow sip, considering the evidence: he was no longer staying either at Savitch’s place or the Swan. No longer hanging out with his mates – maybe they’d gone back to London. But he’d stayed. On his own. And he wasn’t happy. Look at the mindless way he’d been driving, like he didn’t care if he crashed. He peered at her in the gloom.
‘So you think I’m going to tell you about the cockfights. And help you tie Ward Savitch into it.’
