Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain

by Phil Rickman

  ‘It’s all changed.’

  ‘Can’t change the countryside, boy,’ Gomer said.

  ‘You reckon?’

  ‘The ole Unicorn was up by the top bridge, and the cockpit was in the field behind the yard, so I reckon it’s gotter be up by that stand o’ pine.’

  ‘Well fenced off,’ Danny said. ‘So we gotter do it the hard way?’

  He’d been hoping they could get what they’d come for without having to go in with the media and the gentry and the dickheads in chains of office. Far as he could judge from the number of parked cars, there was likely two hundred people here: press, radio and telly and a bunch of bored freeloaders helping themselves to a rich bastard’s hospitality.

  Halfway up The Court’s new gravel driveway they were stopped by a stocky woman, short bleached hair, a warning finger on her lips. Regional BBC were interviewing Savitch with his house in the background. The reporter, Mandy Patel, smiling up at him and nodding hard, the way TV reporters did but nobody ever did in real life.

  ‘Oh, dear me, no,’ Savitch was going. ‘Not the New Cotswolds, this is absolutely not about the so-called New Cotswolds. This is about the Old Marches!’

  Lifting a fist, like he’d just coined a new slogan. What a dick. A phoney cheer went up from behind him, from folks Danny had never seen before, whose idea of the Old Marches would be around 1998.

  Gomer turned away, fishing out his ciggy tin. In his old tweed cap, yellow muffler, red and green trainers from Hay and Brecon Farmers, he looked like part of the stage dressing.

  ‘Now, it’s a fact,’ Savitch was saying, ‘that last year, by far the highest percentage of British incomers t’this area was from London itself. However—’

  ‘You included, of course,’ Mandy Patel said.

  ‘Indeed. Yes, of course, Mandy, but what’s seldom understood is that most of us don’t want t’bring London out here, we want t’sustain and fortify the essential character of the Old Marches. Everything we do here comes out of the area. Local skills, local tradition. I want to win the respect and trust of the real people.’

  Jesus wept. This was how the Americans used to talk in Iraq, while all the corpses got shovelled off the streets. Hearts and minds.

  Gomer sniffed, rolling his ciggy. Got a few hard looks but nobody was gonner challenge a man who looked more Old Marches than any bugger here. Danny looked beyond the TV people at the tarted-up farmhouse, its reblackened timbers bulging like black Botox lips around the white plaster. He saw men in old-fashioned leather jerkins, women dressed as serving wenches with trays of fizzy wine. He saw a load of phoney shite.

  There wasn’t much more to Savitch than spreadsheets and flow-charts, but a few folks would clock the muted tweedy jacket and what looked like working men’s boots and go, Gotter hand it to him, at least he’s making an effort to fit in. Some country folks, when it came down to basics, were no wiser than town folks.

  Mandy Patel lifted a finger, then the cameraman straightened up from his tripod and Savitch shook hands with both of them and moved on along the drive, people patting him on the back.

  ‘OK, thanks,’ the woman with the short bleached hair said to Danny. ‘You can go through now. Thank you for your patience.’

  Looking down her nose at Gomer’s ciggy, then turning away, talking to a woman with a name-tag that said Country Pride magazine. Danny hung around, listening.

  ‘… going to ask you about Countryside Defiance, Rachel,’ the magazine woman said. ‘I see you’ve a stand over there.’

  ‘Well, sure,’ this Rachel said, and Danny recognized her now, from the TV. ‘Country-dwellers are still seen either as dinosaur gentry, old hippies or retired roses-round-the-door types. If we don’t start appealing to younger people with money we’re going to be dead in the water, darling.’

  Danny turned away, feeling like he was drowning in liquid shit. Saw the TV woman and the cameraman, tripod over one shoulder, head across the lawns past the Green displays – solar panels, domestic wind-turbines, geo-thermal heating and other expensive kit that never quite worked.

  ‘Smiffy Gill doesn’t come cheap,’ Rachel said, ‘but he’s certainly good value if you’re trying to show how cutting-edge the country is.’

  ‘He’s not here, is he?’

  The magazine woman looking hopefully around, Rachel frowning.

  ‘Might come later. Meantime, talk to Ward. Talk to Kenny, who’s an absolute treasure, frighteningly macho. Talk to the local councillor, Pierce, who’s youngish and local.’

  ‘And bent as a bloody ole fork-end,’ Gomer said before Danny towed him off.

  ‘Gomer, we don’t draw attention, right?’

  Danny had nearly suggested that they call it off when he’d heard about Lol being in the slammer, but Gomer had said it could be even more important now to nail Savitch on the cocking, and mabbe he was right.

  They moved on down past a white van with Oldcastle Catering on the side, Danny beginning to see folks he and Gomer had worked for, digging new soakaways, wildlife ponds. Also, the usual Ledwardine notables – James Bull-Davies tapping the green-oak frame of a new barn that was never gonner be used for hay, swimming pool more like. Poor ole James likely figuring out that it had cost more than his entire stable-block and his new roof. Realizing he was part of history, but mabbe not the kind Savitch was looking to restore.

  Between two buildings not yet converted was a dark green marquee with HARDKIT HARDKIT HARDKIT stencilled in black all over it and these display boards with photos of men covered in muck. Alongside, a track ended at a stile, an empty field on the other side, stubbled with the dead stems of last year’s docks and stumps of trees and piles of branches gathered for burning.

  ‘That it, Gomer? Up there?’

  Colder now, mucky-looking clouds converging as Gomer and Danny scaled the stile and walked up the field. The sound of a medieval band floating up behind them, drums and possibly a crumhorn. Merrie Englande. As they moved up the rise, Danny looked around, from landmark to landmark: the church steeple, Cole Hill, The Court itself, in its own green nest.

  Then he saw they were standing on the edge of what surely had been the cockpit behind the long-demolished Unicorn pub.

  You wouldn’t be able to tell in summer, but the grass hadn’t really started growing yet and the shallow bowl was obvious. Not many trees left around it, and only a few scrubby bushes in the middle, so it had been preserved at one time, sure to’ve been.

  And that was the point, wasn’t it?

  One time.

  ‘Shit,’ Danny said.

  No blood, no feathers, no beer cans. The ole Ledwardine cockpit was wilderness. Disappointment plunged deep into Danny’s gut.

  ‘I’m sorry, Gomer.’

  Gomer didn’t move.

  ‘Mabbe we was a bit dull to think they was doin’ it yere,’ Danny said. ‘Most likely it moves around, farm to farm, like a circus.’

  ‘Where?’ Gomer’s fists clenching in the air like mini digger-buckets. ‘They was moving round, we’d know about it.’

  He was right. They likely would.

  ‘It…’ Danny hesitated. ‘Gomer… it possible you was wrong about that cock?’

  Gomer didn’t even answer. They climbed back over the stile, to the sound of some audio-visual presentation going on in the Hardkit tent, the voice of Smiffy Gill, mad-bastard presenter of The Octane Show, which Danny had watched just once when it’d been about Jeeps.

  ‘… just had an amazing time on the quad bike, Kenny, mate, but I would, wouldn’t I?’

  Smiffy’s haw-haw laugh. Danny couldn’t stand no more of this. Figured he’d forgo the free champagne lunch guaranteed by Lol’s tickets, unless Gomer…

  ‘You all right, Gomer?’

  ‘Bloody let her down this time, ennit?’

  ‘Jane? Gomer, you done everything a man could do. Mabbe we was wrong about Savitch. Mabbe her was wrong.’

  ‘No. Gotter be folks from Off. It was local folks, I’d know.’

&nbs
p; Danny felt suddenly choked up. Things were changing yereabouts. Things were happening that even Gomer Parry didn’t know about. Because Gomer Parry’s era was nearly over.

  He looked at the Hardkit tent. Had their catalogues through the post, same as most country folk, only now they were inviting him to spend £250-plus on a waterproof jacket. Three year ago they was just this one tiny little run-down shop with the window all blacked-out, looked on the verge of closing down. Now a bloody chain with jackets at two-fifty.

  ‘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.’