A Crown of Lights mw-3

by Phil Rickman

  ‘I promised.’

  ‘But with everything that’s... And look at you... Look at you. You need a doctor.’

  ‘Dr Coll?’ Merrily started to laugh, and the laughter wouldn’t stop.

  ‘Stop it!’ Jane screamed. ‘What’s that on your hands?’

  Merrily looked down, still laughing.

  ‘Oh.’

  Thock, she heard. Thock.

  Seeing the ridiculous dismay on Judith’s face... watching her step back, angrily breaking open the gun, and coming out with that brilliantly dry observation.

  ‘Wouldn’t you know it, Mrs Watkins? A Radnor man to the core. Never load two cartridges when you may not even need the one.’

  The funniest line Merrily had heard in a long time. Possibly, at that moment, the funniest line being spoken in the whole, insane world. When she started to laugh, she was half expecting Judith to come at her with both fists or take a swing at her with the shotgun. But smart Judith, canny Judith... this was not how Judith reacted at all. She simply laid down the empty gun, a few inches away from the half-curled hand out of which she’d snatched it before the fingers could spasm around its barrel.

  ‘The stupid man.’ Voice flat, eyes flat like aluminium. ‘What did he want to do that for? You saw it, Mrs Watkins, you saw how I tried to stop him.’

  As if the previous minutes had never happened – as if editing her life like a videotape. Instinctively compiling the alternative version, with an efficient jump-cut from the second the gun went off. So practical, this Judith.

  And Merrily had reacted quickly for once, getting it exactly right.

  ‘You’d better tell the police what happened then, Mrs Prosser.’

  ‘It’s my duty, Mrs Watkins. Give me a hand here, will you?’

  Both of them then pulling the body away from the door, as though it was a huge dead sheep, so they could squeeze outside.

  This was how Merrily had got the blood on her hands.

  To the left, she could hear the sound of the Hindwell Brook.

  Jane said, ‘She killed Barbara Buckingham, that woman?’

  ‘Yes.’ Strangled her with her own silk scarf. Beat her up first, probably. ‘Perhaps when Barbara went to see her and challenged her over... certain things. I think Gomer said her husband owned a digger. I suppose one of them would’ve driven her car over to the Elan Valley, with the other following.’

  ‘Who is she?’

  ‘She’s Mrs Councillor Prosser, flower – fortified by the local community: the doctor, the lawyer, the councillor... even the priest. Solid as a rock, she was, until someone from Off blew it all open. Someone who hadn’t always been from Off, and realized what she was seeing here.’

  And Merrily couldn’t help wondering to herself, then, if anything had ever gone on, way back, between Judith and Barbara – something Barbara had suppressed, erased from her memory as simply as Judith Prosser had erased from her mental tape the murder of Weal and the attempted murder of Merrily.

  Over her shoulder was slung her airline bag, bought because it was blue and gold. She’d brought it out of the tomb with her, but there was no blood on it, a small miracle. It contained the Bibles, prayers, altar wine and holy water. So medieval?

  They stopped at the bridge, and there was the church across the water, and also reflected in the water. Betty’s birthday cake.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ Jane breathed. ‘It’s... son et lumière. Without the son.’

  Merrily smiled wildly. Less than an hour ago, she was staring into eternity down the barrels of a twelve-bore. Now she was back in airy-fairyland.

  ‘Are you sure about this?’ Jane said. Merrily squeezed her arm.

  ‘Jane... look... I don’t want to have to worry about you, OK? So I’d like you to stay out of the way. I know you’re sixteen and everything...’

  ‘You’re in shock, aren’t you? I mean, you’ve just seen something totally horrific. You’ve been through a really horrifying—’

  ‘Yeah, I probably am in shock.’

  ‘You could do this tomorrow.’

  ‘I said I’d do it tonight.’

  ‘We could explain to Betty...’

  They were halfway across the footbridge now. The ruins shimmered in a hollow of silence.

  Then a woman’s voice rose up.

  ‘Dread lord of Death and Resurrection

  Of life and the Giver of life

  Lord within ourselves, whose name is Mystery of Mysteries encourage our hearts

  Let thy light crystallize itself in our blood...’

  Merrily slumped over the rail of the bridge.

  Too late.

  58

  The Woman Clothed with the Sun

  HIS COVEN AROUND him, Robin lifted the wand high, in his right hand, until it divided the moon.

  The wand was a slender, foot-long piece of hazel wood, cut from the tree with a single stroke on a Wednesday, as laid down in the Book of Shadows. In his left hand Robin held the scourge, a mild token thing like a riding crop with silken cords.

  Behind him were the crone – Alexandra – and a woman called Ilana, who was twenty-four but looked a lot younger and represented the maiden tonight.

  The flames rose straight up out of the tight nest of stones in the centre of the nave as he brought down the wand in a long diagonal, right to left, then left to right in a forty-five-degree angle and straight back horizontally and down... and up.

  To a point. One point.

  The positive, invoking pentagram of Earth... drawn before his high priestess, whose hair shone brighter than the fire, whose eyes were deeper than crystals.

  ‘Blessed be,’ Robin whispered.

  And never had meant it more.

  Merrily followed Jane around the church tower. The kid had a small torch, borrowed from Gomer, but they didn’t need it; the church cast its own light. When she looked up to the top of the tower, she could no longer see the candle-lanterns, only the highlighted stones. She and Jane slipped – unseen, she assumed – from the tower, across a grassy, graveless churchyard, glittering with frost, to the side of what looked like a stone barn.

  What to do? Watch and pray?

  Christ be with us, Christ within us, Christ behind us.

  They stood with their backs to the barn. From here, through an empty Gothic window in the nave, about twenty feet away, they could see the long candles on the altar, and they could see, by the fire and candlelight, Betty in her green robe. On one side of her was a girl of about eighteen, on the other a plump and placid woman, who looked like she ought to be running a day nursery. The girl was combing Betty’s blond hair.

  There was now music on the freezing air: vaguely Celtic, string and reed music from some boombox stereo concealed in the ruins. It all seemed gentle and poetic and harmless and not a lot, in Merrily’s view, to do with religion.

  The distance, the walls and the music allowed them to talk in low voices. Jane said, ‘Doesn’t look as if she’s been, like, coerced, does it?’

  Betty stood with her back to the altar, the other women on either side. The male witch, who looked like he should be playing bass with Primal Scream, appeared in the Gothic window.

  ‘We saw him in the Daily Mail, right?’ Merrily said.

  ‘Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s Robin.’

  ‘And is he the high priest? You know this stuff better than me.’

  ‘Has to be.’

  ‘Not Ned Bain, then.’

  ‘Which is a mercy?’ Jane said.

  ‘Which has to be a mercy.’

  A shadow moved beside her, as if off the barn. Any night but this, she might have cried out.

  ‘A mercy, you think, then?’ the shadow said.

  ‘Hello, Ned,’ said Merrily.

  * * *

  They’d customized the rite slightly, to allow for the place and the changed circumstances, but Robin thought it could still be OK. He tried to concentrate on the meaning of the ritual – the birth of spring. And the purpose – the bringing of fre
sh light to an old, dark place. He wondered if Terry Penney could see them in some way and feel what was happening. For in the absence of the woman priest, Betty said, this rite must also be a form of exorcism, to convey Terry’s spirit into a place of peace.

  But Robin couldn’t dispel the awareness that they were doing this in a church. He would close his eyes for a moment and try to bring down the walls until there was only a circle of stones around them, but he was finding he couldn’t hold that image, and this wasn’t Robin Thorogood, visionary, seducer of souls, guardian of the softly lit doorways. He found himself wishing they were someplace else, in a frosted glade or on some open moorland... and that wasn’t Robin Thorogood, custodian of an ancient site which tonight was entering its third incarnation, quietly and harmoniously, without tension, without friction.

  He laid the wand and scourge upon the altar and helped the maiden to arrange the shawl around the shoulders of the crone.

  From a jam jar on the altar, he took a small bunch of snowdrops – the flowers of Imbolc – which Alexandra had found growing behind the barn and had bound together with some early catkins.

  He presented this humble bouquet to Ilana, the maiden.

  He lifted the crown of lights from the altar and waited while the three women arranged themselves.

  He raised the crown of lights and placed it on Betty’s head, and the maiden and the crone tucked and curled her golden hair becomingly around it.

  ‘Merely spectators,’ Ned Bain whispered. ‘Isn’t it sad? Came for a baptism and they wouldn’t even let us be godparents.’

  Merrily said nothing, keeping her eyes on the Gothic window, full of moving lights.

  ‘I’ve been barred,’ he said. ‘Might that be down to you?’

  She flicked a glance at him. She hadn’t seen him clearly, but he was not robed, like the others. He seemed to be wearing a jacket and jeans. She made sure she kept Jane on the other side of her.

  ‘If you’ve been barred, why are you still here?’

  ‘Because Simon will come,’ Bain said. ‘If he isn’t here already.’

  ‘Simon?’

  ‘You know who I mean.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘You really aren’t on his side, are you, Merrily?’

  ‘I’m not on anybody’s side.’ She was picking up a musky, sandy smell on him. It reminded her, for just a moment, of Sean. She made the sign of the cross and cloaked herself and Jane in the glow from the breastplate of St Patrick. The smell went away.

  Bain said, ‘Am I right in thinking Simon’s offended you?’

  ‘Am I supposed to think this is ESP, Ned? Your awesome powers at work?’

  ‘Isn’t Father Ellis performing exorcisms?’

  ‘Is he?’

  ‘Do they work?’

  ‘Depends on what he intends them to do. That’s where the problems arise.’

  ‘Tell me.’

  Jane touched her shoulder. ‘Mum... I think they’re coming.’

  ‘If I tell you what he did,’ Merrily said, ‘will you bugger off?’

  ‘OK.’

  ‘He performed some kind of baptismal ritual which effectively bound together two people who never should have been brought together in the first place. And when the woman died, her... spirit would not leave the man. And instead of bringing him comfort, it oppressed him and sapped his energy, and turned him into... even less than he was before.’

  ‘Mum...’

  ‘Thank you,’ Ned Bain said. ‘What will you do about that?’

  ‘I don’t know that I can do anything.’

  She moved behind Jane to the corner of the barn, looked out across a yard, past the farmhouse to where a track was marked out by a line of swinging torches and lamps.

  She heard singing – inane, redneck gospel, with all the spirituality of a football chant.

  ‘We shall raise the sword of Christ and strike the Devil down.’

  ‘Sounds like your people, Merrily,’ Ned Bain said. ‘And my cue to disappear.’

  In the night, with all the spearing torches, the hymn sounded dense and menacing. Merrily remembered the Christian biker with the dead dragon on his T-shirt.

  ‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it, Ned?’

  ‘If I were you,’ Ned Bain said, ‘I’d stay well out of it. Call that a gentle warning. Call it a prophecy. Goodnight, Merrily.’ He turned and merged with the shadows. ‘There’s blood on your hands. Why’s that, I wonder?’

  She didn’t see how, in this light, he could possibly have seen her hands. And she’d got it all off, hadn’t she?

  In the shimmering silence of the open ruins, with the tower rearing behind his priestess, Robin brought a taper from the fire and lit the candles around the crown of lights. The little flames sprang brightly. Robin said,

  ‘Behold the Three-formed Goddess,

  She who is ever Three

  Yet is she ever One.

  For without Spring there can be no Summer,

  Without Summer, no Winter.

  Without Winter, no new Spring.’

  Tears in his eyes as he gazed on his goddess. She was everything he’d ever imagined, the beautiful book cover he’d painted so often in his head for the book which was too profound, too poetic, too resonant for anyone yet to have written. He looked into Betty’s eyes and then up at the blurred moon.

  ‘Listen to the words of the Great Mother – She who, of old, was also called among men Artemis, Astarte, Athene, Dion, Melusine, Aphrodite, Ceridwen, Dana, Arianrhod, Isis, Brigid and by many other names.’

  And so it went on, and when it was over, the maid took up a broomstick and walked clockwise around the fire, followed by the mother and the crone, sweeping away the old, and Robin prayed to the moon for the badness and torment in this place to be swept away for ever.

  When the torch and lamp lights were enlarged, beams crossing in the air, and the hymn behind her began to sound like the baying of wolves, Merrily looked up and saw him.

  Just a shadow against the stars, then faintly lit by the lanterns on the battlements. He was not in his white robes, which would have been too conspicuous; someone would have seen him getting into the tower.

  ‘Oh Christ,’ Merrily said. She turned to Jane. ‘Stay there.’

  ‘No chance,’ Jane muttered, and followed her towards the church.

  They kept close to the walls so they couldn’t be seen from the tower itself, passed by the Gothic window full of lights, edged around the building to the opening, where the south porch had been. Merrily began to pray softly and realized, with horror, that she was praying to God for protection against His servants at the gate.

  She was very anxious now.

  Robin picked up, from outside the ring of stones surrounding the fire, two twigs of holly he’d cut a week ago and hung over the back door, so that they were now nicely brittle.

  The coven gathered around him. He knelt before the fire and set light to each twig in turn and held it up for them all to see. Then he tossed each of the twigs into the flames. And the coven chanted with him, in what ought to have been joy and optimism but sounded scarily flat and formulaic,

  ‘Thus we banish Winter,

  Thus we welcome Spring,

  Say farewell to what is dead

  And greet each living thing.

  Thus we banish Winter,

  Thus we welcome Spring.’

  Then the coven melted away, into the shadows and out of the church, Max patting Robin on the shoulder as he passed. ‘Well done, mate,’ Max whispered.

  All over.

  All over, but for the Great Rite.

  A double sleeping bag lay directly under the tower, protected from the wind, a candle-lantern quietly alight at either end.

  Robin stood by the fire. Betty walked away towards the base of the tower and when she reached it, she turned around, all aglow in her nest of candles. But the glow came from more than the candles, and there was a strange moment of fusion, as if the whole church was a crown of lights around th
em both, and Betty’s gown slipped down with a silken rustling, and Robin’s heart leapt like a fawn and he moved towards her along the open nave.

  And then he heard a voice, cold and strident on the night.

  ‘Foul serpent!’

  Robin looked up and saw the spectre on the battlements, its arms raised like the twin points of a pentagram upside down.

  ‘O most glorious leader of the heavenly armies, defend us in our war against the dark spirits which rule this world and the spirits of wickedness in the high places. For the Holy Church venerates you as her guardian and the Lord has entrusted to You the souls of the redeemed, to be led into heaven.’

  ‘St Michael,’ Merrily explained. ‘He’s invoking St Michael. It’s his exorcism.’

  She stood in the entrance, with Jane.

  ‘You’ve got to do something,’ Jane said.

  A bright light lanced over the kid’s shoulder. A TV cameraman was moving up behind her. They were all piling in now, whether they’d come over the gate or across the bridge, forming a big circle around the ruins. But it had been a small church and she and Jane were blocking the narrow entrance. People began to push at her back.

  ‘Make them go away!’ A woman’s voice she’d heard somewhere before... I can show you a church with a tower and graves and everything... ‘This is sacrilege!’

  Merrily put an arm around Jane and didn’t move.

  Ellis boomed from the tower, his voice like a klaxon in the still, freezing air. ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, and of Michael, the Archangel, we confidently undertake to repulse the deceits of Satan!’

  Merrily was furious. He was not entitled. He was not entitled to wield the name of Christ like an axe... or the cross of Christ like a dildo...

  Robin Thorogood couldn’t seem to move. He stood in the nave, staring up, as if his blood had turned to ice. Impaled by TV lights, he looked like a prisoner caught in the searchlights escaping from some concentration camp. Merrily couldn’t see Betty.

  From the tower, in the haze of the lanterns, Ellis cried, ‘God arises! His enemies are dissembled, and those who hate Him shall fall down before him. Just as the smoke of hellfire is driven away, so are they driven. Just as wax melts before the fire, so shall the wicked perish before the presence of God. Behold—’