The Prayer of the Night Shepherd (MW6)

by Phil Rickman

  The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

  PHIL RICKMAN was born in Lancashire and lives on the Welsh border. He is the author of the Merrily Watkins series, and The Bones of Avalon. He has won awards for his TV and radio journalism and writes and presents the book programme Phil the Shelf for BBC Radio Wales.

  ALSO BY

  PHIL

  RICKMAN

  THE MERRILY WATKINS SERIES

  The Wine of Angels

  Midwinter of the Spirit

  A Crown of Lights

  The Cure of Souls

  The Lamp of the Wicked

  The Prayer of the Night Shepherd

  The Smile of a Ghost

  The Remains of an Altar

  The Fabric of Sin

  To Dream of the Dead

  The Secrets of Pain

  THE JOHN DEE PAPERS

  The Bones of Avalon

  OTHER TITLES

  Candlenight

  Curfew

  The Man in the Moss

  December

  The Chalice

  First published in Great Britain in 2004 by Macmillan.

  This paperback edition first published in Great Britain in 2012

  by Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

  Copyright © Phil Rickman, 2004.

  The moral right of Phil Rickman to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  This is a work of fiction. All characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

  A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-0-85789-014-6

  eBook ISBN: 978-0-85789-021-4

  Printed in Great Britain.

  Corvus

  An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

  Ormond House

  26-27 Boswell Street

  London WC1N 3JZ

  www.corvus-books.co.uk

  They had gone a mile or two when they passed one of the night shepherds upon the moorlands, and they cried to him to know if he had seen the hunt. And the man, as the story goes, was so crazed with fear that he could scarce speak...

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle,

  The Hound of the Baskervilles

  No record in cold print can give the reader an idea of the pleasure experienced in collecting the elusive material we call folk-lore from the living brains of men and women of whose lives it has formed an integral part. In some cases, with regard to superstitious beliefs, there is a deep reserve to be overcome; the more real the belief, the greater the difficulty... The folk of the Welsh districts are more superstitious, as a rule...

  Ella Mary Leather,

  The Folk-lore of Herefordshire

  Contents

  Under Stanner in the Summer

  Part One

  1: Without the Song

  2: Game Afoot

  3: What Consultants Are For

  4: The Room Under the Witch’s-Hat Tower

  5: Drink Problem

  6: Beastie

  7: The Healing of the Dead

  8: At Home With the Vaughans

  9: Ask Arthur

  10: Serious Requiem

  11: Welshies

  12: Night Exercise

  13: Real Personal

  Part Two

  FOURTEEN: Word to the Wise

  15: Milk into Concrete

  16: Responding to Images

  17: Detestable to the Lord

  18: Shock of the Proof

  19: Nancy Boy

  TWENTY: Not About Foxes

  Part Three

  21: Cwn Annwn

  22: Whoop, Whoop

  23: Showdown Time

  24: Necessary Penance

  25: Shifting Big Furniture

  26: White High

  27: Five Barrels

  28: The Jane Police

  29: Twist

  30: The Huntress

  31: Noise and Blood

  32: Party Game

  33: Time Nearly Up

  34: The Butcher’s Counter

  Part Four

  35: Fresh Blood

  36: First Snow Casualty

  37: The Schizoid Border

  38: Big White Bird

  39: What Brigid Did

  40: Extreme

  41: Living on the Edge of a Chasm

  42: Alleluia

  43: Tough Ole Bat

  44: Sanctuary

  45: Fatalist

  46: The Living Dark Heart

  47: Losers

  48: Apocryphal

  49: Requiem

  50: Free Coward

  51: Of the Midnight

  52: These Things Happened

  53: No Smoke, No Mirrors

  54: Reichenbach

  55: Sky’s Come Down

  56: Christmas Eve

  Under Stanner in the Summer

  SHOULD HAVE KNOWN, he really should. That morning, even though it was a fine morning, coming up to high summer, the whole valley was singing with unease.

  ‘Oh bugger,’ Jeremy Berrows said to Danny. ‘You seen that?’

  Up on Stanner Rocks, knobs of stone poked out like weathered gargoyles on an old church, or ancient skulls browned by the earth, half-buried, with scrubby trees in their eye sockets. From one side, you could sometimes see a whole body of rock that Danny reckoned looked like the remains of a dead giant thrown back into the greenery encrusting the cliff face.

  But Jeremy wasn’t looking up at Stanner – likely he blamed the rocks for taking Mary Morson away, though in Danny’s view the rocks done him a favour on that one. He was staring instead at the smoky firs across the valley, the dark trees that said, This is Wales now, boy, make no mistake.

  ‘What?’ Danny said.

  ‘Big black crow. Hovering.’

  ‘No, really?’

  ‘Just flew over real low. Then he come back, flew over again.’

  ‘Gotter hand it to these scavengers,’ Danny said. ‘Awful thorough.’

  Bollocks, he was thinking. You could drive yourself daft, seeing signs everywhere – even if you were Jeremy Berrows, with ditchwater in your veins and the valley talking to you all your life.

  Could see where the boy was coming from today, mind. Even without crows, everything visible in the west seemed like a warning about Wales, a stiffened finger under your nose. But when you actually crossed the Border into Wales, the countryside relaxed into the easy, light-coloured, sheep-shaved hills where Danny Thomas had been born and bred and still lived.

  Still lived. Jesus, how had that happened?

  Danny was grinning in dismay, rubbing his beard, and the boy glanced at him but Danny just shook his head and tramped on down the dewy field under the fresh-rinsed morning sky, not sure any more which side of the Border they were on, or if it mattered. He was a Welshman himself, he supposed, although the way he talked wasn’t recognizably Welsh either to real Welsh people or to the English whose country was within shouting distance, and all the shouting, from either side, done in near enough the same accent as his.

  Confusing, really: if Danny was from the lighter, more English-looking country down the Radnor Valley, which was actually in Wales, then Jeremy, back here under the dark firs and the knuckles of Stanner Rocks, must be...

&n
bsp; ‘You English, then, Jeremy?’

  ‘Me?’ Jeremy glanced warily at Danny, instinctively patting his thigh for Flag, the sheepdog, to come close. ‘Dunno. Do it matter?’

  ‘Matters to some,’ Danny said, ‘so they tells me.’

  It was real confusing hereabouts, mind. For instance, the little town a mile or so behind them was in England, despite being on the Welsh side of Offa’s Dyke. Even so, with its narrow main street and its closed-in feel, it felt Welsh.

  Kington: an anomaly.

  This was Danny’s current favourite word. The naturalists he met in the pub used it about Stanner Rocks, said to be some of the oldest rocks in the country. Anomaly meant strange stuff going on, odd climatic things occurring up on the tops, resulting in plants that grew on Stanner and nowhere else in these islands. Local people rarely went up on the rocks these days, it being a National Nature Reserve protected by the Countryside Commission; mostly it was just the naturalists and a few tourists with permission.

  But Mary Morson went up one day, and got a bit of a thing going with one of the naturalists and never come back to Jeremy Berrows, and mabbe the boy didn’t want reminding.

  Boy. He must be late thirties now, but he had this fresh complexion, which was rare for a farmer. Most of them had skin like old brick – like Danny’s skin, in fact, what you could see of it between the grey beard and the seaweed hair. But it wasn’t only that; there was an innocence about Jeremy, and that was rare, too, in a farmer, especially a good one. Jeremy also had commitment, an intense... bonding was the word they used now, with this marginal ground. The kind of bonding that hinged on knowing that if the ash came out before the oak you were in for a soak, and that kind of stuff. Whatever you wanted to call it, it had drained out of Danny Thomas long ago, leaving a bleak old desert of regrets.

  ‘Down by there, it is.’ The boy was nodding his head towards the copse at the bottom of the field, where a bunch of fat lambs was gathering. ‘Other side of the ole conker tree. See him?’

  They were up on a bit of a tump now, and you could see all of Jeremy’s ground, almost surrounded by the huge area owned by Sebbie Three Farms, the robber baron. And you could see the big, naked feet of the giant on the side of Stanner. Below the rock face was the main road where it turned into the Kington bypass, and a long yellow container lorry sailed past, like something out of a different time zone. Danny wondered if Jeremy even noticed the lorry – if all the boy saw wasn’t just grass and trees and the plumpening lambs and the hawthorn trees sprinkled with floury blossom.

  And the intrusion. The vans that shouldn’t be there. Danny’s gaze followed a sheep track down to the bottom field, where he could make out a cool blue roof slashed by a blade of sunlight. But no movement down there, no noise.

  ‘Likely they won’t be up and about yet,’ he said. ‘Always stays up late, these folks, with the booze and the dope. And music. You year any music last night?’

  Jeremy shook his head, and Danny looked wistfully away towards Hergest Ridge, a long arm pushing into Wales, made famous by Mike Oldfield when he named his second album after it. Mike Oldfield was the most exciting thing that had ever happened to Kington: up on the Ridge with his kites and at home in his farmhouse with – the thought of it still made Danny Thomas catch his breath – twenty guitars.

  Danny had three guitars in his stone barn: two acoustics and a Les Paul. He’d sold his classic Strat last Christmas. Broke his heart, but they needed a new stove, and Greta had gone without too long. And Mike Oldfield was long gone now, and Danny was left sitting in his stone barn, riffing into the night and counting all them lost opportunities to get out of farming for ever.

  ‘No music, no,’ Jeremy said. ‘They was prob’ly laying low the first night.’

  ‘You reckon?’

  In Danny’s experience, laying low wasn’t what they did.

  ‘It’s where the ole crow was hovering,’ Jeremy said. ‘Direc’ly over that van.’

  Half-past six this morning, when the boy had phoned him.

  ‘Hippies,’ he’d said.

  Not Danny’s favourite word. There hadn’t been any hippies for over thirty years, but folks in this area loved to hang on to the obsolete. And it was what they’d always called Danny himself. Danny Thomas? Bloody hippy. We all knows what he grows in Bryncot Dingle. If his ole man was alive it’d kill him dead.

  Danny had turned off the toaster, lowered the volume on Wishbone Ash and sought some clarification. To some of the old farmers, a hippy was anybody not wearing a tweed cap, wellies and green waterproof trousers.

  ‘Ole van,’ Jeremy said, ‘with little windows at the top. And a minibus, with one of them funny stars painted on the side.’

  ‘Pentagram?’

  ‘Sort of thing.’

  ‘Just the two vehicles?’

  ‘Far’s I can see. Could be more in the trees.’

  ‘You en’t been down to check?’

  Jeremy had said nothing. He wouldn’t have gone near, not even after dark when he was known to move around among the sheep and the cattle looking like a poacher, but in fact a guardian. Jeremy never lost a lamb to the fox; it was like he and the fox had come to an agreement.

  Greta had come into the kitchen then, flip-flopping across the stained lino. Had on the old pink dressing gown, and there was purple under her eyes, and Danny thought about the stove her’d never asked for and how it wasn’t enough.

  He sighed and waited on the phone, until Jeremy coughed and said, real tentative, ‘Only, I thought as how you might... you know?’

  ‘Aye, I know,’ Danny said.

  It had been flattering at one time. When the New Age travellers used to turn up in force, back in the eighties and nineties, the local farmers had felt threatened by the sheer numbers, and it took the police a long time to get the necessary court orders to move them on. Danny had come into his own, then – a farmer who looked like a traveller and was into their music and understood their ways. One summer night, he’d taken his Les Paul and his littlest generator and the Crate mini-amp up to this travellers’ camp by Forest Inn and hung out there jamming till dawn with a bloke called Judas, from Nuneaton. Biggest bloody audience Danny ever had. He’d donated a drum of diesel for the buses and off they’d all trundled next day, no bother.

  The farmers were well pleased, even Sebbie Dacre, bigtime magistrate, who’d been about to have the invaders dealt with. Might be a raggedy-haired druggy, Danny Thomas, but he had his priorities right when it come down to it: Danny the negotiator, Danny the diplomat. The hippy-whisperer, some bugger said one night in the Eagle in New Radnor. Not imagining for one moment that when Danny Thomas was up there jamming with the travellers, he’d been screaming inside, Take me with you! Please! Get me out of yere!

  And things wasn’t all that bad, then. Nowadays, agriculture was a sick joke, gasping on the life-support of EC grants. Danny wasn’t hardly replacing stock, in the hope that something would come up. Prices were laughable, and he wasn’t even looking forward to the haymaking, which seemed pointless. He was letting the docks grow, and the thistles. He’d even started doing the National bloody Lottery, and that was totally despicable.

  ‘All right, give me quarter of an hour, boy.’ Danny turned to his wife. ‘Jeremy Berrows. Got travellers in his bottom field.’

  ‘You makes it sound like a disease,’ Gret said.

  Danny smiled and went off to find his classic King Crimson T-shirt.

  The problem was not that Jeremy was scared, just that he was plain shy and avoided the company of other men who were cynical about farming and treated their animals like a crop. Never had nothing to do with his neighbour, Sebbie Dacre, gentleman farmer and Master of the Middle Marches Hunt. Even after his mam left the farm, Jeremy ignored the pubs, and the livestock markets when he could. Everybody thought he was coming out of it when he hooked up with Mary Morson – nice-looking girl, solid farming family. Her and Jeremy, they’d go out together, into Kington, and they had the engagement ring from the j
eweller’s there – Mary flashing it around, Jeremy proud as a peacock, if peacocks wore work shirts and baggy jeans.

  The van was below them now, about seventy yards away, and Danny could see most of it – light blue, with bits of dark blue showing through on the roof. Hard to say what make it was – bit bigger than a Transit, sure to be. And quite old, so that would likely rule out foreign tourists who didn’t know no better than to camp on somebody’s ground. Foreign tourists had classy new camper vans and Winnebagos.

  Jeremy was looking tense already, hunched up.

  ‘Tell you what,’ Danny said. ‘Why don’t I go down there, talk to the buggers on my own?’

  It made sense. Jeremy looked grateful and his shoulders relaxed. Flag the dog, sensing a release of tension, lay down in the grass, panting, and Danny went down there on his own, into the dip where the bank was eroded. The stream at the bottom was almost dried up. The blossomy hedge hid the bypass, though not Stanner Rocks, and Danny could still see the faces on the rocks, and the dead giant. Way back, when he was doing acid, he’d once watched the giant’s head rotting into green slime. Jesus Christ, never again.

  ‘Hello there!’ Danny shouted.

  Now he was close up, he could tell this wasn’t travellers in the New Age sense. The van might be old and have windows punched in the sides, but it was tidy, clean and looked-after, with nothing painted on it – no slogans, no pentagrams – and the windows had proper blinds. And it was the only vehicle here. Where was the minibus, then?

  Danny stepped over a bunch of elder branches, neatly sawn and stacked and left to rot, on account of Jeremy never burned elder, which was the Devil’s wood and would bring you no luck.

  ‘Anybody about?’

  He walked over to the van and peered inside the cab, remembering how, on his own farm one time, he’d found this car – posh car, BMW – tucked up against a field gate, with the engine running and a length of hose from the exhaust jammed in the window, and a man in a black suit in there, all pink-faced and well dead.

  A wood pigeon came blundering out of the hedge, making as much racket as a bunch of yobs with baseball bats. Danny spun round, and saw that they were above him. Both of them.