Lucifer's Crown

by Lillian Stewart Carl

  This is now. Maggie lay back in Thomas’s arms, secure in the peace of God which passed all understanding. This is forever.

  Chapter Thirty-six

  Considering the long night of his own soul, Thomas thought, December twenty-first made an apt day of birth. He might have owed his name to that day being the feast day of St. Thomas, but the fact that this apostle was called Doubting Thomas was perhaps less than chance.

  Rose contemplated the last morsel of her steak pie and pushed it away. “So Robin sent Ellen back into the ring with us, huh?”

  “I wonder what else he’s been up to recently?” Maggie emptied the teapot.

  “Taking advantage of the season,” said Thomas. “A priest molesting the children of his parish, evangelist fund-raisers brought up on charges of embezzlement … Well, one understands why even such intelligent individuals as Willie Armstrong choose atheism.”

  “Mick never called back to say what Willie wanted,” Rose said, “just that he’d left a message telling Mick to call him ASAP. Something about the Book, I guess, but I was hoping Mick would be here with us tonight.”

  “He’ll be with us tomorrow,” Thomas told her. “For now, we must leave the lads to their own resources and God’s help. Shall we go?”

  The two women donned their coats, hats, gloves, and scarves like knights girding themselves for battle. Leaving the warmth of The Rifleman’s Arms, they walked with Thomas into the foggy night.

  The longest, darkest night of the year, he thought, a New Year’s of a sort. He remembered spring lambs, midsummer poppies, a kingfisher above the Brue, deer on the stubble and curlews on the marsh. Now the Earth had once again completed its journey round the heavens, meting out the stages of existence. Of eternity. Of his life.

  Once away from the orange glow of the street lamps, like candles guttering for lack of air, Thomas switched on his torch. The diffused light made the surrounding trees look like charcoal sketches on a gray background. The mud of the path muffled their footsteps. Another gate, and the trees ended. The path led gently upward, across an open field now concealed by the fog. At its far side they crossed a stile. “Here we are at the base of the Tor,” Thomas said.

  “Weird,” said Rose. “You can feel it even though you can’t see it.”

  Yes, the great conical upwelling of earth, a high place where earth and sky wed, loomed over them. “Like the Eildon Hills, the Tor is locus terribilis. As long as the relics are safe, Robin cannot tread this ground. But even at night his spies might could see us here, so this fog is an unexpected blessing.”

  “You specialize in following paths into obscurity,” said Maggie.

  “I always find light at the end. Note the marker stone behind the bench.” Thomas climbed onto the first steep incline of the Tor proper. “The labyrinth may have been here since long before the birth of Our Lord, shaped from a hill by the same religious impulse that constructed such sacred sites as Avebury and Stonehenge. Then, like so many such things, it was forgotten until believers cared to search for it.”

  Rose’s voice was muffled by her scarf. “Like the Zodiac?”

  “The Glastonbury Zodiac is a product of recent wishful thinking rather than of ancient topographical features.”

  “Faith is a product of wishful thinking,” Maggie commented.

  Thank God, Thomas thought, that the rebirth of her faith hasn’t stilled her well-honed tongue—whose felicities were of the flesh as well as the word.

  “So when did you first figure out that the Tor is a three-dimensional labyrinth?” asked Rose.

  “Soon after I bought Temple Manor. I’d viewed the hints in the Old Church in my original life, when rumor had it that the stone pavement contained some holy secret. Romano-British work, I thought, but parts of it could have been much older. It certainly suggested a pre-Christian geometrical awareness, even to my unenlightened mind.” Thomas paused. The fog distorted his perceptions, making the familiar path seem strange.

  Ah, yes. “This way.” They moved off again. “A sixth century Greek, Hecataeus, wrote of a spiral temple here—perhaps to Apollo and his mother. And the Celtic myth of Caer Sidi tells of a spiral castle that guards the entrance to the Underworld.”

  “So after you met the Lady,” Maggie said, “you suspected there was an entrance to—well, to another dimension—here, too.”

  “To Annwn, the Welsh Underworld. Or Tir nan Og, the Otherworld, an island, as the Tor has often been during times of flood. When I arrived here during the latter part of the fourteenth century, I was obliged to conceal the Cup. Since the Story of the Grail is rooted in Celtic myth, where better than in Annwn?” Thomas’s torch picked out the second marker stone. “Now we turn along the terrace. Slowly, the way can be both narrow and vertiginous.”

  The light of the torch picked out snowy patches, muddy spots, and broken and weathered grass. To the left the slope fell precipitously into nothingness. To the right the embankment rose just as precipitously upward into a darkly gleaming mist.

  Here, at the precipitous east end of the Tor, the path kinked. Thomas was obliged to cast to and fro until he picked up the terrace again. They stepped carefully along the northern side of the hill and found themselves a short distance above the marker stone where they’d started. “First circuit.”

  “You haven’t been back inside in six hundred years?” Maggie asked.

  “I’ve threaded the labyrinth many times—some prayer is a laying on of hands, this is a laying on of feet—but I’ve never gone back inside, no.” Thomas led them down and then along the terrace immediately below the one they’d just traversed.

  “Whoa!” Rose exclaimed. Maggie grabbed her hand, steadying her until she regained her footing.

  “The path is uncertain here,” said Thomas. “We must stay inside the fence, even though the terrace is actually outside it. Have a care.”

  After a good twenty minutes of picking their way, they came out just above the bench and the lower marker stone. “Second circuit.” Thomas set a slow pace along the path at the very bottom of the slope, beside the fringe of the woods, at the perimeter of the labyrinth. At one point they had to divert back to the second path, the lower one disappearing into the surrounding fields, but before long they were back at the ascending route not far above the bench and the stone.

  “That’s three circuits.” Nothing like taking brisk exercise on a cold night—he could hear the breathing of the women mingled with his own. Beyond that the silence was profound, as though the town, the countryside, the world itself had disappeared behind the curtain of fog, not a wrack left behind. A faint scent of smoke hung on the air, but from what fires he couldn’t say. “Shall we press on?”

  He led the way upwards, past another stone and onto a path that meandered off to the right. The fog seemed a bit thinner here, less a curtain than a veil. That suggestion of rectangular solidity in the darkness above must be the tower at the peak of the Tor. “Excavations have shown a succession of forts atop the Tor, the last dating from Saxon times.”

  “Where else,” said Rose, “would you build … Watch it!”

  Maggie scrambled and grasped Thomas’s coat. “Sorry.”

  “Feel free,” he told her, pulling her up by her arm. “Just a few more yards and we’ll find another terrace … Here we are.”

  Twice more he had to pause and consider his path. But still he felt his way onward. In due course they returned to the ascending route at the upper marker stone. “Four circuits,” he declared.

  “Look,” Maggie said.

  Through the mist appeared the softly glowing orb of the full moon. A hush lay over earth and heaven alike. The air itself seemed solid as glass. Caer Sidi, thought Thomas. Caer Wydr, the glass castle, yet another portal. Ynys Witrin, the Isle of Glass. The Isle of Avalon.

  “The world in solemn stillness lay, to hear the angels sing,” Rose murmured.

  Thomas smiled. “The circuits are shorter this high up. Come along.”

  They climbed the ascend
ing route onto the shoulder of the hill and emerged from the last clinging tendrils of mist. Now the moon-circle appeared hard and bright, a window cut in the obsidian of night and adorned with a scattering of jewel-like stars. Billows of fog glistened in its light, shrouding house, street, automobile. Shrouding the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The top of the Tor was an island in time and space.

  “Wow,” Rose said.

  “It’s magic,” said Maggie.

  The tower loomed close above, a dark masculine vertical rising from the glistening feminine curve of the hill. “Mind your step,” Thomas said softly. They passed another bench, and turned left along a ridge not far below the tower. Behind it, at the most precipitous part of the hill, Thomas took first Maggie’s and then Rose’s hand and guided them onto a lower terrace. A flight of steps and a circular track just below the flat ground where the tower stood brought them back to the main path. “Fifth circuit.”

  “Isn’t this where the last abbot of Glastonbury was judicially murdered by Henry VIII?” asked Maggie.

  “Richard Whiting, an aged and gentle man, was done to death with two of his monks—one of whom was named Arthur. The gallows was set up just there, where tomorrow that cresset will hold a solstice bonfire.” Thomas’s gesture toward the black shape of the fire-basket on a pole retracted into the sign of the Cross. “It was a cold November day, the wind sobbing through the doors of the church. The lands below lay hazy and gray, like repudiated legend. The commissioner who watched as the head was struck from Whiting’s body and mounted above the Abbey gates had red hair.”

  For a long moment Rose and Maggie stood silent. Then Thomas said, “A cautionary tale, yes, but this place is haunted less by it than by echoes of life ever-blooming. Lift up your hearts—we’re almost there.”

  In silence the women followed him back down the main path to the brink of a sharp slope and then around to the left, just above an exposed area of rock and sandy soil. Once again Thomas helped them climb the kink. Back at the ascending path he announced, “Sixth circuit. One more,” and led them down and to the right. Past the kink they went, and a row of trees and a muddy spot covered with nettles. They found themselves standing at the bottom of the exposed area, upon a patch of snow.

  Save it wasn’t snow. They stood amongst white flowers growing thickly together. Flowers which glowed. The face of the Tor shimmered and thinned into a curtain that parted before them.

  “Very good,” Thomas breathed. “Shall we go in?”

  He had to prod Maggie forward with his torch, and grasp Rose’s sleeve to hold her back, but inside they went, to a staircase of hewn stones. The air was cool, but warmer than the icy night outside, and smelled not only of the deep earth but of spices. Voices ebbed and swelled like the murmur of the sea. Thomas switched off his torch. “Down.”

  They walked down the spiral staircase. The walls were of closely set stones like the pavement of the Old Church, save these stones glowed like parchment lit from behind. At the foot of the stair the pavement crossed a stone bridge above a stream of dark green water. Beyond the bridge a bronze mist filled some vast but undefined space … The mist parted. A man and a woman walked along hand in hand, smiling over a private joke. “Calum and Maddy Dewar,” whispered Rose. “Mick showed me pictures.”

  Behind them came Bess Puckle, talking animatedly with Vivian Morgan. “My God,” said Maggie, “they’re…”

  “…reflections,” Thomas told her.

  A horse trotted through the gauzy light. Its rider’s armor was dented but his face was bright and eager. He closed his visor, set his lance, and spurred the massive horse onward in a drumroll of hoofbeats. A dragon stirred and woke, its scales gleaming in jasper, lapis, sapphire, carnelian. Then knight, rider, dragon—all were gone.

  Another knight, this one older, dragged a woman across the pavement. Her long flaxen braid swung back and forth as she struggled. Melwas, king of Somerset, abducting Guinevere to his palace on the Tor … Arthur stepped from the mist, an Arthur with Thomas’s own face. Excalibur gleamed in one hand, his other extended toward a Guinevere who looked suddenly like Maggie—and they, too, were gone.

  A man in a monk’s robe emerged from the shadows, clutching an earthenware flask. Before him the mist rolled up and vanished, exposing a hall lined with stone pillars. Brightly-clad men and women sat at long tables, laughing and feasting and throwing tidbits to several cats and dogs. On a dais sat a powerfully-built red-bearded man wearing a crown. Thomas felt both Maggie and Rose tense. He said, “That is Gwyn ap Nudd, King of Faerie, Lord of the Underworld. The monk is St. Collen, a hermit who had a cell on the slopes of the Tor.”

  Each luminous face-for good reason were they called “the Fair Folk”—turned toward Collen. Gwyn stood, raising a cautious hand.

  “Demons!” Collen scattered water from his flask.

  For just a moment the voices stopped. Then Gwyn threw back his head and laughed, a rich bass laugh that had in it thunder and deep waters and solid rock. Collen shrank into the mist filling the spaces between the pillars.

  “Oh,” said Maggie. “If Gwyn and his court weren’t demons then holy water wouldn’t have much effect, would it?” Musicians began playing a subtle melody on flute and harp. “I know that music.”

  “That’s the tune Mick heard at the Eildons,” said Rose.

  The deep note of a bell vibrated in the stone itself. From the dais a wisp of vapor spiraled upward and became the Lady, a red-haired Lady wearing a gold torc and a plaid caught by a jeweled brooch. She turned toward Thomas, Maggie, and Rose, opening her arms.

  At her feet appeared a steaming cauldron. Nine young women walked from the glistening shadows and paced solemnly around it. Every face reflected Rose’s, bright, clear, radiant with intelligence. The original Rose gasped. “It’s Ceridwen.”

  Or perhaps it was an image of Mary in her blue cloak, light shining from her brow. She picked up the cauldron and it contracted to a small shape, so bright Thomas winced to look at it. A knight with Mick’s face knelt before it, his head thrown back, his gray eyes reflecting the light of the woman’s halo and of the Grail itself. Galahad, who saw the Grail at a Mass of the Glorious Mother of God.

  Suddenly the hall went silent, empty save for the Lady. Gwyn, his court, the maidens, the tables and the foodstuffs—all had vanished as utterly as last winter’s snow. A cold wind blew away the fragrances of flowers and food. With one last keen look from her earth-deep brown eyes, the Lady set the shining object down and faded into the darkening mist.

  Curls of vapor crept across the floor and down from the ceiling. A box sat upon the stone pavement of the dais, gleaming faintly, like a moon rather than a sun. Thomas walked forward and picked it up. It was the olivewood box he himself had fashioned long years past.

  Maggie and Rose waited by the bridge whilst he returned back down the hall, the mist closing in at his heels. “We should be going.”

  “Yeah,” said Maggie dazedly.

  Rose was grinning from ear to ear. “Awesome! Totally awesome!”

  They climbed the spiral staircase, darkness following at their heels. In a small, damp, stone-lined chamber at the top of the stairs Thomas pushed open a stone slab and one by one they stepped out into night. “Where?” Maggie began, and then saw the empty archways to either side. “Oh. The room at the base of the tower.”

  Moonlight silvered the fog below and the heavens above, illuminating the carving of St. Bridget in the side of the tower. To the north rose the black bulwark of the Mendip Hills. To the southwest the mount of Chalice Hill resembled a whale, a hint of substance beneath the surface of a misty sea.

  Thomas looked from Maggie’s face to Rose’s, and smiled tenderly at each. A glance at his watch showed that it had gone midnight. The witching hour. The cusp of a new day. Of a new year.

  “Now what?” Rose asked at last.

  “We go from the center out, although I should suggest instead of threading the labyrinth again we simply go straight down and home.
”

  “Just like a man,” teased Maggie.

  “How do we know home is still down there?” Rose asked. “What if we come out in 1256 or 1702 or 2138, for that matter?”

  Thomas tucked the box under one arm and switched on the torch. “I should think it is still the threshold year of 2000, otherwise there would have been no point to our retrieving the Cup.”

  Leaving the silent radiance of the moon behind, they entered the fog, walked down the slope, and returned to the world. Streetlights still glowed orange. A few cars traversed the streets. The mini-bus sat in the Chalice Well car park where Maggie had left it. They piled inside and sat shivering whilst she switched on the engine.

  Chapter Thirty-seven

  Thomas’s fingertips quivered with the faint but unmistakable chord that emanated from the box he held. Here it was, again in his hands, exposed to the world and its dangers. He was elated. He was grateful for his companions. He was bone-weary of his everlasting task.

  “How did you get the Cup to begin with?” Rose asked.

  Maggie switched on the heater. A breath of warm air touched Thomas’s face. “From people who never perceived it as a sacred relic.”

  “The Cathars,” Maggie said, “who denied Christ’s humanity.”

  “They led relatively ascetic lives, and did not go about torturing their neighbors over points of doctrine. There is something to be said, I suppose, about refusing the symbolism of the blood.”

  The lights of the town streamed by the windows of the car like sparks thrown from a bonfire. “The Inquisition was started,” said Rose, “to root out the Cathar—well, they said it was heresy.”

  “The Templars refused to join in the Albigensian Crusade. Our refusal tainted us with heresy as well. In 1244 many Cathar leaders were besieged in their fortress at Montsegur. I volunteered to act as mediator but failed to bring about a compromise. The night before the Cathars surrendered, their leader—a woman—gave me the cup, as thanks for treating her and hers with respect. Or as thanks for speeding their entry into the next life, however unintentionally.”