by Phil Rickman
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 café 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 legless… 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 ow
n. 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.’
‘Somebody’s got to stop him, before he buys up the entire village.’
‘And you’d expose him how? Being as how Savitch is ring-fenced and lawyered to the gills.’
‘My boyfriend,’ Jane said. ‘He’s a journalist?’
‘Is he really.’
‘He can get the story out. All we need to know is where it’s happening, where he’s doing it.’
Cornel had started to laugh.
‘You don’t know me,’ Jane said. ‘I can do this.’
‘And you think I’m going to tell you what I know?’
‘You don’t have to be implicated. We don’t have to name you.’
A silence. Holding her hands together under the table.
‘Which paper’s your boyfriend work for, then?’
‘He freelances for the Sunday Times. You might’ve seen his name. Eirion Lewis?’
She was on safe ground here. A big fat paper, and nobody ever remembered reporters’ names, only columnists.
‘So what’s in it for me?’ Cornel said.
She didn’t know what to say.
‘Jane, you just don’t know who you’re messing with, do you? You just don’t fuck with these guys for the sake of a few bloody chickens and some flea-riddled badgers.’
‘Badgers?’
Jane stared at him.
‘Badgers are vermin,’ Cornel said. ‘They cause TB in cattle.’
‘That’s… debatable. You’re saying they go after badgers as well? With dogs? Where you dig out the badgers and set dogs on them, and the dogs and the badgers both get ripped to—’
‘Keep your voice down.’
‘Like hell I will!’
‘Not me, all right?’ Cornel looked up to where three women were sitting down, a couple of tables away. ‘Not me personally. I don’t like to get my hands dirty.’
‘You only don’t dig out badgers for hygiene reasons?’
‘Shut up.’
‘But that’s something else Savitch organizes for bored rich bastards, right?’
‘Jane, drop it. You’re a kid. Go away. Have fun.’
‘Anybody,’ Jane said through her teeth, ‘anybody who expects me to go away and have fun while this obscene shit—Just give me something on Savitch, Cornel. Why can’t you do that?’
A silence between them. You could hear everything, every gush and tinkle from behind the counter, every scrape of a chair leg. One of the three women at the next-but-one table was talking about how she’d only take some guy back if he promised to cut down on the booze.
‘You told anybody about this?’
‘No.’
Instinct saying lie, think about it later.
One of the women at the other table told the first woman she was making a big mistake because they never cut down on the booze, whatever they told you, unless some quack told them their lives were on the line.
Cornel said, ‘So you didn’t tell your mother, for instance?’
‘God, no. Why would I? She’s in a difficult enough position, as vicar. Anybody gets the shit on Savitch, it’s better it’s me. I’m just a pagan.’
‘Yes,’ Cornel said. ‘They were laughing about that in the Ox.’
‘Yeah, well, they would, those morons.’
‘Some of them found it rather titillating.’
‘Yeah, Dean Wall. Moronic slob. Like I go out dancing naked. It’s just native religion. It’s my central interest. Ancient sites and stuff. Studied it for years.’
Cornel had his smartphone out, flicking through some stuff on the screen, then he handed it across.
‘What’s this, then?’
‘Huh?’
‘Look at it. If you know so much about paganism, tell me what this is.’
The picture blinked up at Jane, very clear in the dim light. You were looking down this weird kind of stone vault, like the crypt of a church with a fairly primitive plinth at the end. A tablet of stone with a carved face on it with like a Mohican haircut. Primitive, but not prehistoric, and definitely not Celtic.
‘Is it Roman?’
‘You tell me.’
‘Well, where is it?’
Cornel didn’t reply. Jane had another look. You could see stone blocks, like seating, stepped up from a closed-in area, like an arena. She’d seen arenas like this on the Net. Well, not exactly like this, but the same size, a small, closed-in area, impossible to escape from.
If you were poultry.
Holy shit.
‘Cornel…’
‘What?’
‘Is this where it happens? The cockfights?’
Thinking back to the Web sites she’d forced herself to read. It was starting to make sense. The sport which had apparently been introduced to Britain by the Roman invaders.
Was this some little purpose-built Roman arena, a cockfight colosseum?
‘You going to tell me where this is, Cornel?’
Cornel smiled.
‘Why should I?’
‘Then why are you showing me this?’
‘Just thought you might know what it is. Obviously you don’t know as much as you—’
Jane put the smartphone down again, looked Cornel in the eyes.
‘They do badger-baiting here too?’
You could just imagine that, the squeals, the yipping and the ripping in this claustrophobic vault, blood all over its walls
It had Savitch written all over it. The way he was always going on about reviving old traditions.
‘Cornel… please.’
‘Jane, I’m a stranger here. I don’t even know what the place is called. Guys who go there… what usually happens is they’re taken at night. Sometimes blindfolded.’
‘But you know where to find it?’
‘You’re asking me to take you?’
Jane read the car number plates over the bar again, right to left.
‘I’d keep you out of it. I’d just take some pictures on my phone, and that would be it.’
‘I hate to be boring.’ Cornel looked at her, and not just at her face. ‘But what’s in it for me?’
‘Cornel, I’ve got a boyfriend.’
‘And even if you hadn’t, you wouldn’t fancy me, would you?’
Jane said, ‘Please…?’
58
Poultry Contest
IF DANNY HAD ever seen Gomer this mad before, he didn’t know when it was.
‘Hangin’ offence, sure t’be.’ The ole feller was flattened against the back end of a stone ex-pigsty, firing up another ciggy like it was a little stick of gelignite. ‘Passing theirselves off as Her Majesty’s Special Forces. Wartime, that’d be a bloody capital offence. Treason, see. Treason, boy!’
‘Gomer,’ Danny said. ‘There’s boys all over Hereford pretends to be Sass, to get their end away with the local talent. This en’t—’
‘This is bloody different!’
‘It was common land. It was under a foot of snow. No different to… to kids goin’ out with sledges.’
Knowing, even as he was saying it, that this was different. Remembering the tone of voice, the sense of threat. The feeling he’d had at the time that they were gonner get done over at the very least. And a man naked in the snow. Laughing, but serious. The whole thing serious.
‘You know another thing?’ Gomer said, quieter, more sober now. ‘What happened that night all but destroyed my bit o’ faith in the Sass. The Sass is hard bastards, sure t’be, but I always had ’em down as polite, kind o’ thing.’
Ah, so that was it. Danny stared out over the field with dead docks and no stock. Put your lights out, then fuck off. Gomer Parry Plant Hire dissed.
‘Kenny bloody Mostyn,’ Gomer said.
‘You knows him?’
‘Knowed his ole man, Eugene Mostyn. In
herited a tidy farm from an uncle and pissed it all away. Goes off to Birmingham weekends, nobody lookin’ after the stock. Ewes caught in the wire, cattle left out in freezin’ conditions.’
‘I hates that kind,’ Danny admitted.
‘Gets a Brummie girl up the stick, right? Seventeen years later, this boy Kenny turns up from Brum, lookin’ for his ole man. Eugene’s gamekeeper now for ole Glenda Morgan – and her was three sheets by then, else her’d never’ve employed the useless bastard. Boy gets took on by Glenda, to help his ole man, which means doin’ Eugene’s job while Eugene’s down the bettin’ shop. Best thing happened to Kenny was when Eugene comes out the pub on a dark afternoon, goes for a slash in the road and gets flattened by a timber lorry.’
‘Kenny collect much?’
‘No, but ole Glenda seen him right, and when her’s gone he rents a shop in Hereford, and that’s how Hardkit was born. Right, then.’ Gomer peeled himself off the wall in a blast of ciggy smoke. ‘I’m goin’ back in there. Gonner find that boy, have a word.’
‘No, listen…’ Danny stepping in front of him. ‘Mostyn en’t there. I looked around. It’s just a promotional video. Fellers in there’s just punters and a few blokes as done it before, spreadin’ the word.’
‘Where is he?
‘I don’t know, Gomer.’
‘Ah, this is nasty, boy.’ Gomer’s ciggy hand was shaking, and that didn’t happen often. ‘Like goin’ back to the days when you got all kinds o’ scum lurkin’ in the hedges after dark.’
‘Only difference being,’ Danny said, ‘that this is rich scum payin’ for the privilege of crawlin’ through shit and brambles an’ freezin’ their nuts off in the snow. And freezin’ your nuts off en’t a crime.’
He watched a few blokes leaving the Hardkit tent with leaflets, some shaking hands with a bulky bloke he figured he’d seen before.
‘Cockfights is a crime,’ Gomer said.
‘Who said this got anything to do with bloody cockfights?’
‘I never thought, see. Must be goin’ bloody senile, boy.’
‘What – this Eugene was a cocker?’
‘Eugene, he wouldn’t have the patience to feed up a cock for the ring, but he let it go on, see. Glenda Morgan had a fair few spells in hospital, them last years, and Eugene let all sorts go on when her’s out the way. Few quid yere, few quid there. Bad blood, Danny boy. Kenny Mostyn’s a rich man now, and still out on the hills, middle of a blizzard, callin’ the shots. Why’s he need to do that?’