Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain (44 page)

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
.’

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
.

N
O 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.’

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.