To Dream of the Dead

the phone, she had the tree up in the hall, surprisingly perpendicular, in one of the stone tubs from the garden. Damp soil and stones around the roots — cold enough in here to ensure survival well beyond Twelfth Night.

‘Sunday, then?’ Jane was sitting on the stairs with her mobile. ‘No, that’s fine… Yeah, it will be.’

Eirion, evidently. Merrily sensed Jane trying not to sound too affectionate. She waited in the kitchen doorway.

‘Sure. I’ll certainly tell her. No, couldn’t make it up, could you? Bloody hell. Yeah, right. Bye.’ Jane looked up. ‘He says it’s really good of you. He wanted to thank you himself, but I said you were working. Mum, look, there’s something else you—’

‘Spare me a few minutes, flower?’

‘Sure.’ Jane sprang to her feet. ‘What’s the problem?’

Jane was happy, hadn’t even objected to being addressed as ‘flower’. She stood up. Open boxes of tinsel and tree-lights sat at the foot of the tree, Ethel checking them out, pawing delicately at a coloured ball, then dancing away.

No point at all in keeping quiet about this, now Clement Ayling’s name had been released. Of course, it was nothing to do with her really, but with Sophie involved…

‘Could I consult you about something?’ Merrily said. ‘Something you know much more about than I do.’

‘Fine wines? Jane Austen? Vampire Weekend?’

‘The Rotherwas Ribbon.’

‘Oh.’

‘Or as you probably know it, the Dinedor Serpent.’

‘Say no more.’ Jane came downstairs, shedding her smile. ‘What can I tell you about those bastards?’

16 Patio Gravel

A fuzz of viridian forestry, a band of lime-green field and, in the foreground, a vast open spread of red clay where the surface had been peeled away by the road contractors.

Sitting at the scullery desk, Jane had opened up the picture to full-screen. You couldn’t see the top of Dinedor Hill, where tall trees enclosed the Iron Age camp, but you could see the Dinedor Serpent. For what it was worth.

‘This is what it was like before they covered it up again,’ Jane said.

In the middle of the exposed clay, a greyish trickle of small pebbles.

Merrily said, ‘That’s it?’

You might not agree with him, but you could see where Ayling had been coming from. Clement went with a delegation to view the site, Sophie had said. Afterwards, he was quoted in the Hereford Times as saying it just looked like, ah… patio gravel.

Succinct. And probably forgivable, if you weren’t an archaeologist. His opinion was that anyone who thought a vital relief road should be abandoned or even diverted to preserve that must be quite insane. He said that, even if it was preserved, it was hardly going to be a tourist attraction. Adding that Herefordshire Council couldn’t let itself be dictated to by hippies and outsiders.

An old-style local politician. Like Bliss said, Clem Ayling’s younger colleagues would have been crouching behind some trite press statement. Ayling would hold forth… railing against the idiots and the cranks.

Jane, of course, had been following the story from the other side, with frequent explosions of Jane-rage: another example of the jackbooted bastards at County Hall sacrificing Herefordshire’s sacred past in the cause of dubious progress. A crime against history and the environment.

But it still looked like patio gravel.

‘You’re not getting the full picture here,’ Jane said. ‘That’s not possible with hardly any of it uncovered. Take it from me — if it was fully exposed, this could be the most amazing archaeological discovery of the last century. Anywhere in the country. And far, far, far more important than another stretch of crap tarmac.’

She’d found the images on the website built by the protesters: SAVE THE SERPENT. On its homepage was a picture of what was said to be one of the only comparable monuments in the world — a hillside seen from above, with sculpted mounds on it protected by new walls. Above the picture, it said:

This is the imaginatively preserved and presented Ohio Serpent.

And below:

Imagine what would happen to it if Herefordshire Council were in charge.

‘The Ohio Serpent mound is probably the only comparable monument anywhere in the world,’ Jane said. ‘That tells you how significant this is.’

‘The Dinedor Serpent’s not actual mounds like this, though, is it?’ Merrily leaned over the back of Jane’s chair. ‘It just looks like… chippings.’

‘Yeah, well, that’s what they thought at first — that it was a road, a prehistoric pathway, maybe going all the way to the top of Dinedor Hill. A ritual pathway, for ceremonial processions.’

‘Like your pathway to Cole Hill.’

‘Except Cole Hill’s only an alignment, with no actual visible path, other than the one across the meadow. And that’s a straight line, whereas the Serpent is… serpentine. But the archaeologists decided it couldn’t’ve been an actual pathway, because it has nothing under it — no base, no support. If people had walked on it, the stones would just’ve been trodden in. Wouldn’t’ve lasted a year, never mind a few thousand.’

‘So if it’s not the remains of a road or a track…? I’m sorry, I should know this, shouldn’t I?’

Ought to have paid more attention to the Serpent dispute, but other things had been happening at the time. Also, access to the site had been restricted because of the work on the new road, so few people had actually seen it. Not even Jane, apparently.

‘Everybody should know about this, but most people don’t,’ Jane said. ‘The truth is totally magical. Archaeology to die for.’ She looked up. ‘You OK, Mum?’

Sophie had said Helen Ayling remembered her husband receiving at least half a dozen angry phone calls and several abusive letters, half of them unsigned. How many had been actual threats she didn’t know. If Clement took the call, he simply hung up and wouldn’t talk about it afterwards. The letters he burned. Nothing to worry about. Part and parcel of local government service.

Bloody cranks, he’d say. As if we’d block the city’s economic development for their juvenile fairy stories.

Actually sparing the time, for once, to explain to Helen why the Rotherwas relief road was of such strategic importance, issuing as it did from Hereford’s primary industrial sector and perhaps eventually forming part of the city’s long-needed bypass.

Opening up this side of Hereford, the commercial possibilities were enormous, Clem said. Only cranks and drug-addled hippies would even want to get in its way, and at least they were relatively harmless. Sophie said Helen had been less convinced of this — recalling coming home one evening, about four months ago, and finding a message on the answering machine warning Clem to stay away from Dinedor Hill if he didn’t want to be buried there.

Dinedor Hill: implications here. The city’s mother hill, the site of its Iron Age origins. Aligned with the Cathedral in the same way that Cole Hill was aligned with Ledwardine church, but on an altogether more impressive scale. Some people in Hereford felt an almost obsessive attachment to Dinedor. Running a new road too close, cutting off the city from the mother hill, was always going to cause unrest. And if the roadwork itself had exposed even more evidence of Dinedor’s sanctity…