‘No, don’t tell me,’ Miss White said. ‘How could I forget? It was delightfully appropriate. Joy. Yes?’
‘Yes.’
‘ Joie de vivre… Joie de morte. He’s back, is he?’
‘He isn’t back. It isn’t me, this time. It’s someone else.’
‘Someone who can’t come in person?’
‘Due to being dead.’
‘But not at rest.’
‘Athena, I don’t know.’
The Glades had a lift, and they went up in it to the exotic room on the third floor. Not much had altered. The same Afghan rugs on the walls, the same book cupboards, the same radiogram, although the whisky bottles inside would be several generations down the line.
Miss White sent her chair whining softly to the uncurtained sash window and turned her back on the view of Hardwicke Church, which was greystone, Welsh-looking like Brinsop, a small bell tower with the bell on show. Your church, she’d said that first night, is like some repressive totalitarian regime. Everyone has a perfectly good radio set, but you try to make sure they can only tune in to state broadcasts.
Signalling Merrily to the Parker Knoll armchair and Lol to the bed, her face became momentarily serious.
‘So it’s Mithras, is it?’
‘If you’d be so good,’ Merrily said.
‘Which one? The original Persian lord of light, who pre-dates Zoroastrianism… or his very much darker Roman descendant? Who may just spoil your day. Do you mind awfully?’
Merrily sat down.
‘We had a one-off lecture at theological college. It was about dealing with the smart-arses who’ll tell you Jesus was just another permutation of the pagan archetype. Wasn’t Mithras born on December 25th?’
‘Indeed. And his mother was a virgin, and he never had sex. His crib was visited by adoring shepherds. His followers were baptized and worshipped on a Sunday. They represented holy blood with wine and, at this time of year, ate hot cross buns.’
‘And all this half a millennium before the birth of Jesus,’ Merrily said. ‘What’s left to spoil?’
Miss White frowned. Always encouraging.
‘They’re just patterns, Athena. Death and rebirth, all that. Early Christianity slipped into the time-honoured seasonal rituals so people could begin to see them in a new light – now that the world was finally ready to learn about the unifying chemistry of love. There you are – a quiet revolution and no blood shed but His. How’s that?’
‘Glib.’
‘I prefer succinct,’ Merrily said.
Never entirely comfortable with all this, though. The candles of faith flickering feebly under the arc lights of history and scholarship. The nights when you couldn’t get to sleep and doubts hovered in the shadowed corners, challenging you to snap on the bedroom lights and discover there was really nothing there… nothing at all…
Except Athena White showing her little teeth.
‘If you know all this, Watkins, what do you want from me?’
‘Well… that’s all I know about Mithras and Mithraism. Although I think I recall old pictures of him in one of those caps like a beanie.’
‘The Phrygian cap. I’ll accept that the little chap was less handsome than Christ, with that… perpetual petulance. But then, the Roman Mithras was all about finding spiritual fulfilment through killing. An ancient sun god adopted by Roman emperors, hailed as the protector of soldiers. A sun god worshipped in darkness… in underground chambers stinking of blood. Now, what exactly are you looking for?’
‘Don’t know how it works, basically. Only that it was eventually supplanted by Christianity.’
‘Supplanted. That’s what you think, is it?’
‘Well, it certainly came off second best. Even at the time.’
‘Did it?’
Miss White hunched herself up, coquettishly, like a venomous bushbaby in the fork of a tree.
‘I imagine you’re familiar with the missives of St Paul? Who instructed the Ephesians to put on the whole armour of God… the breastplate of righteousness… the helmet of salvation… the sword of the Spirit…’
‘What a thug that guy was,’ Merrily said uncertainly.
‘And where did he get it? Where did all that military imagery come from? His home town, of course. Tarsus. A veritable hotbed of Mithraism. Onward, Christian Soldiers. Mithraism wasn’t supplanted by Christianity at all – they existed side by side for centuries and one fed the other. Scholars ask why Mithraism suddenly disappeared. It didn’t, of course.’
Merrily sat shaking her head. Whatever you got from Athena White you had to pay for, big time.
‘Consider, Watkins. It’s not merely the military imagery that’s seeped into the churches, it’s the whole ethos. Think of the Crusades, the Spanish Inquisition… the ghastly Bush and that grinning shit Blair who took us to war and then had the audacity to turn Catholic.’ Miss White’s eyes lit up. ‘Now there was an interesting coincidence! The bloody thread of the true Roman religion. Does he even know, do you think?’
‘Not for me to say.’
‘Hold up your bloodied cross, and what do you see? The handle of the sword of Mithras. The sword which now forms what some might think of as the spine of Christianity.’
‘Well, that’s not quite-’
‘Tell me this, Watkins… how do you know that you yourself are not, to some degree, a child of Mithraism?’
Merrily smiled.
‘Because, Athena… I’m a woman.’
Miss White clapped her tiny hands.
‘ Excellent reply. Now we can begin.’
55
Danny looked up at the black iron gates which would’ve replaced a standard wooden five-bar, the wall of dressed stone where it used to be chicken wire.
‘What we gonner be looking for, then, Gomer? Blood? Feathers? Empty lager cans?’
He had his new phone with him. Supposed to be a decent camera in there with a shedload of pixels. Should do the job. Shading his eyes, he looked out over the shining roofs of all the cars to the high ground behind the Court.
‘It’s all changed.’
‘Can’t change the countryside, boy,’ Gomer said.
‘You reckon?’
‘The ole Unicorn was up by the top bridge, and the cockpit was in the field behind the yard, so I reckon it’s gotter be up by that stand o’ pine.’
‘Well fenced off,’ Danny said. ‘So we gotter do it the hard way?’
He’d been hoping they could get what they’d come for without having to go in with the media and the gentry and the dickheads in chains of office. Far as he could judge from the number of parked cars, there was likely two hundred people here: press, radio and telly and a bunch of bored freeloaders helping themselves to a rich bastard’s hospitality.
Halfway up The Court’s new gravel driveway they were stopped by a stocky woman, short bleached hair, a warning finger on her lips. Regional BBC were interviewing Savitch with his house in the background. The reporter, Mandy Patel, smiling up at him and nodding hard, the way TV reporters did but nobody ever did in real life.
‘Oh, dear me, no,’ Savitch was going. ‘Not the New Cotswolds, this is absolutely not about the so-called New