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.
56
No 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.
