Mort had dark, swarthy skin, high cheekbones; his hair was pulled back into a tight braid. He looked like he ought to be wearing a broadsword at his belt.
'Ain't a piece of street theatre.' It was as if he'd picked up on Diane's thoughts about play-acting. 'This is the real thing. The real place. The place.'
'What's with this quietness shit,' Headlice demanded. 'We're goin' to our church. We don't have to hide it.'
Mort sighed. 'This is your first time, init, Headlice? There's people don't like us being here. We don't want no Stonehenge situation.'
Even to Diane this seemed a little over-cautious. Stonehenge was a restricted area and the Tor was not. And this was the middle of November, not Midsummer's Eve.
'Also, we don't want local kids tagging along. So we go up in small groups.'
Headlice was right: this wasn't how it had been. Paganism was not against the law, and the whole ethos of the New Age travellers was a kind of defiant exhibitionism; why else have purple hair, lip-rings, nipple rings and luminous pentacles on the sides of your bus?
The vehicles in Don Moulder's bottom field were now in rough, concentric circles, the night beginning to join them together, like walls. It was strangely silent; no ghetto-blasters blasting, no children squealing.
'Idea being that we're up there by nightfall,' Mort said. 'And no lights. You and Roz first, OK? I'll show you the path.'
'No problem,' Headlice said. 'Mol's been up loads of times.'
'Mol ain't coming.' Mort's voice had tightened like his hair. He'd taken his hand out of Viper's sleeve.
Headlice stared at him. 'Huh?'
Mort turned to Diane. 'Don't take this wrong. We got nothing against you, Molly Fortune, but we ain't forgotten you're a reporter, and Gwyn don't conduct rituals for the Press. Sorry.'
'You got to be fuckin' kiddin', man!' Headlice was furious. 'That goes against everything we're up for! Like we're a frickin' secret society now? I mean, come on, what's paganism about, man? If you, like, worship the sun and the moon and natural stuff, you do it in the open.'
Diane wanted to tell him to calm down, it didn't matter, it wasn't right for her to be part of a pagan ceremony, certainly not the kind Headlice envisaged. But he straightened up, absurdly like a little war veteran.
'Listen, I'm proud of what I am, me.' He prodded Mort in the chest. 'I worship the earth, yeah? And that hill's not private land, so if nobody can stop us goin' up, what right got to tell Mol she can't come?'
Mort's face had darkened. He snatched Headlice's prodding forefinger, bent it slowly back. Headlice went white. Mort forced him to his knees, towered over him.
This is religion, Headlice,' Mort said. 'It's between us…'
There was a slight crack from Headlice's finger.
'And the gods,' Mort said.
'You fuckin'…' Headlice shoved his hand between his thighs. 'You've broken it.'
'I don't think so.'
'Oh look…' Diane thought she must be as pale as Headlice. 'You go. To be quite honest…' Inspiration came. She produced a hopeless sigh. 'It's a pretty stiff climb, and I'm not built… Sometimes I get sort of out of breath, you know?'
Rozzie twirled her black beads and dropped a tilted grin that was sort of, Stupid fat cow, why didn't you say so in the first place?
'I'll mind the camp,' Diane said. 'See the kids are OK.'
'Thank you,' Mort said quietly. He turned and walked down the field, his woman clinging to his arm. When he'd gone, Diane felt distinctly uncomfortable. A real journalist would have protested, been absolutely determined to go up the Tor with them.
'Who's that twat think he is?' Headlice struggled to his feet. 'We got a fuckin' hierarchy now?'
'It's, you know, it's all right. Really. I didn't want to cause any… I mean, it's not the same at night, anyway. You can't see the view, and it gets very cold.'
'What you sayin' here, Mol?'
Diane rubbed her goose-pimpled arms. 'I don't know.'
'Don't you?' She saw that Headlice was confused almost to the point of tears. 'I'm fed up wi' this. Everybody treating me like a fuckin' dickhead. And you…' Staring at her resentfully. 'Wi' your fancy accent slippin' through. You're a bit deep, Mol. You come on like fat and harmless. I reckon you're weirder than all of us. I reckon you're the weirdest person here.'
Diane was silent, biting her lip.
SEVEN
Increasingly, the dusk obsessed Jim Battle. He supposed it was due to his time of life: slipping away, as everyone must, into the mauve and the sepia.
But still it was endlessly challenging. Midges, for instance. How were you supposed to paint midges? In clouds, perhaps? A thickening of the air? Or just a dry stipple.
'Dry stipple,' Jim said aloud. One of those phrases that sounded like what it meant. There was a word for that; buggered if he could remember what it was.
With a thumb he smudged the sun. In the finished painting, it would be merely a hazy memory, a ghost on the canvas. Same with the Tor; you should be able to feel it in the picture, but not necessarily see it.
Jim stepped away from the canvas. The tangled garden, by now, was all blues and greys and dark browns. As there were no lights on in the cottage, Jim could barely see the canvas. Time to stop. Time to wind up the Great Quest for another day.
Still, for once, time was playing on his side, staying the dead hand of winter, letting him go on painting outdoors into the early evening, using the very last of the light. For this was when things happened. Often, when he looked at the picture next morning, he'd find that the absence of direct light had wrought some marvellous effects, textures he'd never have found if he'd been able to see properly. All a matter of surrendering to the dusk.
And beyond the dusk… lay the Grail.
Of course, everyone came to Avalon in search of the Grail. And it was different for all of them. There was always the possibility of an actual holy relic somewhere. But for most people the Grail was simply the golden core of whatever you dreamed you might achieve. The vanishing point on life's horizon. Glastonbury being one of those spots on the Earth's surface where the phantasmal became almost tangible, where you might actually reach the vanishing point before you, er, vanished.
Jim's personal Grail – the mystical formula which would (he hoped) come to define a Battle painting – was to be round at the very end of dusk, the cusp of the day, the moment between evening and night when the world stopped.
It should happen at dawn too, but it didn't for Jim. He'd walked out in the drizzle and the dew, to wait. In vain. The moment never came, or he could not feel it. Time of life again: at his age perhaps you were just not meant to feel the stopping of the world at dawn.
Not that he greatly wished for youth – only to have come to Avalon as a younger man. Wasn't as if he hadn't known, then, what he wanted to do. Plenty of time for painting, bloody Pat had bleated, when you've got your pension.
God. Why do we listen to them? If he'd left his wife and met Juanita twenty years ago, when she was a very young woman and he didn't seem so much of an older man…
Well, he hadn't. It was enough of a privilege that she was his friend, that he could bathe in her aura. Jim left the canvas wedged into the easel and manhandled the whole painting to the house. He propped it against the open door and turned to accept the night.
The cottage was tiny but satisfyingly isolated, reached by a track too narrow for a car. Ten years ago, although his worldly goods were few, the removal men had been less than euphoric.
But Jim still was, much of the time. Especially when the sun had gone, leaving its ghost to haunt the lush, sloping grass in the foothills of Glastonbury Tor.
Behind the cottage was a wooded hillside which was always immediately activated by the dying sun. He could almost feel it starting to tremble with the stirring and scufflings and rustlings of badgers and rabbits and foxes and owls.