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Merrily stood looking at it, but not seeing it. Seeing the greater pattern. Dinedor Serpent/Coleman’s Meadow. The trouble with this county, it was just too damn small. Everything interconnected. Everything eventually trickling down into your own community, your own home, your—
‘Mum! You’re digging your fingers into my shoulders!’
‘I… sorry.’
‘OK.’ Jane stood up. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘You mentioned Clement Ayling.’
‘Fascist of the first order. We truly live in a police state, you know? Nobody’s allowed to object to anything any more. I mean, you only have to look at pictures of Ayling with his phoney smile, the smug, fat, arrogant—’
‘Jane.’
‘What?’
‘Sit down, huh?’
17
River of Light
They dressed the tree. A pagan ceremony, Jane always used to say, and she was probably right.
Merrily climbed on a chair to attach their slightly frayed Christmas fairy, or maybe angel, to the topmost branch. She thought of the offerings at Whiteleafed Oak in the Malverns. She thought of the little lights that were supposed to be visible in the orchard here in Ledwardine, where cider apples known as the Pharisees Red had been grown. Pharisees from farises — local slang for fairies.
As if we’d block the city’s economic development for their juvenile fairy stories.
Jane was applying herself, with serious, numbed concentration, to the decoration of the tree. When she’d spoken it was only to point out that they needed more glass balls or strands of tinsel.
You could almost hear her mind turning over and over like an engine trying to start. And then she said, as if the words had just drifted out, ‘Do what thou wilt, though it harm none.’
She had the Christmas tree lights stretching up the stairs to untangle the wire.
‘That would be the motto of the Pagan Federation?’ Merrily said.
‘Actually, it’s a Wiccan saying. But, yeah, if they had a motto it would be something like that.’
‘Right.’
If you were a vicar, a parish priest in the Christian faith, and you were fully aware that your daughter was wearing, next to her skin, a fine silver necklace with a pentacle hanging from it, what were you supposed to do about that? Come over all Shirley West? Ban her from keeping pagan books in your vicarage? Watch her every move, find out who she was meeting, phoning, keep a check on her emails and pray for her deliverance from the arms of Satan?
Or did you, seeing through to the person underneath, remember when you were a teenage Siouxie and the Banshees fan in black lipstick and let it, for God’s sake, lie?
‘Mum, these lights are just not coming on.’
‘They never come on first time. You have to go round screwing every one in tight, and then… pray.’ Merrily came down from the chair. ‘So what you’re trying to say is… no supporter of the Dinedor Serpent or the Coleman’s Meadow stones — and certainly no modern British pagan — would even contemplate something so brutal and barbaric.’
‘You think they would?’
‘I wouldn’t know, Jane. Some of the modern pagans I’ve encountered, it would be difficult to imagine them sacrificing lunch. But if you look at their forebears in the Dark Ages…’
‘Which weren’t dark, but go on.’
‘If you look at ancient Celtic paganism, as practised, presumably, by the Iron Age people who lived in their round huts on the top of Dinedor Hill… and Cole Hill, come to that—’
‘So that would be like two thousand years ago? Three thousand?’
‘Whatever, they were very into removing heads, the old pagans, weren’t they?’
‘No!’
‘All I’m—’
‘That’s disgusting!’ Jane glared down from the stairs, holding the dead lights. ‘I don’t know anyone who could do that.’
‘Well, I don’t either, so let’s not worry too much about it. It’s all circumstantial, anyway.’
‘These are gentle people. Well-meaning.’ Jane looked down at the limp necklace of bulbs. ‘They’re just people who think we should be aware of our origins.’
‘Well, me too, but—’
‘And like just pushing out cities and towns and villages in all directions, ruining the countryside for more and more houses and factories that close down after a couple of years… that’s just mindless. Building that road is… thrusting a spear into the countryside.’
Merrily sighed.
‘It’s like nobody ever really thinks any more,’ Jane said. ‘Like the way they just went into Iraq and nobody considered the consequences. Nobody thought.’
Tears in Jane’s eyes.
The fairy lights blinked once and then came on, like jewels on her fingers. She looked down at them.
‘God, it’s just like the Serpent.’
‘Sorry?’
‘It’s like… I never told you, did I? Let me show you, OK?’
Jane picked up the end of the wire and dragged the lights up the stairs to the first landing, where she took off one of her trainers. She wrapped the end of the wire around it to hold it firm on the landing, and then came downstairs backwards, arranging the lights.
Somehow, they all stayed on.
‘This is how it worked, right? The theory is that the Serpent may run all the way from the top of Dinedor Hill down to the River Wye.’
‘How far’s that?’
‘Not as far as you’d think. So it’s connecting what, in ancient times, would have been the two main features in the landscape, pre-Hereford — the biggest hill and the river. The most important river in the west of England and Wales, so very sacred. And the wavy pattern of the Serpent is actually simulating the meandering of the river.’
‘Who’s saying that?’
‘That’s come from the archaeologists themselves — the guys in charge of the rescue excavation. I got it from Coops. Obviously, they’ve only uncovered a small section of the Serpent, but that’s what they reckon. These guys don’t say anything until it’s looking pretty solid.’
‘I see…’
‘I don’t think you do. Not yet. Listen… this is the cool part — the little stones include fragments of quartz, which was probably quarried in the area. So if you imagine this river of stones — with a high quartz content — rising from the Wye, across Rotherwas. Imagine Rotherwas when there were no factories there, no warehouses, only open countryside. So imagine the river rising up the side of Dinedor Hill. Now…’
Jane went across the landing and snapped off the lamp over the stairwell.
‘… Imagine a full moon…’
Before her eyes adjusted, Merrily saw this shining chain against smoky blackness. Ascending lights.
‘On the night of a full moon,’ Jane said, ‘all the fragments of quartz would’ve been reflecting the light. So you’d be seeing like tens of thousands of little lights. An incandescent stream down the sacred hill to the banks of the Wye. You see?’
‘The whole Serpent lights up? That’s what it was for?’
‘Awesome, isn’t it?’
‘Yes,’ Merrily said. ‘It must have been.’
Light against darkness. My God.
Realising that Jane had said something about this before but it hadn’t really registered. There really wasn’t anything like this, was there, possibly anywhere in the world?
‘Jane, why was this not talked about?’
‘Because the council kept it quiet. You think they wanted everybody to know how exciting it was? Mum, it’s like Bill Blore said, these people are not fit to make decisions on anything important. Anything you can’t take to the bank they don’t even understand.’