Merrily Watkins 11 - The Secrets of Pain (33 page)

‘Merrily…’ Just inside the door, he grabbed hold of her, hugged her, hard. ‘I’m
sorry
…’

‘What for, exactly?’

She kissed him and he felt a quiver in her.

‘Been letting things slide,’ he murmured. ‘When something’s finally paying the mortgage, you tend to go at it round the clock in case it doesn’t last. And you forget what’s really important.’

‘At least you don’t have God on your back. Swan later?’

Lol opened the front door. Up the street, at the Eight Till Late, Jim Prosser was taking in his paper rack. A news bill said: HEREFORD HORROR.

Lol watched Merrily walking back to the vicarage. The voice in his head sang,
Do something
. But he didn’t know where to start.

T
HE BLOOD ON
the book cover was embossed, glossy-bubbled against the background’s matt black and greys and the white title.

CARADOG

They came, they saw…

Lol took it over to the desk in the window, flipping through for any local place names. Nothing he recognized immediately, but it was, after all, fiction.

He took the legionnaire from behind. A thrust to the spine and then, as the man fell back, moved around and hacked off his head from the front, a practised upward stroke. They were easy meat, most of them, mercenaries who’d never seen Rome. They obeyed orders and understood discipline – he’d give them that. But they lacked the ability to think for themselves or operate in small units. And, as lowly foot soldiers, they were not attuned to the higher energies known to the elite and now, at last, known to Caradog, who felt them rising like fire from the pit of his gut. A fire kindled from the sun itself
.

Cartoon violence. Kids loved this stuff, but they’d probably turn off at the first mention of
higher energies
. Lol scanned several chapters, finding two more references to Caradog
drawing energy from the sun, at one stage holding up his sword to catch the light before going calmly into battle and efficiently slaying a large number of Romans.

Druids worshipped the sun.

It was a start. Lol opened up his laptop, put Google on the case. There was modern druidry, the religious arm of Greenpeace, and there was the kind the Romans had known, altogether darker, with animal and possibly human sacrifice. But the Roman accounts might have been propaganda.

He Googled Wordsworth and Brinsop. Quite a lot. Wordsworth had been Poet Laureate when he was holidaying at Brinsop Court.

And then the Net, as occasionally happened, threw up an unexpected link – not to Brinsop but somewhere not far away – which sent Lol back to the small green book:
Wordsworth’s Britain: a little itinerary
.

He found it tucked in after ‘Tintern Abbey’. A poem commemorating:

ROMAN ANTIQUITIES DISCOVERED
AT BISHOPSTONE, HEREFORDSHIRE

WHILE poring Antiquarians search the ground
Upturned with curious pains, the Bard, a Seer,
Takes fire:—The men that have been reappear;
Romans for travel girt, for business gowned;
And some recline on couches, myrtle-crowned,
In festal glee: why not
…

The poem was dated 1835 and carried a note from Wordsworth describing its inspiration: a Roman pavement discovered only yards from the front door of Bishopstone parsonage:

in full view of several hills upon which there had formerly been Roman encampments

Doubtless including Credenhill, with its Iron Age fort. In Wordsworth’s day, any kind of camp might be considered Roman.

Lol put a block of ash on the stove and dug into the shelves for an OS map:
Hereford, Leominster and surrounding area
. Cleared his desk and opened out the map to the area west of Hereford.

It brought an invisible landscape into existence in various archaic fonts and symbols.

ROMAN ROAD (course of)

Again and again: Roman roads either side of the Wye. One skirting Credenhill. Under the hill was Brinsop, the church marked only by a small + but earthworks and moat nearby signifying an area of extreme antiquity.

Bishopstone, a hamlet with a church, was no distance from Brinsop. Directly east of it, two more Roman roads made a kind of V-formation into the point of which was tucked something identified on the map as RAF Hereford. Which could only be the SAS camp. Just before the Roman roads converged on

MAGNIS (ROMAN TOWN)

the ruins of which, according to several Internet sites, had still been visible in recorded memory. Much of the masonry had gone into the foundations of Hereford. By 1772, the antiquarian William Stukely was discussing a fine mosaic floor unearthed at Kenchester and the remains of a temple, and also noting that one Colonel Dantsey had paved his cellar with Roman bricks.

Around the original Roman army camp there had been evidence of streets and shops. The remains of a shrine had been uncovered near the Wye, part of a villa found in the river itself.

Lol went through to his kitchen for a glass of water, digesting the key point: the SAS, quite recently, had moved its headquarters from Hereford itself to a former RAF base at the
convergence of two Roman roads serving a Roman military base.

Back to the roots.

Brinsop Church, however, was part of a different story. He remembered it now. Remembered a wet Sunday when he and Jane had been enthusiastically defacing another copy of this same map, circling every stone, mound, cross and old church, marking up every conceivable alignment of prehistoric sites and then checking them out to see if they’d found anything that Alfred Watkins had missed. Alfred Watkins of Hereford, the original Simple Trackway Man on whom Lol and Danny had based the song. Whom Jane claimed for an ancestor.

Lol pulled down his copy of
The Old Straight Track
, Watkins’s masterpiece, the book which, long after his death, had sent generations of Brits – young hippies, old hippies, pre-hippies, post-hippies like Lol,
post
post-hippies like Jane out into the countryside, to find the stones and mounds and mysterious church formations that lit up an alternative Britain.

OK, most archaeologists rubbished the idea, but it was still exciting to think of being surrounded by ancient landscape patterns, which also drew in churches because so many of them had been built on sites of prehistoric pagan worship. You saw church towers and steeples, you saw four thousand years of ritual.

And, in the middle, the Romans.

Alfred Watkins had suggested that the Roman roads had often followed the old straight tracks – in his view more by design than accident, as if the Romans had merely widened existing prehistoric routes. Lol felt a twitch of connection. He’d known that, of course. Even worked it into ‘The Simple Trackway Man’.

Interesting to think this guy Byron, a man who could rape a friend’s wife, might have been on the same trail, fascinated by the same magic landscape.

He’d drawn lines across the aerial photos
.

Lol found a pencil and, using the edge of
The Old Straight Track
as a ruler, drew in three of the lines that he and Jane had found radiating from Brinsop Church, one linking it with four other medieval churches.

Brinsop Church was on a site of some significance and, although it was only a few miles away, he’d never even seen it.

The sun was low in the sky over Ledwardine, but there were a good two hours of daylight left to find what could be found. Lol picked up his car keys, went out to his truck.

Two hours.

B
RINSOP
C
HURCH WAS
locked now. Maybe the smoking ghost of Syd Spicer was inside, waiting there in motionless, crampless silence, the way the SAS could. Waiting for a signal.

Lol moved among the graves through the soft light. The bell tower was crisp against the cooling sky, the giant conifer black, like a knobbly monolith.

It didn’t matter that the church was locked. Outside, the landscape had revealed itself. The Ordnance Survey map was opened out in his head, the lines drawn in.

At the end of the short grass, before the woodland began its march up Credenhill, you could see, like an entrance to the underworld, what the OS map identified as moat. Alfred Watkins thought some moats might have been dug not for protection but to mark the tracks by reflecting sunlight or beacon fire or lamplight.

Lol had looked across the dark stain of the moat to the wooded thigh of Credenhill, imagining the pale essences of long-gone villagers walking the spirit paths that intersected here. Syd Spicer following some distance behind, cautiously adjusting to being dead.

In the adjacent field, a stile gave access to a squat monolith on top of a circular stone slab with a metal drain cover set into it. On the stone it said
The Dragon Well
. As it was unlikely that a dragon had died here, what did it actually mean?

Half an hour ago, standing at the side of the lane somewhere
around Kenchester, Lol had gazed out over the fields which enclosed the ghost of the Roman town. He’d seen isolated farms and, further away, on the higher ground, the frames of this year’s polytunnels spreading like worm-casts.

He’d driven past the SAS camp with its armed guards. A military base built close to, maybe even on top of, the buried remains of another. What could
that
mean? What could it mean to Byron Jones?

A cyclist was bobbing along the lane, dipping periodically behind the hedge, heading this way. Lol waited. The man wheeled the bike to the dead end of the track. He was thin and bearded, maybe in his early sixties, wearing a scarf and a flat cap.

‘Nice truck,’ he said. ‘Animal or Warrior?’

‘Animal.’

A match flared. The guy applied it to a roll-up.

‘Used to have one meself. Comfy, for a truck.’

He looked like an archetypal peasant, therefore obviously from Off.

‘On your own, mate?’

‘It’s what country churchyards are for,’ Lol said. ‘Being alone.’

‘Not so much these days. One of the finest St George churches in England, this, but who bovvers now?’

The guy checked him out again, then took a step back.

‘Hang about… I fink… stone me! I was at your gig. In the floods? At Ledwardine? Hey… how cool is this?’

Lol smiled, a bit bashful. This never used to happen at all, but it had occurred a dozen or so times since Christmas. Local recognition: a mixed blessing.

‘Forget what I said,’ the guy said. ‘This is
exactly
the right setting for you, Lol. There should be a soundtrack.
Sunny Days
?’

The edges of his Londonish accent were rounded off, as if he’d been living here a good while.

‘Well, you know, that was a long time ago,’ Lol said.

‘Well, I had it first time around, I’m proud to say. Hazey Jane. First album I ever bought by a band a good bit younger than
me. Big fing, that, when you first accept younger guys can get it right. Seventeen, was you?’

‘Another lifetime,’ Lol said.

The guy put out a hand.

‘Arthur Baxter. Bax. I live a mile or so back there, over the pitch. Still come here most nights, on me bike. Meet the dragon.’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘You feel his breath?’

‘Like a blow-heater?’

‘Exactly.’ Bax grinned. ‘You know the story?’

‘Um… no. You got time?’

‘Got all night, mate – the missus is rehearsing a community play, down the leisure centre at Credenhill. Dragon’s drinking at the well, right? George comes down off of Credenhill, lookin’ for trouble. Slash, slash, spear downa froat, all over.’ Bax took a meditative drag. ‘You out here looking for inspiration, Lol? If you’re not, don’t spoil it for me. I wanna point to a song one day and go,
I was there when he got that one
.’ Bax drew deeply on his cigarette, offered it to Lol. ‘Try this? It ain’t bad.’

A certain sweetness drifting up. More than one kind of dragon. Lol smiled, shook his head, nodded at the truck. Bax assured Lol that he’d been biking these lanes, pleasantly stoned, for the best part of two decades, never once been stopped.

‘Tell you how far back this all goes,’ Bax said. ‘If we could get into the church you’d see this old stone slab with a picture carved on it of St George and the dragon. Only George is wearing like a skirt? Which means somebody seen him either as a cross-dresser or a Roman soldier – you know the little whatsits they had, wiv the belt?’

‘St George is portrayed as a Roman?’

‘Well, that’s the answer, innit? That’s what it’s about. It’s the Romans slaughtering the Celts. You really here for inspiration?’

Lol told Bax about ‘The Simple Trackway Man’. Which could use another verse. Bax was delighted, clapped his hands.

‘A lot of Roman stuff around here, too,’ Lol said. ‘Or there
used to be. I was reading this poem by Wordsworth. “The men that have been reappear”.’

‘Yeah, yeah, I know it. Often wonder… did he
see
them?’ Bax waved his spliff. ‘Bigger than they know, that Roman town. Me and the missus found maybe a dozen coins down the years.’

‘And the men who reappear?’

Bax shuffled around, prodded a tyre on his bike.

‘I live in hope.’

Lol said, ‘Ever come across a bloke called Byron Jones?’

‘Round here? Should I have?’

‘I think he lives in a caravan. Or he did.’

‘Oh…’ Bax blew out smoke. ‘You mean
Colin
Jones?’