Phil Rickman: A Crown of Lights

She heard singing – inane, redneck gospel, with all the spirituality of a football chant.

‘We shall raise the sword of Christ and strike the Devil down.’

‘Sounds like your people, Merrily,’ Ned Bain said. ‘And my cue to disappear.’

In the night, with all the spearing torches, the hymn sounded dense and menacing. Merrily remembered the Christian biker with the dead dragon on his T-shirt.

‘This is what you wanted, isn’t it, Ned?’

‘If I were you,’ Ned Bain said, ‘I’d stay well out of it. Call that a gentle warning. Call it a prophecy. Goodnight, Merrily.’ He turned and merged with the shadows. ‘There’s blood on your hands. Why’s that, I wonder?’

She didn’t see how, in this light, he could possibly have seen her hands. And she’d got it all off, hadn’t she?

In the shimmering silence of the open ruins, with the tower rearing behind his priestess, Robin brought a taper from the fire and lit the candles around the crown of lights. The little flames sprang brightly. Robin said,

‘Behold the Three-formed Goddess,

She who is ever Three

Yet is she ever One.

For without Spring there can be no Summer,

Without Summer, no Winter.

Without Winter, no new Spring.’

Tears in his eyes as he gazed on his goddess. She was everything he’d ever imagined, the beautiful book cover he’d painted so often in his head for the book which was too profound, too poetic, too resonant for anyone yet to have written. He looked into Betty’s eyes and then up at the blurred moon.

‘Listen to the words of the Great Mother – She who, of old, was also called among men Artemis, Astarte, Athene, Dion, Melusine, Aphrodite, Ceridwen, Dana, Arianrhod, Isis, Brigid and by many other names.’

And so it went on, and when it was over, the maid took up a broomstick and walked clockwise around the fire, followed by the mother and the crone, sweeping away the old, and Robin prayed to the moon for the badness and torment in this place to be swept away for ever.

When the torch and lamp lights were enlarged, beams crossing in the air, and the hymn behind her began to sound like the baying of wolves, Merrily looked up and saw him.

Just a shadow against the stars, then faintly lit by the lanterns on the battlements. He was not in his white robes, which would have been too conspicuous; someone would have seen him getting into the tower.

‘Oh Christ,’ Merrily said. She turned to Jane. ‘Stay there.’

‘No chance,’ Jane muttered, and followed her towards the church.

They kept close to the walls so they couldn’t be seen from the tower itself, passed by the Gothic window full of lights, edged around the building to the opening, where the south porch had been. Merrily began to pray softly and realized, with horror, that she was praying to God for protection against His servants at the gate.

She was very anxious now.

Robin picked up, from outside the ring of stones surrounding the fire, two twigs of holly he’d cut a week ago and hung over the back door, so that they were now nicely brittle.

The coven gathered around him. He knelt before the fire and set light to each twig in turn and held it up for them all to see. Then he tossed each of the twigs into the flames. And the coven chanted with him, in what ought to have been joy and optimism but sounded scarily flat and formulaic,

‘Thus we banish Winter,

Thus we welcome Spring,

Say farewell to what is dead

And greet each living thing.

Thus we banish Winter,

Thus we welcome Spring.’

Then the coven melted away, into the shadows and out of the church, Max patting Robin on the shoulder as he passed. ‘Well done, mate,’ Max whispered.

All over.

All over, but for the Great Rite.

A double sleeping bag lay directly under the tower, protected from the wind, a candle-lantern quietly alight at either end.

Robin stood by the fire. Betty walked away towards the base of the tower and when she reached it, she turned around, all aglow in her nest of candles. But the glow came from more than the candles, and there was a strange moment of fusion, as if the whole church was a crown of lights around them both, and Betty’s gown slipped down with a silken rustling, and Robin’s heart leapt like a fawn and he moved towards her along the open nave.

And then he heard a voice, cold and strident on the night.

‘Foul serpent!’

Robin looked up and saw the spectre on the battlements, its arms raised like the twin points of a pentagram upside down.

‘O most glorious leader of the heavenly armies, defend us in our war against the dark spirits which rule this world and the spirits of wickedness in the high places. For the Holy Church venerates you as her guardian and the Lord has entrusted to You the souls of the redeemed, to be led into heaven.’

‘St Michael,’ Merrily explained. ‘He’s invoking St Michael. It’s his exorcism.’

She stood in the entrance, with Jane.

‘You’ve got to do something,’ Jane said.

A bright light lanced over the kid’s shoulder. A TV cameraman was moving up behind her. They were all piling in now, whether they’d come over the gate or across the bridge, forming a big circle around the ruins. But it had been a small church and she and Jane were blocking the narrow entrance. People began to push at her back.

‘Make them go away!’ A woman’s voice she’d heard somewhere before... I can show you a church with a tower and graves and everything ... ‘This is sacrilege!’

Merrily put an arm around Jane and didn’t move.

Ellis boomed from the tower, his voice like a klaxon in the still, freezing air. ‘In the name of Jesus Christ, our Lord, and of Michael, the Archangel, we confidently undertake to repulse the deceits of Satan!’

Merrily was furious. He was not entitled. He was not entitled to wield the name of Christ like an axe... or the cross of Christ like a dildo...

Robin Thorogood couldn’t seem to move. He stood in the nave, staring up, as if his blood had turned to ice. Impaled by TV lights, he looked like a prisoner caught in the searchlights escaping from some concentration camp. Merrily couldn’t see Betty.

From the tower, in the haze of the lanterns, Ellis cried, ‘God arises! His enemies are dissembled, and those who hate Him shall fall down before him. Just as the smoke of hellfire is driven away, so are they driven. Just as wax melts before the fire, so shall the wicked perish before the presence of God. Behold—’

He stopped. Betty had walked out. She was robed again. She looked terrified, but she didn’t look up, not once.

She was somehow still wearing the crown of lights.

And Merrily, in a vibrantly dark moment, was already hearing the verse from Revelation when he started to broadcast the words.

‘Now a great sign appeared in heaven... a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet... and on her head... a garland of twelve stars...!’

Robin Thorogood shouted, ‘No... that’s not...’ Throwing out his arms in protest.

‘Serpent!’

Merrily saw what she knew that Ellis was seeing. She saw the picture in his war room, the one by William Blake, and it turned Robin’s arms into great webbed, leathery wings the colours of a freshly dug worm, and his wild hair into a ram’s curling horns. She saw the Woman Clothed with the Sun, stars around her head, a twinkling lure for the Great Red Dragon.

Merrily at last gave way to the prods and thrusts at her back.

Robin saw the small, dark-haired woman running into the nave.

‘ No ...’ she was yelling. ‘ Please God, no .’