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.'

And when he heard, from above, this sickening, crumbling, creaking, cracking sound, he realized he was screaming too as he hurled himself towards Betty, threw his arms around her and bore her to the ground, covering her with his body and closing his eyes as the first stone came out of the sky.

He didn't feel it. He couldn't feel anything. But he could hear other people's screams and, above them all, Ellis's bellow.

'And there was war in heaven!'

Robin just lay across his goddess on the sleeping bag, unmoving as the black sky tumbled.

He opened his eyes just once, to watch the crown of lights rolling away like a cheap Catherine wheel, the birthday candles going out one by one.

There were many other lights, too, but he closed his eyes on them; many other sounds, but he didn't listen to them. He heard only the heart of his goddess, and his own voice whispering the words which moved him beyond all others.

In the fullness of time we shall be born again, at the same time and in the same place as each other, and we shall meet and know and remember... and love again...

59.

Damage HE WAS A tall, stooping man with a mournful, half-moon kind of face, a heavy grey moustache. He was the recently appointed head of Dyfed-Powys CID, a mere caretaker role, he said, before retirement. His name was Gwyn Arthur Jones, detective superintendent. Gomer Parry knew him from way back, which saved them some time.

But it was still close to three a.m. before they left the incident room Dr Coll's waiting room for the comparative privacy of Dr Coll's surgery. The door was closed, and a metal Anglepoise burned on a desk swept clean of all papers.

Formal statements had been taken and signed. Jane was asleep on Dr Coll's couch. Sophie had taken Eirion back to Hereford and his stepmother's car.

Detective Superintendent Gwyn Arthur Jones had brought out his pipe and discovered a bottle of single malt in Dr Coll's filing cabinet.

'Kept naggin' at me, see,' Gomer said, 'that piece o' ground. Amateur job, stood out a mile. Why would bloody Gareth dig it up again and put it back, 'less he was lookin' for treasure, and Gareth wouldn't know treasure 'less it come in a bloody brass-bound chest with "Treasure" wrote on it.'

'And Mrs Prosser?' The superintendent's accent was West Wales, quite soft, a first-language Welsh-speaker's voice. 'Did no one ever nurture uncharitable suspicions about her?'

'Judy?' Gomer shook his head as though he would go on shaking it for ever. 'Not me. Least nothin' I could get a ring-spanner to. But her kept croppin' up, ennit? I kept sayin' to the vicar, didn't I, vicar, you wanner talk to Judy... Judy's smart... Judy knows. Bloody hell, Gwyn, I never guessed Judy knowed it all.'

'And still holding out on us.' Gwyn Arthur sipped Dr Coll's whisky. Merrily had noticed that when he'd taken the bottle from the drawer he'd replaced it with a twenty-pound note. 'I don't somehow think she will ever do otherwise. "Mrs Councillor Prosser, wife of a former chairman of the police committee" time and time again, like name, rank and number.'

'Local credentials,' Gomer said. 'Means everythin' here.'

'And Dr Collard Banks-Morgan, former acting police surgeon the allegations about him, he tells us, are quite risible. As we would have been further assured by Mr Weal, had the poor man not taken his own life. I suspect people cleverer than me will have to spend many days among Mr Weal's files.'

Gwyn Arthur poured further measures of whisky into those little plastic measuring vessels you got with your medicine.

'All in all,' he said, 'never, in my experience, have so many eminently respectable, conspicuously guilty people lied so consistently through their teeth. I'm awfully afraid, Mrs Watkins, that you are destined for a considerable period in the witness box.'

'What will you do with Ellis?' Merrily asked.

'We'll hold him until the morning, then we shall have to think in terms of charges, and I'm very much afraid that my imagination, at present, will not stretch a great deal further than wilful damage if that regardless of the tragic consequences. He didn't even have to break into the tower. Just bolted himself in from the inside. What happened later was, he insists, an unfortunate accident. He hasn't even described it as the will of God. The tower parapet, as the late Major Wilshire discovered to his ultimate cost, was horribly unstable. He did not mean for all those stones to fall.'

'What about the TV pictures?'

'Almost gratuitously graphic when it comes to portraying the results. But the lights on the cameras were insufficiently powerful to reach the top of the tower or to illuminate Ellis's movements in the moments before the stones were dislodged. I would give anything for it to be otherwise, but there we are.'

Merrily lit a cigarette with fingers which still would not stay steady. 'I'm not giving up on that bastard. Expect me at the station later today, with a Mrs Starkey, if I've got to drag her. But I don't think it'll come to that. Not now.'

'Yes, indecent assault is a better beginning.' Gwyn Arthur Jones drained his medicine measure and went to stand at the window. The only vehicles left on view in the village were the police cars and vans, Merrily's Volvo, Gomer's Land Rover and Nev's truck with the digger on the back. Gwyn Arthur came back and sat down and contemplated Merrily. 'And what else? What else, in your wildest imaginings, Merrily, would you think Ellis might have done?'

She took a tiny sip of Scotch. 'Well... have you got anybody yet for the village hall?'

'Interesting,' Gwyn Arthur said, 'but no we haven't. The travellers we brought in were most indignant.'

'I mean, it was all getting a bit tame, wasn't it? A few hymns, a little placard-waving. He'd had his chance to convince three hundred fundamentalist Christians that Satan was in residence in Old Hindwell, and he hadn't really pulled it off, had he?'

'You think he planned to inflame these people, as it were, with the thought that the pagans wanted to burn them alive? Maybe to drive them to excesses?'

'Knowing full well he'd have been able to lead them to safety out of the rear entrance, even if Gomer hadn't turned up and received the credit? I think that's very much on the cards.'

'Hmm,' said the superintendent. 'Certainly, emotions among those decent, church-going Christians were running at a level possibly unparalleled since the days of the witch-hunts. There's no question in my mind that it could have become extremely nasty... if, ironically enough, those stones had not fallen when and where they did.'

'You could always check out his robe for petrol traces or something.'

'No one as yet, has been able to find his robe,' said Gwyn Arthur Jones regretfully. 'He doesn't remember where he left it. Unlike Mrs Prosser, he's being entirely cooperative. He tells us he chose to go alone to the church, one man against a horde of heathens, precisely because he did not want his legitimate Christian protest against the desecration of the house of God to become a bloodbath. Several witnesses confirm that he tried to stop them.'

Merrily closed her eyes. 'He doesn't like churches. Churches are disposable. Instead, he set up in this village hall because it was close to Old Hindwell Church... the battleground. He claimed he'd been getting anonymous letters, phone calls... signs on the Internet.' She sighed. 'Do you know the Book of Revelation at all? The paintings of William Blake?'

Betty stared down into the near-black water. She said slowly, 'O Lord, Jesus Christ, Saviour Salvator, I beseech the salvation of all who dwell within from witchcraft and from the power of all evil men or women or spirits or wizards or hardness of heart. Amen Amen Amen.'

An ambulance warbled across the city. Maybe the one which had brought her here several hours ago.

From the viewing platform above Victoria Bridge, the suspension footbridge over the Wye, bushes hid the sprawl of Hereford County Hospital.

It was dawn, that coldest time, with only a few lights across the river, shining through the bare, grey trees.

'Either the charm didn't work,' she said, 'or it worked all too well.'

'Get rid of it,' Merrily said.

Half an hour ago, she'd been waiting with Betty when the orthopaedic surgeon, who was called Frank, had explained that Robin's pelvis was smashed, and there was some spinal damage. 'Will he walk again?' Betty had asked. Frank couldn't answer that one, yet, but he said he was hopeful.

Merrily said bitterly, 'War in heaven, and all the casualties down here.'

'Don't you go losing your faith,' Betty said. 'It's only religion. Faith is faith, but religions are no better than the people who practise them.'