Candlenight (54 page)

   
"Aye, I remember now—he
spoke Welsh to me. I switched over to English pretty smartly, mind, when I realised
how good he was."
   
"Typical."

   
"Well, I was brought up in
the Valleys. Welsh is only my second language, see. You don't like to be put to
shame in your own country by an Englishman."
   
"Good heavens, no."

   
"And you say this vicar
thought he topped himself because he couldn't turn it on in the church?"
   
That was what he said."

   
"Sounds highly unlikely to
me," Guto said. "Red hot, he was. And it's not an easy language to
learn. This is what you wanted to tell Morelli?"

   
"More or less." She
told him how Berry Morelli had gone to Y Groes with Giles Freeman and returned
feeling very funny, disturbed over some son of dubious psychic experience.
"And when Freeman snuffed it suddenly, he got very upset. And now these other
two people. Giles's in-laws . . .Well, gosh, it's even made me think. It's a
lot of deaths, isn't it?"

   
"Probably more than you
know," Guto said. "But it's all explained and, after all, they
were—"

   
He'd been about to say they
were all English, but stopped himself on the grounds that she could do a man a
lot of damage, this one.

   
"Well, I'm going there
tomorrow night," he said.

   
"I heard."

   
"So if you want to tag along,
it'll be one more in the audience."

   
"Super," Miranda said.
"I look forward to it. Where do you think Morelli's gone? Will he be there
tomorrow?"
   
"How should I know?"

   
"It's snowing again."
Miranda said, switching out the bedside light so they could see the white blobs
buffeting the long window. "Quite hard, too."

"Berry, wake up. Please."

   
He turned his head into the
steam from a white cup of black tea.

   
"What's the time,
Beth?"

   
"Nearly four-thirty. I'm
sorry to wake you, but my thoughts are killing me."

   
He sat up, took the cup. Waking
wasn't so hard.

   
"Please can we talk. About
everything."

   
"We can try, kid,"
Berry said. He'd called her Beth and he'd called her kid, and she hadn't
reacted. She must be serious about this.

   
"OK," he said.
"So what are we into here? One sentence. One word. Say it."
   
Bethan said, "Magic."

   
"That's the word,"
Berry said. 'That's the word we've been walking all around and poking at with
the end of a stick on account of we don't like to touch it."

   
"Perhaps there are two
words," Bethan said.

   
"And the other one,"
Berry said, taking her hand, "is black. Right?"

   
They sat on the edge of the bed
in the overheated hotel room, holding hands and drinking tea and watching the snow
fall, feeling more afraid now the word had escaped.

Chapter
 
LXI

Hotel staff had cleared most of the snow from the carpark, but Berry had
to dig out the Sprite, which coughed like hell and turned the air blue with
acrid smoke.

   
"Could be pneumonia,"
he said anxiously, driving into the centre of Hereford, where the early morning
streets had a first-fall purity that would last maybe until the shops opened.

   
The snow had stopped soon after
dawn, but the bloated sky suggested this was only an interim gesture of
goodwill.

   
The city library was almost opposite
the cathedral and at this hour they had no problem parking right outside.
Waiting for the library to open, they wandered the cathedral grounds, an
ancient island cut off from the city by a soft white sea.

   
Bethan said, "If it snows
again we may not make it back for days. We'll have problems anyway; it could be
a lot worse in Wales."

   
Berry thought it would be no
bad thing if they didn't get back for weeks, but he said nothing.

   
On the way here, they'd talked
about the baby.

   
He said it was the most insidious
case of rape he'd ever heard of. "Some bastard has to pay."

   
Bethan thought this was unlikely.
"I'm sure, you see," she told him. "that when I was offered the
head teacher's post—at the express request of the school governors, I've since
discovered—it was expected that I would return very pregnant. And of course the
baby would be looked after while I was at the school—very caring people in Y
Groes. And the child would grow up like all the rest."

   
"What would that
mean?"

   
"I can't explain it very
easily. They are children of Y Groes. Steeped in the Welsh
traditions—traditions which no longer apply anywhere else, not to this extent
anyway.
Although the community is . . . clings, if you like, to its church, this church
is different. There's an element in the religion of the village which is almost
pre-Christian. It accepts all the eerie, psychic things—the
toili
and the
cannwyll gorff
and the bird of death—as part of life's fabric. All
right, that's not unusual in itself, rural west Wales is riddled with superstition,
but here it's a way of life."

   
"But the church is
Anglican." Berry said now, under the massive spireless tower of Hereford
Cathedral. "Like this place."

   
"Not so simple."
Bethan was wearing her pink woolly hat and a red scarf wound twice around her
neck. 'The old Celtic church was the earliest form of Christianity in Britain and
it probably absorbed many elements of paganism. Nobody knows for sure what its
rituals were, or its dogma. I suppose we can say the two earliest known
religious
influences in Wales were the Celtic church and . . . what remained of Druidism,
I imagine. Intermingled."

   
"It says in Guto's book that
it used to be suggested Owain Glyndwr had been trained in Druidic magic. Like,
he was some kind of sorcerer who could alter the weather and—"

   
"—Call spirits from the
Vasty Deep," said Bethan. "Yes. Obviously. Guto is deeply dismissive
of all this. He wants Glyndwr to have been some sort of pragmatic early
socialist with a deep commitment to democracy and the classless society."

   
"What do
you
think?"

   
"I think Glyndwr was probably
fumbling in the dark like the rest of us." Bethan said, taking his arm.
"You need a thicker coat, Berry, you must be freezing."

In the library they paused to glance through the morning papers. Over Ray
Wheeler's story in the
Mirror
was the
headline:

W—KERS!

GUTO BLASTS THE BOMBERS.

Bethan shook her head wryly. "The things an election campaign can
do to a person. Not three weeks ago he was saying that while he deplored the
methods, he could fully understand the motives of anti-English terrorism."

   
They went up some stairs, and
Berry said to the guy in the reference section. "We're interested in
aspects of Welsh folklore. The, ah—"

   
"
Gorsedd Ddu
" Bethan said.

   
"I don't think I've heard
of that," the guy said, and Bethan assured him this was not so surprising.

   
They spent more than an hour
bent over a table, exploring maybe twenty books. At one stage Berry went down
and moved the Sprite to avoid collecting a parking ticket. When he returned,
Bethan announced that she was satisfied there was nothing to be learned here.

   
"This mean there's nothing
actually documented on the, ah ... "

   
"
Gorsedd Ddu
. Probably not."

   
Before they left the hotel
Bethan had given him a very brief history of the Welsh bardic tradition. Of the
Dark Age poets, of whom the best known was Taliesyn. And how, in the nineteenth
century Edward Williams, who called himself Iolo Morgannwg—Iolo of
Glamorgan—had identified himself as the Last Druid in Wales and set about
singlehandedly restoring the tradition. It was Iolo, an inventive antiquarian
scholar not averse to forging ancient verse to prove his point, who established
what was to become the National Eisteddfod of Wales—the annual gathering of poets
and singers and cultural leaders honoured as "bards".

   
The inner circle of which was
the
Gorsedd
—whose members appeared in
white ceremonial costumes such as the Druids were believed to have worn.

   
"You mean it's all crap?"
Berry had said, astonished. "The great Welsh bardic tradition was
dreamed up
by this guy, bridging a
cultural gap between the nineteenth century and the Dark Ages? It's all
bullshit?"

   
"Well, let us say, ninety
per cent bullshit. But it did fulfil a need in the Welsh people to . . . exalt
their heritage, I suppose. It gave them this annual showcase for the language and
the poetry. The Welsh love to show off."

   
"And they conveniently
forgot about the antisocial side of the Druids—like human sacrifices in the oak
groves under the full moon, all that heavy ritual stuff?"

   
"Ah, now, some Celtic
scholars say the Druids did not sacrifice people or even animals—that was just
stories put about by the Romans. We only have people like Julius
Caesar to rely on for concrete information about Druidism. But, yes, the
organisers of the eisteddfodau have even forgotten that the Druids were pagan.
It has always been a
very God-fearing festival."

   
They collected all the books
together and took them back to the man in charge of the department.

"Nothing"?" he said. "Are you sure you've got it right
about this
Gorsedd,
er—"

   
"
Ddu
," Bethan said. "It means black. The Black Gorsedd. Yes,
but don't worry, there is nothing wrong with your books."

   
"Oh, we do know
that." he said.

They sat a while in the car with the engine running, for heat. "Where's
that leave us?" Berry said.

   
No more snow had fallen and
last night's was already being trampled into slush.

   
Bethan said. "They talk
about the
Gorsedd Ddu
in some places
like you talk of bogeymen, to frighten the children. Eat your greens or the black
bards will get you. Or the
Gwrach y
rhibyn
"

   
"What's that?"

   
"The
Gwrach
? A sort of Welsh death-hag. A monstrous woman with black
teeth and leathery wings who's supposed to scare people to death and then steal
away their immortal souls. She's a vengeful demon who preys on those who have sinned."

   
"Jeez, what a country.
What do the black bards do?"

   
"Well, the inference is
that while the white bards—"

   
"—as invented by this Iolo
guy—"

   
"I wish I hadn't told you
that. now. Yes, the white bards, while they are amiable pacifists, the
Gorsedd Ddu
are supposed to have very real
magical powers. They are stern and cold and . . . perhaps vindictive."

   
"Question is." Berry said, "do they exist? This is the bottom
line. And if they do, do they have any more of a solid foundation than the old
guys at the eisteddfod or are
we just looking at a bunch of fruitcakes?"

   
"And if they have—"
Bethan leaned back in the ruptured bucket seat, the side windows and the screen
all misted, blurred ghosts of people walking past. "If they have
foundation . . . powers . . . what can we do about it anyway?"

   
"Magic's not illegal any
more. Not even black magic."
   
"Killing people is."

   
"How can we say that?
Natural causes, accidents, suicide and, OK, a murder now. But it's solved."
   
"Yes, it sounds silly.
Utterly."

   
"We're saying there's a—an
atmosphere, whatever, generated here. Which causes outsiders—say, people not
protected by the village or by this aura of Welshness, whatever that
means—either to lose the will to live, to fail in what they most want to
do—"