Lucifer's Crown (12 page)

"Please,” Maggie said with a wave of her hand. In some people Thomas's old-fashioned speech would be ludicrous, but it fit him, every inch—and he had a good many inches—the scholar.

"Did you sleep well?” Thomas asked Mick.

"I kept dreaming my dad was standing over me, all pale and woeful."

Maybe he was
, Maggie thought with a shudder.

Rose touched Mick's sleeve. “I'm sorry."

"Thank you,” he said, and ten years slipped off his face.

Disgruntled, Sean clambered into the back seat. Maggie rolled her eyes. With his sense of entitlement and his truculent need to prove something—anything—Sean reminded her of her former husband, Danny. Whatever Thomas needed to prove was nothing so straightforward as his manhood.

Rose settled on the far side of the same seat, leaving the center vacant. Mick sat down next to Anna. Maggie settled herself behind the wheel. “Seat belts on? Good. Off we go."

By the time they reached the main road she was ordering herself to relax. She'd driven on the left before, and chauffeured people talking about less interesting topics than Alfred the Great and Arthur—who, Thomas said, fought against the Angles but became the hero of English—the red dragon of Wales, the cross of Christ, the cauldron of the Great Goddess—the earth principle, said Thomas, and the male and the female. Not only his patrician accent but Mick's Scottish lilt made the American voices sound flat as the whine of a power saw.

The names on the road signs—"Charlton Mackrell,” “Compton Pauncefoot"—elicited outrageous puns even from Anna. The world, the flesh, and the Devil swelled inside Maggie's stomach until she felt ready to explode. The original prayer, she thought, went, “From the
deceits
of the world...” That was the issue, wasn't it? Deceit and trust. And yet the world was not deceitful. People were.

Soon they were driving through the narrow streets of Salisbury, making circles around the silvery spire of the cathedral. At last Maggie found a car park and turned everyone loose. Rose, Sean, and Mick moved off in a clump. “Maybe Sean's accepted him,” said Anna. “Nothing like comparing stories of pub-crawling and bar-hopping to forge a brotherhood."

Thomas ushered the group through an ancient archway and into the vast enclosure of the Cathedral Close. Sean aimed his camcorder toward the spire. “Church towers and spires are today's standing stones,” Maggie lectured. “Both cosmic pillars and phallic symbols."

"Raised not only to the greater glory of God but to the arrogance of man,” murmured Thomas.

"You know you've created God in your own image, when you think your enemies are His enemies,” Maggie returned.

"Quite.” Thomas's eyes glinted with something more than sunlight.

Fey
, she thought. Maybe that described her mood, too, goaded by fate into—into what? Demanding answers?

They entered the cathedral through the north porch, passing a bulletin board lined with notices. Inside, ash-gray Gothic arches sprang one upon the other higher and higher, until the vault of the nave ceiling was the vault of heaven itself. Shape and shadow met in an austere harmony, plainchant in stone. The air was cool and damp, scented with mildew, flowers, and candle wax. The throb in Maggie's stomach beat like a drum,
dust in your hands, wet by blood, knotwork in flesh willing when the spirit is weak
...

Delivering commentary, Thomas led them past another chapel of St. Thomas Becket to the far end of the building. “Here we have the Prisoners of Conscience window, created only twenty years ago."

Beyond a grove of slender marble pillars glowed a stained glass window, multiple faces and forms on a blue background. The Virgin's tranquil blue, Maggie noted, not Mary Magdalene's red, despite—or because of—the blood shed by centuries of martyrs. “Martyr” meant “witness,” after all—a conscious witness, not an innocent bystander.
Wet with blood, feet of clay
...

Mick, Rose, and Sean threaded the blue-gray pillars to the far side of the chapel. Behind her, Maggie heard Anna's hushed voice, each word carefully measured. “The faces in the window look like the faces on the train platform as the soldiers loaded the boxcars going to Auschwitz. Most of my family died at Auschwitz."

"I'm very sorry to hear that.” Thomas said.

"The one redeeming feature of the Holocaust was that so many people risked their lives to save others. You remind me of one of them, a Catholic priest who carried many Jewish children to safety. I was one of those children. I've often wondered what happened to that man, whether he paid for his faith with his life."

"I should imagine,” Thomas said, his quiet voice resonating among the pillars, “he lived on to continue his search for redemption."

Maggie glanced around to see Anna cast one last look at Thomas, part baffled, part calculating, and then walk quickly after the others. What was that all about? Redemption? Was that something you found, like buried treasure? Was it something you earned by building a cathedral? By risking your life for another? Simply by believing? You didn't find it by persecuting other people, Maggie knew that much.

The students, Mick, and Thomas were moving down the far aisle. She hurried after them. At the crossing of the nave and the transepts Thomas told them to sight upward along a column. It was perceptibly bent, the stone sagging beneath the weight of the great spire. In the south transept he announced, “The chapels of St. Margaret of Scotland, who reconciled the Celtic and Roman churches. St. Lawrence, a Grail-saint. St. Michael, dragon-slayer and weigher of souls, who was an angel long before the life of Our Lord. And,” Thomas added, “here's Mrs. Howard, the librarian. Edith!"

The woman who emerged from a door in the corner of the transept could have been anywhere between fifty and seventy, with short gray hair and a stylish purple sweater and skirt. “Good to see you again, Thomas. And this must be the student group from America."

Maggie introduced herself and the others, concluding, “Thank you so much for letting the students use the library, Mrs. Howard. They all know their topics. If you could just show them the references, they can take care of themselves.” She punctuated her sentence with a severe look. “Right?"

"Don't leave the cathedral,” Thomas directed.

All three faces, Anna, Rose, and Sean, nodded agreement.

"I'll sure we'll get on famously.” Mrs. Howard led them toward the door. Rose shot one last smile at Mick and was gone.

"I'll be having a wee dauner down to the police station.” Mick swayed back and forth, like a magnet caught between positive and negative poles, then fell into a brisk walk that carried him around the corner.

Maggie saw that a stringy-haired girl was watching them from the ranks of wooden chairs. Well, Mick and Sean were almost as eye-catching as Rose, in a more terrestrial way. Taking a deep breath, she turned to Thomas. “You said you'd answer some questions."

"Yes, I did. Although the answers may be more than you want to hear."

The word made flesh, in the world made true, and the Devil take his due from your hands
. The words, the images crowded together in Maggie's head, beating out time, beating time itself. She was caught between medieval fantasy, soap opera, and the Twilight Zone. She was caught in Thomas London's eyes, their embers flaring into a fire so hot and strong she felt sure she was casting a shadow on the gray stone of the floor.

The issue, she thought, was not only what he wanted from her, but what she wanted from him. Maggie reached for her keys. “Try me."

"Park in the farmyard,” Thomas told Maggie.

She had driven the three miles from Salisbury without speaking, but not, he thought with a glance at the sun-dappled highlights in her dark eyes, without thinking. Now she parked in the farmyard and leaned over the steering wheel to look as skeptically up at the vast mound of Old Sarum as she looked at him.

What were the children singing last night?
From the deceits of the Devil deliver me
? An appropriate motto for the day's work—assuming the day's work went as it should. As, please God, it must. This time he would not betray his own decision.

The slams of their doors echoed from the looming earthen ramparts. Thomas climbed the gate across the path and offered Maggie his hand. She took it. Her flesh sent a wave of warmth up his arm, as though the same swift palpitation of hope and dread pulsed in her body as in his.

They walked toward the mound of the Norman stronghold that rose above the hub of the Iron Age hill fort, past the ruined gatehouse and up to a track atop the highest earthen battlements. There they stood, braced against the rush of wind, not quite side-by-side, not quite back-to-back. A landscape sculpted by time and man rolled away before them, the cathedral city of Salisbury looking like a child's model in the valley below. Catching his breath, Thomas smelled not only smoke but a teasing odor of incense. The Otherworld, then, did indeed interlace itself with this one, here and now.

Maggie's nostrils flared. Her expression of skepticism deepened into suspicion, but all she said was, “Okay, we're here. How about those answers—you know, who, what, when, where. Why."

"Today is the feast day of St. Winifred of Wales. The story of her martyrdom is yet another echo of an old Celtic tale. Her shrine, Holywell, draws pilgrims to this day."

"That's the when. And the where?"

"Celt, Roman, Anglo-Saxon, Dane—the many peoples of Britain have all been familiar with this place. Sarum was once the site of a great Norman castle and a greater cathedral. But by 1164 secular and spiritual rivalries had driven Sarum into decline. King Henry II preferred his hunting lodge at Clarendon, just beyond that hill."

"The Constitutions of Clarendon,” Maggie said obligingly, “were a compromise in the power struggle between church and state. Becket as Archbishop of Canterbury signed, but the next day retracted his signature. His allies mocked him, saying, ‘Only our leader fled the field.’”

Thomas's jaw tightened, sending a ripple of tension down his spine. Waves of grass rose and fell like sea-swells around the massive earthworks. Hares gamboled up and down the slopes.

"Going beyond history to legend,” prompted Maggie, “Sarum is one of the places that might be Camlann, where Arthur was defeated."

"Like Glastonbury, Sarum is older than the legions, older than the Celts. Look there, beyond the spire of the cathedral—can you see the mound of another hill fort, Clearbury Ring?"

She squinted toward the southern horizon. “Oh—yes."

"Stand atop Clearbury and sight north, and the line will pass through the cathedral, across Sarum, and into the circle of Stonehenge. Close by Amesbury, where Guinevere did penance after Camlann."

"Ley lines are more wishful thinking than real."

"Mostly, yes. Not this one. Nor the line through Glastonbury, which begins at St. Michael's Mount off Cornwall, passes through other high places devoted to St. Michael, and ends at Avebury stone circle."

"Those lines must cross somewhere, like x marks the spot."

"They cross at Liddington Castle, another ancient hill fort, reputed to be the site of the battle of Mount Badon, Arthur's greatest victory."

"Where he won a generation of peace...” Maggie's brows cramped. “By the time the Saxons reached Glastonbury they'd become Christians, and didn't destroy it. Are you trying to tell me that Glastonbury is so important that supernatural forces, God, whatever—arranged history around it?"

"All I can tell you is that Sarum is a place of conflict and exclusion,” Thomas answered. “The Waste Land of Arthurian myth. Whilst Glastonbury is a place of inclusion, growth, and renewal. Avalon."

"So inclusion is your answer to life, the universe, and everything?” For a long moment she considered his words, her expression indicating an emotion between incredulity and impatience. “That's great. I like it. But where do Vivian and Calum come in?"

"They are but the tip of the iceberg. Its body is a pattern which was laid down in deepest antiquity by those supernatural forces we call faith. But I can't play my role in that pattern, or lead anyone else into his—hers—without confronting Robin Fitzroy."

Maggie's gaze raked him like a cannon salvo. “I wondered when we were going to get to him. Have you arranged to meet him here?"

"I hope to attract his attention.” Thomas set off along the path which followed the top of the battlement.

Below lay the foundations of the cathedral, its crossed arms diagrammed in concrete, the arc of the ancient earthworks making of it a Celtic cross. Another symbol almost filled the square of the cloister, the whorls of an immense fingerprint drawn upon the green grass. Across it cut black bars, as though canceling it out.

"A labyrinth,” Maggie said, catching him up. “A Cretan spiral. Another pre-Christian survival."

"Yes,” said Thomas, as much to himself as to her. His senses itched like skin wearing a hair shirt.
The word made flesh, feet of clay
... Here and now, it had to be here and now. He led the way down a flight of muddy steps so quickly Maggie had to run. In moments they stood inside the cloister.

She brushed her fingertips across the stiffened grass. “The labyrinth is paint, but the bars are burned. Did the Foundation people try to break up a labyrinth ceremony here? If all this is about freedom of religion, then you can count on me."

"Thank you.” Thomas considered her intelligent and demanding face, her cheeks burnished to the crimson of a ripe apple by the cold wind. She was more than a pawn if not quite a queen—a knight, perhaps, leaping at unexpected angles. The queen waited at the center of the labyrinth, whether Mary the Holy Mother or Ariadne the Great Mother didn't matter. The journey mattered, and the defeat of the beast who blocked the way.

Maggie stood up, brushing off her hands. “Have I passed the historical trivia test? Are you going to tell me what's really going on here?"

His smile was taut as a bowstring. “It's not your test, but mine. Until I tell the truth about who and what I am, I cannot move freely against Robin."

"Is he blackmailing you?"