Up among the barren peaks, the wind whined and howled, swooping down to tear at our flesh with talons of ice. The gale was unrelenting, save for the chance protection afforded by a rock or wall as the road twisted and wound its tortured way along—sometimes no more than a footpath clawed from the mountainside, little wider than a scar. Everyone walked, for we dared not risk a fall on such a treacherous trail.
Since we could no longer ride, we loaded all the horses with as much hard-scrabble gorse as they could carry. Each animal looked like a walking furze hillock bouncing along. We went more slowly than I would have liked. Still, but for the road, we could not have made the climb at all.
On and on we went, dragging ourselves blue-lipped and shivering from one march to the next, cringing, tears streaming from our eyes as the wind and cold pared us to the bone. We grew hard as leather and sharp as knives. We grew hungry, too, with a fierce and gnawing desire no feast could satisfy. It was a longing to be healed as much as filled, a yearning to return to Albion and allow the sight of its fair hills and glens to salve our ravaged hearts. It was taithchwant, the profound hunger for home.
But I could not go home. I would sooner abandon my life than my beloved. My enemy’s head would adorn my belt before I turned my steps toward Druim Vran; my wife would stand once more beside me before I turned my face toward Dinas Dwr. My queen would return with me to Albion, or I would not return at all.
At dusk, the first night after crossing the mountain threshold, we sensed a change in the mood of the land. But it was not until two nights later, when we had penetrated deep into the mountain fortress, that the change began to make itself felt. Where the lowland moors had been bleak and broody, the mountains were threatening; where the forest had been forbidding, the mountains were menacing. And it was not merely the threat of plunging from the narrow road to die on the broken rocks below. There was a wary malevolence aprowl among the peaks, a dark power that deemed our presence an invasion and reacted accordingly.
On the third night we finally understood the nature of our adversary. The day’s march had gone well; we had made good progress and had found a suitable refuge for the night in a deep divide between two peaks. Solid rock walls rose sheer from the roadside, the surface raked jagged as if the road had been hacked through the mountain with a dagger; the peaktops were lost in cloud above us. Here the wind could not reach us so easily; thus the place provided a welcome respite and made as good a shelter as could be found in those bare crags.
We huddled close to the fires, as always, but that night as the gale rose to its customary shriek, we heard in the wind-wail a new and chilling note. Tegid, ever alert to the subtle shifts and shades of light and sound, was first to perceive it. “Listen!” he hissed.
The talk, low and quiet around the fire, ceased. We listened, but heard nothing—save the icy blast tearing itself on the naked peaks of Tor Esgyrnau.
I leaned close. “What did you hear?”
“Did and do,” Tegid said, cocking his head to one side. “There— again!”
“I hear the wind,” Bran volunteered, “but nothing more.”
“Nor will you if you keep drowning it with your own voice.”
We waited a long while. When the sound did not come again, I asked, “What did it sound like?”
“A voice,” he said, hunching his shoulders more tightly. “I thought I heard a voice. That is all.”
The way he said it—curt and dismissive—made me curious. “Whose voice?”
He poked a loose ember back into the campfire with the tip of his staff, but made no reply.
“Whose voice, Tegid?”
Cynan and Bran, and several others sitting near, looked on with increasing interest. Tegid glanced around, and then back to the fire quickly. “The storm is rising,” he said.
“Answer me, bard. Whose voice did you hear?”
He drew a breath, and said the name I least expected to hear. “Ollathir’s,” he replied softly. “I thought I heard Ollathir.”
“Ollathir? He has been dead for years. He is—”
“Well I know it!”
“But—”
“You asked me whose voice I heard,” he replied, speaking angrily and low. “And I am telling you the truth. I thought I heard Ollathir, Chief Bard of Albion, long dead in his grave.”
The words were still hanging in the air when Bran leapt to his feet. “I heard it!” He stood over us, his face in shadow. “There! Do you hear?” He paused. “And again! But it is not your Ollathir—it is Alun Tringad!”
Cynan turned a baleful eye toward me. “There is something uncanny here, I feel.” His voice was a wary whisper, as if he feared being overheard.
The fire creaked and ticked, and the wind cried. Then Cynan himself rose slowly to his feet, placing a finger to his lips. “No . . . no . . .” he said, his voice little more than a sigh, “it is not Alun I hear, it is” —amazement transformed his features in the firelight—“Cynfarch . . . my father!”
Soon the whole camp was in turmoil, as everyone succumbed to the eerie voice of a dead friend or kinsman. Everyone, that is, except me. I heard only the wild wind wail, but that was unnerving enough. For as night wore on the gale raked more fiercely at the unseen peaks and fell shrieking from the heights. We could only cower closer to the fire and hold our hands over our ears.
And then even the fires were taken from us. The wind screamed down between the walls like a rushing waterfall. The campfires flattened, guttered, and went out. Plunged into a chill darkness churning with the gale and the cries of dead friends and loved ones, the men began scrambling for their weapons.
“Tegid!” I shouted, trying to make myself heard above the wind-roar. “Someone is going to get hurt if we do not act.”
“I fear you are right,” agreed Cynan. “It is most unchancy in the dark.”
“What do you suggest?” replied Tegid. “I cannot stop the wind!”
“No, but we can stop the men from running amok.”
At that, he jumped up onto a nearby rock and raised high his staff. “Aros! Aros illawr! ” he shouted in the bullroar voice of command. “Stay! Stand your ground. It is not the voices of the dead!” he cried. “Some treachery is upon us. But do not be deceived. Take courage!”
“They are calling us!” someone shouted. “The dead have found us! We are doomed!”
“No!” I told them. “Listen to our Wise Bard: we have all lost friends and loved ones. Our thoughts are with them, and so you imagine you hear their voices. It is a trick of the wind and storm. Nothing more.”
“Do you not hear them yourself ?” another frightened voice demanded.
“No, I do not. I hear only the wind,” I told them sternly. “It is raw and wild, but it is only the wind. Sit down, all of you, and we will wait it out together.”
This seemed to calm the men. They drew together, some with weapons at the ready and crouched shoulder to shoulder to wait. And, gradually, the gale died down and the eerie assault ceased.
We rekindled the fires and slowly relaxed and settled down to sleep, thinking the trouble was ended. Wishful thinking, as it turned out: the ordeal was just beginning.
31
BWGAN BWLCH
We had just settled to our rest when the eerie sounds began again, but not the voices alone. This time, the dead also appeared.
As the wind dropped, fog descended from the icy altitudes—a strange, ropy mist that ebbed and flowed in rippling tidewaves. Gray as death and cold, the elusive vapor stole among the bare rock face of the wall and slid over and around the rubble at the roadside, groping and curling like tendrils. The sentries were the first to see it and raised a tentative alarm. They were concerned but uncertain, as there was no clear danger.
“No, no,” I told Niall, who apologized for waking me, “this night was never meant for sleeping. What is happening?”
His face, deep-shadowed in the fitful light, screwed into a squint as he peered beyond me into the darkness. “A fog has come up,”
he said, paused, and glanced back to me. “It has an evil feel, lord. I do not like it.”
I rose and looked around. The fog had crept thick, forming a solid cover on the ground beyond the ring of light thrown out by our campfires. If it had been a living creature, I would have said it seemed reluctant to come into the light. Probably it was just the heat of the flames, creating a margin of space around us. Yet, it seemed almost sentient, the way it snaked and coiled as it thickened.
“It is watching us,” Niall whispered.
He was not the only one to feel that way. Very soon the unnatural vapor had formed a weird landscape almost man-height around us. Queer shapes bulged up from the mass only to melt back into it again. Men began to see things in the gray billows: floating limbs, heads, torsos, ethereal faces with empty eyes.
The horses did not like the fog; they raised such a commotion with their jerking and jigging and whinnying that I ordered them to be blindfolded and brought within the fire ring. They liked that scarcely better, but allowed themselves to be pacified.
Our fears, however, could not so easily be allayed. I ordered the men to arm themselves and to stand shoulder to shoulder and shield to shield. We took what comfort we could in the heft of our weapons and the nearness of our swordbrothers, watching helpless as the spectral display continued.
Disembodied heads mouthed silent words; detached arms gesticulated, legs twitched, and other body parts melded and separated in monstrous couplings. Grasping hands reached out from the mass and beckoned to us, melted and reformed as toothless mouths. I saw a huge lidless eye split into smiling lips, then dissolve into a puckered fistula.
“Clanna na cù!” Cynan growled under his breath.
Tegid, hovering near, whispered, “Something is stirring here that has slept for ages. The ancient evil of this land has awakened, and its minions stalk the land once more.”
Cynan turned his face, sweating despite the cold.
“What could do that?”
“Could it be Paladyr?” I wondered. “Could he have done something to rouse this—this evil power, whatever it is?”
“Perhaps,” Tegid allowed. “But I think it is a thing more powerful than Paladyr alone—a presence, maybe. I do not know. I feel it here.” He pressed his fist to his chest. “It is a sensation of deep wickedness. I do not think Paladyr capable of such hatred and malice.” He paused, thinking, and added, “This is more like . . .”
The ghostly shapes formed and congealed, altering in subtly suggestive ways. Watching this silent, shifting dance of the macabre put me in mind of Lord Nudd’s Demon Host at the Battle of Dun na Porth at Findargad. “Lord Nudd,” I said aloud. “Prince of Uffern and Annwn.”
“From the tale of Ludd and Nudd?” wondered Cynan.
“The same.”
At the mention of the name, I began to feel an almost hypnotic effect. Whatever hostile power animated the fog, it was beginning to exert a fell authority over us. I was drawn to it, coaxed, beckoned. Fascinated, my spirit yearned toward the billowing panoply of mutating forms.
Come to me, the fog seemed to say. Embrace me, and let me comfort you. Your struggle can be over; your striving can end. Sweet release. Oh, your release is near.
The sly seduction of this insinuation proved potent indeed to a band of bruised and exhausted warriors. Long on the trail in a harsh and hostile land, there were those among us who had begun to weaken. One young warrior across the circle from me threw down his shield and staggered forth. I called to his companions who hauled him back.
He was no sooner returned to the fold than another warrior, a man named Cadell, gave a cry, dropped his weapons, and made a dash into the fog. Thinking quickly, those on either side of him grabbed him by the arms and restrained him.
Cadell resisted. He dug in his feet and shook off those holding him. Turning, he made to run into the fog. A nearby warrior tripped him with the butt of a spear. His kinsmen were on him in a moment, dragging him back to the line. As if overcome by a gigantic strength, kicking and flailing with his arms, Cadell sent his holders flying. Screaming terribly, he staggered to his feet, turned, and lumbered toward the fog once more.
Calling for Bran’s aid, I darted after him. He had reached the fog, which seemed to surge toward him in an embrace, curling around his wrists and ankles. I felt a cold exhalation emanating from the undulating fog as I put my hand on the warrior’s shoulder—it was like touching a damp rock.
Cadell twisted around me, flinging out his arm. His flying elbow caught me on the point of the chin, and I was lifted off my feet and thrown back; I thought my head had come off. I rolled onto my knees, black stars spinning in dark circles before my eyes.
I shook my head fiercely. My assailant once again staggered into the fog. I stood on unsteady legs and launched myself at him. I did not try to turn him again, nor did I try to restrain him; it was too late for that. I simply sprang, raising my silver hand and bringing it sharply down on the nape of his neck.
The warrior stiffened and threw out his arms. He raised his head and screamed, then toppled backwards like a felled tree. He hit the ground and lay still.
Fearing I had killed him, I stooped over Cadell and pressed my fingertips against his throat. The instant I touched the body it began jerking and trembling—all over, head to foot, all at once—as if he were dancing in his sleep. His eyelids snapped open and his mouth gaped wide; his clawed fingers clutched at me, grasping for my throat.
I swung my silver hand hard against the side of his head. He convulsed and I heard a gurgle low in his throat. The breath rushed out of his lungs and with it something else: a transparent, formless shape like a flying shadow. It brushed me as it fled, and I felt a sick, slimy chill and an aching, piercing emptiness—as if all the loneliness and misery in all the world were gathered into a swiftly fleeing distillate of woe. In that fleeting touch, I felt the creature’s mindless anguish, and knew what it was to be a tortured animal, able to feel pain, but unable to fathom its cause or reason. My heart felt as if it would burst with the utter desolation of that sensation.
And then hands seized me, pulling me to my feet. The despair passed as swiftly as it had come. “I am myself,” I told them, and looked down at the body before me. To my surprise, the man opened his eyes and sat up. The warriors hastened us both back to the safety of the circle.
I had no sooner returned to my place beside Tegid and Cynan when the eerie spirit voice beckoned once more:
Come to me. Oh, come and cast away your care. Let me hold you and comfort you. Let me free you from your pain. Come to me . . . come to me . . .
“Hold, men! Stand your ground!” I shouted. “Do not listen!”
“It is gaining strength,” Tegid said, glancing all around. “Our fear is feeding it, and we are losing the will to resist.” He spun away, tugging me with him. “There might be a way . . . Help me!”
“Cynan, you and Bran take over,” I ordered as I hastened to follow. “Whatever happens, stand firm.”
The squat, twisted stems of the gorse bushes we burned for warmth were not large enough to serve, but our spear shafts were made of ash-wood. Working quickly, we cut the blades from three shafts, and Tegid had me hold them while he dipped them into the pouch at his belt for the Nawglan, the Sacred Nine, as he called it.
Taking the specially blended ashes, he sprinkled a portion into the palm of his right hand and then rubbed it the length of the bladeless shafts, each in turn.
“There,” he said when finished. “Now let us see if they will stand.”
It was not possible to drive the wooden shafts into the stone-paved road, of course. But we tried wedging the ends between cracks in the stones. “This would have been easier with the blades still attached,” I complained.
“There can be no metal in this rite,” the bard replied. “Not even gold.”
We persevered, however, and eventually succeeded in wedging the three spear shafts into cracks: one standing upright, two on either side inclined at a right angle
to form a loose arrowhead shape—a gogyrven. Gathering live coals on the inner rim of a shield, we placed a small pile of embers around each standing shaft. Taking up the hem of his cloak, Tegid quickly fanned the embers into a flame that licked slowly up the slender poles.
Holding his staff in both hands over his head, the bard began walking rapidly around the blaze in a sunwise direction. I could hear him muttering something under his breath in the Taran Tafod; I was not supposed to hear or know what he said.
“Hurry, Tegid!” I urged.
At the completion of the third circuit, the bard stopped, faced the blazing gogyrven and said, “Dólasair! Dódair! Bladhm dó!!”
The words of the Dark Tongue resounded in the pass, echoing up the sheer rock divide. Extending his staff vertically, Tegid began to speak the words of a saining rite.
Gifting Giver!
You whose name is very life to them that hear it,
hear me now!
Tegid Tathal ap Talaryant, Chief Bard of Albion,
I am.
See me established in the sunwise circle;
hear my entreaty.
Earth and sky, rock and wind, bear witness!
By the power of the Swift Sure Hand,
I claim this ground
and sain it with a name: Bwgan Bwlch!
Power of fire I have over it,
Power of wind I have over it,
Power of thunder I have over it,
Power of wrath I have over it,
Power of heavens I have over it,
Power of earth I have over it,
Power of worlds I have over it!
As tramples the swan upon the lake,
As tramples the horse upon the plain,
As tramples the ox upon the meadow,
The Endless Knot Page 32
