by James Wilde
‘And Hecate?’
Gaia ran her fingers through his hair, as if she were acting out what was to come for him with the witch. ‘When you marry her, my love, and when she bears you a child, she will help secure our claim. A new bloodline established, and it will be tied to me … to us.’ She smiled. ‘Here is a truth I learned long ago, my darling. The Dragon is elusive, with all the substance of the mist. He is whoever the people say he is. And our voice will always speak louder.’
‘At the start, I was searching for a wood-priest, that was your command. But they all seemed to have disappeared into the forests like the morning mists. And then you bade me find a witch …’ His thoughts flew back to that icy forest in Gaul when he had bribed the Alamanni warrior to lead him away from the battle to that dismal hut where the sisters lived.
‘I had a wood-priest in my grasp once.’ Gaia’s voice hardened and her face became ugly with anger. Corvus looked away. ‘And that fat slug Varro stole him from me so he could follow the trail to the Dragon. My wood-priest was to have argued my claim with his forest brethren. After all my coercion, how could he have refused? I hope Varro the grotesque dies a painful death.’ When she paused, he looked back and saw her face light up once more. ‘But this is better. Oh, so much better! Nothing happens by chance. Why did I compel you to bring me a witch? Because, my love, when she joins with you that union will be seen to be great. The wood-priests and the wyrd sisters will not be able to ignore it. Your child will have greater power than anything my worthless daughter can produce.’
Gaia whirled around the room as if possessed, her eyes bright with fire, her arms outstretched. Ecstatic, now. ‘All these years of plotting … forcing you and your brother to follow the path of Mithras so we would have allies …’ She dropped to her knees, bowing her head so that her hair fell over her face. ‘Mithras,’ she breathed, ‘a dying god with a fading band of worshippers. One day soon, they will join with the pagans to preserve the sacred knowledge, mark my words. Sun Runners and Fathers and druids, side by side, keeping the secret of the saviour for generations to come. And you will be there among them, praised by all. So many times I thought this plot would fail, but now … now you are unbeatable.’
Corvus grinned. ‘I am invincible now. I, your son.’
‘Sol invictus,’ she breathed, understanding. Then: ‘Are you ready?’
He nodded, and watched his mother draw herself up, composing herself, becoming regal. ‘I was chosen first, did you know that?’ she breathed. Turning, she slipped that beautiful white silk dress off her left shoulder. On the bare flesh, he saw something that had never been revealed to him before: a brand, dark against the pale skin – a serpent eating its own tail.
‘The Ouroboros,’ she whispered. ‘The mark of the bloodline. I was chosen by the wood-priests when I was a girl, and, oh, it was glorious. I was special.’ She closed her eyes, beatific for a moment. But when she spoke again, he heard her voice become wintry. ‘And then I had a daughter with that weak husband of mine. How could I let her become special? I wanted a son, a strong, powerful son, to continue the line, but that feeble Menius could not give me one. Three girls I killed at birth, stifled them with my own hands, but this fourth time he came in before I could finish the deed, and swept her away, overjoyed that we finally had a child.’
Corvus heard such contempt in her voice that he winced.
‘A girl. A pathetic, mewling girl. I ordered Strabo to take her out into the forest so I could be done with her. But the wood-priests, or the sisters, or the forest folk knew … they see all that happens in their world. And they saved her.’ She turned to him, eyes wide. ‘They could not forgive me, Corvus. Me! I had wanted only the best, but they hated me then for my selfless act. I had no choice but to flee. They were coming for me. Now they had Catia, they had no use for me, you see. Can you imagine how that feels? But I was chosen first, not her. I have a greater claim upon this bloodline. And between us, we will take it, Corvus. You and I, mother and son, united.’
Corvus felt her passion inflame him too. He rushed over to her and hugged her tightly. She folded into him. ‘Tell me one thing,’ he breathed into her ear. ‘I’m not a man who easily believes in these stories, these prophecies that the devout tell each other. They’re for people like Theodosius, not me. Is it true? That this saviour will come, this king who will not die?’
‘It doesn’t matter if he is a saviour, or if men believe him to be a saviour. The result will be the same. He will wield power by the words he proclaims. Followers will come, disciples, and they will heed his every utterance. It may be a hundred years until this saviour is born, but until then, whosoever controls the bloodline controls the power invested in him. And that will be our family, Corvus. Our blood.’
Corvus stiffened, a flame flickering into life deep in his head. ‘Our blood,’ he repeated.
Gaia pulled back, frowning. ‘What is wrong?’
He looked into her face. Still the beauty that had ensnared two men, still youthful. ‘I will give you the son that Menius never could,’ he breathed. ‘I will be the father, you the mother, and then all will be well.’
He had expected some resistance, but there she was, smiling, the glow from the brazier twinkling in her eyes. ‘Yes. Yes.’ She shivered. ‘Why weaken the blood by mingling it with that of the witch? The wood-priests declared me worthy to bear the bloodline when they branded me.’ The light in her eyes took on a different tone, but he could not tell why.
‘And Hecate?’
‘She loves you, you know. She will do whatever you ask of her. She will guide us. She will be our intermediary with the wood-priests, and argue our claim. This … this is perfect.’ She hugged him tight to her and kissed him on the forehead.
What a trail of blood had led to this moment. Hecate’s sisters, killed by the Alamanni warrior at his behest, so she would have nothing to keep her in that frozen forest, and then the barbarian himself slaughtered so he could never speak. Strabo, drowned in the Tiber, to prevent him from revealing what he knew about their family’s secrets. And finally his own brother. But it had all been worth it.
Now only his half-sister stood in their way, a bloodline that must be brought to a sudden end so there would be no rivals to the claim.
Striding over to the brazier, he stooped to pick up a cloth from the floor and wrapped it around his right hand. Grasping the handle of the iron brand in the hot coals, he raised it. The circle glowed red in the gloom of the room. The serpent eating its own tail.
‘Here,’ he announced. ‘So all will know who I am. A king who will beget kings. A Dragon who will beget Dragons.’
Shucking off his tunic, Corvus stood naked before her.
For a moment, he felt barbs of agony drive his wits from him, and he breathed in the stench of his own searing flesh. But then he shook his head, clearing it, and closed his eyes in ecstasy. Though he couldn’t fully see the brand upon his side, he could imagine it.
The endless circle of death and rebirth, the serpent coiled, consuming itself.
Now he was the Dragon, and he would lay waste to all who dared stand before him.
The strong voice ceas’d; for a terrible blast swept over the heaving sea:
The eastern cloud rent: on his cliffs stood Albion’s wrathful Prince,
A dragon form, clashing his scales: at midnight he arose,
And flam’d red meteors around the land of Albion beneath.
William Blake
Author’s Notes
Five steps away from the click of the gate and the past swallowed me. It was Midsummer’s Eve, and the day had been bathed in gold and lazy with the drone of honeybees. Now everywhere was silver and black, bright fields and hedgerow shadows as stark as under the afternoon sun. The rumble of traffic had stilled and there was only the beat of my footsteps.
I left the few bats still swooping around the eaves and walked along an old track made new by boards smelling of cooling creosote. My father had walked this way, as had his father b
efore him, and generation upon generation of feet before that, drawing a line upon the earth and on time that connected now and then.
The track opened out on to woods clustered around a winding stream. A barn owl screeched, an omen perhaps, as the Greeks and Romans once thought. When I was a child I was told not to come to these woods on Midsummer Night for fear of meeting the spirits of the newly dead who had been released for the journey into the next world by the sun’s turning south.
This was an old story and you can hear it all over the country. The Midsummer festival has been celebrated since Neolithic times. It’s a time when the barriers between worlds thin – the living and the dead, the present and the past – like Halloween. Christians claimed it as St John’s Eve and started new stories of witches abroad cursing any innocent traveller who dared venture out after dark.
Beyond this old woodland was a new forest, planted in recent memory to cover one of the mine workings that once scarred this corner of the old Kingdom of Mercia in the English Midlands. The shaft has been capped and ash trees tower above it, but the tunnels still run underground. The locals tell of encountering tree-climbing rabbits here, feral, bloodthirsty things, the offspring of bunnies trapped underground, forced to become predators to survive.
My grandfather was a miner. As a boy I was fascinated by his missing fingers and his blue skin, the result of impacted coal dust after a tunnel collapse when he was trapped beneath ground for a night and a day, up to his chin in freezing water. He used to tell me tales of the Tommyknockers, the spirits of dead miners who would tap on the tunnel walls to lure the living into their world. This is an old story too, and you can hear it around Cornish tin mines and Scottish collieries. My grandfather’s friends used to entertain me with a wealth of stories. They lived every day close to death, there, hundreds of feet beneath the earth, and they’d created their own mythology to explain the vicissitudes of life and to give them hope down in the dark.
There’s no sign of the mine now and the tangle of oak and birch and ash and rowan looks as though it’s always been in this place. Old stories are buried, new ones will grow.
On the edge of the trees, I walked along the towpath of the canal that once carried barges laden with coal to the ironworks in Birmingham, and on to an old drovers’ path that pre-dated it by hundreds of years. I’d walked this way time and again since I was a boy, at all hours of the night and day, in all weathers, and every one offered something that lodged in the memory. This time I was rewarded with a badger lumbering across the road, its eyes glowing like headlamps in the light of a passing car, a rare sighting that made me jump as if I’d witnessed the appearance of a mythical beast, emotions that you usually don’t access in the world of men, pulled from their deep sleep in the unconscious: a shiver of fear, a glimmer of wonder.
I wandered on to a playing field, wide and silent, and then under a bridge that once allowed access beneath a long-gone railway, and on into more forestland. No track here, the eye told me, no ancient path, except there was. Under these trees lies Via Devana, the old Roman road that bisected England from the north-west to the south-east, long since buried and barely excavated.
As I crept through the woods, I remembered a story told me by an old man in the local pub, a beer-memory, of hearing the tramp of a Roman legion as he walked here one Boxing Day. I’d told a few people. They had told others.
And then I saw a light glowing in the dark, an unearthly light with an odd, greenish tinge, and I heard the whisper of all those old stories and felt a prickling down my back. Time and occasion makes superstitious fools of all of us. Chest tight, knowing this was something I’d never encountered before, I plunged on through the trees to investigate, determined to put a knife to that lizard-brain fear. And on the edge of a sweep of grassland, I found the cause: a firefly.
I was honestly astounded, by the brightness, and the, to me, unnatural colour, and more, its effect upon me. If you open yourself up to it, the world still has the power to amaze you, and change you.
Nothing happens by chance, they say.
This book arose from that walk and many like it. When you’re a writer, you like to think that you consciously shape things. But the truth is, all the heavy lifting comes from the unconscious, far beyond your control, and it surfaces when your mind is doing something else. Most of my creative moments have come far away from my desk, drifting into daydreams that merge with the world around me. If you’re an eastern mystic, of course, you would say those dreams and the hard world are one and the same.
I love history, and I studied history, and I’m impressed by the vast body of work sweated into existence by archaeologists and other historians, discoveries that have shaped our understanding of our heritage, the long tramp of experience that has made us who we are.
But sometimes I wonder if we’re shaped as much by the intangibles, the abstracts, the folklore, the myths, the legends, the stories we tell ourselves, that arise out of history but are not part of them, and add a deeper layer to explain what events truly mean to us.
The power of a story, well told, is sometimes more affecting than the real experience. And sometimes the two merge to be something new entirely. History and stories blur, each one affecting the other, and rippling out into the world. Something that doesn’t exist, in any tangible terms, can have just as much of an effect as something that does.
This fascinates me.
When I was writing my last series of books, about the English rebel Hereward who led the resistance against William the Conqueror after the Norman invasion in 1066, I began to think about how legends were formed out of the world around us. Within a hundred years of Hereward’s death, stories were circulating about how he carried a magical sword and slayed giants. Not true, yet true, because it explained what he and his endeavours meant to the people of England in living memory of his struggle. History and symbolism bound together.
This book is about the creation of the legend of King Arthur, and about the very simple belief that it doesn’t matter whether he existed or not. That thought might be anathema to evidence-based historians, and I fully understand that. But if the belief in something that isn’t there still affects the world, is it any less important?
I’ve looked at elements of the Arthurian mythos and how they might have arisen out of the history we know. But the more important question is: why did the legend of King Arthur come about in the first place? Why did we need it? Why do we still need it?
There are elements of this tale that you might want to explore further. The survival of the druids beyond the slaughter at Ynys Môn has long been debated. There’s a long-standing belief that the druids were snuffed out that day, but I would ask you to consider the likelihood of a belief system’s being destroyed in one night, especially one that reached across continental Europe. The historian Peter Beresford Ellis has written extensively about the survival of the druids, and there are several books which pick up this work.
If you are interested in the story Myrrdin told Lucanus at the Heartstones, read Uriel’s Machine by historians Christopher Knight and Robert Lomas, which expounds upon the theory that the stone circles are a response to an apocalyptic meteor strike. And there is some excellent work out there about how the stones may have been designed to respond to shamanic drumming, to create a hallucinatory experience at a mass gathering within the circle.
One key aspect of this book is the importance of the magic mushroom, or psilocybin, to world history. One aspect of historical research that I find interesting is how it’s responsive to cultural mores – the Victorians, for instance, saw the past, and ‘discovered’ the past, in a very different way from how we do it now. It’s indisputable that psychedelic drugs have been key to human development – depictions of these mushrooms have been found in art from three thousand years ago. There is a large body of work that propounds the theory that our most breathtaking cave paintings were conducted under the influence of these hallucinogens, and that they may well have been responsible fo
r the emergence of both art and religion in human evolution. There is certainly evidence that they were used in the rituals of all early religions, a way of contacting the ‘gods’, including early Christianity. If you want to dive deep into controversy, take a look at The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross: A Study of the Nature and Origins of Christianity Within the Fertility Cults of the Ancient Near East by the English archaeologist John Marco Allegro. The spiral imagery prevalent in a lot of Celtic artwork may also have been influenced by hallucinogens and you can find studies of their use in the Mithraic mysteries.
The Dark Age is a fascinating time. It’s a gulf in our knowledge, waiting to be filled, but no less rich in history than the times before and after. We don’t have much in terms of historical record from that era, but what we do have is the emergence of myth and legend, which in its own way tells us just as much about the people of that time, their hopes and their fears.
The legend of King Arthur which rose out of those benighted centuries shapes our perception of who we are even to this day. This, then, is a historical novel about the invisible hand of history, the things that can’t be found in the substrata, or in the few surviving fragmentary writings. Legends, faith, religion and the need for gods and heroes in a harsh world.
It’s about the dream of King Arthur, and of Camelot, and how it might have formed from the mists by the will of men in an age of destruction and war.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Thanks to Elizabeth Cooper, of the University of Newcastle, for advice and guidance.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
James Wilde is proud to be a Man of Mercia. He was brought up in a home full of books and studied economic history at university before travelling the world in search of adventure.
He has been a journalist, writing for the national press, and is now a scriptwriter and novelist, author of the bestselling series about England’s near-forgotten hero, Hereward the Wake. James Wilde divides his time between London and the family home in Derbyshire.
