‘Right,’ the Arch-Druid said, turning his back to the temple, ‘tell me what you saw.’
Wulf faced his master. ‘I, er, I saw the stars and the moon and could tell the time through the patterns in the sky and where they were above the stones.’
‘As you’ve been taught,’ the old man acknowledged. ‘But you haven’t been taught to read when the crops will come in.’
‘No,’ Wulf dropped his head. ‘I didn’t really see it, it was just sort of there,’ he shrugged.
‘It was just sort of there,’ the Arch-Druid imitated Wulf’s voice in a very mocking manner and was clearly not satisfied with this explanation. True to form, he reached forward and clipped Wulf sharp round the ear.
‘Ow,’ the acolyte responded. He thought he’d been acolyte long enough for the master to stop hitting him.
‘What were you looking at?’ the master barked, ‘quick now.’
‘The mithral stone,’ Wulf blurted out, without really understanding why he had forgotten.
‘Ah,’ said the Arch-Druid, apparently satisfied with that answer, which gave Wulf time to rub his ear. ‘And?’
‘It just looked as if the weather was going to change later on.’
‘The mithral stone looked as if the weather was going to change?’ The tone was now mocking and challenging, speaking to Wulf as if he was stupid as a tree. As it had since he was eleven.
The old man ran a hand over his face. ‘I suppose I should be grateful to see this in my lifetime,’ he said in dark tones, ‘but I suspect it’s a whole load of trouble in a robe.’
‘What is?’ Wulf asked.
‘It’s the Sight.’
‘The Sight?’
‘The Sight of the seer. You always were a troublesome child,’ the druid went on, this Sight business plainly being Wulf’s fault. ‘Always questioning everything and coming up with answers before the others.’
Wulf could only agree with that and he had the bruises to show.
‘I knew from the earliest days you’d make the priesthood,’ the druid nodded.
Well that was a bit much. Wulf wished that had been mentioned seven years ago, before all the agonies of the acolyte. A bit of encouragement now and then wouldn’t have gone amiss.
‘And I had a suspicion there’d be more. Perhaps a bard but maybe, just maybe a seer.’
The seers were great men, usually old and wizened, who, through years of selfless dedication and denial, were able to read the future from the state of the world. Becoming a seer was always a bit of a dream of the acolytes, but they rather hoped the gift would come naturally, selfless dedication and denial not being high on their list of things to do. And the one seer they had met gave most of them the shivers.
‘And I’m a seer?’ Wulf asked slowly. He hadn’t even started to consider dedication and denial, and here he was, a seer.
‘Don’t know how else you’d explain it,’ the Arch-Druid grumbled.
‘But then why’s it trouble?’
The Arch-Druid sighed his sigh at ignorance revealed. ‘You know yourself, all seers are old men of great authority and wisdom.’
‘That’s what you told us.’
‘Then that’s what’s true. You on the other hand are neither old, nor of great wisdom. If a wise and ancient seer turns up and wants to reveal what’s going to happen, he generally cackles and laughs a lot. Might even dance about a bit to make people think he’s mad.’
‘Why?’ Wulf didn’t understand this at all.
‘What would you do if someone came and told you in a calm and sensible manner that your cat was going to die tomorrow, and then it did?’
Wulf had to admit that sort of thing didn’t go down very well. The cry of witchcraft was a popular one which seldom ended happily.
‘But if an old loon comes dancing around the village singing an obscure song about cats and the afterlife, and then your cat dies? Well, you think that old man has been blessed with special powers and you probably give him a free meal.’
Wulf shook his head in amazement.
‘It’s all part of the training,’ the Arch-Druid explained, ‘the training you haven’t had. And stone sight is the worst kind of all.’
‘Stone sight?’
‘The sight that tells you useful things and in detail. Just the sort of things people want to know. When will it rain, when will the frost come, when to harvest, when to plant?’
‘Well that’s good surely,’ Wulf thought that sort of thing would make him quite popular.
‘And the sort of things people don’t want to know in detail. When the plague will come, how many will die, when there will be a famine, fire, flood. People don’t like bad news. They don’t like bringers of bad news in general, but they really don’t like bringers of bad news who are always right.’
‘What do we do then?’ Wulf asked, suddenly feeling rather helpless and hopeless.
‘We have to keep you alive.’
‘Well that’s good.’ He hadn’t even imagined the question would be up for debate.
‘Stone-seers are as rare as singing sheep. Only a stone-seer can build a circle in the first place, and do you know how long it is since the last new circle was built?’
Wulf considered the question carefully, it was probably one the Arch-Druid had asked before, and tried to pull Wulf’s hair out for not knowing.
‘Er,’ he hesitated and screwed up his face in the manner of all children who are trying to drag from their memories some fact that they know isn’t there, ‘no,’ he eventually admitted.
‘Me neither,’ the Arch-Druid responded with disarming honesty, ‘so it must be a long time ago.’
‘So,’ said Wulf with a realisation that scared the spit from his mouth, ‘I’m supposed to make a circle?’
The Arch-Druid shrugged, ‘Who knows? No one’s ever met a stone seer so the Gods know what you’re supposed to do. The best we can do is keep you alive long enough to find out.’ He lapsed into silent thought. Wulf tried not to look into the temple, the nine wooden statues of the Gods were in there somewhere and he wasn’t ready for them yet.
‘There’s only one thing we can do,’ the Arch-Druid announced, brightly, ‘we need to see Lypolix. He’ll know.’
Wulf’s stomach sank. Many of the events of the acolyte’s life had been challenging, some had been alarming and a few had been disturbing. Then there was Lypolix.
…
In the darkest recesses of the sacred wood, they found Lypolix the seer. All the acolytes were brought before the old man of the trees as part of their initiation. It was the part guaranteed to make those without a strong constitution go running for their mothers.
The body was small and bent, whether by old age or all the things that hung from it was hard to tell. If the small pots, pans, bits of plant, bones, twigs and dried rodent corpses which dangled from the arms and neck on lengths of twine were taken away, the man might be able to stand up straight. The tears in the figure’s robes exposed bits of the wrinkled old man which people really didn’t want revealed, and which took the word “wrinkled” to horrible extremes.
On top of this panoply of the peculiar was the head. And this made the rest of the body look positively wholesome. Random lengths of matted grey hair sprung in all directions. That there was face at all was only given away by the eyes, which peered from the depths like a drowning owl. They peered at Wulf though, and Lypolix cackled again.
‘That’s how you do it,’ the Arch-Druid said with great respect, ‘you could learn a lot from Lypolix.’
Wulf was pretty confident there was absolutely nothing he wanted to learn from Lypolix. He thought there might be some things he could catch, but not if he kept his distance.
The cackling went on a bit longer until the face looked straight at Wulf, which was rather disconcerting, ‘The stones,’ the mouth said, before the words were buried in yet more cackling.
‘That’s all it takes,’ the Arch-Druid was nodding in appreciation, ‘a good long cackle, a
couple of words and leave it at that. No need to go telling people what date things are going to happen. Just cackle “crops” and shut up.’
Wulf was wondering if this was all there was to the encounter, a lesson in cackling.
‘And in his younger days Lypolix did an excellent dance of the madman.’
Wulf was sure a dance was unnecessary.
‘Yes,’ said Wulf, nodding to Lypolix as he did to mad mother Gwynn, whose only word these days was “thicket.”
‘In here,’ Lypolix tapped the side of his head.
‘A vision,’ the Arch-Druid nodded authoritatively.
With the Arch-Druid’s revelations about the methods of the seer, Wulf looked with new eyes at Lypolix. He realised the old man really was a cuckoo.
‘We are gathered,’ the great seer announced, with barely a cackle at all and his hands raised.
The Arch-Druid looked on in awe, hand raising was clearly a significant development.
‘The acolyte of the stones,’ the wizened finger came down again and hovered in the direction of Wulf, who smiled politely.
‘The Arch-Druid,’ the finger moved along. The Arch-Druid bowed his head in humble acknowledgement.
‘And Lypolix,’ the man even went to the trouble of pointing at himself.
A silence descended on the grove, the oak trees standing patiently, waiting their turn to be dragged into all this.
‘It is the Prophecy,’ Lypolix hissed into the night air, as if he’d been saving a special breath for just those words.
‘The Prophecy,’ the Arch-Druid repeated in a voice with so much awe he could be mined for the stuff.
‘There will be more.’ Lypolix breathed. ‘More will come. More for the stones. We are not enough, but more will come. Even now they come. The monk. We must have the monk of the Christian God. Called, they are. Called I say. They cannot resist. There will be one for every stone and every stone will have one.’
Well that added up, even to Wulf. For years he had thought of the old seer as a figure of fear and respect. Tonight he had started to look on him as a rather harmless old loon, the type you would throw twigs at, or dunk in the pond. Now he found himself in the middle of some prophecy or other, he saw the sort of loon to be avoided. The sort who arrived in a village just before all the dogs disappeared.
‘And when they are all here, ‘Lypolix paused, dramatically and Wulf looked on, expectantly. ‘Then we can get on with the sacrifices,’ the old druid cackled, as if looking forward to second helping of oats.
Caput IV
All Druids.
Travelling through the countryside on a Norman cart was not a comfortable experience for the small team of Saxons. They got things thrown at them by both sides.
The journey itself was pretty awful but the destination didn’t bear thinking about. Wales. Hermitage reasoned that it couldn’t really be all druids and dragons could it? If everyone was a druid who did all the work? If the sky was awash with dragons, how did anything get done at all?
But it was all fitting together in a rather horrible way. Years ago he had been told to go away from his monastery and study the ways of the druids, and other outlandish groups, so that the church could damn them more effectively. Well, he’d been told to just go away from his monastery first, the bit about the druids had come later. And of course he had done his work well. He only ever did his work well.
Many of the groups he encountered made a field full of March hares look like one of old Abbot Hender’s silent contemplations on death. These were people who not only talked to the trees, they listened to the replies and then went off and did what the foliage told them.
Compared to most, the druids had been quite sensible. Plainly heretic and deserving of their fate, but at least you could talk to them without them whooping at you and skipping round a yew tree waving a dead fox in the air.
And old Theletrix had told him. Quite matter-of-fact, as if discussing the weather, the druid had said that Hermitage would go to Wales, he would attempt to take from the druids and would come to his end. But Hermitage did not believe in prophesy, well, not the ones come up with by druids. They were just normal people. Wrong, but normal.
The only reasonable view to take was that Wales was just like everywhere else. The people were just people and they only did the things people did. Obviously they did them in Welsh, but that was hardly life threatening. A trip to Wales would be absolutely no problem and in fact would be educational and informative.
He reached over and grabbed Wat’s sleeve, ‘We can’t go to Wales,’ he howled, ‘we’ll be eaten.’
‘Oh, pull yourself together for goodness sake,’ Wat, stirred from his reverie and brushed Hermitage off. ‘It’s no different from anywhere else.’ The weaver gave the monk a very disappointed look, and even Cwen coughed her contempt.
‘Look,’ Wat went on in whispered tones as the cart trundled along, ‘I didn’t tell Le Pedvin or William of course, I wouldn’t tell those men their heads were coming loose, but I’ve been to Wales before. It’s not a problem.’
Hermitage regarded his friend with the old familiar admiration. He had known Wat would have the solution to the problem, and he did. ‘You’ve been to Wales?’ he asked in tones of awe.
‘Of course,’ said Wat, ‘I’m a tradesman, I go where the trade is. There are so many superstitions about Wales that most people stay away. Leaves the market open for those of us who are prepared to make the journey. And of course the prices go up as a result.’
‘Ah,’ said Hermitage in interest. But then a worry popped up in his head. He had a large space in there where he kept his worries so there was always one ready for action. ‘So your trade was tapestry,’ he confirmed.
‘Of course.’
‘The old tapestries,’ Hermitage said with some caution.
‘Yes,’ said Wat in the tone of someone who knows they are about to get an earful of trouble.
‘Oh Wat,’ Hermitage said in disappointment.
‘They were very profitable,’ Wat explained, ‘Wales didn’t get much in the way of sophistication.’
‘I would hardly call tapestries full of naked people cavorting with one another sophisticated,’ Hermitage admonished.
‘I did one of a monk once,’ Wat offered.
‘And was that decent?’
‘Oh no,’ Wat said quite firmly, ‘definitely not.’
‘And the Welsh bought these disreputable works?’
‘As quick as I could churn them out. They liked the outdoors. Very popular, the outdoors.’
‘Scenes of the country and the natural world?’
‘Mainly naked people cavorting outdoors, to be honest.’
Hermitage had run out of sighs.
‘We’re still living on Welsh gold,’ said Wat, as he patted the pack on his back.
This gave breath to one of Hermitage’s oldest and most familiar worries. In accepting the weaver’s hospitality he was accepting his past, and the methods by which the hospitality became possible.
As usual he reasoned that he could continue to take the hospitality as long as he continued to complain about it.
‘And you heard it from Le Pedvin,’ Wat smiled, ‘England’s got thousands of Normans, all very much alive and looking for trouble, Wales has only had four, and they’re all dead.’
…
Towards the end of the day, as the late summer evening descended cautiously over the landscape, the party approached a field full of tents. If Le Pedvin’s camp had been bustling and busy this one was a beehive of Norman soldiery.
The tents stretched endlessly along the south bank of what must be the Thames. The river was broad and wide, or rather the space it occupied was. The tide was out now and the expanse of river looked like nothing more than a dribble down the chest of man who’s fallen asleep in a field of mud.
On the opposite side of the river there was building work. Wooden scaffolding could be seen wandering up into the air, and even from this distance men were visib
le, swarming over it. A lot of them. Doing a lot of building.
‘Alright, you can leave them here,’ Le Pedvin’s voice barked out a command as he rode up on his horse.
Hermitage felt genuine relief that they wouldn’t be going into the camp, they were being released to start their journey to Wales. Actually that was worse, wasn’t it? His sense of good and bad was being eroded by the continual absence of any good by which to measure things.
Le Pedvin noticed Hermitage gazing at the structure over the river.
‘The Tower of London,’ he announced.
‘The what?’ Hermitage didn’t know if this was supposed to mean anything.
‘The Tower of London. That’s what we’re building. On top of the old Roman fort, we’re building the Tower of London.’
Only one thought occurred to Hermitage, and as usual it had to be let out. ‘Why does it want a tower?’
Le Pedvin looked at the monk as if he was very stupid indeed. ‘Got to have a tower.’
‘Have you?’
‘Of course. First thing you have to do, build a tower. Defend against attack.’
Hermitage pondered the idea that if the Normans weren’t so violent all the time, they wouldn’t get attacked. And then they wouldn’t need the tower. He knew ideas like this never went down well. ‘I see,’ was all he said.
‘Well,’ Le Pedvin dropped disdain from the back of his horse, which itself looked at the small Saxon band as if they were something nasty stuck to its hooves. ‘You can head off to the druids and their gold, and we’ll see you in Derby in three weeks. Won’t we.’
‘Oh absolutely, of course, no question,’ Hermitage blurted out.
‘Laden with gold I expect,’ Le Pedvin added.
‘Oh laden,’ Hermitage confirmed, ‘very laden. Really very laden indeed. Hardly able to walk, probably.’
‘Pleased to hear it,’ said Le Pedvin. ‘And just to make sure things go well I’m prepared to help you out some more.’
Hermitage, Wat and Some Druids Page 3
