Hermitage, Wat and Some Druids

by Howard of Warwick

  ‘By sending a druid?’ Cwen clearly thought that was odd.

  ‘If you’ve got a lot of spare druids, why not?’ Hermitage suggested. ‘We just happen to be the first people he found, so here we are. He was just lucky we were coming this way. For all we know there are others out all over the place trying to recruit new villagers.’

  Hermitage put on his, there-you-are face.

  Cwen scowled a bit but didn’t seem to have an immediate response.

  ‘They’re going to be a bit disappointed when we don’t stay,’ she said. ‘Never mind,’ she observed brightly, ‘we still outnumber them. Fight this lot off easy if they try anything funny.’

  …

  Wulf was nervous about taking the news of the great feast to Hywel. The man had been very difficult about everything so far. Mind you, he was usually very difficult about everything anyway. His normal response to enquiries was to say no first, and then ask what the question was.

  At least Wulf had the upper hand. Twenty two people, one of them a monk, really had turned up in the village. He wouldn’t have believed it himself if he hadn’t seen it. He knew that would knock Hywel back a bit, perhaps just enough for him to deliver the news that the twenty two people, one of them a monk had been promised a great feast.

  ‘A what?’ Hywel squealed when given the news.

  Wulf had been right. The village headman had been knocked back by news of the arrivals, but he soon found his old self when the feast was mentioned.

  ‘Lypolix said there would be a great feast, apparently.’ Wulf felt bad about blaming this on Lypolix. Not very bad, though.

  ‘Well Lypolix can get the food and cook it then. There is no way I am using the village’s supplies on a great feast for a bunch of strangers.’

  ‘Bunch of sacrifices,’ Wulf corrected, hoping that the link to the Gods would persuade Hywel.

  ‘Whoever they are, they are not eating our food.’ Hywel folded his arms and dared Wulf to say more.

  ‘This is very difficult,’ said Wulf.

  ‘It is, isn’t it,’ Hywel was not budging.

  ‘Yes,’ Wulf went on, ‘twenty two people, one of them a monk, several of them robbers, one of them a very adept looking warrior with a fine selection of swords and knives, and all of them expecting a feast.’

  Hywel started to look suspicious.

  ‘Not going to go down very well when you tell them there’s no feast.’ Wulf shrugged as light heartedly as he could.

  ‘Why do I have to tell them?’

  ‘It’s your decision. You’re the village leader after all. Just the sort of thing the leader does.’ Wulf tried to look as innocent as he could.

  ‘A sword, you say?’ Hywel checked.

  ‘Quite a shiny one,’ Wulf confirmed, ‘well used, by the look of it.’

  ‘Why can’t the Gods provide?’ Hywel asked. It was a very good question.

  ‘They are doing,’ Wulf gave the standard response, ‘they asked us to do it.’ The lessons of the Arch-Druid were sinking in.

  Hywel frowned and grumbled, still not convinced.

  The door of Hywel’s hut was thrown roughly aside and Caradoc appeared, breathless and excited.

  ‘What is it?’ Hywel snapped, having enough to deal with already.

  ‘The stone,’ Caradoc announced, ‘the great master stone.’

  ‘What about it?’ Wulf was worried. Surely they couldn’t have broken it.

  ‘We was getting it back on the rollers, even installed some front uprights to hold it until we were ready.’

  ‘Wulf didn’t have a clue what Caradoc was talking about, but it sounded like the movement of the stone was getting quite sophisticated.

  ‘Yes, yes,’ Hywel grumbled his impatience.

  ‘But one of the bracing stanchions slipped against its anchor.’

  Hywel and Wulf gazed at Caradoc as he spouted this gibberish. Caradoc frowned at them for not understanding a plain description. ‘The Stone moved.’

  ‘Well, good,’ said Wulf, as he thought that was the plan.

  ‘Not really,’ Caradoc explained with a grimace, ‘at least not if you were the sheep standing in front of it.’

  ‘You killed a sheep?’ Hywel was outraged.

  ‘Erm,’ Caradoc was clearly thinking about saying no. He was also clearly thinking there was no way of describing a small sheep hit by a very large rock as anything other than dead. ‘Yes,’ he confessed.

  ‘There you are,’ said Wulf with a grin. ‘The Gods have provided.’

  Caput XX

  A Hearty Welcome.

  The sun had vanished completely behind the surrounding hills, presumably quite pleased not to have to look at the village anymore, and darkness was filling the valley like some inexorable flood.

  The stragglers were now happy as the smell of cooking wafted around the village. Hywel had suggested preserving the sheep for the long winter months but was overruled by the large group of people occupying his village, all of whom were looking forward to the feast.

  The sheep-killing stone movers had come down from the hillside, laying what appeared to be a path of flat rocks as they came. After a whispered conversation with Wulf, Wem instructed his men to terminate the roadway just outside Hywel’s hut. The village elder was too distracted seeing a perfectly good sheep vanish in one meal to ask what on earth was going on.

  Hermitage, Wat and Cwen found themselves inexorably drawn from their hut by the delicious odour, and wandered towards what seemed to be roughly the middle of the village to find all their companions ready and waiting.

  Everyone was gathered round a fire pit, watching with slavering anticipation as a sheep did what sheep do best. It was still going to be hours before the thing was ready, but some outer slices might be available early. It always paid to be at the front of the queue.

  Hermitage looked over the crowd with disappointment. He appreciated that this group was naturally light on dignity and self-control but you would think they’d never seen food before. He had spent so much of his life starving hungry that he considered it normal. In any event, his charitable nature meant that he would always let others go first. Which was mainly why he spent so much of his life starving hungry.

  He appraised the assembly and realised he should have expected no different. Then he frowned and turned to Cwen.

  ‘Where’s More?’ he asked.

  Cwen turned from her own internal slavering. ‘Eh?’

  ‘Where’s More?’

  ‘Where’s More?’

  ‘Yes,’ Hermitage held his arms wide to cover the multitude, ‘where is More?’

  Cwen looked rapidly over the crowd, searching for the unpleasant shape of the diminutive boatman.

  Villagers and new arrivals were mixing quite well now. At first there had been a lot of suspicion, but when it became apparent there was going to be fresh meat, and it was all because of the visitors, cautious friendship broke out. There must have been thirty-odd people around the cooking now. More would be hard to spot.

  ‘He could be sitting in the fire,’ said Cwen, ‘you know, waiting for the very first slice.’

  ‘Cwen, really.’

  ‘What does it matter where he is?’ Cwen asked. ‘He’s old enough to look after himself. He’s old enough to do anything.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he be here?’ Hermitage didn’t like things out of place. ‘Meat cooking on the spit, everyone else gathered round. But no More.’

  ‘Don’t worry about it,’ said Cwen. Which was entirely the wrong thing to say to Hermitage.

  He wandered off into the crowd and looked down by the fire, round the nearby huts and even at each group of two or three people who had broken up into separate conversations. More was nowhere to be seen. Had he wandered off and got lost? He returned to the fire as that was the most likely spot.

  He looked for the young druid, Wulf, he seemed to be in charge and might know where More had last been seen.

  He spotted the white robe of the druid emerging from the
woods off towards the back of the village. The bizarre Lypolix was there as well, along with the druid who had joined them at the inn. It was getting to be quite a druid gathering. And there was another.

  This new arrival was as strikingly a druid as anyone Hermitage had ever seen. A huge beard with a man attached strode at the head of the small group and Wulf was clearly the junior. This new man had enough shining metal around his neck that even from this distance Hermitage could see it was gold. Much gold. There was no chance of the robbers not spotting that lot.

  The villagers moved to make way for the new arrivals.

  Hermitage looked but they were not accompanied by the figure of More. Where had the man got to?

  The druidic threesome made straight for the fire, the press of people breaking like a wave.

  Hermitage stood his ground as the druids came up.

  ‘Ah,’ the great druid said on seeing Hermitage, ‘the monk.’

  ‘Actually, there are several monks in the world,’ Hermitage pointed out. Perhaps this man had been so isolated he didn’t know that monks were quite numerous.

  ‘You were expected,’ the great druid boomed.

  ‘So we’ve been told.’ Hermitage tried not to be rude, but really. All this talk of foresight and expectation was just plain ridiculous. Of course the Old Testament prophets foresaw the coming of the Messiah, but that was different. They were right.

  ‘This is the Arch-Druid,’ Wulf introduced his master, ‘and this is master Hermitage. A monk.’

  ‘It’s brother, actually,’ Hermitage corrected.

  ‘Master Hermitage brother,’ Wulf nodded.

  ‘Just Brother Hermitage.’

  ‘Ah,’ Wulf understood but didn’t look like it made any sense to him.

  ‘The feast has begun?’ the Arch-Druid asked as he cast his eyes around the village, ‘I thought we were saving that until after the stones?’ He looked at Wulf and Lypolix.

  The old seer cackled into life, ‘We shall have another feast once the stones are in place.’

  Hywel brushed past, fussing over something or other, ‘Oh no you won’t,’ he said, ‘I’m not letting another sheep go to waste.’

  ‘A whole sheep?’ the Arch-Druid was clearly surprised at such largesse.

  ‘Your wretched master stone ran the thing over.’ Hywel grumbled.

  This delighted Lypolix, ‘Killed by the stone. It has come to life and struck down a magnificent sacrifice.’

  ‘It slipped off a bit of wood and squashed a sheep,’ Hywel corrected. ‘And now we’re eating it,’ he added, with a sigh at the extravagance, ‘all of it.’

  ‘Talking of eating,’ said Hermitage, ‘you haven’t seen one of our number about the place have you? Small old man called More?’

  ‘You want to eat him?’ the Arch-Druid turned up his nose.

  ‘No, no,’ Hermitage said quickly. Good heavens, what were these people like? Perhaps the stories were true. ‘It’s just that with a feast about to begin I’d expect More to be here.’

  ‘No,’ Lypolix leapt in with a spontaneous cackle, ‘not seen him, not seen him.’

  Hermitage frowned. The strange old druid seemed very quick to deny seeing More. ‘He hadn’t wandered off into the woods?’ He nodded in the direction the druids had come from.

  ‘No one wanders off into those woods,’ Wulf pointed out, ‘those are the sacred woods.’

  ‘Ah, yes. I see,’ said Hermitage. Sacred woods! What a load of nonsense.

  ‘I’m sure he’ll turn up somewhere,’ Wulf sounded encouraging.

  ‘The stone, the next stone,’ Lypolix skittered about for no apparently good reason.

  ‘You don’t have a river nearby do you?’ Hermitage asked.

  ‘A river?’ Wulf seemed thrown by the question. ‘We’ve got quite a big stream and a small lake.’

  ‘More is a boatman you see, he might have gone to look at your boats.’

  The druids exchanged looks that said dealing with this strange idiot-monk was becoming trying.

  ‘No, no boats,’ Wulf nodded and smiled politely. ‘We had a coracle once for fishing in the lake, but the things we caught didn’t look quite right, so we gave that up.’

  ‘I’d better go and look for him then,’ Hermitage concluded.

  The druids smiled a smile that said they’d be quite glad if he just went away.

  Hermitage left the druids and didn’t really know why he was worried about More. After all, he hadn’t wanted the boatman to join them in the first place. Now he was missing he should be glad. But they were in a strange land with strange people. Very strange people. This was his mission and he felt some unwanted sense of duty towards those who accompanied him.

  All this talk of sacred woods and stones that sacrificed sheep was giving him a feeling of foreboding. He suddenly felt that they were a very long way from the safe world he knew. Well, he would have to admit that the world he knew wasn’t actually very safe, but at least it was familiar. Everything around him now was wrong. The druids in their robes, the language people spoke amongst themselves, the shape of the hills, the colour of the rocks. All wrong.

  Eventually Hermitage re-joined Wat and Cwen, having circumnavigated the entire village. He had even taken a cautious step or two into the sacred woods. When the druids weren’t looking. Not that he believed for a moment that they were sacred. Just a normal wood with normal trees. Except they weren’t like the trees at home. When something rustled in the undergrowth he left the sacred woods quite quickly.

  ‘He’s not here,’ he announced, holding his arms out to demonstrate just how far he had searched.

  ‘He’ll turn up,’ Cwen reassured, ‘as soon as the actual eating starts. You wait and see.’

  ‘Why would he go off?’ Hermitage fretted.

  ‘Why does he do any of the things he does?’ Wat asked with little interest. ‘He’s an old man, he can take care of himself. He’s survived this long without anything bad happening to him, which must count as a miracle in its own right.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Hermitage, scowling at the borderline blasphemy, ‘he is an old man, so he may have fallen somewhere.’

  ‘Why are you worried?’ Cwen asked, ‘we’ve got far too many people with us on this task anyway. One less is a good thing surely?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Hermitage was thoughtful and serious. ‘I’ve just got a sense that something’s not quite right. There’s a feeling about this situation that’s nagging at the back of my mind and I can’t put my finger on it.’

  ‘Really?’ said Wat. ‘Being in a village in the middle of Wales with a group of druids. Eating a sheep that’s apparently been murdered by a rock? What’s odd about that?’

  Hermitage looked at Wat with surprise. He saw that the weaver was being sarcastic, which Hermitage always found trying. He had studied the form of the Greek sarkasmos in some ancient writings an old Abbot had kept in his private chamber. The old Abbot had a lot of material in his private chamber that Hermitage did not approve of.

  …

  More did not appear when the eating started. It was easy to see everyone as the entire population, villager and visitor alike, sat in silence on the ground concentrating hard on what was probably the largest meal many had ever had.

  Only Hywel wandered about, making sure there was no undue indulgence or waste. The whole business with the mead had been bad enough. Now they were devouring a whole sheep. And the bread that was going with it was simply unthinkable. It would take months to recover from this. Lord Bermo might as well have marched his entire army through their village for all the damage this one feast was doing.

  Hermitage noticed that only the druids were showing any restraint.

  Perhaps they were holy men after all, not indulging in the pleasures of the ordinary man in order to keep their spirits pure.

  Or maybe they were like those awful brothers at the monastery in De’Ath’s Dingle.[ Those awful brothers are fully exposed in The Heretics of De’Ath, the very first Chronicle of Bro
ther Hermitage and an essential volume in any collection.] The ones who stuffed themselves with a secret supply of food and wine while everyone else was starving.

  More likely they were being put off their meal by Banley, the lead robber who sat very close to the Arch-Druid and was staring at the gold as if his eyes were stuck to it.

  After a while the druids got up and wandered off, back to their so-called “sacred woods”, making it perfectly clear that no, Banley could not come with them just to have a look around. Before they departed, the Arch-Druid leant close and whispered something in Banley’s ear. He returned to his fellow robbers, eyes wide, muttering something about druid curses.

  This really gave Hermitage the wobbles. Perhaps this really was the place that cursed Le Pedvin’s messenger to death? Or it could just be a normal community of druids who cursed people as a way of life.

  With all this worry swimming about his head, he really didn’t feel like eating. His stomach soon told his head to stop being so stupid.

  He was concentrating on extracting the last morsel from a particularly troublesome bone when a question from another group of feasters caught his ear.

  Those who had attacked their meal with vigour had already finished their allotted portion and were relaxing with groans of pleasurable discomfort. Each group of people had returned to their companions for the actual eating. Pilgrims sat with pilgrims and robbers with robbers. It was as if they trusted strangers with many things, but not with their food.

  The question arose from the group of stragglers, which surprised Hermitage.

  ‘Where’s Leon?’ one of them asked in a loud voice.

  As a topic of after dinner conversation it was interesting, but Hermitage puzzled over what possible discussion could have led to this being asked.

  There was no reply from the assembly and so Hermitage offered the best information he had.

  ‘I believe it’s a Kingdom many miles away,’ he called, ‘over the sea, beyond Normandy.’

  ‘What?’ the voice of the straggler sounded angry at the answer. Which was odd.