by Chris Page
They spent that night sitting just outside the Stonehenge circle. Merlin talked quietly about what was expected of them at the annual Equinoctial Festival of the Cowering Dead, which would start at first light the following day with the formation of the thick mists.
“You never know who will come at you in this,” said the long magus. “One thing is for certain, there will be surprises. Remember this, in the presence of a nominated cowerer, di mortius nil nisi bonum, say nothing but good of the dead.”
As the dawn began to creep over the rolling green hills they moved to the center of the great circle. Prepared by the long magus for the rolling murk that suddenly engulfed them, Twilight gripped the hand of the old astounder tightly, took a deep breath, and set himself for an ordeal of extreme disorder and pietism. If their plan worked, this sarcophagal murk would be his to control each year for most of the rest of his life. If it didn’t work, the Celtic world and its glorious Wessex past would be obliterated by the onslaught of the freed cowerers as they wreaked vengeance on an unsuspecting people.
Along with much else that kept the human and immortal worlds turning.
With the suddenness of a snake strike, the raging mists of the Cowering Dead were upon them. At first the intensity and volume of the screaming voice took him by surprise. Pitched at a high, penetrating level with a multitude of others in screaming accompaniment in the background, the voice screeched directly into his ear with a pent-up violence that defied anything he had ever heard before. Keeping his eyes firmly closed and bracing his legs as advised by Merlin, he tried to understand what the screaming ranter was saying. Then he heard the voice of the long magus talking back. Soothing, placatory, the words dripped like cool water onto molten embers.
“We both know why you are here. We both also know that your release is impossible, and there is no escape from the place you are in. You performed glorious deeds. Your name is mentioned wherever villagers gather around the communal evening fires. Be satisfied with the great accolades that these people pay your actions and memory. These deeds will continue to shine and live on in their hearts for a great many more years …”
Gradually the screaming voice lost some of its intensity as Merlin talked through its tirade, systematically applying the balm of soft-spoken flattery. With a sudden start the boy realized that the ranting soul was none other than King Arthur. Dux Bellorum himself was the first tortured cowerer chosen to scream into the attack.
With no mention of the faces he burned, Guinevere, or Mordred - events or people from the past evoking longing or bad memories would only prolong the rant - and often repeating himself, the long magus kept up the soft flattery. There were no explanations, no logic, just placatory blandishments. As Merlin had said to the boy during the night, if you batter them with fine chatter they’ll eventually scatter.
With something resembling a cross between a soft scream and a sigh, the assuaged, tortured rant that had been the mighty Dux Bellorum flitted away as suddenly as it had arrived. To be instantly replaced by another, slightly differently pitched but still piercing screech.
That turned out to be Old Bovey, the snake man first encountered by Twilight when he and Sam Timms were journeying to Merlin’s compound. In much the same way, the long magus placated the rant, which, as far as Twilight could make out, was to do with the loss of Anguis, his snake. Still clinging to Merlin’s hand with his eyes tightly shut he received a short message in mind-speak from his mentor.
Are you okay?
He squeezed the long, bony fingers hard in reply. He was beginning to understand the process, beginning to feel less intimidated.
Then two things happened almost simultaneously that changed everything.
A resonant inner voice, deep and penetrating, smashed into his mind with the force of a hurricane.
RELEASE THEM NOW. NOW, I SAY. RELEASE THEM!
He reeled at the onslaught of the voice, felt his knees buckle at the force of the command.
Then another voice assailed his ears, a voice that even in the highest register of a screaming cowerer’s rant he recognized immediately.
It was Elelendise. The wolf-woman herself, alive only yesterday in all her destructive glory, had been instantly consigned to the worst hell imaginable. The nearness and volume of her screeching took Twilight’s breath away. He felt faint. The two voices assailed his being in a juxtaposed nightmare, one screeching at the very highest human pitch and the other a deep, resonant, mind-attacking baritone.
RELEASE THEM IMMEDIATELY. USE THE SECRET. LET THEM GO … NOW!
Desperately clutching the hand of the long magus he began to lose consciousness. He had a good idea where the resonant command was coming from but couldn’t get away from it. Neither, because he didn’t have the secret, could he obey it. He could also faintly hear the soothing tones of the long magus against the background screeching of the cowering soul that was Elelendise. Suddenly it all faded into nothingness. As the blackness of unconsciousness took over, all he could hear was the repeated, penetrating tones of the resonant voice.
Then that, too, was gone.
Kiss the winds and sense the seasons,
Smell the rain and know the reasons.
Feel the sun, plunge the earth
Whisper plant, whisper birth.
Run with hares, fly with bird
Climb with trees heavenwards.
Then you will know the reasons why
The earth resides beneath the sky.
And if you think it’s yours to change,
To redesign and rearrange,
Consider your time within its place
As no more than a flash in space,
And in that flash you would deface
The beauty of its timeless place.
For no more than a flash in space
You would leave your own disgrace, So by kissing winds of zephyr light And smelling rain throughout the night And understanding backward sigh All your mistakes are rendered right. And this noble place we call our Earth Will have survived you death from birth And all will be as it was before, Your flash in space required a cure. The Elder Pendragon’s words of the Song of the Veneficus,
taught him by the long magus, swirled around his head. Was his flash in space over? Had his all-too-brief sojourn as a tyro magic man ended? He could smell rain - smell the rain and know the reasons - the wind played over his cheeks - kiss the winds and sense the seasons - he could feel damp grass under his hands - whisper plant, whisper birth. Had all his mistakes been rendered right?
Was he dead?
Then he heard the most wonderful sound his young life had ever encountered.
“By the Ford of the Barking, I thought we had lost you,” said the voice of the long magus from above him.
He opened his eyes to see the unaccustomed sight of the unshaven and ponytailed head of his birth father and mentor looking down at him with a concerned look that quickly changed into a broad smile. On one of his shoulders sat a yellow-eyed hawk and on the other a glossy plumaged brown-eyed pica.
Both birds were nodding with pleasure.
“Ahhh, there you are, skirmisher. C’mon, we’ve finished at this mournful crucible of hell for another year. It’s time to weave a little crinkum crankum around this green Celtic sward called Wessex for the good of those who live here. The enchantments, and the many challenges that accompany them, await your divine presence.”
“When I have learned how to use them properly,” the boy mumbled happily.
The long magus chuckled. “With seven more years to learn and the help of these rare birds, there is nothing beyond you. Even the immortals had better take care.”
Twilight’s black eyes took on a faraway look.
“And Rawnie,” he said quietly. “Let’s not forget Rawnie.”
The Presidium trembled with the ferocity of Zeus’s wrath. Before him on
the marbled floor, his arms and legs apart, his face pressed against the right foot of the seated King of the Immortals, stretched the prostrate body of Tiresias, the Seer of Thebes. Around them the other seven gods gesticulated in anger, and beyond them many tens of the lesser deities shook their fists and screamed their opprobrium.
The angry voice of Zeus roared down on the head of Tiresias.
“Your intention was clear. If that boy had released the cowerers, they would have swept all Wessex mankind before them in a desperate tide of vengeance. After Wessex would come the rest of the Britains, then the Low Countries, Rome, Greece, the East. Nothing and no one would be able to stop it. Growing in size and unconstrained bile with every human life it engulfed, the tide would eventually reach this Presidium … and WE, the Olympic gods that sprang from the overthrow of the Titans to rule the universe … would have been destroyed. You, on the other hand, as their god, expected to live in perpetual omnipotence as their leader. Well, traitor, let me tell you something. Once released the cowering dead would have no loyalty to anyone, least of all YOU. Your immortal existence would have been the first to be swept away.”
He paused to look around at the other primary immortals, Poseidon, Hera, Athena, Apollo, Aphrodite, Helios, and Hermes.
“I suggest we transfer the overseeing of the Domain of the Cowering Dead to another, more trustworthy god, and banish this pitiful plotting traitor to Tartarus, the lowest world of darkness and death … forever.”
There was a chorus of approval.
“The only reason I am sparing your miserable existence is to inflict infinite suffering. Death would be a merciful escape for you that I am not prepared to countenance. There is no escape from the fires of Tartarus, only lasting torture of a kind that makes the mists of the cowering dead comparable to Nirvana.”
The Presidium erupted in cheering as Zeus slowly stood and drew himself up to his full height.
“Tartarus awaits you, traitor Tiresias. NOW GO FOREVER!”
Epilogue
Seven years later Twilight stood with Rawnie, his wife, who was heavy with their second child, their two-year-old daughter, Eleanor, Guinevere, his brothers and sisters, a few scattered picas, and the entire Wessex population of Merlin hawks, consisting of one hundred and sixty-five free pairs and fifty-eight single birds from captivity.
It was the second funeral ceremony the humans had attended that year, with Leah, Twilight’s beloved mother, having succumbed to the ravages of leprosy just fifty days previously.
Looming over them, casting a long shadow, in sympathy perhaps with the former venefical life beneath, the freshly laid sarsen stone, named by its occupier as Obelisk, pointed proudly to the sky. The ninety-ninth stone, in perfect circular symmetry with the others and surrounded by a legion of small ligamen and other brave helper commemoration stones, had just been laid by Twilight over the one-hundred-year-old body of his great mentor and birth father, Merlin.
Pressing his face against its cold hardness, the now resident Wessex veneficus all on his own, and, at just twenty years of age, a husband and father himself, unashamedly let his tears flow. Despite the intensity of their time together, there was still so much left unsaid, undone, and unlearned. The journey ahead was fraught with danger and the weight of its expectation on his young shoulders immense. Yet, along with the grief he felt a communion with the other stones, a bond of shared purpose. They, who had also known this moment in its many manifestations as the venefical chalice was handed over, were with him.
He would not let them down. The teachings of the long magus would see to that.
And had the great journey of redemption undertaken by the long magus succeeded?
Had he sprinkled a little venefical stardust on the thrones of the immortals?
Did he add earthshine and fulfillment to the great prophesies of the venefical purpose?
It was for others and history to decide. Others, perhaps, who also inhabited great stones in this place and had their own way of passing such judgments.
Twilight, the former village boy, capricious questioner, pupil and companion in arms, and now burial overseer of his mentor, knew what he thought the answers were. It was, as the old astounder himself would have put it, accompanied, no doubt, by a chuckle and an iridescent flash of those high, heavily browed green eyes, a simple conundrum.
“Qui docet discit - he who teaches learns, eh skirmisher.”
Rawnie gently touched his arm and handed him their small, dark-eyed daughter, Eleanor, who was herself fighting back tears having seen her father’s grief. As was her wont when cuddled by her adored father she began to play with the pica beak necklace around his neck.
He smiled down at her through his tears and took Rawnie’s hand.
“Come, my two princesses, there are eternal truths, iridescent mists, baseless wars, blue feathers, and, in time, a new skirmisher to find … It’s not me anymore. I am the Wessex veneficus.”
The Stones of the Chosen
Located at Avebury in Wessex, these stones are the resting place of each veneficus going back ten thousand years. There are ninety-nine of them in place. If any of these stones are moved or defaced in any way, they will dissolve into their own weight in blood, which will gather in a pool where the stone stands. That blood will never evaporate or lose its deep crimson color; if moved or drained it will always return, remaining a permanent reminder to the world of the desecration of a most sacred venefical monument.
Around each Destiny Stone there are many small stones. These represent all the humans and animals who gave their lives helping the veneficus within, whose mighty stones’ shadow their bones now rest. As time has gone on a great many of these smaller tribute stones have been removed or lost.
No.
Veneficus
Stone
100
Twilight
Blue Horn
99
Merlin
Obelisk
98
The Elder Pendragon
Summit
97
Idris the Former
Turret
96
The Pale Sybil
Presidium
95
Zero the Romany
Point Hill
94
Michael
Great Crag
93
Another Idris
Peak
92
Olivia the Unseen
Long Crest
91
Maximillian the Younger
Eyrie
90
Maximillian the Elder
Giant
89
Princess Estana
High Mount
88
Simon of Andoversford
Overtop
87
Parva Boy
The Tower
86
Miller of Brace
Behemoth
85
Madeleine of Usk
Sta
ck
84
Peter Landsman
Chalk Rest
83
Idris of Tinnis
The Flint
82
Andrew de Pomphrey
Peninsula
81
The Eeorl Ashley
Roar
80
Eleanor of the Horses
Saddlestone
79
Belle Noble
Royal Hold
78
Salvador
Stone of Ravenna
77
Samuel Saunders
Stronghold
76
Sable the Soothsayer
Firma
75
The Chosen Sara
Lode Stone
74
Long Thomas
Sarsen Rest
73
William of Shad
Bird Lip
72
Son of Cate
Rock of Cate
