by Peter
“Of course. Do you think this is the first such site? But such study is best undertaken covertly. Where men like Gracer are involved, there is only one way to guarantee secrecy.”
There was a cry of alarm from within the cave, and then the screaming began. Elantris was trembling, staring into the beautiful, composed face of his mistress. She smiled slowly.
“I should have them kill you as well, I suppose, but you are a useful little tool, and I think I am fond of you. Now go and pack my bags, I’ll have the mercenaries strike our tent.”
He did so, numbly and, when he returned, the Scorpions were standing around Hastella respectfully – all so much bigger than she, and yet she dwarfed them with her presence and her Art, always the centre of her own web.
“I will send those I trust to further examine the site,” she explained. “For now, block up this door. Let us seal away the monsters once again.”
Too late, Elantris thought, watching them all, reliving the moments of his dream. We are already outside.
Passage by Shannon Connor Winward
SHE REMOVED THE first stone herself. She found it by touch, prodding with numb fingers until she fastened on one that would betray the others. Three and three and three more tumbled to the ground, their dull clacking thunderous as the crowd of people behind her held their breath.
Then there were hands beside hers, her brothers pulling down the stones, breaking through with their iron picks, shoving her aside when she stumbled.
She waited by the torches, swaying on her feet as more people came forward, hands crawling and sweeping until the last of the wall was pulled away and the mouth of the tomb lay open.
Someone whispered in her ear.
“Danu,” it said, and something more, but the words were dissolving. Hands came to her throat, unfastened the pin she wore there. Her layers of warmth fell away. They took her shoes, her gown. They let her hair spill down her back in loose coils. She stood with arms outstretched, held in place as hands exposed her to the winter air.
She was so heavy. The drug they had dosed her with had begun to crystallize under her skin. If they let go of her she would fall, but they did not let go. They lodged themselves beneath her – mother, sister, friend. They took her shivering.
They moved her forward, bare feet dragging on the ground. She was clad only in her rings and torcs and the lightest dun shift, but she no longer felt cold.
Eoichaid did not look at her as he walked to the front of the gathering. The priest paused between the lintels of the entrance and etched sigils in the air, then passed into the tomb without a light. She watched the hem of his robe disappear into the black arch of space.
Danu leaned against her mother’s shoulder. In the old man’s absence, people dared to cough, whisper, shift their feet. Danu heard them, full of impatience and fear and something else. She rolled her eyes in all directions, but every face turned away from her. One in particular was missing – maybe watching, but not here where she could see him, not in front. Still, she looked for him until her vision grew blurred.
One of the women that held her shifted and stifled a complaint. As she moved, Danu’s right foot turned out at an awkward angle. To Danu it looked alien, not her own flesh. Her head sank onto her chest, too heavy now to hold itself erect.
Danu heard her mother’s ragged sigh, somewhere near her ear.
All at once, the ground below Danu’s foot began to bubble and writhe. The earth peeled away like skin from bone and a large serpent emerged, a shiver of silver and black that curled into a fist of scales beneath her heel.
Danu felt – but did not feel – the gentle flicker of the serpent’s tongue on the underside of her foot. She tried to raise her head to ask if the others saw it, but she had no strength. The serpent’s head lifted instead, gliding over her foot and around her ankle, slowly inching its way higher and higher into her very core.
She felt the assembly draw close around her, though they had not moved. The priest returned from the tomb and had begun to call out to the people, and to the spirits of this place.
“Accept this … her crime … the right of kings…” The words fell like meaningless stones in Danu’s ears, but she knew them all the same, for the serpent of the land was inside her, listening.
The serpent coiled in tight knots around her spine, moulding to her joints and limbs. Danu lifted her head, eyes of blue fire levelled on the priest as he threw hands to the sky, as he spread his arms in supplication to the mound and the hill and the valley.
The strength in his voice comforted the others on this dark, cold night, this turning point of the year when men believed they could harness power – but he could not fool her.
To Danu, the priest revealed his secret fear.
“Interloper,” the serpent whispered from Danu’s frozen mouth. Danu’s mother went rigid, digging her fingers deep into Danu’s arm. It would have pained her, if the flesh had still been her own.
Oblivious, Eoichaid gestured and called.
Three men – her brothers and, there, one other – separated from the assembly and moved towards her, to take her from the women.
They drew away her mother last. She plucked at Danu’s wool shift. She smacked away their grip. She held Danu’s cheeks until one of the men uttered gruff words – a plea, an oath. Mother tore something from her bosom and tied it around Danu’s neck, then stepped back into the crowd.
Danu could not turn to look after her, nor could she feel the hands of the men that bore her, but her mother’s pendant lay heavy and warm against her breast.
They stopped before the priest, at the mouth of the tomb. Eoichaid’s small grey eyes shied away from hers, focusing on the line of her mouth instead. He forced her lips apart and placed a quartz stone under her tongue. He covered her mouth and nose with his wizened hand. He whispered, breath rank with mead, “For the people.” His other hand swept across her with a sudden jerk, and Danu’s throat opened.
As she bled, the serpent inside her loosened its coils. It slithered through the mouth of her wound, down her body, and back into the ground.
Her heart roared. Somewhere, she heard her mother’s answer, keening.
Danu’s body went limp. The men let her sink to the ground at Eoichaid’s feet. One of her brothers swiped his hand across his mouth, concealing an unmanly sound. They laid her on her back, her eyes full of stars slipping silently, guiltily, over the horizon.
With his sickle spent and dangling at his side, Eoichaid waited for her life to empty itself. It took a long time. The blood that seeped from her grew sluggish, lacklustre. Eoichaid gestured.
The priest went first, then he, who held aloft a torch. Danu’s brothers lifted her body and, with it suspended between them, followed.
Danu’s friends and sisters came next, bearing gifts – her mirror and combs, clay jars and bundles, a bronze beaker. Without a word, the funeral party inched forward into the barrow, and the crowd behind them breathed a collective sigh.
Danu walked at the rear of the procession as the men carried her body down the corridor of stone. The priest stared straight ahead and the others watched the ground, unwilling to see any more than they must in this place of the dead, but Danu saw how the torchlight brought the passage to life. Symbols danced in the stones, at her sides and overhead – spirals and ovals and a thousand suns. The passage was the night sky, reigned in and narrowed so that they could touch it, if only they had the courage to lift their heads.
Danu lifted her head, and Danu touched the sky. It was hot and cold beneath her fingertips, solid and fluid. She felt a dawn of understanding humming just within the stone, but it was more than she could bear. She withdrew her hand.
When the passage opened into the central chamber, they moved quickly. One of her brothers, the one holding her feet, tripped in his eagerness to be finished. The necklace bounced from Danu’s breast and dangled in the air, twisting and glinting in torchlight.
Under the priest’s guidance they arranged her b
ody in a foetal position within a low niche, just to the right of the chamber entrance. Eoichaid himself tucked her arms beneath her breast and angled her chin towards the back of the cairn. Her eyes were still open, and he could now look into them, now forgiving, now admitting in his secret thoughts how unsure he really was. How desperate. The Gods reveal their will to no one.
She turned a blind eye to him. Eoichaid took his hands away, and it was done.
The man who held the torch stepped forward. Eoichaid began to bark angry words, but the man silenced him with a snarl and the raised tip of his sword. The old priest said nothing more.
The man put his weapon away and stooped beside Danu. Gingerly, he plucked her mother’s pendant from where it had trailed in the dirt and placed in between Danu’s sticky, folded fingers.
His touch lingered. I’m sorry. Sorry. Sorry, said his heart.
He backed away.
She followed them out from the main chamber, back down the passage. Though the cairn was open and light from the torches tickled the floor, the world beyond the mouth of the tomb was hidden from her, covered in a heavy grey mist. One by one they passed through it, and left her. None of them looked back. He did not look back. He was moving quickly now, eager to get out and into the business of forgetting.
At the portal’s edge, she stopped and leaned her head into the mist, listening to the sounds of the assembly dispersing, people heading back down the hill. A few stayed behind – she heard low voices, and scraping. Then with a heavy thud the first stone was laid in place.
They worked steadily into the night, tamping in wet clods of earth to cover cracks, closing the door between the worlds. At last, the wall was finished, and the folk could go home, comforted now with the knowledge that Danu was within. Danu had been offered.
Danu would protect them.
Danu turned and moved back to the chamber.
When she got there, a small, dark, bearded man was waiting for her.
“Interloper,” he growled.
Danu froze. There were others in the chamber, as well: an old woman hunched on the floor, squinting at her with a squirrel-like face; another man beside her, a cripple with a knotty oak staff. He regarded Danu with curiosity. And yet another watched, too – somewhere. A shy, formless presence, lurking, perhaps within the walls.
“Look how tall she is,” the old woman declared with wonder. “Look at all that bright hair!”
The cripple leaned towards her. “What do they call you?”
“Daughter,” Danu replied. Out of habit, she lifted her chin. “Daughter of the King.”
“What king?” queried the old woman.
“This is your name?” the cripple pressed.
“No, it is my rank.”
“Trespasser,” hissed the bearded man. His brown little eyes leered at her, darkly.
“This is not your home,” the old woman said.
It was an observation, not an accusation, but Danu bristled. “It is.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“Criminal!” barked the bearded man.
“I am not!”
“What is that you’ve got there?” the cripple asked. With a few quick, twisting steps, he picked up the bronze beaker they had left beside her body and poked a finger in its contents. He brought the finger to his mouth and smiled. “She’s got beer!” he said brightly.
“Has she got porridge?” the old woman asked.
“Has she got a weapon?” the first man snarled.
“She has jewellery,” came a soft voice from the recesses of the mound.
The bearded man wiggled his dagger at the niche where Danu’s body lay. “She’s getting blood all over the floor.”
The chamber fell silent as the trio turned to look. Eventually, the old woman broke the stillness with a loud tsk of disapproval.
“I–I’m sorry,” Danu blurted.
The cripple looked at Danu, his features softened with pity. “Do you not have fire where you come from?”
“Barbarian,” the bearded man mumbled.
“Such pretty, pretty trinkets,” the old woman chimed, changing the subject.
The cripple dipped another finger into the beaker and tasted thoughtfully. “It’s been a long time,” he said, slowly, as if in epiphany. He turned to look at Danu. “It’s been a long time since they brought us beer.”
“I suppose it has,” Danu replied.
“She doesn’t belong here,” the bearded man insisted. “She isn’t one of us.”
“But I am.”
The bearded man ignored her. “She’s one of them.”
“One of who?” asked the old woman.
“One of them, the new ones. The big ones, from the ocean.”
“But I was born here,” Danu protested.
“They pronounce things wrong. They swear allegiance to whatever man carries the biggest sword and they can’t even dispose of their dead properly.”
Danu opened her mouth to argue but closed it again, realising what the bearded man said was not untrue.
“They’re all murderers! The lot of them,” Bearded Man went on. “When they run out of enemies to fight they slay their own. Look!” he gestured to the lump in the niche on the floor. “They even slay their women.”
“I was chosen,” Danu said softly.
“They slay their criminals for sport,” he told them, jutting his chin and eyeing her knowingly. “They play foot-games with their heads.”
“I was cleansed,” she whispered.
The trio regarded her in heavy silence. After a long moment, the voice in the walls asked, “Are you a criminal?”
Danu turned to the wall. “I loved wrongly,” was all she said.
The voice in the wall was still for a while, its thoughts reflected in three pairs of unblinking eyes around the room.
When the voice piped in again, it asked, “How can love be wrong?”
Danu fidgeted with the bands of gold around her arm. Again, she could not answer. She could not argue.
The old woman shook her head. “Poor girl,” she said. “You don’t belong here.”
“I do,” Danu answered. “They’ve given me to you.”
The trio looked at her quizzically. “Given you?” the cripple repeated. “Whatever for?”
“For the good of the People. To make the rain come. To stop the crops from failing. To protect the herds and bring us victory at war.”
The trio stared at her, all with wrinkled brows. Then the bearded man began to snicker. The old woman’s mouth twitched at the corners. The cripple hid his face behind a healthy drought from the beaker.
From behind her head, Danu heard a muffled giggle.
The bearded man lowered himself to the floor and retrieved a pair of bones from a niche in the wall. “Idiots,” he said, shaking his head. “Barbarians. Every last one of them.” He began rubbing one bone against the other – slowly, methodically, as if he meant to sharpen them – or grind them into dust.
Danu felt a soft hand upon her arm. She looked down – far down – at the tiny old woman, who had shuffled over to her side.
“I suppose you might as well come sit with us, then,” the woman said. She glanced at the body on the floor with a look of mild distaste, but patted Danu gently, kindly. “I hope at least they remember how to tell a story. We could use some new ones.”
Danu let herself be led to the floor where the others sat, on the far side of the cairn.
“Stories?” she repeated.
“Why yes, love,” the old woman replied. “The nights can be very, very long.”
One Man’s Folly by Pauline E Dungate
JOHN PERROTT SMOOTHED out the plans on the surface of the trestle table, anchoring the corners with quarters of red brick. He placed a compass in the centre and checked the alignment of the drawings with the poles and string set out in the field before him. He nodded to the architect who was standing beside him and asked, “How long before you’ve dug deep enough for a firm foundation. I don’t want
it falling down after the first winter gale.”
“Bout five days more, squire,” was the reply.
A boy, no more than ten, came belting across the grass towards them from the direction of the excavation. He stopped breathless on the other side of the table. Perrott gave him a few moments to recover before asking, “Your message, Tom?”
“Mr Bathgate. He says can you come look. They’ve dug into summat.”
“Very well. Tell him I’m on my way.” Perrott carefully rolled up the plans and stowed them back into the metal carrying tube before handing them to the architect. He picked his way across the field, carefully avoiding the larger tussocks and mole hills. He came to stand beside Bathgate, the man in charge of the crew doing the actual construction.
“What is it, man?” he asked.
Bathgate tugged his cap further down over his face. “It’s the ’ole, squire. There’s a ruddy great rock in the bottom of it. We won’t shift it short of gunpowder.”
“Hmm. How far down does it go?”
“We dug down next to the bugger. Ain’t found the bottom yet.”
“I’ll look at it.” Perrott walked round the edge of the excavation until he reached the wooden ladder that was the only easy way to the bottom. He tested it for security before trusting his weight to it. The distance to fall wasn’t great; the risk of loss of dignity was greater.
From above, Bathgate shouted, “Barker, ’old the ladder fer the squire.”
One of the men, liberally smeared with mud from the digging, dropped his spade and trudged the few paces to grip the uprights of the ladder and prevent it slipping. These men might be uncouth but they were compliant and hardworking. He couldn’t fault Bathgate’s choice of workforce.
The clay soil quickly adhered to the soles of Perrott’s boots as he picked his way across to the large boulder. Bathgate was right. It would be a devil to move. He knew of others in the area and one theory was that they had been dropped by ice rivers such as he had seen in the Alps. He put his hand on it, feeling the rough surface. The minerals sent a slight tingling through his fingers similar to brushing against nettles. He rubbed the tips of his fingers together, the sensation passing once he no longer touched the surface.
