by Brian Bates
After a short rest, Wulf led the way across the thickly turfed plateau. He walked slowly, apparently scanning the grass, until he stopped abruptly. In front of us a scattering of yellow flowers barely peeped above the grass, blowing in the wind. I had never before seen such plants.
‘What are they called?’ I asked tentatively, afraid to interrupt the intense concentration with which Wulf was surveying the flowers.
He bent down on one knee and plucked a sprig from the plant nearest to him.
‘Do not label them; just get to know them,’ he said. ‘Here, chew this piece.’
He handed me a leaf. I put it on my tongue and sucked at it cautiously.
‘Chew it!’ Wulf instructed, watching me closely.
I bit into it and immediately my mouth stung with an unpleasantly bitter taste. I spat it out into my palm.
‘What do you use it for?’ I asked, wiping my tongue with my fingers to relieve the burning sensation.
Ignoring the question, Wulf stepped carefully into the cluster of plants; squatting next to one, he cradled a leaf in his palm and laid the first and middle fingers together above the leaf.
‘See? It is too small,’ he said. ‘Take only those that are broader than your two fingers. We need the most vigorous plants.’
He pulled his knife from his leather sheath and, thinking we were about to cut some plants, I moved to a large plant three or four paces away and slipped my hand under a leaf near the base. It was almost as broad as three fingers. I grasped the top of the plant and unsheathed my knife.
‘No!’ Wulf’s sharp cry froze me and he leaped over and grasped my wrist. ‘First we must mark them.’
While I watched carefully he rested the long blade of his knife in his left palm, curled his fingers around it and with a sudden twist flicked the blade against his fingers. When he opened his hand, blood was seeping from the fleshy underside of his fingers and dribbling into his palm. The warning notes of nearby sparrows pierced my ears with unnerving clarity and a wave of apprehension stirred in my stomach.
Sheathing the knife, Wulf crouched over one of the yellow flowers, examining it closely, his face a mask of concentration. I watched him in trepidation, helpless to intervene. He rubbed his fingers against one of the leaves, smearing blood all along the stem and across the leaf. A stench of evil pervaded the plateau and, sickened, I turned away trying to control the urge to retch. Christian teachings and law expressly forbade blood rituals and in silent anger I berated myself for not having realized that I might be an unwitting witness to such abominations.
Wulf repeated the disgusting ritual with two more plants, while I stared determinedly into the distance, trying to separate myself from his activities. Then he rose to his feet and stepped away from the plants to stand at my side. I clamped my jaw shut, determined to voice no protest but simply to report all I could to the Mission.
Wulf calmly surveyed the expanse of yellow flowers. ‘We identify the best specimens and offer them our blood,’ he said, almost in a whisper. ‘When we have finished, we shall take only those plants marked by our blood.’
He pulled out his knife and again laid the blade across his left palm, then nodded towards my own knife. With horror and dismay, I realized that he intended that I should cut my fingers also. The evil prospect filled me with dread.
‘Why do we need to mark them, Wulf?’ I stammered, searching desperately for an excuse which would not offend him. ‘If we test them for size, then cut them immediately, we cannot forget which plants we want to collect.’
Wulf stared at me steadily, unblinking
‘Identifying them is not the purpose,’ he said in a voice as soft as the wind. ‘The blood is your sacrifice to the plant.’
I looked around in panic, seeing no alternative to a confrontation. ‘But the blood...I am not able to spill my blood on the plants. It is forbidden to those of my faith.’
Wulf arched his eyebrows. ‘Do you not offer blood sacrifice to your god, Brand?’
He gazed directly at me, his eyes confident, unwavering, knowing. Immediately I thought of the Eucharist, in which we take bread together with wine and, after consecration, they become through a spiritual mystery truly Christ’s body and His blood. But I could not believe that Wulf would know of our ritual—and even if he did, he could not understand it.
‘No. We don’t,’ I said firmly.
‘Do you not drink the blood of your god?’ Wulf persisted, his eyes twinkling now with amusement. ‘I am not asking you to drink the blood of your god, merely to dedicate a small drop of your own in honour of the plants.’
I thought now that surely he knew of the Eucharist, for he was baiting me with wicked enjoyment.
‘But Wulf, this is different. We are not here worshipping my God or your gods; we are merely picking flowers.’
‘We are not picking flowers like some courting lover,’ Wulf snapped, his eyes flashing with sudden anger. ‘We are hunting for power. If we were merely picking leaves, flowers or berries the plant would not suffer, for it could replace them. But we are about to take the roots of these plants, for therein lies the source of their life-force. When we dig a plant from the ground, we have separated it from its source of breath and it can no longer spin a spirit-skin. The plant will die because we have laid a claim on its life-force and we have to offer something of ourselves in return. Our blood is a gift to the plant, a token of our thanks.’
‘But Wulf, such concern is reasonable for the death of a person, for people are divinely blessed. But how can you feel so strongly about plants?’
‘Plants carry life-force as potent as any person. To take the life of a plant, whether for food or sorcery, is to act with the gods.’
I snorted condescendingly. Everything Wulf said underlined the error of his ways; at the monastery we blessed the fields and prayed for the favour of the Almighty in growing our crops. But we did not, of course, harvest plant foods as if taking life, for plants and animals were provided by God for use by man.
Wulf gestured impatiently towards my knife—and this time I said nothing I knew that I had either to refuse and lose Wulf’s services as my guide or to suspend my beliefs in the higher service of the Lord. It had to be the latter course. I was here to listen, learn and report to the Mission, not to argue the teachings of the Lord; that blessed task would be carried out by others in good time. I had to believe that no matter what I did in this Godforsaken land, I was acting to His greater glory. Wulf’s blood ritual would be, for me, a sacrifice to the Almighty.
I laid the knife across my palm, closed my eyes and prayed silently for his forgiveness. Gingerly, I pressed the cold blade into my fingers and nicked the two middle fingers near the base. Blood oozed out slowly and trickled between my fingers.
To my surprise, Wulf suddenly put an arm around my shoulders and hugged me gently. ‘Now let us collect some power,’ he said, leading me by the arm into the cluster of plants. We crouched down next to a large plant.
‘Mark them like this,’ Wulf instructed. ‘Grip the plant tightly, placing your thumb and forefinger around a leaf.’ He held a leaf with a pincer movement of his fingers and deftly stroked a line of blood down the centre vein.
I took hold of a leaf and bent it over carefully. The plant exuded a heavy, musty odour as I pulled the leaf taut and wiped it with my palm. It made only the faintest streak of red because the blood on my hand had dried, but even so I felt nauseated and thought I was going to be sick.
Wulf materialized at my side.
‘All the plants are trying to help you,’ he said cheerfully, indicating with a sweep of his arm the expanse of flowers on the plateau. ‘Listen! They are talking loudly to you.’
I looked around at the yellow petal clusters, bending and ducking in the breeze.
‘See? They are all waving at you,’ Wulf said, chuckling.
The very idea of flowers waving to me was amusing enough to break the tension and I sucked in several deep breaths.
‘Now cut harde
r and collect the blood in your palm,’ Wulf instructed, still crouched at my side.
Again I pushed in the blade, feeling the cutting edge slicing into my fingers. This time blood gushed at an alarming rate and ran warm into my cupped hand.
Squatting still, I hurriedly wiped my hand against the plant, blood streaking an incongruously bright red against the dull green of the leaf. But the leaves were still moist from night dew and the blood gradually diluted and faded to a pale pink smudge.
I forced myself to mark a second plant and this time I felt less nauseated, though my cut fingers now stung sharply. I had just finished marking my fourth plant when Wulf’s voice broke the silence and he called me over to watch him.
‘Brand, we have marked enough. Let us now take the marked plants. We must take out the entire plant; use your knife to dig a circle in the ground, about a foot from the plant, but take care not to cut the roots.’
Working swiftly, he dug a trench round a plant he had marked, then inserted his fingers into the circular depression and forced them deeper, eventually working his fingers under the root and lifting the whole plant from the ground.
I set to work on the first plant I had marked. The task was absorbing and difficult, for the rain-soaked soil was heavy. Eventually I raised the plant and, carefully concealing from him my sense of achievement, submitted it to Wulf for inspection.
‘See where you have injured it,’ he said, pointing to a subsidiary root that had snapped off.
I looked at it closely. It was only a tiny break. ‘But Wulf, the plant is almost intact. I pulled it from the ground very carefully.’
Wulf shook his head. ‘You chopped through that root with your knife. Life-force is drawn off by iron. A plant which has been cut with iron is no longer a plant of power and is useless to a sorcerer.’
He insisted that I replace the plant in the exact spot from which I had taken it.
We worked for a while longer and Wulf accepted two of the four plants I raised, placing them carefully in a large sack and closing the top. I noticed that he stowed away into a separate sack the plants he had dug up.
Wulf placed the sacks carefully in the shade, in a hollow at the base of a lone beech. The sun had risen high in the sky and we stretched out to rest under the tree. I decided to try again for more information.
‘Wulf, what will you use the plants for?’
‘Venoms,’ he replied casually.
I sat up and glanced around nervously. I was always on the alert for adders, for their bite was deadly.
‘What kind of venoms?’ I asked, trying—and failing—to adopt a matter-of-fact tone.
Wulf could not fail to notice that I was looking with consternation into the grass.
‘Snakes more powerful than you have ever encountered,’ he chuckled. ‘In these forests, some snakes mediate between death and life. They carry the life-force leaked from the dead until it is taken up by another living form. We can expect snakes to follow us for a while, seeking the life-force from the plants in those sacks. But we have marked them with our blood and therefore have first claim on the life-force. For a time, anyway, the snakes cannot harm the plants.’
He had not really answered my question. I wanted to hear how the snakes could affect me.
‘Wulf, according to your beliefs, do the snakes ever approach dying people?’
He nodded lazily. ‘And they approach living people; that is why the bite of some snakes is so deadly. They thirst for the life-force of other creatures and if none is presented to them they sometimes seek it out for themselves. If a snake kills you, your soul is released from your life-force and flies around screaming through the world of the dead, burning like a flame in the night.’
I swallowed hard. I found his images very disturbing
‘The plants are meant to protect from such forces?’ I asked.
‘Yes, eventually. In the meantime, we should keep you clear of the dealers in death.’
I glanced at him in time to see him smile. He seemed to treat the death of people more lightly than the death of plants. With a finger to his lips he cut off my next question before I had mouthed it.
‘Let us start,’ he said. ‘I want to reach Cydda’s farm by nightfall, and we may have more work to do before then.’
He gave me the sack containing my own two plants.
‘Do not allow the sack to drag on the ground or bump into the trees,’ he warned. ‘The plants are very delicate and any injury to the roots will render them useless.’
Wulf led the way North, across the plateau and into thin copses of mixed beech and oak woodland. Gradually the land sloped down into a valley and we rejoined the stream that had cut through the ravine. Then we tracked North-West, away from the stream. As we walked, I tried to order my thoughts. Guilt about what I had done gnawed at my stomach. I tried to concentrate on the positive aspects, itemizing in my mind the information I could report to the Mission.
First, I attempted to recall some of the plants Wulf had listed as being of use to him. Then I rehearsed, over and over, the plant-collecting ritual as I would report it to Brother Eappa. But, hard as I tried, the Mission seemed distant not only in miles and days but also in spirit. Wulf trudged into thick forest and increasingly, as the terrain became more entangled with undergrowth, my thoughts were distracted by stabs of pain from my ankle. I tried to favour it and eventually limped quite badly, concealing the limp from Wulf whenever he turned round to wait for me. I concentrated so hard on controlling the pain that I almost forgot where I was, cocooned in my own world.
‘Stop!’
Wulf’s cry startled me and I froze immediately, looking around in alarm. We were about a third of the way across a small meadow, set in the forest like an island in a sea of trees. I scanned the ground rapidly, searching for the zigzag back of an adder.
‘Don’t move!’ Wulf ordered. He was crouching about five paces away, staring at my feet. He crawled carefully around me like a wildcat ready to pounce, coming no closer than five paces.
‘What’s the matter, Wulf?’ I said, completely bewildered. My voice sounded small and frightened and seemed to come from a long way away.
‘Look at the grass in front of you,’ he hissed and obediently I stared at the ground.
Wulf’s intensity was making me feel panicky, but I could see nothing in the grass. He rose slowly, standing on the balls of his feet and balanced for rapid movement. Pointing in front of me, he moved his arm to indicate a circular area on the ground.
Immediately I became aware of a circular patch of grass, about three or four paces in diameter, which was longer and darker than the surrounding meadowland. Inside the circle was a small patch of bare earth and at the centre, a cluster of small, strange mushroom-shaped plants, their bright red caps covered in white patches.
‘We are in a power field,’ Wulf warned, holding up one hand to keep me motionless. ‘If you had walked into those plants the concentration of power would have struck you down like a bolt of lightning.’
I stood stock-still, staring at the plants. I had seen them before and knew that some peasants believed them to have special powers. Eappa taught that such notions were absurd, but I had no desire whatever to challenge this now. The red mushrooms loomed in my vision like deadly flames. Slowly and carefully, I backed out of the circle.
‘The spirits are aware of your presence,’ Wulf muttered ominously, darting glances into the surrounding shrubbery. ‘They are the key to the secrets of Middle-Earth, for they have access to the gods and the Underworld. In these sacks, we have the means to make enough life-force to protect you from the excesses of the spirits, but you are not yet ready for it. In the meantime, we must be very careful, for the spirits are testing you. The power circle was a trap. Walk close behind me and do not speak until I tell you that we are clear of the danger.’
Wulf set off at a slower pace and I followed so closely that we were almost touching. I put my hand to my chest to feel the comforting shape of my crucifix. Beside i
t, I could feel my heart pounding but I knew that there could now be no turning back.
Reading the Omens of Wyrd
WULF WADED knee-deep into the water, paddled up river and disappeared around a bend. I settled back to wait for him. It was a tranquil scene. Trees leaned drunkenly from opposite banks to meet above the river and weak sunlight, slanting through the foliage, shimmered and danced among the shadows on the water. White and pale yellow parsley covered the bank sides and smothered the roots of the trees. Finches, tree pipits and blackbirds flitted and sang amongst flowering shrubs. The setting was so calm that I found it difficult to believe that this same forest had held such terrors for me during the night.
After collecting the plants, we had trudged on without further incident until the sun passed its high point in the sky when, drenched with sweat, we had stopped to rest by a river bank. My injured ankle had been agony and frequently I had failed to keep up the pace even though I was desperate to stay close behind Wulf. Several times he had waited for me to catch up with him.
‘Do you always hop on one leg?’ he said finally, pointing to my ankle.
‘I twisted it, getting over one of those storm-fall trees,’ I said untruthfully. While accepting that Wulf somehow knew about the demons I had encountered, I still had not been able to accept the fact that my ankle had been damaged during the terrifying horse-head dream.
Wulf took my arm and helped me to hobble from the path, through some bushes and on to the river bank.
‘Show me the injury,’ he said, lowering me into a clump of purple heather. I sank down gratefully, unstrapped my shoe and peeled back the leggings. The ankle was swollen and throbbed steadily; I fingered it gingerly, wincing with pain.
Wulf squatted next to me and looked closely at the damaged ankle, cradling it gently in his palm. He lowered my foot carefully to the ground and grunted, nodding his head knowingly.
‘Stay there and do not move,’ he instructed. ‘I shall return shortly.’
At that point Wulf had paddled up the river. Now, waiting for him to return, I leaned back on my elbows and yawned indulgently. As I tipped my head back, I glimpsed the tiny silhouette of a hunting hawk gliding across the clear, early afternoon sky. While I watched it, the bird dropped out of the blue and hurtled towards me like an arrow. I snapped fully alert, startled, but then the bird seemed to veer away and shot out of sight behind the trees. The sky was empty, as if the hawk had never existed.
