Throne of Darkness: A Novel

by Douglas Nicholas

  The priests smiled, Hob laughed, and Jack made the sounds that passed for laughter with him, but earned him a frightened look from the boy.

  “Come say farewell before you leave, child,” Father Athelstan said to Hob, and patting Jack’s shoulder, he turned to go. He staggered a bit, but only a little bit, the turn making him somewhat dizzy. Father Eustace steadied him; the old priest waved backhanded; and they set off toward the priest house.

  • • •

  THEY SPENT AN HOUR OR two putting the wagons in order, watering Milo and Tapaigh and Mavourneen, and hitching those three to the wagons, all with a small crowd of children and those adults who had no chores that could not be put off gathered around, watching every move of these visitors, who might have dropped down from the stars, so different were their lives from the quiet round of life in the village.

  Molly called Hob into the big wagon. She shut the door behind him, to speak out of earshot of the army of witnesses standing in the road outside. She handed him a leather pouch, heavy, the drawstrings pulled closed.

  “Hob, a chuisle, here’s a great deal of the silver da Panzano’s after giving us. I’m thinking ’tis only right that you help your old priest, who took you in when you were a helpless bairn, and raised you up—and a fine job I’ve always thought he did of it—and help also this village that sheltered you, and they with borrowed horses and cows struggling to plow, and to have milk and cheese—sure with this they’ll be able to replace their animals, and have some beside. He’s a good man, and knows how to live, and that without greed, and I’m trusting him. But it’s you should make the gift.”

  “But ’tis not mine, Mistress—da Panzano gave it to you.”

  “He gave it to us, lad, to the family, and you a part of it—’tis yours as much as it is Nemain’s, or Jack’s, or mine, and any road ’tis you should be our family’s representative in this.”

  “Yes, Mistress.” Hob found himself smiling, happy: he was not sure why, but as an orphan, the thought of himself so embedded in a strong family lifted up his heart, in ways he could not have explained, even to himself.

  He swung down from the wagon and strode across the square to the priest house. Father Eustace opened the door to his knock, nodded pleasantly at him, and stood aside. Hob went in, to find Father Athelstan struggling to his feet. Hob put the pouch down quietly as he walked by the table. He went up to the old priest, and embraced him.

  “I came to say farewell, Father,” said Hob. A sadness swept over him, and lodged in his throat, and in the corners of his eyes, so that he had to struggle to speak without a quaver, and to keep his eyes from filling with tears.

  “I hope ’tis but for a while,” said Father Athelstan. “The whole village has had joy of your coming, and that of your excellent family.” His eyes took on the unfocused look of recollection. “Those harps! Still they play in my memory. I hope to hear such music again in Heaven.”

  “I will see that we make every effort to return, as soon as we may, even if only for a little while.”

  “I hold you to that, child,” said the old priest. “But what is in that pouch that you so slyly leave on my table?”

  “It is a gift from us, Father—for you, and also for Saint Edmund’s folk, that you may replace the horses and cattle you have lost.”

  The priest moved painfully to the table; he held to the edge with one hand and with the other loosened the pouch strings. When he had widened the opening, and placed a hand therein, and ruffled the coins somewhat, he turned to Hob.

  A shadow flickered across the old priest’s face. “But how could you come by so much—” He threw up a thin hand. “Hob, child, I must beg your forgiveness: of course there is some perfectly correct way you and Mistress Molly have acquired so much wealth. You are two good souls. There was a moment when I thought—Satan was whispering in my ear, I believe.”

  Hob was having trouble following what Father Athelstan was getting at, and then understanding burst upon him so precipitously that it brought forth a peal of honest laughter, perhaps the most convincing demonstration of innocence that he could have made.

  “You thought we were brigands?” Hob cried, and set himself off again; it was so absurd that he could not become offended either for himself or for Molly, and his laughter diminished only gradually, slowing to chuckles and snorts of mirth, wiping his eyes.

  “Hob, I—” Now the priest really was embarrassed. Father Eustace, in a chair by the door, busied himself with his paternoster, looking down determinedly.

  “Oh, Father, ’tis not so strange that you should think such—we might be quite successful brigands: my little wife, for example, is more dangerous than any of the men in this village, and how could musicians and such ever earn such pouches of coin?”

  “Well—”

  “Mistress Molly is a wealthy woman in her own right, and a queen away in Erin; she chooses to live simply to avoid notice. Yet she is hunting those things from which your village hid away, and—this comes under your oath of silence of last night, are we agreed?”

  “Yes, child.”

  “Father Eustace?”

  “I consider myself bound to secrecy, Master Hob.”

  “She is summoned to do so by His Holiness himself. Do you think the Church would not be grateful for someone who can contain these devils; or that Sir Odinell, whose people she saved from a horrid fate, would not reward her; or that Sir Jehan, whose castle folk she kept from being slaughtered, would not be her partisan?”

  “I, ah, had not considered . . .”

  “There is no taint to that silver, Father; use it for your flock with an easy conscience.”

  For a moment Father Athelstan considered him very seriously, though a small smile played about the old priest’s mouth.

  “For someone who spent so many summer hours gazing out the window while he was supposed to be practicing his letters, you have grown up remarkably well, and I trust God will permit me my great pride in you.”

  “Father,” said Hob simply, and hugged the old man again. Fearing to stay longer, he went quietly to the door, bowed his head as Father Eustace signed a quick blessing above him, murmuring in Latin, and left the house in which resided his earliest memories.

  • • •

  THE LITTLE CARAVAN SET out from the square; every person in the village had assembled to see them go. Hob, walking in front with Milo’s lead rope in hand, had to stop every few steps to say good-bye to someone else: hugs, kisses, handshakes, claps on the back. Afterward the one clear memory of that raucous leave-taking was of Father Athelstan: Hob turned around, walking backward a few paces, for a last wave; and, standing in the middle of the road, the villagers from respect leaving him a clear view of the departing wagons, was Father Athelstan, matching Hob’s childhood memory of the rather forlorn priest waving good-bye to the child he had raised. Now, though, there was Father Eustace to lean on, and there was the knowledge that Hob had done well in the wide world, and there was the hope that Molly’s troupe would one day come through again. If it was possible, Hob swore to himself, they would do so.

  He turned about and walked on, setting his face to the road ahead; to the future; to unholy peril.

  CHAPTER 28

  MOLLY LED THEM FROM A well-traveled road running north, onto a smaller, less-traveled road running to the northeast. After a bit some trees appeared amid the cleared land on Hob’s right hand, and then more trees, and finally they were dense enough to constitute a forest: some lord’s untilled, uncut hunting preserve. An eastbound trail struck off into these woods, and Molly bade Hob turn the ox onto the track. The wagons shouldered aside branches that overhung the way; twigs squeaked along the wooden sides; their leaves, scraped off by the little caravan’s passage, carpeted the trail.

  After some time moving through deep woods, with the view to either side showing shadowed gloom relieved only by shafts of sunlight that managed to pierce the leafy canopy, they came to an area of increasing light. The track opened into a nearly circular
meadow, sunlit and knee-deep in fragrant bent, bisected by a tiny gurgling stream.

  Molly looked around, pleased; she drew a deep breath of the perfumed air. “There’s a fine dispute over who holds these lands, one earl supported by the barons and the other by the king, and the matter at law, and none hunting through them till ’tis settled. So it’s privily we mice may come, and nibble our crumbs, and none to disturb us.”

  For years, Hob had seen Molly stop and talk with every tinker and every one of the traveling people that they encountered, casual good-humored conversations that somehow yielded information about the road ahead, the sort of lore that wanderers share—where was danger, where was shelter, who was hostile, who was kind. There was never a tavernkeeper on their way whose confidence she did not gain, and she would come away knowing what he knew. So Hob was not surprised that Molly knew of this secluded glade in which they were unlikely to be discovered, let alone troubled.

  She directed the wagons to one side of the meadow, the wheels crushing a path through the stiff grasses; here there was a slight swell to the land, the wall of trees climbing up its face. Nestled into the hillside was a huge irregular boulder, higher than Hob’s head, part embedded in the ground and part thrust back into the hill. The stone showed a fairly flat side to the meadow; the lake of grasses washed up to the boulder’s front and halfway around its sides.

  They secured the wagons and unhitched and tethered the animals, letting them graze at the ends of long ropes. Nemain disappeared into the midsized wagon. Molly went up to the stone and ran her strong smooth hand over the level surface. Hob and Jack trailed after her, Hob wondering at Molly’s intent inspection of the granite surface.

  “I’m after thinking that I remembered such a stone here,” she said to them. “ ’Twill be a good place for the Lord of the Beasts to dance.”

  Hob, a little behind her, looked a question at Jack. The man-at-arms pointed to his shirtfront. Hob nodded: Jack Brown carried an amulet Molly had made for him, a little leather bag with small bunches of dried herbs bound with locks of Molly’s silver hair, and a tiny statuette, carved from wood, of an antler-headed man: the Lord of the Beasts.

  “Is it a fairy stone, Mistress?” Hob asked, peering at the boulder.

  “ ’Tis but a stone,” she said, “and yet a stone is never just a stone. Here, come close, look hard; feel of it; tell me what you can learn.”

  Hob, unsure of what was being asked of him, approached the stone, put his face very close, and looked, and looked. There was a fine grain to it that he had not noticed from a few paces back, and there was variation from gray to light gray-brown to dark gray. He put his palm against it: it gave back the warmth of the sunlight that had been playing upon it. He traced an indentation with a forefinger; there was a slight roughness to the surface, but not so rough that he could not slide his palm across it, a small sensuous pleasure.

  “And what does it say to you, Hob?” she asked.

  He looked from her face to the stone and back. “Say—? It is interesting, Mistress. Perhaps I feel now, a bit, what masons feel for stone; and certes I never thought to look so closely at one—but say? It is a stone, and does not say aught.”

  Molly sighed. “Well,” she said, “there’s a world behind the world, and some are seeing it, and some are not. But you are a true man of this world—’tis why you’re so clever, and are forever riddling things out with your wit, and are so much a man of your hands. But there are those who are seeing or feeling into another world, the world that’s made of the shadows that this world’s casting, and so they’re working the Art. So ’tis that I remembered this stone, and knew ’twould be the very place to build my fire, and pray, and sing a calling-up song. I’ll be calling up the Horned Man, and won’t He send me every king bull of the wild white cattle that is on this island, and won’t I be speaking to them, and so assemble my army.”

  At this point Nemain came clattering down the wagon steps, a cauldron hanging from one hand and a sack of dried peas in the other. She dropped the cauldron to the ground and came up to them.

  She swatted Hob on the buttocks. “And where’s my fire, husband? Are we to fast tonight? And you”—pointing at the widely grinning Jack—“ ’tis a shameful example you’re setting, standing about, and your great limbs idle.” But all this was said with mock severity, and Jack and Hob generally enjoyed this mood, of which Jack, with some difficulty, had once gargled the comment: “Little mother.”

  “Nay, ’tis my fault,” said Molly. “I thought to see if there was some echo of the Art in Hob, but there’s nary a bit of it.”

  “I’m destroyed with astonishment to hear it,” said Nemain, in a voice dripping with lemon, and with that she set off to the stream.

  CHAPTER 29

  THEY SAT TO A LIGHT meal of peas seasoned with chunks of dried venison sausage and dark bread studded with bits of onion. The somewhat stale hunches of bread were softened by the simple expedient of holding them on twigs over the steaming cauldron, swaying gently on its tripod of branches, and there was clear water from the brook to quench their thirst.

  After sunset Molly had Jack build up the fire again, and she had him place a stone, a cubit high, between the fire and the great boulder. She and Nemain went into the woods and returned, each with an armload of small bare branches—they had stripped away all leaves.

  Hob went to help, but Nemain warned him not to touch the wood. There were aspects of the women’s Art that must remain free of male influences—even a touch could compromise the delicate web of unseen influence woven of prayer, spoken or sung spell, certain elements drawn from nature, and the relentless application of the will.

  Molly set up a miniature forest of the bare branching stalks in a circle around the rock, thrusting the ends into the soft earth so that they seemed to have grown there. From the large wagon she brought forth a carved wooden figure, perhaps a foot in height, of the Horned One: a man depicted as sitting cross-legged, antlers sprouting from his head, in his left hand a writhing ram-headed serpent and in the right a torc.

  Jack had spread cloths by the fire for them to sit and recline upon. Molly had cups of the uisce beatha filled for everyone, and cautioned the men to keep strict silence. Then she and Nemain, without further ceremony, drained their cups, stood on either side of the fire, facing each other, and started to chant in Irish.

  The incantation, which began to soar and glide, moved closer to song; as the voices rang out over the firelit meadow, Molly reached into an interior pocket in her skirts, and drew out a handful of powder, which she cast into the campfire. At once a burst of varicolored flames twirled up and frayed into sparks. A scent as of spice reached Hob. Molly did it again, and yet again.

  Hob abruptly became aware that the firelight, passing over the statue and the stone and the bare branches, was making a shadow show upon the flat face of the great boulder. Because the flames were twisting, were flaring up and subsiding, the shadows of the branches and the antlered man seemed to move upon the stone.

  Suddenly the shadows seemed to coalesce into a larger shadow, the outline of a standing man, antlers tossing high, legs astride. Hob blinked, forced himself to concentrate: no, there was only the shadow of the branches and the statue upon the stone. Molly and Nemain sang; Molly tossed powder into the fire again; the chant reached a crescendo.

  Beside Hob, Jack gasped. He gripped Hob’s shoulder with a large hard hand; he rose to a crouch; he pointed wordlessly at the stone, shaking Hob the while. Hob looked wonderingly at Jack’s expression, one of deep awe, and he peered again at the stone, but there was nothing, only the shadows of branch and statue, writhing in sympathy with the shifting flames. Nothing else, nothing else.

  Jack sank back down and drew a sleeve across his damp forehead. His other hand still held Hob’s shoulder in a near-painful clamp, and now he became aware of this, and let go.

  Molly and Nemain were each down on one knee, heads bowed, and Molly spoke in Irish, her tone matter-of-fact but subdued enough t
o be respectful, and just like that it was done. Molly and Nemain remained immobile for a moment, silent, lost in thought; then the women were regaining their feet, dusting the skirts of their garments, pulling up the branches, carrying the figure back to the wagon.

  Hob was unsure what had happened; only that everyone had seen more than he. Even stolid Jack was finishing his cup of strong drink, his mighty hand shaking a little. Hob reflected that Jack Brown wore an amulet containing a small representation of the Lord of the Beasts, and had been a Beast himself at whiles. Jack was as much a Christian as Hob—what had the burly man seen, to shake him so?

  Molly came back, poured herself another draft of the lifewater, and, holding cup and flagon, lowered herself without using her hands to a sitting position, graceful as a young girl despite her heavy bosom, her womanly hips. She sat cross-legged and leaned back against Jack’s shoulder.

  “What happens now, Mistress?” asked Hob. He had been prepared to see a herd of the feral cattle come thundering into the glade.

  “Now I’ll have another cup, and watch the stars, and then to bed, for it’s weary work speaking with these Powers, and taking good care to give no offense, for it’s prideful They are, and so ’tis perilous work as well.”

  CHAPTER 30

  FOR A SENNIGHT THEREAFTER, folk awoke from sleep, hearing the beat of heavy hooves in the earthen village street or the crackle of underbrush crushed beneath powerful limbs, followed by a storm of barking from the dogs; in the day, farmers turned quickly from their work in the fields, seeing a glint of white in among the bordering trees. The chieftains of the wild white cattle made their way south by privy ways, keeping to unspoiled forestland where it was possible, and where it was not, crossing open plowland, crashing through wood fences with their great bodies, moving at dawn and at dusk and even by night. Their brides, their offspring, and the young bachelors, all remained for now in the North Country, while the king bulls, moving to an irresistible compulsion, fared ever southward, guided by—what? Buried lines of magnetism, or the stars, or the pointing hand of the Horned Man, not to be denied? Few women, no men, can say for sure.