by Ross Lawhead
Ealdstan frowned. Northlanders, he thought. Again, the Northlanders.
“My mother is direct of that line.”
“And now Cnut, son of the foreign conqueror, sits on the throne of England. Is the old English world passing?” His eyes shifted and he looked around the hall at the sparse and sleepy serving staff. “The Dane tongue is a hard one for me to speak.”
“I wouldn’t worry. Everyone in the land speaks in the Angles’ tongue still. The farmers in the fields. The priests in the pulpits. Even the merchants in the marketplace still speak it when in their homes and at table. Old queens use it when speaking to old men. Indeed, it allows one to question how much further the Dane rule extends past the Dane tongue.”
“But still, it may pass in generations,” Ealdstan said. “Alas.”
“Alas, indeed,” Emma scolded, her tone hot. “You come too late to save a tongue. The time for help passed the moment you refused my husband’s-??elred’s-entreaties to rouse your warriors and chase the Viking invaders back into the mists and oceans that spat them out. You failed him then. You failed us all then.”
A piece of still-wet wood popped in the fireplace and sent sparks up into the air.
“I am sorry for your loss, and the loss of the kingdom.??elred was an able king.”
“That he was. He was a strong king. He simply had bad counsel.” Emma pulled the scarlet covering tighter across her shoulders. “Do you know, even in the last he believed he would receive aid from you and your stronghold of warriors? And when it failed to come-failed again and again-he panicked and fell back on ill-advice.” He did not meet her furious gaze. “Can you blame him for turning to others? When we suffered constant invasions from a hostile, foreign enemy? Every day my husband hoped the ground beneath our feet would crack open like the shell of an egg and Ealdstan’s warriors would chase the Danes out forever.”
Emma lowered herself onto a bench. “Yet here we are. He is dead, and I am married to a barbarian king. Where were you?”
The fire continued to crack as Ealdstan turned to face her. “I thought that prayers and counsel might be enough.”
“The women of this land know the strength of prayer in preventing their loved ones from being slaughtered.”
“Yet here we find ourselves. What is to be done?”
Emma massaged her right leg. “You are deeply invested in this land; at one time you had the kings under your hand, and now they will not let you in the door. And you sit like a dog, shut out in the cold, waiting to be allowed back into the warmth, or at least thrown a bone.”
Ealdstan’s face did not change, and yet she fancied something burned underneath his skin. Good, thought Emma. Let him burn.
“And the only reproach I have against my husband, and all of his fathers back to??elstan, is that they didn’t take a stick to your hind legs and beat you out of the door.”
Ealdstan hardened his jaw and tilted his head back. “You drew me here to insult me, is that it? Abuse your betrayer?”
Emma grinned. “We are all of us traitors now. All of us left standing. Betrayal has become the price of life today. Do I chide? No, I show you plain the world around you.”
“I need not schooling,” Ealdstan said, rising. “I need not-”
“I drew you here to deal,” Emma said, breaking in. “I believe you seek to make reparation-so do I. The song of this land has not yet been sung and it can be made great again. I see this isle as the seat of an Empire of the North, an empire that unites several strong races together against all the heathen who would stand against us.”
“A great dream. An ambitious dream. How do you see me in this dream?”
“You shall be the power behind the throne-a guiding hand for the ages. The commander of an army of light against the world of darkness.”
Ealdstan’s eyes turned downward and Emma fancied she saw some emotion ripple across his forehead, but it could simply have been the firelight.
“The Norsemen are strong,” she continued, “but their heads are easily turned. They are not the stuff that empires are made of. The army that defeated this land have been paid off and are gone-drinking the long nights away back in Sweden and Norway, where there is infighting and threat from all the kingdoms around them. They have no desire to rule, only to fight.”
“So why then shall-”
“But the Normans, on the other hand, are strong leaders-strong rulers. My sons,?lfred and Eadweard, are in Normandy now, with my relatives. They are creating bonds of trust and goodwill that will nourish the seeds that will grow this great nation into a might to rival even Karolus Magnus’s new Roman Empire.”
“Can they yet stand against kings?”
Emma tilted her head. “Not yet; the storm will rage but awhile longer before their time comes to stand. And in this time of uncertainty, others shall try their footing and invariably fall, to be caught beneath the waves. . But their downward turn will offer us an upward turn.”
Ealdstan stroked his beard and pondered on this. When his eye turned fully upon her again, the sharp flash was in them once more. “I feel I should apologise. I feel I have judged you awrong,” he said.
She smiled a sly smile. “Everyone does.”
IV
“The Cornish knights are proud and fierce fighters,” Ecgbryt told him. “We will need their spears and long arms. They are kin with the giants, you know? The oldest peoples of these lands-even of the Welsh and Picti.”
Alex raised his flashlight around to look at all the stunning stalactites hanging above them. Some of them must have been twenty feet long. He was looking up, jaw hanging open, when his foot slipped and he splashed into a pool of water up to his knee. It had probably been undisturbed for hundreds of years and felt as cold as ice. “Could we not have driven a little closer to it overland?” he asked, shaking his sodden leg. They had driven to a boutique-filled village called Honiton, near Exeter, and started their trip from there. The drive had probably saved them days, but in the race they were on, every hour counted.
“I judge not. The Eastern tip’s tunnels were ancient even to the Celt peoples. They are hard to access from the surface-hard, at least, in one sense. There are many, many entrances and they form a true maze to get past. This path is the same as what you would call ‘the back door.’”
Alex swore.
“Slipping again? I do not understand why you have your light turned up so high. Meotodes meahte, but it is dazzling.”
“But why start in Cornwall, exactly?” Alex asked, stomping his foot.
Ecgbryt considered awhile before answering. “Ni?ergeard has been occupied for many years, its people captive, and possibly many of its secrets have been spilled from unwilling lips. You know how many chambers have already been discovered-it would not be worth holding out hope that those nearest the city would be untouched. However, this end of the island is densely packed with obscured places and mysteries that were kept even before Ealdstan’s time, I wist. Although there are not many knights here-the Dumnonians have ever been independent-they will be well hidden. And hardy, as I have said. Did I tell you they came from giant stock?”
“Aye. You mentioned that,” Alex said. “But it’s so out of the way. Why corner ourselves like this? What’s so special over there?”
“The Cornish kingdom,” Ecgbryt continued and Alex didn’t correct him, “is one of the thin places of this island. If anything were to leak through, this is one of the places it would first occur. We may be able to judge the extent of this island’s peril by what we find there. In any case, Cornwall is not a corner. We will need to pass through it to get to Llyonesse and points beyond.”
“Llyonesse, the sunken land?”
“Swa swa. Just so.”
They came upon their first sleeping chamber after a couple more miles. It was not hidden by any illusion or enchanted wall; it simply lay at the centre of a labyrinth made of black stone that ate the light cast by the lanterns and made it hard to tell wall from opening. Ecgbryt insisted all thr
ough the maze that he knew the path, but he led them to many dead ends before they found the sleeping circle of knights.
Or at least, what had once been the circle of knights.
On sixteen black stone tables lay sixteen white corpses, each of them held down by a web of metal chains and manacles that ran beneath the tables.
“They are all dead,” Ecgbryt said, casting his eyes over the scene. “Not one of them escaped.”
“They were stripped of their weapons,” Alex observed, examining them closer. “Then tied-quickly and skilfully, if it was done without waking them from even an enchanted sleep.”
“Here is the horn,” said Ecgbryt, walking to the centre of the ring. He looked around with baleful eyes. “Trussed like snared fowl and then awoken from their immortal slumber. They died of starvation? Or thirst? Did the yfelgopes watch them suffer? Did they torture them?”
“There don’t appear to be any wounds, apart from dried blood on the manacles,” Alex said with a sigh. “Some nearly pulled their hands and feet off trying to escape.”
“Swa swa. They would have done it if they could,” Ecgbryt said. “They were valiant warriors all, and not a one would hesitate to sacrifice life or limb for another.”
“Well, they are dead, and their spirits have left this place.” Alex thought of the massacred Scottish knights of Morven and shivered. It could be worse, he thought to himself. “Let us keep moving. We are too late for these knights; let us pray we are not too late for the others.”
But the yfelgopes had a head start of many years. It was possible there were no sleepers left on the entire island.
V
Walsall
Rian Watts took the long way home from the playing field. Nathan Edwards had failed to show, and he was the one who was supposed to bring the ball. The others had hung around, waiting idly for something to happen, but Rian had become tired of watching them perform lame stunts on their bikes. The best any of them could do was pop a wheelie for about half a second. And then they’d skid around, beaming, expecting wild applause, as if they’d just jumped a bus.
Bored, broke, and with absolutely no reason for wanting to go back home, he picked his way through the endless suburban streets, weaving a serpentine path. He was feeling more and more restless these days, more and more content with endless rambling. It calmed him somehow. When he stayed in one place, everything became drab and dark, like it was losing its colour or fading out slowly, like the end of an old movie. What would happen when it faded out altogether? But when he got out and moved, when images started flashing by him, then everything snapped back into bright, vibrant colour. Life was motion; stillness was death.
But how far could a fifteen-year-old boy go? And what could he do? He was essentially trapped. Trapped in this maze of houses. Trapped in the routine of an unimaginative school life and even less imaginative friends. His favourite word was stagnant. It was doodled on every workbook he’d been given.
He decided to walk along the canal. It was dirty, smelly, and some scary people hung around there, but it was different, a break in the depressingly thin terraced houses and their littered front gardens.
He scuffed along the gravel towpath and swept his idle gaze over a submerged shopping trolley in the canal and beached cider cans, vaguely wishing he had some piece of rubbish he could contribute to the vast convoy of filth that Manchester continually poured into the town. It was one of life’s truths: there was always someone higher up the ladder or farther up the river who was dumping on you.
Rian realised that he wasn’t walking anymore. His eye had been caught by a white, luminescent object that was shimmering on the other side of the canal, and his ear had been pricked by a song that seemed to come from both around him and inside of him.
Come down to me, my lovely,
Come down and lie on my bed.
I’ll come with you, my sweet one,
Allow yourself to be led.
The glistening object in the water seemed to almost give off a silvery light of its own. As he craned his neck, Rian wished that it was closer to him so he could see what it was. And then he found it moving toward him, as if controlled by his unspoken desire. It glided just under the surface of the dark, manky water, making movements that suggested it to be alive.
It broke the surface and Rian gasped. It was a girl, a woman. Her skin was almost sickishly pale-blue veins could be seen underneath white skin that seemed to glow. But high cheekbones, large eyes, and an angular jawline and eyebrows made her as beautiful as a supermodel. She appeared to be naked. Large drops of dark canal water beaded off of her face, tracing a desirable path down her neck and along the inside cleft of her breast. Her hair was black and as slick as an oil spill.
She smiled at him. It was a very warm smile and seemed to transmit some of its warmth to the inside of his belly.
“Are you okay?” he asked, suddenly overwhelmed with gallantry. “Are you in trouble? Do you need help?”
“Why do you say that?” the woman asked, giving him a puzzled look but sliding a smile quickly on top of that. How old was she? She looked like an adult but sounded like someone his own age. But of course, no woman ever smiled at him like she was smiling at him now.
“I just thought. .” Rian said, rapidly trying to recover the thread of conversation. “It’s not very clean in there. With diseases and bacteria and stuff. I thought you might want to get out.”
His heart was pounding and his throat had constricted. His brain seemed to be split into two parts. One part of him was helpful and in charge of talking and breathing and everything involved in trying not to fall over. The other part of his brain just stood to the side, observing and asking unhelpful questions like, Did you really just say “diseases and bacteria” to the first naked woman you’ve ever met?
“I don’t think I could live if I wasn’t able to swim,” the woman said. “Could you?”
“I guess I–I don’t-” His words were getting jumbled. He was trying to recall exactly how long it was since he last swam. About two years ago, on a school trip, he thought. But then, why would it possibly matter?
The woman, and that she was a woman was now very apparent, for she shifted in the water, arched her back, and swam back a couple feet, twisting and swirling as if the sludgy, stinky water was really something beautiful and refreshing. Through the brown film of water, he saw her breasts, her waist, her thighs, and her feet float past him like something in a feverish dream. His heart stopped beating and his breath caught. It was as if the whole world stopped for just that moment.
She moved her arms around her to steady her movement. He watched the taut muscles slide underneath the clear, smooth skin of her shoulder. He wondered what that movement would feel like if he were to touch it-if he was to move his hands over it, and over the rest of her body.
Her lips moved and the song continued, buzzing in his mind and imagination.
Your face is young and so handsome,
Your limbs are soft and so fine,
Come down to me in the river,
I’m yours and you’ll be mine.
Your breath is near and so warming,
Your blood is quick and so hot.
It’s deathly harsh in the dry air,
But here in the water it’s not.
Rian was entranced. He felt as if he were asleep and dreaming. Suddenly, staying in just one place for the rest of his life wasn’t so bad, so long as the one place was with her.
She raised her arms and held her hands out to him. “Don’t you want to come in and swim with me?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do.”
“Then come to me.”
He took one step and then fell forward into the canal. For a terrible, awful moment, he thought that he wouldn’t reach her hands, that he would fall too short, or that she would pull away from him, but as his face hit the water, he felt her hands close around his wrists and felt her tug at him, pulling him farther and farther down with her, her body rippling against
his in a way that made him want to laugh and cry and sing and shout and dance and be still, all at once.
The canal had to be fairly shallow, and yet he had the sensation that they were going deeper and deeper. It was getting darker and darker, and colder and colder, and still he went down, down, down. Into the deep.
Into oblivion.
Into death.
And the last words he heard were those at the end of the hauntingly beautiful song:
Come down with me, my lovely,
Come dance with me in the waves.
For all the lovers I dance with
Find cool and comforting graves.
CHAPTER FIVE
Stone Leaves
I
Abingdon
Winter, 1142 AD
Ealdstan stood near the altar rail of the stone church and spent some time peering up at the carvings. He recognised the work of the carver, an almost supernatural master at forming stone, one he’d persuaded to join the stonemasons of Ni?ergeard nearly a hundred years earlier. Even now the man spent his days shaping and decorating what he intended to be an outer defensive wall.
He waited.
At length, there was the sound of horses and the many calls and orders that entail the arrival of a retinue of the king, which served to remind Ealdstan just in time: Norman. I keep forgetting that the new kings speak Norman. He wondered if he had time to produce a language enchantment but decided his own language skills were more than adequate.
The entourage entered. Though Ealdstan had only seen the king once, as a young prince-and even with them all dressed in a similar fashion-the old wizard was able to pick out the king. He was thin, with wavy, shoulder-length hair. He had sharp features and a long, straight nose that tilted downward. There was a harried, hangdog expression in his eyes, and his face seemed older than it should be, his once straw-coloured hair now a platinum white.
