by Chris Page
Transforming inside invisibly, Twilight sat high in the dome as the emperor strolled across the marble floor and greeted the waiting patriarch, who had a prelate alongside him. Both the religious men were also bare-headed in long silk robes of white and yellow. The greetings were friendly and open, two groups comfortable in each other’s company. Waving to a long table in one corner of the cavernous altar room on which stood an ornate silver pitcher of cold water and five equally decorative chalices, the patriarch led the way. Before they sat down, Archbishop Nicholas said a short grace, his prelate poured cold water into the chalices, and they all took their seats. There was one spare chair.
Only it wasn’t spare anymore.
Twilight was sitting in it.
The sudden spasm of alarm hit all their faces at once. Before anyone could move, the old astounder held his hand up.
‘I come in peace and mean you no harm,’ he said softly in Latin. ‘I have frozen you all for just a few moments in order to explain my presence here. If you object when I let you go, I will depart immediately and let you continue with your business.’
He beamed at them all. Even now, after inflicting many, many examples of frozen immobility upon folk, the look of fixed incredulity trapped in the faces still amused him.
‘I am Twilight, veneficus of Wessex in Britain. My purpose here, at the request of King William of England, is to better understand the problems between Christians and Muslims with particular reference to Jerusalem. This will be my fifth day in Constantinople.’
He waved his hand.
The first to react was Emperor Alexis. Taking a shaky gulp of water he spoke.
‘King William of England, eh? The former Duke of Normandy. He who invaded the shores of England under arms and took by force what didn’t rightfully belong to him.’
Twilight smiled, nodded, and replied.
‘Like Christians everywhere in the west, William is worried about Muslims taking Jerusalem, the cradle of their Christian faith. I should say at the outset, I do not adhere to any faith and remain neutral. I also hope to be visiting the Muslims and Jerusalem.’
The emperor pondered upon this for a moment.
‘If this is your fifth day in Constantinople, you will know that Jerusalem’s future does not bother us. It’s too far away for us to defend, and I do not have the men to send there. In attempting to do so we would be weakening our own position here and that would be unforgivable.’
‘Once Jerusalem is taken, would the flames of Saracen ambition then start to lick at the walls of Constantinople?’
‘They will anyway,’ replied the emperor gloomily. ‘Ever since this place was established eight hundred years ago by Emperor Constantine, they have wanted to occupy it. Only great resilience and bravery coupled with the strength of our walls and surrounding waters has kept them out. Regardless of Jerusalem’s fate, they will keep coming and we will keep repelling them. The frontline of this city has to be our own walls. Anything outside of that cannot be allowed to detract us.’
Archbishop Nicholas finally got together enough composure to speak.
‘Our faith has also been a key ingredient in repelling the Muslim invader. Christianity saturates this city like swarms of beneficial locusts; its providence permeates everything, including the very walls that protect us. The people have demonstrated time and again that they are prepared to die for this belief.’
‘So,’ said Twilight, ‘sitting down around a table like this with the Muslims to discuss the peaceful sharing of worshipful facilities such as this beautiful Basilica is, I assume, an idea that would not find much favour with you?’
‘None at all,’ said the archbishop through gritted teeth. ‘We would oppose it to death itself.’
Twilight looked at the emperor.
‘Our resistance would be implacable and finite,’ he said forcefully.
The conversation ebbed and flowed for a while, but the position of this great city with regards to Jerusalem and sharing was set in stone. As Twilight stood to go, the emperor placed a hand on his arm to stay him. Without reading the man’s mind he knew what Alexis I Comnennus was going to say, but he let him articulate it anyway.
‘Your gifts are extraordinary. No enemy, Muslim, Barbarian, or otherwise, would ever take Constantinople if I had such gifts by my side. Would you consider staying here?’
Twilight looked across the table at the archbishop and his prelate. The scowls on their faces said what they thought of the idea. Twilight’s magic would soon compromise their positions and highlight the impotency of their own religion. His presence here beside the emperor might well save this great city from its attackers, but in doing so would set Christianity in Constantinople back to the days of universal paganism and apostasy.
‘Ask your patriarch, he has the answer,’ he said softly as he disappeared.
Chapter 14
‘Don’t call my mentor,’ whispered Tara, reading his mind. ‘We can get through this together. Leave him where he is.’
Nature had not seen fit to bless the relationship between Tara and Virgile with any children, so the vague possibility of their offspring having the requisite aura for a venefical future did not occur. With hardly a day going by without the need for both of them to perform some sort of venefical feat in their respective England and Francia, they didn’t have much time to worry about it. As Tara grew through her mid-thirties and it became obvious that she would remain childless, it became less important. What little time they had was spent with each other in snatched days, in Francia then England in turn, and with their animals. Their ability to engage in instant mind-speak also helped, but Tara would find Virgile worrying about her if she was involved in a tricky situation.
Like the Black Ghost Dog of Sherbourne Maisy.
A couple of days after Twilight left for Constantinople, a wizened, toothless old lady staggered wearily into the Avebury compound. She had walked from Sherbourne Maisy, a small hamlet of two hovels and some animal pens two days away, and had a harrowing tale to tell. Her husband, son-in-law, daughter, and granddaughter had all been dragged away by a huge black dog. None of their bodies had been found and she was too scared to look far. The dog, which ignored the animals in the pens and only took humans, had the ability to walk through the solid wattle and daub walls of hovels. It had come each of the last three nights before she had left to come to Tara. Having dragged away its victims, the dripping fanged hound could be heard howling from the top of a nearby hill. Bloodstains showed the direction it had gone. When it took her husband, she had been lying on the straw pallet alongside him and had felt the animal’s hot, rancid breath and dripping spittle on her face before it grabbed him around the throat and dragged him from the hovel. He’d been awake, waiting for it with a sharp sickle in his hand when it grabbed him like a sack and shook him. It was huge, black, and had bright red eyes. Devil’s eyes, like coals in a fire. She called it the Black Ghost Dog. She was the only one left in the hamlet and had no alternative but to leave. Her entire family was gone. What was she to do?
Tara told her not to worry and that after she had rested the two of them would transform quickly to the hamlet and deal with the dog and find out what happened to her family.
This was the everyday fare of the veneficus. Dealing with the crinkum crankum and downright absurdity of myriad imagined evils of a pagan culture; the heresies, occurrences, superstitions, legends, lore, and traditions of angels, ghosts, djinns, dragons and other assorted monsters, wraiths, ghouls, demons and diabolical devils, haunted places and buildings, spirits, bullbeggars and witches, ancestors, and old enemies returning to seek revenge for misdeeds past, bilious sightings, cold drafts rippling across the body, skulls and legends, grim-faced, opaque bodies thundering across the sky on horseback, loud cries in the night. Dead babies and their ghoulish mothers, tortured screams, grim burial places, rampaging armies, and clashing swords. Spectre. Flaming, fabled fallacy. Demented, supernatural, imagined.
Imagined and completely unreal.
The mental terrors of the Celtic mind usually, but not always, brought on by nightfall.
But it still had to be dealt with or madness quickly followed.
As Twilight was fond of saying, ‘Such ingrained superstitions are as difficult to overcome as the plague. Once they have taken hold of a person’s mind they are hard to shift and will reappear - regardless of the venefical ridding of the current spectre - time and again.’
It would not be the first black ghost dog Tara had dealt with, but, unknown to her at this stage, this one was different.
She’d also made an elementary but understandable mistake.
That could be fatal . . . to her.
Later that afternoon when the old woman had rested, albeit fitfully with a great deal of muttering accompanying her sleep, Tara roused her with a cool drink of water and prepared her for the return journey. What had taken her two days would now be all over in a matter of seconds.
‘Take my hand,’ said Tara. Gripping the gnarled old hand the old woman held out, Tara smiled confidently. ‘It’s better if you close your eyes for a few moments. When you open them we will be standing outside the door of your hovel in Sherbourne Maisy.’
And they were.
Twilight had always impressed upon Tara that in the event of any sense of danger, real or imagined, she was to immediately react in two simultaneous ways. Invisibility and movement. By removing her image and moving, preferably upward in order to get an aerial view of any situation, a veneficus was buying time, safely, to assess the situation.
At the exact moment Tara and the old lady appeared at the threshold of her hovel, alarms started to go off in Tara’s head. Something wasn’t right. As she went for immediate invisibility and cloud height, her action coincided with another sound.
The sudden twang of twenty longbow strings releasing their arrows from point-blank range.
Even as she was instantly carried aloft, Tara took two arrows. One burst through her right shoulder, its metal point protruding out of her slim back, and the other buried itself in her left thigh. She was dimly aware of the old lady scuttling into the trees. The other eighteen shafts all thudded into the hovel door at chest height, splintering the old wood, dark stains beginning to run from the buried points.
Dark stains.
Poison.
Twenty men formed a semicircle around the hovel clearing. All of them were placing a second arrow in their longbows.
One of them, his face screwed into a mask of hatred, was beginning to look frantically around the sky as he searched for her.
Although it had been a long time, twenty-two years long, Tara’s perfect venefical recall placed him instantly. Marcus Groningen, the third-generation Viking who, with his ten men, had tried to rape her mother, Katre, at the cottage alongside the old Roman road leading to Glastonbury. Revenge for the removal of his manhood by Tara had obviously festered long in his mind. This was a planned attempt to satisfy that revenge. It might also succeed, as Tara was beginning to feel the effects of the poison.
Virgile, I am hurt. Two poisonous arrows have pierced me in shoulder and thigh. Come quick but stay invisible.
The mind message hit her lover’s brain like a bolt of lightning. Virgile, himself exorcising some diabolic demons in the South of Francia, dropped everything and immediately zeroed in on her location. With a wildly beating heart he arrived in the clouds alongside her. Taking in the situation at a glance, he took her hand and transformed both of them to the Avebury compound. Sitting her down on a straw pallet, he gently snapped the front of the arrow in her shoulder, covered the metal tip protruding from her back with a small piece of linen he tore from her tunic, placed his lips tenderly over hers, and quickly pulled out the arrow tip first. As the wooden shaft came free, Tara gave a short gasp against his pressing lips. Then he quickly withdrew the arrow in her thigh, placed his lips over each wound, and sucked out the poison in the immediate vicinity before spitting it out.
‘There will be poison in your bloodstream. You are trained in the husbandry of the simpler. What plants do I need to provide an antidote?’ His deep rumble had a slight tremble in it, betraying his concern.
Tara’s voice was faint but clear; a film of sweat was forming on her freckled brow.
‘The poison is a mixture of viper venom and wolfsbane, a common enough killer that shepherds around here use to smear meat to poison wolves. Using the same ingredients you’ll need to make a poultice for putting on the arrow wounds and a liquid for me to swallow. First you need the red nettle called feverfew, then blackthorn bark, crushed burdock balls, dry celandine leaves, and the roots of the centaury plant. The feverfew and blackthorn bark will act as an antidote to the viper venom, and the crushed burdock balls and celandine will counter the wolfsbane. The centaury - also called bloodwort - will allow the mixture to enter the bloodstream quickly. Boil them up until a paste forms, cool, siphon some off to mix with water for me to drink, then spread the remainder as a poultice on the wounds.’
Virgile had never thanked his enchanted skills so much. Within moments he’d gathered the plants, boiled them, siphoned some into an earthenware jar of clear water, and placed the thick poultice on the bloodied arrow wounds. As he held the drink to the lips of a visibly weaker Tara, he considered the situation.
‘Don’t call my mentor,’ whispered Tara, reading his mind. ‘We can get through this together. Leave him where he is.’
Virgile smiled down at his beloved wife with a confidence he didn’t really feel.
Due to complacency or a moment of forgetfulness, Tara had completely forgone all her training in such matters. Such as the rudimentary reading of the old woman’s mind when she had first arrived at the compound. Had Tara done so, as she normally would, she would have seen immediately that it was a trap with the old woman as bait. The story and the old woman’s weariness had put her off.
If she survived, it would never happen again.
If she survived. Even for them, this was a first and got them very close to the ordinary human reaction. There were no divine venefical defences against poison, only the training, senses, and reactions to avoid them in the first place.
For the next eight hours, Tara hovered between lucid speech and febrile muttering as she fought the poison in her blood. Slipping in and out of the present, a pattern began to evolve. For some delirious moments a prism of some of the early events and voices from Ireland would take her over before she would suddenly blink and be back in the present, gazing upward into the concerned but devoted gaze of her deep-voiced husband. Her beloved mother Katre, herself killed so brutally by the Viking raiding party, flitted across her consciousness. Soft-voiced and pure she spoke lovingly of their flight from Ireland and her pride in her daughter’s great gifts. How she had found the delicate four-leafed clover clasp, a talisman which Tara still had. Leannan Sidhe appeared, blood running down her chin as she rolled strips of intestinal flesh from bodies still warm with life. Her grandmother, grasping and shrill, pointed her crooked finger accusingly, and Coyle Brogan, her bald and philandering birth father, hovering in frozen terror over the crashing waves of the Devil’s Pit alongside the abbot of the Skellighaven monastery, he of the pudgy, probing fingers. The catatonic screams when the four fingers of his right hand dropped to the floor echoed loudly in her mind to be replaced by the becalmed green sails of the Celtic Lady as it made its slow, wave-tossed way toward the coast of Britain.
Virgile continued to replace the poultice, gently pour the drink down her throat, and mop the sweat from her feverish brow. Joining together in the enchantments to defeat common enemies was commonplace, but only Tara alone could fight this battle.
Feeling a tension and helplessness he’d never before experienced, Virgile gently did all he could. Outside the hovel Tara’s family of wolfhounds, using an inner sixth sense that told them their beloved liege lord was facing a life or death struggle, howled, prowled, and snapped at each other around the compound. A pair of Virgile’s peregrines also sat quietly on a bra
nch in case they were needed. Night, silent and sombre, fell over Avebury and the Stones of Destiny. The great sarsen stones exuded a uniform determination as if the venefical inhabitant of each mighty edifice was enjoined in the fight for Tara’s life. They did not want her to join them; it was too early in her time. In just seven short years it would be the turn of her mentor, Twilight, to take up his place alongside them. That was the correct order of things. His patch, with its many smaller tribute stones, was ready, but hers had not even begun to take shape. She was only just beginning the venefical journey - all their hopes of another sixty-five years of Wessex venefical presence and the annual appearance at the Stonehenge Festival of the Cowering Dead rested with this special young lady. Ten thousand years of enchanted magic and all they could do, like Virgile, the dogs, and the pair of peregrines, was wait and put their trust in the simpler’s art of plant-lore.
Dawn began to creep over the rolling Wessex barrows. As the gloom gradually gave way to morning light, Virgile rose and walked to the compound door. Instantly the dogs crowded around him.
‘Go on in and see her then,’ he said as he stood aside. ‘She is going to be alright.’
Three days after Tara’s recovery, she sat with Virgile in the clouds over the deserted hovel at Sherbourne Maisy where she had almost died. Virgile pointed out the eighteen arrows still buried in the door of the hovel, their poison still darkening the splintered wood around each tip. Newly trampled grass trails led away from the hovel, one of them heavy with the scent of the old woman. Tracing the scent from the clouds, they were led to a larger village five miles away, and there, sitting alone in a dark corner of a hovel, they found the wizened, toothless old woman counting a pile of coins.
