Weed: The Poison Diaries

by Jane Northumberland

  My attention is wrested by a hulking club that batters against my temple and I fall to the ground, dazed. I watch half consciously as Ruth runs at the club-wielder like a nimble cat. She rides her own momentum, climbing deftly up the weapon, then up the attacker’s arm, until with nails that look like claws she gouges his eyes out. The child skips cleanly into the air behind the warrior as he falls to the dust below. Ruth saved me.

  I right myself and a third guard rushes at me with bare fists, trying to box me with a right hook. I’ve fought men and know his weight is on his left foot and so I sweep it hard with my leg. The grasses around me cheer briefly before being stifled by the warrior’s hulking body as it collapses. I find my sword then and join the fight properly. Wielding its sharpness I cut in a simple arc that slices the boxer’s neck and blood gushes to the ground. That’s three down and out.

  I turn and see Ruth dodging a hard punch, ducking beneath the arm and striking its elbow, breaking the bone. She clambers to his chest and delivers him a mighty blow where his heart beats. He stumbles to the ground and the child finds his face, thrusting her fingers into his mouth. A spurt of blood from the man’s lips tells me that she has pierced some vital source. His eyes turn up dead-white into his head and Ruth untangles herself as he crumbles.

  I look up and notice Malina heaving the lifeless weight of a fifth attacker over her shoulder onto the ground at her feet. I’m shocked at the bloodthirsty savagery but nevertheless I take my sword and stab the sixth and final guard through his chest. He stares down at the blade in horrified silence before joining his fallen mates on the forest floor. Sated and covered in blood, Malina and Ruth close upon me and I am frightened lest their lust for violence confuse me for an enemy. Instead they pause and compose themselves back into a semblance of their former selves: the beautiful mistress and her innocent child.

  I look at the red detritus beneath us and can’t help but laugh at the absurdity of gore and slaughter. My heart is beating fast and deeply in my chest and though I feel wretched, adrenaline excites my body. Malina approaches me and allows her dress to fall over her shoulders. She steps naked from the garment and with a swipe of her hand Ruth is banished, climbing high into the branches of a nearby tree. I’m appalled but when she smiles at me, I’m a slave once more. Strangely compelled, I curl into her for comfort and warmth and cresting on the waves of exhilaration we make love. This is not what we enjoyed at Soutra Aisle. It is desperate, vigorous and selfish, much like the battle we have just fought. The air is hot and alive with energy and as we climax I see sparks flying across my vision. Even in this bliss I know that there is something deeply wrong here, something I must be careful of. Yet nestled in Malina’s shape I can’t help myself and, ruined by exhaustion, I sleep insensibly.

  Chapter 14

  I am awake and yet my muscles are stiff and I can barely move. There is a fire just off the path to the left and the bodies of the fallen have been cleared. I see Malina and Ruth; they are squatting in the dirt together and I remember how they fought last night like beasts. I have never seen people move like that before. I try to stir again but only manage a faint grunt. Malina glares at me. The look in her eye communicates nothing but feral cognition. I cannot understand her face. It could be hate or love. I could be prey or kin. There is no difference.

  Then as if by sheer effort she regains a softness of flesh and speaks. ‘Sweet Weed! How deeply you dream.’ I hear a warning, a better voice from the trees, commanding me to remember her face from last night as she approached me, glutted on death and altered. Her head tilts to the left; she sniffs the air and speaks, voice rumbling, as though she talks from deep within her throat. ‘I am glad you are awake.’

  Still sore and stiff, I sit up and reach into my pocket-belt for a handful of Belladonna berries. I eat them quickly, hoping that their sweet medicines will unclench my muscles and ease the discomfort in my mind. ‘Where are the bodies of those we fought?’

  She waves a hand above her head. ‘Long gone, Weed. Why keep dead prey to smell in the morning air? Those thirsty roots of your growing friends won’t need to beg for their breakfast this morning. Little roots clambering for ready flesh.’

  ‘How far are we from Lindisfarne?’

  ‘It is just across the causeway. We must go before long if we are to cross before the salty sea comes to swallow it up again. Don’t like to drown, do we, Weed? Like salty seaweed. Have you ever smelled the stench of salt-rotten meat?’

  ‘No. I don’t believe I have.’

  ‘Well, what do you know of what you have, or have not, done?’ Her eyes roll and her teeth smile.

  ‘Last night we–’

  ‘Oh yes, Weed. Your heart fit right in with the butchery of it. Your time in dark cellars and pleasure gardens hasn’t blunted your instincts to kill.’

  ‘But the way you moved. More like animals than humans.’

  ‘We command the beasts of the field but they have taught us a thing or two as well. Kill or be killed. That is the whole of the law. The law of animals.’

  ‘That is not the lore of plants.’

  ‘Nasty stinking mudrot plants don’t know nothing. Would you be dead? Earth salts for dead roots?’

  ‘The roots aren’t dead.’

  ‘Might as well be for all the good they do. Where were your Rowan or Yew or Thistle or puke last night? You live and still you fret. Still you worry. Better go on now. Too late to turn back. Or little child Ruth will be alone, trapped inside her head forever.’ She stands up off her haunches and drags Ruth to her feet. Malina’s face smoothes out its hard edges and her voice goes up an octave. ‘Come now, Weed. We are almost there. Together we will see what the Lindisfarne garden has to show us.’

  Reluctantly I join them and we continue east along the path. I begin to hear the sound of waves lapping the shore and soon we emerge from the forest. From the mainland the island of Lindisfarne does not betray a welcoming face. It seems a barren, flat plain of gorse emerging from the freezing sea. Only to the south is there a rise of craggy rock with a man-made castle clinging to its side. The fortress’s curtain wall rises to a jagged bulwark more ghastly than the precipice on which it sits. The way to the island is a narrow causeway rising from the boiling sea. It is marked by salt-eaten wooden stakes thrust into the sand at intervals. In the early half-light we begin to follow the markers, saying nothing and looking steadily on to our destination.

  The stinking seaweed swirls in my nostrils and it takes me by surprise when the lank tendrils stir at my feet. Even to me these creatures of the murky depths seem alien when they speak.

  ‘Dwelling on the hardness! Shining in the darkness! Very strange to us. Know ye we?’ Their voices slide over each other like slow currents.

  ‘Yes, odd creatures, I can hear you and I can smell you too.’

  ‘Speaking it is. Smelling what is?’ The currents shift.

  ‘Smelling is tasting in the rotting thinness.’

  ‘Yes I can smell you in the air.’ I miss the cheering talk of the Silver Birches.

  ‘Salty and sweet in the deep. Dancing in the currents we like to keep. Where are you stepping with your heavy crushers?’

  ‘To the gardens of Lindisfarne Island.’

  ‘Hum! Going a-beaking with yon mistletoe cutter.’

  ‘Red sap spiller, hot in the froth.’

  I look ahead at Malina and think of the blood that has already been let through our deeds and shiver. She is ever ahead on the causeway, her eagerness visible. She hauls herself forward, gait bent like an old woman into the wind. The child scrambles skittish around her feet, sometimes ahead, sometimes behind, but never close to me. They don’t look back and I am relieved to tarry behind, an afterthought and out of the lens of Malina’s glare. Her legs move beneath her dress with preposterous lumbering speed; she is more alien than the strange alien seaweed beneath my feet.

  The causeway is coming to an end and grasping the final marker pole I hear a warning: ‘Think on this, finless. Holding your sap
inside your scales is best.’

  I reach the margins of the island, sand dunes rising to either side of me. Short crops of Seawort grass sprout from them, blown in the wind like the hairs of a dead man on a bleached skull. Ruth and Malina recede ahead; I look at the little girl, silent and yet seemingly so knowing. She followed me around the gardens at Soutre Aisle with such rapt attention that I felt a bond grow between us, almost like a father to a dutiful daughter. She spake not then, although I sensed how badly she wanted to. To see her now, scrambling to reach the medicinal garden, she seems weird and unfamiliar. In Malina’s presence she is somehow less the little girl that saved Boone from death and more the animal that bested two grown men last night. If this land is dedicated to holiness and medicine, I would expect it to reach out to a sick little girl, but I feel it recoil from these two.

  Slowly the dunes give way to a plain of spotted grass. I see the landscape more clearly now and in the shadow of the escarpment and castle lie the splendid ruins of an ancient priory. This land was not spared King Henry’s jealous milk-fat fist as he crushed the Catholics beneath it. Approaching the remains of the abbey I am reminded of Hulne Priory and Soutra Aisle and consider myself a wanderer in the relics of man’s industry. I reach out with my mind and attempt to contemplate something more pleasant: the natural world around me. I think on Green. I am still a distance from the ruins but I can feel the vibrations of the ancient ground beneath me. My heavy mood is lifted as kindness and support quicken at my feet. The earth hums here with a unique grace that I can’t remember having felt before. I can’t seem to find words or voices, but rather the island breathes contentment into my lungs, evaporating my misgivings in an instant.

  Gliding on such comfort, I float happily into the ruins of what must have once been a great medieval construction. It is far larger than Hulne Abbey and Soutra Aisle put together. It is almost as though an ancient city had risen from the depths of the ocean on the back of a volcanic upsurge. As I walk among the remnants of streets and arched walls connecting temples to God and healing, the Island whispers its ancient name to me. ‘Medcaut is our name. Island of Medicine.’

  I am lost in happy reverie when I turn a corner and see, to my instinctive dismay, Malina and the child. Their aspect seems changed once more. The frantic movement that characterised their dash and hurry to get here is replaced with an odd stillness. Malina, all beauty and poise returned to her, stands on one straight leg; her other is bent at the knee with the foot resting high on the opposite thigh. The child stands next to her looking up at the sky, watching the flight of birds. Both seem frozen. When Malina speaks her voice is cracked as if she hasn’t used it for a week, but once she starts with her questions, her timbre levels to a syrupy brightness.

  ‘What about here, Weed? Do you feel something here?’ Her foot descends and she reaches down to touch the ground. She arches her back and smiles at me through the falling strands of her silver hair. Still crouched, her legs wheel towards a nearby stone wall and fast as a cat her body follows. She pats the firm grass next to the wall’s edge. ‘Or on the ground hereabouts?’ She sniffs the air. The child is still gazing fixedly at the greying clouds over our head.

  ‘I don’t feel that we are in a garden of any special significance here. The earth all around us is powerful with an impulse to heal. I sense within the soil calming words, soothing.’

  In a second she is at my side, holding my bicep, leaning into me and whispering. ‘Well ask it, Sweet Weed.’ She straightens and looks at me, commanding me. ‘Ask it where lies the root that is unnamed by men. The root that frees the mind.’

  I try to do as she requests but there is a peculiarity at work here. ‘The plants don’t speak to me, Malina. The roots don’t hear a single voice and they don’t respond with one. The island seems a collective mind.’

  ‘Then try shouting, Weed! Try shouting very loudly.’ Her fingers are steel against my arm, squeezing. Her eyes are on mine, boring. Suddenly she breaks her grip and looks towards the child. The girl’s hands are pointing to a spot close to us in the sky where crows are circling. ‘From the west he comes. A king or lord. It is trouble.’ She turns back to me. ‘Do it! Do it now! Scream this place down if you have to! We must have our answer.’

  ‘I don’t think that is a good idea, strangers.’ A tall man in a grey hooded cowl appears from around a ruined wall. He takes off his hood to reveal a face of indeterminate age. Neither old nor young, but with deep eyes shining and a beard flecked with white. He speaks softly. ‘The island: if you can hear its hum of contentment, gentleman, then that is enough. Do not ask it to raise its voice loudly or it will deafen you. Do not outrage it with importunity or it will kill you. And your woman and child too.’ He looks with benevolence at Malina and the child but I can see that he recognises danger there. I recognise danger there myself. ‘I’m sure that I would not escape its rage either. So I ask you, as a boon to me: leave the island to its own ponderings. My name is Connell. I live here.’

  ‘We have come far, old man! Fast to this spit of land thrust out of the sea. We have been way-laid before and we overcame. Do not stand in my way.’ Malina keeps her head down but her eyes are fastened on the stranger. She looks ready to pounce.

  ‘So the Lady leads the troupe, I see. And what about you, good sir? Do you have a tongue in your head for men as well as for plants?’

  ‘My name is Weed and this is Malina. We have come looking for medicine for the child, little Ruth. She’s ill. She’s mute. We have heard tell of a rare root that grows hereabouts that might help her. I have a way with Green things and I hoped I would recognise it. But I can find nothing.’

  ‘Aye, well the old gardens are dead and gone along with the friary but it’s harder to do away with seed than stone. There are a deal of books and other bits and pieces that have been saved and held for keeps in the library of yonder castle. Perhaps you’d like to accompany me there and continue your search.’

  ‘We don’t need your help, dry bones,’ Malina spits.

  ‘The young gentleman seems less sure, miss, and if your intention is to bully the Holy Isle into submission, well, greater than you have failed. Try to pull down the four corners of the earth and don’t be surprised when the sky falls on your head. This island will swallow you up if you don’t treat it sweetly.’

  ‘It can try me,’ snarls Malina.

  ‘There’s more to you than meets the eye, woman, and your bairn too.’

  ‘Malina. Let us at least try and find an answer within. I fear I can make no purchase on this land alone.’

  ‘Weed! You’re no good.’ Her eyes flash with silver lightning and her tongue hangs from her mouth, moving in the air outside her teeth as if searching for something. Maybe words. ‘So. Follow you we will.’

  Our course determined the four of us leave the stone ruins behind and head in silence for the rocky headland. It rises before us like a great mass and Connell leads us up the escarpment on a hidden path. As we approach I notice that the castle at Lindisfarne is nothing at all like lavish Alnwick. It is in fact a small fort with three tall curtain walls of stone and a barbican encircling a bailey. As we reach the nearside battlement wall Connell opens a door that leads into an overgrown courtyard, green with shrubs and sprouts and open to the elements. I see many familiar species here. Good herbs of healing and with properties to kill as well. And yet I only see them with my eyes. When I call out to them I feel only the strange stunted muteness that seems to occur when I am near Malina. As we cross the bailey I come to a stark realisation that gives me great disquiet: I am weak in her presence.

  Far on the opposite side of the courtyard stands the great barbican where Connell must live. An inner gate cuts through the battlement and through it I can see the fortified portcullis, the outermost entrance to the castle. There is no evidence of another soul here to share Connell’s duty. I ask him if it is a lonely existence.

  ‘Lonely? No I am not lonely. I have my books, you see. There is ample room to hold them in th
e library.’ He slows his course through the courtyard as he talks. ‘And there is plenty of time to study on the island. We almost never have visitors since King Henry destroyed the friary. Since then some seafarers come ashore here, but the waters are rough. Fishermen enter the bay to catch sturgeon, shad, rays and skates but often seasons will pass with no one for company.’

  ‘We met some company on the mainland who tried to prevent our passage,’ smiles Malina.

  ‘Met with them, did ye? They’d not let you pass if they still drew breath. Did you not think I knew by what method of murder you had arrived when I saw you on the island? Those ancient kinsmen owe this place a great debt. More will come to replace them. A mere six lives do not repay their obligation to the Holy Isle.’

  ‘It must have been a hard bargain for them to pay so dear a price,’ I say.

  ‘Lindisfarne has saved men from hell and worse. Their clan once committed a crime so terrible it saw them damned. A promise was sworn to protect us here with their lives. It is a covenant they fulfil so that they might find the otherworld safely upon death.’ Connell replies.

  ‘You talk of the otherworld. You are a Priest of the old religion. A Druid. Weed, if you think my ways are bloody you have no idea what you’re getting into.’ Malina looks at me without venom or connivance for the first time since we arrived. In their place I can see the blank calculations of one who fears to be here but one who has come too far to flee. I am strangely pleased to see Malina perturbed. I can feel the Lady’s dreadful focus sliding from me to other concerns and my head is clearer than it has been for many days.

  ‘I saw you looking to the sky at the ruined priory, woman. An augur are you? I’ll wager you did most of the killing on the mainland. And the wee bairn. She can read the beasties too.’