A muscle twitched in Ack-olon’s cheek but he managed to keep his composure. He was too afraid of Morigau, of her poisons and sharp knives, to answer her wrath with anger of his own. “We were helping, Lady; we had not abandoned you. We could do nothing at the temple in your defence—except die needlessly. So we stole away when tempers flared high and prepared a boat to take us to safety on the mainland. The boys will have to help paddle—they can do that, can they not?”
He gave Mordraed a mean, piggy-eyed look; Ack-olon had been Morigau’s lover since they were little more than children and it irked him the way she fussed about the boy, treating him like he was already a little king, better than his brothers, better than him and La’morak, who were of high status clans themselves. Ack-olon was also privy to the truth—that Mordraed was the child of a broken taboo, cursed, for he had been there that night when Morigau, masked as the raven, had seduced her own drink-addled half-brother.
Mordraed noticed the look and stiffened, his eyes turning black with fury. He hated the two men who were always sniffing about his mother, hated the sly jokes they shared, their wandering hands when they thought he could not see. How he wished Cludd had finished the two warriors, but he was certain that they had been, as Morigau had accused them, in hiding… or at best, preparing the boat to save their own skins should the worst happen.
“Of course I will help.” He cast a frosty smile in Ack-olon’s direction. “It would be rude of me not to help an old man.”
Ack-olon’s teeth gritted; a vein throbbed on his temple but he forced himself to turn away. At his side La’morak choked back a laugh.
“Old men…” Mordraed added.
La’morak’s smile curdled like milk.
Mordraed carried on to the seashore, grinning, enjoying their almost palpable dislike.
*****
A boat lay on the shingle, carved from a great log, long and slippery as a sea serpent. The wind was blowing fiercely, as it often did on those bleak treeless isles, and the waters beyond were choppy and wild. Clouds of spume blew past the faces of the refugees.
La’morak looked worried. “The tide is not good. The wind is up. It is a fierce crossing even for experienced sailors.”
“We have done it before, we shall do it again,” Morigau stated flatly.
“Maybe wait till dawn and see if the wind dies.”
Morigau stared over her shoulder, head on one side, listening. A little bead of sweat appeared on her brow to be licked away by the wind. “Are you deaf? Can you not hear? They proclaim Cludd as new king in the Circles of Sun and Moon. They are deep in their beakers and their anger rises. They will come looking for us, and if we are not gone they will tear us all limb from limb!”
“The boat it is then.” Mordraed shoved Gharith and Ga’haris into the log-boat, and beckoned impatiently for Agravaen to join them. The loutish boy thudded clumsily into the craft, almost tipping it over before the party had even set off. Mordraed squashed himself in just across from him and grabbed a paddle made of driftwood, while Morigau sat with her back pressed against her favourite child and the youngest two crushed between her knees. Her two servants pushed the log-boat out to sea and began to paddle with all their strength against the fierce riptides. Mordraed joined them with his own paddle, amused to see how swiftly they tired, their brows lathered and dripping, while he was still fresh and keen, not even breaking into a sweat.
The wind blew and the craft skirled, tipping dangerously to one side. The youngest boys screamed and were violently sick, spewing over the side. Agravaen moaned horribly and slumped to one side, vomiting, his shifting weight threatening to spill them all into the cold, deadly embrace of the sea, where Mahn-ann waited with his scaly green face and hair full of fishes.
“Agravaen, control yourself!” Mordraed slapped the younger lad with an open hand, making him leap back howling from the side of the log-boat. “You had your man-rites a Moon ago—act like it, or I will smack your arse like a baby’s!”
The boy glared mutinously at his brother and pressed his fingers to his red, stinging face but he obeyed, moving not an inch. Not one, for he knew Mordraed made no idle threats.
Finally, beyond all hope, the exiles spied land, grey and hazy in the approaching dawn. Seabirds were just waking, wheeling over the waves and the misted green shores. The boat ground onto a pebbly spit and its occupants tumbled out, the older men exhausted from constant paddling, the little boys worn out by fear, Agravaen still holding his churning belly and slapped cheek. Morigau and Mordraed, however, seemed untouched by the perilous crossing, eager to go on.
“We cannot linger here,” said Morigau. “These lands are ruled by Loth’s kinsmen, sons of his brother Urienz, who was killed by my kinsman Ardhu. They have no love of me or my blood. News spreads fast, and I fear we won’t be safe long here either.”
La’morak clambered up, unsteady, his face grey and stubbled in the murky dawn-light. “What is your plan, lady? Where is safe for the likes of us?”
She smiled; a smile that did not reach her green-brown eyes “We will be safe with my brother, the Foe-hammer, the Stone Lord. My dear brother in the south. How would you like that, my boys?” She turned to the youngest of her children, gesturing them close. “We will travel to the great temple of Khor Ghor and meet with Ardhu Pendraec!”
“My uncle!” Mordraed yelped in surprise. “Have you gone mad? From the time I was a babe you told tales of how much you hate him! Why would you go to him for help?”
She sighed and, unexpectedly, threw her arms around Mordraed’s waist, making him flush with embarrassment. Agravaen made a disgusted noise, eager to score against the brother who had shamed him on the sea-crossing. “I do it for you, my beautiful son. For you.”
“For me?” He shook her too familiar hands from him. “How exactly? I would be gladder if you raised a warband to take back Ynys Yrch… my birthright.”
“There is better for you than that harsh place of pigs and the wind!” Ignoring his obvious reluctance, she coiled a hand in his hair, ran lips like dried leaves along his cheekbone. “Mordraed, soon I will tell you… tell you all. But not now, not before your brothers. Not until we are away and safe from the savage kin of Loth.”
*****
Mordraed brooded for the next few days as they travelled through wild, wide lands fringed by mountains with heads cloaked in grey cloud and crisscrossed by thundering streams, swollen from winter rains and melting snow. Frigid rain pelted the refugees, sometimes turning to snow when they crested the highest hilltops—great flat flakes that slapped into their eyes and melted on their lashes. The wind was sharp as a blade, but fortunately their sealskin capes and boots helped protect against both water and wind. The younger boys, less afraid now that Ynys Yrch was far behind them, started to laugh and play childish games, casting snowballs at each other and their brothers and catching snowflakes on their tongues.
Eventually the fierce mountains diminished and the great glens that gaped between their adamant feet fell away, and the lands around them became tamer, less stony and remote. Standing stones lined rills and ridges—territorial markers of the various northern tribes who lived in these regions: Painted Folk and Khaledoni mostly, both known as head-hunters and not the type of folk who would give the former queen of Ynys Yrch succour.
By a dark little wood of pine the travellers found the remains of an abandoned round house, roof shorn away by time and wind, an open pit gaping before its door where some Ancestor’s long interred skull had been wrest from its long sleep when the hut’s owner had decided, for whatever reason, to take all his own and flee.
Ack-olon and La’morak set about making a fire in the long-cold hearth and putting down skins for their mistress and her sons to sit on. Morigau ate a piece of dried fish from her pack, giving nothing to the boys who watched her hungrily, and when she finished gestured for Mordraed to come to her.
She stroked his face, still smooth, a pretty youth’s face but with a hardness beneath the glamour. �
�Your eyes are haunted. Can you not trust me?”
“No,” he said, pursing his lips. “I cannot. You told me from the time I could walk that I would be king after Loth… and now you act as if I should smile at the loss of a kingdom. Smile… and go to the house of an uncle who is an enemy of my house, and beg him for scraps!”
“It is time for us to talk,” said Morigau, and her lips curved into a crooked, almost sinister smile that made Mordraed feel vaguely uneasy. He knew his mother dealt in dark things; he had seen the blood on her hands, smelt the scent of death on her robes. But she was a priestess, she served the Blue-Faced One most of all, and the Dark Moon, and it was not for him to question.
“Then let us talk,” he said gruffly. “Be out with it.”
“Not here.” Morigau took the sleeve of his jerkin and drew him from the hut toward the trees that surrounded it. “What I must tell you is not for the ears of your brothers. In fact, they must never know.”
Intrigued though vaguely apprehensive also, Mordraed let Morigau lead him in the direction of the grove. Ack-olon and La’morak were huddled together in the hut’s door, staring after them and nudging each other, faces smug with some private knowledge. He did not like that at all, and longed to slash away those smug grins with his dagger…
Morigau picked her way between the trees, which swayed and creaked in the rising wind. Dead branches lay denuded on the forest floor, bark bleached silver-white like old bones. Fleshy mushrooms clustered in the damp, spores puffing up in a yellowish cloud as Morigau’s feet passed, filling the night with vapours and strange earthy scents.
Where the grove ended, a worn path wound out into grassland long stripped of trees in some ancient clearance. Morigau strode out into the sea of grass, her long black hair streaming like a banner in the breeze. She walked so confidently Mordraed wondered if she had been here before; on her travels throughout the isle of Prydn before she finally settled down as priestess and wife to Loth of Ynys Yrch. Wondered if the empty hut and its rifled door-step grave could have had anything to do with her visit…
Up ahead he could see the pinnacles of two stones, weather-pitted oolitic fangs that jutted from a cobbled surface still red from old burning. A huge recumbent stone weighing many tons rested between the knife-like flankers; it was streaked with quartz, but a thousand exposed and brutal winter’s nights had cracked it, the cold splitting the great megalith so that its dark inner core lay open to the elements.
Morigau hastened to the recumbent stone and lithely vaulted onto it, sitting between the flanking stones as a queen would sit upon a throne. The Moon was behind her left shoulder, her face shadowed, her head a silhouette against the blazing stars.
Morigau loved drama and effect; Mordraed knew she was using her theatre on him now, to awe him, to make him fear. He made a soft snarling noise, hating such mummery. “Mother, it is too cold for these games. Say what you must and let us return to the fire!”
He moved another step closer. He was standing on the cobbles now, loose and jumbled and filled with ash and charcoal. Objects crunched noisily beneath his ankle-high cowhide boots; glancing down, he started in surprise, for the things half-hidden in the gloom were white and rolling, fragile as eggs fallen from the nest of some giant bird. But suddenly, one tumbled toward him, pivoting as it struck against his foot, and he realised these frail objects were not eggs at all but the domed crania of neonates, newborn children.
He scowled and his spine prickled. “Why must death always go with you?” he spat at his mother, and he gave the nest of skulls a great kick. They disintegrated in a puff of white dust.
“Death is always with us.” Her eyes gleamed, feral. “Look!” She reached forward and grabbed his arm, fingers digging like tiny knives into his flesh. “Is this not the bow-hardened arm that wields death?”
“Maybe… but you will not let me use it!” he spat at her. “Mother, you promised I was to be king… but you made us leave Ynys Yrch without a fight, stealing away like cowards in the night! I would have fought… fought to the death! For my honour...and yours.”
“Throwing your life away would be stupid, Mordraed. Yes, I once saw you as a ruler on Ynys Yrch, a rival for my brother in his high hill of Kham-El-Ard. But I have seen… better things for you. My mind is never quiet, my son; it works night and day, devising, foreseeing. You will be a king, Mordraed, that is true… but you will be king of more than just a lonely, wind-scored isle. You will be master of all Prydn.”
Mordraed’s lip quirked. “Your brother would have something to say about that, I’m sure. Are your wits addled, woman? What are you thinking? That he will somehow see me as his heir? He has a son, does he not? He does not need a sister’s son for inheritance; many tribes do not follow Mother-right any more.”
Morigau licked her lips; they looked black, dry as dead worms in the shaky starlight. “I want him dead, Mordraed. Dead, so that all that I lost through him is restored to me—through you. The boy, of course, must die too. The woman, the White Queen, will become your woman, as she is Sovereignty and men will respect what she is, even if they have no love of you.”
Mordraed’s heart pounded. “This is madness! No one would follow me, a usurper!”
“No, Mordraed.” She reached out and caressed his silky cheek, her fingers now oddly gentle. “They wouldn’t. But you would not be a usurper. Mordraed, Ardhu Pendraec’s young son is not his eldest. The eldest is… you. Know that you are Ardhu’s son, so true heir to all he owns.”
Mordraed jumped back as if she had struck him. The spot where her fingers had caressed him burned like fire. Cold waves of sickness and terror ran through him. “He cannot be… I knew my fire was not Loth… but Ardhu! He… he is your brother!”
“So he is, my son. The sacred blood of kingship flows doubly in you from our Ancestors in deepest Belerion.”
Mordraed fought the waves of nausea that washed over him. His head spun. “ You tell me I come from a union that was taboo! I am a creature born of great wrong!”
“Then turn that cursed birthing into a great right…” She reached down and caught his arms, drawing him towards her, pulling him near until he was almost lying across the great cracked block of the down-lying stone. She was stronger than a woman ought to be, strong as a war-goddess. “Look… look, Mordraed, see the Moon behind us, see her beautiful white skull? Near nineteen Sun turnings has the Moon’s cycle, and you were conceived when the cycle was on its turn, so you shall come to your full power as it ends. Then shall great sacrifices be made, and Ardhu, my brother, will be amongst them. The Moon is your mother, my boy, not the Sun that rules Ardhu, and she will eclipse his Sun as in the days of old—and her shadows will not pass away. The very stones of Khor Ghor will tremble and fall before your hand, Mordraed, my one of Great Judgement, my son of the Dark Moon.”
He knew not what to answer, but lay as one frozen, the horror of her words sweeping over him, the cold of the stone eating through his clothes, grasping at his beating heart as if to still it. Morigau reached under her cloak and drew out an obsidian blade set into a hilt of horn and raised it, its edge winking dully. She kissed it and then with a sudden downward motion slashed Mordraed’s left cheek. He screamed in shock and pain and blood pattered, black in the moonlight, onto the great block on which he lay.
Morigau skirled the flowing blood into patterns with her fingers. “It is done. You are sworn by the shedding of your royal blood to the dark Mother that rules the Moon. I am sorry about your beautiful face, Mordraed, but that is your sacrifice… to the one whose spirit will guide you… and to me. Come, I will make it better, so it will not look uncomely.”
She drew him towards her; he was whimpering like a child, hating himself, hating Morigau both at once. Morigau took her dagger again and refined the cut across his cheekbone, before taking blue powders from her belt pouch and rubbing them into the wound. “There…” she said happily, as if well satisfied. “You have nothing to worry about. A nice tattoo to mark you. You do swear to me, don�
�t you, Mordraed? Swear to follow the Moon that helped make you… follow me, your mother, your priestess, who only wishes the best for you… for both of us.”
“Have I any other choice?” he said.
“No, you do not,” she replied.
CHAPTER TWO
THE HALL OF THE STONE LORD
The youth ran along the crest of the chalk ridge, bent low to the ground, seeking animal spoor to follow. Frosty leaves crumbled beneath his feet, but his soft deerskin shoes made no noise upon them so light of foot was he. He was like a spirit, a pale ghost in the mist, fast moving and insubstantial in his tunic of white aurochs’ hide and grey wolf-skin cloak, a tribute-gift to his father from a distant Northern king.
He was gifted and he was touched by the spirits.
He was Amhar, son of Ardhu Pendraec and his White Queen, Fynavir.
Amhar had been born amid great fear. He had nearly killed his mother at the birthing, and Ardhu had ridden to Khor Ghor during her long travail and treated with the spirits to let them both live. The King had slashed his own flesh to give the Stones blood, to show them his suffering and willingness to sacrifice. And on a clear sunrise, after five bitter days, when the Ladies of the Lake crowded round the sacred pool moaning and chanting, the child finally slid forth into the waiting hands of Nin-Aeifa and Mhor-gan of the Korrig-han. “It is a man-child!” Nin-Aeifa had cried, lifting the red and purple infant up by his feet to drain the choking fluids from his lungs. The baby’s mouth cleared and he started to scream, and Mhor-gan had taken her ceremonial dagger of finest flaked flint and slashed the cord that bound him to Fynavir, freeing him into the mortal world. He had then been swiftly carried to Khor Ghor in a robe of soft red fox-skin and presented to the five trilithons, where the ancestors watched with ancient eyes—the Portal-of-Ghosts, Throne of Kings, the Western Guardian, the House of the North Wind and the Arch of the Eastern Sky. The afterbirth had been burned before the Stone of Adoration as an offering and Merlin had anointed the child with animal fat, writing sacred, protective marks upon his skin while Nin-Aeifa sang strange women’s songs in a high, trilling voice, driving off any evil spirits that might seek to snatch the young life away.
Moon Lord: The Fall of King Arthur - The Ruin of Stonehenge Page 2
