The Circle of Stone: The Darkest Age

by A. J. Lake

  Heored was bleeding from several wounds, but was still on his feet. He had his back to the rear wall of the temple, beside the great central idol, and had picked up one of the flanking statues, a thick wooden pole half the height of a man, with a face carved at the top. He held the statue in both hands, swinging it like a club.

  Edmund darted forward, drawing his knife. The swordsmen around his father were moving warily, but they were still closing in. With a yell, Edmund stabbed at the man nearest him, catching him in the sword arm. The man grunted and swerved. Heored looked towards him, and saw his son.

  ‘Edmund – no!’ he cried, and for the first time in his life Edmund saw fear in his father’s eyes. ‘Go back!’

  But Edmund could not obey. One of the assailants had seized on Heored’s distraction to lunge at his throat. Edmund struck without thinking and buried his knife in the man’s back. The attacker dropped without a sound, the knife still in him, and Heored grabbed at his sword as it fell.

  Then Edmund felt himself seized around the waist, his arms pinioned, and dragged away from his father. He howled and struggled, twisting around in the iron grip.

  Olav Haaksen’s face grinned into his. ‘You can’t save him, foolish boy!’ he cried, and threw Edmund from the platform.

  He fell hard against one of the men below, who staggered. Edmund hit the ground on hands and knees. For a moment all he could do was crouch there, winded, while lights flashed before his eyes. Then his sight cleared and he looked up, as a heavy grinding noise sounded above his head.

  The great doors of the temple had been closed. Edmund screamed, but he could not pull himself up through the press of bodies. He could still hear shouts and the clanging of metal behind the heavy wooden doors. Haaksen stood before them with a bloodied sword in his hand, slashing at any man who tried to come close, until the sounds died away.

  ‘It’s over!’ the earl shouted exultantly.

  The men around Edmund had stopped fighting. Haaksen called up two of his followers to open the temple doors again. Inside, nothing moved. One of the lamps had fallen and gone out. The dim light from the other showed only a confused heap of bodies.

  ‘Sussex men!’ he cried. ‘There’s no need for any more to die. Go home now, and my word to you will stand.’

  ‘Your word!’ shouted Teobald, his voice breaking. ‘You broke parley – you murdered our king!’

  ‘His life was forfeit, for leading his men to this land,’ Haaksen said. ‘And our god required it. He fought well,’ he added, looking with a little regret at his dead men on the platform. ‘But that makes the sacrifice more worthy.’ He beckoned to some of his men on the ground. ‘Take up their bodies,’ he told them, ‘but leave the king for his own people.’

  Cathbar looked at him with contempt. ‘You’ve defiled your own goddess’s temple!’ he said coldly.

  ‘This?’ Haaksen laughed. ‘Freya and her kind are dead! We worship a new god. This will be his temple from now on, consecrated with blood and fire. Look!’ He leapt on to the platform again and took up the remaining torch, bringing it to light the giant statue. For the first time Edmund saw that the face of the goddess had been defaced with sword-strokes. Over it was scrawled a new face: narrow eyes, a savage grin, and hair and beard of flame.

  ‘The burning man,’ Haaksen said, and there was reverence in his voice. ‘He heals when he will, and kills when he will, and his eyes are upon us now and for ever. He comes with the thunderbolt, and his veins run with fire.’

  ‘And his name,’ Cluaran said softly, ‘is Loki.’

  To Edmund, standing in the ruins of his world, it seemed as if he had known it all along. Loki . . . who destroyed Elspeth’s father, and Cluaran’s, and now mine. Who unleashes dragons and burns villages. What else could he be but a god?

  ‘Your father is dead, little king,’ said Haaksen. ‘Go home, and I’ll kill no more of your people. The Burning One will need many warriors when he comes to spread his rule over your own land. But it will not be my men who bring him to your shores. You’ll embrace him yourself before long.’ He smiled. ‘As all do in this land. Even the ones who spread his word in blood and fire – burning the homes of those who will not praise his name.’

  The bodies were being carried out of the temple, leaving only one behind. Olav Haaksen turned on his heel, closely flanked by his men, and strode away down the hill.

  Edmund ran to where his father lay sprawled on the altar beneath the grinning, mocking face.

  Heored opened his eyes as Edmund raised him and looked at his son with the ghost of a smile. ‘You came to me in a good hour,’ he whispered. ‘You saved me from the death of a trapped animal, let me die with a sword in my hand.’

  ‘Don’t leave me, Father! Please...’

  ‘No more of that!’ Heored interrupted, with some of his old impatience. ‘You’re a man now . . . A king. Listen to me, Edmund – take the men home, do you hear me? Go and comfort your mother.’ He broke into a racking cough, gasping for breath, while Edmund clung to him as if his father were a leaf being whipped away in the wind.

  ‘I’ll do everything you say,’ he promised, trying to keep his voice steady. Heored nodded. When he spoke again his voice had faded to a breath, so thin that Edmund had to bend his ear to his father’s mouth

  ‘Whatever skills . . . the gods have given you . . . you’re still my son, Edmund. Be a king.’

  ‘I will, Father! I’ll be worthy of you, I swear it.’ Edmund’s voice caught in his throat. ‘And I’ll avenge you on the one who did all of this. I’ll destroy the Burning Man.’

  He did not know if his father heard him. Heored’s eyes stared at him unseeing, and his head lolled back. Edmund lowered his father to the ground and looked up. Men were standing around him, waiting for him to speak. Cathbar looked down at him gravely. Behind him, Cluaran was silent and Elspeth’s eyes were full of tears.

  Edmund felt tears run down his own face, but he did not stop to wipe them away. He bent to close his father’s eyes, then rose to his feet.

  ‘King Heored is dead,’ he said, amazed to hear how steady his own voice sounded.

  Teobald nodded and knelt down by Heored’s body. When he stood up, he held the king’s signet ring, the great ruby that Edmund had never seen off his father’s hand. The captain took Edmund’s right hand and slid the ring on to his middle finger. Then he knelt again.

  ‘Hail,’ he said, and around him the other men joined in, their voices rising in chorus.

  ‘Hail, Edmund: King of Sussex!’

  Chapter Fourteen

  There was no getting near to Edmund that afternoon. He was given no time to mourn, Elspeth thought with sympathy: the captains surrounded him, pledging their service, and asking his instructions for the disposal of the camp, and the place of his father’s burial. There was work to do, too. Some of Heored’s men had been wounded by Haaksen’s followers. Two had died, and several others needed all the help that the camp healer and Eolande could give them. The Fay woman kept Elspeth busy improvising splints and tearing bandages, and then, after the wounded and dead had been carried back down the hill, set both her and Wulf to fetching water.

  Elspeth was glad to be occupied. Whenever her hands were idle, Haaksen’s words came back to her: The Burning Man . . . his eyes are upon us now and for ever. She remembered the grinning face she had seen scrawled across defaced shrines throughout her journey. The demon’s image had followed her across the country, but she had not recognised it until now. Perhaps Loki truly was everywhere.

  She shivered, looking over her shoulder – but there was only the activity of the camp: men lighting fires, cleaning their weapons, and further away from the hill’s foot, building a pyre.

  They held the funeral just before sunset. Teobald and the other two captains laid Heored’s body on the bier with his two slain men on each side. Their three swords were laid beside them. It was Edmund who set the lighted torch to the wood; then all the men stood back while the flames rose and the thick smoke coile
d upwards, turned a lurid red by the dying sun.

  Edmund looked very small and slight among the men, and his face was wax-pale in the light of the flames, but he held himself as straight as a spear.

  ‘I pledge my father’s memory,’ he declared, and there were answering cries of ‘Heored!’

  ‘Before he died,’ Edmund went on, ‘my father charged me not to spend the life of a single one of his men on needless revenge. Tomorrow you will start back for Sussex.’

  There was a loud murmur among the men; Elspeth suspected that but for the sorrow of the occasion, it would have been a cheer. She looked at her friend, who suddenly seemed remote from her: a leader of men. Would he go home, too? And if he did, how would she manage without him?

  It was a black night, without even a moon. Elspeth walked through the sleeping camp. The burial mound had been completed: it stood stark and bare, abandoned except for Edmund, who sat alone, keeping watch over his father for one last night.

  He looked up as she approached, his face twisted with misery. In that moment she forgot that he was a king and ran to him, throwing her arms around him.

  ‘Oh, Edmund, I’m so sorry...’

  Edmund leant against her, his shoulders shaking with sobs. They held on to each other fiercely for a few moments; then Edmund pulled back and brushed the tears from his face, struggling for calm.

  ‘I’ll be better tomorrow,’ he said. His voice was slow and rough, as if the words hurt him. ‘I know what it is I have to do, and my father’s . . . the captains will help me.’

  ‘Must you go back?’ Elspeth had not intended to say it, but the words flew out of her. ‘If Loki wins, we’ve all lost. There won’t be a kingdom for you to rule!’

  Edmund turned to her, and she recoiled from the anger in his face. ‘I’m lost already,’ he said. ‘It was Loki who killed my father, not Haaksen – he was just the tool. Up in that temple, I swore to destroy him – but I don’t know how. We can’t even find him!’

  ‘Maybe we can,’ Elspeth argued. ‘We know now that he’s getting followers... worshippers. They’re killing in his name: the Burning Man. He must have won them over somehow – maybe their leaders have met him. If we can find some of them, and talk to them . . .’ she shuddered, ‘maybe pretend that we believe in him too, we can find out where, and what form he took.’

  Edmund was staring at her. ‘As he did in the fishing village in the Snowlands, you mean? Making them see him as a miracle-worker?’

  ‘Yes, and the healer in Alebu. If we talk to people, just as travellers...’

  But Edmund was looking away again, the hope dying in his face. ‘It’s no good,’ he said. ‘I have a duty to my men. What would they think if I abandoned them? I have to be a king now.’

  He did not look like a king, Elspeth thought. Sitting here in the dark, his thin arms around his knees, he was more like the boy she had first met on the Spearwa: lost and afraid. And he bore the weight of everyone’s expectations, on top of his grief. She could not burden him with more demands.

  ‘Father told me to take them home,’ Edmund said, very low.

  ‘That’s for tomorrow,’ Elspeth told him. She put an arm around his shoulder, and he sagged against her. ‘You should rest now.’

  He nodded slightly. In a few moments his head fell forward and his breathing became soft and regular. Elspeth lowered him to the ground and wrapped his cloak around him before creeping away.

  In her dream that night, Elspeth stood on a steep hill, ankle-deep in snow. A chasm gaped at her feet, its depths rumbling with unseen fires – and from the far side, someone was calling to her. She made out a tiny, distant figure; black-haired, clothed in white.

  Ioneth! she shouted over the ravine. The little figure answered, gesturing downwards at something. Try as she might, Elspeth could not make out the words: only the faint, sweet sound of Ioneth’s voice. She ventured closer to the chasm’s edge, but the roaring from the depths grew louder, drowning out all other sounds. Ioneth seemed further away now, her frantic warning fading into the distance. And in the chasm, something stirred: something fiery and raging, too huge to be contained. An answering jolt of fire shot down Elspeth’s arm and burst painfully from her hand.

  She started from sleep. Her hand tingled, but she could not tell whether the jolt had been real or imagined. Light from a blue sky stung her eyes, and the makeshift camp was filled with quiet bustle as the Sussex men rolled their blankets. Elspeth pulled herself up, reassured by the bright light and the orderly preparations. Then she saw the freshly made grave-mound, and remembered. King Heored was dead – and today Edmund would leave to take his men home.

  Teobald and the other captains were calling the men into marching order. Elspeth looked for Edmund but did not see him. It’s probably best, she told herself. We said all we needed to say last night. She tried to shake off the heaviness that dragged at her, and set off to find Cathbar and Cluaran. She would tell them her idea of using the Burning Man’s converts to lead them to Loki.

  But she still had to find a way to fight Loki. She remembered her dream: Ioneth’s fading voice, and the impossibly huge distance between them as the fire rose against her. I won’t let you vanish! she vowed, clenching her right hand.

  Cluaran came striding towards her, propelling Wulf by his shoulders. ‘I found the imp playing around the king’s grave,’ he said. ‘We’re nearly ready to go, if you are.’

  Elspeth nodded. ‘We should say farewell before we go.’

  Cluaran gave her an odd look. ‘Edmund’s here now,’ he said.

  Edmund was running up to them, his face touched with colour. He was no longer wearing the fine clothes his father had given him, but his old fur cloak and heavy boots. He looked better, Elspeth thought; no longer lost as he had seemed last night.

  ‘I wasn’t sure if we’d have the chance to say goodbye,’ she greeted him.

  ‘I’m not saying goodbye,’ he told her. ‘I’m coming with you.’

  Elspeth stared at him.

  ‘You were right,’ he said. ‘While Loki lives, there’s no safety for my people, or for anyone. We have to fight him.’

  ‘And what of your promise to your father?’ Cathbar asked.

  ‘I promised him I would send our men home, and I will. Teobald will lead them back to Sussex, and bear a letter to my mother. Father charged me not to waste any more of our men’s lives, but he didn’t forbid me to attack Loki myself. You may think I’m a fool, but I have to try.’

  Cathbar looked serious. ‘I don’t know how you’ll succeed,’ he said, ‘but I won’t call you a fool, Edmund Heoredson.’ He turned to Elspeth. ‘Well, my girl, our party is complete again – and it seems our task is to catch the wind and tie up the lightning.’ He swung his pack to his shoulders. ‘So we’d best make a start.’

  Chapter Fifteen

  They started by returning to the road.

  Both Cluaran and Cathbar approved of the idea of looking for the god’s followers. ‘I thought of something of the sort myself,’ the captain said. ‘But we’ll have to watch our words, and lie skilfully.’

  ‘Trust me for that,’ Cluaran said.

  The trees by the roadside were in full leaf, and loud with birdsong. The fields that they passed seemed deserted, and Elspeth began to fear that it would be a long search for anyone they could question. But the road was still churned up with footprints, and Cluaran, inspecting them, said that some at least were recent.

  It was mid-morning when they found their first opportunity. Cathbar, who was up ahead, stopped and called back to them. ‘Over there!’ he said, pointing.

  Just visible down the road was a thin plume of smoke. It came from a settlement a little way from the road: small, poor, and apparently deserted. All the people they could see were gathered in the field at the roadside. There were around two dozen of them, all poorly clothed. Near the road, a scrawny donkey cropped the grass. Its cart had been set up in the middle of the field, with a small fire lit in front of it. A man stood on the ca
rt to address the crowd, who listened with rapt attention.

  ‘And he shall come to them in flame!’ the speaker shouted. ‘Then all shall know his glory. He will rule over all the earth. From east to west, there shall be none but the Burning Man!’

  There was a clumsy response of ‘Praise him!’ The listeners were mostly young men, with a few women and children at the back. Elspeth guessed that most of them were from the village, but a few of the men, and two women, stood in a separate group close to the cart, leading the responses. They were even more ragged than the rest of the crowd: beggars, Elspeth would have said, but for the fierce pride on their faces.

  ‘Who will come with me?’ the speaker cried, his voice rising almost to a scream. ‘Who will join in the work, and spread the word of the Burning One?’

  The group near the cart cried out together, and some of the young men among the villagers joined in, but not all.

  ‘What about our fields?’ called one woman, and an old man near the back spat disgustedly.

  ‘Load of nonsense, if you ask me,’ he shouted. ‘Leave my crops to go traipsing round the countryside? Be off with you.’

  ‘You talk of fields?’ the preacher cried. His voice dripped scorn. ‘What are cabbages and corn to the glory of the spirit? Our god can nourish us with a word.’

  ‘Have you tried eating your own?’ the old man jeered. There was a nervous laugh among the listeners. Three of the men by the cart detached themselves and made for the back of the crowd.

  ‘We will rise up with him!’ the preacher vowed. ‘No more poverty, or hunger, or disease. The Burning Man will heal all ills for those who truly believe in him. We have seen it!’

  ‘We have seen it!’ echoed his followers by the cart. The three who had moved away were making their way purposefully towards the old man now, and Elspeth saw the flash of knives in their hands. She cried out, but Cathbar had already started forward.