Leyh’r sat unmoving as the courtiers, guards and servants withdrew. When the great wooden doors closed on them with a sepulchral finality, he slumped against the throne, the dammed tears breaching his manhood, eroding the remains of his resolve.
Tectonic heaves wracked his shoulders and his regal facade collapsed to reveal a frail old man who barely filled the great seat upon which he sat, or the robes he wore.
Skalliger strode around the dais, his robes flapping like an agitated rook.
“Cordelia banished?” he demanded.
Leyh’r looked up, eyes red, white beard wet with tears and mucus. He drew himself up, his limpid gaze frosting to a glare.
“Reason not the need, Skalliger! You may be party to this but I am Priest King of Albion as was my father before me. Prescribe not my sacral duty. I would have something saved. Something pure. Give me that at least. There is blood enough in the succession of Goneril and Regan for your purposes.
“No, do not speak. By Nodens, I have spoken. I am firm. Albion will endure. And so will my Cordelia. Beyond you, beyond this accursed isle, safe in Gallia and bounded by Nodens’ protection.
“I have but one concern now and it is but the main; these late eclipses of the sun and moon. The stars are right and the Old One, Goemagot stirs from his slumber beneath Albion.” He paused, laying his hand on Skalliger’s shoulder, his voice wistful. “I had hoped this cup might pass from me that I might yet see out my dotage in quiet reflection and peace. But fear not. My duty is clear. Though I wish it were otherwise, I have been preparing my entire reign. And, as Daughters of Albion, so too will Goneril and Regan once they are crowned and initiated, and learn the secret I have tried so long to keep from them.”
“Goemagot will yet sleep, thanks to you.”
“Aye,” sighed Leyh’r, as if that were of little consolation. “Come Skalliger. We must prepare for the ritual. Send forth and summon hence the Pnakotic Order, lest to Goemagot I be no warder.”
II
In one of Troynovant’s many cloisters a shadow resolved itself into a man. Edmund, the dutiful whoreson, had returned to Troynovant having spent years away out of sight, out of mind. But now the time was right. Now he returned to confront the old lecher, Gloucester, who begot him and his legitimate half-brother Edgar; heir to the lands, revenue and title of the Earl of Gloucester, a title he once coveted but now a mantle so meaningless and fleeting in the face of what was to come that Edmund sneered. Stepping forth from the darkness, he held a book beneath his coat, at pains to hide the thing from sight in such a place.
“Brother Edgar, you came.”
“How could I not, brother?”
Edgar stared at his half-brother. He had not seen him for over a year and he had changed. His skin was pallid and his watery eyes bulged.
“Edmund, you’re ill. Shall I fetch the apothecary?”
Edmund waved away his concerns with an unnervingly wide smile. “This is no illness, plague, or pestilence, brother. This is who I am, the unnatural fruit of your dear father’s loins.”
“You mean our father. He has ever held us both alike in his affections.”
“No. He is your father, not mine. He but sired me. My true father does yet sleep till I wake him.”
“I do not follow. What game is this?”
“Your father,” said Edmund, patiently, as if teaching a recalcitrant child its alphabet, “consorted with unnatural things in blasphemous acts and brought me into the world. See for yourself. I have the proof of it here in this book. Look well where I have marked it.”
He thrust the book into Edgar’s hand.
Edgar’s brow furrowed at the strange and indecipherable script.
“I cannot read it.”
But then a kind of comprehension dawned as the heretical script spoke not to the eye but directly to the mind, wherein Edgar began to conceive the meaning of the marks.
“Oh gods, gods! Blasphemy!”
He fell to his knees and his bright eyes dulled as reason fled. Contaminated by its necromantic touch, he thrust the book away from him, as he might a poisoned dagger or envenomed cup. Seeking to put distance between himself and the foul tome he fell, scrabbling back to the corner of the cloister.
Edmund calmly closed the book, smiling. “Why brand you us with ‘blasphemy’, ‘blasphemer’, ‘blasphemous?’”
But Edgar was no longer listening. His eyes were wide with a vertiginous terror that threatened to pull his mind into the abyss. Overcome by an overwhelming desire to flee, Edgar dragged himself up by means of a column and ran.
Edmund watched his maddened brother stagger off. It mattered not. The burning ember of corruption had already taken hold of Edgar’s mind and would consume what wits he had left, like a spark to tinder.
He put a hand into the leather pouch at his waist and felt the small graven image there and smiled his unnaturally wide smile.
“Of late a rumour I dripped into unsuspecting ears, that it should spread like a canker and blacken the name of Gloucester. I have word that my invention thrives. Now, Goemagot, stand up for bastards.”
Edgar stumbled through the claustrophobic passages and stairwells of Troynovant until he found a gate that opened from the suffocating stones into the open air, his place in this cosmic creation only too clear to him now as he fell to his knees beneath the vast cold firmament that neither knew nor cared of his existence. Looking up at the night sky, his mind was swamped by a cold immensity until he felt diminished. Insignificant. Lost.
“Edgar, I nothing am!” he screamed.
III
The untimely rage of the King unsettled the Court and, in the following weeks, whispers, like water running downhill, trickled quickly through the corridors and cloisters of Troynovant.
“Is our Royal father mad?” asked Regan. “He has ever been cold and distant as the stars with us, while he shone like the sun on Cordelia. But now he has removed our youngest sister from his affections as surely as our mother’s o’er hasty death removed him from ours.”
Goneril shrugged. “We know the guilt he bears for our mother’s early death; we were old enough to grasp some measure of the gulf that grew between them and to know the blame was his, even if we know not the reason. Yet was Cordelia too young to know anything.”
“Aye, he has long doted on her in atonement for our mother’s passing; how is it that she bears the full brunt of his fury? ‘Tis madness. And now he girds his personage with strange and riotous knights of gods know what provenance. No doubt his tortured mind sees foes where there are friends, and fears phantasmic reprisal.”
“If he is mad, it is well he did what he has before he lost all his reason,” replied Goneril.
“Aye, we have waited long enough for this. Now the kingdom is parted betwixt us we have no need of caring. Thus may we truly regard him with that scant worth he is due and turn him out like a mad dog that has bit its master, for in truth I know not when he will turn his wrath on us.”
“You speak my very thoughts, sister. Once we return to our seats for our coronations and become true Daughters of Albion, he shall have no succour from me or mine. We shall turn our faces and bar our doors against him and whatever knights now attend him, for fear of our persons.”
IV
The Earl of Gloucester was troubled. The vigorous knight who once championed the king had long since run to an amiable bulk. An old man, ruddy of complexion and silver hair a-wisp, he stared into the blazing hearth, lost in thought. He had no doubt that those who envied his friendship with the old king would move against him. In times such as these with a crown divided, allegiances shifted, loyalties were bought and sold, accusations of conspiracy and treason spread as rivals sought to curry favour with the newly ennobled. Recent rumours concerning his own character had given him more cause to worry.
Gloucester glanced up from the fire. The youth loitering in the shadows beyond the heat of hearth did little to ease his concern. Edmund had been away at Bladud’s Great University, and aw
ay he would again. But the whoreson must be acknowledged.
“You look ill,” said Gloucester, returning his gaze to the flames. “Have you seen Edgar? I have not had word from him these three nights past.”
Edmund sat down across from him and leaned forward, resting his forearms on his knees and gazed intently at the old man.
“You say I am ill. Very well,” he said. “Glean what afflicts me.”
The old man studied his son’s face. It appeared familiar yet different. His wiry brows wrestled with the enigma until finally they reared up in alarm.
“You... you have the Deeping look!”
“There we have it!” said Edmund bestowing his wide smile upon the old man.
Gloucester was on his feet, shaking his head vehemently. “No. No! Your mother was ever fair and you were as well-proportioned as any honest issue.”
Fire-cast shadows writhed across Edmund’s face. “You consorted with a lineage more ancient than your own, in black and blasphemous acts. And such was the rumour I dropped like a poison into the ears of the court.”
“Oh, villain! Blasphemous villain. It is not true!”
“Oh, it is.” Edmund’s voice was inhumanly calm, no longer slave to the choleric humours to which Man was heir. “At the university I discovered heretical texts collected by the old necromancer Bladud himself. In them I learned the secret of the Blood of Albion, whereupon I began to have such strange dreams.
“Compelled by my visions, I wandered into the Deepings hard by the university. There I found my mother in the village where you left her and she revealed to me my true nature. When you lay with her, you consorted with a Deeping One, a follower of the Old Ones. That which I inherit proceeds from the maternal.”
“Fie on you! I brought you up a son of Gloucester. You owe me thanks, boy. Obeisance.”
“You cannot appeal to my filial duty. But you do have that for which I must be thankful: your still soliciting eye and your bawdy lusts. And if not for your foppish conscience I would have fared little better than the rest of my outcast clan. If it is the legitimate you seek, then the Deeping Ones have more claim over this land than any hereabouts.”
“Oh, treason!”
“Don’t mock me with false outrage. I owe you no fealty. That I owe to a greater power. The Old Ones are my gods now and to their law my services are bound. My ‘true’ father, Goemagot, does but sleep ‘til I wake him. Then I shall see him do such things! What they are yet I know not, but they will be the terrors of the earth!”
“You’re mad!”
“Oh no, not I.” He reached for the leather pouch at his waist. “Here. See the truth of it for yourself. She gave me this in commemoration of him.”
He thrust into Gloucester’s face a small graven image, worn with age, its features all but rubbed away through reverent handling.
“Look! See what a dread and terrible purpose is seated on this brow?”
Gloucester saw the truth of it, and far more. He shook his head, and rubbed the calloused heels of his hands against his eyes to abrade what he had seen, the horror of what he had done in begetting Edmund. And in his mind he saw the writhing bulk of the graven creature, as large as a hill fort, rise up from beneath the earth and turn its eyes upon him.
In a paroxysm of terror, he wormed his fingers into his eye-sockets and with a bestial howl tore out the profane organs, as much as for what they had seen as what they failed to see.
He collapsed to the ground, pain briefly numbing the horror he felt as, tender and newly blind, he flinched from repeated kicks as Edmund drove him toward the door as one might a beggar, casting his father out into the night.
Edmund regarded the bloody orbs on the floor, naught now but offal. He ground the jellies into the flagstones, feeling them burst beneath his heel.
“Now to attend the Daughters of Albion and to draw from them that which my Gloucester-father loses, no less than all. The Old One rises when the young doth fall.”
V
Nameless emissaries, heralds from distant kingdoms where learnèd men kept watch on the stars, and eldritch scholars from Bladud’s University, came daily to Troynovant. Their haunted visages and truculent manners did nothing to assuage the Court’s opinion that the old king was mad. And some courtiers repeated the oft heard refrain that he was never the same since the death of the queen. Strange knights whose shields bore heraldic devices of unknown origin arrived at Troynovant by ship in the dead of night, the sounds of chanting could be heard from the royal chambers and the smell of strange incense drifted about the cloisters.
The arcane practices continued until one morning, just before dawn, when a column of a hundred Knights of the Pnakotic Order rode forth from Troynovant, accompanying Leyh’r, Priest King of Albion, his high priest Skalliger, and a small group of acolytes and scholars, north along the King’s road.
The land gradually rose, leaving the rich forests and wide-skirted meads behind. The road gave way to drovers’ trails and cart ruts that wound up sparsely-populated valleys, through banks of brown withered bracken where scabrous sheep watched them pass without interest.
Soon even the tracks and trails petered out, and cairns and waymarkers vanished, along with any sign of human habitation.
They reached the top of the moors to be met by a howling damp wind laden with the threat of rain. There, open before them, lay the foul Fell; a vast undulating, almost featureless plateau, where low-lying mists clung to the sodden earth like a cawl, the horizon permanently lost in a haze of mist, haunted by the spectres of hillocks and solitary menhirs marking the Fell’s boundary. Here and there splintered crags thrust up through the pustulent surface of the moor like the shattered bones of a decomposing corpse.
In this place, Man seemed nothing more than a skim of civilisation, a daub on the wattle of an ancient, unknowable world. The might and intelligence that built Troynovant, Caerbran and Caerleir held no sway here.
Leyh’r felt a wave of despair and shivered. It fell to him now, as High Priest King of Albion to discharge the last of his divine duties, one he did not relish, but he had lived a long life. He was ready, Cordelia was safe and he had spent the last weeks purifying and preparing himself, learning the ritual incantations.
Nonetheless, he wished he had been a bloodier and more belligerent King, then he might have died in glory in battle at the height of his manhood and been long dead ere the stars crept toward their blasphemous alignment. Yet he had overseen a reign of peace and his life had been a long and healthy one, unperturbed by war.
But even those kingdoms with which they had treaties regarded Albion with dark suspicion and thanked their gods for the intervening sea.
Among the expanses of bogs and rounded hillocks scoured by ancient ice, an occasional carved, weather-stained cyclopean block of unsettling dimensions emerged through the swirling mists, as if some titanic hand had tossed them there. On a barren plateau that admitted no other imposition of intelligence, their presence was disturbing.
An intermittent keening wind, if wind it was, howled through the crags and hidden hollows with an awful inhuman lament, bringing with it a surge of unnameable fear. The Order of Pnakos unfurled their banners, embroidered with the Elder Sigil, and muttered wards of protection under their breaths.
The horses became skittish and recalcitrant as they wound in single file between black viscous pools, and their riders struggled to control them. One knight’s horse panicked and lost its footing, sending both rider and mount into a quagmire. Despite desperate attempts to save them, both were lost to the foul sucking mud.
After that they abandoned the horses, leaving some men behind to tend them. Leyh’r strapped the ceremonial sword to his waist, drew the satchel carrying the forbidden scrolls containing the ritual formula over his shoulder, and proceeded on foot.
Loud cracks and rumblings from the ground stirred up pestilent vapours from the clinging bogs, and by midday heavy storm clouds had filled the firmament from horizon to horizon, to be met there by
the spectral mists that clung tenaciously to the Fell.
As they wound across the bleak unforgiving landscape, a nagging anxiety continued to sweep through the accompanying knights. They had not the training and eldritch knowledge to fortify their minds as Leyh’r and his acolytes had, and throughout the day the maddening drip of apprehension and fear continued to diminish the train’s numbers. Men lost themselves in the low mist and slunk off, a rising dread smothering their shame.
With night approaching, those of the Order that remained made camp on a rocky outcrop that stood proud of a fetid mire where strange pale plants grew, their thin tendrils whipping sluggishly at the air.
“What, half my men gone?” protested Leyh’r when he heard.
“What need have we of a hundred?” reasoned Skalliger. “Fifty will do.”
“What need we of fifty, my lord?” asked another. “Ten will suffice to see you delivered to the Stones, and each will gain a greater part of the glory when Albion is safe again.”
Leyh’r smiled indulgently. There could be no glory in this place, of that he was sure, but there was no reason to disabuse a man clinging to what hope he could.
Unable to sleep for fear of the dreams he knew would come, Leyh’r watched the slow sweep of the stars that brought the awakening of Goemagot ever nearer, along with his own indentured end. The temperature dropped. Frost crusted the peat and a brittle ice spread over the boggy pools as if, in their passage, the cold stars had touched the Earth itself.
Leyh’r shuddered, and not from the night’s chill.
VI
The next day brought a relentless freezing rain that soaked into clothing and sapped morale. More knights had slipped away in the night. Those few that remained looked tired and haggard, their sleep tormented by the same strange dreams.
The cyclopean ruins grew more numerous and water sluiced off the weathered blocks as if nature itself sought to wear them away through stubborn erosion. The rain filled stagnant pools to overflowing so that the ground became a sodden treacherous bog of sucking peat, the water cutting rivulets through the Fell into the becks before rushing headlong over rocks, through crevices, cascading over ledges and lips in great spates of foaming rust-coloured water that roared down off the malignant moor.
Shakespeare Vs Cthulhu Page 27
