Further along, he spied the pointed roof of a hut set on an islet in the heart of the marsh. It was so quiet he guessed at once it was the house of some idol or spirit rather than the dwelling place of mortal men. Respecting its sanctity, he avoided its lintelled doorway and continued to skirt the boggy lake.
Just as he was beginning to despair of ever walking on solid land again, he spied a trail that led from the water’s edge. Mist was rising around him now, as the cool of the night strove against the warmth of the day, and some of the stars went out, blotted by the opaque cloud. Merlin scanned what he could still see of the sky and realised it was very late; the Moon had Westered. It was time for him to sleep like the sunken Moon, lest weariness made his steps clumsy and he ended up sinking in the bog amid the slimy marsh-eels.
He peered around, eyes straining in the murk. Off to one side, he could see a tree on a rise, guarding an entranceway or passage formed by several natural boulders. He stepped towards the gap and nearly bumped into a wooden post covered in carvings that he could not decipher. He ignored it, although he realised it might be perilous to do so, and entered an enclosure surrounded by close-set, stunted trees. They were laden with small ripe apples, and the grass below their boughs was full of fallen fruit that gave out the sickly-sweet smell of decay.
He could hear water running and stumbled through the gloom towards the sound. His feet splashed into the stream before he saw it. Ice-cold water swirled around his calloused soles, soothing them. He sighed in utter pleasure.
He followed the small stream further into the enclosure. A sharp tang hung in the air, stronger even than the fug of the rancid apples. Recognising the sharp coppery scent, Merlin felt the hair on the back of his neck prickle.
Fumbling in his belt-pouch, he drew out his flint strike-a-light and a piece of tinder. Swiftly he kindled a small torch and held it aloft.
Shadows swirled about the garth, retreating from the flame. Merlin stood on the edge of a pond fed by the tiny stream. Offerings lay on its shores: wheat sheaves bound with twine, a broken pot with spiral designs, the upended top of a skull that rocked mournfully, ominously, in the wind. The sharp tang rose even more strongly here and Merlin knelt and cupped the water, bringing it to his lips. It was pale, pure and clear, seemingly untainted, and yet…the waters tasted of blood.
There was no mistaking taste and scent. It was as if he were drinking the blood of the Earth itself, of Great Ahn-ann whose breasts were hills, whose body spawned all living things. This spring and the coiled hill beyond were very holy places indeed. Holy, but fearsome and filled with dark mysteries, women’s mysteries of which he knew little.
Awed, he knelt to pray to the patron of the blood-water spring…but he heard a harsh breath in the dark, a swish of long robes.
Before he had chance to react, the cold blade of a bronze dagger pressed against his throat. Warm breath tickled his ear, and a woman’s voice said, “Who are you stranger, who have come unbidden to the Garden of Afallan? To enter here without the permission of the Lady of the Lake makes your life forfeit!”
He froze, scarcely daring to breathe. “I am friend, I mean no harm. I am a wanderer who comes in search of wisdom. The Ancestors have guided me here.”
“Have they now?” the woman said mockingly.“The Ancestors are capricious, or did you not know? Perhaps they guided you here to be sacrificed to them.”
The dagger poked his neck; he felt a drop of blood slide over his collarbone. He was filled with real fear. He had not envisioned his life-force going to feed this bitter, metallic-tasting pool. “The land may want my blood,” he croaked, “and if that is what the high ones decree, that is my fate. But I would not gladly die before seeing Khor Ghor.”
The woman’s breath railed between her teeth. “Khor Ghor? What business do you have with that mighty place? If it is merely to gawk, there are screens to shield the holy of all holies from unworthy eyes. You would not be welcome there—you are, by your tongue, a rude mountain man.”
Anger kindled within Merlin, overcoming his fear of the woman’s dagger. “I seek the priesthood. Barbarian I may be to you, woman, but I tamed the Wyrms of Faraon, I have studied in the groves on Mhon, and I’ve held counsel with the priestess of Brygyndo in Ibherna.”
The knife suddenly dropped away. “Interesting.” A hint of mirth deepened the woman’s voice. “Maybe you are more than just a hapless wanderer after all. Maybe you were guided here for a reason. Turn around, slowly mind…If you disobey, my dagger will strike your heart quicker than lightning.”
Slowly Merlin turned around. A girl stood on the green grass, a deadly copper rapier in her hand. Autumn-brown hair wound with strips of blue felt tumbled to her waist, and a white-gold lunula circled her neck. Spirals were painted on cheeks and chin. Fringed by dark lashes, her eyes were as green as the conical hill of his dreams. A thin robe blew floated around her, ephemeral as the mist, hiding little of the slim, wiry body beneath.
“Who are you?” he breathed. She seemed so beautiful, standing in the starlight; she put all the women of his tribe to shame. But there was a deadly, dangerous quality to her beauty. It reminded him of a snake, mysterious and exotic with its piercing eyes and dappled skin, but with fangs ready to bite the foolish hand that reached to touch. He would not dare touch this lady. He half wondered if she was human at all, or one of the Everliving ones, who could take on human form at will.
The girl was looking him up and down with her unsettling, grass-green eyes. “You are younger than I thought at first, and less ugsome. Though you could use a meal…and a bath. But not in the sacred lake…unless you wish never to come out again.” She giggled quietly, her laughter unsettling. “My sisters and I alone can swim there and live. I am Nin-Aeifa, priestess of Afallan, the Apple-garden, and guardian of the Tor where Hwynn the White Fire, lord of the mortuary and son of Nud Cloudmaker, rides every Sovahn to collect the shades of the dead. With my sisters we form the ring of Nine Maidens who tend the Sacred Cauldron of Inspiration, boiled by fires that never wane.”
“I am known as the Merlin,” Merlin said simply, and at that moment his hawk descended from the clouds to flutter round his shoulders. Merlin was oddly pleased to see Nin-Aeifa jump at the sight of the bird before regaining her regal composure.
“You continue to surprise,” said Nin-Aeifa. She sheathed her rapier. “Follow me.”
The young priestess led Merlin to a round hut outside the enclosure, within sight of the great cult house that stood on the artificial island in the lake, but not too near it. She gestured Merlin onto a pallet of furs, then reached for a drum made of gut stretched taut over a wooden frame. She tapped out a sharp tattoo, bringing a flurry of younger girls, who carried in trenchers heaped with pork, and beakers brimming with a drink made from fermented apples, the likes of which Merlin had never tasted before.
“Eat, Western stranger,” commanded Nin-Aeifa, “and slake your thirst to your heart’s content,” and Merlin did as he was bade, uncaring in his hunger that juices smeared his face and dripped onto his clothes. As the apple-ale hit his belly, his tongue loosened in a way that was unusual for him, and he began to tell Priestess Nin-Aeifa about his old life, of the serpents that caused the godstones to fall, of Old Woman Buan-ann and the warnings of the priestess of Fiery Arrow. He even told her how he had slain Vhortiern and given him to the stones.
Nin-Aeifa sat cross-legged, stroking her chin thoughtfully. Merlin was amazed; she was so young yet appeared so wise, as if the knowledge of centuries was locked within the body of a girl. “Rumours have come to Afallan,” she said, “that Eckhy, one of the elder priests of Khor Ghor, is ill with a disease than thins his blood. It is thought he will not last more than one more Winter, two at most. When he passes to the West, magic-men from all over Prydn will gather to compete for his position in the Great Temple. Maybe his death will be new life to you, outlander—perhaps it is true, that the Ancestors sent you from your mountain realm to take his place. This may be a good thing. Many of th
e priests there are old both in body and mind, and seem not to see the perils of these troubled times. Maybe Khor Ghor needs new blood.” She laughed again, the not-quite-pleasant laugh of the garden. “And if not, the Stones may well have your blood anyway. They do not like pretenders there.”
“I am no pretender,” growled Merlin, flushing with annoyance.
“Well, good.” She smiled impishly, tossing her blue-streaked hair over her shoulder. “You will have nothing to fear then.”
“I will press on to Khor Ghor at first light,” said Merlin. “I will make myself known to the priests before this Eckhy passes.”
“No, you will not.” Nin-Aeifa sidled up to him; suddenly he noticed how sweet she smelt, but it was the cloying scent of the rotted apples in the enclosure, a scent dark and earthy and unsettling, an overwhelming brew both fair and foul. “You have eaten my food—t he food of Otherness—and drank my ale, brewed with the waters of Life and the apples of Afallan. You are mine for a year and a day. But no, do not cast me those angry looks; yours will be a fine captivity. I will teach you many things that you must know before you reach Khor Ghor. Right now you are but a boy of some talent…you must go there a man of Many Talents.”
He dared not defy her; knew he could not, that her bright blade would snake out to seek his veins if he resisted. And he was not entirely sure he wanted to resist. The offer of learning appealed; his inquisitive mind was fast as flame and, like flame, craved more fuel to burn. He felt strange other yearnings and longings too, in his chest, and in his loins. He had not had much truck with women of his own clan, who had seemed like dull, dumb oxen, worn down with care. But this creature, fire and water and cloying apple-scent, she was a match for him, one of the Touched Ones, an equal of his own kind.
“I will stay,” he whispered. “I want you to teach me… everything.”
“Oh, I shall…” In her hand she held a small round cup laced with perforations; she lit its powdered contents with a bit of kindling from her hearth and the room was suddenly wreathed with curling, pungent smoke. Enchanted smoke that went to the head and gave men visions of the Otherworld.
The clouds wreathed her and he saw her face, haloed by the smoke, a face serene and young, yet cunning and dangerous. A goddess’s face. Her crescent collar gleamed like the Moon as she took it off and raised it, kissing it before setting it aside. Then her flimsy robes slithered away, pooling on the floor, and she flung herself down upon the furs, her supple legs and floating autumn-leaf hair tangling with his limbs, and her lips, apple-laced, burning hotter than the fire against his yearning mouth.
*****
The days marched on into months, and the trees in the nearby groves turned red as blood, then became thin as skeletons in a barrow. The Year Turned, the Sun falling into the sacred lake on the shortest day, and the dance of the seasons began again, with new buds sprouting on the trees followed by flowers and leaves, and gradually, the gold and reds of yet another Autumn.
Merlin and Nin-Aeifa lived as lovers in her hut below the Tor, and as she had promised, she taught him all she knew of magic and the spirits of the water and the dead, and he taught her of his mountain ways, and the gods of sky and stone. He gave to her his secret name, Lailoq, and she whispered that she had been born Hwyndolona, child of a priestess of Afallan, and she was consecrated to Hwynn, god of the Mortuary, by both name and upbringing.
“When I leave this place, will you come with me, be my wife?” Merlin asked one day, when they lay beneath her sheepskins, with a wind that bore the first bitter hint of winter whistling about the roundhouse.
She glanced at him, eyes fathomless. “Never. I am a Maiden of the Cauldron. If I were to go with you, my honour would go too. I would have to kill you.”
“Maiden!” His hands slid over the rises and valleys of her lithe body. “I hardly think so.”
She gave him a glare that immediately stopped his ministrations. “Maiden merely means that the servants of the Cauldron never wed. It does not mean we must remain virgin, though some choose that path. Every year at Midsummer we bathe in the lake on the first full Moon after solstice, and it is said the Lady of the Spiral Crown purifies us anew.”
Merlin settled down into the warmth of the furs, pressing against the swell of her hip. “Forgive my rash words. I am but a man and do not know the women’s mysteries. Women…the doom of the Merlin!”
“It may be so,” she whispered, and turned away into the dark.
*****
The next morning Merlin went to gather healing plants in the nearby woods. He was alone, for Nin-Aeifa had gone to the cult house in the lake, attending to matters of the Cauldron. Distantly he could hear his lover and her fellows singing and chanting, as they began the preparations for Savhan, the night when the dead came from their barrows and walked the dark beyond the firelight. It was when Hwynn himself rode forth, head burning with White Fire, and collected new spirits to take into the Deadlands.
Merlin had gathered half a basketful of fungus when he became aware of a faint rhythmic vibration in the earth beneath his feet. He lay down and pressed his ear against the ground. Yes, something was coming. Something large…far larger and heavier than a man or even several men. Winds arose, and the fallen leaves eddied as if dancing in anticipation. Shoving his woven basket beneath a bush, he hastened to the ancient trackway that wound through the marshy woodland where he collected his mushrooms, mosses and herbs.
At the end of the track a figure appeared, mounted on a great black horse. This sight frightened Merlin at once, for men seldom rode those great wild beasts; they were sacred to the spirits, and had hooves and teeth to fight off the advances of men. Some tribes captured them and kept them as totem animals, and it was said the kings of Ibherna ate their flesh after boiling them at their inauguration feasts, but his people just avoided them... they were the children of the Lady-of-Horses whose head was a woman’s but who ran on four legs.
The galloping animal drew closer; he could now see its wild eyes and the froth on its muzzle, and a shaggy, raven mane plaited with what looked to be human finger-bones. Astride its back was a man, or something man-like, with silver-white, bleached hair that billowed like a cloud of fog. Its face was narrow, lean, painted in black and white, its contours those of a skull…or was it paint indeed, for there seemed to be no human eyes in the darkness of its sockets, just pinpoints of bright blue light?
Merlin shuddered and dropped to his knees, heart pounding with both terror and elation. Surely this was Hwynn the White himself, riding to the Holy Tor to bear the souls of the newly dead back to Ahn-un, where Hwynn and his sire Nud would judge them, before sending them on to the Plain of Honey, or casting them back into the world as vengeful ghosts. Fearfully he peered up, and saw with terrified excitement, that there were now three great dogs bounding alongside the unearthly rider, their coats white as untrodden snow and their flapping ears the hue of old blood. They bayed and howled and snapped at the air, frenzied by the mad flight of the skull-faced rider.
Fighting down his fear at being in the presence of such a holy one, Merlin struggled back to his feet. “Oh Great Lord!” he cried. “What tidings do you bring to Afallan this day?”
The skull face turned, white hair foaming around it. “I come from the lands where Abona makes the waters swell.” A gravelly voice rang out, reminiscent of the clatter of winter icicles, of long bones in rifled cists upon the hills. “I come bearing the spirit of one who has passed, one who will now live forever with his mighty forefathers from the Times-before-Time. Eckhy the old, the wise, priest of Khor Ghor, has now lain upon the mortuary platform for the prescribed turning of the Moon, and will now come to rest for a while under the Hill.” He parted his cloak of shredded black pig-skins, and revealed a drum-shaped chalk box upon his knee, decorated with surprised, watching, faceless eyes. “His heart, his spirit, lies within.”
The vision of the sinister reliquary box was gone in a flash and the unearthly rider with it, pounding on his sweat-stained ste
ed along the track toward the Tor, domain of Hwynn, son of Snatcher, Son of Snarer.
Merlin stepped onto the path and stared after the fearsome figure as it dwindled into the distance, the attendant hounds yammering around the horse’s hooves. “So…Eckhy is dead,” he whispered. “And as the Moon accounts it, it nigh on a year and a day since Nin-Aeifa bound me to her. I am free of her constraints, and I must go.”
There was a shriek from above and his totem-hawk descended from the trees and dug its talons into his uplifted forearm. He was surprised, for the bird had not come to him for a while, though he had oftimes spotted it circling in the sky, wary of the settlement of the Ladies of the Lake yet still tied to its mortal brother.
“You have returned, my friend,” he said, stroking the feathered head. “You will be my one companion on the road to the Temple of the Ancestors.”
A stab of pain needled his heart as he spoke to the bird, but he forced it away. Nin-Aeifa had made her choice, and he had made his. Quickly, without a backward glance, he hurried away into the wintry woods, his hawk flying up above his head, spiralling and screaming as if goading him on.
And in the cult house in the lake, the Nine Maidens paused while stoking the fire round their sacred Cauldron, and they heard the hounds and hoof beats of Hwynn the White upon the beaten path, and suddenly Nin-Aeifa cried out with knowledge and loss, “He is gone!”
Her Sisters, thinking she spoke of the spirit of the old one that Hwynn carried, began to keen for the dead, and to tear their hair and faces. Nin-Aeifa joined in their mourning, her hands clawed and a shroud across her face.
But it was not for any ancient temple priest she wailed.
It was for the death of love, and the end of youth, and the twisting of destinies in the unassailable hands of fate.
CHAPTER THREE
Darkness shrouded the Great River than was known simply as Abona—the River. It was the prime waterway of Albu and the most holy, hence the simple, defining name; the recipient of ancient soulstones on a long journey from the West, and a source of life and death and cleansing.
Stone Lord: The Legend of King Arthur (The Era Of Stonehenge) Page 4
