“Give me two days…the Solstice is upon us,” said Merlin, “It will do not good for any of us if the Sun does not return in spring!” He flitted off into the shadows, leaving the younger man burning with his unfulfilled desire on the banks of Deroweth henge.
*****
U’thyr eventually sought the Merlin’s hut, where he was invited to sleep as a token of friendship. Under sheepskin rugs he slept fitfully, until, shortly before dawn, he was woken by the sound of mournful horns blowing. Groaning, he clambered to his feet, tugged on his boots and trews, and took from a small wooden box the symbols of his chieftaincy, passed on through many generations; gold tresses to clasp his hair, armbands that twisted round the biceps like copper-coloured snakes, a bronze diadem decorated with serpentine spirals—the crown of the Head Dragon. He donned them swiftly; fastening the gold buttons on the tunic with chilled fingers, then wrapped his warm fox-fur cloak around him, and went out into the dark-before-day.
Outside the sky was lightening, the night-fog turning violet. Frost glittered on the ground. A solemn drum was banging inside the culthouse in the centre of the earth circle, while Woodenheart and the other smaller timber temples were silent and dark. All around the people of the plain and visitors from the Five Cantrevs flitted like grey ghosts, some with faces painted into skulls, others ash-smeared, dark and sombre. Quietly, with none of the laughter of the night before, they hastened toward the Hallows to wait for the imminent dawn.
U’thyr followed the crowd, alert for any sightings of Y’gerna, but he saw neither her nor Gorlas. He castigated himself inwardly, unsettled by his own weakness where she was concerned; he must strive not to think of her till after the ceremonies were done, least the spirits be angered and play cruel tricks on them all…
Silently he entered the culthouse, stepping over a crescent of skulls which had been chosen from the many sacred bones carried to Deroweth from afar, and took his place among the great of the Five Cantrevs, who stood ranked between the oak posts that stood open to the sky. The common folk crowded outside the circle, silent, and expectant.
Down by the river, the sound of chanting started, and the drummer at the back of the culthouse began to tap out a faster rhythm. The sky above Magic Hill in the South-East flushed crimson, and suddenly a solitary flame flared beside the waters of Abona, slashing through the mist, chasing back the night and any malevolent wights that might reside in it. The chanting grew louder, and the tongue of flame became a glowing circle of fire, round as the Sun himself, casting out sparks and fiery tendrils into the gloom. Slowly, as the flames intensified, it began to bob up the slope from the great river toward the dawn-aligned temple.
At the embanked entrance of the Great Circle, U’thyr could now see the source of the flames. Surrounded by a score of priests, Merlin was bearing aloft a huge, spoked wooden disc that had been set alight. Symbolic of the Sun, it blazed into the darkness, imitative of the solar events that would soon occur.
“Today Bhel Brighteye dies and is reborn!” the Merlin cried, holding the solar-wheel aloft. “His Mother is angry, for she is now the Old Woman of Gloominess, The Watcher of the Dead. As a Great Sow who eats her own farrow, she has chased him and bitten him till he is weary and wounded, for he is growing old and weak. He will bleed upon the stones of Khor Ghor this Winter’s eve…and then he will be reborn, the Young Son, growing fairer and stronger. If ever it was not so, then the world we know would perish!”
An awed moan rose from the waiting crowd. Women began to wail and tear their hair. Men stomped and cried out to the heavens, raising bronze axes to the still-twilit sky.
Merlin stepped into the culthouse and cast down the firebrand, which was extinguished by the other priests, who flung crumbled chalk upon it, burying the ashes under a mound that resembled a miniature barrow. Then he turned back toward the undulating bulk of Magic Hill and opened his arms wide, his voice rising in a wordless cry of both joy and despair.
At that very moment, the rim of the Sun peeped out from a small gap in those distant snow-crusted hills, a red burning eye, sullen and without warmth. It ascended swiftly, a ball of blood, livid colours staining the sky around it. Sullen beams struck the metalled path that led to the river, and a shaft of wavering, uncertain light streaked into the heart of Deroweth, cutting a path across the grass and entering the lintelled archway of the great culthouse, piercing the shadows beyond.
Another moan came from the crowd, and the drummer inside the temple beat on his drums in a frenzy. People fell on their faces, bowing toward the South-East, while warriors blew on horns and waved bullroarers that made a terrific, thunderous sound.
Merlin made a jerking gesture with his arms and the noise ceased abruptly. The drums started again slow, steady, but with an added beat, a touch of menace. One of the priestesses ventured forward, her face and naked body blackened with ash, carrying a black-feathered chicken below one arm. She was Night, her hair a snarled tangle of darkness, her teeth in her ebony face as sharp as the fangs of the creatures that prowled the midnight hours. Another woman joined her, body striped with yellow and crimson ochre, bearing a squawking red-feathered bird in her hands. She was the Day, the dying day when Night held mastery over the weary Sun.
Together they entered the culthouse and promptly sacrificed the two chickens, cutting their bellies with flint knives and mingling their blood as day mingled with night at that auspicious time of the year. The women then painted each other with the blood, the essence of life, and daubed it on the carved faces on the stout posts of the unnatural forest that surrounded them, while Merlin read omens and portents in the birds’ entrails that lay coiled across the chalk floor.
Heading back outside, the priestesses began to dance a circular, halting dance, and the women of the tribes joined them. The men clapped and shouted. Suddenly one priestess stopped and pointed to the entrance of the Circle: ‘Look, he comes, he comes—the cursed one!’
Through the gap came a black billy-goat followed by a man wearing a hideous bull-horned mask. He bore a club, which he used to swat the goat, forcing the frightened beast forward. The animal was dressed outlandishly; a garland of holly on its brow a mock crown that slipped over one rolling, terrified eye.
“Evil!” shouted a priestess, gesturing to the bewildered goat. “Cursed. Drive him from this place, so that he will take away your sins, your pains, your wickedness. Let him take away famine, plague and death…Let all the ills men suffer fall on his cursed head!”
The tribesfolk began to hurl lumps of chalk, handfuls of grass, a finally stones at the frightened animal. They screamed with rage, cursing the goat and cursing every ill that afflicted them—aching bones and abscessed teeth, children who died in infancy, wives lost in childbirth, husbands slain in strife. Their eyes became fierce and wild and they would have run forward and torn the animal to bits had not the priests held them at bay.
This unfortunate beast was not for their pleasure. He would go to Khor Ghor, to please the Old Woman and her Son and take the troubles of Albu’s people into the West. At one time, in days long gone, it was a Man who made this sacrifice when the land was invaded, when crops withered and babes went hungry... but for now, a fine, healthy animal crowned with holly would do to appease the forces of heaven and earth.
Merlin looped a rope round the beast’s neck and led it toward the river, where waiting rafts and coracles bobbed along the banks. The masked Teaser shuffled behind, swinging his club, forcing the goat onto a raft, where it was trussed up with hemp ropes. Next, the temple priests processed to Abona, singing and chanting. A group of elite supplicants followed them, warriors, chiefs and high status women who would be permitted to enter the stones of Khor Ghor on that night only. Many bore funerary urns packed with cremations; others carried bones scraped clean that would be interred around the ditch. They clambered into the boats, and they party set out into the purple morning, the goat’s bleating becoming fainter as the current carried it farther downstream, to the Old Circle and the start of
the Avenue.
The rest of the celebrants spilled out along the verdant banks of the great river, tossing in cremations, wailing and praying, splashing themselves with the cleansing waters of old River-Woman. U’thyr walked along proudly with members of his warband, long-shanked Kol, swift-handed Rivan, Govna the smith of the Dwri, who wrought doughty blades. He tried to keep his mind on spiritual matters but his thoughts kept slipping back to Y’gerna dancing under the Moon. He glanced around surreptitiously, hoping to spot her, but could not see her in the heaving throng milling about on the banks of the river.
After a long walk, the tribesfolk reached the start of the Sacred Avenue. They hurried along it, crying out to the heavens, beating the path with the thighbones of Ancestors. Mothers with babies strapped to their backs held up yellowed, age-worn skulls, clacking the jawbones and making a sinister, rhythmic noise amid the ululations of the mourners and the reedy skirl of bone pipes.
Reaching the bend of the Avenue below the ridge of the Seven Kings, where mighty white barrows stood glittering with frost, the celebrants paused, gaping and awe-struck. The great sanctuary of Khor Ghor rose up on the Plain before them, shining like a beacon, its stones warm in the crisp winter light, the shadows of trilithons and free standing menhirs running like black fingers across the grass. Two fire-pits glowed before the entrance, and priests were driving long-horned cattle through in rites of purification. Drumbeats came from within the circle, slow and steady, bouncing from stone to stone, while deep, otherworldly horns blew in the heart of the sanctuary, almost sounding like chthonic voices as the great megaliths reverberated to the sound.
The celebrants halted outside the henge bank, for this was as far as was permitted for most. Excitement hung in the air, and men drank heartily from beakers before ritually breaking them, killing them as the Sun was killed on this day, and soon the people of the five Cantrevs became very noisy with the shouts of boasting, cheering, intoxicated men. The women did not drink the honey mead—a man’s drink—but they had a thinner brew of their own that made them just as merry as their menfolk.
Like the others, U’thyr hastily imbibed as much of the mead as he could. The more a man could drink without vomiting or unconsciousness, the higher he was held in the esteem of the others. It was also thought that the effect of the mead could put one into close proximity with the spirit-world, while also giving a warrior courage and unnatural strength.
He had just downed his fourth beakerful when he saw Y’gerna caught within the ring of revellers, her hateful bloated husband flapping about her like some sinister, flesh-gorged raven. She was clad in a tight dress of tanned deerskin, and her hair was braided many times and set off by blue beads. A great chunk of honey-hued amber from the north rested on a thong between her breasts.
He could not keep his eyes off her, and he felt both the fire of the mead and the fire of his lust well up in him. Heat suffused his face, although the air around him was cold.
As if sensing his stare, Gorlas turned his head towards him, his piggy black eyes full of anger. It was almost as though he sensed that here was a rival who could bring his whole world crashing down. He scowled evilly, his face twisted like that of some hideous demon from the Otherworld.
The sight of Gorlas’s contorted visage turned U’thyr’s lust to white-hot rage. He wanted the man dead, and his hand stole to the antler hilt of his dagger. His companions milled about him, seeing the murderous look in his gaze, and tried to calm him. Violence among rivals was forbidden at the temple, with harsh penalties exacted, especially on this sacred day.
Knowing of this prohibition, Gorlas swaggered over, his beard split by a white gap-toothed grin. “You stare at me…at my wife,” he said. “Maybe, one day, when you are grown, you will get yourself a woman as fair as Lady Y’gerna. That is, if some angry husband does not cleave your skull first. I would smite you myself, but it is Solstice. And Gorlas of Belerion is magnanimous.”
U’thyr made a lunge at him, but Kol and Govna grabbed his arms and dragged him back.
“You will be sorry you spoke those words,” U’thyr snarled. “When I split your skull and let your spirit out, and lie that very night between Y’gerna’s thighs!”
Gorlas laughed. “Idle threats, from a boy who is a chief but has gained it only through lucky descent from his betters! Prove yourself a great warrior and then maybe I will battle you. I could use some sport! But now, I would not even raise my dagger to you, it would be an insult to the might of my arm. I do not fight children!”
U’thyr flushed; he knew he was the youngest of all the chieftains in the Five Cantrevs. “Prove myself I shall!” he spat. “Tonight, back in Deroweth, I will claim the Champion’s Portion, in the way done of old, and be lord of the feast with nothing denied me! Then you will be sorry, old man!”
Gorlas’s face went pale but he promptly regained his composure. He laughed harshly, dismissively. “I hardly think so. If you follow such a course of madness, my young friend, you will be dead before the night is over!”
CHAPTER FIVE
U’thyr made another lunge at Gorlas but his warband pulled him back, keeping him from committing an act that would have been seen as sacrilegious, especially outside the very portal stones of Khor Ghor. Kol yanked U’thyr’s arms behind him, keeping his fingers well away from his dagger, while Govna poured a brimming beaker of mead over his head, making him roar with rage but having the desired effect of distracting him from his enemy.
“Hush, my chief,” said Govna, as U’thyr bellowed and kicked at him, his sodden hair straggling in his drink-maddened eyes. “You must cease this fight with Gorlas—for now. It is almost time! The Sun is almost dead!”
There was a sudden blast of noise from the shielded heart of Khor Ghor: a cacophony of chanting, wailing and blowing horns, flat and sinister.
Merlin appeared in the central arch, seemingly in a trance, holding up a bloodied dagger of harsh black stone—an ancient artefact from a thousand years past. Standing between the Watchers, he wiped the gore in streaks upon his face and licked the blade. Behind him, the Sun was going down in a welter of blood, setting puffy-ridged clouds on fire. Slowly, slowly the orb tumbled through the firmament, until it was framed, the bloody eye of the dying Winter-god, between the immense arches of the Great Trilithon, Door into Winter. It hovered briefly above the shimmering head of the Stone of Adoration, and then sank into the West, utterly vanquished.
“He is dead…but he will rise again!” Merlin held his sinewy arms up to the sky in ecstasy. “And so too will a great Chief, greater than the men of today, a man like unto our blessed forebears, those mighty ones who braved the seas to come to Albu the White! I have read this in the entrails, in the death throes of the Chosen Beast and I have read it in the patterns of the sky! It will be, and Albu shall be great once more! As Bhel Sunface will rise on the morrow, strong and renewed, so too shall the fortunes of Prydn rise!”
The crowd cheered. Some men began to leap and stamp their feet before the pit-fires and the gross bulk of the Stone of Summer. Women joined hands and danced a circular dance around the outside of the bank, singing to the Sun that was gone into the Land of the Dead, and to the Moon, the woman’s planet, that was rising in ghostly majesty over Magic Hill in the East.
The priests and supplicants inside the stone circle began to process out of the ring, two acolytes dousing the fires at the entrance, as the Sun itself was extinguished. The crowd began heading back down the Sacred Avenue, mood lighter now that the Merlin had foreseen the rebirth of the Sun and a new dawn for Albu. The drummers came along behind, still playing, while masked flautists leaped amongst the crowds blowing on their bone pipes.
Back in Deroweth, the warbands of U’thyr and Gorlas sought desperately to keep the two chieftains apart. Now that U’thyr had, in Gorlas’s opinion, doomed himself by boasting of the deeds he would do, the older man took the opportunity to make U’thyr’s boasts known to all the peoples of the Five Cantrevs. Waving a beaker about, with mead slo
pping down his arms and torso, he pointed to his young adversary. “Look over there!” he slurred. “A young pup who thinks he’s a hero! Who thinks he has right to my wife. MY wife! Ah, I cannot wait to see him humbled. He said he’d claim the Champion’s portion! “
Red-faced and furious, U’thyr tore himself away from his men and stormed towards the leering Gorlas…. only to find his path blocked by a herd of squealing young pigs that were being driven by two acolytes of the temple. The animals were fat and rosy, fed with honey to make their meat taste sweet. They would be slaughtered today, chased by the young men of the tribes, who would shoot them with arrows, making sport rather than mere slaughter, with the man who slew the most being awarded ‘the Champion’s portion’— the right to eat the first of the cooked flesh, from the largest, juiciest pig in the herd.
Raising his arms to the sky, U’thyr cried out in a great voice: “Let no man speak me ill this day… for I will claim the Champion’s portion! I will be Lord of the Feast, the Winter King! But... ” he paused as the sea of faces around him grew thicker, deeper, interest piqued by his show of bravado, “I will not be testing the strength of my bow arm tonight! I will become one with my quarry, I will become the Sun himself, chased by the Hag of Winter, his dam and his bane! I will run with the pigs!”
A gasp rose from the crowd. In their father’s father’s day, it was customary to have a man run through the heaving, squealing herd of pigs, while the youths let fly with their barbed arrows. If the man lived—and most often he did not—he was feted as King-for-a-day, and had his every wish granted and the Champion’s portion on his platter. If he died, pierced by many arrows, his remains would be thrown under the pig bones in the great middens around the settlement.
“Do not do this, my son!” U’thyr’s mother Indeg staggered up to him, face twisted in anguish. “What madness has possessed you? You are a chieftain, not some callow boy out to prove his manhood! You must not risk yourself this way!”
Stone Lord: The Legend of King Arthur (The Era Of Stonehenge) Page 9
