With that, he gathered up his green robe, tossed a cloak about his shoulders, and strode from the cave.
“Sit.” Rhagnell pointed Hwalchmai in the direction of the bench. He sat down and she brought him a handled beaker of heather-beer and a wooden platter of meat and cheese. When he had eaten his fill, she took his arm and guided him into an antechamber, where a bed of furs and sheepskins lay on the floor. Tallow lights hung suspended from the ceiling, casting flickering shadows around the walls.
“You shall stay here until the beheading game takes place,” she said. “Sleep well, Hawk of the Plain.”
She retreated, her long skirts and long hair rustling. Hwalchmai lay down, pulling a sheepskin over himself, watching water bead on the cavern roof. He swore to himself that not only he would not sleep well in this eldritch place, he would not sleep at all.
But despite his vows to keep wakeful, Hwalchmai dozed off sometime in the early hours of the morn. He was woken, suddenly, by the mournful hoot of an owl in the woods outside the cave. He sat up, heart hammering. An owl’s cry was no good omen; the owl with its huge flower-like eyes was sacred to the Guardian.
Crawling out of the sheepskins, he pushed back the hanging that fronted the chamber and slipped out. The tallow cups had burnt down, and the only light came from the sullen glow of the hearth. Rhagnell was there, sitting cross-legged by the dying embers, crooning words he did not understand to something that lay in her lap. Her face was painted with strange signs and suddenly looked old, like that of a crone. She turned as he came into the room, and he hesitated, grimacing, as he noticed that on her lap she held a human head. She was oiling it, rubbing preservatives into the tanned leather skin.
“Are you repulsed?” she asked calmly, putting down the grisly artefact. “Do I frighten you?” She rose and walked towards him. He could smell the scent of the unguents she’d rubbed on the skull oozing from her skin, saw where sweat had tracked through her ceremonial face-paint.
He was too polite, in this strange house, to say ill words of her and maybe offend. Admitting fear was also not for a man and warrior of Ardhu’s warband. “I am not afraid,” he said. “Although I find this a strange house. But I would expect nothing more when its master is the green-faced rider.”
Rhagnell laughed. “Do you find me fair, lord Hwalchmai?” She whirled on her bare feet, and suddenly he was all too aware of the thinness of her robe and how it clung to her flesh with sweat and scented oil.
He stared at his feet. “I found you fairer without the paint,” he said, trying to make light.
“Ah, but this,” she pointed to her face, “is what I must wear, to speak with the spirits of the men my husband has killed. A face half of shadow, because I must speak with shades. It is something I have always done, for I have that gift. If you were my man, instead of Bresalak, would you forbid me to wear my dark face and walk only in the world of light?”
“Lady,” he said, “if I were your man, I would give you free will to do as you would. It would not be my place to stop you from speaking to those beyond the Western Door.”
She smiled, her teeth glowing white against her artificially blackened lips. “A good answer, my brave young Hwalchmai. “Now kiss me to prove your words are true, to prove that you are my friend.”
He hesitated. “What of Bresalak?”
“He is far away on a midnight hunt, tracking down the wild one with his branching horns. Besides, there is no harm in it. Another kiss for peace and one for friendship.” She reached up and plucked another sprig of mistletoe from a bunch that hung from a hook on the roof, and handed it to Hwalchmai. He took the green shoot, but to his embarrassment could think of naught but that the plant was also linked with fertility, its white juices resembling the seed of a man.
Rhagnell laughed. Hwalchmai almost fancied that she knew where his thoughts were leading, and he blushed red to the roots of his hair. The dark-eyed wife of the Green man reached out and touched his chin, drawing his face towards her with her finger. “Mistletoe is the key that opens all doors,” she said softly, watching as he blushed even deeper at the double meaning in her words.
Struggling, he found his tongue. “I do not think its use is always well advised.”
“Ardhu Pendraec teaches his warriors much in the way of courtesy and self-sacrifice,” said Rhagnell, still caressing Hwalchmai’s face. “He must be an extraordinary being…as he is barely more than a boy himself.”
“He is extraordinary. And I am his kin.”
“Go now, then, Hwalchmai.” She leaned in and kissed him, first his cheek and then, grasping his shoulders, his mouth. “But remember, in two days the Moon will be in the correct phase. Bresalak will wish to commence the beheading game.”
Hwalchmai returned to his chamber and fell into the sheepskins and furs. He tossed restlessly, sweat beading on his skin. He felt feverish; he hoped he was not becoming ill. The idea of offering his neck to the green-faced warrior seemed utter madness now…surely he must have been ensorcelled to follow such a doomed path. And then there was Rhagnell, loathly as she caressed the severed head of one of Bresalek’s victims, but also filling him with a desire he dared not slake. He thought with both pleasure and despair of her dark, questioning eyes, and her wandering, oil-smeared fingers on his face. Fingers that had caressed a withered death’s head…
Night passed into morning, and he heard the roar and bellow of Bresalek returning to Lud’s hole. He wandered from his sleeping space, bleary-eyed, in time to see the massive man stride into the chamber, a deer slung over his shoulders. He hurled it to the ground and began to skin it, uncaring of the blood and innards that slopped across the floor.
Excited, Rhagnell knelt beside him, helping clean out the carcass. Her arms were red with gore to the shoulder; daubs of red marred her face. She was truly the loathly lady again, the tender of the dead, aiding her monstrous, surreal husband with the fruits of the hunt.
“There will be fine venison for your meal tonight, Hawk of the Plain!” boomed Bresalek, wiping his besmirched hands on his baggy trews. “Your last meal, maybe…if that is what the spirits will.”
He got up from the floor, and approached the silent youth in the corner. “And what did you do when I was gone? Did my woman Rhagnell entertain you?”
“She entertained me as every woman should entertain a visitor in her household.”
“Indeed. And did she give you anything? Anything at all… Come, show me, boy…I will know if you lie.”
Hwalchmai stared into the inscrutable face, Sun-bronzed and leathery, with deep, green-flecked eyes under grizzled brows. “Two kisses, that was all, one for peace and one for friendship, and I give them in return to you.” And he duly set the kisses of peace and of friendship on the Green Man’s cheeks, though he felt inclined to neither.
The Green Man roared with laughter and stretched out his immense, muscle-bound arm, beckoning Rhagnell to bring him a beaker of mead. “Peace there will be until the Moon’s phase is right,” he said. "And aye, we can even be friends until that time. So for another day enjoy my home, and the company of my woman, and let us not think about the future.”
Finishing with the deer, Bresalak went outside and did not return. Rhagnell continued tending to the meat her husband had left, and then turned her attention to the deer’s skin, scraping it clean with an old stone scraper and stretching it out on a drying frame made from branches.
“Where has Bresalak gone?” asked Hwalchmai.
“He hunted deer, now he seeks boar,” she replied. “Just like your lord, Ardhu.”
Hwalchmai sighed. “Who I should be with now! I am a man or honour and would not break my word, but tell me, Rhagnell wife of Bresalak, why should I die just for some whim of your husband? We have no real cause for enmity.”
She sighed.“Bresalak was touched by the spirits when he was young. He ran wild in the forest. He saw He-who-is-Oldest beneath his thunder-oak, antlers springing from his brow and leaves spilling from his mouth. It changed him
. He devoted himself to his Lord of the wildwood, but there was one thing he could not accept—that he, like the foliage, would wither and die and a new young king supplant him. So, every year, he has chosen the best and brightest to play the beheading game…when he takes the head he feels the mightiness of the slain pass to him, renewing him for another year.”
“He is mad,” muttered Hwalchmai. “No mortal man may live forever.”
“No, no man may,” said Rhagnell, and she would say no more.
*****
The day passed as if in a dream. Hwalchmai wandered outside, walking the woods of that wild place in a haze of anxious anticipation. Wind buffeted him, the trees roared and swept down with long branches. Everything around him seemed unusually bright, unusually vibrant—the rich greens of the mosses and leaves, the violet blue of the winter skies. And the smells! Water and damp earth, cold frost, and distant snow being gradually swept over the higher moorlands. All fresh and alive, taunting him with their beauty... for unless fate intervened, this would be the last such beauty his eyes would behold, for tomorrow he must face the Green Man’s axe.
He wandered back to Lud's hole later that afternoon, after watching the Sun impale Himself upon the craggy fangs of rock that topped the long moor beyond the deep earth cave. Inside the fastness, Rhagnell had cooked some of the venison brought home by Bresalek; Hwalchmai ate in silence, and Rhagnell said nothing either, but merely stared into the fire with a strange lost look on her face.
As the tallow cups sputtered, and shadows danced around the main chamber, Hwalchmai departed for his room. He lay down but had been there only a short while before a shadow filled the stone doorway. He reached for his dagger instinctively…but let it drop with a clatter when he saw that his visitor was none other than Rhagnell.
Her hair fell unbound around her, autumn leaf hued, gold and brown and red combined. It was smooth and shone like metalwork, like Sun on a shield. A flowing robe, white as the Moon, and tied at the waist by a sash of green-dyed cloth, tumbled loosely to her ankles. She walked with purpose and her eyes swallowed the feeble, wavering light.
Hwalchmai propped himself up on his elbow. “Lady, what do you do here? I beg you let me rest and dream, for it may be the last night I can do so.”
She knelt beside him on the sheepskins. “I have been here near enough three times in three years, Hwalchmai, ever since Bresalak brought me here as a young and frightened girl. My father was a prince of the north; he traded me like a piece in a game in order to avoid Bresalek's axe. I have been loyal to my husband, and tended to all his needs. I have been a good wife to him. But I can sense a change in him, a weakening, and my own heart is changing too, and for the first time I feel sullied, not like his wife, but his captive, his slave. He is no longer the great oak, stalwart against the wind—he is the vine withering on the ground, its sap spent. We have no children, Hwalchmai.”
She spread her arms, the loose white linen floating around her so that she almost looked like a spirit. “Hwalchmai, untie my sash from my waist and keep it safe with you when you go to face Bresalek tomorrow. My token to you…maybe a help, and maybe not. It is in the hands of the gods and they can be cruel.”
Hands slightly shaking, Hwalchmai reached up to untie the moss-green sash. It tumbled in verdant folds to the floor. His hands then drifted to the front of her robe, where the linen gaped with the unfastening of the sash, revealing a provocative slice of pale skin. Gently, he pulled back the robe from her shoulders and let it drop alongside the sash. She had a lean, athletic body, with narrow hips and round, firm breasts that had been tattooed with spirals. He let his fingers trace the line of the tattoos, seeking, exploring. She wrapped her arms around his neck and drew his face up to hers and kissed him on the lips, three times, but no longer was it the kiss of friendship or of peace, but the kiss of a lover.
He pushed her down into the skins, admiring the play of the softly flickering tallow-lamps across her nakedness. He ran his hands through her glossy hair, spreading it out across the sheepskin, noticing for the first time that she still bore mistletoe, but it was artfully threaded through her locks, the berries cool and soft against his fingertips—much like Rhagnell’s naked flesh.
She realised he had found the berries and smiled, coiling around him like a cat, drawing him down against her pliant warmth. “I am the key, Hwalchmai,” she said.
*****
Rhagnell left Hwalchmai’s bed just before dawn. He heard her go, bare feet slapping on the stone floor of the cavern. He lay still for a few more minutes then rose himself, dressing quickly and binding on his belt with its daggers and axe. Last, he picked up Rhagnell’s discarded sash and tied it tightly around his waist.
He went from the cave and out to the green grass before Lud’s Hole. A sprinkle of snow had fallen in the night, and the rising Sun glittered on frozen fronds and boughs. A clean wind was blowing from the West, bringing the promise of kinder, warmer days.
He wanted to live to see those days…
Suddenly a shadow fell across him, wide as a broad-backed bull. Bresalek stood before him, grinning, his huge hands planted on his hips. He had been successful in his hunt again, but this time he had downed a wild boar. It lay over his muscled shoulders, its blood trickling down his tunic. With a grunt he heaved it away and beckoned to Hwalchmai with a red-stained hand.
“Come closer, boy. Don’t stand gawping like some sheep! This is the morning of the Beheading Game. The game I always win.”
Hwalchmai approached the giant as bidden. A strange calm filled him. The Sun was brightening, sending long shafts of light between the spindly trees that surrounded Lud’s hole. Surely, surely, he could not die this morning…
“So what did you do on your last evening, boy?”asked Bresalak. “Did you drink? Did you hope? Did my dear woman Rhagnell try to assuage your fears?”
“Indeed she did.”
“And what did she give you this time? No more kisses of peace, I’ll wager, for this morn no peace can be between us, only rivalry and death.”
“No, no kisses of peace…” said Hwalchmai, unable to restrain an ironic grin. To think he had cuckolded this green monster, in his own den!
Bresalek’s countenance whitened as he guessed the meaning of his victim’s words. His gaze fell to Rhagnell’s sash, bound tightly about the young warrior’s waist. His eyes turned black as obsidian.
“To the place of Beheading –now!” he roared.
He stormed into the wood and Hwalchmai followed. Soon they reached a raised mound with trees standing sentinel all around it. A single squat stone stood on the summit, a block of worn sandstone streaked with ores that turned its surface red as blood. It was aligned on a gap in the crags beyond, where the Moon would rise and dance every nineteen turns of the Sun.
Bresalek gestured angrily to the worn block. “Kneel down and part your hair,” he ordered, “as I did for you in the hall of Ardhu Pendraec. Otherwise, be known as craven, and un-man…and I swear I will kill you anyway, with honour or not—the choice is yours!”
“I keep my word,” said Hwalchmai and he dutifully knelt before the stump and laid his head upon its surface. He wondered how many others had knelt in such a fashion, and how much blood had bathed that single worn-down monolith.
“Are you ready, boy?” Bresalak was swinging his great double-headed axe, the muscles rippling in his enormous arms. “Have you made your peace with your gods?”
Hwalchmai’s eyes darted, as his mind frantically worked out ways to distract the giant. “Wait! Let me change the place where I kneel. I am ashamed that I die without great conflict of arms. Therefore, it is fitting I die gazing into the shadows and not at Bhel’s bright and victorious face.”
Bresalek snorted. “I care not which way you kneel, head to the East or to the West. All that interests me is taking that head and adding it to my collection. Be assured I will make that slut Rhagnell dress it and lie with it at her side…since she favoured you so much!”
Hwalchma
i wriggled round the pillar until he felt the rays of the strengthening Sun warm his back. Bresalek stomped up in front of him, brandishing his axe. His movements were jerky, erratic, dictated by fury rather than by the rules of the Beheading Game. His hair and beard bristled and his cheeks were purple with simmering rage—uttering a strangled cry, he swung the axe upwards, preparing for the death-stroke. The axe-head caught the early Sunlight and turned to a ball of lambent flame…
The light was full on Bresalek’s face, pure golden light from the East. He faltered, suddenly blinded, as the Sun rose even higher in the sky, its radiant beams smiting deep into his eyes like the spear of the Young Son who had been reborn at Solstice and now slowly grew towards the flame of his power at Midsummer. With an angry, thwarted yell, he lashed out wildly with his axe at the crouched figure of Hwalchmai.
And missed.
The deadly blade of the axe thudded against the earth, cutting into the icy ground and sticking there.
Before Bresalek had the chance to pluck it free, Hwalchmai leaped to his feet and charged at the giant man. “One blow you had….and yet I still stand and breathe upon the earth!” he cried triumphantly. “Now it is your turn to meet the fate you gave so readily to others!”
Bresalek cried out, a note of fear in his voice. He suddenly looked old, weak—as Rhagnell had said, a withering vine, ready to return to the earth, where he would moulder alongside a million fallen leaves, his flesh and bones feeding and nurturing all manner of living things.
He tried to flee, to make a mad dash into the trees, but Hwalchmai flung himself on Bresalek’s back, kicking his legs from under him and bringing him to the ground. Tearing off Rhagnell’s sash, Hwalchmai looped it around Bresalek’s throat and twisting with all his strength. Breath cut off, the Green Man thrashed and flailed, his hands scrabbling uselessly at the ever-tightening garrotte. Hwalchmai continued to twist the sash with one free hand, while drawing his flanged axe with the other.
Stone Lord: The Legend of King Arthur (The Era Of Stonehenge) Page 30
