Stone Lord: The Legend of King Arthur (The Era Of Stonehenge)

by J. P. Reedman

  “Khelynnen…” Fynavir dragged herself upright and shook the girl’s shoulder. “It is time for us to go. Long past time, I fear.”

  Heavy-headed, Fynavir stumbled across the settlement, clutching the Bride-doll to her as if it was a child. Khelynnen lurched after her, the bone pin tearing loose from her hair and spilling long dark coils over her befuddled face.

  One of the lads who had carried Fynavir’s chair from Kham-El-Ard approached them, a well-built fellow with a shock of auburn hair. “I am Drem son of Khas. If it is your will, Lady Fynavir, I will escort you back to Kham-El-Ard.”

  Fynavir hesitated a moment. There was little to fear for two women walking the short miles between Place-of-Light and Kham-El-Ard. Wild boars and wolves never came so close to human habitations, unless the winter was so hard that they were unnaturally hungry. As for men with bright blades and sharpened arrows, it would take someone extremely brave or foolhardy to mount an attack right on the doorstep of Kham-El-Ard, even with the Bear away chasing the Boar.

  And yet Mhor-gan had given her stern warning…

  “Yes, we would appreciate your company, Drem, son of Khas,” she said, a shiver running down her spine at the memory of the priestess’s words. “I am sure you have a very stout arm to defend us from all manner of evil creatures…the hares and badgers, or perhaps old beaver-man in his dam on the river!”

  “I will do my best, lady,” Drem responded, his crooked teeth flashing in the dimness.

  The three made their way down the escarpment, Drem leading, while Fynavir supported the stumbling and complaining Khelynnen with one arm while trying to carry the Bride-doll tucked under the other. She half-wished she had left the girl to sleep off the drink in some hut at Place-of-Light, but Khelynnen was a comely girl and might come to grief among all the high-spirited youths that dwelt there, training to become warriors for Ardhu’s cause. Fynavir didn’t want to have a serving-girl whose belly would grow big as the full Moon over the next nine months.

  Once the little group was on level ground, they headed swiftly across the boggy fields toward the river. The Moon was lost behind the trees, and a sharp breeze, heralding the approach of dawn, blew out of the East and made Fynavir tremble like a leaf in a gale.

  Soon they reached the banks of Abona. Fish jumped in the dark, while a night-prowling owl hooted in the distance. Wind hissed in the grass, while trees creaked and groaned, their branches clacking. All natural nightly sounds, noises Fynavir had heard a thousand times before. Why then these feelings of unease, of rising panic, that burned away the warm cloud of drunkenness and made her suddenly, frighteningly sober?

  Suddenly she saw it…a metallic glint between the boles of two large oaks. Darkness swirled, and immediately the minute gleam vanished like a firefly snuffed out. But Fynavir sensed that something was out there, in the dark of the woods, and it was watching their progress with hot, intent eyes.

  “Quickly, quickly!” She prodded Khelynnen, trying to force her to pick up her feet.

  “Lady, I can’t,” the girl wailed. “So tired…”

  Drem turned and glanced at Fynavir and saw the naked fear in her face, and his own big, raw visage whitened. “What is it, Lady Fynavir?” he whispered. “Why do you look so strange?”

  She leaned over toward him and hissed in his ear: "There’s a man in the bushes, maybe more than one. I can feel eyes watching us.”

  The youth began to sweat and his eyes widened with terror. He had not foreseen such a thing when he had offered to escort the Queen to Kham-El-Ard. The worst he had expected was to chase off a fox or a hare. Hand shaking, he reached towards the hilt of his dagger, given to him in his manhood rite just two weeks before.

  Fynavir grabbed his wrist. “No,” she said kindly, “you are too young. I will not have you give your life in a fight you cannot win.”

  “But Lady, I am sworn to protect you…” he began, but again she shook her head and pressed her finger to his lips.

  “Drem, you are more use to me alive than dead. Don’t be foolhardy. Do as I tell you, I beg you.”

  “Yes, Lady. What is your will?”

  “We must keep walking, until I say otherwise. Maybe the stranger is just a passing traveller who is curious as to our doings. Maybe he will either come forth in friendship and all will be well, or maybe he will just journey on into the night.”

  At Fynavir’s side, Khelynnen, sensing something was wrong, began to snivel. Fynavir tried vainly to hush her, while keeping attuned to the shadowed trees around her.

  There…she heard it now…a heavy footfall to her right, followed by crackling of twigs and branches deeper in the woods. A frond swayed, and she caught a faint glimpse of figures moving, keeping pace with the two women and the lad as they hurried along the banks of the river.

  Fynavir stared hard into the darkness that stretched ahead—miles ahead, it seemed. The hillfort wasn’t far away, but she knew these strangers would make their move long before she reached it. But perhaps…perhaps…

  She tugged on Drem’s sleeve, trying to seem commanding and reassuring at the same time. “They are all around us now. We must assume they are enemies. Drem, did I not hear that you ran straight and true, faster than the other village boys?”

  “Anwas the Winged, who rides with noble Ardhu is my brother. He is the fastest runner in the entire West but I am catching up.”

  “Then go…use those fast feet to fly to Kham-El-Ard. Tell them we have been attacked and that they must bear word to the Merlin and to the Lord Ardhu, wherever he may be.”

  “Lady, I can’t leave you at their mercy…”

  “Do as I say—this is my command as your Queen. As Ardhu’s woman I am the one most likely to be spared by them, the only one whose life may have value. Go. Go now and the gods give you speed!”

  She gave him a hard shove in the back and he staggered out into the path. He cast her one pitying look and then bounded away into the darkness like a frightened deer.

  As he broke for freedom, the woods sprang to life. Men jumped out of trees and from behind bushes. Arrows whirred and skittered on the path as they fired at Drem’s retreating back. Khelynnen started to scream, till a tall man with stone bracers on either wrist stepped up to her and struck her across the face, knocking her to the ground. She fell instantly silent.

  “Stop it! She is just a girl!” Fynavir flung her god-dolly to the ground and raced toward the man looming threateningly over her serving-woman. She noticed that, beside his high status bracers, he also wore a leather jerkin with a plate of gold sewn to the breast, similar to Ardhu’s Breastplate of Heaven. However, it was a rectangle rather than a lozenge, and was quite battered.

  The man turned to Fynavir and smirked. He was of great height and no longer in the first flush of youth, although there was still a ruined comeliness to his face. Ruined, because one side had been slashed by a dagger in some bygone battle, leaving a gouge from the corner of his eye down to the edge of his mouth. Greying dark hair hung round his shoulders, and his eyes were pale grey flecked with amber. Wolfish eyes, without pity.

  “So, you must be the fabled Fynavir, queen to the boy-king Ardhu,” he said, eyes raking over her appraisingly. “Many chiefs speak of you beyond Khor Ghor, of your beauty and your otherworldly whiteness, and how you are born of a goddess. How you are Sovereignty, the Land itself, and how any man that possesses you will be the King! “

  “Maybe men should talk less of women they haven’t met and deal with hardships within their own folds,” she shot back icily.

  “Although you are white as snow, fire burns within you,” he said, nodding. “I like that. I am Melwas, King of the Summer Country, and I claim you here by warriors’ right, and from this day forward you shall be as my wife and dwell with me in the Summerlands. Together we will rule Prydn, and the fledgling boy you wed will fall, toppled like a stone raised in a bed that is too shallow. “

  “You are mad!” she cried. “Ardhu will hunt you down and kill you!”

 
Melwas sneered. “He is far away; do not think rumours of his exploits haven’t reached the Summer Country! Indeed, he seems more interested in chasing his wild Boar than he does you, my little snow-white one. Maybe it is animals that hold his fancy, or the pretty man from Ar-morah who they say always rides at his side. But fear not, I will attend to you every night, and soon we will have a whole hut full of sturdy, divine sons!”

  She recoiled, though she knew it was useless to run. “You are Moon-mad if you think I’ll willingly go with you!”

  “You will come with me,” he said, an edge of danger in his voice. “And without a fuss. Or…I kill this one, here and now.” He grabbed Khelynnen’s hair, dragging her to her knees and pressing the blade of his dagger against her throat. “And then I will take my men and burn down your fancy fort and the village on yonder downs. I’ll kill the men and children but take the women as rewards for my men, and they will spit and curse you, for it will be your own selfish stubbornness that doomed their menfolk and made them slaves.”

  Fynavir stared at Khelynnen, who was paralysed with fear, her eyes pleading. She could not be responsible for her death, nor the deaths of any of the people who lived nearby.

  “Very well…you have won,” she said to Melwas. “I will go to the Summer Country with you. Just leave the innocent folk of Kham-El-Ard in peace.”

  Melwas let Khelynnen’s head fall. She crouched on the ground, weeping. “A wise decision. I would not gladly kill the lowborn; there is no honour in that. Come, woman, I must bind your arms and feet…I will not chance you trying to escape along the road.”

  Resigned, she meekly extended her hands. Grinning, Melwas tied her wrists and ankles with gut ropes. Lifting her to his shoulder, he carried her into the woods, where she saw the rest of his band waiting, a rag-tag group of hard-faced men armed with bows and staves. They had a cart with them, drawn by a dispirited-looking ox and filled with war-equipment and food supplies. Melwas dumped Fynavir in the cart amidst the bows and baskets; an object for future use, just like the cart’s contents, spoils from a bloodless war.

  “Don’t any of you bastards touch her,” he warned the leering men. “Or I’ll feed your bollocks to my hounds. You mind she’s not damaged in any way on the journey home …she’s not some slut; she’s going to be my wife.”

  The warriors prodded the ox with long sticks, and slowly the cart lurched away through the woods. The men roared and jeered, filled with crude mirth. Fynavir lay staring at the lightening sky, trying to hold back tears of rage and fear. Why had she been so foolish, so careless, when she had been warned by Mor-ghan? She was a failure in all she did; it was as if the spirits conspired against her.

  “Ardhu…An’kelet…you must find me!” she whispered desperately to the four winds.

  Behind her, on the riverbank, the discarded Bride-doll broke apart in the breeze and its bright fragments dispersed upon the flowing water.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Hwalchmai and Rhagnell rode swiftly across country, seeking signs of Ardhu’s men. Rhagnell had tracking skills, learned from years in the forest with Bresalek, and soon she picked up a trail, not of Ardhu, but of Rhyttah Chief Giant and his band of brigands.

  “Pig-shite,” she said, dismounting her steed and kneeling beside a pile of dung on the trampled earth. “With the marks of many footprints around it.”

  Hwalchmai grimaced in disgust. “Looks big enough to be horse-dung, but smells a hundred times fouler.”

  “That is because T’orc eats flesh, not grass,” said Rhagnell solemnly.

  They journeyed on, and began to find more evidence of the passage of T’orc and his guardians. A village lay burnt and devastated, and then another. Finally they found one settlement that still stood; it was large and had been hastily fortified by a ring of boulders and earth.

  As they approached, a dozen archers leapt up onto the makeshift defensive wall and faced them with bows nocked. “What business do you have here?” called out an older man, who appeared to be a headman or minor chief; he had bronze threads sewn in his cloak and carried a black basalt axe.

  “We seek the warband of Ardhu Pendraec,” replied Hwalchmai. “We seek to help him defeat Rhyttah Chief Giant and the great boar T’orc.”

  The chief spat on the ground. “He is about, for all the good he’s done. He’s chased the Boar for days, going round and around like a puppy chasing its tail! Yet he can never catch it, and every day more innocents are killed. The very rivers of our land turn red, and the clouds are full of the ashes of the pyre.”

  “It shall not be so much longer,” said Hwalchmai. “The time of this evil is at an end. Which way did Ardhu’s warriors go?”

  The petty chief pointed with the butt of his axe. “West.”

  *****

  Hwalchmai and his lady galloped on, passing into wilder lands filled with wind-blasted trees and scrubby heathland. Suddenly Rhagnell yanked on her horse’s reins, drawing it to an abrupt halt. “There is something in the wind…someone comes. We must hide.”

  Hastily, they hunkered down amid a jumble of huge, irregular boulders that lay as if they had been tossed from some giant’s apron. They held tight to their mounts’ bridles of woven grass, willing them to be quiet and still.

  Over the brow of the nearby hill marched a party of warriors, hard-faced men clad in the skins of wolf, bear and deer, with the heads left on to serve as headdresses. Their leader was a massive one-eyed man, with arm-muscles that rippled as he swung a flail toward the flank of a huge black boar that had a heavy bronze chain attached to its hind leg. It squealed and snorted, eyes glowing, and thrust honed tusks into the air. “Down you beast!” the big man growled at it, yanking brutally on the chain. “I know you’d love to gore me, but I am master here!”

  “Chief Rhyttah, the animal grows wilder each day,” said one of the warriors, gazing uneasily at the champing boar. “Bloodlust and the evil spirit inside it have made it mad. I fear even you will not be able to control it ere long.”

  “Nonsense,” said the big man, Rhyttah Chief Giant. “I will control T’orc until the day he dines on the innards of Ardhu Pendraec. Then I will slay the boar and eat its heart, and ingest both their strengths into myself.”

  “Why do we not turn and meet Ardhu in battle?” asked the other man. “We traipse over the hills and dales like men Moonstruck!”

  “You are no tactician, are you, Gronu?” Rhyttah grinned, his upper lip curling in derision. “I weaken him, tire him out. When at last I change course and meet him head on, with T’orc charging before, he will not be expecting the about face, and he will perish.”

  “May it be soon, Lord Rhyttah,” grumbled the man Gronu.

  “It will, Gronu, never fear.”

  In the clump of boulders, Hwalchmai drew his axe and would have sprung out in a rage, but Rhagnell wrapped her strong arms around his waist and pulled him back. “No, that is not the way! There are too many of them for us to take on, to say nothing of the beast. We must find Ardhu, and tell them what we have seen and heard.”

  “But they may well vanish into these harsh uplands again!” snarled Hwalchmai.

  “No…this time there will be no escape.” Rhagnell took her short woman’s bow from her shoulder and raised it, putting an arrow to the string. Carefully she aimed through a crack between the lichenous boulders, seeking the flank or chest area of T’orc.

  “No!” Hwalchmai grabbed her wrist; “you dare not shoot the beast. One arrow will not kill such a mighty one, but it could make him go mad. He might well kill Rhyttah and his men in his rage, but he would also turn on us, and we have no weapons to bring down such a powerful animal.”

  “I do not intend to kill him,” said Rhagnell. “Just a little wound. A prick.”

  “Why?”

  “You will see.” Rhagnell shook free of her lover’s restraining hand and aimed her bow again. “Trust me, Hwalchmai. I know what I must do.”

  This time, Hwalchmai allowed her to fire. The arrow skimmed through the gras
s, a low deadly shot. It grazed the hind leg of T’orc, tearing off a strip of flesh and bristle, then fell away into the moorland scrub. The giant boar squealed and danced about in anger, blood dripping from its wounded leg.

  Unaware of the animal’s wound, Rhyttah shouted an oath at the boar and hauled on its chain, waving his flail in a menacing way. “Move on, pig, or you’ll have a taste of my wrath!”

  “There,” said Rhagnell smugly. “I have done what I intended. T’orc will lead Ardhu’s warband to him by the trail of gore he leaves behind. A trail Rhyttah has not noticed. And I do not think he would dare touch the monster to bind the scrape, even if he did.”

  Hwalchmai hugged her. “You are as clever as you are good to look at. Now let us find my cousin and tell him our news!”

  *****

  They came upon Ardhu’s warband later in the day. The warriors were riding over a high ridge where bleak stone stretched to the sky and a cold wind was singing. Anwas the Winged, the tracker, knelt down on the damp earth, examining the ground, but his face was pinched and solemn; the soil was so deliberately churned by feet he could make no sense of what he examined.

  Hwalchmai gave a joyous shout and spurred his steed ahead into the midst of the group. Laughing, he and Ardhu embraced. “So you still have your head, cousin!” said Ardhu, ruffling the other youth’s hair.

  “Aye, that I do. But Bresalek—the Green Rider—has lost his! And his life is not all I have taken … with me is his wife, Rhagnell, a woman of noble lineage, who is now to be mine.”

  Ardhu glanced at Rhagnell and then back to Hwalchmai. “You amaze me, kinsman. Adept in the warrior’s art, adept with fair women!”

  Rhagnell urged her mount forward. “Ardhu, lord of the West, I greet you, but Hwalchmai and I have more to tell than of our doings. We have spotted your quarry on the other side of yonder ridge. They are growing weary…”