Veneficus: Stones of the Chosen (23 page)

As the night slowly receded from the Tor and the shadows around its vales and autumnal woods melted into the dawning Wessex day, Merlin stood tall and still on the peak. His long silver-streaked beard and shoulder-length hair ruffled and flattened in the eddying Celtic breezes, whilst the piercing emerald eyes beneath the bushy brows that could flash such powerful changes in nature and phenomena were still and neutral. His long arms were folded with the hands up the opposite sleeves of his long tunic. Composed and at peace with his surroundings he waited for the arrival of the wolf-woman about whose life, impurity, and deadly purpose he now knew so much.

She did not disappoint him. The transformed arrival placed her no more than four arms’ lengths away from him, the beautiful, full-lipped face, ringed by waist-length fair tresses, already twisting into a sneer of hatred as she appeared. Merlin was instantly aware through the power of her aura that she had switched off the ravening watcher. Good. The first part of the plan had worked.

Without showing a flicker of emotion and by way of a greeting, the long magus inclined his head politely.

“So, old man. You chose to ignore the immediacy of my warning. It will, therefore, not be lost on you that the hotheaded son of your old friend is close to death. Only your utmost and immediate compliance with my demands can save him.”

The old wizard smiled, his gentle words at odds with their message.

“Godwinson means nothing to me. Do with him as you will. As for your demands, they are equally meaningless.”

Her sneer turned into a snarl. “So much for the vaunted chivalry and togetherness of that great family of the Round Table supposedly embodied in all those battle trophies I saw adorning the walls at Cadbury Castle.”

Merlin shrugged. “That was fifty years ago. I won’t deny that it all meant something then, but not now …”

“Where is the boy?”

“I have sent him away.” The long magus was purposefully oblique.

Elelendise stepped back a couple of paces and pointed the index finger of her left hand at his face.

“You have fourteen days before the Equinoctial Festival of the Dead takes place. I
will
be your companion, and you
will
hand over to me at the Festival.”

“And if I refuse?”

“For a start I will feed Godwinson’s blood-soaked intestines to my wolves this very morning. They will enjoy feasting on the fattened offal of a well-bred. You may or may not care about that, but you
will
care when King Penda and his Christian army, assisted by my command of the enchantments and the ferocity of my loyal beasts, tear every pagan in this accursed land limb from limb. Then my wolves will feast on
their
entrails, gorge on their genitalia. You have already witnessed their ferocity when they raided your young brat’s settlement of Malmesbury. Believe me, old man, that was nothing compared to the coming slaughter. Rivers will run crimson with blood. Colonies of weevils and sundry insects will feast and breed in their rotting Celtic cadavers and rats suck out their brains. Children will be hung by their dirty feet from boughs and used as spear and arrow targets before being pulped to bile of red spume. Babies will be eaten alive from their straw cots and their screaming mothers cast into deep pits of poisonous excrement. Decapitated male heads will adorn stakes at every bridge, crossroads, and flattened settlement, their heathen bones burned to charcoal twigs in fire-pits alongside. The air will reek of the foul bane of apostate stench. We will scourge, we will obliterate, we will emasculate. We will not just kill but slaughter with extreme violence. No one will be spared - thanes, villains, freemen, house carls, goatherds, knights, slaves, pig keepers, kitchen middens, troubadours, bondsmen, peasants, and yes, obstructive venefici, all will be remorselessly rendered to dust, their casts removed forever. I will also personally see to it that the bent-beak hawks whose friendship you so zealously guard and the piedpoly bauble thieves your brat values so highly are extinct within days - their rancid meat poisoning the earth where they fall, their feathers turned to stagnant forest floor litter. When I leave here my first task will be to hunt down that settlement brat you call a tyro veneficus and turn him to a droplet of vile spittle. You may have had some limited success with childish tricks, but from here on it’s serious bloodletting that is deaf to every appeal. I will destroy everything around you until you are completely alone in a barren landscape, devoid of all living forms of civilization. Wessex will become a pitiless ghost land of Celtic memories wallowing in the fetid decay of its dead because its stubborn, aged old protector refused to acknowledge his frailty and accompany his natural successor to the Festival and pass on the great secret. Finally, if you do not take me I will go without you.”

As the tirade of death poured from her lips, her voice rose and her face contorted in hatred. The fair, shoulder-length hair crackled in discordant static, and her long, slim hands clenched into rigid claws of demonic emotion.

Merlin shook his head in amazement, then replied evenly.

“By the Oracles of Delphi I have never heard such a loathsome outpouring of destruction. The imagery your words conjure is beyond anything I have experienced and represents a warped contribution to humanity that I just do not recognize or understand. Nonetheless, and notwithstanding the destruction of all the things in this green and mystic land that I hold most dear … I will
not
take you with me into the cowering mists on their festival day, nor will I
ever
willingly reveal the secret to you. The boy does not know it. No one does. It will die with me if I do not choose to pass it on at the appropriate time to the right person. I cannot be forced into giving it up. I know that is an action that forsakes all the venefical codes, but I believe that should you get hold of the secret, the outcome would be even more catastrophic.”

“And what do you perceive is my purpose in knowing the secret, old man?”

The long magus held her gaze. “You will release the cowerers from the hold of the raging mists. I realize now that has been your purpose all along. I cannot allow that to happen.”

Elelendise scoffed dismissively. “You are wrong about the secret. You are
not
the only holder of its mysterious composition.”

“I am the only
earthly
holder, and there is no means of communicating with the immortals.”

A sly look came over the wolf mistress’s face. “So say you, wrong magus, so say you.”

She turned and looked away from him back down the autumn-colored valley. Slowly she raised her left arm and brought it back over her shoulder, fingers straight. He watched, knowing what she was about to do.

“For my own entertainment and by way of a demonstration that I am serious, I am going to destroy that small hamlet of hovels at the end of the valley, now. Stop me if you dare, old man. Stop me if you
can
!” The challenge was naked in its ferocity, laid bare for him to accept or reject.

A blue-black thunderbolt with a golden trail shot from her fingers as she brought the arm forward. As it roared unerringly toward its unprotected and innocent target she turned back to the long magus with a look of triumphal gloating on her face.

Which he didn’t see, for he was gone.

The instant Twilight saw Elelendise join the long magus on the Tor, he transformed away from his vantage point on the top of a neighboring hill. Moments later he was standing on the cold stone floor of Princess Rawnie’s bedroom deep in the heart of Cadbury Castle. The hooded ravens had done their job well and passed on its exact location to his pica.

With his heart pounding strangely he looked around the room. There was no one else in it other than the princess, who slept soundly in the middle of a rather large bed. The glowing embers of a fire nestled in the large hearth, and rich tapestries lined the walls. Guessing that there would be guards outside the door, the boy tiptoed to the side of the bed and carefully sat down on its mattress. The princess stirred, mumbled something, smacked her lips, and resumed her rhythmic slumber. One of her pale, dainty hands lay outside the coverlet; it had a small, brilliant turquoise and silver ring on the index finger.

For a few precious moments he was bewitched by the purity and innocence of the sight. Then he reached out slowly and touched the ringed finger.

Her eyes sprang open.

For a moment she just looked at him, her blue eyes widening in fright. As she opened her mouth to scream, Twilight smiled and put his finger to his lips.

“That won’t do you any good. My magic will muffle the scream until it has no sound at all, not even a tiny squeak.”

She closed her mouth; her big eyes remained fixed on his. Then she spoke in a clear, unafraid voice.

“I am the daughter of King Penda of Northumbria. Tiny squeaks do not issue from my lips. I was about to call loudly for my guards, who are standing on the other side of that door, and my mother and father, who are in the next chamber.”

The boy broadened his smile and squeezed her ringed finger again.

“I mean you no harm. I am Twilight, tyro veneficus to Merlin, the long magus of Wessex.”

“What do you want?”

“You,” he said, gripping her ringed finger tightly and hoping that this was one transformation he would get absolutely right.

Tiresias decided that he would issue formal invites to Zeus and the other seven primary gods that lived on Mount Olympus. To whet their appetites the invites would sketch out the rudiments of the story so far. He wanted the viewing, which he estimated would take about four earthly days - nothing in their time continuum - to be dramatic and special, even for them. In order to make such an event stick favorably in the minds of gods that had seen just about everything since the world was created from the Chaos, it needed to be very special indeed. Not necessarily history-making, epoch-creating, or cataclysmically unique - that was daily fare for an immortal - but something of far more importance.

It had to be amusing.

As King Penda railed, his wife wailed. The castle walls resounded to their histrionics. His senior officers stood around the castle keep, shuffling their feet and trying hard not to look at either of them. Eye contact, especially with the northern king storming around the place in this mood, was not a good idea. As for the wailing queen, she was just an embarrassment. Elelendise leaned against the inner wall with her blond head back and eyes closed. There wasn’t a wolf in sight. The mood Penda was in, he would have eaten them raw.

“Counselor,” he roared at Elelendise, although she was only a couple of paces away. “While you were posturing and boasting to that old savant magician, he tricked you. Drew you into his plan like a lamb to the slaughter, listened to your empty words, nodded at your crass stupidity, smiled inwardly at your crudity; whilst his apprentice - a mere ragtag settlement urchin according to you - stole my beautiful daughter. Your negligence gifted her to him. Your ineptitude and vanity lost her. You assured me that the ravening watcher was impassable, that it would kill anyone unauthorized, ANYONE who so much as breathed in the same space as our beloved little princess. Yet you released it before meeting the long magus because you needed all your power. Against an old man of ninety-three years YOU NEEDED MORE POWER! And what did you do with it? Hurled a thunderbolt on a few hovels. I’m sure Merlin was most impressed. For that we have lost our beloved daughter. The Lord only knows what state she is in now. We must pray hard for her salvation.”

He looked at Queen Phoebe, whose wailing and racking sobs rose and fell with the cadence of his words, then back at the wolf mistress.

“And what’s more, you’ve killed the only bargaining counter we had.” Penda gestured disgustedly to the dead young knight Godwinson, whose broken body topped by the shoulder-length fair hair lay flung in the corner like a bundle of rags, appropriately but unknown to those there, on the exact spot where the grave of his parents had resided until Merlin had spirited it away. “Does your stupidity know no bounds? Were you so naïve as to think that the old magus with all his battle experience with King Arthur would not have a plan? Did you think that he would stand there enduring your boasting and childish displays of sorcery in awe of your puny feats?”

He rounded on his officers, his eyes blazing with a mixture of grief and anger.

“I want every available man out on search patrols. Leave only a small force with which to protect the queen and garrison this castle. The whole of this cursed land must be covered. Leave no stone unturned in the search for the princess. Divide the land up into provinces, quartiles, sectors, settlements, and hides, then by tribe, kinship group, feudal enclave, and community and then scour every blade of grass, every shrub, forest, tree, and hovel. Torture locals until they either tell what they know or die. Burn every settlement when you are sure she is not there. Find Merlin and the boy, and you’ll find the princess. In God’s name find her, find my daughter, and praise be to the Lord that she is still alive.”

As his officers hurried off to do his bidding the queen began a fresh bout of wailing.

Penda turned to Elelendise.

“As for you, counselor, your work with me is done. Your inexperience and posturing are too much of a liability. You have not, thus far, been tested against an equal. Now that you have, you have been found sadly wanting. I suggest you find a forest hovel as far away from me as possible and stay there and commune with your wolves and play with your fireballs. I do not want to see your face ever again. If I do, magic or no magic, I will destroy you and every wolf I ever come into contact with. Now go!”

“As you wish, my lord,” said the wolf-woman unemotionally. “But a word of warning. You will never defeat the long magus without my help. Never.”

As King Penda reached for his sword she disappeared.

Having placed a very angry Princess Rawnie in safe hands, Merlin soon arrived back in Summer Land to be greeted by the news of Godwinson’s death and Penda’s banishment of the wolf-woman and her lupine charges. Once again the hooded ravens passed the news to Twilight via the pica.

“Although I did not intimate as much to Elelendise, I am very saddened by the death of the young knight, although not surprised. As soon as he fell into her cruel clutches I suspected his life was over. I will see to it he joins the graves of his parents when I replace them in Cadbury Castle.” He stroked his beard. “I wonder,” he mused, “what she will do now.”

“Continue with her original purpose to get rid of me and usurp you, I expect,” replied Twilight. “I would think her task is easier now she doesn’t have to worry about a twelve-thousand-strong army.”

“I’m not so sure. It was a big force to hide within or behind. Now she is exposed, albeit with the protection of three hundred and fifty wolves. We haven’t heard the last of her, that’s for certain. She will no doubt make her repellent presence felt in due course, especially as the visit to the ringed Stonehenge for the Equinoctial Festival closes rapidly on us all. Meanwhile, skirmisher, we have an army to fight.”

“Fight? I thought we were going to ransom the princess in exchange for Penda leaving our lands,” exclaimed a surprised Twilight.

“That is a part of our strategy, but what is to stop him returning once he has his daughter back? I know from personal experience these Christian warmongers are a zealous lot. It’s that drive to convert the pagan population of Wessex that brought Penda here in the first place, and he won’t give that up easily. We must give him a bloody nose and demoralize his zealotry before handing him the opportunity to creep back to his northern stronghold with his beloved daughter. The longer he is without the princess, the greater the impact her return will have on him. If he loses a few hundred more men and experiences sundry religious travails in the meantime - for little or no reward other than some dead peasantry and a scattering of sacked settlements - he will think twice before ever venturing anywhere near the Celtic hinterland again. At least, that is my hope.”

“I don’t like wars,” said the boy glumly. “They’re very complicated, and too many people and animals get killed.”

The long magus chuckled and ruffled his charge’s hair. “Come and sit by me and let me tell you a short but interesting story. One that will, perhaps, play a part in bringing about the early return of Penda and his army to Northumberland.”

“What is it about?” the boy asked eagerly. He liked these stories.

“Horse manure,” wheezed the old sorcerer. “It’s about a man with more than his fair share of horse manure!” He snorted in mirth for a few moments, wiped away a tear, then composed himself. “In ancient Greece there was a legendary king of Elis called Augeus. Augeus had many stables that had not been cleaned for years. In fact they were abominably filthy and a complete disgrace, and pressure was being put on Augeus to find a way to clean them. This was the time of another legend, the mighty Greek strongman Hercules. As a means of proving himself worthy, the gods had given Hercules twelve extremely difficult or dangerous labors. Augeus managed to get the cleaning of his stables as one of Hercules’ twelve labors, and it’s the method the strongman used to clean the stables that may prove most useful to us.”

As was becoming his custom the long magus stopped at a crucial moment with bushy eyebrows raised to see if his charge had any ideas or questions. The boy’s blank stare told him that for once he didn’t have a contribution.

Merlin continued. “Hercules cleaned the stables by diverting the river Alpheus through them.”

The boy nodded in understanding. “And we are going to divert a river into the path of Penda’s soldiers?”

“We are,” said the long magus, taking up a stick and beginning to draw in the soft earth by their feet. “Although it’s just a little bit more complicated than that.”

When a detachment of Penda’s soldiers found a remnant from a nightdress caught on a thorn bush at the beginning of a mound known as Bradley Hill, they marked the spot and sent it back to Cadbury Castle along with several other bits of torn cloth they discovered along the way. As soon as Queen Phoebe saw the nightdress remnant, she started wailing again because it belonged to the nightdress worn by the princess when she was abducted. So it was that four hundred and fifty heavily armed soldiers under the direct command of King Penda himself arrived at the Bradley Hill site and started to search the surrounding hills. Bradley Hill is part of a Summer Land range known as the Polden Hills, a series of limestone escarpments on the other side of the Levels through which runs the River Cary. Another remnant of the same material was quickly found at Beakers Crossing, a ford where the River Cary splits into two separate tributaries.

That night Penda, exhausted but pleased that they at least appeared to be on the right track, pitched camp in the hollow that nestled beyond the two tributaries. It was an ideal site for a camp, offering shelter from three sides and fresh water. First light would see them fanning out and continuing the search. He and his men had, however, been led by the placed nightdress remnants into a trap. They were camped in a naturally deep hollow with sheer limestone escarpments forming a natural dam around three sides. The other side was formed by the ford of the river that held Beakers Crossing, the point where the two tributaries parted. The bridge at Beakers Crossing, although a solidly constructed wooden affair, was the only way in or out of the camp.

Placing a strong ring of guards around the camp perimeter, Penda and his soldiers bedded down for the night. Until five very loud claps of thunder followed by a torrential downpour awoke them. At least, they thought it was thunderclaps.

Looking down from atop the pitch blackness of Bradley Hill, the long magus and Twilight knew better. For each explosion had been caused by searing, jagged green bolts that shot from the glowing-eyed old sorcerer’s fingertips. He’d added the localized heavy downpour just to complete the initial picture of a huge night storm. Then, so that he and the boy could see, he placed a strong blue lightning flash in the sky above to illuminate the scene. The first green bolt had completely demolished the bridge, and the other four had rearranged the twin courses of the River Cary tributaries.

Swollen with the onset of seasonal rains, the twin tributaries joined in one mighty torrent at the mouth of the hollow and swept down onto the camp like a violent sea crashing into a small, unprotected cove. In no time the entire hollow was flooded to a depth over a man’s waist. As the water level rose and washed back from the protective sides of the limestone escarpment, it clashed with the incoming torrent to form a violent vortex at the center.

Right where Penda’s ornate, pennant-bedecked tent stood.

Men, weapons, and horses struggled to maintain a foothold as the vortex currents swept them backward and forward.

“Now I’m going to show you some real crinkum crankum,” roared the long magus as he held his right hand high in the air and began to slowly rotate it in a circular motion. Picking up his rotated rhythm the huge body of water, still being added to by the incoming torrent, began to rotate slowly around the hollow’s limestone walls like a giant whirlpool. As the whirlpool gathered speed, the terrified screams of Penda’s men mingled with the frenzied baying of their horses as they were picked up and swept, together with their sleeping blankets, saddles, loose bits of weaponry, and armor, in the ever increasing circular current of water. Around and around it went, gathering speed. Along with his personal guard, Penda could clearly be seen clinging for his life to his brightly colored tent as it swept around the water-filled amphitheater. To add further to the terrorizing effect of four hundred and fifty men and assorted horses and war impedimenta whirling around in an ever increasing vortex of water, the long magus threw in a few more detonating green thunderbolts with his left hand. Then he stood back and admired his handiwork.

“What are you going to do with them now,” shouted a tremulous Twilight over the crescendo of screams and rushing water.

“Mmmm,” mused the old war astounder with a smile. “I don’t really know. What do you think, dash them against the limestone rocks in groups of a hundred or drown them? All except Penda, that is. We need him to bargain with.”

“Some of them are drowning already,” the boy said with tears beginning to stream down his cheeks. “Can you stop it, now, please, my master … oh please.”

“If I must,” grumbled the long magus, realizing that the vast spectacle of death he’d created was too much for the boy, who, despite a grasp of matters way beyond his years and a unique set of early life experiences, was still only a raw thirteen years old.

A few counter rotations of his right arm followed by a gentle waving toward the opening of the hollow and as fast as it began, the whirlpool subsided and the water began to flow out of the hollow.

Men and horses collapsed into the mud, coughing and spluttering as carts, saddles, tents, and weaponry fell around them. Some did not move, but most of them began to struggle exhaustedly to their feet and look around them with frightened, bewildered expressions.

A bedraggled King Penda hauled himself to his feet and, picking up a sword from the mud, waved it in the air and screamed his anger to the darkening night sky.

“The all-conquering king doesn’t look very happy.” The long magus chuckled. “Do you just suppose that he’s beginning to regret the decision to subvert this easy, undefended little Celtic land?”

With that his eyes glowed iridescent green and he waved at the area of Beakers Crossing, and the River Cary tributaries were as before, and the bridge was replaced.