by B G Denvil
“Stop getting moral,” complained Whistle.
We ate. We drank. And with eight waving arms and eight clicking hands, we made a delightful tent, something which might have honoured a king. Large, high ceilinged sufficiently for Edna, four beds, including a tiddly one for the squirrel, rugs underfoot, huge furry blankets, stools and a table, platters, spoons and knives, and finally a very large selection of food for dinner.
Sitting over our meal and stuffing in the consolation of food while the wind outside battered against our tent walls, we talked nonstop, mouths full, and interrupted each other without qualms.
“I’m quite fond of morals,” I said, hiccupping over my ale and bacon fritters. “I hate the idea of losing my sense of self.”
“Having lived basically two hundred years,” Peg muttered, “I’m me, and that’s not changing.”
But Edna spat bacon crumbs, and her eyes looked sparkly. “I am going to adore every moment of this discovery.”
“Not if you get carried off by a demon,” Peg pointed out.
Whistle didn’t eat, but he still talked. “I cannot travel either backwards or forwards in time,” he said. “I’ve tried. Actually, I used to attempt time travel more than anything else. I managed the odd squelch in direction and turned up yesterday, which was boring, because I just had to do everything all over again. Luckily, I went to bed and slept well and woke up tomorrow. But here we are talking of seven thousand years ago. We’ll not be fiddling about with anything from that intriguing past, but I am quite sure we’ll get the odd dream. Perhaps the occasional vision. And who knows – maybe a faint revelation.”
“Visions and revelations will do me,” I murmured, finishing my ale, “for the rest of my life. I might just stay here.”
“It’s not all going to be fun, though,” said Peg. “Visions can be dark too.”
“And that’s the whole point of being here,” added Whistle. “Not to discover the past or have strange experiences. We’re here to find the red spoon. You do understand that, I hope.”
We all dutifully nodded. “But,” I said, “what I was getting before troubled me a great deal. But it wasn’t evil. Not even mildly wicked. Just disturbing.”
“What disturbs you might frighten me,” Peg pointed out.
“Or delight me,” said Edna.
“Or entrap all of us,” Whistle said. “We are here to discover something which I believe has been here for three or four hundred years. Purposefully buried here. And we need to get it, claim it and take it to the High Court Judge. But while searching for it, we’ll be facing something far older, far more complicated, and far more interesting. I also have to add – probably far stranger than anything we’ve experienced yet.”
“And exciting.” Edna was cuddling her knees. Her platter was empty and surprisingly clean. Now she leaned forward and poured us all a cup of wine from a suddenly appearing wine jug. “I have to admit,” she gulped her wine, “I’m very excited.”
“Why not?” said the squirrel. “Now, sit comfortably please. It will be dark soon, and we need to see the stones in starlight. But first I want to tell you a story.”
That pleased us all. “Great. You carry on,” I told him.
“I have been here before,” Whistle told us. “Several times indeed. And I shall return when I can. This place holds the magical secrets of thousands of years, and each generation of wizards was able to advance on the enchantments of before.” He looked around at us all. “Except for now,” he said. “It is more than one thousand years since this magical site has been abandoned. But I would like to summon it all back. Every tiny bit.”
“Six thousand years of developing magic?” I yelped, mouth open. “We’d have to stay here for at least another thousand years. How long do you expect me to live?”
“You don’t have to be alive,” smiled the squirrel. “But let’s ignore the passing of time. We shall sleep, and wake to a day of discovery.”
Six
I think Peg snored. But it might not have been her. It possibly could have been me.
It was around the middle of the night, although without windows I couldn’t be sure of the time, when I felt a big warm shape cuddle up to me. With only the choice of a small squirrel, Peg or Edna, I was slightly bewildered, but carefully did not move. The warmth, after all, was significantly welcome. The snorts and snores were now multiplied, but did not keep me awake.
Eventually I woke to Wolf licking my face.
His tongue carried a sense of slight desperation as if he was assuring me of his need to be here, just in case I was planning to tell him off and send him home. When I did neither of those things, Wolf calmed down.
“You’ve run all this way through the night?” I wheezed in amazement.
“Not too far for loving dog,” he said, and the licking increased.
Whistle regarded the dog. “Acceptable, I suppose,” said the squirrel. “Could even be useful.” Wolf’s tail wagged with energetic delight.
We started the day with an extended walk around the stones, seeing how the patterns had been altered, or extended, over time. Watching the sun rise through one gateway was interesting, sensing the depth of the grave sites, the meanings lying hidden and the few more easily understood.
Wolf ran around, extending his search beyond our own, and I accepted this as an energy exercising excitement, but when he returned to me, he told us of how far the henges stretched.
“Big, big, bigger,” Wolf explained. “Big circle there. Big circle over beyond. I’ll be a very useful dog,” he said, wagging his tail and looking so desperate to stay.
“He will be,” Edna told me. “No doubt this big hound will tell us many things we can’t see ourselves.”
The tail wagged even more furiously.
After my blazing insights, none of them clear, of the day before, I had hoped for messages, even visions today, but very little happened. We sat between the stones for dinner as the sun rose overhead, a meal of odd bits and pieces produced by Peg, who gave a larger platter to Wolf than to anyone else. Whistle wasn’t eating so Wolf finished that as well.
Later, sitting snuggled back in the tent with my cloak tight beneath my chin, the wind battering against the stones outside, and the warmth of Wolf over my lap, I thought I saw something strange and stopped myself from dozing.
A huge eagle, golden brown, was perched on Edna’s bed. It fluffed its feathers and opened its beak. As the beak opened further and further, I could see that its body was empty, and down its throat I saw the rest of the tent.
“A ghost eagle then,” I whispered softly. “What do you want of me?”
But the empty eagle didn’t speak. It sat there, watching me. Wolf did not wake. I kept staring. I wasn’t understanding, until I realised the whole bird had become transparent, and through its distinct outline, I could see a different world. A world of the past. I was so utterly bewitched, I could not even blink.
I saw a procession of people carrying stretchers on their shoulders. They were chanting, but I understood no words. These were burials, bodies stored over weeks or possibly months, I thought, ready to be set in the place of the rising sun and the setting moon, and on some day considered hugely important. This was daylight, not the night of Hallowe’en, but I believed those buried must surely be those of some religion, of royalty, or of healers. I saw everything, but knew nothing. The pictures did not bring insight.
A hundred people, perhaps, twenty burials. The singing was beautiful. And then I realised the activity on the ground, however meaningful it might have been, was not the important part of what I was being shown. It was the sky I had to watch.
This must have been long, long ago, for the standing stones stood, engravings still visible, with nothing missing from those great circles or the gaps that existed now, and on these, unseen by those below, sat four creatures I thought hideous.
Their bodies swirled in twists of crimson, scarlet, maroon and black. They did not see me, but were watching below where their
legs flowed like streamers, loudly ridiculing the natives and their careful processions. I heard them, but those below did not, and continued with their beautiful ceremony.
A mirage of perfumes blurred. The chanting natives used incense of some kind, spiced and unusual. There was also the scent of fresh water nearby, and cut grass along the wayside. But the stronger was a reek of intense evil, and I knew that came from the flowing shapes, their spiteful gossip and their intentions.
Only moments. Then it had gone, and the eagle too. I sat in the tent and felt slightly sick.
That evening over supper, again sitting on the grass outside, I described what I had seen, and how the pictures had come. Peg, who had produced three large jugs of excellent wine but a rather unimaginative meal of small-boned silvery fish steaming hot, with a dollop of lettuce on top,
Slightly more important than the diet, was our conversation. Whistle, Edna and Peg all had somewhat differing reactions.
“Brilliant,” said Whistle, “since this is exactly the information sent to me quite some days ago. A combination of long past history, combining the beauty of the original place with the reason why it was built. And there, cackling and feeling themselves more important, were the petty students of the early shadow magic. I do believe you’ve seen exactly the same.”
Peg, however, mumbled about going there. “I get whisked off to odd places often enough. Now I need to go to that time. How do I arrange it?”
And Edna was speaking to herself, arms crossed, rocking backwards and forwards. I couldn’t even hear what she said, so I asked her to repeat it. She was strangely startled, as though she’d not realised what she was doing. “I didn’t say a word,” she insisted. “I was listening to the rest of you.”
“Magic is all very well,” I pointed out, “when we’re the masters of it. But I’ve decided I dislike magic when it’s me being controlled by others. They could be stronger, and a lot nastier.”
“Well, no one’s getting the better of me,” Edna said. “In the meantime, I’m fascinated.”
“It’ll be tomorrow night that will teach us what it’s all about,” said Whistle. “In the meantime, we need to find out as much as we can.” He turned to Peg. “I’d dearly love to send you where you wish,” he sighed. “But I can’t do it. I don’t know how to send myself, let alone you. Time has its own rules, sadly.”
Walking endlessly was exhausting, but we flew occasionally, much to Wolf’s disgust since he couldn’t come with us, but we saw very little of intrigue or even interest. The intentions of the builders were complicated and impressively intertwining, but the shadow powers were revealing nothing.
Until Edna fell asleep.
It was the following morning we shared stories. I had dreamed of Whistle’s mournful burial in The Rookery gardens. I’d been crying. Now I told Whistle I’d dreamed of nothing at all, except roast pork with crackling.
Whistle said he had been talking to his father, sharing opinions and guesses regarding the shadow side, but these had been theories without proof.
Peg had sat on a river bank, picking daisies in the sunshine. Not now, but then, with the rain clouds darkening and the morning looking more like evening.
But Edna had dreamed of far more important things.
She had met with one of the women helping to carry her husband’s body, and had then knelt beside the place already dug in preparation, watching as the body was lowered into place. Edna did not see any of this, but spoke with the woman afterwards. “She was very tall,” Edna told us. “She seemed more gracious and more beautiful than our modern people. She said her name was Keranda, and she was a queen amongst healers. She had asked the sun and the moon to help her husband into the places beyond the sky, yet she had loathed her husband. He had been joined with her as the king of healers, but she said he had not only healed folk, but had also arranged for others to die in pain, and for women to die in childbirth, if the children they carried were not healers.”
“Influenced, then,” said Whistle. “Met the shadow powers.”
“I assume so,” Edna said. “But she never saw any such creature, neither red spoon or toadstool nor cup. But she said he was a good man when she first accepted him, it was only later he turned so nasty. Then I asked her what happened here on Samhain, and she said there would be a procession to honour the dead. She wouldn’t be there, and people would criticise her, but she had no wish to honour her dead husband.”
The last day of October, grey and bitterly cold, chugged on. I didn’t think any of us were enjoying ourselves, except Edna, but we needed to wait for midnight. I went for a walk with Wolf and Peg, but Whistle and Edna sat together making spells.
It wasn’t even supper time when the stars first speckled the black sky. Then it started to rain. The wind blew itself away and instead the silver curtains of rain whispered down around us. With rather less courage, common sense or magic than we should have shown, we all agreed to go back into the tent for a quick supper, drink as much hot spiced wine as we could conjure and keep dry inside until the Samhain witching hour approached.
And then we slept. Each one of us fell into a deep sleep, and fell was probably the correct word too, as we’d been sitting cross legged and talking, cups of wine getting regularly refilled, yet when we woke the next day, we were all safely curled in our beds.
It wasn’t dopey dozing, it wasn’t our own tiredness, it wasn’t laziness, and it wasn’t even too much to drink.
It was meant. Destiny, sometimes, made up its own mind.
Seven
Naturally we all had the same dream. Not only did we see and hear exactly the same, we also saw each other, and comparing later, knew we had been called.
No rain. This was five thousand years before our visit to Stonehenge, and our rain had no place back then. But it had been snowing and that was very different. The freeze was a white drift of glacial beauty without the whine of wind.
Around the burial grounds, recently covered, and the huge standing stones, was the soft crust of new laid frost, turning to snow banks as the crystal shimmer fell like diamonds all about us.
I put out my tongue like Wolf, and tasted the glimmering magic of snow flakes, and I saw Edna doing the same, while laughing at me. Then I saw Whistle. And he was Whistle himself again, no swirling ghost figure or squirrel, but himself in his striped trousers and blue coat, red boots and smattering of snow in his hair. It was lovely seeing him like that again, and I grasped his hand, enthusiastically.
Peg, sitting beside me, was crying a little. Whispering, I asked her why.
“It is so utterly perfect,” she whispered back. “So glorious. So enchanting, And, yet, I know the shadows will come.”
The thin glow of the moon slid one real shadow across the land, and in that place, like one line of sleepwalkers following their path, began the procession of the dead. Slipping into sight from a far distant horizon, they walked very slowly, leaving no footprints in the snow. Their heads were down, their arms loose at their sides, and they did not see us. They followed that one giant shadow, until they walked beneath the gate the stones had formed and disappeared.
The people were crowded around us, sitting or standing, darting forwards. When they saw someone they had loved, they rushed forward to throw their arms around the ghost’s neck. That ghost would look up, understanding and recognising his living survivor. The pale ghost figure would smile and regain colour, embrace whoever had come, and together they would break from the single file and run like joyful foals into the darkness. Many were greeted. But those who plodded on alone, heads down, unknown and untouched, seemed so sad to me. I almost ran to one, purely to bring joy to an unwanted creature. But then I thought it might bring more misery if I went to some ghost who would not know me, and would be disappointed I was not the woman he had longed for.
Then Edna nudged me, pointing, murmuring, “She came after all.”
I watched a tall and gloriously elegant woman from the crowd as she swept forwards, meekly touch
ing one of the passing ghosts on his shoulder. He turned, looking up and his face lit, as if candles within him had sparked alive. He embraced the woman, who seemed surprised. Then, as he kissed her cheek, leading her away, she equally as rapt.
I loved watching. Then it became even more delicious, for crowds of small animals joined the trail, skipping and dancing, playing with each other, seemingly delighted to see once more the world they had left. There were frogs bouncing amongst tiny furred creatures, mice, weasels, moles, rats and water rats, squirrels and scuttling hedgehogs, rabbits, voles, hare, otters, stoats, even snakes, and then the larger creatures, foxes, and badgers, deer and wild pigs. Even dogs and cats, horses, donkeys came scampering and jumping, and a huge flock of birds, ducks and geese, swirling and whirling, every type I had ever seen, flying, diving, and finally mixing with the human ghosts, tripping between them, climbing up them, singing, bleating, cackling and rejoicing.
It woke those humans remaining, and they began to play, disappearing back into the nothingness with whoops of laughter and happiness. The memories of whatever old life they had found miserable was now disappearing as instantly they danced the new life, and its far greater happiness.
I watched them all go. Those who had enjoyed a final meeting with their loved ones, and those who wished only the bright thrill of their new existence.
Some time passed before I was ready to leave, for the return of the dead had seemed so perfectly gorgeous, an entertainment so utterly unique and unexpected, and a wonderful manner in which to pass the night.
I was ready to wake, but of course, it wasn’t over.
I hadn’t dreamt of such things for the sake of my own pleasure. I had been brought here for the extremes.
The first glimpse of the opposite extreme was mild, but it grew worse.
I saw the shadow people rise from the ground. They were screaming, some of them, but silence was the imperative, and those who screamed were beaten back into the clouds. But at their lead, one tower of darkness carried a red cinnabar cup, and in front of him, another carried a red spoon, a huge thing like a ladle. But first, strode the one with the red toadstool, and he held it high.