Darkwells

by R. A Humphry

  As the three combatants fought with blade and magic, with wood and talon, the fey poured out across the land in triumph and glee. Killynghall had drawn the Dread-Witch away but the ferocity of their fighting rumbled across the flat open ground like battleships firing off a mist shrouded horizon. Heather tore at Henry with fury and the last Lord Grenville was hard pressed to keep her at bay.

  But for Manu there was only Gwyn with the burned face. Gwyn and his swinging blade. The Warden mantle surged through Manu, stronger than he had ever felt it before and yet it was not enough. He had seconds before the sword broke through his guard and cut him in half. He was saved by Arthur’s knights.

  The guardians had fought their way through the throng and gained the summit. Gwyn spotted them and there was a pause of recognition. The Green Knight hefted his axe and Gawain flanked left his shield raised. Manu rolled clear and caught his breath. The combatants exploded into action and Manu saw a battle the like of which had not been seen in the land for a millennia. Gwyn was liquid speed and relentless rhythm. He met the attacks of both of the Knights in turn and without breaking his form. He made the peerless knights seem awkward and slow. Axe and blade, elbow and boot, shield and swaying evasion. Then the Green Knight was down, run through by the monstrous blade. Gawain fought on in a rage and Manu flung himself into the fray heedlessly.

  The taiaha moved with grace and speed and power and yet it barely kept up with the lightening fast great-sword. Manu fought with everything he had. He poured all that he was into each move of his body. He was the strength of his father, so tall and strong. He was the wide open spaces of the rift, the motion of the startled gazelle, of the hunting lioness. He was every hero in every book he had read on the soft carpet floor. He was Henry’s kindness and quick wit. He was Robert and Arap Milgo. He was Stonehouse and Peter and Sean and all of England’s heroes. He fought with everything he admired in this life, in this country, in his fatherland. It was not enough. Gawain’s head rose up and flopped to the earth as Gwyn broke through. In the same moment the inevitable happened and the taiaha was slapped from Manu’s hand. Gwyn swept Manu’s feet up from under him and he landed on his back. A heavy boot landed on his throat and he knew it was over.

  He saw Henry fall to earth, his hawk-form singed with flame. Heather walked up to him and picked up his staff. She looked down the ancient length of it then broke it over her knee. Manu felt his heart rend. That was Henry’s heritage. It was the heirloom of all his people, of his whole line. She had burnt his house and broken his staff. She had taken everything from him. His whole history, gone. His history. His dreams.

  #

  “Do you remember, my liege, what you said to me that first time? About how you proved yourself worthy of the blade?” Merlin had said on this very hill.

  “I told you that I just let myself become everything I could be,” the King had answered. Manu closed his eyes. Other memories were racing to him now.

  The Raven-Master had grinned. “You know who Te Aké is, boy. You must recall the spirit of Tawhiri-matea. Let it go. Embrace your nature. It is what will define you, in the end.”

  He recalled his conversation with Henry, a lifetime ago. “I doubt my mother gave me very much.” Manu had said. “There isn’t much in that side of my heritage beyond sitting in a canoe.”

  “Oh I don’t know Manu, that seems a very one dimensional look at the world. One day you might find that it’s the side of yourself that you deny that defines you.”

  #

  Manu breathed deep. He had not given everything. Not yet. Gwyn raised his sword and Manu loosed a knot inside him he had worked so hard to keep locked. It was easy. It was not something he had to force. It was something that he had to stop denying. Everything changed. Unimaginable power swirled into Manu’s body. Mana of generations filled him to bursting point. His arms gripped the boot at his throat and he pushed hard at it, sending Gwyn flying across the hilltop and into the tower, shattering stone. Manu stood. He reached out his hand and his taiaha flew into it. He saw patterns running up his arm, seething across his body. He felt them dance across his face. They were the patterns his mother had made for him. They were his identity, his heritage. They were what he always tried to deny.

  Heather stared at him and then launched spells from her hands at him. Manu contemptuously cast them aside and his tattoos spiralled outwards and gripped Heather, lifting her clear. She cried out and Manu laughed. There was a screech from the sky and the Dread-Witch reappeared, swooping out of the sky and wrapping herself around Heather with quivering darkness. She hissed and Manu took one last look at Heather’s confused, hurt, face before the two of them vanished into the night.

  Gwyn freed himself from the rubble of the collapsed tower top and stood at his full, giant height. He raised his blade above his head and roared as he pointed the blade at Manu, who stood unmoved. The power was over him now and Manu felt a giddy rush as the haka burst out of him in challenge and defiance. His mother’s ancestors knew an enemy. He shed his tattered cloak and shirt and stood bare-chested on the cold English hill. Manu thrust out his blue-marked tongue and slapped his pattern covered chest. The words tumbled out of his mouth in an ecstasy. They were old words, true words and the spirits answered. As he cried out and followed the sacred motions, pulling the power from the sky and infusing it into his being, he noticed that he was not alone.

  “Ka Mate! Ka Mate!”

  Old Maori, dead Maori were on the hill with him, echoing his calls.

  “Ka tk te ihiihi

  Ka tk te wanawana!”

  His people were here. The warriors and chiefs who had taken the spirit canoe and watched down on them with eyes of stars. As he finished the final movement and poured out his aggression the ancestors scattered. They battled the escaped Cun Annwn and the sky burned for the ferocity of the clash.

  Gwyn came for him. Manu waited. The old warrior swung at him and Manu parried. It was beautiful, he realised. This twinning of power and knowledge. This blending of pure vitality and honed craft. The Warden and Savage were one and Gwyn ap Nudd was over-matched. Manu parried and parried again. He pretended to strike up at the giant’s head and then drove the blazing greenstone deep into Gwyn’s guts. He rolled clear of Gwyn’s answering sweep of the blade then ran at him again, leaping on the impaled taiaha and launching himself at Gwyn’s face where he planted his father’s Arabian blade deep in an eye. The faerie king fell back and Manu fell with him, pressing the dagger down until he hit stony earth.

  Chapter Thirty Four: Tor

  “Pakeha,” the strange voice said to him. “Pakeha, get up.”

  Henry was broken. His leg was pounding. He had pushed it too far. He had done too much complex magic too quickly. It was past any sort of endurance he could ever hope to recover from. He was no-one’s idea of a warrior and the battles had shattered him. Heather had tried to burn him alive. He was hollowed out. Betrayed and hopeless. He picked his face up from the mud and looked on a vortex of power above a shaman’s exotic head and knew awe.

  The shaman looked like Manu but had shifting tattoos all over his body. They danced and writhed and twisted as if alive. All around were the wailing cries of battle. The shaman spoke to him again, his voice so unlike that of his friend. “Pkeh, we have a task to finish. We must repair this seal.”

  “Heather?” Henry croaked as he picked up his broken staff.

  “Your soul’s companion has left this place.”

  “The Seal is broken, I can’t do anything.”

  “Pakeha, the old ones say you can. Work with me. I will provide you with the strength; you will provide me with the direction. We are victorious this day.” The shaman picked up the broken staff and ran his hands along it. The wood jumped and writhed and grew. Henry watched dumbfounded as the staff knitted itself back together. Who was this man?

  He took the shaman’s hand and stood on the Tor. The body of Gwyn lay like a fallen tree across the top. The tower was blasted and half broken. “What do I have to do?”


  Manu-who-was-not-Manu looked at him. “Your master who is in the tree says that you will know.”

  “Merlin?” Henry spluttered.

  “Pakeha names all sound the same,” the shaman responded as he strode to the middle of the hill. “Let us begin,” he said as he started a vigorous chant. Henry stepped back, astonished at the raw energy that Manu was channelling. Then he realised what it was he had to do. The old spell that had gone wrong. The spell his mother had undone. The memory was never far from his mind. She had burst into the room like a star in supernova. He knew the spell as he knew every line of her face that night; the last night she was ever truly herself.

  He seized the power that Manu wielded. He shaped it and moved it and channelled the ritual into the proper forms. Manu started to glow then, as his mother had. He started to blaze. The fey were dissolving in the light, trapped back into the prison below.

  “It is good, Pkeh. It is very good. But you are not enough for this task. I have called the others and they come.”

  Brighter and brighter Manu burned on the strange hill. He burned like the morning star, like the moon, like a second sun. Henry worked feverishly on. He followed steps that he had never done before, never understood but that his mind now knew. Like a piano prodigy he started to feel the spell on a fundamental level that had little to do with his conscious mind. Was this his purpose? Was he just a part of this colossal spell from birth? He worked harder and faster but the energy was too huge. The ocean of power repairing the breach was beyond his ability.

  Around him portals started to open and his apprentices stepped through. The boys linked together as he had shown them. Chanting together as he taught them. He adapted his work to bring them in like a chorus and they managed the energy together. Where had they come from? Henry wondered as he felt a surge of pride in them. They looked battered and bleeding. They were far, far away from everything they knew and yet they were here. The tear started to heal and Manu glowed brighter, lifting from the ground.

  It was still too much, still too great to manage. Then the ravens descended from the sky in a squalling mass and Killynghall appeared, clutching his side. He crawled up the hill and added his voice to the ritual, calm and strong and assured. Slashes opened up around the Tor. Harrington stepped through and the Valravens and then the Raven-Master himself. They combined together and they sang and such a working of magic was done that hadn’t been seen in England since Merlin. Manu’s tattoos loosed themselves from his body and whirled in the vortex of light and power and then the job was done and the Tor plunged into darkness once more. Henry saw Manu fall to the ground before he, too, was falling. He didn’t remember landing.

  #

  The press went crazy. There was fevered speculation linking the attacks in London to the attacks in the West Country. It was reported that the SAS had stormed North Camland in a daring raid to rescue the wealthy students of the famous Darkwells School. The country decided it was under attack but had no idea who they should blame. The papers decided that the best solution was to blame the Prime Minister, which they did.

  Twelve people died. Seven townsfolk perished before the Darkwells rescue teams could reach them. This included four members of the same family, an elderly couple and a man who had stumbled out of a nightclub at the wrong moment. Two of the rescue party died, a prefect called Bryant and a fifth former called Harriet. Alex Jacobs died trying to escape down the players walk and they never found the body of Max Bolton. Then there was Sean.

  Fawad had told Henry about Sean in the hospital. They had been put in the same ward and Fawad explained it all to him in his quiet, accented voice. He explained how Sean had been the one to rally everyone. That he had risked his life to save people over and over and how the toll would have been in the hundreds without him. He explained that he saved his life in his final act.

  “I don’t know how I’ll live with it, right? I can’t ever say thanks. I can’t ever make it right.”

  They attended the funeral together. Kim was there as were a horde of journalists. The red haired girl who had seen Sean last had insisted on telling the world about what he had done. She was the daughter of a media baron and the story, once it was sanitised of any words like magic and faeries was a complete sensation. Sean’s face was everywhere as the boy who had fought back. The boy who had picked up a terrorist’s rifle and saved his countrymen. The story got more and more publicity. Cambridge revealed that they had sent his an acceptance letter and had been waiting to hear back from him. He was engaged to Kim and only weeks away from marriage. The Queen sent the family a posthumous medal to honour his gallantry.

  There was, of course, a thirteenth casualty that night. One the papers did not talk about. One that just vanished from people’s lives with hardly a trace. With all the craziness and the shooting and the deaths no one thought about what might have happened to the pretty girl called Heather Evynstone who had once made such beautiful costumes. No one asked how the boat in the canal ended up a blackened skeleton. No one noticed the heart-broken woman who sat hunched on a swaying gypsy caravan making its sad way down the towpath to parts unknown. No one noticed at all. Except Henry, of course.

  Manu took a long time to recover. Henry had Watkins move him to a retreat up in the highlands of Scotland, away from the craziness of Darkwells and the media and all the questions they didn’t want to answer. Hawksworth was not yet an option as the rebuilding had just started. It was one more wound for Henry to bear, the loss of his home. The final repository of his memories of his childhood and his parents. The bastion of his family’s proud history, all gone now, ash and sodden waste. Henry had received an outraged and yet amused letter from his step-father about the fire. He had threatened to bring him to Chicago but was worried that Henry might destroy the city.

  Killynghall had watched over Manu night and day since the Tor. He had sustained a serious injury himself in his duel with the Dread-Witch but refused to move until he was sure that Manu was recovering. He assured Henry that Darkwells would not comment on their absence when Henry moved him.

  #

  “I forgot to tell you,” Henry said to Manu as he moved his pawn up the board. “I met the Raven-Master just after we brought you here.”

  Manu grunted. He hadn’t said much since the event. His body had survived in surprisingly good condition but whatever had happened to him had taken a toll on his spirit. He was not quite the same Manu that Henry had known. This was a wilder version, a more dangerous version. The old Manu was wide-eyed and whole-hearted. He loved most things with a child’s appreciation of the new. He had been passionate about the quaint little corners of being English and of England itself. The new Manu still had these things, but not as deeply. He was more of a physical being. He was more capricious and less even tempered. “What did he say?”

  “He apologised. He rescinded everything he tried to impose on us. Tried to get us to join the Raven-Banner again.”

  “Stupid of him. He was right. If we had obeyed him then none of it would have happened.”

  “Maybe,” Henry conceded.

  “What did you say to him?”

  “I told him that the House of Grenville is now its own order. I told him that we were taking Harrington and Killynghall and Ewitan’s boys and anyone else who will join us and we are going to start asserting some responsibility in this world.”

  “Are we now?”

  “Yes, I thought you should know.”

  Manu moved his knight then leaned back in his chair. He didn’t look his age, not by a dozen years. His warm chocolate eyes were hard and fixed like dark mahogany now. He looked out over the stark rolling hills then back across the warm room with its log fire and soft autumn colours. “And if I am done with it all? If I just want to finish my studies like a good little boy?”

  “Well,” Henry said moving his rook and putting Manu in check, “it’ll make my conversation with your parents quite awkward. We fly out in three weeks.”

  #

&nb
sp; Glossary

  Mzee

  Swahili - Old person

  *

  Themanini

  Swahili - Eighty

  *

  Sukuma

  (Slang for Sukuma Wiki)

  Swahili – Part of the staple food diet

  *

  Pö atarau,

  E moea iho nei,

  E haere ana,

  Koe ki pämamao

  On a moonlit night

  I see in a dream

  You going away

  To a distant land

  *

  Haere rä,

  Ka hoki mai anö,

  ii te tau,

  E tangi atu nei

  Farewell,

  But return again

  To your loved one,

  Weeping here

  *Translation courtesy of New Zealand Folk Song

  *

  Jumamosi

  Swahili - Saturday

  *

  Kalenjin

  Rift valley tribe

  *

  Ekipe

  ‘The Ancestor’, a version of Satan