The Exile

by Steven Savile

  "I will hunt him and kill him in his lair," Sláine vowed, ignoring the dwarf.

  "See," Ukko whispered, "I told you. Next is the bit where he promises to rip his heart out and feed it to the dogs or to make a goblet out of his skull and drink to the Goddess's health with the blood of his fallen enemies."

  "Tell me all you know of these Drunes."

  They were, as far as he could tell, the dark god's equivalent of Danu's druids. They gathered at sacred groves, where their perverted rites soured the land. The most sacred of these, Brianna said, was known as Drunemeton. Sláine thought he had heard the name before. He would not forget it. He remembered Cathbad's humiliation over the so-called sacred knowledge the boys had made up. It felt like such a long time ago. It was hard to imagine the old man having the power to be dangerous even if he wanted to be.

  Without thinking, he said so.

  "He holds the knowledge, Sláine," Ukko pointed out. "That gives him the power over ignorance. I bet he hoards his knowledge too, doesn't he? Keeps things secret and hides them in rituals. I would if I were him. Stands to reason. If you know stuff other people don't you can get stuff in return for the knowing, but when everyone knows something, well it isn't worth a pot to pee in."

  "Aye," Sláine said, following the dwarf's rambling logic. It actually made a certain amount of sense.

  "So, what if he turned up one day and said the sacred knowledge declared the neighbouring tribe of yours infidels that must die? Said that it was the word of the Goddess? Said you needed to build a special temple dedicated to her worship, only it needed to be made from their bones. Would you believe him?"

  "Why would he lie?"

  Ukko let out a slow whistling breath. "You and me, Sláine, we're going to be great friends. Want me to give you a lesson in why someone might want to lie? Let's just say they have something he wants. Or hey, maybe your king is annoying him and this is your druid's way of having him done in. Send him off to fight a war against a stronger tribe. He could have a million reasons, Sláine. That isn't the point. The point is you listen to him. He has power. Power has a way of changing people. They don't like to give it up once they have it, and if they have power, they want more, always more. That's the way of it with powerful people."

  "You paint a bleak picture of humanity, dwarf."

  "I'm just saying you can't trust anyone. Those Drunes could have been just like your priest once. It isn't unreasonable."

  "Our druids protect the land. They serve the Goddess. They would not bleed her dry. It is against everything they believe in."

  "Well not exactly the same then, but that doesn't mean I am wrong. Give a man power, he wants more. It's natural. Power is addictive."

  "Well it's time someone weaned the Drunes off their addiction."

  "And you're just the man, right?"

  "I will walk into the heart of Drunemeton itself, the most sacred of their groves, and rip every last heart out of their corrupt skins. I will teach them what real fear is. I will-"

  "Bore them to death with self-important speeches probably." Ukko leaned over to the girl beside him and whispered, "See, I told you he would go on about ripping out arms and stuff. I am beginning to think that that's all heroes do. Well, that and kill things, obviously. Can't forget the killing."

  "I would see this dolmen that Slough Feg built," Sláine said.

  The dolmen was a huge construction that beggared reason.

  It was unlike anything the druids of Danu had ever constructed: a megalithic behemoth. He could feel it, deep in his bones. It called out to him every bit as seductively as the lamia's song had. It was sweet, but too much so, sickly sweet. It left him light-headed and feeling sick, and it was powerful, there was no doubt about that.

  A circle of smaller stones formed oddly spaced arches, and the arches formed a ring around the central stones of the dolmen. He entered the huge stone circle, laying his hand against the central rock pillar. A faint blush of heat ran through the grain of the stone. Sláine stood in the middle of the ceremonial circle, dwarfed by the towering rock pillars. The central stones were more than ten times his height. The capstones holding them firmly in place were at least fifty feet above the earth. The sheer scale of the construction was daunting.

  "Feg built this?" Sláine said, marvelling at the feat. The central pillars appeared to have been hewn from a single slab of rock. He couldn't imagine how they could have been transported from wherever they had been quarried, let alone raised in place.

  "Him and his Drunes," Brianna told him. "I was just a little girl but I remember it as if it was yesterday."

  It wasn't the stones that disturbed Sláine; or rather it wasn't the scale of the megalith. It was something far more primal. He could feel what was happening to the earth. He could feel it bone deep. His link to Danu made the leaching effect of the dolmen something palpable, a reverse of the familiar link he shared with the earth where it fed him. He felt the stones draining the vitality out of his flesh and blood.

  He felt the Goddess's pain, and it scared him more than anything had ever scared him in his life.

  "Get me out of here, Ukko," Sláine said, lurching back from the central pillar. A moment later the ground tilted, the sky shifting into a dull brown haze and his legs gave way beneath him. He fell.

  The next thing he remembered was Ukko's ugly face peering down at him and the sting of the dwarf's hand slapping him across the face, hard. "Wake up, Sláine! Wake up!"

  He grunted groggily.

  Ukko slapped him again.

  "Enough!" he said, reaching up to grab the dwarf's wrists and stop him from hitting him again.

  "Soth! I thought we'd lost you there, big man," Ukko said, relieved. "Scary bloody stuff, let me tell you. One minute you were staring at the big stone and then you started acting all weird. I mean really weird and then you just collapsed. I thought your brain had been struck down or something. You were shuddering as if you were having some kind of fit. Your eyes were rolled up in your head. Brianna carried you back to the village. I couldn't lift you by myself. I tried."

  Sláine sat up. The world spun again but this time he rode it out. Everything smelled, or rather he was aware of their odours for the first time: the pungent whiff of the dwarf, the rose water Brianna had bathed in, the pollen from the withered grass, the dirt itself, which reeked of corruption instead of loam. It was wrong, unnatural, as were so many of the other odours that reached him. He could smell decay in so much of the natural world that it scared him. Blessedly, it was fading or it would have driven him insane.

  You're too late, my love, always too late.

  He had shared Danu's pain, felt the world's hurt. He would not fail Eiru. He would not be too late this time. This was why Danu had saved him from drowning in the river, he told himself. This was why she had lured him to Niamh's door. This was what she had wanted him to see, not just a few skull-swords sacking his home. It was all part of an elaborate pattern, a Gordian knot of needs and deceit with him at the heart of it. His exile had a purpose: to save the Goddess from this pain.

  "It's all right. You did well, Ukko. The stones..." He trailed off. How could he explain it? How could he hope to understand it properly? "The stones are responsible. They are like..." He was lost for words. "Like voids, like empty vessels... They hunger. They are the essence of all hunger, never sated, like a big gaping maw sucking the life out of everything around them. The land, the people, they all feed the stones."

  "We were worried," the woman said, kneeling beside him. "It is good that you have come back to us, warrior."

  "You must tear down these stones, Brianna. You must. They are parasites on the flesh of the Goddess."

  "But how?" the woman asked.

  "Pull them down with your bare hands if you have to. Break their strength unless you want this souring to spread across all of the land. We must root out the canker at its core."

  They had carried him halfway back to the village, mercilessly out of the sickening range of the wors
t of the dolmen's blight. He could still feel it though, an insidious tug on his strength. He needed Ukko to help him stand.

  "What will you do?" the woman asked.

  "Exactly what I promised. I will travel to the beast's lair and slay it. There is no other way. This is my land, Brianna. I may be far from my home but that does not make the land any less mine. The stones themselves have shown me that, in their own sick way. I will not stand by and watch it wither and die. My mother raised me better than that."

  "She must have been an exceptional woman," Brianna said.

  "In everything she did," Sláine agreed.

  Sláine and Ukko saw more and more of the huge megaliths the deeper into the Sourland they travelled. Sláine felt sure they formed some vast invisible pattern. Had he been an eagle soaring high in the clouds he might have been able to see the whole of it, but walking amongst the stones the pattern was invisible. All he knew was that there were hundreds of them arranged across the Sourland.

  At each one the draw on his flesh became more powerful.

  More and more frequently he knelt to press his bare hands against the earth but there was nothing. It was dead land, dry.

  At first he kept his fears to himself, but as the days turned into weeks he found himself confiding in Ukko. He didn't need to. For all his joking, Ukko understood what the stones meant and feared them every bit as much as he did. As the drain became greater Sláine began to feel a sickening hollowness form within him. In some distant way he understood what it was. The further he travelled from the healthy earth the more distant Danu became. That hollowness was a Danu-shaped ache inside him.

  At some of the dolmen they saw people bent in prayer, as if the stones might save them from the damned blight they had brought down on the land. Sláine wanted to shake some sense into the worshippers, make them see that where they looked for salvation there was only more damnation. At others he saw mourners and realised that the villagers had turned the stones into a graveyard of sorts, burying their dead beneath the wyrm god's broken stones. It made him sick to see their emaciated forms hunched down low debasing themselves before the megalith as if some deity might hear them and take pity. They deserved to know that their false gods were killing them day by day.

  He wished Dian were with him, and Fionn, Cormac, Niall and Núada. He hadn't thought about his friends in so long but they had never left him, not really, and, he came to realise that he had never left them. They were bonded in ways that not even distance could separate. That understanding gave him strength. He wondered where Tall Iesin had taken Fionn and if their travels had reached these blighted lands. Had Iesin carried back word to Murias of the threat the tall stones posed?

  "Do you think there really is a pattern to the stones?" Ukko asked, picking up a pebble and casting it at a broken capstone. The rock missed its mark by a good ten feet, bouncing away across a patch of brown grass.

  "What do you mean?" Sláine had been worrying about the possibility almost constantly since stumbling across the second, third and fourth dolmen, so hearing it come from the dwarf's mouth did not help ease his fears. There almost certainly was, but he couldn't see it. He was the river, he was mountain; he was not the eagle flying above them.

  "Like, you know, some kind of sacred pattern. These druids-"

  "They are not druids. Druids worship the land, they do not defile it."

  "Fine, these Drunes don't seem to do much without there being a method behind it, right? So how do they choose where to place their Weird Stones? That has to be the pattern doesn't it, choosing certain sites because they are important, somehow. We know they are draining the land with the stones but what I don't understand is how they decide what areas are worth draining. I mean, I could understand it if some places had more power than others, but dirt's dirt. It isn't as if there is special magic dirt."

  "Ukko, you're a genius!" Sláine said, suddenly understanding. There was a pattern to it all, the most obvious one at that, one that he should have seen immediately. He couldn't believe he had been so dense.

  "Well, yes, I have my moments. What exactly did I do this time?"

  "The leys! The lines of power! Soth! It's so obvious. They are using the leys to drain the earth of its magic." The ley lines were ancient sacred energy lines that intersected all across the Goddess's earthly form. They were a map to the paths of sun, moon and stars, charting their positions come solstice and equinox. What made them special was that they acted as foci or nodes for the earth power, enhancing the magic of the land and acting as a channel for it. They were, as Ukko had said, sacred areas where the earth's power was at its most potent. The tribes of the Goddess often congregated around these foci, drawn by the power. It made a sickening kind of sense that Slough Feg and his Drunes would seek to tap into the naturally occurring focal points, draining the magic from them. They were, in comparison, huge reservoirs of untapped power: the kind of power that Feg would need to stave off mortality.

  They found more and more dolmen along the road, and although some of the locals called them by other names, their purpose remained the same.

  Again and again that hollowness consumed Sláine.

  "Danu, what have they done?"

  There was no answer.

  Seventeen

  Shoggy Beast

  The endless rows of dolmen at Carnac were like nothing Ukko or Sláine had ever seen.

  The Drunes had erected thousands upon thousands of the Weird Stones. Field upon field of standing stones stretched as far as the eye could see. Ukko didn't like it in the slightest. He grumbled as they crept closer but he might as well have been grumbling to himself for all the good it did with Sláine. They crested a gradual summit and looked down over a great stone in the centre of ten or more thousand broken and disjointed standing stones. They edged closer. Ukko lay flat on his belly and scooted forwards. Sláine mumbled something. Ukko assumed it was another promise to perform the "blood eagle" on the false priests. He didn't quite understand what the blood eagle was but he was in no doubt it was a gruesome way to shuffle off this mortal coil.

  There was quite a gathering down there. He counted easily over two hundred heads. It was some kind of ritual. The ululations of the Drunes chant reached them on the rise. The air around them crackled with life. Bluish veins of energy sparked out of the ground, coiling around the horned figure in the centre of the stone circle. With each sizzle of energy the horned man jumped and twisted, contorting his body in a primal tribal dance, throwing his hands above his head, kicking his legs out, spinning and jumping in time to the venting of the earth's energies.

  As the dance grew more and more frenzied Ukko knuckled his eyes, sure that they were lying to him. The horned man froze, threw his arms above his head and began to rise, until he was levitating ten, fifteen, a full twenty feet above the heads of his worshippers.

  The blue jags of power snapped and crackled, chasing through his body. The horned man acted as a conduit for the huge central stone, the earth's power streaming out of and into it.

  At the horned man's beckoning the sky appeared to darken, rumbling thunderheads taking shape above him.

  "Did you see that, Sláine?" Ukko whispered, unable to believe the hideous power the stones gifted the horned man. He looked over his shoulder to see the barbarian in the grip of a fierce fit. Sláine was on his knees, clutching at his gut, a low moan escaping his clenched teeth. Spasm after spasm wracked his entire body. He stayed crouched on his knees as a fresh seizure convulsed through him and then, gasping for breath he collapsed forwards, his bare torso pressed low to the earth.

  Ukko scrambled back to Sláine's side. "Not now, come on, not now. I can't carry you out of here on my own."

  Sláine couldn't talk. His eyes had rolled up into his head. Ukko couldn't break the contact with the diseased earth even though it was so obviously killing Sláine. He grabbed the barbarian by the shoulders and hauled him backwards. It took every ounce of strength the little dwarf had to drag Sláine ten feet. He hunched over
Sláine huffing and puffing, counted to thirteen because at ten the idea of trying to move him another inch still felt idiotic, and hauled on Sláine's arms, managing another five feet.

  He slapped Sláine across the face.

  Sláine groaned groggily.

  "Come on, Sláine. Don't you die on me, you big aurochs, not here. You still haven't told me where that moneylender buried his bloody gold! Wake up, Sláine!"

  Ukko hunched over Sláine, folding the warrior's arms across his chest.

  "Forgive me, big man, but needs must as Crom drives and all that." He reached under Sláine and rolled him over, and again, grunting with the exertion of it. A third shove and gravity lent a hand. Sláine tumbled down the hill, gathering momentum with each roll.

  "Soth!" Ukko gasped, running after Sláine even as he rolled all the way to the bottom of the hill. "Well if the damned stones don't kill him I will."

  Ukko jumped and bounced, and skipped and struggled valiantly to stay on his feet as he followed Sláine down the hill.

  At the bottom he fell to his knees beside Sláine, gasping for breath.

  The barbarian opened an eye. He did not look happy with his lot in life.

  "You're a hard man to keep alive, Sláine Mac Roth," Ukko grumbled.

  He felt a prickling on the back of his neck, the short hairs there standing on end. It was an uncomfortable sensation. He cast a worried glance over his shoulder, back up the hill, but the Drunes hadn't suddenly appeared at the crest. The feeling of being watched didn't disappear though.

  "Wake up, Sláine. I think we're in trouble."

  No amount of begging or cajoling helped. The Celt was dead to the world.

  "Don't say it's up to old Ukko. I'm a lover not a fighter." He chuckled to himself, and then checked that he still had the small stabbing dirk tucked into the ratty folds of his grubby tunic. "Oh, come then, if you're coming. I know you're out there and I really hate waiting to die. Well, I don't really. I like waiting to die. I just like the idea of it being a long, long way off, in bed surrounded by a dozen beautifully rotund women pampering me with there bare breasts so that I suffocate happy."