by Brian Bates
I sat and sweated until the sun sank behind the horizon and the wildfires on each side of me seemed like twin, earth-bound suns, lighting up the whole clearing with their brilliance. Flurries of moths, attracted by the flames, wheeled and dived about in the smoke. At the bottom of the slope the river surged past, silenced by the crackle of the flames, reflecting the firelight like a river of blood.
At one instant Wulf appeared in front of me silhouetted against a sky glowing with an orange sunset, but when I looked again he was lit instead by the flicker of flame from the wildfires; more time had passed and the sky behind him was dark with night. Wulf strode to my side, knelt down and placed his hand on my stomach. I shuddered at his touch, my skin alive and sensitive.
‘Air is the fan of wildfire, breath is the fan of inner fire,’ he whispered. ‘Make your breathing deeper and slower.’
As soon as I heard his instructions, I realized that I was breathing in short, shallow gasps. I took in a deep breath, my ears hummed and whistled and the pressure mounted inside my head. Wulf passed me one more cup of spearwort and squatted in front of me, watching every movement as I sipped the drink I still had the sensation of tremendous power, but I no longer wanted to get up and exert physical effort; I was rooted to the spot and had no desire to move.
Gradually, as I breathed deeply, I began to feel very relaxed. My breathing slowed further and I suddenly realized I was having difficulty keeping my eyes fixed on Wulf’s face. My tongue started flicking in and out like a lizard; it buzzed and tingled, then went numb. I could not control the sensations, yet I felt certain that I could assert control if I really wished. But I did not attempt to stop any part of the process now; I would do whatever Wulf instructed. My life depended on it.
Abruptly Wulf floated out of focus and my eyes closed involuntarily. I felt buoyant, as though floating on water. Then my head felt so light that it seemed to want to come away from my body. Suddenly I began to separate. I appeared to move out of my body and to be sitting about two feet above my right shoulder, looking down at my head. I was too astonished to be frightened, but when I tried to move my eyes flickered open again and I was back inside my body. I looked for Wulf, but he was not there. I tried to call to him, but my tongue lay limp and helpless on the floor of my mouth.
Just then Wulf came back into vision, sitting squarely on the spot where I had just seen him.
‘Rock back and forth.’ His voice rumbled, as though it came from underground.
Slowly I inched my body backwards, then leaned forward very carefully, but I felt as if I were perched on top of a mountain and any movement would piling me into an abyss.
‘Rock!’ Wulf repeated sternly. ‘You now possess enough life force to enable your shadow-soul to slip out through your shield-skin. Relax, and allow your shield-skin to move aside. Give yourself some space through which to escape.’
I tried to rock back and forth but my body became rigid with fear. I felt sure that I would fall.
‘Brand, you are afraid because inside your shield-skin you feel soft and vulnerable. You are like a tortoise in its shell. But you need not be afraid; you will remove only one layer of shield-skin, escape temporarily and then return to your body. And for each layer of shield-skin, removed, you will gain a guardian spirit. Some sorcerers have as many as nine guardians, but one is sufficient for you to journey to the spirit-world.
Now, rock; let your shadow-soul out of your body. It knows where to go.’
I tried it again and this time I was able to set up a very slight rocking motion. I felt sure that I would fall, but I was determined to let it happen. I rocked a little further each time. Suddenly I pitched forward out of control, my body trembled violently and I felt myself floating out. I shut my eyes tightly and let it happen. I knew that I was journeying to the Underworld.
The Dwarf of the Underworld
WHEN I OPENED my eyes I was plunging frantically along a narrow deer track, face slashed and whipped by low branches, pursued by something monstrous. Its hot, rancid breath burned my neck and desperately I kicked my legs out harder; but the ground was soft and spongy and I could get no grip. My legs felt like fast-melting candles and my strides chopped shorter and shorter. Whining with terror, I scrambled across a small dark clearing and staggered towards a gap in the bushes on the far side. A rush of familiar smells sucked me towards a small rise at the base of a gigantic beech, where a hole lay invisible in the darkness; without hesitation I dived into its dark, safe confines.
Suddenly I was suffocating I forced my head back, gulping for air like a landed fish. I was trapped in a long dark tunnel, a tiny, distant, bright circle of light glimmering at the far end. I struggled and kicked for air, but the life was being crushed from my chest. Just when I thought I would surely die, the walls of the tunnel pulsed and surged and I slid smoothly down the darkness towards the circle of light. The walls stopped moving and I was stuck ten feet from the end of the tunnel, my arms still pinned to my side but able now to breathe. Kicking and squirming I managed to worm my way down the passage inch by inch until I reached the end, thrust my face into the light, and immediately recoiled from tremendous crashing sounds ringing out rhythmically like hammers on metal in some gigantic smithy. Pushing forward again, I blinked into the brightness to see a huge cave stretching away into the distance, the whole cavernous space flooded with a diffuse orange light. Immense daggers of rock hung from the ceiling and others reached up from the floor, like the teeth of some monstrous dragon. Still stuck in the mouth of the tunnel, I swivelled my eyes and saw the floor of the enormous cave glowing like molten gold. Smoke from some hidden source gushed and hissed towards the roof and I thought I must surely be in the bowels of hell.
Suddenly all light was blocked out by the monstrous figure of a gigantic man, huge but built like a dwarf, his naked body stubby but muscular as if forcibly restrained from growing. His head moved towards me: huge, flaring nostrils and small glassy eyes, smooth like river pebbles. I remembered the eyes of the creature who had attacked me on the night of the spearwort hunt and I struggled violently to retreat back into the tunnel. I tried to scream, but I could not expand my chest sufficiently to draw breath; all I managed was a gurgling whimper.
I struggled again and the face moved away from me, to be replaced by an enormous hand holding an outsized pair of metal fire tongs. A sharp stab of pain gripped my neck and coursed through my body and with one gigantic heave of the fire tongs, the monster pulled me into the cave. I crumpled on to the floor like a rag doll, my body pushed out of shape by the narrow tunnel.
The face bent over and peered at me again, then the dwarf turned and stumped away.
For a time I lay motionless, hardly daring to move. Eventually I raised my head and peered down the cave. For a moment it looked eerily small and cramped as if I were peering into a rabbits’ burrow; then it was huge and bright once more.
The dwarf seemed to be at least a hundred paces away, tiny now; I saw two others behind him, equally small, pumping something up and down, and I heard the hiss of distant bellows. Immediately the orange light became more intense. I knew now that the huge cavern was some kind of underground smithy and Wulf’s words roared back into my mind: he had forewarned that I would be ‘prepared’ by the dwarf smiths of the Underworld, magical dealers in wildfire.
The sight of the dwarf frightened me, yet I felt a strange sense of destiny as if I had been meant for this experience from the moment I was born. I had never even conceived of such a place as this cave, yet now that I was here I felt as if it was right, as if I belonged.
I rolled slowly into a crouching position and watched the first dwarf cracking a hammer down repeatedly onto a long thin piece of glowing metal resting on an anvil showering sparks, turning the metal deftly this way and that, always placing it precisely to meet the rhythmic drop of the hammer.
The smith plunged the red-hot strip of metal into a huge cauldron of water and a tremendous gush of steam hissed to the ceiling. Suddenly he turned a
nd stumped across the floor towards me with a tight, strangely constricted gait, and as he neared me he seemed to grow in proportion to the giant shadows he cast on the cave walls. He reached out a massive hand and gripped me. I squeaked with pain, but could do nothing. His arms had grown so that they were as thick as oak trunks and his mighty fist clamped my entire body, pinning my arms to my sides. He lifted me up high into the air, brought me close to his eyes and then he spoke:
‘All-Wise I am called: I dwell under Middle-Earth, in the rocks of the Underworld. I am a dwarf in the world of giants and a smith firing the secrets of sorcery.’
His voice was strangely and eerily beautiful and melodious, like the gentle rumble of an underground stream.
‘Declare your name,’ he said, more an invitation than a command.
I tried to speak, but could say nothing
‘Have you runes?’ he rumbled, raising eyebrows thick as black sheep.
I nodded weakly. I was terrified, yet I did not panic for I knew that he would not harm me.
Opening his hand, the giant dwarf held me in his palm like a trembling butterfly. I reached awkwardly into my tunic and pulled out the rune-stick. He took it, the stick tiny in his fingers, and read it out loud in words I did not understand. Then he carried me to his furnace and laid me gently on my back on a flat slab of rock, next to a mighty, black anvil of traditional shape but enormous proportions. The anvil was mounted on a gigantic slab of oak.
I swivelled my head to look past the anvil towards the fire. At least eight cauldrons seethed on top of the fire, the basin-shaped bottoms glowing red, and pillars of steam rose from their mouths to gather in the murky shadows of the cave roof.
The dwarf spoke again:
‘This is a sorcerer’s smithy, miles deep, where webs of wyrd are welded. Your runes are strong and call for urgent powers to recover a captured soul.’
Dimly, in the back of my mind, I puzzled over the fact that Wulf had cut the runes long before the spirits had captured my soul; but I no longer questioned such events. That much, at least, I had learned.
The smith spoke again: ‘You are a far-wanderer, traversing forests in the service of your god. It is the will of the spirits that you enter the realms of wyrd. I shall re-pattern your fibres, so that you may journey with a guardian into the world of spirits with the strength and vision of a sorcerer.’
He gestured towards the furnace.
‘Each of these cauldrons, hard-hammered in the heat of wyrd, will reveal powers. It is then your task to become aware of the secrets welded within you.’
The smith reached into the nearest steaming cauldron and pulled out the piece of metal he had hammered. It dripped and gleamed, two razor-sharp edges winking in the strange light, a long knife of such beauty and elegance as I had never seen before. My eyes were held in thrall by the blade, fascinated by the handle of horn he slid on to the hilt.
Suddenly the dwarf snatched me from the slab, I saw the knife flash and instantaneously I flew to the roof of the cave like a stone from a catapult. Floating high against the roof of rock, I had the incredible sensation of being in a body still, but a body without substance: my being seemed indistinguishable from the steam which swirled around me like a winter fog. For an instant the engulfing steam cleared and I glimpsed myself far below—or rather, I glimpsed my body lying still on the slab of rock. My mind registered terror but I felt no grip of emotion; only an acceptance, a resignation, a sense of helplessness. Steam poured across my vision and then cleared again; the body far below looked familiar and complete, yet strangely sparkling and iridescent.
Then the dwarf grasped the body and lifted it from the slab. The great knife slashed again and I gasped in wonder; he had sliced my body free from a mass of shimmering fibres and then cut it into pieces, flinging the parts into the various cauldrons boiling furiously on the fire.
I felt no pain, only the shock of the spectacle I was witnessing. The network of light that lay on the slab, conforming still to the shape of my body, was a wondrous sight. Running down the entire length of the spine was a strip of intense blue light; as I looked closer through the shifting curtain of mist, I could see that this light was a length of moving liquid webbing and that woven across and spraying out from the spine were countless more fibres—brilliant slivers of light, waving slowly like the white heads of seeding dandelions blown by a gentle breeze. Spasms of yellow or orange light pulsated along the blue spine, beating rhythmically like blood in a vein and spinning whirlpools of sparkling fibres bright as stars in a winter sky.
Steam blinded me again and I floated across the roof of the cave, drifting past the massive icicles of rock, until I could again see the dwarfs, the image undulating through the steam like an underwater scene.
I saw the dwarf take the pieces of my body one by one from the cauldrons. First my head was picked out and pounded on the anvil; I winced as the heavy hammer crashed, but could feel no pain. The furnace was roaring now with the pumping bellows of the other two dwarfs, and the smith plucked from the fire a strip of white-hot metal and forged something into my head. Then he seemed to take out the eyes and to do something to them with the strip of metal before putting them back. Again I felt a strange combination of involvement and detachment: part of the incredible ritual, yet separate from it.
When the dwarf had dealt with all of my body parts like a smith banging shapes out of metal, he laid the body next to the fibres and appeared to weld all the pieces together once more. Finally, gripping the network of fibres, he applied the hot poker from the furnace and seared a line right down the length of the spine. Working like a weaver, he plunged the fibres in and out of the body to form a web of light that penetrated through and beyond the boundaries of the skin. The entire procedure had been a terrible and a beautiful vision and though I felt no emotion, my thoughts seemed to soar with the enormity of it. I lost all sense of time. I did not know whether I had floated near the roof of that Underworld cave for seven heartbeats or seven moons.
Gradually I became aware of a sucking sensation and I fell backwards, plunging down as in a sudden awakening from a dream.
Then I slowed and came to rest gently. I felt a pounding in my chest and after a moment I realized that it was my heart beating I was back in my body. Almost immediately I was swept from the rock and thrown across the cave; the bright orange light went out like an extinguished candle, I was crammed into the darkness of the tunnel and then I smelled the freshness of the night air. I opened my eyes but could see nothing they were still adjusted to the orange light of the cave. But the fresh smell of grass filled my nostrils like a perfumed candle and I buried my face gratefully into the sopping night dew. After a short time I raised my head and looked around. I was lying on the grass near the wildfires and Wulf was sitting in silence, watching me.
‘Welcome back!’ he chuckled.
I pushed myself up to a kneeling position. I felt better than I had for days; the light-headedness was gone completely.
‘The dwarf has strengthened your body,’ he said, sounding delighted. ‘You are now ready to seek a guardian spirit.’
I looked down at my hands. In the firelight they looked unchanged and bore no sign of having been strengthened.
I did not know whether I had really encountered the dwarf or whether it had been a dream. I had come to accept that spirit forces were entering my life, but the Underworld experience had been so unbelievably fantastic that I had to doubt it.
‘Wulf, did I meet the dwarf in a dream?’
As soon as I asked the question, I knew the answer I wanted to hear. But Wulf took a longtime to answer.
‘If you can dream, then you can see the spirits,’ he said eventually. ‘Wryding life wallows in the indulgences of the word-hoard. Wyrds spin webs of deception and delusion. They shape and falsify our experience of wyrd to serve the human masters of fear and vanity. In dreams, however, words serve the true images of wyrd. In dreams the things we meet, even our enemies, tell us the truth, for in dreams we
meet souls freed from the fears and foibles of Middle-Earth. Dreams offer a fragmentary glimpse of the spirit-world. To enter the sorcery of wyrd one needs only to dream.’
I felt a sudden, devastating disappointment. I wanted fervently to believe that the dwarf had been something more than merely a figment of my night-time imaginings.
‘Can I never do more than glimpse the world of wyrd in dreams?’ I said sadly. ‘Is that all there is?’
I saw Wulf smile.
‘Brand, do not doubt that you journeyed to the Underworld, and the welders of wildfire have given you great powers. Do not doubt that and you will be able to use those powers.’
My heart quickened. ‘Now?’
He nodded.
‘Will you show me?’
Wulf pulled me to my feet and I stood for a few moments, trying to regain my sense of balance. My body felt very strong but strange, as if my centre of balance were lower, and yet I felt taller. I lifted up my tunic and explored my body with my hands; it did not feel any different and was still covered by the dried layer of paste Wulf had applied after the encounter with the Wyrd Sisters.
‘Is the green substance still affecting me?’ I asked, remembering the strange sensations that had followed Wulf’s treatment.
Wulf shook his head emphatically. ‘You have slept for a night, a day and into another night. The protective salve no longer has potency.’
He was crouching near one of the fires, scrutinizing me with half-closed eyes and smiling.
‘Brand, you are producing a vast quantity of life-force and your body can now contain it without bursting into flames. Your shadow-soul is projecting a spirit-skin of vibrant colour and potency and may be able to journey to the spirit-world to recover your soul. But first you need the assistance of a guardian spirit to accompany you, and before that you must learn how to use your fibres.’
Wulf stood and walked over to me. ‘Take off your clothes,’ he said.