Haunt Me Still

by Jennifer Lee Carrell

  A grumble of dissent rose from deep in Eircheard’s throat. “Cannot be,” he said, shaking his head. “It’s pattern-welded, like I said. A process that was lost for centuries before archaeologists and smiths put their heads together in the twentieth century and worked it out again.” He touched the knife with one finger, as if it might disappear. “So you see, it’s either under a hundred years old, probably well under—or nigh on a thousand.”

  The fire had cooled from white and lemony yellow to richer oranges. In the silence, the whole room seemed to flicker. The knife, too, seemed to be flickering.

  “So if it’s the original of these drawings—” I swallowed hard. “Then nigh on a thousand would be right.”

  I stared at the blade, its strange markings exactly mirrored in the drawing. “That’s impossible,” I said slowly. “Isn’t it?” for a moment, all of us stood in a circle staring down at the knife.

  “Could a blade survive that long in this condition?” asked Ben. “Still bright, still holding an edge?”

  “I don’t ken of any,” said Eircheard. “But I don’t ken any reason why one couldn’t, were it taken care of properly. Not on a Scottish hill, mind. Or in one, at any rate. Our hills are a wee bit damp, if you haven’t noticed, and damp’s no friend to a bonnie bright blade such as this. But taken care of—well, steel’s wonderful strong stuff.”

  The heat of the forge was suddenly making me dizzy. The battle in 1054 had pitted Macbeth’s Scots against Malcolm’s invading army of Sassenach Northumbrians—a combination of northern Anglo-Saxons and Viking mercenaries. Had one of them carried this knife?

  Nigh on a thousand years old. I found myself staring at a corner of the drawing. In a fine copperplate hand, someone had written a few lines of description. I read them aloud: Black hilt of fine-grained wood. A polished steel guard. Barbarian inscription down the center of the blade, and another around the hilt.

  I looked up. “Another inscription?”

  “Well, now,” Eircheard said, stroking his beard. “I’d forgotten about that.”

  I picked up the rag and dipped it in the oil, brushing it around the metal ring at the base of the hilt, where it joined the blade. Very faintly, runes appeared, running around the perimeter in an unbroken ring. No beginning, no end—not even any divisions between words. “It’s a round,” said Eircheard softly. “A phrase that begins and ends with the same word or syllable. But on the blade, see, that word’ll only be engraved once. So that the phrase runs round and round in a never-ending circle. Strong magic, that was thought to be.”

  Pulling a pad of paper toward him, Eircheard turned the knife slowly until he found a word he recognized and began transcribing, first dividing the runes into words and then putting them into the modern alphabet:

  He bit his lip, concentrating. “Buto plus an abbreviation for thætte, ‘Except that,’” he murmured. “Northumbrian dialect. Then you skip to bith, or ‘is,’ negated by na ne, or ‘not.’ Then nawiht, ‘nothing,’ and a, or ‘always.’” He scribbled out the whole sentence in block letters:

  EXCEPT THAT WHICH IS NOT NOTHING ALWAYS

  “Sounds more Eeyore than warrior,” said Ben.

  Eircheard ignored him. “Like I said, it’ll make a phrase that begins and ends with the same word. Let me think….” He sat staring at the blade, his fingers rubbing his temples.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” he said after a few minutes, his breath coming out in a long whistle. “It’s bith.” Hunching over the pad, he wrote out another line, rearranging the words:

  BITH NAWIHT A BUTO THÆTTE NA NE BITH

  “What’s it mean?”

  It was Sybilla who’d asked the question, but it was me he looked at as he answered it. “Nothing ever is but that which is not,” he translated.

  “Begins and ends with ‘not,’” said Ben. “I like it. It’s even a round in modern English.”

  The whole smithy seemed to be rising, spinning around me. “You know it in its shorter form, lass, no?” Eircheard asked softly.

  I nodded, and my throat moved, but no words came out. It was Lady Nairn who spoke, her voice no more than a dry whisper. “Nothing is but what is not.”

  Ben frowned. “Sounds familiar.”

  “It’s Shakespeare,” said Lady Nairn. “It’s Macbeth,” I said, the words seeming heavy, slow, impossible, as they floated away from me.

  Sybilla glanced at all of us in turn, frowning. “But I thought you said the knife was a thousand years old. How can it quote Macbeth if it’s a thousand years old?”

  “It can’t,” I said. “It would have to be the other way around.”

  “Runes can be added,” Lady Nairn said again, her voice harsh as a crow’s.

  “In Old English verse?” shot Eircheard. “Complete with alliteration, correct stress, and decent meter? Possible, not likely.”

  I ran a hand through my hair. “But that means swallowing the notion that Shakespeare not only marched up to Scotland and saw this knife, but that he could read Anglo-Saxon—in runes, no less. It’s absurd.”

  The blade winked mockingly in the light. Nothing is but what is not.

  Eircheard went to a cupboard, where he drew down five mismatched tumblers and a squat, wide-shouldered bottle of single-malt Scotch. “A blade called Blood Serpent, ringed with an unbroken verse about the intertwined web of being and not being—that’s a blade that has killed plenty,” he said as he splashed a finger of amber whisky into each glass and shoved them around the table. “But Ben’s right. The inscription doesn’t read like a warrior’s thought.” His eyes met Lady Nairn’s.

  “It reads like magic,” she said.

  He nodded. “I think you’ve found a ritual blade. Never seen one, mind you, but there are whispers of them in the old stories. If that’s the case, maybe it wasn’t this blade that Shakespeare somehow knew. Maybe it was the ritual it was used for.

  “religious rites have longer lives and a wider reach than any single object used within them. If you found a thousand-year-old chalice engraved with a line from the Latin Mass, should you infer that someone who’d quoted the Mass in English yesterday, or four hundred years ago, for that matter, had seen that particular cup? Or only that they both knew some form of the same rite?”

  The fire in the forge had cooled even further, to a simmering red that brought the pattern of the blade to life. It seemed to writhe and undulate, coiling and uncoiling like the creature for which it was named.

  “What ritual would require such a blade?” Sybilla’s eyes glittered.

  He shrugged. “Hard to say.” He poured out another splash of whisky and wiped his forehead with his arm. “Neither the Anglo-Saxons nor the Celts were shy about sacrifice, though. There’s a roman account of Celtic priestesses dressed all in white, moving through sacred groves dispatching victims with sacred blades, cutting their throats and letting the blood run into a cauldron.” He drained his glass, sucking the last drop of whisky through his teeth. “Like I said, I haven’t seen a ritual blade. But I’ve handled a fair few that’ve seen hard use in battle. Something strange happens to blades that have drunk a fair lot of blood. They wake. Not quite alive, but, still—sentient, somehow. And some of them grow to want more. Blood, I mean.” for a moment, there was no sound between us save the guttering of the fire. Then, from the back of the smithy, came a shrill cry. We turned to hear a grating sound floating in through a narrow window high up in the wall. The noise grew into a rumbling, rattling slide like a sudden fall of rock and then faded to silence. For an instant, no one moved. Then Eircheard and Ben sprinted out of the open front and around the corner toward the rear of the building. Snatching up the knife from the table, I followed close behind. A stack of crates and pallets under the window had collapsed in a heap that was still groaning and settling. Just beyond, what looked like a small shed clung to the back wall. The door was ajar.

  “Come out, you wee rotten scunner,” growled Eircheard.

  Inside, nothing moved.

  He ya
nked the door open and shone a flashlight inside, revealing a bedroom, neat as a monk’s cell and as small—barely big enough for Eircheard to lie down in. It was empty.

  “Can’t’ve gone far,” said Eircheard.

  Ben turned and shone the flashlight about the area around the back of the smithy. Patiently, he and Eircheard began scanning the ground for clues.

  They’d just disappeared around the far corner, heading into the field beyond, when something caught my eye off to the right. Someone moving stealthily back into the woods that divided the smithy from the hill, and from Dunsinnan House.

  If I yelled, the intruder would take off. If I waited for Ben and Eircheard, or went to fetch them, the intruder would be long gone.

  My grip on the knife tightening, I slipped into the woods in the wake of the shadow.

  The woods turned out to be a stand no more than ten feet thick, after which they opened up again. At the edge of this clearing, I paused. It was not a work of nature. It was a carefully shaped circle, lined on the inside with a ring of immense old beech trees, the last of their leaves rustling like dry paper. Inside the trees hunched a circle of standing stones. Not as tall or as massive as Stonehenge. Lumpier, somehow. Older and less refined. And in the darkness, far more powerful. A brooding, ancient power.

  Wind swept through the treetops. I glanced up, watching them bend and lash against the star-scattered circle of night overhead, their moaning rising from a low murmur to the howl of an oceanic gale. Leaves floated downward in large, eddying flakes, as if the sky were snowing darkness. I shivered and drew my jacket closer around me.

  When I looked back down, a figure stood in the center of the stones. The silhouette, black on black, of a woman from an earlier century, her long hair and gown stirring in the wind. A dry hiss left her lips, and she began to glide toward me.

  10

  THE BLADE in my hand burned with a cold fire; it seemed to buzz at a pitch so low that I felt rather than heard it, as if it were resonating with some strong source of energy. Backing a few paces, I turned to run, but her arm whipped out and gripped my wrist. I yelped, but only a squeak came out.

  “It’s me, Kate,” she whispered. “Lily.”

  Lily alive, or Lily dreamed and dead? My heart thudding hard in my chest, I slowly turned around.

  Her face was pale in the faint light, her wide-set eyes large and dark. What had looked like the gown of a renaissance lady resolved into a coat with a tight bodice and long flaring skirt. Above the coat, her throat was a pale column, unmarked.

  “Do you think it’s true?” she asked in a low voice. “Do you think that’s a ritual knife?”

  I glanced down at the dagger and then back up. “How much did you overhear?”

  “All of it.” She grinned sheepishly. From over at the smithy came a shout. “Kate!” It was Lady Nairn.

  “Damn,” said Lily. Her grip on my arm tightened. “Please don’t tell her I was here. I’m already entry A-one on her shit list.”

  I was staring at her wrist gripping my arm. On it was a small tattoo I hadn’t noticed before. A delicate five-pointed star. A pentacle, the symbol of witches—of Wicca, the neo-pagan religion of witchcraft.

  Lady Nairn called again. “Please,” whispered Lily, her eyes pleading. “I won’t tell a soul.”

  Fifteen going on twenty-five, Lady Nairn had said of her. In the days following my parents’ death, I’d been very like her. Unpredictable and a little wild. But she was, at heart, a good kid. “Go on, then,” I said with a wave of the hand.

  She flashed a wide smile. “Thanks. You’re awesome.” She dashed across the circle, in the direction of Dunsinnan House.

  In a bright, evil flare the image of her body, bound and naked on the hilltop, flashed across my mind. “Lily,” I said, stepping after her. At the far edge of the clearing, she looked back. “You’ll be all right?” I asked, feeling suddenly both frightened and foolish.

  “No worries. We’re practically in the back garden. Besides, we’re too bloody far out in the sticks for a bogeyman to bother in the first place.” And then she was gone, her passing barely stirring up a rustle amid the deep bracken.

  I was turning to head back to the forge when a voice whispered out from the woods at my back. Why did you bring the dagger from that place?

  I whirled. “Who’s there?”

  Another voice snaked from the right. It must lie there….

  And a third voice came from the left. Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.

  The wind tossed in the trees, and I thought I saw shadows glide in toward the stones as all three voices spoke at once: She must die.…

  Gripping the knife close, I turned slowly about.

  “Kate!” This time, it was Ben’s voice. Flashlight beams criss-crossed the night, and footsteps pounded across the field toward the woods.

  Thirty seconds later, a flashlight beam strafed the clearing. Eircheard and Ben crashed through the trees in its wake.

  Ben took one glance at the knife and looked up at my face. “Are you all right?”

  “Someone was here.” I swallowed hard.

  “What happened?” asked Eircheard.

  I shook my head. “Nothing. Voices. I saw nothing but shadows.”

  Ben was scanning the ground around the stones.

  “Kids,” said Eircheard with contempt. “At a certain age, the village kids love to scare themselves silly telling ghost stories in the circle. Make a night of it, they do, by heading over to snoop about the forge. A few of them, you can see their eyes all starry with dreams of lame smiths forging magic rings and dragon chains. Most of them, though, are just idling, hoping to see me burn the place down, maybe the woods with it. Sodding little pyros.”

  “Not kids,” I said. Lily had been here, only moments before. Was I sure of that?

  I looked at Ben. “They were the same voices I heard on the hill this morning.” That time, there had also been a body.

  I told them what I’d heard, thinking through the words as I did. Why did you bring the dagger from that place? It must lie there…. Lady Macbeth’s cry to her husband after he’s killed the king, with the dagger made singular. “Put it back,” was the gist of it.

  Auld Callie’s words exactly.

  But the voices had stolen Sir Angus’s words, too. Dunsinnan must go to Birnam Wood.

  All in all, a fairly clear message: Drop the dagger, go after the manuscript—or whatever it was that Sir Angus had been after.

  Who would need to tell me that in the guise of ghosts in a stone circle? And tack on a death threat, besides.

  She must die.

  Who must die?

  “Jesus,” said Eircheard. “No, not kids.”

  Lady Nairn and Sybilla walked into the clearing. “A stone circle,” cried Sybilla, clasping her hands in delight. “I knew it. I knew there was a place of power hereabouts.”

  “Everything all right?” asked Lady Nairn. “I’d like to go to Birnam Wood,” I said.

  She looked from me to Ben and Eircheard and nodded. “I’ve organized a reading of the play on the hill at sunrise,” she said. “To begin the celebration of Samhuinn. We’ll head to Birnam directly after that.”

  It would do. It would have to.

  Sybilla was standing in the middle of the circle, swaying a little. “The knife belongs here,” she said. “I can feel it.”

  Irritation suddenly overwhelmed me. “The stone circles of Britain—and I am assuming this is one of them—are Neolithic,” I said crossly. “Stone Age. The druids were Iron Age Celts. And if Eircheard is right about the knife, it’s late Anglo-Saxon, which makes it medieval, at least five hundred years after the fall of rome. So where that knife belongs is anybody’s guess, but it isn’t here.”

  Sybilla wasn’t fazed. “It’s a sacred knife, and this is a sacred place. It belongs.”

  I gave up. “I’m heading back to bed.”

  “High time we all followed suit,” said Lady Nairn.

  At the smithy, Eircheard g
ave me a leather scabbard for the knife, and then we made our way back to the house in silence. Orion the hunter, his star-studded knife at his belt, was just rising into the southeastern sky. To our left, the hill seemed to lean down over us, heavy with menace. Or maybe it was just mockery.

  We said good-night to each other at the upstairs landing. Sybilla’s hand lingered on Ben’s arm in unspoken invitation, but he discreetly disengaged himself and walked me down the hall. Just outside my door, he stopped.

  His clean, slightly spicy scent sped through me until my whole body ached for him.

  Nothing is but what is not.

  “Hide it,” he said with a glance at the scabbard in my hand. “Are you okay with that? Or would you like some help?”

  “I can take it from here, thanks.” Bastard.

  He opened his mouth to say something but thought better of it. “Good-night, Kate.” Turning the corner, he walked ten feet down the corridor. Lady Nairn had given him the room right next to mine.

  In that, I thought I saw the long hand of Athenaide.

  Just inside my room, I leaned back against the door, wondering whether I was about to cry or scream. In the end I did neither, splashing water on my face at the sink instead.

  A small fire was burning cheerily in the fireplace; the luxuries of life with a staff, I thought. Toweling off, I sank into one of the armchairs before the fire and drew the knife out of the sheath, watching it ripple in the light. My outburst in the circle had left me shaken. Not just because it had been childish, but because for all that my facts were right, it was Sybilla who had hit, however messily, upon some truth. Not about the knife, but about the place. There was something strange about that circle in its clearing in the woods. A place of power, she’d said. And she was right. I’d felt it too. But I wasn’t as sure as she was that the power there was entirely benign.

  She must die, the voices had chanted. Who must die?