Moon Lord: The Fall of King Arthur - The Ruin of Stonehenge

by J. P. Reedman

  Mordraed hesitated, waves of sickness rushing over him. To take the hand of the man he had slain… Slowly, reluctantly, he took the other’s hand, not quite knowing why he did so, when it would be so easy now to turn away. This ending was not as he expected; in his mind’s eye he had seen himself standing over Gal’havad’s inert form, the proud conqueror, shouting his triumph to the world. Instead he felt sick, as if heart and guts were being wrung from within, and all he had striven for and desired so much seemed bleak and pointless as an old worm-eaten skull. Gal’havad had stood in his way, but he had helped him too, had sworn to give him lands and riches had he lived to be king. And surely he would have kept his word, for Gal’havad was a man of honour… unlike Mordraed, son of the serpent-woman, with her cold blood running in his veins.

  Unexpectedly Mordraed began to cry. It burst from him like a wave from the sea, unwanted and unstoppable.

  “Don’t grieve for me,” Gal’havad whispered, squeezing his fingers with rapidly dwindling strength. “It is the will of the Ancestors. That must be why my own cup went missing, it was taken from me by the spirits so that I could enter the doors of their domain.”

  Mordraed wept even harder, guilt and remorse and anger and other feelings long suppressed rose in him like a furious storm. The remains of Gal’havad’s talisman lay a mere foot or two away, crushed by his feet. His! Not the spirits’… Even in dying, Gal’havad was deluded; there was none whom the Gods loved, only those whom base men hated… Men like Mordraed, lusting for power at any price…

  Was the price too high to pay?

  Gal’havad slumped back onto the cold flagstones, the Cup lying fallen beside him, his hair a radiant sun wheel around his drained face. “Farewell, my friend,” he muttered. “I can see the steeds of the sea with white warriors riding on them wielding long spears of light. They come for me, to bear me to the lands where falls not the rain, nor snow, nor any tears, where Sun and Moon are never dim, and there is no sorrow. I… I…” His voice was barely above a whisper; a haze of bloody mucus marred his pale mouth. “I… will miss you… you were like my brother…”

  “I… I am your brother.” Mordraed leaned over him, his tears falling freely onto his pallid face, and kissed him on the mouth, as if hoping his pain and the poison that destroyed his innards would pass to him too.

  Gal’havad gazed up at him and smiled through his pain. Then suddenly he took one great gasping breath and no more.

  A dark madness grasped hold of Mordraed, a monster lurking in his head that sank claws and teeth into his brain, into his very spirit. He flung himself down across the inert body of Gal’havad and screamed his rage and fear and grief and confusion into the echoing chambers of God’s Peak.

  *****

  Ardhu’s men heard the first cry, a haunting howl so agonised it sounded scarcely human. Standing beside her father Maheloas, Ivormyth gave a terrified gasp and dropped the beaker she had been holding for a celebratory draught when Gal’havad emerged from Spiralfort. It smashed on the cobbles, dark contents staining white quartz like blood.

  Ardhu sprang forward, throwing himself with abandon into the mouth of the tomb, Hwalchmai and Bohrs hot on his heels, and the other three men behind them with drawn axes. They skidded and slid in the darkness, shouting in anger and pain as they crashed into the jagged juts of stone that thrust out into the narrow passage.

  At last Ardhu stumbled out into the awful, flickering light in the terminal chamber. He saw the corbelled dome, stained with soot; he saw the side transepts with their beautiful yet sinister basins filled with pale ash and clinkers of welded human fat and hair.

  He saw Mordraed crouched down on the floor, a hunched shadow on the dusty flagstones. He saw the Golden Cup, the prize he had sought for his Land, fallen, dented, rolling in the wind that blew up the central passage.

  And he saw Gal’havad lying as if asleep, his hair the setting sun around him, his face as white as the chalk of the Great Plain, or the Mother Moon, or the bones of the dead. His lips curved in a faint, unfathomable smile, as if he knew some eldritch secret, some special mystery reserved for him alone… but they were blue, with no breath passing between them. The Prince of Twilight had passed into the twilight of Ahn-un… and his passing brought darkness and night to the heart of Ardhu Pendraec.

  “What have you done?” Ardhu screamed at Mordraed. Grabbing his shoulder, he wrenched him up and flung him away from the body of Gal’havad.

  Mordraed hit the wall and slumped back to the ground, throwing his arms up over his head. “I did not touch him!” he gasped. “I swear it. The spirits have taken him; he was always close to their world!”

  Ardhu drew Caladvolc, its long blade a tongue of blood in the fluttering lantern-light. His eyes were stony, maddened. Hwalchmai clutched his chief’s sword arm, trying to wrest the weapon from him. “No, Ardhu… do not do this, you cannot shed blood here… You have no proof, it may not be a lie… the boy is clearly grieved!”

  They strove together for a moment or two, then suddenly Ardhu let go of the sword hilt. Caladvolc clattered to the ground. Ardhu stared at his fallen weapon, and then at Gal’havad’s body. Mordraed was forgotten. Ardhu’s visage drained, becoming nearly as pale as that of the dead youth, and he crashed down on his knees.

  At the entrance of Spiralfort, the warriors of Ardhu could hear Maheloas and others moving, calling out and asking what was wrong. The men drew their axes and daggers, ready to defend their mourning chief and the body of his son, though there were only four of them. Mordraed, slouched against the wall, choking with the madness of his unforeseen grief and guilt, was forgotten.

  “Do you think they have murdered him?” Bohrs glanced at Hwalchmai. “Was this their plan, to poison Gal’havad? But why? They seemed peaceable and kindly hosts!”

  “I do not know.” said Hwalchmai shook his head grimly. “But in my heart I do not think they are to blame. Maybe the gods did but act… Gal’havad, may his spirit travel light to the Uttermost West, was purer of mind and body than the rest of us… but he was unwell and becoming more so. Whatever the truth, Maheloas’s folk must not come in here and see Ardhu in his grief… We will come out when we are ready. Block the entrance if you must, till Ardhu is himself again.”

  Bohrs thrust his corpulent frame into the narrow passageway. “Hold, friends!” he shouted down the shadowy corridor. “A great evil has fallen upon us. Let us deal with this as best we can, in the way of our people, and when we are ready we will come out to you.”

  Hwalchmai went to Ardhu and laid a steadying hand on his shoulder. “Kinsman,” he said gently. “We need to take him from here. The people of Maheloas are wondering what has happened. This is their tomb of Ancestors; we cannot keep them from it for long.”

  Ardhu lifted his head; Hwalchmai gaped for it was as if the hand of time had struck his cousin a resounding blow. He looked as deathly as Gal’havad, waxen, suddenly aged. Slowly, like a very old man, he clambered to his feet. “Lift him,” he murmured his voice grating in his throat. “Bear him from this place as one would a returning warrior.”

  Hwalchmai and Bohrs went to Gal’havad and gently lifted him, wrapping him in his cloak. They supported his head, while the other men lifted his legs, and they raised him to their shoulders. Ardhu picked up Caladvolc from where it had fallen, and holding it aloft like a brand began a slow march from the heart of God’s Peak, leading the makeshift funeral cortege. Mordraed scrambled up and staggered behind the others, ignored as if he did not exist.

  The warband exited the tomb with grave dignity, watching the faces of the tribesmen gathered in the forecourt. The horrified expressions of Maheloas and Ivormyth immediately told them that their hosts had not played them false; that they had nothing to do with the death of Gal’havad.

  Ivormyth began to wail and keen, tearing her hair; Maheloas tried to draw her to him but she pulled away and ran toward Ardhu and his men. “What evil had befallen? What evil?” she cried. “Oh, let me see him, who was the Prince of Twil
ight, who was to be my husband!”

  In silence Ardhu gestured to his men and they laid their burden on the earth before the spiral stone that was the Watcher’s eyes, a Bull, a Wave of the Sea. Ivormyth knelt beside Gal’havad, leaning over his body and rocking with grief. Briefly she kissed his pale lips, and her face twisted. “There is death in his mouth! I can taste it. Such bitterness was not in the draught I gave to him!”

  Immediately Bohrs’s gaze swivelled to Mordraed, crouching by a kerbstone like some crushed spider, his hair a tangled web over his white, red-eyed face. “You! What were you doing in there? You had no right to be within the sacred space!”

  Mordraed raised his head; he looked haunted… and hunted; he knew his position was a precarious one. “You cannot blame me!” he gasped. “He was my… cousin, I loved him, we fought side by side! I went in there to… to protect him! I suspected from the start that all was not as it should be. The girl… she attached to him as a burr sticks to a horse’s mane! She hardly knew him, it was not natural! I hid to make sure he would not be harmed… but I failed him; he drank that cup of poison before I could make myself known and strike it from his hands.”

  Hwalchmai frowned. “Inside God’s Peak you said that you thought the spirits had taken him. You mentioned naught of poison.”

  Mordraed licked his lips; he pointed a shaking hand of Ivormyth.

  “She mentioned the poison; she damned herself out of her own mouth.”

  Ivormyth cried out, angry and grief-stricken at once. “I noted the taste of it upon his lips; I would hardly have done the act then announced it to you and my folk!”

  The tribesmen behind Maheloas began to murmur, angered by Mordraed’s accusations. The flames of the eternal lamps of Uffern gleamed on newly-drawn daggers.

  Maheloas held up his arms, shaking his head is dismay. “Enough, all of you! Put up your blades! Evil has marred this night already. Ardhu Pendraec…” he took a stride toward Ardhu and clasped his arms at the elbow; Ardhu barely moved, hardly reacted; his face was near as lifeless as that of Gal’havad, “I swear by the Almighty Sun, by the Good God, by Ahn-an whose breasts are the Mountains, and by Crooked Krom who carries the Grain-of-the-World upon his back, that my people and I are blameless of any wrong doing in this matter. I can only guess what happened to your son. Maybe the spirits did reach out to take him; it is not for me to say. Or maybe you can think of other possibilities…” His pale blue gaze, glistening, slid toward Mordraed. “But be that as it may, do not bring your anger and your bloodshed to this place. I would counsel that you go back to Prydn as soon as your grief is no longer raw. You may take the Cup with you; for it was won by the Prince of Twilight.”

  Ardhu jerked into life, shaking his head as if to clear it from evil dreams; perhaps he hoped he truly did but dream and he would awake and the world would be in its normal balance once more, and Gal’havad would rise from the ground, with laughter on his lips and the sunset trapped in his locks. “There is no point in taking it, this Cup of Life that brought his death! If the world was barren and failing before; it is truly the Wasteland now, at least for me. And so it shall ever be.”

  Stooped like some hoary elder, he turned to his warband… what remained of them. Only five still lived, including Mordraed. All in all, including himself and Betu’or, if his loyal friend had survived the wait upon the sea-strand, only seven of his once mighty warband would return to Prydn from Spiralfort. He had failed utterly; once he had been as the rising Sun, growing brighter and more powerful in strength… now it was as if his Sun had tumbled from the sky, leaving a bleak world of Winter and despair in its wake.

  Hwalchmai made a coughing noise. “Ardhu, I know this is a time of great sorrow but we must decide and decide quickly… what are we to do with Gal’havad’s body?”

  Startled, Ardhu glared at him. “We take him home, to the sacred cemeteries of Khor Ghor.”

  Bohrs nervously shifted from one foot to the other. “Ardhu… my friend, my lord of these long years, it is not possible. You know that. We cannot carry a body with us while travelling many days, nor can we afford to tarry here while he lays open to the sky. We must bury him in Ibherna, wherever we are permitted…”

  “No!” A muscle jumped in Ardhu’s jaw. “He will not stay in the land where he died! I forbid it!”

  Maheloas stepped forward, his hands clasped, his fingers knotted together, working nervously. “He died while in our territory; we will help you,” he said gravely. “Our great Ancestor-tomb has been made unclean by the evil that has happened today. We must sanctify and purify… with fire.”

  “You would cremate him. Burn him on the pyre.”

  Maheloas bowed his head. “If it is your will.”

  Ardhu passed his hand over his brow, lines of strain clear on his face. “So be it… I can see no other way. Once the deed is done, I can take his bones back to Prydn to be buried in earth-houses of his own Ancestors.”

  Maheloas gestured towards his waiting people, the grim-featured warriors, the weeping women. “We must make ready a pyre for the Prince of Twilight, the holy one, the Cup-winner… he whom the gods loved so much they have taken him to the Plain of Honey this very day. Go to the House of the West and prepare it to receive Gal’havad, son of Ardhu Pendraec.”

  *****

  The pyre was ready by Sunrise. Gal’havad had been laid on an oak plank in the centre of the timber cult-house, knees curled up as if asleep, his face turned toward the East as was the custom of his people. Burnished copper, his long hair lay spread out over his shoulders and around his face, and his woven cloak, coloured violet with the dye from the magic stones in the Sacred Pool behind Kham-El-Ard, covered him from mid-chest to feet. His amber necklace hung about his neck, glowing, its strange insects frozen in time; and he too, given false semblance of life by the dawn, seemed to be caught in time, a vision to be remembered for eternity by all who gathered there.

  The men of Spiralfort gathered around him, placing brush and dried reeds around his bier to help fuel the fire. Heaps of skins lay round as offerings, and women brought meadowsweet and wild flowers in great bunches and beakers of drink so that he would not thirst upon his Great Journey. Maheloas danced and invoked the Sky, the Ancestors, the Earth itself, and with Ivormyth laid protective lumps of quartz, the stone of the Moon, the stone of the Sun, around Gal’havad, placing one clear fine rock before his face so that his spirit, if still travelling to the West, could clearly see the way within its depth.

  Ardhu took up Gal’havad’s dagger, the gift from An’kelet for his manhood rites. He broke the tip, drawing blood from his own hands as he killed the spirit of the weapon, sending it to the Deadlands alongside his son. Likewise he took Gal’havad’s bow and with a great cry snapped it in two across his knee before placing the fragments across Gal’havad’s legs and tipping the contents of his quiver of arrows after it.

  Lastly Ivormyth brought the Cup of Gold, the fatal Cup that had brought death and not the renewed life Ardhu had hoped. Hands trembling, she set it down on the bier close to Gal’havad’s hand. It had been a relic, sacred to the God Dag, but her people wanted nothing to do with it now; its magic had turned bad, feast falling to famine.

  This last act done, Ardhu and his men and the folk of Spiralfort departed the House of the West, Maheloas cutting the throat of a black-faced lamb against the blocky standing stone in the doorway to sanctify and seal the funeral chamber with blood. Once outside, he gestured to his followers and they set many brands alight with their flint strike-a-lights. Solemnly, he handed one to Ardhu. “It is your right, Ardhu Pendraec, to start the flames that will light his way to the land of the Ancestors.”

  Ardhu walked toward the cult-house, grey as a winter’s night, no life in his eyes, like a dead man who yet walked. He paused for an instant, gazing into the gloom of the chamber, taking in one last glimpse of Gal’havad that must last him to the end of his days… and then, with a violent motion, he thrust the burning torch into the reed thatching.

/>   A whooshing noise filled the air and the thatch caught alight. Flames raced up the roof and over it in a searing sheet. Ardhu’s warband and the people of Spiralfort hurled their torches after it, adding to the conflagration. A wind, blowing from the East, fuelled the fire and it sprang ever higher, roaring and crackling. The chamber was consumed, as twisted orange flames spiralled into the air and oily smoke belched above the quartz-faced mound of God’s Peak.

  Maheloas began to chant before the burning house, and his men followed suit, rubbing ash and dirt on their cheeks to emulate the dead man within the tomb of fire. The women hewed off hanks of their own hair and flung it into the inferno as an offering to any passing spirits; it sizzled and sparked, sending up a horrible, acrid scent that mingled with that of the pyre.

  Then Ivormyth walked toward the pyre, slowly, stately, a strange twisted expression on her face—suffering mixed with determination. She dropped her spotted cowskin cloak to the ground and the watchers gasped as they saw that she was arrayed with gold from head to toe—a gorget with flower-faced terminals, buttons like rayed suns with jet surrounds, a belt of woven strands closed with a massive polished buckle. She drifted towards the burning hut, her hair streaming out behind her like a tendril of escaped smoke.

  She halted near the entrance, blinking as smoke and glowing embers billowed around her. Nothing could be seen of Gal’havad amidst the smoke and fire. The stone in the mouth of the hut seemed to glow with a sullen reddish light as flames licked greedily around it.

  Ivormyth looked from her sire, Maheloas, to Ardhu and then to Mordraed, who stood behind the rest of Ardhu’s warband, pushed to the back, forgotten in their grief for their lost prince. White as bone, his countenance was wracked by sorrow… and guilt. He held his arms protectively across his body, as if expecting blows from some otherworldly agent.

  “I was named as the killer of Gal’havad son of Ardhu by one of this company,” Ivormyth said in a clear, ringing voice, her gaze still locked on Mordraed. “That was the cruellest lie ever spoken by man’s lips on this Isle of the Blessed. I have harmed none in my short life; I served my father and the Ancestors well. I was to wed the Prince of the Twilight, and was glad to do so. I was happy to lie at his side in life… and to prove that I am no murderer, I will show all how true I am to him and to his blessed memory. Today I will join the Prince of Twilight as his bride in the realm of the Not-world.”