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

by J. P. Reedman

  “Betu’or…” his voice was fading; his fingers, cold, touched Betu’or’s arm. “Long ago I spared your life… now it is time you did something for me in return. The sword… the sword Lady Nin-Aeifa gave me… It must go back whence it came. Back into the Sacred Pool, into the holy waters. Will you take it there and return it to the spirits? I ask you because you are Betu’or, Knower of the Graves… Will you find the watery resting place for this thing of power?”

  “I will, lord,” said Betu’or, and he picked up the broken shards of Caladvolc, held them to his face and wept.

  Ardhu gazed up at the sky; the clouds had suddenly rolled away and the heavens were bright with a thousand stars. The Cloak of Nud, the Milky Way, stretched above the Stones and into infinity. He smiled. He could hear the Hounds of Hwynn the Fire-White, god of the Mortuary, baying faintly and then louder, as they sallied forth from Hwynn’s stronghold at the Tor and came towards him.

  And then he was away with them, over the Great Plain and into the ultimate West.

  CHAPTER TWENTY ONE

  INTO ETERNITY

  An’kelet camped before the gates of Kham-El-Ard with his men around him in hastily thrown-up tents and shelters. Every now and then, he glanced into the shadows by the banks of Abona. The Moon had long risen and Ardhu had not returned from Khor Ghor; he had sent Ardhu’s most trusted warriors after him as agreed… but they had not returned either.

  A knot of dread had settled in his belly, cold as the bone-white Moon floating in the sky.

  Where could they be?

  Suddenly, he heard the hammering of a horse’s hooves. Grasping his spear, he raced in the direction of the noise. A pale grey horse was flying down the Avenue, heedless of any missiles fired from the ramparts of Kham-El-Ard, where Mordraed’s warriors foamed and fretted like mad dogs bound on the lead.

  The horse wheeled to a halt near An’kelet’s encampment and the Ar-moran prince saw Hwalchmai, Hawk of the Plain, drop from the saddle-pad, his knees almost giving way as his feet struck the ground. He staggered toward An’kelet, footsteps so laboured and heavy that An’kelet thought he might be wounded.

  “Hwalchmai, what has happened?” he shouted, hurrying towards the shambling figure.

  Hwalchmai said no word. He glanced up at An’kelet, his eyes shining and wet, star-silvered. Reaching under his short fringed cloak, he drew out Ardhu’s Lightning Mace, symbol of the Stone Lord’s authority in Prydn. Its fossil head was smeared with blood.

  Kneeling on the ground, he bowed his head and proffered the Mace to An’kelet.

  And above him, the men waiting in the fort of Kham-El-Ard, seeing this as a token of Mordraed’s victory, went wild.

  *****

  Dawn broke, sullen and red. Blood and fire everywhere, in the sky, on the river, on the ground. The Sun was a hot ball of flame over the horizon, while beneath its rays Kham-El-Ard burned, the greatest fortress in that age of the world, gone forever. Great oak posts toppled and tumbled into the defensive ditches, while gouts of flame shot heavenward and black smoke curled, a shroud that blocked half the morning sky.

  An’kelet leaned on his spear, breathing heavily, his heart a stone. He had tried to avert such a disaster but Mordraed’s men, believing their master was victorious, had acted in berserker fury, flooding down the Crooked Hill like a hive of angry bees, breaking the truce between the two warbands in their madness. An’kelet’s more experienced warriors had taken them on in one great wave, driving them back up to the gates, killing half of them with arrowfire alone… Upon sensing imminent and utter defeat, Mordraed’s band had acted with rashness, firing the dun around them as they retreated into its interior. The dry posts and the thatched huts and Hall had ignited almost instantly.

  Everything lay in ruins… and yet An’kelet had won.

  “Look.” At his side Hwalchmai pointed to the Sacred Avenue. “He comes. Ardhu comes home… one last time.”

  An’kelet shaded his gaze against the brightness in the heavens. On the Avenue he could see figures moving slowly, heads bowed in mourning. A supine figure lay across their shoulders, raised up toward the strengthening face of Bhel.

  “We will go to the River,” he said. “And wait. Then we will prepare him for his last journey and do what must be done.”

  *****

  Betu’or the Knower of the Graves stood beside the Sacred Pool at the foot of Kham-El-Ard, the place where the Old Hunters had gathered millennia past to hunt the great cats, the antlered deer, the mighty aurochs that could feed a whole tribe for a whole Moon. Coils of mist twisted from the waters; below the greenish surface, amidst moving weeds, bubbles streamed to the surface and burst.

  Betu’or stood on the pool’s edge, one foot in the holy spring, one on dry land—standing between the worlds of men and the watery Otherworld. In his hands he held the two shards of Caladvolc Hard-Cleft, shattered against the stony flank of Throne of Kings. He held up the pieces to catch the light, to let all those assembled in the woods behind see that they were truly broken, their spirits released forever and sent from the domains of mortal men.

  A sigh went through the assembly, flowing out into the bright morning, and with that Betu’or flung the shards high into the air over the Sacred Pool. They spun in mid-air, shining like gold, like fire, like the tears of the Sun, and then, still whirling, they tumbled into the heart of the waters and were consumed, swallowed into the deep depths whence they came.

  An’kelet, holding the Lightning Mace before him, led the mourning party from the Pool down to the fords of Abona. There, on a huge oak plank, lay Ardhu Pendraec in splendour, extended on his back, rather than in the usual crouched burial position of his people, signifying that he was more than mortal man, that he, alone of men, walked with the Great Spirits, the Gods and Ancestors. His face had been painted with ochre, giving him the semblance of life, his hair had been washed and combed down; he looked as if he merely slept, waiting for the right hour to rise. The Breastplate of Heaven gleamed on his chest, reflecting the moving clouds, and Wyngurthachar lay above his head, and all around him the folk of the Lake Valley and Kham-El-Ard placed armfuls of meadowsweet and campion, the red flower of champions.

  Beside him, guarding the bier was his sister Mhor-gan in her priestess’s robes of death-green. Her hair was unbound in mourning and her face drawn with grief. Nin-Aeifa stood next to her, a very old woman now, but still tall and straight, her grey braids clattering with quartz beads and shells. Seven women circled them, priestesses with moon-collars and necklets of faience beads shaped like tiny blue stars.

  The Nine Ladies of the Lake, drawn together on this day to honour the Stone Lord, to bear his earthly remains away on his final journey.

  As An’kelet, the warband and the villagers watched, the holy women took up the oak plank with Ardhu’s body and placed it reverently on a wide wooden raft anchored within Abona’s swell.

  “Where will you take him?” An’kelet breathed, sinking to his knees at the water’s edge. “Where can I go to place offerings to the spirit of my friend?”

  Mhor-gan looked at him solemnly. “He will have no known grave, prince of Ar-morah. Dark times will come to Prydn with his death; and warfare… I think you, as his successor, know that. There can be no risk of his bones being disturbed. Let it be thought he is everywhere and nowhere, like the noble Merlin… his grave and ultimate fate unknown. Maybe he will lie in a deep cave, under the protection of the Great Spirits; or maybe he will merely lie atop a hill in a coffin carved into the form of a boat, sailing the seas of time toward the Tor of Hwynn and beyond. Maybe some men will even believe he is not truly dead but has been taken by the Nine Maidens for healing in the Garth of Afallan, ready to return when he is needed again by his people.”

  She turned from An’kelet and gestured to Nin-Aeifa to join her. They boarded the raft with the Maidens gathered around them, and knelt in a ring around Ardhu’s body, singing and chanting and keening. Then the ropes mooring the raft were cut and they slipped slowly, mournfu
lly, down the breast of Mother Abona, the Holy River, the Cleanser, away past the grieving people, past the Old Henge, away into the wilds of the lake valleys, away into eternity.

  EPILOGUE

  DAWN

  For the next eighteen turns of the Moon An’kelet of Ar-morah, heir to the legacy of Ardhu Pendraec, strove to build a new settlement to replace fair, doomed Kham-El-Ard; he chose a place on the hither side of the Plain, not far from the charred remains of Deroweth, but not so close that the angry ghosts of slain priests might disturb the slumber of the inhabitants. Between bushes and sylph-like trees, the ravaged stones of Khor Ghor frowned in the distance, shimmering in sunlight, standing bleak as skeleton bones in the morning mist.

  Men seldom went there anymore. Some still visited, curious as much as worshipful, and carved axes on the stones, in imitation of those graven on the Throne of Kings but the days of the Great Feasts at Midsummer and Midwinter were over; the people now lit fires within their own home villages and jumped the flames among folk they knew. Once An’kelet had tried to rouse enthusiasm for a rebuilding of the shrine, and he took the tribe’s holy man and a force of ardent youths, and they dug pits all around the Stones, hoping, perhaps, to add more monoliths, to rebuild the structure anew.

  His plan did not work. Men drifted away, putting up single stones near their hamlets and worshipping at cult-barrows; after what had happened at Khor Ghor, the death and the destruction, it had become little more than a haunt. Only the ever-present birds remained, nesting under the lintels, squabbling over long-dried bones in the ditch.

  It was the way of time… felling and changing.

  An’kelet sighed. He could not resurrect what the spirits had doomed to die. Khor Ghor was meant to go. So instead he turned his thoughts to other things pressed to the back of his mind through the long painful months after Ardhu’s death.

  Fynavir.

  He had asked the folk of Place-of-Light, the Valley, and the Plain if they knew of her fate after the night of her forced marriage to Mordraed. They knew nothing, only that she was gone… but many hinted she must be dead, maybe even by her own hand, through shame and bitterness.

  An’kelet could not bring himself to believe it.

  And one bright day of sunshine and showers he found himself walking down the river to the House of the Ladies of the Lake. If any would know Fynavir’s fate, it would be those wise women who saw all, in both the realms of the living and the dead. He pondered why he had not sought them out earlier, and hung his head in shame—it had been too painful to see them, those women who had borne his friend on his final journey, carrying him to a resting place they would not even reveal to him.

  He spied their hut ahead, standing on its long spindly legs in the river’s swell; ancient Nin-Aeifa squatted outside the door, dandling a raven-haired infant on her knee and singing to it as it gurgled and wriggled, while two young, brown-haired boys splashed in the water nearby, trying to spear the fish that darted below the surface. An’kelet did not know whose the baby might be, but with a jolt he recognised the boys...Gharith and Ga’haris of Ynys Yrch. Ardhu’s nephews… and half-brothers of Mordraed.

  As he drew closer, the boys glanced up and fell silent, their harpoons clutched in their hands. The elder sprang from the river and dashed inside the house and brought back Mhor-gan of the Korrig-han, leading her by the hand.

  She walked toward An’kelet and gave him the kiss of peace on either cheek, and he felt his heart near break again for she looked so much like her dead brother… the same smile, set of cheekbone and jaw, the dark eyes mixed with forest green. “I knew you would come,” she said softly. “I am only surprised it took you this long.”

  An’kelet nodded toward Ga’haris and Gharith, who had resumed their play in the water of Abona. “It seems you have made the House of the Lake something of a refuge.”

  Her white teeth flashed. “Indeed. Many have been under the care of the Ladies of the Lake; some shall stay with us as servants… others must find their own path in the world.”

  He was silent a moment, an awful thought filling his mind. “That infant… Surely it is not…”

  “No. Not hers. His. Mordraed’s. But do not look unkindly on it because of its parentage. Remember, it is still Ardhu’s grand-child, no matter what evil its father did.”

  He leaned over her, a good head and shoulders taller and gently took her arm. “Where?”

  Mhor-gan nodded toward the vale-side, overlooking the old barrowfields of the early Kings. “Beyond. She goes there often, to look and to remember.”

  “Should I seek?” His eyes were weary, tired. He pushed his amber hair from his brow. “Or is it too late? Is it tearing open an old wound, making it bleed again?”

  Mhor-gan touched his face with her fingertips. “Go to her. There are some wounds that cannot be healed… but many that can.”

  He turned from the river and headed over the hillside toward Khor Ghor. He could see it in the distance, with the barrows of the old kings lying before it like supplicants, dappled by Sun and by cloud shadows. The skylarks were dipping and swirling in the grass, and a small, fierce hawk soared against the Sun, reminding him poignantly of the Merlin.

  And then he saw a woman, kneeling in the long waving grass, simply dressed in a woven kirtle, with a large basket of plaited river-reeds at her side. He frowned at first for the hair that coiled on her shoulders was an earthy brown, not the white mist he had expected, but as she moved, hands seeking in the grasses, he recognised the curve of cheek, her sweet long neck, that he had kissed, that he had loved. She had used dyes to disguise herself, so none would suspect.

  He began to run, unable to help himself… though he felt an eager fool, he who was now Ardhu’s heir. Fynavir shifted in the grass and stood up, her face calm and her eyes shaded by her fair lashes, so incongruous with her dye-stained hair. “An’kelet. Or should I now speak of you as Stone Lord?”

  He halted, hands dropping to his sides. “You know then that Ardhu passed the mantle on to me.”

  She nodded. “I was surprised to hear such news… but I am glad you were reconciled. And that you were with him at the end.” She pressed her knuckles to her mouth, her voice faltering. “What was it all for, I ask you? I ask the spirits day and night. We ruined it, An’kelet… between us, we made the great thing he wrought fall to ashes.”

  He went to her then and held her, and she wept against him for a while, and he wept too against the darkness of hair that had been white as snow.

  “He will never die,” he then said quietly. “He is legend now, Fynavir. In a thousand years or more they will still tell his tale, though it will be changed by many tongues and many retellings.”

  “That is some small comfort.”

  “Sometimes…” he clasped her hand, twining his fingers with hers, “a small comfort is all we have.”

  Together they turned and faced the Stones, distant on the Plain, the remaining half of the Door into Winter a barren stick with its naked tenon stabbing the sky, and An’kelet took his axe from his belt and saluted the temple three times with blade upraised—for Sun, for Moon, for Ancestors. Then he gathered Fynavir beneath his cloak and led her from that place of loss and memory, from the realm of the Dead to the realm of the Living.

  To start anew.

  To live in the new age that must come.

  MOON LORD

  HISTORICAL NOTES

  As ever, my thanks for help and support with this novel to my partner Dan, mapmaker and blogmaster, cover artist Frances Quinn http://echdhu.deviantart.com/, my proof reader Simon Banton, and the Stonehenge team. Thanks too to all those who purchased copies of book one, enabling me to produce the second. A special mention must go to Andy Rhind Tutt of the Amesbury Museum, who showed me the ‘magic’ colour changing stones from the ‘sacred pool’ at Blick Mead, which inspired an important character in this book. (If any of you visit Amesbury, do go to the museum, and see the history of the area PRE-Stonehenge!)

  As with STONE LOR
D, nearly all the places in MOON LORD are real, as is the archaeology, although I have played around with dating sequences to a certain extent… .some things are just too good to leave out! The characters fare farther afield in this book than in part one, just as King Arthur’s knights quested far and wide in traditional legend on their trek to attain the Holy Grail. In Moon Lord, this meant a trip to the Wastelands of the East (Seahenge), a sacred journey to Ireland where they visit the Bronze Age ritual monuments built around Newgrange while seeking the Cup of Plenty, and they even travel to An’kelet/Lancelot’s homeland in the forest of Broceliande in Brittany. Mordraed, Arthur’s illegitimate son and nemesis, comes down to his father’s holdings on the Great Plain from Ynys Yrch, the Isle of Pigs—Orkney—and recent findings from the complex discovered at the Ness of Brodgar are featured in the early part of the book. Closer to home, there is a ritual pit based on the Wilsford shaft, and also a cave in the side of Khal-El-Ard… this is Gay’s Cave on the Antrobus estate and a place we feel needs further investigation. It is thought to be a folly of approximately the 17th or 18th century, but there has been some suggestion that some of its stone is sarsen and a local legend says that it was there at the time of the Romans. It was also rumoured to be used as a cell by the Dark Age Guinevere after Ardthur’s death and her retreat to Amesbury Abbey!

  Later in MOON LORD, there is a sequence showing some destruction at Stonehenge itself. Although it is unlikely it was slighted in prehistoric times, there is some evidence that one or two stones had fallen even before it ceased to be used. We don’t exactly know when one stone of the Great Trilithon fell, only that it was before any realistic drawings of the monument were made. I have incorporated its collapse into my fiction.

  I have also endeavoured to show a changing Bronze Age world at the end of the novel, a veering away from the building and use of big ceremonial centres due to climate deterioration (perhaps caused by the eruptions of Thera and Hekla) and other social factors. This is of course is a deliberate anachronism for, although this change did happen, it was not till several hundred years after the period MOON LORD is set in.