That same night Ugard and Wiglaff conferred about the kind of magic that might make a difference for their village’s cause against the enemy. They reviewed what they could accomplish through their ritual, even when they included all their villagers among the concelebrants. The option of continuing the rains indefinitely had appeal, but that strategy would impact their village since they must plant next year’s crops and grow and harvest them: they could not do those things if the land was mired in mud. The option of doing nothing had the distinct disadvantage that eventually they would be conquered and killed or enslaved.
Ugard told Wiglaff, “Other options exist, but they’re not white magic like bringing rain but black magic, as dangerous to shamans as to the forces that are pitted against us. While Winna continues to prevail against the enemy, I’ll teach you the black magic that might work to save us. I apologize for having to do this, but we don’t have any choice in the matter. We either do black magic, or our village perishes.”
Wiglaff asked, “Where do we start, Ugard?” He was anxious but looking for good advice going forward.
“First, I’ll need the dolls that the children of the village play with, and then I’ll need enemy hair, fingernails and artifacts—anything that the enemy soldiers touched—perhaps their weapons or what they wore around their necks or on their fingers.”
When Winna departed with her warriors the next morning, they had another mission to perform than killing the enemy. They had to fetch the hair and fingernails of some of the enemy dead. They also had to fetch any rings or talismans that the enemy soldiers wore. By now the dead bodies were swelling and they stank; nevertheless, the women warriors did as they were told.
They returned that evening with sacks of hair and rings and amulets, and Winna delivered them to Ugard in the cavern. All of these artifacts the shamans sorted so that he could concoct the potions and organize the rituals that would be necessary for Ugard’s black magic.
As a shaman, Ugard had learned this form of his art from one of the greatest black magicians in the world, but he had refrained from using what he had learned because he saw the horrible things it did to the magician who had taught him. The man had gone stark raving mad, and after many years of self-mutilation and torture, he had cast himself off a cliff into the sea and drowned. This Ugard told Wiglaff before he began the magic. Wiglaff was forewarned, but he was resolved to follow his master’s teaching, since it was the only remedy in an otherwise hopeless situation.
Now Ugard took the hair of all the victims, and he burned them, scraping the ash into a container. He took the dolls of the village children and opened each of them with a knife. He took the stuffing out of the dolls and filled the resulting cavities with the ash from the burnt hair, and then he sewed the dolls shut again.
All the enemy soldiers’ rings and amulets he examined carefully before he melted those of gold and silver and formed them into one molten mass. With tongs he dropped the dolls one-by-one into the molten mass while he chanted slowly the same song that brought the crops, only in reverse. He spat on the mixture and gestured over the mass with his hands. Finally, he poured the amalgamated liquid into a container of water. Steam rose into a fabric that he placed over the water immediately after he plunged the molten material into the water pot. He burned this fabric, and he took its ashes outside the cavern into the rain.
Reciting ritual imprecations and curses, he dispersed the ashes into the air and rain. He stood back from the entry to the cavern and shook himself dry. Then he sat down on the floor of the cavern exhausted and asked Wiglaff if he understood what had just happened.
Wiglaff shook his head vigorously. He was intrigued but rattled by the magic. As when Ugard asked him to apprehend, not comprehend, the meaning of numbers, he resolved to apply rote first and grasp mentally what he was doing afterward. “I didn’t understand what you did at all, but I will remember every step of the process you performed.”
“Good. We’ll see what comes of this evil business,” Ugard told his protégé. “I have combined earth, air, fire and water, and with these I have mixed the quintessence or fifth element. That quintessence or fifth element is an idea of ruin at the heart’s root for any of our enemies. Those affected will burn from the inside out and die in agony. This may give Winna and her warriors a decisive advantage and provide a caution for our enemies if they should ever think of attacking our village again. Tomorrow, I’ll give her the composite in the bottom of that water vessel. She’ll take it to the enemy encampment and leave it where the leadership dwells. I’ll keep the residue water in a separate vessel here.”
The next day Winna received the composite material from Ugard, and she did what he asked her to do with it. Because of the continuing rain, she had no trouble placing the mass outside the enemy leaders’ dwelling, and she heard the leaders exclaim when they found it and took it inside with them.
She and her warriors then returned to the village, and Winna went up to the cavern to tell Ugard that she had complied with his instructions. He invited her to stay in the cavern while he performed the rest of his black ritual of evil. This required another set of children’s dolls, which he had laid aside for the purpose. He carefully placed them in the vessel with the water that had cooled the molten composite. He placed the vessel on a fire so that he, Wiglaff and Winna could together observe what happened next.
Above the heating vessel in steam an unmistakable image emerged. Men in an enclosure were suddenly struck with pains of such extreme agony that they doubled over and jerked wildly. They died screaming. As others entered the enclosure, they too were stricken in the same fashion and met the same end.
The enemy troops could not help themselves: the remainder of the enemy troops entered the enclosure in fours and fives, and as they did so the former occupants, now dead, dematerialized, and so the process repeated again and again until all the enemy forces had been eliminated. In the vision all that finally remained in the enclosure was the throbbing, flashing composite that sat on the ground in the middle of the enclosure. Winna and Wiglaff were shocked and repulsed by what they saw. However, they felt satisfied to watch their enemies suffer and saw no other remedy to their aggression besides their deaths.
“Now you’ve both seen the result of our black magic on our enemies. We haven’t yet seen the result of our using this form of magic on ourselves, but in time we shall. I wanted you to know the power of this magic. If you ever see the same effects, you’ll now know the cause.”
He turned to Winna before continuing his dialog. “I told Wiglaff earlier that I learned the black magic ritual from one of my teachers, who was the greatest such practitioner in the world. The man died as a result of his practice by throwing himself off a cliff into the sea. I believe he was so tortured internally and driven to extinguish the fire that burned within by plunging into the cold sea. They say he drowned.”
“So does this mean that our enemy won’t continue with their plan to destroy our village?” Winna asked.
“We’ll see, Winna. If my black magic works, the empire itself will be wracked just as the men you saw figured in the vision here. What makes an empire desist in its intentions? This is a mystery beyond this shaman’s solving. It could be that the empire will continue to wreak destruction and include us as its victims eventually. In any case, we must continue to be vigilant and ready. You and your women have been proven as great warriors, and you’ll be a formidable force for the empire to consider in its deliberations about how to proceed.”
“How do you know so much about empires, Ugard?” Wiglaff asked.
Ugard took a deep breath. He thought for a moment. Then he answered, “I’ve made a study of humankind, and I discovered that the seeds of empire are in all us humans. So in thinking of larger and larger aggregations of humans, the ultimate state becomes an empire, with all the rot and corruption of individuals summed up in a great chaos of evil.
“Consider what destruction we brought upon ourselves in the village wars that cost you
a good father and me many friends. Now think of larger and larger groups of humans in cities and states and empires, all warring and none getting along any further as human institutions than individual, selfish humans are.
“I spent some time in my early days as a shaman in the court of the empire in Rome. There I met the exponent of black magic who threw himself into the sea. After that happened, I withdrew from court and returned to our village. Because I’d seen things that none of our villagers understood, I was an outcast. I was only tolerated because I knew how to perform the ritual of the rain. If I ever fail to produce the rain, the villagers will destroy me.”
Ugard looked up and outside. He gestured toward the opening.
“Look outside: the rain is stopping. Tomorrow we’ll have sunshine. Tell Onna that she’ll have to wash her pots specially to eliminate the poisons. Your warriors will have to find and dig out all the poisoned stakes and staves and spears that might hurt villagers. I don’t think the empire will come again soon, but they will come eventually. In the meantime, we will return to our white magic and our dun red stone.”
Chapter Three
Shaman Wars
An invasion of Caledonia led by Severus and probably numbering around 20,000 troops moved north in 208 or 209, crossing the Wall and passing through eastern Scotland on a route similar to that used by Agricola. Harried by punishing guerrilla raids by the northern tribes and slowed by an unforgiving terrain, Severus was unable to meet the Caledonians on a battlefield. The emperor's forces pushed north as far as the River Tay, but little appears to have been achieved by the invasion, as peace treaties were signed with the Caledonians. By 210 Severus had returned to York, and the frontier had once again become Hadrian's Wall.
-- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Britain
The enemy priests were not happy with the outcome of their plan of attack on the villages. They had been bested by forces they did not understand, and they wanted to prevail in this struggle against a primitive people with no gods and no structured priesthood such as theirs. Ultimately they understood only the struggle between spiritual combatants, and they lacked any understanding or compassion for deaths of humans who dwelt below the spiritual level.
So instead of armies of the empire against the villages, they pictured war as being between their conclave of spiritual entities and an inchoate mass of folk religions and superstitions. For them the contest was already won by the entrenched beliefs and their believers and the others, whatever they might be.
In the treasury of artifacts that the empire controlled lay the reliques of numerous religions that had failed and de facto ceded their powers to imperial gods and goddesses. So the small, insignificant village wars transitioned to the broader wars of attrition, whereby the empire tried vainly to destroy all opposition and finally led to the wars of the shamans, inevitably a war that meant either victory or defeat of the empire.
As Ugard told his protégé Wiglaff, “If you can imagine how hopeful imperial citizens can be affected by circumstances beyond their control, you can understand how two shamans can combat the representatives of gods and goddesses and win.”
With Ugard’s words ringing in his head, Wiglaff sat in the cavern contemplating the effects of an eagle’s feathers on a snake he had found in the forest. He waved the feather over the viper, and the viper invariably shrunk from the feather as if its life depended on its instinctive movements. In fact, its life did depend on its instincts because all representatives of its kind had perished, except for those who could withdraw upon sensing the sound of an eagle’s feather. The shaman never failed to marvel at this phenomenon.
He waved the feather over the dangerous, poisonous viper again, and the snake ducked its head and drew back on its ribbed coils. Wiglaff liked predictable features in the universe because he knew their value, and he had been trained to use them by his mentor, the great shaman Ugard. He picked up a live, large, white rat by the pink tail and dangled it over the viper. He dropped the rat, and the viper struck and coiled itself around its meal. Wiglaff was pleased.
Ugard watched his pupil perform this ritual, and he was also pleased. In the enormous cavern on the mountain above Wiglaff’s village, he and his disciple were preparing for a war that would decide the future of the villages. Inured to the habits of imperial thinking, Ugard had his doubts about their chances for success, but he was accustomed to working against the odds, and he felt that this combat was not in the least ordinary. For him it was a contest between the shaman’s power and the powers of unknown spirits, gods and goddesses intruding on the ancient, magical realms.
The word came to Winna through her women warriors that the empire was about to embark on yet another attempt to subjugate the county’s villages. Serving now as the enemy’s primary scout was a former villager named Ulma, who had been discovered by Winna and Wiglaff to be an enemy spy. The brother and sister turned her loose rather than have her killed because they thought Ulma would impart a message that benefitted the villagers more than the enemy. Evidently she had used the charms that had failed to entice Wiglaff on the enemy leader, who took her as his bride. Now she pleasured the entire leadership nightly in their tent and whispered ideas about how to conquer her former people until they had achieved their objective of domination of the entire country.
At first the enemy leadership discounted Ulma’s claims that a warrior maiden and her shaman brother were behind the resistance that stopped their last advance down the trunk road. They decided that their forces had been stopped by such savage opposition that they decided to stand back and study what they were up against before they advanced again. It had been six months since the great monsoon ceased and the land dried enough for the enemy to proceed farther down the trunk road. When they found the remains of their fellow soldiers stuck and decaying in hardening mud, they had to assess what had happened but could not account for their failure.
How could the enemy know that Winna’s women warriors and the shamans Ugard and Wiglaff together had killed their soldiers, stolen their weapons and poisoned their food? Even if they were told the facts by people they trusted, they would choose not to believe them because the facts would prove embarrassing and unsettling.
So the enemy chalked their defeat down to inclement weather—not a magically inspired flood, and they claimed that the villagers had killed themselves as they had done during the village wars—pure nonsense if you knew the truth. The enemy leadership gladly allowed their priests and priestesses to step forward and take responsibility for their forces’ defeat and to levy their defeat against their gods.
The enemy stopped to make sacrifices to their gods, consult with oracles and bolster their troops with reserves. They improved their rain equipment and their uniforms, and they decided to move their rear command centers closer to the front advance forces so that communication could be maintained more easily than before. The enemy’s leadership staff reviewed their new plans repeatedly until they decided what they would do, and they requested funding and leadership from Rome to prosecute a very long war of attrition and insurgency.
They left nothing to chance, and they bribed the priests to give them good readings of flights of birds and steaming entrails of sacrificial animals. This time when they advanced into the field, alongside their official military standards, they carried images of their gods and goddesses, and each soldier wore a talisman dedicated and personally blessed by a priest or priestess.
In this way the enemy tried to raise the morale of its troops, and that was good from their point of view, because their morale was at an all-time low after they discovered what had happened to those who had moved farthest north. The cremations and burials of the corpses of their dead troops took months. From the summit of the mountain where Ugard and Wiglaff watched the progress of the pileurs, the shamans knew that the noxious smoke they observed only portended progress in an inexorable march towards a new invasion of the villages.
Meanwhile the crops had to be planted, and village life co
ntinued in the buoyant and hopeful spirit of the season. The shamans did their ritual, and the rains fell on the newly planted seeds. In short order the new sprouts came up green in furrows raised in the rich, brown earth while Winna’s warriors piled new weapons in the cavern and in Onna’s hut in preparation for combating the enemy forces.
It was nearly harvest time when the enemy was ready to march north. Their preliminary scouts were tracked and reported by Winna’s warriors in the late summer, and the streams of refugees started to flow northwards shortly after that, leaving only enough villagers in the southernmost villages to bring in the crops and plough under what was left in the fields afterwards. Winna’s warriors watched the assembly of the massive forces that would march, and it seemed to them that this time the enemy would not turn back, no matter what.
The troops’ ribbons and heralds were richly colored, and the insignia of the troops shone in the sunlight on their guidon poles. Ugard knew that it was time for the magic to begin, so he and Wiglaff prepared for a great ritual involving the ten villages in the informal alliance. They ordered all villages to harvest their crops early and store what they could not use immediately underground. They also ordered that all elderly persons, women who were not warriors and children evacuate and proceed as far north as possible. Finally, the two shamans were ready to start their rituals, and they descended from the mountain to prepare.
When the square had been prepared according to Ugard’s instructions and the villagers had all assembled around the square, Ugard gave a speech that was now characteristic of him. In all but the last of his prior rituals, he had proceeded in silence. This time, as the last, because of the gravity of his effort, he wanted to be sure that the villagers understood what was happening.
The WIglaff Tales (The Wiglaff Chronicles Book 1) Page 7