by J. D. Oswald
Errol assumed that he must have shown a key. ‘Here, let me,’ he said, reaching out to help. Before he had even finished speaking the guard had him in headlock and a sharp blade was at his throat.
Away from the river the trees soon closed in together, their canopies merging almost completely. And yet the path was still easily followed, its hard-packed surface suggesting it was well used, even though Benfro had not seen another traveller since he had flown from Emmass Fawr.
He chatted with Malkin as they worked their way slowly up the side of the valley, reaching the top of a shallow ridge by mid-afternoon. The squirrel was not a great fount of wisdom. Its answers, when they came, were usually more questions, so that by the time they stopped for lunch Benfro had learned nothing more of the strange creature than that it had decided, apparently on a whim, to be his travelling companion, and even less about the great tree. It was nice to have company though. It helped to keep the despair away.
The path turned to follow the ridge as it climbed towards a dusty rock peak that occasionally showed through the thinning canopy. The afternoon sun, beating down from directly overhead, soon became oppressive, and Benfro cursed himself for not drinking more while he had the chance. He had no means of carrying water and had been relying on the occasional rills that babbled through the wood, tumbling over the path or diving underneath it to rise, sparkling and spring-like, on the other side. No brooks rose on the ridge now, not even the tiniest of founts welling up from between the ancient scattered rocks.
On his shoulder Malkin had fallen silent, and a glance to the side showed Benfro that the squirrel had gone to sleep, rocking back and forth with the rhythmic motion of his steps. It seemed to be quite secure, perched as it was, and he reflected that it had most likely been awake all night while he had been stuck in his dream. For all he knew it was more of a nocturnal animal anyway, glad of somewhere safe to sleep during the hot day.
The forest gave way gradually to scrubby bushes and boulders strewn as if some giant child had been playing marbles in the sand when it was called away by an irate mother. Some of the rocks were small, no larger than a fist, while others towered over Benfro as big as a house. The track worked its way around these, twisting ever up towards the peak. He couldn’t help noticing how straight the edges of the boulders were, how even and smooth were their sides. Some were almost perfectly rectangular, some square. Even more extraordinary, some seemed to show signs of having been carved into the elegant curves of arches and pediments.
Once he first noticed this, Benfro began to see evidence in every rock: the chip of hammer and chisel, the smoothed surface of a long-forgotten ornament. Strewn all around him were the remains of some magnificent great building, cast down long ago from the top of the hill he had spent all the day climbing. It must have commanded a spectacular view of the forest spreading into the hazy distance all around.
The closer to the summit he came, the thicker the jumble of broken rocks. Whole columns lay in jagged lines where they had toppled, each interlocking block stretched just a little out of place by its fall. The path had straightened now, as if someone had gone to great trouble to clear it. Or maybe the destruction wrought around it had somehow been kept from its course. It was as clean as if it had been recently swept, and paved with flat, level slabs of stone, the joins so tight no sand was needed to grout them. Not a grain of dirt marked the surface, even though the ground to either side was dusty and barren. Low steps, each about twenty paces apart, made the climb to the summit easier. Shallow parallel grooves cut into them would allow a cart with the right width wheels to pass, but the rise was still such that Benfro could not yet make out the actual summit.
The first part of the great structure he saw was an arch. It put him in mind of the monastery of the warrior priests, only this was no brutal rock construction imposed upon the mountain but a magnificent carved stone edifice seeming to grow naturally from the ground. The wall surrounding the palace was mostly gone, crushed into the debris that lay in a thick carpet over the hilltop, but what remained was enough to keep all but the most determined raider out. It stood in places fifteen foot high, in others over thirty with the shapes of windows still dimpling its top edge, but where it met the road it climbed fifty feet or more to crown that massive arch.
Two great oak doors, as thick as Benfro’s waist, lay smashed and splintered on either side of the opening. They were on the outside, he noticed, blown out by something within. Whatever it had been, it had exploded a long time ago. The wood was grey with age and weathering, riddled with holes from woodworm. When he reached out a hand to one of the doors it crumbled at his touch, the faintest odour of decay reaching his nostrils, dry and powdery.
The space beyond the gateway was open to the sky, but the walls obscured the view. Benfro stood for what seemed a long time staring up at the arch. It channelled the wind, which was cool on his face with an aroma of something unplaceable but not unpleasant. It put him in mind of lazy summer afternoons, hot rocks and the promise of a good meal. The road carried on, arrow straight into the heart of the massive derelict building, and he was about to step through when the claws in his shoulder suddenly gripped tight.
‘Where is this?’ Malkin’s squeaky voice said, an incredulous tremble in it. ‘Malkin not like it.’
‘There’s no one here.’ Benfro tried to reassure his companion when in truth it had just given voice to his own nagging fears.
‘Where are trees?’ Their absence was obviously a source of distress for the squirrel. Benfro looked around. Half of the view, that in front of them, was obscured by the building. Behind, the hill dropped away from them, leaving only the distant green swathe visible through the jumble of fallen rocks. A ring of mountains surrounded everything, impossibly far away and unclear in the thick hot afternoon air, with only the occasional white cap determining where ground stopped and sky began.
‘It’s all right, Malkin,’ Benfro said, as much to comfort himself. ‘We’ve climbed a bit above the forest, but it’s still there. We have to follow the road.’
The squirrel made no reply, instead shuffled itself closer to Benfro’s head as if that would afford some protection from whatever nastiness lurked in the silence. The sun was beginning to sink into the distant horizon, lengthening the shadows inside the remains of the building and casting the broken edges in sharp relief against what sky Benfro could see. Still he felt none of the foreboding that was obviously troubling his companion. Without so much as a backward glance he stepped over the threshold and into a different world.
He stood in a courtyard of glittering splendour. The stone slabs beneath Benfro’s feet were painted in bright colours, red, green, gold and silver. They picked out a design of some kind, but from where he stood he couldn’t see what it was. Turning, he saw the inside of the arch, a tunnel the thickness of the great wall, at least twenty paces deep if not more.
A walkway circled the courtyard, let into the wall forty feet above the ground. Below this the wall was fashioned from smooth stone slabs, joined with such skill that you could not get a talon into the gaps. The only exits from the quadrangle were the great arch, now closed, through which he had stepped and a much smaller door on the far side. Surprised but curiously not alarmed, Benfro took a stride forward, then another. The road was still marked out in plain stones running straight to the far exit. He had walked the path so far, he reasoned he might as well continue.
The door was a far smaller affair than its great cousin in the outside wall of the courtyard, yet still it was massive. It was a different style of arch, flanked on both sides by intricately carved pillars whose stone details seemed to writhe and undulate as Benfro looked at them. There were branches and leaves in the pattern and hundreds of animals poking their heads through the stone foliage. They reminded him curiously of the great mother tree, although they looked nothing like her. And here there were two trees, their upper branches leaning over and linking to form the top of the archway. At its peak a face peered down from the
vegetation, and Benfro gasped when he saw it, for it was a dragon.
Neither was it any dragon. Even carved in stone and weathered by time, he could distinguish those proud features. They might only have met in a dream, yet he could recognize at once the face of Magog, Son of the Summer Moon. It gazed down with curious indifference on the splendour all around. This must be the great dragon’s home. Cenobus.
A pair of oak doors black with age and studded with huge iron pins stood closed in the archway. Three stone steps climbed from the courtyard up to the entrance, and Benfro took them in three powerful leaps. Something about the place filled him both with awe and with strength. All his upbringing, the constant preachings of his mother and the village elders, told him that no dragon had any right to live in such splendour. And yet here was evidence that once, long ago, a dragon had done just that. Dragons, he had been told, had small wings because they did not fly. Yet his wings were huge and growing; he had flown. This place, with its magical impossibility, lit a spark deep inside – the idea that he might so far have been living a lie. He longed to find out more. Grabbing the great iron rings that hung from the locks, he twisted them and pushed.
They resisted at first. Those great weights, unmoved in countless years, were loath to shift. For a moment he thought they might be locked, or barred from the inside by some obstruction, but it was only time that fought against him. With a grinding of rust the hinges finally moved, pivoting counterweights that swung into recesses in the wall. Once they had decided to move, the doors gave way with good grace, gliding open with only a modicum of squealing.
Inside was a vast hall lit with burning torches mounted in iron sconces high on the walls. Tapestries hung over the rough stone and a huge fireplace crackled with blazing logs. Low benches were placed around this to catch the heat, and a series of small tables were laid with food. Benfro approached warily – he had learned at least that much from his recent experiences – but there seemed to be no one about, no obvious trap luring him in. He did not notice the marks on the floor, a thick stripe paler than the flagstones heavily spread with dark reeds, which veered away from the fireplace and headed for a door in the farthest, darkest corner of the room. Neither did he notice the insistent tugging at his ear, the shrill little voice that warned against straying from the path. He completely failed to notice when, suddenly, the voice stopped and the tugging ended in one final desperate pull.
There were freshly caught river fish, beautifully prepared vegetables and bowls of fruits and nuts placed on the tables by the fire. Benfro was hungry and chilled, so he took a place on the bench nearest the flames and helped himself to some food. It tasted good, very much like the last meal he had eaten. He looked around for something to drink, hoping for some wine. A goblet, curiously chipped and battered alongside everything else, held only brackish water, but it was cold and it was wet, so he drank it down. No sooner had he replaced it on the table than it magically began to refill.
Movement in the corner of his eye caught Benfro’s attention. At first he thought it was just shadows cast by the flickering flames of the fire, but when he glanced across the great hall, he realized that the shade was constant, not moving. Even where the torches guttered on the walls their light was curiously motionless.
When he stared at the lights, the movement appeared again, once more in the corner of his eye. He whirled his head around to try and catch sight of what it was. For a moment he thought he saw something, but it disappeared into the shadows before he could get a clear view.
‘Who’s there?’ he said, a sense of unease beginning to spread through him. ‘Show yourself,’ he added, trying to muster a tone of command in his voice. ‘Don’t try my patience.’
They shimmered into existence like nothing he could describe. One moment he was staring at empty space, the next the air took on a frosted, glass-like quality, bending and flexing until something unbelievable stood in front of him.
There were seven of them, all slightly different, each about seven feet tall. The one nearest him was perhaps the oldest; certainly it had the most pronounced stoop and the others seemed to defer to it. Quite what it was, Benfro was not sure. It had six legs covered in coarse tufts of thick black hair. Its body was segmented, a bit like a wasp’s but fleshy and pale, some more of that black pelt coating its back. Its head was a stubby thing with a misshapen hole for a mouth and the multi-faceted eyes of a spider. Its arms were spindly black chitinous things that moved constantly, the ungainly pincers it had for hands working back and forth.
‘Forgive us, master,’ the creature said. ‘We have felt your presence approaching these past two days, but you chose not to call us. We feared you were angry with us.’
‘Angry? Why? What are you? Who are you?’ Benfro asked, taking an involuntary step backwards, away from the horrible sight.
‘Have we changed so much that master does not recognize us?’ the leader asked, bobbing up and down in some perverse genuflection, its claws snapping open and closed like a dying crayfish. ‘It has been many years, I suppose. Too many to count. We are your loyal servants, master, your Gweinyddau. We have waited patiently for your return.’
‘I’m not …’ he started to say, but thought better of it. These creatures could all too easily turn on him, and who knew what subtle arts they could command. If they could appear and disappear at will then he had no way of fighting them should they decide to be hostile. Instead he sat himself back down on the bench by the fire, doing his best to feign nonchalance. They thought he was their master, Magog, so he had better do his best impression.
‘It has been many years,’ he said. ‘Too many, true. So tell me what has happened in all those years.’
‘Master teases us,’ the elder Gweinydd said. ‘You created us to serve only you. When you are not here, we are not here. We know only the passage of time, nothing else.’
‘But surely travellers have come this way. Haven’t you welcomed them? Is there no hospitality in this castle?’
The Gweinyddau shuffled together, almost as if having a group discussion, though Benfro heard no spoken words pass between them. Six of them disappeared, fluttering out of vision like morning mist under the rising sun. The elder remained. It hobbled closer to where Benfro sat, peering up at him with its crazy eyes. He wondered how well it really saw him, for surely no one who had met Magog could mistake him for that giant among dragons.
‘Master, please do not be angry with us,’ the creature said. Close up, Benfro could see that it shook, though whether this was with age or fear he could not be sure. Its skin was mottled and diseased-looking.
‘Why should I be angry with you?’
‘When you left, we left also,’ the creature began. Its voice was frail, croaking and wheezing at the end of its utterances as if it found breathing difficult enough without having to punctuate its breaths with words. ‘We went to the place where we always go, to await your return. We waited, counting the slow passage of time as has always been our way. But you did not return. Still we waited, the slow years passing from one to the next. And you did not return. The centuries passed; we waited. Waiting is what we do. But we grew restless in our wait. My brothers began to talk of leaving that place, of coming back here to wait. At first I condemned their whispering as heresy, for truly that is what it was, but as the centuries rolled on even my resolve was tested and found wanting.
‘One by one my brothers deserted me, came back here until I was left alone. Without their whispering voices to calm me, the void became a terrible place. A loneliness fell upon me then, such as you cannot imagine. I bore it for as long as I could, but I longed to know what had happened to you. Had you returned, found some of your Gweinyddau already here to serve you and not thought to call me back? Perhaps some great misfortune had befallen you and you could not call. I had to know. So, after too many years of waiting, I finally slipped unbidden back to this great castle.
‘Master, it was a terrible sight. Some great beast had lain waste to the walls, blown t
he great front doors out into the night. Most of the roof was gone, and the tapestries were turned to dust with age. The whole place was a ruin and I searched through the rubble for any sign of your return. One by one my brothers came back to me as I picked my way through once-splendid rooms. We searched the castle from the lowest basement to all that remained of the tallest tower, but there was no sign of you at all.
‘We have stayed here since, doing what we can to keep the place from falling further into disrepair, waiting all the while for your return. Over the years a few travellers have come here, but we have not welcomed them. It is not right that they should enjoy your hospitality when you are not here. We drove them off as best we could. Those that would not leave we lured into the dungeons, there to wait as we have waited for your eventual return.’
‘What manner of beasts were these visitors?’ Benfro asked. ‘Are they still here?’
‘No, master,’ the Gweinydd said. ‘Or rather only their bones remain. They did not have the patience to wait as we do.’
‘Were there dragons among them?’
‘There were creatures that called themselves dragons, master, but they were not what they claimed to be. Wretched beasts, they were weak of spirit and had no wings worth mentioning. They all left when we asked them to.’
‘So what lies in the dungeons?’ Benfro asked, both sad he had not found his father and relieved he had not found his bones.
‘Strange arrogant creatures they were, master,’ the Gweinydd continued. ‘Small, with squat legs and short bodies. They bore weapons of light and would not heed our warnings. Some even tried to do us harm, as if you would allow harm to befall us in your own home.’
‘Men,’ Benfro guessed.
‘Surely not men, master,’ the Gweinydd said, incredulous. ‘Men are simple-minded shuffling growers of grain with no spark in them. These were powerful mages all, despite their puny outward appearance. It took all the wit of my brothers and I to trap them, for they would not leave when we asked them to.’