Merlin sat in a canoe while a lean, wiry, river-man poled the craft through weirs, past tall stands of reeds and round islets where strange birds, disturbed by splash of the paddle, rushed up shrieking into the shadows.
Overhead the stars wheeled in the vault of sky, their white points scattered amid the tangle of trees on the riverbank. Fish flopped in the water, their passage leaving rings on the swell, and Merlin, listening carefully, fancied he could hear the song of the river-mother who lay, green and weedy, on the beds below:
“Lay di lay, for a thousand lives’ span
The river will run where the river ran
I was here ere great stones stood
I saw them borne on rafts of wood
But I shall flow while stones may fall
Old Mother shall outlive them all!”
“Where am I now?” he asked his guide, whose services he had hired at a village downriver in exchange for a handful of bluestone chippings.
The man grunted, continuing to pole the craft. “Not far from the Temple. On the right…” he paused, waving one arm into the blackness, “are the Resting Places of great Kings, and the Giant’s Dance beyond them, where their shades may look upon it. Continue to follow the river and you will come to the Old Circle, where the Spirit-Avenue begins, leading over the hill and across Mai Mor, the Great Plain, up to the Stone of Summer itself. If you turn your back to the Avenue and following the river South, you will soon see the Place-of-Light upon a plateau, marked by posts and lit by torchlight. This is where the folk who are not priests dwell.”
Merlin craned his head around, smelling the air, eyes seeking in the deep darkness. “Pull into the bank,” he ordered, nodding towards a spot where the reeds were thin.
The man bared his teeth. “I would rather take you to the settlement. There will be ghosts walking in the fog. Not all are happy to be dead, not all have joined their Ancestors on the Plains of Honey!”
Merlin grinned, his eyes twinkling. “I fear no Wight. Indeed, I would gladly talk to the dead tonight!”
“You are mad,” said his companion morosely, but he pushed the coracle in against the bank as Merlin had asked. “I do not suppose I will ever hear of you again. My wife will thank you in her prayers for the lucky bluestones.”
Merlin climbed out onto the bank, his skin shoes slopping in the mud. “You will hear of me again. Remember the name of the Merlin! Remember it, and pass it to your sons and to your sons’ sons’ sons! My name will live forever!”
“Mad!” the boatman repeated, as Merlin vanished into the scrub growing on the riverbank. Then, as shivers that were not brought by the chill of the wind rippled down his spine, he began to paddle madly toward the wholesome, welcoming fires of the Place-of-Light.
*****
Merlin wandered a while, before finding a track. Cut into the chalk, it wound up from the verdant banks of Abona and snaked north, glowing faintly in the starshine. Hoisting up his heavy, tooth-fringed robe so that his legs were bare and free, he began to follow it. The night was cold, and rags of mist fluttered past him like the souls of the dead that the boatman had warned him about.
Suddenly, one of the dead men’s barrows came into view, huge and round, blocking out the starlight, circled by a white chalk ditch that kept the spirit of the corpse—if he still lingered on the mortal plain—within its sacred boundaries. A decaying memorial pole loomed on the mound’s summit, facing North-East, where the Sun rose at Midsummer.
Merlin felt power flow from the tumulus, cold lines that twisted like serpents beneath his ill-shod feet. Approaching, he crossed the ditch and knelt by the pole, examining carvings of axes and chevrons and spirals. Around him the air sighed, and he suspected old barrow-man was stirring; that he, loving life as a warrior of Khor Ghor, had not yet crossed the Great Plain to the Deadlands of the ultimate West where the chosen played eternally on the Plain of Honey.
Hastily, Merlin fumbled with the pouch at his belt and drew out some dried herbs wrapped in a large dark leaf. He crumbled them between his fingers, thrust them into his mouth and forced himself to swallow, despite the bitterness that caused him to grimace and gag.
For a while he sat cross-legged, the wind hissing in the grass and in his sleek black hair. Gradually, a dull cramping sickness gripped his belly and he forced back the urge to heave. Zigzag flashes obscured the edges of his vision, while the centre of his gaze became an undulating black tunnel. His heartbeat grew loud, echoing in his ears, while a fine sweat covered brow and torso, to be licked away by the rising breeze.
A splitting pain gripped one side of his head, almost as if some primeval monster was squeezing it with vicious claws, trying to rend his skull and steal his brain as a man might suck a wild bird’s egg. He closed his eyes against the throbbing agony, and when he opened them again…He was there.
The warrior. The grave-wight. He was one of the old ones, one of the first men of tin. He carried a bow and golden baskets glittered in his hair. His face was green and glowing, alternating between a skull and livid flesh, and in his hand he brandished a dagger of ancient style, phosphorus flowing from its blade in a stream like a comet’s tail.
Merlin felt a surge of both fear and elation. “I welcome you, mighty Ancestor!” he cried, kneeling with his head almost upon the bony feet.
“Why do you wake me from my sleep of a million nights, from my dreaming with my beakers and my arrows and beloved gold?” asked the Wight, his voice the eerie sough of wind in bare branches. It was the inhuman rasp of one who has no throat, no tongue of mortal flesh with which to speak.
Merlin gazed up, suddenly fierce. “Because I can!”
The dead face looked almost surprised. But then the jaw dropped and a grating screech came from the desiccated throat, a terrible sound that Merlin only just recognised as laughter. “You are not as other men if you, in truth, wish to gaze upon such a creature as I!”
“I am not as other men,” replied Merlin. “Indeed, some say I am not a real mortal man at all, for my sire was of the spirit world. Hence I do not fear you. It is learning I seek.”
“To what purpose?” The creature leaned over him, smelling of cold earth and long-dead flesh. “You have hawk’s eyes. I do not trust you. Hawks rent my flesh when I was dead.”
“Tell me the secrets of Khor Ghor. It is there that I go this night, to become a priest—the greatest priest ever—of that temple. I must have knowledge in order that they will accept me, a youth and a foreigner.”
The Wight’s teeth grinned through rags of flesh. “Secrets should stay secrets, but as you have compelled me here, know this— I lived when the lintel-ring was raised. The great stones came from the north, from near the temple of the Eye. Many hands pounded these stones into shape—the work of men, not gods, brought with blood and hard labour. Wooden platforms were built skyward to put the capstones in place, a work never seen among the stone buildings of men, truly a fitting tribute to the Ancestors and to Bhel Sunface and Mother Moon. And when it was done, we carved upon some of the stones, putting marks upon them from our respective beliefs—the image of She-Who-Guards, the Axe that bears the power of the Sun, the Blade of Power. And the priestesses, the dancing women, came and honoured the Great Stones, weaving in and out until their cries of ecstasy greeted the dawn…”
“You honour me with your knowledge.” Merlin bowed, awed by this being who had witnessed the raising of the greatest temple in Prydn, who had walked in an era when stone fell before metal and Midsummer became secondary to the great feast of resurrection in Winter’s heart.
The cold wind blew more fiercely; goose bumps sprouted on Merlin’s bare legs beneath his robe. The mist went sailing in great ragged loops down the valley, while stray leaves tumbled and fell like dead men on the valley sides. He swayed and fell, and went tumbling with the leaves, rolling over and over, unable to gain footing, while behind him the ghostly, ghastly laughter of the barrow-man split the night until, suddenly, his gaunt, surreal figure flickered out as a flame is
extinguished in the wind. Only the night and the wind trod upon the lowering bulk of his great barrow.
Merlin staggered dazedly to his feet and trudged on, heavy-headed and unsteady, his vision still distorted from the effects of the potion he had consumed. Up ahead, he noticed a lofty rise crowned by an unassuming earthwork and lit by the hard crescent of the Westering Moon. The place looked deserted, but its height would enable him to survey the lands below and plan his route.
Breath a cloud of white before his mouth, he clambered up the rise. As he climbed, he could smell a sickly tang, the same sweet but hideous scent he had recognised beside the Holy well in Afallan. The scent of decay, of dissolution.
The scent of death.
Cresting the bank of the earthwork, he immediately knew why. The hill was covered by excarnation platforms, some with hunched figures lying upon them, others bearing completely skeletal bodies, their rib cages stark beneath the cold, thin, bone-light of the Moon.
As he stumbled forward, his feet shifted millennia of teeth and small bones fallen from their owner’s corpses into the grass. They tumbled like shimmering pearls in the muted starshine.
Merlin noticed one platform that loomed higher than the rest, and seemed to be of recent construction. The body lying on it was furled in the shredded remains of a blue robe that fluttered like a sail in the breeze. The face had been picked clean by birds and other scavengers, but the hands, still retaining some flesh and tendon, grasped a boar’s tusk and a shard of magic quartz.
Suddenly he realised who this sky-burial must be. “Eckhy the priest,” Merlin murmured.
There was a rushing sound, another skirl of wind, and suddenly the spirit of the old man appeared, thinner and less substantial than the Tin-man in his ancient mound, and less threatening. He was like a dim reflection of life, ready to break apart like an image seen in a raindrop or on a puddle. “You have come, I know you would,” he said. “It was foretold a Merlin would return to the Temple.”
“Do I have your blessing, old one?”
“Aye, but your desire will not come easy. Many covet a place in Khor Ghor. But you alone will have spoken to the dead of the Stones, as well as the living priests. You belong to our world as well as the world of men. Look, Merlin…look over and see the Dance-of-Spirits in its majesty.”
Merlin peered out from the height, gaze sweeping over rises and ridges dotted with barrows, some overgrown with spiky thorns, others glowing white, their chalk faces still bare and their ditches newly dug. Beyond them, pallid in the starlight, on a plain long denuded of forest, stood the Temple; the Year’s Turn, the Circle of Eternity. Its lintels rose into the night, beacon bright, while its barrier-ditch glowed with an eerie earth-light. The worked, smoothed stones of the outer ring grinned like a row of even teeth, with utter darkness gathered in the spaces between them.
“It is not a place for the faint hearted,” said Eckhy. “Some have come with foolish posies and gifts of pebbles, but this is not a place of simple charms and cures. Khor Ghor is a place of power, a place of Kings that were and Kings that will be.”
Merlin stared at the gigantic structure, hot and cold chills rippling down body. He felt as if his very spirit was being sucked from his chest into the unearthly blackness between those massive stones. He was afraid…yet he wanted to plunder that blackness too. He too was part of the darkness, the mystery that lay beyond safe firelight, and if any could tread those paths unscathed—it was the Son of No Man.
“Do you fear what you see, boy?” asked the shade of the old priest, pointing to the Stones, while the substance of his thin arm unravelled like mist. He was being drawn back into the darkness, back across the Plain to the Holy Hill where Hwynn had taken him to enter the Otherworld, to begin his long journey from Ahn-un to the Plain of Honey.
“I do,” replied Merlin. “But not a fear that would put me to flight. It is a fear that has also set a fire alight within me—I want to know more.”
“Then you, like your namesake, will surely become one of the great priests of that hallowed Place,” said the spirit, and he abruptly vanished with a hiss like escaping marsh-gas, leaving only a bird-ravaged body high on a wooden dais.
Merlin stared at the bundle of bones that had been a man, and climbing onto the platform placed pebble offerings in the dead man’s empty eyeholes as a token of thanks and respect. Finishing, he swiftly left the hill and hurried across the chalkland on a well-worn trail. It led between the upturned bowls of warriors’ barrows and the disc-shaped tumuli of forgotten queens, before petering out a respectful distance from Khor Ghor’s bank, which formed a stark boundary between the profane world and the world of the Ancestors.
Heart drumming against his ribs, he cautiously approached the earthwork, watchful for any guards. Mere feet away, the outer sarsens were like pale, malformed giants dancing in a ring, joined together for all time by their lintels. Beyond them the mighty five trilithons that were symbols of both death and power roared up into the night, the largest man-made structures Merlin had ever laid eyes on. He knew their names from age-old lore: Throne of Kings, decorated with dagger and axe; the Arch of the Eastern Sky; the House of the North Wind; the Western Guardian, and tallest and most imposing of all, the Great Trilithon, Door of the Setting Sun, with its massive lintel towering high above the rest. More ominously, this trilithon was also known as the Door into Winter and Portal-of-Ghosts.
Not yet daring to approach the heart of the sanctuary, Merlin wandered Sunwise along the edge of the bank. His eyes scanned the shadows; he saw ghosts, watching shyly, but no living men, or any guards. He had heard that though Warrior-Priests traversed the Plain all night, they did not tarry long in the Stones themselves—it was too fearsome a place to linger after Sunset.
Indeed, at that moment Merlin’s own heart quailed and he wished momentarily to be very far away, where there was fire and the comforts of men. But, then, unexpectedly, there was a rush in the dark, a brush of wings against his cheek. He nearly screamed, but took control of himself at once, watching as a huge white owl, its eyes the colour of amber beads, beat shadows back with its wings before vanishing amid the Stones.
The Owl was the totem of the Guardian, the Lady of the Watching Eyes, whose rectangular symbol was graven high on the Western trilithon.
Merlin had his omen, his welcoming.
Taking a deep breath, he crossed the divide and passed beneath the lintels of the outer sarsen ring.
A hedge of bluestones greeted him, crowding around him like old friends. Stones from his own lands, the jagged mountain that was God-of-Bronze, with its views across the waves to Ibherna. Damp with dew, the stones gleamed bluish-green, the Western ones tall and elegant, the others more roughly formed, though two, one pointed and the other broad, were exceptions. They were the Old Father, with his peaked head, and flat, broad-faced Grey Woman; progenitors of the tribes of Albu embodied in stone.
Leaving the bluestones, Merlin crossed the circle and came before the Altar, the Stone of Adoration, the godstone that held the very essence of the Circle’s power. Green and faintly glittering, it was backed by the enormous Door into Winter, which opened the way for the spirits of the departed to fly across the Great Plain, following the path of the setting Sun.
This was the centre of all things, caught in a circle that had no beginning and no end. Awed, Merlin knelt on the chalk floor and bent his head to the ground in homage to the Stone of Adoration. He could feel energy rushing through the earth, the beat of life itself. It soothed him, comforted him as if he was a child. Sighing, he stretched out beneath the dark skies, watched over by the guardian Stones.
Heaviness crept over his limbs; his body went limp as a babe’s. He feared nothing here, not spirits, not angry guards. His eyelids dragged down, and the darkness of sleep overcame him.
*****
“Should we kill him?”
The prod of an arrow’s tip between his shoulder blades brought Merlin to wakefulness. Biting back a cry, he struggled to wake from h
is potion-addled sleep. The world tilted. He could see he was still in the centre of Khor Ghor, lying slumped against one of the sarsens, but the sky was blood red with approaching dawn.
Turning his head, he saw two men glaring at him. He guessed they were warrior-priests of the temple, both young, clad in woven tunics and with bronze bands holding back their hair. The one prodding him had some kind of northern ancestry for his long locks were corn-coloured, braided in front and hooped by gold rings. The other had wild, curling russet hair, and dark tattoos ringing his eyes, giving him the semblance of Owl’s eyes. Both carried bows, and daggers with hilts of horn.
“So, the sleepy one wakes!” The tattooed man nudged him with a toe. “How dare you, ragged one, come in here and lie like a dog at the fire in the holy of holies.”
“You are lucky you are not dead,” said the blonde man, lip curling in a sneer. “What have you to say for yourself, stranger?”
“I say… who is leader here? Neither of you I would wager.”
The men glanced at each other with mingled expressions of anger and perplexity. “You must be Moon-touched, boy!” choked the tattooed man. “To speak so to the guardians of Khor Ghor, when the very arrows that mete death are pointed at your heart!”
Merlin stared into the man’s eyes. “If you had really sought to kill me, you would have done the deed by now. You don’t know what to make of me, do you? You don’t know how I got here, passing your careful guardianship…” He smirked mockingly. “You wonder if I am a spirit, or a sorcerer…after all, you could not tell your superiors a mere mountain boy slipped into Khor Ghor and slept the night among the holy Stones, while you huddled outside like frightened women!”
The tattooed man gritted his teeth. “Stop playing with us, boy. Who are you, who comes here with such audacity, mocking us?”
Merlin flashed a vulpine smile. Suddenly he looked older than his captors, as old as the Stones themselves, and somehow sinister, with his beak-nosed and strangely archaic face, its high planes streaked with sweat and dirt, the deep-set eyes bloodshot from his magic spirit-brew. “I’m son of no Man. They say my father was a spirit from the forest. I have studied the mysteries within earth and within the sky. I have made stones stand that have fallen. I have killed a chief and have tasted the apples of Afallan. The Salmon of Knowledge has blessed my tongue, and the Lady of the Lake my body. And so I come here to join the priests of Khor Ghor and replace Eckhy the old.”
Stone Lord: The Legend of King Arthur (The Era Of Stonehenge) Page 5