SWORD OF TULKAR Read online

  SWORD OF TULKAR

  AND OTHER WRITINGS ON ANCIENT BRITAIN & IRELAND

  BY

  J.P. REEDMAN

  First published 2013 by Herne’sCave

  Copyright 2013 by J. P. REEDMAN

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission of the publishers or author, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Any reference to real names and places are purely fictional and are constructs of the author. Any offence the references produce is unintentional and in no way reflects the reality of any locations or people involved

  SWORD OF TULKAR

  By J.P Reedman

  On a fated day, when the clouds were warped by a storm-wind into the shapes of gods and giants, I stood by the kilns on the hill outside our settlement, working the clay with my hands. Always clumsy, I cursed as the soft beakers crumpled into lumps of mud beneath my fingers. I was no good at such menial chores. I, Ardagh, the chieftain’s daughter was good at naught except being the chieftain’s daughter…. Sighing, I threw the clay aside and lay back, watching the swift passage of the clouds. Perhaps that was all I was good for – dreaming and mooning about the hillsides like one fey-touched...

  My reverie was broken as my ears picked up the sounds of feet on the grass. Sitting upright, I spied Bri, the youngest daughter of Tulkar the smith, sprinting up the hill. I rose as she approached me, lank hair flying in the wind. Thin, dark and dirty, she looked like a beggar, yet no one would ever treat her with anything less than respect for she was a smith’s daughter, and smiths were regarded as wizards, having learned the art of working the fire-metal bronze.

  “Welcome, Bri,” I greeted her. “What brings you here?” I wiped my hands on my corded kilt.

  “My feather has a gift for you.” Bri toyed with her amber necklace. “You must collect it at Haddery Burn Cave.”

  I started. “A gift for me. Why?”

  Bri shrugged. “Ask my father,” she said, and then she dashed away, vanishing into the shrubbery on the hillside.

  For a while I loitered on the hill, unsure if I should seek out Tulkar. His people were different from mine – a mysterious tribe whose customs reached back to the Beginning Time. But at last curiosity overcame me, and I began the journey to Haddery Burn.

  Full darkness had fallen when I reached Tulkar’s cave, which lay several miles outside my sire’s village. The Moon Lady floated high in the heavens, casting a pale, shimmering light over the fields. I paused on the rugged incline below the cave, gazing fearfully at its smoking mouth. Aye, for all manners of the spirits were rumoured to wander here.

  Fear gripped my innards and I longed to flee but then a figure emerged from the cave and called out to me. I paused as I recognised Tulkar’s wife, Oulagh.

  “Oulagh!” I cried happily, clambering over the heaps of shale towards her. She turned, smiling. No beauty, Oulagh was thirty summers old, toothless and arthritic, but her face shone with the simple joy of living.

  “Is that you, Ardagh?” she asked, peering into the gloom. “I sent Bri to bring you hither, but the silly child returned alone.”

  I strode over to Oulagh, dwarfing the little woman by more than a head. “I… I was not sure if I should come.”

  “Have no fear,” Oo said, as if reading all my troubled thoughts. “My husband means you no harm. Why would he mean ill to Ardagh, chieftain’s daughter?”

  Taking my hand, she led me into Haddery Burn cave, the secret lair of the smith and before him, another smith, and before him yet another right back to the days when smiths first realized how to forge metal from stone. I stared here and there, wide eyed, while Oulagh’s scruffy brood of children regarded me with amusement. All about in the shadows gleamed valuable objects; swords, shields, cauldrons. The light from the hearth fire made them glow blood-red.

  In a corner Tulkar sat cross-legged, observing me, his sweat-streaked face wizened as old leather, but not unkindly. A naked infant crawled over his knees, playing with an amulet that hung around the smith’s neck.

  “Master Tulkar.” I bowed reverently. Though conquerors of Tulkar’s folk, the People of the Hills, my tribe still treated them with due respect. Their knowledge of earth-magic outstripped all others in our land, and earth magic was necessary to ensure the fertility of the man and beast.

  “Ardagh.” Tulkar dislodged the baby and rose. He was only a slightly taller than I, and bandy-legged from crouching long around his fires. “I am glad you came. I have a gift for you.”

  Beckoning, he walked into the back of the cave. I followed gingerly, guided by Oulagh and her eldest daughter, Dhu, my eyes, watering from the constant smoke, fixed on the knotted shoulders of the smith. Suddenly he halted, raising a hand. “A spirit…comes,” he whispered reverently.

  My spine prickled; Dhu giggled and squeezed my fingers. Tulkar produced a strike-a- light and kindled a torch, which gladdened me, for the cave had grown dark as the underworld. As the light blossomed, my horrified eyes saw a half-buried body lying crouched in foetal position on the floor. I bit back a cry, remembering that the hill folk were not squeamish about corpses, but I found it difficult to control myself, for my folk feared the dead and imprisoned their bodies in round barrows capped with stone slabs to keep them pinioned in the Deadlands.

  “This is Ourar, the grand-mother” explained Oo, seeing my fearful and sickened expression, “In her youth she ruled the hill folk with wisdom and prudence, and she was a powerful seer.”

  I nodded mutely, recalling the living Ourar, a hunched woman who, despite her great age, had a bright wit and keen eye. I had liked her but feared her also, because she was of the hill folk and a queen among her people. Her ways were different; the dark ways of the Old Ones.

  “Ourar spoke to me the night she died,” Tulkar said. “She told me of a vision – a vision of death. Painted men killed our tribes... the crops burned ... the people lived as beasts, groaning in torment.”

  “Ah!” I gasped, knowing that Ourar often saw true.

  “Since then,” Tulkar continued, “travelling kinsmen have brought word of the invaders’ arrival. The newcomers are terrible demons, without mercy. Some even wield the star-metal, iron.”

  Cold terror gripped my innards. “What has this to do with me?”

  Tulkar’s birdlike eyes glittered over his long, sharp nose. “On the very brink of death, Ourar spoke your name... it was a shock to me, Ardagh, for I had not known she marked you so! She ordered me to forge a sword. She said you, of all the folk in your tribe, were most fit to bear it against the invaders.”

  Forgetting my fear of the smith, I burst into hysterical laughter. “I am a girl and have no skills with weapons! Ourar must have been raving to suggest a thing! A sword for me? Gods!”

  Tulkar grabbed my arm, anger flaring in his eyes. “Perhaps she chose unwisely when she picked you to aid your own people!”

  Oulagh stepped in, soothing her man, rubbing the muscled shoulders with their dark soot streaks like tattoos. “Tulkar, be calm. The girl is frightened! Surely you expected that!”

  Tulkar shook her off and continued to stare at me, face shuttered. “I will melt the sword down if you do not want it.”

  A strange sensation gripped me; it was as if someone were gripping my heart, my belly, forcing me to speak, forcing me to do deeds that I had never dreamed of as a chief’s privileged daughter. Words burst unbidden from my lips, halting but firm: “L…Let me see it first!”

  Tulkar gestured to the huddled shape on the floor, the bones poking from beneath the frayed, decaying shroud. “It lies beneath Ourar’s body, in her hands. It was her will that it should be made for you…she desired to present it herself.”

  For a
second I felt faint, my head reeling and numbness gripping my limbs. As if moved by a will not my own, I knelt and thrust my hand beneath the dried husk that had been Ourar, my fingers prying beneath the dead woman. Fingertips skimming over fleshless ribs, I eventually touched a hilt of cold bronze. I grasped it firmly and pulled, and the sword emerged with a rush.

  I turned the blade over in my hands. The workmanship was flawless, the edge sharp and fierce. It was a beautiful weapon and I knew in that instant I wanted it. I lifted the sword, giving it a brandish.

  Tulkar’s hand clamped down on my shoulder. “Do you take the blade?” he asked solemnly.

  “Yes,” I whispered. “I do.”

  “So be it.” Suddenly he whirled, his face blanching, his gaze raking the recesses of the cave. “The spirits speak. They say... they say... you must go now, Ardagh Ni Unjin! You must hurry!”

  I shook my head, unnerved by the sudden change in him. “But why? There is much we should speak of!”

  “Do not question, just go!” He shoved at my back. I could feel his hands trembling. “Let the spirits and your own sense guide you…I can do no more!”

  “Oulagh!” I turned around clutched Oulagh’s bony wrist; her eyes looked glassy and fearful like her husband’s. “What is happening? Tell me!”

  “No time to explain!” she cried harshly, thrusting me forward. Children started to wail in the shadows; cauldrons and tools clunked and clanked as I clumsily bashed into them in my wild panic to leave. “Go as you were bid!”

  I fled from the cave into the night. Outside, the fields were lightless, untouched by the Lady Moon, whose pale round face had vanished into a threatening bank of cumulous cloud. A chill wind whined in the grasses, moaning a funeral dirge. My heart thudded and the leaf-bladed sword in my hands felt heavy as a stone. I guessed something was amiss and I halted, quivering, head flung back like that of a startled beast.

  And then the wind blew again, shrieking through dead elms clustered on the hillside… and on its breath came the reek of burning thatch and worse. My stomach lurched, and then I hurtled toward my father’s village.

  The sight that greeted me would have sickened the doughtiest warrior. Every hut, those places where I’d spent my life weaving, baking, dreaming, blazed like a beacon, the thatching alight and belching flames and smoke. And the villagers…those men and women I had known since I was born, some funny, some fierce, some my friends and some my rivals lay locked within the wall of flames, unmoving, their bodies blackened by the heat of the fire. I could see no one alive. At first I could not accept that this was anything but an act of an angry god—perhaps a lightning-bolt from grumbling Ta-ahn of the Thunder—or maybe it even was something simple but tragic: a spark from one of the cook fires that had caught and spread with the wind. But then I saw, gleaming coldly, the broken blade of a dagger, a dagger of iron. The invaders had come as foretold, and they were indeed without any mercy.

  Sobs tearing at my chest, I turned from that awful sight and ran back toward Tulkar’s cave. The night drove in at me, filling me with terror, making me see ghosts in the shapes of stones and leering ghouls amid the fleeting clouds. My head spun and I retched dryly over and over. As I neared Haddery Burn, I noticed with a sinking heart that the cave’s mouth was black, lightless. I hurried on nonetheless, scrambling up the path that led into the cavern.

  Haddery Burn stood empty. Dirt clogged the hearth, and Tulkar’s treasures had been removed. “No! I screamed, tearing at my windblown hair. “Tulkar, Oulagh, don’t leave me!” They were the last people I’d seen alive, the only people I knew still breathed. And they were gone.

  Like my tribe.

  Like my father who would have been at the heart of the burning village, fighting an invaders until his last breath…

  I rushed outside the empty cavern, wailing and howling, half out of my mind with grief and fear. I did not care if the invaders heard me, for in those dreadful moments I wished for death, but the attackers had gone, and numb with grief I wandered aimlessly out into the darkness...

  Soon I found myself on the edge of Stonydale Moor, where long ago my people had built a temple and a vast burial ground. I bit my lip in consternation. My arrival at Stonydale could be no accident. Ancestral spirits must have guided me to such a place.

  Following a beaten track, I picked my way across the moor and soon reached the ancient barrow-down of my tribe. Darker blots against the darkness, dozens of cairns rose on the face of the moor, their curbstones sagging with age, their crowns topped with golden-bloomed gorse. I could see one where the barrow’s side had collapsed, perhaps in heavy rain, and the rim of an ancient urn stuck out. Three bony, blackened fingers poked through the soil as if the ancient dead one strove to claw its way back into the living world.

  I shuddered at the thought and averted my eyes from that sad, macabre remnant, then continued on, wraith-like, through the silent graves, letting my feet lead me to the Stone Dance at the centre of the cairns.

  The Stone Dance was a funerary temple wrought of great standing stones that stood taller towards the west, shorter towards the circle’s north-eastern entrance. Two large slabs reared on either side of a recumbent block pocked by cup and ring marks sacred to the Moon.

  Exhausted, I squatted down amongst a heap of debris left by squatters who had used the temple as a camp after its abandonment during the great rains of yesteryear.

  I stared at the sky. It was beginning to rain now; a cold rain that slicked my hair to my face. Clutching my knees, I huddled down for warmth, the breast of the earth mother my only refuge. The standing stones gleamed yellow, like the old bones buried beneath their feet. On one menhir I could discern a faint lozenge shape carving, on another a triple spiral, eroded but still beautiful. My eyes traced its curves, circling round and round ... Suddenly my head begun to spin, and I collapsed, the world heaving around me.

  When I raised my head I saw the figure of a woman leaning against one of the stones. Lightning flashed behind her, making strands of her long, unbound hair glow with eerie phosphorescence. She wore outmoded garb, the like of which I had never seen, and her flesh was pale – unnaturally so. Grave-black eyes gazed out of a gaunt face.

  “Who are you?” I asked warily.

  “Do you not know me?” She moved forward, bronze rings jangling in her ears. “Have you forgotten me already? I am Ourar—the Grand Mother of Tulkar’s clan.”

  I started, shaking my head. “You lie!” I said fiercely “Ourar is dead!”

  “Dead am I, yet walking earth for yet awhile. Did you think me so cruel as to send you against the invaders without instruction?” She pointed to my sword, lying useless in the muck, the chill rains beating off the long bronze blade. “I’ll wager you don’t know how to use that.”

  Without waiting for an answer, she swept towards me. “I am here to teach you Ardagh. Come closer and stop trembling-- I won’t eat you!”

  “But you’re dead!” I cried, recoiling.

  Ourar’s eyes blazed with strange fire. “You too will be dead unless you hearken to me! The invaders will slay you, laughing as you die. Or worse…they will take you as their slave, a strong pretty girl like you. Death might seem preferable to what they will do to you.”

  “No!” I hid my face in my hands.

  “Yes Ardagh, look up and face me!”

  Unwilling I glanced up. Ourar reached out and cupped my chin. Her touch was cool, not clammy or foul, as I had imagined it might be. “Tonight you begin a warrior’s training,” she said, “and the liberation of our people. Tulkar’s sword will aid you, but it won’t be your only weapon. Nor will it be your strongest.”

  “What other weapon can one such as I possess?”

  Ourar smiled, illusory flesh drawing in over her jutting cheekbones. “You shall learn, if you are wise.”

  ###

  In the weeks that followed, the spirit of Ourar taught me to use sword and spear. Training was not easy, every night I cried myself to sleep for weariness and sorrow
, my muscles in knots and bruises blue on my flesh. But Ourar would not allow me to quit, to become a weak, shivering thing that feared death – and life.

  At length she told me she could teach me no more, and that I would have it seek the haunts of men again. So I took my sword and a shield I’d looted from one of the broken barrows on the moor, and headed down to the old flint-traders track that led north to more habitable lands. Invisible, his mortal form faded away, Ourar followed on my heels, her unseen hand brushing my shoulder when ever I stumbled, encouraging me to fare on.

  I felt strangely elated as I strode along the time-worn track, rain puddling around my toes. Before the invaders slew my tribe, I’d been a landless younger daughter, almost valueless on the marriage market. Though not unhappy, my life had consisted of baking, pot making, child-tending, and little else. I had no real skills or even any real status despite my father being chief. My future would have been marriage to a stranger, or else I’d have become a despised helpmeet in the village.

  Now I was confident and independent. I had mastered warrior arts and had grown strong and healthy, the fat of sedentary living burned off by Ourar’s training. I almost looked like a youth in my close-fitting leather jerkin and kilt.

  My swift strides soon carried me to the River Y, which wound through those regions until it joined other waterways leading down to the Northern Sea, the great Whale’s Road which led to the lands where men traded amber, a precious commodity in these parts. Upon Ourar’s instruction, I followed the river’s winding course.

  Shortly after sunset I reached a settlement that consisted of a few smelly, unkempt huts surrounded by vast middens. The villagers glared distrustfully at me as I entered their territory, and two elders, a man and a woman, scurried toward me with upraised cudgels. Ignoring their menacing stance, I bowed courteously, “Greetings!” I intoned.