Stone Lord: The Legend of King Arthur (The Era Of Stonehenge) Read online

  STONE LORD:

  THE LEGEND OF KING ARTHUR

  THE ERA OF STONEHENGE

  BY

  J.P. REEDMAN

  First Published in Great Britain 2012 by Mirador Publishing

  Copyright © 2012 by J.P. Reedman

  Cover art © 2012 by Frances Quinn

  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.

  Second edition: 2013

  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.

  A copy of this work is available through the British Library.

  ISBN: 978-1-908200-95-2

  Mirador Publishing

  Mirador

  Wearne Lane

  Langport

  Somerset

  TA10 9HB

  DEDICATED TO RICHARD ‘KIP’ CARPENTER

  PART ONE — MERLIN: MOONRISE

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Stones demanded blood.

  Blood to bathe their stony feet, to bind their cumbrous bodies to the earth.

  *****

  So it had always been. The Chosen would die, the marked One touched by the spirits since birth.

  In the settlement of Faraon, the child who was Chosen dwelt with his mother in a filthy lean-to that bordered the pigsty and the midden. His boy-name was Lailoq ‘the Friend’—but his name was a lie. He had no friends among the people ruled by the chieftain Vhortiern.

  Lailoq was an outcast, a scapegoat, along with his mother, Keine of the White Streak. Children spat as he walked by, and elders made signs against evil when he went around on his daily chores, a clay pot balanced on his head and a sack of kindling bound to his scrawny back.

  His mother, Keine, was to blame for his misfortune. She had been beautiful once, desirable, perhaps even a potential bedmate for Vhortiern himself. But she had a white streak in her dark hair—an ominous sign, a flaw that beckoned to interested spirits—and one night, twelve Sun-turnings before, those spirits came to claim her. She had drifted away from the Midwinter fire-feast to enter the woods, the taboo area of the Old Hunters. Three days she went missing, and the people beat ancestors’ thighbones on the ground and mourned for her as one dead.

  However, on the new Moon’s rise, she returned, dazed and raving, telling tales of bears with the voices of men and crows that stood tall as young saplings. They had danced with her in the forest and begged her to join them. Their leader was called Min’kammus; stag’s horns crowned his head and his cloak the pelt of the spotted deer. He had led her through the dance, and wetted her lips with fire-mead, and eventually he took her away from the ring of dancing beasts and danced with her in the way of men with women. She fled at night’s end, fearful of what she had done, of the dread being she had lain within the shuddering forest, but it was too late. The horned chief, whatever he was, man or beast, god or spirit, had left her with a gift—or curse—from that solitary coupling. The seed of his unnatural loins blossomed like a dark flower in her belly, and Keine soon grew great in size to match the pregnant full Moon.

  Lailoq had come squalling into the world on an eve when Tarahn the Thunderer smote the hills with his thunder-axe and sent the deer of doe-eyed Fleesh running in fright. Small and dark, with a long, black-furred head and deep, bird-like eyes, he resembled a wizened little old man rather than an innocent newborn babe. Six fingers grew on his right hand, a sure mark of the malevolent spirit-world.

  So it was no surprise, some twelve years later, that he was Chosen be given to the Stones. It was not a common thing, not any more, though such sacrifices had been frequent enough in the times of the early kings of Albu—the bloody but glorious days of the tinkings Samothos, Sarron and Longho, and before them Raven-lord Brahn and his sons Brito and Amaethan, who brought agriculture to the land.

  But when Vhortiern and his men were unsuccessful in raising the final two stones of their holy circle at Din-Amnon, and the pillars tumbled down, crushing heads and smashing bones, fearful and frenzied whispers went through the tribe: “The Ancestors are angry! The Ancestors want blood and bone! Something must be done, a gift must be given!”

  Chief Vhortiern had no doubt what the gift must be, and who. Axe in hand to assert his might, he went to Keine of the White Streak in her hovel, and asked for the boy. Keine shrieked and wailed and tore her hair, but he would not be moved by her torment. The boy Lailoq, sitting by the pitiful, half-dead fire, said nothing, but went quietly with the chieftain to be prepared for the act of making the stones sacred.

  The time of the sacrifice was set for twilight, when the veil between the worlds of the living and dead grew thin, and barrows on the hills opened their stony wombs and released the ghosts of the Ancestors, for good or for ill. Wearing masks and painted with ash and ochre, the village folk began their procession from Faraon toward the high ground where the unfinished stone circle lay under a blood-streaked evening sky.

  Even incomplete, the ring was a marvellous sight. Two massive portal stones of white quartz, twice a tall man’s height, lay stretched out on the grass before empty stone-holes that yawned like waiting mouths. Behind them stood a neat oval of stunted blue-green stones, open to the East and aligned on a gap in the sunset-bloodied peaks of the Holy Mountain known as God-of-Bronze.

  Vhortiern entered the circle first, as was his right as chief, followed closely by the village Shaman, the Old Woman of No Name, who had lived longer than any other in the tribe, and had blood-ties to almost all. An infant’s skull hung on a loop round her neck, and a mask with a wooden nose curved like the sickle-Moon covered her shrunken face. The mask’s eyes were ochred scallop shells brought from distant seashore, and masses of dung-stiffened grass hair fanned out from the rim, giving the mask a crazed, grotesque appearance.

  It was the face of Death. Of She-Who-Guards.

  Behind the chief and the shaman walked the important men of the tribe, harsh vertical stripes and rib-bone patterns daubed onto their torsos, their thick manes of hair plaited into fantastical knots and tails. Their wives trailed after, painted moss green from head to toe, the colour of death and Otherness. Both sexes danced as they processed into the circle, beating on skin drums and making hideous keening sounds with pipes made of perforated bone.

  They surrounded the sacrifice, the fatherless boy, circling, swooping, spitting, calling on the Ancestors to take him and his evil luck away and let their stone circle stand. Lailoq walked amid them as if he feared nothing and merely looked on this as an adventure. Some folk sneered and nudged each other. “Look, he is simple,” they whispered. “He does not cry, he does not know he is to die…”

  Overhearing, the boy fixed them with an unnerving smile, and something about his dark, sharp face made them quail and reach inside their cowhide tunics to touch the talismans that hung there.

  Lailoq had been dressed and adorned for the role of sacrifice—the only time he had ever worn anything other than scraps of skins. A pale linen robe tumbled to his calves, and his long black hair had been greased back with pig-fat and twined with the feathers of hawks. His face was painted a livid blue, the colour of a corpse, to show that he was already dead to the tribe, already half in the Otherworld.

  Vhortiern gazed at him uneasily. He wanted this night to be over. He was not squeamish about breaking the boy’s head and letting out his spirit, for he thought the brat should have been exposed at birth�
��but there was a depth, a darkness, in those glittering and somehow ancient black eyes that almost unmanned him.

  Unconsciously, he stroked the worn, gold-pinned head of his war-axe, the Good Striker, a thousand years old and made of jadeite from a half-forgotten motherland beyond the shores of Albu the White. Tonight Striker would drink, and the stones would drink too, and the angry Ancestors, always demanding their due, refusing to be forgotten, would allow the Man-stone and Mother-stone to rise and stand together, framing Sun and Moon and Holy Mountain.

  A sound from Lailoq made him jump, and he eyed the brat with renewed suspicion. Would this be the beginning of tears, of fighting and begging? He felt suddenly old and tired, all too aware of his own vulnerable young sons, asleep back in his hut in Faraon. He just wanted the sacrifice to be over and the stones to rise, a lasting tribute to the spirits that would make them whisper his name with pleasure and confer fruitful harvests on his folk.

  He let his hard, jaded eyes travel to the scrawny, linen-clad boy, who had wandered up to the diamond-shaped Mother-stone and was staring at it if willing it to leap up from the ground and fly. Suddenly the child squatted down, staring intently into the empty stone-hole beside the menhir, making the Chief fear the brat was going to jump in and start some futile fight for existence there in the gathering gloom.

  Instead, the boy kneaded the earth with his horrible six-fingered hand—like some beast’s paw, Vhortiern thought with a shudder—and suddenly his eyes gleamed, glowed even, green sparks breaking their deep darkness. Vhortiern scowled, making a sign against evil behind his back. He thought of Stag-man and Bear-man and Crow-man in the woods, tumbling white-streaked Keine whom he had once desired, and getting this fey, half-animal child, and he knew it was right that Lailoq should die…

  The brat was making a low, guttural noise, a self-satisfied kind of growl. He snapped his long brown fingers at the chieftain, his stance one of an equal, not of one whose life was forfeit for the good of the people. “Chief Vhortiern, you must not use Good Striker tonight!” the boy cried, his voice harsh as the shrieks of the bird of prey he resembled. Not a child’s shrill voice, but that of a fell spirit, surely. “If you slay me, it will not make the stones stand. You will raise them but they will fall again, like dead men. You will bring other children to them, one by one, till the village’s child-wealth is all spent and only crones and greybeards dwell in Faraon, weeping for their lost future. Never will your stones stand, and the village will become a cursed place of dust and bone.”

  Vhortiern’s face grew white; his heavy brows bristled. “What do you know, you who are the Son of Nothing?”

  Lailoq smiled slyly, his strange, fevered eyes sucking up the last of the lingering light. “I know much, much more than you think, Chieftain. In the village pigsty I listened to the grunts of the Great White Sow, dead-eater and prophecy-maker. I understood her tongue. From her, I learned how to commune with the dead in their cairns and with the hunting spirits who wander the forest. I have heard the voices of the trees and conversed with salmon in the rivers. And I hear voices calling me now, from deep beneath the earth.”

  “What voices are they?” Vhortiern grunted, unable to control the shivers that ran up his spine. Why did this unseelie creature disturb him so? He was just a boy. A tainted boy.

  “The shrieks of Wyrms, two great serpents that battle and slash each other with their fangs!” Lailoq licked his lips almost eagerly. His tongue looked too red, too bright, to the uneasy Chief, and it was pointed like a snake’s. “One is Moon-pale with eyes of flame, the other fire-red with breath of smoke. They battle for supremacy under this hill, and their shudders are what make the stones fall!”

  Vhortiern felt sick. He should have guessed some evil slumbered on this hill. An old burial mound had been cleared away in order to build the circle; its bony occupants had come from another tribe and he had smashed the skulls and cast them into the offerings shafts near the village. It had been a foolish move.

  The Old Woman with No Name limped forward now, removing the mask from her dried-up, toothless sack of a face. Ugly as she was, her eyes still shone a brilliant sea-blue, and they were keen and intelligent. “So, boy, if what you say about these Wyrms is true, what must be done?”

  “Old Grandmother,” said Lailoq, “let the men come and re-make the pits to hold the stones. They must be wider and deeper, and the women must help too by packing their bases firmly, with no gaps. The packing stones must be magic stones, red ones for the red serpent and white quartz for the pale one. Once the stones are properly laid down, they will seal the angry serpents below us, and the stones will not fall.”

  Vhortiern glanced at the Old Woman; he feared her, disliked her, even, but she was versed in lore and magic, and he had no choice but to ask her advice. “What is your counsel, old one?”

  The Old Woman with No Name put a painted claw on Lailoq’s greasy dark head; she looked almost fondly at him, and for a moment Vhortiern noticed a similarity in the thin but determined jaw, the jutting bird-beak nose. He had not noticed such a look before; the boy had seemed to him completely foreign, a changeling creature. Could the Old One have lost her edge and decided to protect this cursed boy because of some real or imagined kinship?

  “Let us try the way he describes,” she said. “He is half of the Otherworld; maybe he speaks truth. But if he fails to quiet these Serpents-Under-Earth, I myself will break his skull and add his knucklebones to my necklace.”

  *****

  And so, shortly before the next full Moon, the stone holes were dug anew, using the shoulder blades of oxen as shovels, and the two menhirs were tipped into them and packed firmly at their bases with skull-sized chunks of quartz and red sandstone. The Old Woman sprinkled lamb’s blood on the stones, and kissed them and bowed to them, while men and women wove a spiral dance around the ring, and singing and feasting went on in the village for seven nights and days, until the full Moon crested the utmost peak of God-of-Bronze and sailed West into the Deadlands.

  At last the stones stood, proud and tall—without the blood of a fatherless boy to hold them fast to the ground.

  As for the Child, the Chosen One, he was no longer an object of scorn and hatred in the village. Men still feared him, but he was also revered for his wisdom in the matter of the stones. His rags were burned and offered at the circle, and the Old Woman gave him a deerskin tunic painted with magic signs. She wove bronze rings in his hair and hung a blue bead shaped like a star around his neck on a thong.

  And on the Feast of the Summer-lord, when the dawn Sun made a path of gold between the massive portals of Din-Amnon, the youth stepped forward with all the tribes folk watching, to be made a man of the people. Vhortiern gave him a bow and quiver of arrows and cut the marks of manhood on his cheeks, then rubbed them with woad that the women had ground that morning. A lock of his hair was cut and burned as an offering to the Ancestors, and the ashes scattered in the grass. So too, were his fingernails pared and then burned.

  “Swear that you will serve me,” said the Chief sternly, “as my magic man, from this day forward. Swear this oath, and use your wiles and wisdom to protect me and mine from the Otherworld, and you will be held higher in esteem than my best warriors!”

  “I swear.” Lailoq smiled his unnerving crooked smile. “I will serve you till the day you go to live among the Ancestors, great Chief Vhortiern.”

  Vhortiern extended his hand, thick as a club and massed with scars as pale as the white serpent now pinioned below the Man-stone at the entrance to the sacred circle. “Then let you take your place by my right hand side! Cast off your childhood name of Lailoq, and choose you the name by which a man shall be known!”

  Lailoq lifted his arms toward heaven, as if embracing the Sun, which hung like a fiery eye in the Eastern sky. He took a deep breath as he stared into the heavens, searching, seeking, summoning. A shriek sounded high above, and a winged shape suddenly darkened the face of the sun, before plunging down like a deadly dart, straight towards
Lailoq.

  Vhortiern shied away, grimacing, while the women watching outside the circle began to wail in terror.

  They fell silent when they realised the creature did not attack. It glided gracefully onto Lailoq’s upraised arm, talons carefully seizing his forearm without puncturing flesh. It flapped lustrous wings and uttered a sharp cry from its hooked beak.

  It was a Merlin, a hawk, a shrewd predator who flew among the lonely hills, seeking prey.

  “From now on, you will call me by the name of this beast that is my brother,” said Lailoq, who was no longer Lailoq—and the hawk that was his totem-animal screamed defiance into the growing light. “From this day forth I shall be called the Merlin.”

  *****

  The Merlin of Din Faraon thrived in his new honoured position. Wise and canny, he advised Vhortiern in matters of commerce and war, and soon traders from far and wide traversed the green hills to reach Faraon, making white tracks across the countryside with the passage of so many feet. They traded skins and beads and weapons, all under Merlin’s shrewd gaze, and soon the daggers of the men of Faraon grew longer, and they replaced their old stone axes with fine new ones of bronze.

  Merlin himself continued to learn the lore of all within heaven and earth under the tutelage of the Old Woman of No Name…who, to her young pupil, was not nameless. She had whispered her secret, true name, Buan-ann, into his ear at his initiatory rites, as a sign of her trust and approval.

  “I won’t lie and say I wouldn’t have killed you, if it had been asked of me,” she cackled, when she took him into the nearby forests to gather mushrooms that would open the spirit-world, and willow-bark to soothe the villagers who had bone-bend and tooth-rot, “but I always hoped it wouldn’t come to that. Man with no father…pah…” She spat on the forest floor. “I can see the Old People, the Hunters, in you, boy. Their blood’s in me too, probably in most of us, if truth be known. And undoubtedly something of a hunter was in your mother, too, that fateful night she vanished! Ahhheee.” She laughed at her own ribald joke, slapping her thighs with gnarly hands.