Hag of the Hills, page 16
‘Then I swear to Osimus that I shall kill you if you help me!’
‘Then let us go down now, it is so dangerous up here!’ he said. ‘Be careful! At twilight, I will make you into the man you are.’
I descended first, later regretting it, since I was younger and fitter than Cammios, and Cammios came down above me, and if he fell then we would both tumble down together. I recited my lineage to myself, from Lugus to Biturix, and Cammios agreed that he knew I had been a warrior, though I looked like a slave now.
As we descended, pebbles and chunks of earth fled down in our wake, and razorbills and oystercatchers flew to and fro, which distracted me.
‘Do you know what razorbills and oystercatchers mean?’ he asked.
‘I don’t know, tell me.’
‘I cannot tell you, but watch it!’
I lost my footing, and I slid down, my arse skidding hard on the thinly covered rocky cliff. Pebbles and dirt flowed over my face and down my body and then Cammios rolled down. He rolled down and further down. He finally stopped himself on a knob of the cliff. I scuttled down to him, and though he sat there silent, I could tell he had not been badly injured, just full of scrapes and bruises.
‘Do you know what this means?’ he asked, recollecting himself from
the ground.
I thought he meant the fall, but then he held up a glittering grey macehead. It was polished and had an empty socket where a handle would have been. It resembled something the Hillmen would carry.
‘A gift from the sidhe,’ he said, and when he turned to me, his eyes looked so glazed. ‘It’s a sign, and as thanks…’
He put the flat of his hand on the gneiss slab under him, spread his fingers and then smashed the macehead down upon them. He rolled over on his back, wheezing dryly. I worried he would roll off the knob and so grabbed him by the shoulders, and he started jabbering again.
‘Penance!’ he cried, and he brandished his mangled hand. He then started down the hill. How with crushed fingers, I don’t know, but I followed him down.
‘Wait here,’ he said. ‘I will return to you just before twilight to begin the ritual. Listen to me good, Brennus, listen to me good – you have a second chance now, but there is no chance for me. You will become the man your ancestors had created, and you will fulfil your promise and kill me. That
I know.’
He headed eastward down the sheep trail with his mangled hand stuffed in his robe. Belus, the sun god, reddened the horizon. That revealed the start of the new day for my people.
I prayed to Belus. He sank further down the horizon. I had no thoughts and just sat there at twilight. Behind me, the green stony foothills obscured Slighan Hill, and in front of me, the shale beach of uneven slabs, the limpid ocean that shone red-yellow now. The brine-breeze flowed through me, it seemed. Peace had reached me. I was to become a new man, and shed off this husk of nothingness that I had been left with by my own foolish heart.
A jolly hum. A feminine voice hummed over the crashing waves. I should not have looked. I had ventured deep into the Black Headland, where boats are wont to wreck, where erring sheep never return, where the sidhe roam. Yet I looked.
There I saw her reclining on a shale slab. A young woman, no older than I, waist-deep in the ocean that breathed over her lower body. Wheat-coloured ringlets danced at her lithe back. She reposed there nude, her skin white as bleached bones, her body as desirable to me as a slavering dog desiring scraps. She combed her hair with a seashell.
‘Come back to the Slighan Hill!’ she said.
Badb! How could that be? That sentence knocked me out of my stupor. This was the sidhe! I climbed to my feet and turned to run, and her hair had turned green, as if strangled by seaweed. But then she sang again, extended an arm, that lovely, endearing hum, and her hair appeared golden again.
‘What did you say?’ I asked her.
She stood up, revealed her youthful body to me, her hips swaying as she walked across the rough shale like a bird on a rope. The sun had set the ocean alight behind her. I closed in on her, and she on me.
‘You know what I said, Brennus,’ she said, her voice playful. She had a sharp face, with a snub nose and a smile as endearing as her voice. She hummed again.
‘Queen Slighan is waiting for you. Did you know she is now the queen of this island, Brenn? Our queen has returned!’
I shook my head. She hummed more and I found myself drawn to her.
‘It’s all thanks to you, sidhe-walker,’ she said.
Once we came into close quarters, my worries had left me. I just stood there enthralled by this lusty girl, as salty droplets fell from her perky pink nipples.
‘I am Negorm,’ she said, and ran a tendril-like finger over my face.
‘What are you?’ I nearly sighed.
‘Oh, what am I? Just a vessel for our queen,’ she said and pointed over my shoulder. I turned and there the red hill of Slighan lit up the darkening sky. I shuddered, turned back and noticed that her hair was now green, seaweed green, or just seaweed and not hair at all.
’I’m here to persuade you. We know what you did to Ciuthach, the giant. But the queen is merciful, and understands you were just scared of my poor brother.’
Brother? What monstrous womb could squeeze through such differing forms? I thought, and then lost myself to the shadow of Slighan.
Slighan came forth and oppressed me, it crunched my spirit and begged to pull me to my knees. My bare knees hit the cold, wet shale. Negorm rubbed my bald head with both of her tendril-equipped hands. Humming, she pressed her crotch against my face, the soft hair bristling my lips, and she giggled.
She urged me up, and I climbed to my feet, and she put both of my hands on her cushy rear, wrapped her arms around my waist and hauled herself against me. I could do little to resist. Her skin felt oily; even scaly like a lizard. She slithered in my arms and this harrowed me, and truncated my desire for her.
‘Your reward for freeing Slighan,’ she said, her hips thrusting near mine, her hard nipples grinding against my bare chest, her lips brushing mine. Soon her tongue wrapped around my tongue, as if in a bind, and her lips tasted sour, and her tongue felt split, like a viper’s. My heart began to race and I desired nothing more than to flee, and I would have swum across the ocean if it meant shirking both her and the Slighan hill. The latter I could feel almost more than the lusty sea-sidhe-thin. Negorm pulled me down onto, and she splayed out on all fours on the shale. I could do nothing but obey her spellbind.
‘You’re coming with me,’ she said. ‘We’re going to meet queen Slighan down in the Ocean! Yes, indeed – there is much to see down there! Come, Auneé is there too! She’s sitting on Bodvoc’s lap! They’re all down there.’ She reached down and squeezed my pulsating boar tusk.
I had to resist. I knew the tales of the Black Headland. One tale told of a sidhe that lures men into the water, and promises them love and marriage and children, a gilded glorious life down in the depths. And they drown. They’re called morgens. Morgen… Negorm... of course! Badb! I cannot die before Cammios has made me a new man! But how could I resist this?
Nothing is unconquerable. Even our gods can die.
I had one chance.
‘I do,’ I said. ‘But let me take you from behind.’
Negorm’s eyes widened to the suggestion. My dear Luceo, I don’t know what I ran into that day on the shale beach in the Black Headland. I still do not truly understand my sight. Could I have seen her if the hag had not unlocked it? Could I truly have humped something such as this, which may very well be an illusion? Could it really drown me? I still do not know, and I do not think I will ever fully know, but at that moment it mattered not.
Before I took her, her eyes, as bright as they had been, looked as if they had turned to slits. I wrenched myself free, gripped a handful of seaweed-like hair, and smashed her face into the shale.
Her horrid face turned over her shoulder. Her mouth agape. Two fangs dripped venom from her scaly lips. Her eyes slitted up. I fell, drew away apace, and she lunged at me.
The sea-thing was upon me. Her arms hugged around my torso and she bowed her head to sink her fangs into my shoulder. I wriggled away, spittle dripped from her onto my shoulder and it stung. Her fangs dripped venom. They had sunk into my shoulder and I screamed and she gurgled as she sucked the blood from me.
I wrestled myself away, I fell backwards and scrambled to my feet and pulled up a piece of shale to pelt her with, and then came the rod. She recoiled at the blow. It was Cammios, he had a wooden rod and he smashed it over her head twice, then thrice. Negorm screeched.
‘Begone, sea-slut!’ he shouted at her. ‘By Belenus, the light of this world, I banish this darkness! Begone!’
This checked Negorm, her eyes sank low, she slithered away across the rocks as if she had no bones in her body. She slinked into the ocean and never returned.
A veiny, cold hand fell on my shoulder, across the bloody wound.
I was breathing heavily with my eyes fixed upon the sea, and it now vexed me. I feared such a thing would return.
‘Your last trial before becoming a man,’ Cammios said. ‘You resisted that morgen.’
I barely had, Luceo, and I’ve always wondered if it jinxed me.
Now Cammios stood before me, in the waning light, his robe scrubbed clean, his hair combed, his beard waxed, his face free of blemish. He seemed nonplussed by my attack from the morgen.
‘She will do no harm to you,’ he said, running a cold hand over the wound of two red holes on my shoulder. A smile flickered over his face.
‘It’s time for you to become the man that you will be.’
He led me away from the sea, and out of the shadow of the Slighan hill, toward the grasslands that bordered the shale beach to the red scrubby hills. We came upon a lonely stone that stood upon a stony knoll. It was broad and flat and it bent toward the sea. Cammios sat me down with my back toward it, and the bright sun blinded me. He instructed me to close my eyes.
‘And don’t you open them, until it is bright no longer.’
I sat there, the bright sun flaring my eyelids red. It began to hurt. I writhed while alone in my own thoughts. Bodvoc’s dead body. Lappie drooling blood. The battlefield outside Dun Ashaig strewn with bodies of my kinsmen. That little boy brained against a rock. Aine’s body thudding to the ground as we descended the well. Myrnna’s dreadful eyes. Cicarus’ bloody knuckles. The pile of my clothes and things on the beach. My ascent away from the mercenary camp, feeling as if the ghost of chief druid Ambicatos wept in the wake of my footprints. I hated it all, and I wished I could open my eyes and focus on something else, and then the hag herself began dancing in my mind, kicking her heels, that old crone dancing madly, her eyes red, her cackle ascendant, mocking me.
‘You’re alight,’ he said, and then his rod tapped my head. ‘Don’t you open your eyes.’
They stayed closed. Hours passed. Soon the sun sank deeper, and the redness dulled, and the pain left. I wondered just what Cammios was doing. The old druid was mad. He had gone mad.
What could he possibly give to me? Become the man that I am? I am disgraced, dishonoured, and oath broken.
The sun must have set because my eyelids went black. Now there was faint light, and I thought of nothing. I became numb to it all, numbly resentful, and then just numb.
After a long time of nondescript thinking and sitting, Cammios thumped me on the head.
‘Open your eyes.’
The full moon shone bright and had greyed the world. The sea looked grey, the moorlands grey, the sky alight with Danu, our goddess of all gods, whose breastmilk lights the sky from horizon to horizon.
‘Belanus has blessed you with his fire,’ he said, ‘you have gone through your second trial. Now you must face the final trial, and you will become the man that you are. Go up that path yonder,’ he said, and pointed to a sheep path through the scrub that led up a hill.
‘What’s up there?’ I asked.
‘The man that you will become,’ he said. ‘Go. Salvage your oath, if you dare.’
I started up the path, thinking little, the heather brash against my bare cold legs.
‘And remember,’ he said. ‘When you come down, you’re going to kill me.’
CHAPTER XI
There in the high moorlands, among the scrub and night croakers, I started up the hill. The stars shone so brightly, and the moon so silver, and the moorland opened around me. It was grey and there was nothing around, just the moors, and had I not felt so calm at this time, I would have feared more giants, or morgens from the sea, or the hag herself.
It will be but for a price...
I spat at that quote. She offered me the life I wanted for a price, yet I did not want this life. I wanted to cast it away, and I wanted a new life, and Cammios offered me that.
My eyes rose to the endless gulf above me, stars swimming in it like so many seagulls, and I turned to view the sea and spotted a sliver of red-yellow over the horizon, Belanus’ last refuge. My feet caked in mud, I crested the hill and there I met my tomb.
The land sank down into an ovular shape around nine craggy outcrops on this breast-like rise. Three slabs of granite capped by a flat capstone formed the tomb. It slanted down into the depression, like descending stairs. Its entryway faced away from the moon and received no light from it. Its portal stood as pitch black as the sky.
The man that you will become…
To become that man, this man had to die. Luceo, we know that some men must die so that others may live. This is true in war, this is true in family, this was true for me. There could not have been both the man I was, and the one I would become. I pulled my trousers down and stepped out of them, and clad in the stars, I stepped into the tomb.
The tomb was dark, the hard dirt floor cold to my bare feet, the air musty. My head became light as I descended, and for a moment, I thought I had not stepped down into the tomb, but rather that the entirety of Taman had flipped, and I walked into the black sky. Moonlight poked through a tiny hole in its rear wall, and illuminated the chamber in faint blue light. I could see many bowls, cups and suchlike placed around the chamber. Some scrappy and rotting carpets laid out on the ground, and what looked like the skeletal remains of a sheep piled in one corner, and then the skeleton of a man laid in the centre. Supine, skeletal hands were folded over a bone handle of a sword sheathed in a mouldy wooden scabbard. I leaned over it and the stench of cedar oil assailed me, and I recalled Cicarus’ so-called Amazon head.
The thoughts fell out of my mind, dissembled, as easy as the skeleton would, if I were to move it. I would kill Brennus. Brennus would die and with it all his disgraces, and with his death, I would receive an attempt to save my oath.
I leaned over the body again, its bleached bones illuminated by moonlight, and I stared into the blackness of its eyes. His head faced southwest, towards where the Otherworld was: westward, far west, wester than the most western druid islands, and far beyond the ocean. This man had made that journey, and yet his body remained in this lonely tomb.
A mouldy green cloak had snared the body, wrapped him up like a cocoon. His hair was still spiked in beeswax, and he had a long red moustache, thin and fragile.
Kneeling at his right side, for one never approaches a man on a journey on the left, I thought about him. I thought about what kind of man deserved such a burial. I spotted a skull under the crook of his arm. A dog to hunt with, in the Otherworld. His hands still gripped his sword. He had been a warrior. He must have been strong, manly, and kept his oaths. He died not a moment too soon or too late to command the land with his tomb.
I sat there naked, shivering from the air, unarmed, drenched in shame. I reached down to touch his hard, cold hand.
And you will emerge a man.
I knew what I must do. I do not know if my sight had instructed me, or the sidhe that inhabited the tomb, or if the warrior himself had guided my actions. I just knew, the same way I knew how to breathe, eat, and sleep, I knew I had to become who I am.
The bones trickled into the folds of the cloak as I unravelled the shawl from the skeleton. A glimmer of yellow-green on the blade of the sword flickered in the moonlight when the arms shifted. I removed the bony fingers from the bone handle. I felt the corroded bolts, and raised the sword into my hands. I ran my finger along the chipped handguard, squeezed the bulbous pommel, prodded the stubby quillons, and then ran my tongue down the cold, dinged bronze blade, pocked in verdigris.
My tongue bled. It was still sharp. It was a bronze sword, not an iron sword, and I nearly wept at its age.
Our ancestors cast bronze swords, and spears, axes, and tools like the adze, but we never used bronze except for jewellery such as my brooch. Bronze swords often turned up here and there, when we would wade into water to spearfish and step on one, or when we explored these old tombs. Sometimes, they turn up in fields piecemeal. If a warrior dies, then his sword must die as well.
While looking at the green blotches on the blade, I discovered a series of faint scratches. After a spell, I understood that the scratches formed what southern men call an inscription. Thus spoke the sword.
On the opposite end of the blade, a swirling pattern had been chiselled into the chappe. I pondered about it, and recognized it as the faint remains of a spiral, the symbol of the dead’s spirit spiralling down into the Otherworld, and then emerging as his descendant.
The swordsmith had dedicated the sword to Green Cernunnos, and now he, the horned one, had possessed me. The world spun, and all became hazy and unclear. My body trembled as the moonlight went askew, and all the tomb appeared asymmetrical, as if a giant had lifted the tomb and broke it in two, and then when the daze faded from me, I found myself sitting on my legs with the sword across my lap, and I knew that Cernunnos had birthed a new man, and that man resided now in me through the sword.
