Hag of the Hills, page 7
I gingerly walked upstream through the black cavern, feeling my way. I sheathed Bodvoc’s sword, and groped for the well, placing my wet warm hands on its damp cold stones, and climbed up. I heard nothing but an ever-present echo. My face went through a spiderweb. A light flickered, and hushed noises came from above. I also heard an ambient, dull roar of a crowd. I found the edges of the well and pulled myself out.
I nearly shat myself when spears were upon me, iron ones now. The spears lowered when someone yelled ‘It’s Brennus!’. I found myself amid hundreds of Skye’s inhabitants. They all looked confused. I had popped out like a hunted hare, sweaty, filthy, dreary eyed, teary eyed, bruised, sunburned, scraped, scratched, huffing and puffing, leaves and twigs matted in red clots in my hair. My trousers were tattered. Pebbles dribbling down my face like raindrops. A spider crawled along my shoulders.
I raised Bodvoc’s bloody sword. ‘I killed one! Bring me some beer!’
That is what I would have said, if it had been Vidav that climbed up the well, and not Brennus. What I did and said shall not be repeated here, for it is shameful. Brennus is shamed, and there is no reason to shame him further.
CHAPTER V
Truth is, my dear Luceo, that I am of two minds when I think of Dun Ashaig. Before I made my entry through its well, Dun Ashaig occupied my wonder. There the druids discerned the will of the gods. There we feasted on holidays. There we drove the cattle through the fire to protect them from evil that they can catch in the mountains. It was where we solved legal matters, or traded with foreigners.
For nine days, the Hillmen besieged Dun Ashaig, and I enjoyed it. Yes, enjoyed. We faced death, but I enjoyed it. Those nine days were the hope of the smith. When he works his iron, and he follows the procedure right, honouring Lugus with his craft for nine days, but on the tenth day, all goes wrong and he has wrought a nightmare, a misshapen thing that should not be. That was the tenth day on Dun Ashaig.
But I will start from the first.
They brought me into one of the tents that housed the sick and wounded, who laid strewn about like harvested wheat. The nurses there tended to my scrapes and fetched me water. I listened to the wind rattle the thatch while I asked for my missing Fennigus and Auneé and a few of my younger cousins I had not seen in the byre. Only Fennigus was here.
I found Fennigus sitting with the boys around a fire. His eyes lit up and we embraced. I wanted to keep holding but he shoved me away, then gestured for me to sit down. I sat on the log among his six friends, and on the windy plateau, they told me what happened to our ravaged homeland.
An invasion had occurred while I was up in the Slighan Hills. Boats had landed all over the island, dragged upon its beaches and slipways, and men poured out like ants from a disturbed anthill.
They were called Hillmen because the survivors here, including myself, first spotted them coming out of the hills, though they had come from the ocean, but Hillmen was their first moniker and no one cared that it was a misnomer. They had swarmed over the island, as quick as a surf, and devoured all they could like crabs devouring dead fish. There were thousands of them, and they were mostly armed with flint weapons, or some, it had been reported, with quartz, or jadestone, hornstone, greenstone, bloodstone, or with clubs. Nonetheless, they did not use iron or even bronze. The chiefs among them wore wooden armour as I had observed, latched together with thongs. What was the queerest was that they all had black hair like ravens. Even men like the Greeks who normally possess dark hair have the occasional redhead or blond among them, but not these Hillmen. They stood out in deep contrast to our clans, since we were all blonds and redheads. The only brunette I knew was Myrnna, and now men whispered rumours about her having a connection to the Hillmen because she shared their hair colour.
With their strange weapons and armour they waged war against us, or rather, cold murder. They killed whatever man they found, and then took the women, children, the slaves, and animals, though they hated horses as they hated iron. They did not wage war as we did. We Celts, as the men of the south note, make a spectacle of it. We dress in woad and spike our hair in beeswax and charge in nude. We dance with our swords and dance on our horses and dance in our chariot cars. We shout insults and blow our carnyx and then we dance some more. When we do fight, we tend to duel, man versus man, for we seek to honour the gods by conquering another man, and there is no honour in killing two-on-one.
Yet the Hillmen had no such honour. They warred when they had to and they did war well, but they sought to kill us. They sought to remove us, the men that is, from Taman, a task that must be done like how the crops must be harvested before winter. They stalked the countryside and murdered whatever man got in their path.
We had no idea what they wanted, we of warrior, farmer or slave blood. Lots of folks suspected the druids knew something that they refused to tell us, perhaps out of fear, or to save their own hides. All the druids were here, as well as the vates and bards, and we found it suspicious that not one of them was left at the mercy of the Hillmen.
I sat with Fennigus and his boys – six of them, all clansmen who were around Fennigus’ age. I recognized some of them from the failed raid, but that hardly mattered now.
‘Maybe it’s lucky for us, our trial is postponed,’ Fennigus said with a grin. ‘We’ll die freemen, and in battle, Brenn. It’s what we always wanted. It was father’s fate and now it’s ours.’
‘And Bodvoc,’ I said. I had been quiet, just listening to them speak, for they had a lot to say and I was afraid to tell them about my encounter with Calli in the hills. But I told them my story now and how I ended up among them.
‘What a man!’ Fennigus shouted, as he stood up and raised a finger toward the sky, ‘I never thought the old man had it in him! Three, you say?’
‘Lappie also killed one.’
‘Ha! I never knew that bitch had a fighting bone in her body. By the gods, tonight, we drink to their deaths! Then they drink to ours in the Otherworld!’
The Otherworld is the realm opposite of this one, the land of the dead. I didn’t know if men and dogs drank there, but I did know it is where you rest among your ancestors. Fennigus had funny thoughts sometimes, but such a thought is more inspiring than just sleeping.
A fat druid with a flat nose and a shaggy beard, dressed in his golden embroidered white robe and bearing his hazel-bough staff, emerged from the night and told us to drink tonight and that we would sleep in tomorrow before training. So we all drank ourselves stupid and one of Fennigus’ boys, Tascio, vomited, while Fennigus and another boy whom the gods had blessed with both height and broad shoulders tried to sneak to where there were some pretty girls quartered on the other side of the promontory, but the boys were far too drunk and they both slept in the muddy trackway. I slept in an unfurnished tent with the boys, all haphazard and with the pungent stench of beer and vomit, I drifted asleep for possibly an hour and then a horn blew.
Pain shot through my head. A raspy voice ordered me up to my feet, and we all clambered up and it felt as slowly as plants grow. My head throbbed and my stomach quivered and my ears rang, then rang again when the horn blared again. An undertow of groans accompanied it, the seven of us coming to our senses. The fat, flat-nosed druid with the shaggy beard stood in the doorway before dawn. The promise to sleep in had been a lie, and he hectored us out with his hazel bough staff.
We went outside. Fennigus was up, running in place. He was dusty from his rest in the trackway. He was still drunk, but he looked ready for war and his fire heated the other men around him. They all woke up, and I too stuck my shoulders back. We were all ready.
‘I’m Cammios,’ said the druid, ‘every single one of you will be dead soon. Does that scare you? Cúchulainn said ‘It matters not to me if I die tomorrow or next year, if men remember my deeds!’ So now all of you now must honour his memory by your warcraft. You will be warriors, and the Hillmen will know our iron!’
It had not been the best speech, but it roused us enough to wake us up to soberness. Cúchulainn was our hero, there was none else before him except for the gods, but the gods were distant and Cúchulainn had walked our lands. He had trained with the Banaghaisgeich, an amazon in civilized men’s tongues, in the Black Mountains – the Cuillins, named after our heroic Cúchulainn. Those were the mountains just beyond the Slighan Hills, and he may as well have been a clansman. All men listen when his name is spoken, and all men listen when we hear his words, and there is no easier way to rouse a man to war than to speak of his deeds.
We followed Cammios into the great trackway where we drive the cows in a circle during the winter. It encircled the grove sacred to Cernunnos, our god of the hunt, forest, and kingly sovereignty. We met a hundred other men ranging in ages from fourteen to fifty, I reckoned, perhaps some younger and older. They marched us around the trackway once, then made us run, and kept making us run. Sometimes they took us into the grove to toss stones around or grip the boughs of the ash trees there and pull ourselves up until we couldn’t pull any longer. We were told to pull ourselves up more if we wanted beer that night, so we did and then didn’t receive anything that night but milk and stale bread.
The next morning, they armed us with short spears that could be thrusted or thrown. We had also been given shields, oblong ones that ran from knee to shoulder, edged with rawhide, and held with a clenched fist in the centre behind the iron boss.
The plateau had been loaded with eager aspiring warriors, and not enough druids to train us, so the druids appointed lieutenants who had battle experience, and they appointed Fennigus as my lieutenant.
We had a small group of nine of us armed with our short spears tipped with small wooden blocks so that we would not stab each other. Two in our group were Fennigus’ boys, and the rest some neighbours from the neighbour clans, including one I remembered seeing at the botched raid. His name was Varatus, and he had a long nose and sunken eyes and a skinny, long neck that would beg a sword to swing toward it. I hated him the moment I saw him, and he hated me, too. That bad blood had been washed away when the Hillmen washed over our island, at least I thought that at the time. He befouled me with a look so foul that I wondered if he hexed me.
We stood with our short-spears and our shields in the trackway. Sweat poured down from me on that balmy day before I had hardly moved. Women, children, and the druids all wandered about outside the fence of the trackway, watching us, surely praying to the gods that this new crop of warriors would somehow grant them victory over the Hillmen.
Despite the seething hatred from Varatus, the impending death waiting just beyond Dun Ashaig’s tall walls, and the worry that I would disappoint Fennigus, I felt happy. Yes, my dear Luceo, happy. I had finally gotten what I wanted. Holding ashwood in one hand and the iron in the other, I had realized I received the life I wanted.
For a price…
Fennigus faced us all. He strutted up, stripped to the waist, sun glistening on his sweaty chest and his sword that he poised at us, his shield at ease.
‘Rules for the game,’ he said, ‘first to hit wins. Who’s first?’
Varatus charged in first, hopping through the mud and closing the distance with Fennigus. He jabbed his spear toward Fennigus’ head. Fennigus raised his shield, sidestepped, and stabbed Varatus’ exposed
belly.
Varatus struck again, ignoring the rules of the game, and Fennigus blocked, pivoted, parried another of Varatus’ blows. Fennigus then drove the shield edge-first into his jaw. Varatus stumbled, the shield fell from his hand, and he fell to his knees. Two boys pulled him up to his feet, the knees of his yellow trousers stained brown. He was bleeding from the mouth and the boys hauled him and tossed him on his arse at the fence. He never messed with Fennigus again.
‘You see, boys, what he did wrong was,’ Fennigus said, ‘is that he assumed power means most in combat. Finesse is what matters the most: the ability to work around the attacks of your opponent, to cut him where he is exposed, to dance around his blows. Cractacus, come,’ he gestured to one of his boys. Cractacus was wiry with a weak chin and a fat nose, ruddy face, and jovial eyes. He had a black scab on his face from the botched raid on Varatus’ clan. He looked like he was always on the verge of laughter, and now was no different, toothy smile and approaching Fennigus.
‘Cractacus is more experienced. Show them how it’s done.’
My mind wandered now. I had wished Fennigus would have called on me to display the proper way of combat. If only Bodvoc had allowed me to train! But now Bodvoc was gone, and I had his sword at my side, and as if his ghost had come back to slap me upside the head, I heard his words.
Pay attention!
Now that Varatus had been dispatched, the real fight began. Fennigus had his spear over his head and held his shield outward. Cractacus mimicked Fennigus’ stance. They both leaned forward as they moved toward one another, one foot straight and the other poised. Fennigus must have trained Cractacus, for they moved much like one another.
Like a badger, Fennigus snapped forward, his front foot stomping the baked mud of the trackway, his spear struck. Cractacus lifted his shield up and blocked, and Fennigus feinted – and I felt pride because I had feinted against the Hillman – and struck. Cractacus jumped back and they both lowered their weapons. The fight had lasted just moments.
‘One or two hits, and then you leave. The longer you linger, the better chance your enemy will kill you.’
We trained in that manner in the hot sun. Fennigus and Cractacus fought, and then we fought amongst each other. We learned to keep our feet in the right places. We learned how to block and how to dodge and how to counter. We learned to use the shield as a weapon. We learned how to use our weapon as a shield. We learned to expose the enemy by forcing him to expose himself.
I learned. But learning and doing are two different things. I will admit now, my dear Luceo, that I simply could not keep up. My feet always faced the wrong way. I always leaned backward instead of forward, throwing myself off balance. My strikes were predictable, and I received deep bruises from all the times I missed with my shield. Now I am a formidable opponent, and men dread to face me in single combat, but then I dreaded facing anyone in single combat. Each day went much like this, we trained and fought all day and at night, we were given ale and meat and we drank. Each day I tried, and never gave up.
‘Brenn is struggling,’ Fennigus said to Cractacus, while the two shared a cup of ale by the fire one night. They had no idea I was nearby. ‘He tries, but he just can’t do it.’
I went to bed that night without my ale, just gazing up at the stars outside my sleeping hut.
The next day, after more training, we readied for the nightly feast. It had been a typical day of failure for me, and I grew frustrated until I realized that it was day nine, and on the tenth day, we would die. That is, tomorrow.
All day long, the Hillmen outside the fort pounded on drums in one big dumpth. They never stopped dumpthing until we would stop them. Each strike reminded me of how close we were to the end, and now at the end of the day, when the sun streaked the sky red, where the sidhe were most active, when magic was most potent, and when our dead ancestors visit the living for a while, we stood in the trackway after the final day of training. We warriors all idled around in clusters of circles. We were all weary, except for Fennigus, who had spent much of the day beating us all silly. The druid Cammios brought us two girls dressed in drab brown tunics. He hauled them toward us like he drove cows. He stepped behind them and yelled.
‘You see these?’ he asked. We nodded.
‘No, you don’t see these. Now, see these!’
He yanked their dresses down to the waist to expose their perky breasts. The two blond girls looked like sisters. They both blushed and covered themselves. I couldn’t believe my eyes, fixated upon those pointy breasts.
‘Each warrior gets a girl tonight,’ Cammios said. But we’re uneven, so one warrior will have to go without a woman. We’re going to have a tournament now – all will watch it. Whoever wins gets the first pick for a woman, and the second a second pick, and so on, but the last will get none, and will have to chaff the wheat from their own cocks instead.’
We don’t swear feeble oaths, my dear Luceo. An oath is a bond between man and the gods, the mediator between us. When we die, all that is left of us is our deeds and our honour, and a man’s word is tied to honour. I then swore an oath, silently, holding the blade to my forehead, that I would not be the last in line for a woman. No one heard me except for myself, but it bound me just the same as if I had shouted it to the scores of warriors on the trackway. I would not die before tasting the sweet fruit of woman, not when those perky breasts were burned in my eyes.
Cammios hauled the girls away, and we stood awestruck. It was as if one had just dangled a steak in front of caged wolves. We all turned to one another in the dimming twilight, our spears and shields raised.
Fennigus approached me across the muddy span of trackway. It had been beaten muddier by our feet in the last few days, and the brown had crept up his green-yellow check trousers. He came to me with a nondescript face. He pointed his spear at me.
‘You and me first.’
His hungry eyes called for my defeat, I feared, but I knew that if I shirked from him then he would despise me even more. The gods hate cowardice.
I aimed my spear at him in response. All eyes were on us. The night seemed to darken by the second and soon the druids would light the torches. The Hillmen outside the moors beat on their drums as they had been doing all day, and the beats hit me in the chest.
We closed in slowly.
‘I fucked Cloda, Brenn.’
I looked on, agape.
