The Hallowed Isle Book Two Read online

  DEDICATION

  In Memoriam

  Paul Edwin Zimmer

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Map

  Prologue

  1. The Wild Hunt

  2. Verulamium

  3. Holy Ground

  4. The Ostara Offering

  5. The Raven’s Head

  6. The Feast of Lugus

  7. The High Seat of Hengest

  8. Battles in the Mist

  9. Alliances

  10. Mons Badonicus

  People and Places

  About the Author

  Also by Diana L. Paxson

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  My special thanks to Heather Rose Jones, who took time off from her doctoral studies in Welsh philology to advise me on the mysteries of fifth-century British spelling. I would also like to thank Winifred Hodge for her comments and for correcting my Anglo-Saxon.

  For those who would like an excellent historical overview of the Arthurian period, I recommend The Age of Arthur by John Morris, recently reprinted by Barnes & Noble. There are many works on the Anglo-Saxons, but I suggest in particular the fine series published by Anglo-Saxon Books, 25 Malpas Dr., Pinner, Middlesex, England.

  Through the fields of European literature, the Matter of Britain flows as a broad and noble stream. I offer this tributary with thanks and recognition to all those who have gone before.

  MAP

  PROLOGUE

  IN THE BEGINNING WAS THE BREATH.

  When the first Fire met primal Ice there came a wind, released by their meeting, feeding the flame. By virtue of that third element, the breath of life and the spirit that moves through all the worlds, matter and energy interacted.

  It moves upon the face of the waters, and life begins to stir; the trees of the forest exhale it; the newborn babe breathes it in and becomes a child of time.

  In the beginning was the Word.

  Invisible, essential, it moves through all that lives, knowing everything, itself unknown. Aware, it wills the world to change and grow. Conscious, that will is borne on a breath of wind in the form of sound. . . .

  In the morning of creation the god who gave men breath hangs on the Worldtree. Nine nights and days he hangs suspended, neither eating nor drinking, until out of his agony comes understanding, and he calls forth the primal energies of the world in sacred sounds. One by one he calls them into manifestation as Runes of might and power. And then he gives them to the world.

  The Breath carries the Word.

  In a northern forest, a rune-master chants, calling the wind. All through the night the wild storm rages. He stands to face it, hair streaming, garments blown to ribbons, shouting out the names of his god. When dawn breaks and the wind grows gentle, he sees before him the limb of an ash tree that the storm has speared into the ground.

  Whispering a prayer of thanks, he pulls it free, finding it exact in weight and balance for his needs. From fallen wood he builds a shelter at the foot of a hill, and there, for nine nights and days he labors, eating nothing, drinking only from the sacred spring.

  Carefully the wood is smoothed and polished, all irregularities planed away. As he works, he sings of the sun and rain that nourished the tree, the earth that bore it, the wind that ruffled its leaves. When he is finished, he holds a smooth shaft, almost as long as he is tall.

  With his graving tool, he carves into the ashwood the angular shapes of the runes. One by one he carves them, chanting their names so that the wood vibrates with the sound. With the sounds come images, each rune name is a doorway to another realm. With blood and breath and spittle he colors and consecrates them, and as each one is added, the shaft gains power.

  On the eighth night he is finished. To his eyes, the rune staff seems to glow. Now, it contains, but does not yet direct the power. In the dawning of the ninth day, he draws forth from its wrappings the one thing he himself has not made. A cleanly polished leaf-shaped blade of translucent, smoky stone, it came to him from his father. But it is far older.

  When he holds it images come to him of hide-covered huts beneath a northern sky, and he feels the icy breath of eternal snows. The soul of the shaman who made that blade still guards it, whispering of ice and fire and monstrous enemies. Since the time when the fathers of the fathers of his people first spoke in human words, this blade has warded them; it comes from a time even before they knew the runes.

  Handling it with reverence, he eases it into the slot that he has carved into the shaft, bedded in glue made from the hooves of stallions. With the sinew of wolves he wraps it, and ties two raven feathers so they will flutter in the breeze.

  When he is finished, the wood feels different. It is not only that the balance has shifted. The power that was inherent now is focused. As the ninth night falls he climbs the hill. The wind that has sprung up with the coming of darkness is whispering in the trees.

  He turns to face the breeze and it blows stronger. With both hands, he holds up the spear. Wind shrills down the shaft.

  “Gungnir I name you, to Woden I offer you, to bear his word and his will throughout the world!”

  I

  THE WILD HUNT

  A.D. 470

  WIND GUSTED AROUND THE FEASTING HALL, SHRILLING through the thatching and shaking the pillars. Oesc, leaning against the posts of his grandfather’s high seat, could feel the wood trembling beneath his hand. Maybe this will be the storm that destroys us, he thought with a shiver in which excitement mingled with fear. The wind will knock down the hall and then the sea will pour in over the fields and wash us away. . .

  Storms were common at this season, when the forces of winter fought a rearguard action against the advance of spring, but in all his nine years Oesc could not remember so mighty a wind. For generations the Myrgings had held this land, stubbornly clinging to their homes when other tribes passed away. Men spoke of gentle winters and good harvests when they sat around the fires, but since his birth, it seemed, the weather had been bad, and this was the worst year of all.

  A cold blast whipped up the flames in the long hearth as the door opened. Several drenched figures pushed through and slammed it shut, stamping their feet and shaking themselves like wet dogs. Oesc listened with interest as they swore, testing the forbidden words with a silent tongue.

  “The etins are pissing up a storm, curse them!” exclaimed Æthelhere, flinging his cloak at one of the thralls. “I swear the rain is coming in sideways, straight from the sea!”

  “—And cold as the milk from Hella’s tit, too!” echoed Byrhtwold, following him. Their boots squelched, and water ran down their necks from their wet hair.

  “What of the tide?”

  Oesc looked up at his grandfather, who had been sitting motionless since noon, listening to the wind.

  “It will be high just past sunset, lord,” said Æthelhere. “If the wind has not dropped by then—” He grimaced and shook his head.

  He did not need to say more. At this season the wind, adding its power to that of the tide, could turn back the Fifeldor in its course. The storm tides and the flooding river between them would drown the newly planted fields.

  “The Norns have cast for us an evil fate . . .” muttered Eadguth. “If foes attacked us I would go forth in arms, old as I am, but no man can hold back the sea.”

  Oesc looked up at his grandfather. Eadguth had always seemed eternal. Now the boy saw the sunken eyes and furrowed brow, the transparent skin on the thin hands, and knew that the Myrging-king was old, not as a standing stone is ancient, its rough surfaces weathered by the years, but like an old oak, decaying from within until it has no strength t
o withstand the storm. Already this wind had torn limbs from several of the trees that had rooted themselves in the wurtmound on which stood the royal hall. What would it do to the old man? He crept closer and clasped his arms around Eadguth’s leg as if his young strength could root him into the ground.

  The old man’s hooded glance turned downward and his lips twisted.

  “Is it a curse on your line, boy, that has doomed you to find rest nowhere? I am glad that your mother did not live to see this day. . . .”

  Oesc let go and sat staring. He did not remember his mother, a fair woman with eyes the rich brown of tree bark in the sun, so men said, who had run off with an Anglian adventurer called Octha and crept home again, heavy with child, when her man went over the sea to join his father in Britannia. Eadguth’s sons had died in battle, and his daughter had been the apple of her father’s eye.

  “Or is it you who are the doom-bringer?” The king’s gaze sharpened. “Doom to your mother in child-bed, and now the doom of my land?”

  Oesc edged carefully away. He knew Eadguth’s black moods too well. When he was smaller he had tried to say he was sorry, though he did not know what for, and only been beaten harder. He looked like his father, said the women. Perhaps that was why. But the old man, he could see, was too weary to strike him now.

  Byrhtwold glanced from his king to the boy, pity in his eyes, and gestured toward the door. The old warrior would never criticize his lord, but he had showed Oesc what kindness he could. Nodding his thanks, the boy reached the shadows behind the row of pillars and slipped down the aisle between them and the bed boxes until he reached the door.

  His grandfather, king of the Myrgings and lord of their land, was the supreme power in his small world, but Eadguth had ever been a chancy protector. Still, he was not the only power. Oesc slipped through the door, straining to hold it against the wind, seeking the one person by whom he had never been betrayed.

  Before he had gone three steps he was soaked to the skin. The storm was driving down from the north, cold as the seas from which it came, lashing the land with rain. With each gust the big oak tree beyond the palisade thrashed wildly; the ground was littered with leaves and branches. Bent nearly double, Oesc splashed through the puddles, shielding his eyes with his arm. Even so, the wind slammed him against the weaving shed and sent him sprawling beside the storehouse before he came under the lee of the log palisade and crept along it to his goal.

  Hæthwæge’s hut was partially sheltered by the wall; the horse’s skull on the post before the doorway rattled in the wind, and the raven feathers tied beneath it flapped wetly, but here Oesc could stand upright. He took a deep breath and wiped his eyes before knocking at her door. The moments seemed long before there was an answer. Surely, he thought, on such a day she would stay indoors, although the wise-folk were not like other men, and if her magic required it, even a woman who was a wicce might brave the storm.

  The weight of the spindle drew out the thread, spiraling ever round and round like the turning of the seasons, the lives of humankind. Half-tranced by the motion, Hæthwæge did not at first distinguish the knocking from the sound of the storm. It was the flare of emotion that got her attention, rather than the sound. In another moment she sensed a pain more of the mind than the body, and recognized, as one identifies the pungence of bruised pine needles on the wind, that Oesc was waiting there. She twisted the thread through the notch in the shaft of the spindle, and before the knocking could come again, opened the door.

  As the boy started to ease around it, the wind gave him a sudden push that propelled him the rest of the way inside. He fell to his knees, blinking at the darkness.

  “Child, you are wet through! Take off your shoes—you are already making a puddle on the floor.”

  The words were harsh, but the tone was not. Hæthwæge had been Oesc’s nurse when he was little, and knew that he was used to her scoldings.

  The fire flared in the draft, showing her a boy whose hands and feet seemed too big for his thin frame, his fair hair plastered dark and flat by the rain. She took up a cloak and wrapped it around him. He sank down on the three-legged stool beside the fire, nose wrinkling at the smell of wet wool as its heat began to absorb the moisture from his clothes.

  Hæthwæge took up her spindle again and began, humming softly and watching him from the corners of her long eyes, to spin. Oesc eyed her curiously, knowing that a wicce’s spinning was sometimes more than yarn.

  “It is black wool and white,” Hæthwæge answered his unvoiced question, “carded together. Opposites entwined balance the magic.”

  “What do you use it for?”

  “For healing, mostly. I can use this yarn to take a sick man’s measure and seal it with a drop of his blood. Then I bring it home and sing over it, and the magic works as well to heal as if the man were here.”

  To heal, or, of course, to harm. . . . Those hanks of yarn measured trust as well. In the dozen years she had lived with the Myrgings, Hæthwæge had treated almost everyone in the king’s household. She glanced at the boxes and sacks crammed into the space above the boxbed and around the room, trying to remember how many twists of grey yarn she had stored there.

  “Can you use the measure to change my grandfather’s mood?” Oesc said suddenly.

  The twirling spindle stilled. “Has he beaten you again?”

  Oesc shook his head. “I almost wish he had. He talks like one doom-fated, and blames it on me. Is it true, Hæthwæge? Is that why my father never came back for me?”

  For a moment she considered him. She had known that one day he would ask her this question, and understood as well how careful she must be in her reply, so as not to alter the twinings of wyrd and will.

  “Doom-fated you are, and so is Eadguth, and so is every man, all the more when they are god-descended, the children of kings. Eadguth traces his line to Ing the son of Mannus, but your father’s family comes of Woden himself. When you were born, I cast the runes, and told your grandfather that he must lift you in his arms and give you a name.” She fed out more yarn from the distaff and set the spindle to turning once again.

  Oesc nodded. No doubt he had heard the maids gossiping when they thought he could not hear. Until the head of the family accepted the child, it had no legal existence. Her throat ached with pity for the boy whom she had taken as an infant from his dying mother’s side, sensing his potential, and impelled by her god. She could not leave it there.

  “I told him that you were the hope of his house, that if he gave you to the wolves, it was not Octha’s, but his own line that would fail. And yet I do not see you sitting in Eadguth’s high seat here. You will have a kingdom, but it lies elsewhere. The rune that goes before you is Sigel, the sun-road that leads to victory.”

  “Does my father know?” Oesc asked sullenly.

  “A message was sent, but even I cannot tell if it ever found him. He has been fighting in Britannia. Perhaps he felt you would be safer here. And remember, the wandering shope who sang at last year’s Yule feast told us that Uthir the British king had taken him prisoner.”

  “Perhaps he’s dead . . .” muttered the boy.

  Hæthwæge shook her head. “I have seen the two of you together. Your time will come.”

  Oesc sighed and let the blanket slip from his shoulders. His damp clothes were beginning to steam in the heat of the fire.

  “Well, if it’s not my fault, why does the king lay the blame on me?”

  “Do not judge him too harshly. He is an old man. Since his own grandfather was slain by Offa of Angeln on the banks of the Fifeldor things have gone badly for the Myrgings. Now he sees his land being eaten away by flood and storm. When he goes to his fathers, the shopes will not sing that the harvests were good in his reign, and no one will lay offerings at his grave. Of all dooms, that one weighs hardest on a king.”

  As Hæthwæge played out more wool the thread broke suddenly, sending the spindle rolling across the floor toward the rune-carved spear that leaned against the
wall, its head shrouded in a piece of cloth.

  Hah, Old Man! she thought, Has the time come for you to take a hand? For a moment it seemed to her that a faint radiance played about the spear. A dozen years ago it had been entrusted to her, at the same time as her visions had instructed her to take service with the Myrging king.

  Oesc bent to retrieve the spindle, his troubled gaze meeting her own, and carefully set it beside her stool.

  “My grandfather hates me, and my father doesn’t even know my name,” he said bitterly. “Who will protect me?”

  Hæthwæge twitched, feeling the first brush of power against her mind, subtle as the draught that stirred the fire.

  “Look to the father of your fathers,” she answered, her own voice sounding strange in her ears. Sight darkened as more words came to her. “Not the god of the land, but the one who hunts on the storm. He is coming—do you hear him?” She pointed northward, head cocked, listening.

  The fire hissed, and above that came the sound of the rising wind, gusting through the branches of the trees beyond the palisade with a sound like surf on some distant shore. And beyond that . . . deep as her own heartbeat, the drumming of hooves.

  Oesc’s voice came to her as if from a great distance. “I don’t understand—”

  “Come—” The wicce rose from her stool. Without needing to think about it, she took the spear from its corner and started toward the door.

  She could sense the boy’s confusion, but to her spirit the hoofbeats were growing ever closer. If the boy’s presence had been a scent on the breeze, what was coming now was the wind itself, a storm of terror and delight that could whirl consciousness itself away.

  Hæthwæge pulled open the door. Wind swirled around her, insistent as a lover, plucking the pins from her hair. She felt the spearshaft vibrate in her hand and laughed.

  I am coming, I am coming, my lord and my love. . . .

  Laughing, she walked into the storm to meet the god, in that moment scarcely caring if the boy followed her.