They are fairies; he that speaks to them shall die.
I'll wink and couch; no man their works must eye.
~William Shakespeare
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Prydain was over there, somewhere to the east. He knew that.
But Llyr's vast-by-comparison neighbor was so far as to be invisible, and for all intents of imagination that endless shifting mass of ocean might go on forever, to the very edge…an edge, just now, where earth met sky in an incandescent conjunction of water and fire.
Geraint stood spellbound, face fixed upon the horizon. He had seen many sunrises in all his wanderings. But never had he witnessed a sunrise birthed from the sea, and it filled him with such awe that he could not tear his gaze away.
Awakened, chilly and damp, as the sky had begun to grow pale at its edge, he had risen up stiffly and taken a few breaths to clear his mind, muddled from the exhaustion of the previous day and the discomfort of the night. But within a few minutes his thoughts had been silenced, quelled beneath a growing awareness of what his vantage point was revealing. Above him, the heavens were lightening into a vast overturned bowl of color: cobalt, turquoise, rose, and gold bleeding one into another, broken by banks of dark violet cloud. At their feet, the sea breathed like a slumbering dragon, a muted mirror of the sky, crossed by undulating black stripes and laced with pearly webbing.
He stared, heart pounding strangely. It kept changing, moment by moment, never the same from one heartbeat to the next; the light and the color and the drifting cloud gathering into an anticipatory glow at its center. Then the first brilliant edge of the sun unfurled like a banner over the rim of the water, scattering ribbons of scintillating light in a beckoning path upon its surface. The fire swept higher, became a searing white-gold and crimson sphere, setting the edge of every cloud ablaze. He could no longer look directly at it: fire and water wed, such unfathomable beauty wrought from their union that his breath seemed to swell to something his body could not contain; he wanted to soar, like a gull, into the very heart of that all-consuming radiance.
A warm wind moved, ceaseless, from the midst of the sunrise through the coarse sea-grass surrounding his rough shelter, lifting his hair, whispering Angharad into his mind. His hands clenched painfully into the clumps of vegetation at his knees. He ached with wanting her next to him, to witness it with him, this swirl of elements that was the very core of her being; no wonder she held him in such thrall. Every shifting color and mood of the scene before him had its incarnation in her; to love her was to hold that magic of light and liquid in his arms and crave both the burning and the drowning it would bring. The crescent of raw flesh at his chest flamed painfully; he pressed the cold metal of the pendant against it and set his teeth, welcoming the sting. This, he thought, blinking at the flaming circle, his eyes watering, is why I am here.
With new resolve, Geraint rose to his feet again, taking in his surroundings. The grassy hollow among the sea cliffs that had provided his shelter had been the limit of his travels the previous evening. The journey around the island had been as smooth as Arianrhod had promised, and he had docked without incident before dark. But his attempts to delve inland, to find paths among the cliff faces, had proven frustrating. Every promising gap he followed eventually ended in impassible stone; then night had fallen, too early, somehow, and with it had come other things. Strange sounds, of whose first furtive echoes he had taken no notice, had gradually become loud enough to make him pause and look about in consternation, wondering if he'd really heard them. Eventually he had not needed to wonder; hair-raising howls and gibbering cries rang out, without warning or consistency of direction, every few minutes. Setting foot into one likely-looking cleft had resulted in a bloodcurdling shriek rising from behind a boulder at his very elbow, sending a shock of terror down his spine. He had sprung away instinctively, and nearly tumbled from a sheer drop at his other side.
That was enough. It was a common occurrence, in their legends, for the gwyllion's unearthly screeching to drive unwary travelers to their deaths. Though it both intrigued him to have proof of their presence and sparked his anger to be made into such sport, a tumble from the cliffs would put a swift and wasteful end to his quest. Waiting for daylight to continue the journey made sense from more than one angle. He had found a hollow out of the wind to bed down, and was grateful when the source of the eerie noises, perhaps nonplussed by his lack of activity, must have moved on to seek a more lively target. Exhaustion had claimed him, but his sleep was troubled, and filled with strange dreams that left him with no memory of their details, only their sense of disquiet.
Now, in the daylight illuminating the cliff faces, he could see through the cleft he'd been driven away from. Smooth hills rolled behind it, humps of emerald velvet with gray boulders cutting through here and there like crumbling teeth, oddly vertical and top-heavy, in formations that did not quite look natural or even, in some cases, physically possible. The noises of the night still echoed in his mind, and the setting brought the hair on his neck to prickling attention. Treaty or no treaty, small wonder this area was forbidden.
He rummaged in his pack for breakfast and his hand encountered something cold and hard; he pulled out a small iron dagger and mulled it over thoughtfully while he ate, slipping it into his pocket instead of returning it to the satchel. Arianrhod or Eilwen must have included it; cold iron was a ward against faery mischief, as was salt - with which his own hair and skin were coated, thanks to yesterday's journey. No harm in such precautions.
Half-expecting the strange sounds to start again the moment he began traveling, he eased from his hollow with reasonable caution, but no cries rang out as his feet found their way among the waving saltgrass, except that of the gulls and waterbirds calling to each other from their morning rounds. The noise of the surf faded as he wound between the cliffs, and his frustrations of the day before melted away as the view opened before him. At last, he had found a way into the highlands.
Ahead, the hills stacked one upon another, rising up several leagues inland, backed by one that towered over the rest, its green slopes glowing in the early light. It was too far to see what crowned its top, but he set his feet toward it with a thrill of mingled fear and anticipation, trusting in the word of his guides.
There was no path, and only a few stunted and twisted trees. He picked his way through prickly patches of gorse and thistle as he descended into the hollows west of the cliffs. At the lowest point his feet squelched through marshy patches, reeking of mud and thick with moss, and he kept to the stony places wherever possible until the ground sloped up once more. White toadstools sprouted like whiskers in the shadows of boulders, and spread in concentric rings over damp areas of ground. Hidden hollows opened before him, filled with the cool haze of bluebells. He gave all a wide berth, and palmed the knife in his pocket.
It was during his descent into the next valley that he felt it, or heard it - he could not tell which, and perhaps there was no difference: a tremor, rumbling as thunder caught beneath the earth, rippling beneath his feet and vibrating into his legs and chest. He froze mid-step as the ground trembled, held his breath. From some immeasurable distance there was a crack like the blow of a stone axe…another, and then another. The sounds split the air and rang in his ears, and he crouched low on instinct. Pebbles dislodged themselves from the slope and bounced toward the valley, clacking and scurrying like frightened animals. He turned unsteadily to see whether he was in the path of anything large enough to pose a danger, just as a patch of earth not twenty yards away suddenly broke loose and became fluid, roaring into the valley like a brown river. He clung helplessly to the grass at his heels and waited, heart pounding, expecting any moment that the ground under his own feet would give way.
It held. The tremor ceased, dying away as suddenly as it had begun, but Geraint sat motionless for long minutes, as though the slightest move on his part might trigger another. He stared at the bare ground the slide had left behind, and realized, as his eyes traveled further, that there was evidence of similar destruction all along the ridge, brown streaks by the dozens marring the green slopes, broken dry brush and piles of boulders tumbled at their lowest point. He shuddered, suddenly realizing how precarious his nighttime perch upon the cliffs had been, took a few breaths to steady himself, and stood up again. Clearly, there was no time to waste in fear and doubt.
The towering hill was close enough now that he could make out the faint outlines of something at its crest, grey shapes a little more solid than the backdrop of clouds that were gathering in the west. In another hour he was certain of it; standing stones in a grim ring crowned the highest point, jabbing at the sky like accusing fingers. He tried to count them thrice, got a different total every time, and gave it up. Another ridge, and another, slid away beneath his feet, until he was at the foot of the peak.
He looked toward the top with a growing sense of dread. His sense of time felt somewhat off, and the sky was now blanketed in a gray that gave him no clear idea of the location of the sun - still, it could not be more than mid-afternoon, as early as he had started. Yet he felt weighted with sudden exhaustion, as though it were nearing midnight, and he should have gone to bed hours ago. He shook it off, pulling his feet up the slope. Its steepness demanded a meandering diagonal route, crossing to the north and then to the south, over and over. The clouds overhead grew thick and dark. Thunder grumbled within them and he frowned, uneasy at his exposure upon the bare hillside. More than once he passed dark openings between boulders, openings that might have been the mouths of caves, promising shelter should a storm break. He passed them by hurriedly, and tried to ignore the thought that something within them was watching him.
It did not rain. His feet dragged as he reached the top of the hill, every step weighted as though he pulled them through mire. He wondered if he'd have less trouble if he were an enchanter, or…more of it. Had the queen's father experienced such barriers? The man had been that determined, without even knowing exactly what he sought…but perhaps he had had other forces at his disposal, more potent than a bit of iron and salt. Not that any had saved him in the end.
Cresting the summit, Geraint stumbled to a halt, staring up, his heart pounding. Not a dozen yards away, the stones stood sentinel: dark, forbidding, watchful. He fought down an unmanly urge to turn and run back from whence he had come by being as practical and prosaic as he could. He counted them twice: twelve. Four were larger than the rest, placed opposite one another in alignment with the points of the compass. Even the smallest were at least thrice his height. They were rough and pitted, their surfaces mottled in lichens, their feet lost in thick mounds of moss. The circle was large, perhaps fifty paces from one side to the other, and in its center stood a low mound, a miniature copy of the hill it crowned. A black hole like a door, large enough to accommodate a grown man, opened into the mound, lined and linteled with more stone.
Geraint stared, as dread settled upon him in a suffocating fog. He became aware that the silence around him was absolute. His journey up until now had been accompanied by the twittering of birds in the underbrush, the chuckle of the occasional stream or spring tumbling from some unseen crack, the sea-winds drifting through the grass. Here on the hilltop there was no noise. Even the ominous rumbles of thunder had died away. It felt as though the stones themselves sucked all sound into their center.
He stood, and his feet would not move, tied to the ground as though with invisible cords, and he suddenly found he was angry. He had collected enough tales of the Fair Folk to know that their general disposition toward humans varied widely, from overt malice to tolerant benevolence, depending on what type of creature you asked. Their king kept the instincts of his baser subjects in check when it suited him, and there were occasional stories of alliances, even friendships, between the races. The creatures who guarded this place, whatever their nature, were allied with Llyr; they had agreed to the arrangement, gotten their justice when called for. Why, then, fill the space around themselves with such formless dread, seek to terrorize any who approached? Why make themselves so difficult to contact in a time of need? They had given the gem to the royal house. Yet now it seemed they played him for a coward and a fool.
He had no patience for such caprice. Instinctively he pulled the iron knife from his pocket and crouched, stabbed it into the earth, cut a dark line into the green turf before him, slid it in a circle around him. He heard nothing, felt nothing, but all at once his feet were free of their weight, and he rose and stepped out, striding forward before he could lose his nerve, holding the knife before him in one hand. The stones were twenty paces away. Ten. Five.
Between the nearest two he paused. With his free hand he clutched the pendant at his breast, the gem pricking at his palm, took a breath, and stepped into the ring.
Geraint blinked, looked around in confusion. Strange lights dazzled his eyes. Torchlight and candlelight winked from alcoves and braziers, bounced off surfaces polished to a mirror gloss, glittered from gems on the breasts and brows of…of…who were they? A crowd of revelers: couples danced past him in complex formations, men and women, fair of face and sumptuously dressed. Silks and velvets brushed him as they swept by; he sensed floating gossamer hair and dark, beckoning glances. Music played from some hidden place, haunting, compelling; his feet wanted to follow its rhythm, to blend into the ring of dancers. Almost he let them. He thought, somehow, that he had been there a very long time, standing about like a rude churl. Joining in seemed the most natural and mannerly thing to do, particularly when one dancer broke away from her partner and turned to him, smiling with irresistible charm, holding out a welcoming hand. He reached for it automatically, unthinking, with the hand that clutched the iron knife.
The music made a sound like a thousand strings breaking. Before he could even react, the pretty face before him distorted into a thing of terror, the dark eyes expanding into deep slits like black gashes in a pinched white face, the mouth shriveling into a lipless hole that opened in a shriek of rage heard not with his ears but stabbed inescapably into his mind. The lights all disappeared as though simultaneously snuffed out, and left him in blackness and silence that was a relief, after the horror. Dizzily he stumbled forward, into…
A moonlit glen. A procession of figures on horseback was drifting slowly past him, barely an arm's length away. There were men and women, indescribably beautiful, robed in white and silver; they took no notice of him but gazed straight ahead, serene and unhurried, singing an unearthly, haunting chorus. Even their magnificent horses did not turn their heads. He felt an urge to speak, to draw their attention, to beg for inclusion in their midst, but a sense of reverence held his tongue, and he watched in silence, listening to the song.
He lost all sense of time. They seemed to go by for hours, winding up from one stand of silver-leafed trees and disappearing around another. Finally, he realized he gazed at one last horse, riderless, bringing up the end of the procession. It was saddled and bridled, moving sedately forward. But next to him it stopped, turned its head and looked at him, and huffed out a gentle, invitational whicker.
Geraint stepped forward, holding out a hand to the lovely animal's muzzle. The velvet mouth nuzzled his palm, soft whiskers tickling at his fingertips. The horse sidled closer to him, presenting him with easy access to a stirrup. He pondered it thoughtfully: silver filigree and tooled leather, exquisitely crafted, with strange symbols embossed into the straps; they swam before his eyes. Without knowing quite why he did it, he reached out with the iron knife, and scratched the leather with the point of the blade.
The horse screamed like something from the pit of Annuvin and he fell back as the procession ahead whirled toward him and became airborne like a flock of gulls, shattering the air with shrieks and cries; their beating wings pummeled him. In confusion and terror he fell to the ground, and in the chaos dropped his knife.
The cries ceased as though cut off by a slamming door.
Golden light fell about him and he looked up. Before him spread a green meadow, sprinkled with wildflowers like scattered rainbows. Bees buzzed in the fragrant air. Birds twittered overhead, in a sky the pure cerulean of a midsummer day, the sunlight clear and warm. On the turf before him a dozen fair-haired children frolicked, their heads, wrists, and ankles bedecked with chains of flowers. They were picking jewel-bright berries from the brush, laughing gaily, tagging each other in a merry chase. One of the group called to him, waved him over. "Welcome, stranger." It was a small boy, twinkling-eyed; he took his hand with the warm trust so common in children. "Come, play with us."
Geraint let himself be led into their midst, charmed by their laughter. A tiny girl held out her basket of berries to him, lisping permission to share. The fruit glowed like rubies in the sunlight, and he found he was hungry, and reached for a berry just as one of the others asked his name. He looked up to answer and saw that they were all watching him with strange intensity, as though the fate of a world hung upon his response. It came to him that none of them were eating the berries themselves.
He knew, with a sudden, inexplicable certainty, that he must not answer truly, and spoke through lips gone dry. "I am called…Storyteller, for that is what I do. Would you like to hear one?"
The intensity in their faces grew ravenous, a fey light shining in a dozen pairs of eyes. "A story." The word rippled like a whisper of wind through their midst, though he did not see any of their lips form it. "Yes. Yes. Tell us a story. All your stories." The child with the berry basket pushed it toward his chest. Geraint looked down at it against his own will, compelled, and the silver chain at his throat swung forward, the pendant flashing into his line of vision.
The pendant. The gem. Angharad.
He almost shouted her name in the rush of memory. His hand flew to the burning scar at his chest, knocking the basket from the child's hand; the berries spilled in a crimson pool upon the green turf and disappeared. Again, a bloodcurdling shriek of rage assaulted his senses. He shut his eyes lest the features of the child be twisted into the same horrifying visage he had seen before. Long-fingered hands clawed at his limbs and broke away, accompanied by inhuman hisses of anger and pain. He was buffeted as though in a gale, felt as though he were being dragged; opened his eyes in a panic, upon darkness; he struck out at nothing. Fear assailed him like a living thing, a black and ravening beast, its maw gaping to devour him; gripped in its jaws his mind seemed to shrink to something small and transparent and lost. In a moment it would be gone completely, leave him an empty shell on that barren hilltop.
Angharad, he thought. He was failing her. The pendant was smooth and cool in his hand; the only solid thing he knew. With the last bit of sanity he possessed he pressed it to his lips. A vision of the sunrise over sea flashed into his mind, that glorious kiss of light upon water, and his heart's wild, erratic race slowed, rolled to a steady, even beat. He held it before him: the blazing sun, the rose and gold clouds, the glittering sea-path to the horizon, and he whispered her name aloud. "Angharad."
The air around him trembled at the sound, darkness fragmenting into green and gray; the ground was beneath his feet again, above him sky, no longer blanketed with cloud. It was the dark of twilight; stars shone in it, and an oblong moon, low, between two of the stones at his right. He blinked and turned slowly, taking in his surroundings. The green mound before him. The stone sentinels encircling him. He was within Pentre Gwyllion.
He stood still, waiting, but there were no more illusions. The air was as still as death, and he would have thought himself alone but for the cold certainty of a sentient presence, many of them, watching him with malevolent wariness. He thought of the children — no, the not-children; they had never been children. Twelve of them; one for each stone. He had survived them…so far.
Geraint threw his head back. "Gwyllion of the Tylwyth Teg," he said aloud, "I have bested you."
The words seemed to be pulled into some chasm cut into the silence, deadened and muted, but a whisper sizzled around him like the rustle of dead leaves. From the corner of his eye he saw movement, the furtive flit of a wild thing disappearing into hiding; he whirled to look, but there was only one of the stones, dark and immobile.
You have trespassed. The angry words whistled in his ears, in his mind, in a chorus of voices like wind through grass, thin and rasping and made of many notes; a discordant song, instantly swallowed by the silence. You were warned. Warned. This place is ours, and mortal may not enter.
"The blood of Llyr may not enter," he countered, with a confidence he did not feel. "So states the treaty between your people and those of this island. I am not of Llyr."
Again, there was movement at the edges of his vision, gone when he jerked his head around to catch it. He felt a brush of disturbed air, as if some ephemeral thing had moved past him in the stillness, and shivered. The voices muttered to themselves, a sweep of dubious discontent that he sensed more than heard. You speak truly, not-of-Llyr. But you carry Llyr with you, they accused, and its own doom with it. Why have you brought the gem here?
Surprised, he caught at an unexpected note, and concentrated on it. "You fear this?" He held up the pendant, dangling from its chain, and the wavering things in his peripheral vision scattered like leaves on a wind. He had an impression of a sweep of dark hair, of pale, unnaturally long limbs. "Why? Did you not gift it to them?"
The elusive presences seemed to consider him; whispering without any words he knew. The king's gift, they said finally, the king's concern. We gave them nothing. We do what is required. We abide by the terms.
"As you did for the queen's consort."
A ripple of outraged, defensive mutterings. He broke the treaty. He came to steal, a fool who knew nothing of the consequence. We protected the gem, protected the island, as we are bound to do.
He sensed resentment. "Bound to whom? Are you not here of your own will?"
Something like a howl rose up, and he blanched, remembering that horrible face in the broken illusion. You ask many questions, not-of-Llyr, the voices snarled.
Geraint took a step back, heart pounding, and raised his hands placatingly. "It is true. Perhaps we might come to a…an equitable arrangement." The voices quieted, and he had the sense of being the center of a circle of intense attention. The flickering in his vision slowed, became still, and he thought there were pale shapes, as edgeless as wraiths, at the base of each stone, shapes that disappeared when he looked at them directly. It was as though these creatures occupied spaces that defied the movements of his eyes, undetectable by anything but fleeting, accidental glimpses into the midpoint between light and shadow. He was not sorry for it. He had no desire to see them clearly.
He took three breaths, calming his nerves, wondering if he was about to doom himself. He had only one thing to offer, but it was infinite. "I told you before that I am a storyteller. It was no deception. This is my offer. For every question, a story…your answer as payment."
The quality of the silence changed. The deadness of it lifted, leaving a hushed, expectant stillness, charged like the air before a storm. The whisperings became eager chattering, anticipatory moans, the sort sighed out by hungry guests at the sight of a laden banquet table. Again, a movement in the air brushed past him — almost a caress, Geraint thought, with a prickling at his scalp — as one might stroke a pet lamb, one last time, before slitting its throat.
The voices spoke, in one bell-like note. Done.
After this, his performance in the Great Hall is going to be a cake walk.
Just FYI for all my readers; I recently moved all of my story Sunrise over to Wattpad, so if you have an account over there give it a gold star for me, would you? I don't know how much of an audience I'm likely to find there, but it's a nice reading format, and I even designed a cover for it. :) Just do a search for the keyword Prydain and you can't miss it.
