Out of the Earth

© Copyright 2013 John Avison.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the written prior permission of the author.

Rook image on front cover courtesy of Margaret Holland

ISBN: 978-1-4669-7241-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-7243-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-4669-7242-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013901387

Trafford rev. 03/05/2013

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Contents

PART ONE

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

PART TWO

17

18

19

20

21

22

23

24

25

26

27

28

29

30

31

32

33

34

35

36

37

38

39

40

41

42

NOTES

GLOSSARY

‘The Lady and the Rooks, Edward Calvert, 1829—© Tate, London 2012’

For my father, George, who didn’t live long

enough to see his son do what he had always

promised—write a book

There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.

—Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 1, Scene 5

PART ONE

1

I N the dead of night, one muscular pulse of a wing.

It seems to lift Richard bodily, flinging him sideways in the bed. As if it is part of him, massively outgrown, black, sheathed in feathers. As if he has slept on his arm and numbed it and something else, something from the furthest blackness, has crept into the insensible skin, muscle, nerve, gristle, and bone.

Hands curling arthritically, fingers long and blue and gnarled, nails hooked and flaky, flesh and nerve pared away. Face straining forwards into the armour. I’m inside the scold’s bridle again, the Serotonin Maiden’s. Shoulders massively muscled, Quasimodo on speed and workout. Eyes out to the side, nictitating membrane installed, vision black, blue, grey—and mind-numbingly, I can see all but twenty-seven degrees of the wide world.

At first, Richard is terrified, fearing that what has grown into his bedroom might wake Sarah sleeping beside him; then he’s furious it has arrived unannounced, that Sarah could not possibly understand if she saw… if she knew… and that she would leave his house and his life, tearful and horrified, as if he had raped a child, one of his pupils perhaps, and he would be alone with whatever possessed him.

Then he thinks, It’s only another dream. The oft-repeated dream of rooks that seem to watch his every move as he lives and works in this ordinary Pennine village of Kirkbretton. They fall quiet in the trees as he passes and accusingly look down on him in silence as he looks up. Sometimes, at his approach, they circle the rookery in Saint Bride’s churchyard in anger and frustration, screaming down at him, Don’t you understand yet? Can’t you see it? He wants to invite them to sit on his arm, to hop clumsily up to his shoulder, to whisper in his ear and tell him what they have seen and know, to give him the word. In his dreams, they might be guardians or messengers.

We rise, unnoticed, in the Triassic as the great reptiles struggle to find their feet. I trace my avian genes back fifteen million years to archaeopteryx, but this is a game with no beginning or end; the chemicals of life endlessly unravelled, simplified, brutalised. This pushing forwards is a force as basic as gravity, the inevitable in action like heat death, entropy. I haven’t detected a change in the genes, though I’ve watched many a thousand generations of rooks try everything their intelligence has fitted them for. We’re still the same creatures who watched the filthy Pict shiver in his furs and, before him, the Aryan stumble his way across the deserted plains east in Asia, west into Europe, and before that, Africa, and before that . . .

But this isn’t a dream, unless life itself is a dream from which everybody waits to waken.

Out of what line did I step? The product of a promise as old as the rock on which Abraham strapped his son Isaac—the rock doused in oil, the rock on top of the highest hill, the Beltane fire-wheel, the cross rock, rock of ages. She called, She moulded, She created a lovely hybrid. Time shall have no dominion, She said. You shall see like a god, both man and bird.

Now facing the mullion windows and what little moonlight filters through the net drapes, he sees Sarah’s very human arm beside him, long and still and peaceful, each tiny hair alive with light, resting on the duvet cover. He sees the bridge of her nose outlined as if in silver wire, the slit glitter of her sleeping eye.

He has the newly wakened intricate awareness of the little things—disturbed dust motes twinkling like free stars in the cold light from the window, the musty ancient smell of feathers, the softness of the laundered pillow on his cheek. But mostly he is aware of the bulky expectant avian creak of whatever is now in the room, fidgeting, breathing, waiting in the darkness beyond his human sight.

An angel? No. Angels bring light. Whatever woke him has sucked the light out of the air. But then Richard realises countless angels are dark, fallen out of the light an age ago, and maybe this is one.

We were never lovers. What, crow-man and queen of heaven and earth? But neither was I her slave. I am made this way to sit on her shoulder, to whisper from the fifteen-million-year wisdom of my kind, and she to whisper from the eternal myth of hers.

He should feel fear, but something deep within him is reassured.

There’s a sudden impatient primeval croak that stirs Sarah in her sleep. It is not the sound an angel makes, Richard is sure.

He has heard the voice of an old and constant friend. No menace, just a statement.

I’m here.

But then he thinks of himself as asleep again because he is not in his bedroom in Kirkbretton lying next to Sarah. He is in the Air. He thinks of the air as Air because it is the element in which he is most at home, the way humans think of their home as Earth, not earth. This would cause him to smile, but he can’t because his face is not built to smile; instead, he opens his heavy beak and emits an exultant rasp. The Air wraps him and comforts him. He controls it with every feather and bone and muscle.

I can feel where my feet became claws, lengthening and curling round the branch. I can feel where the first black and dusty feathers grew, wrapping and tightening around my fingers, impossibly bending my arms, stiffening my joints for flight. On my shoulders sprout the first scapulars, glossy shields; and beneath them, the greater and lesser coverts; and beneath these, the long primaries and short secondary, the powerful remiges, rower feathers for each turn and trace I make, driving and steering the Air. My face, a face that looked and smiled on the gods of the Keltoi and Galli, the dreaming tuath, and, on their mortal servants of high and low birth, stiffens. Out of the death-grey mask and a brutal beak capable of blinding—and in some instances, murder—nostrils rise to sit like caves in which the stews of the world miasmically circulate.

He tries to remember what dreams of flying mean. Do they mean you feel free, or do they mean you want to be free? Who would want to be human, when the Air is your domain? He remembers the name rooks give to humans—upwrights. Or at least, that would be the translation. He can hear only the rook word. In the part of him that is human, he hears Homo erectus, Homo sapiens. Standing man, clever man.

As he beats his ragged wings and glides, he can see a bulging panorama of the world below him. It is like a landscape seen through a fish-eye lens. It is picked out in blue, grey, and black, though the blue is an inhuman colour, perhaps in the ultraviolet. Other traces, like the weaving lines of a map, are projected onto his vision—the whispers of stars invisible in daylight, the earth’s magnetic pulse, thermals, a knowledge of where food can be found and where others of his kind live and move.

He thinks of this as a second language in which he is utterly at home. Yet he knows this is not the language into which he was born. The two race in his mind, and he wonders what he truly is.

Way below his wings, a pristine world glitters in early morning sunlight. It is not Kirkbretton. Perhaps it is his ancient congeries in the Lammermuir Hills of southern Scotland or his human ancestral home in the Yorkshire Dales. But again, it may not even be of his time. He recognises no feature of the world, no wall or field or stream or settlement. For a moment, he falters, scared, and the Air gives way beneath him.

These manifestations of my earthliness—this ancient mute-spattered nest I call home and throne, greatest in the length and breadth of old Pretan, as the misty land mutates into Pryddan, then Prythain, then Brithan, then Britain—serve only to remind me of my duty to the gods, which is a duty, of course, to life itself. Together, we spin through the emptiness of space while the world grows old around us. For as long as I choose to live in these twisted mist-limned boughs, weaving my days with thoughts that mix the past, present, and future, this tree will live, as impenetrable and eternal as the Northmen’s Yggdrasil, old Mimameidr.

In that moment, he realises, as he has realised before and thrust it away, that he is being called. He is under contract. He has a commission, and the Being that commands him is as old as the earth. The Being has many names and is life and death.

What does She want?

I want you, of course, says Sarah sleepily. The same early morning sunlight now filters into the room. It shines on Sarah’s billowing ruddy hair and turns her skin to gold. She’s smiling. Richard raises himself on his elbow and strokes her freckled forehead. Her arm reaches to Richard’s shoulder and draws him downwards. Her breath is morning breath, and her breasts are warm.

Where’ve you been? she says, frowning.

He wants to say Flying or With the Goddess but, even with sleep in his eyes and mind, this wouldn’t be right. Just dreaming, he says and kisses her gently on the lips. Her hand goes to the back of his tousled head and pulls him closer. She kisses him more urgently.

A feather, the gentlest reminder that all is not as it seems, drifts out of the sunlight to the bedroom floor.

2

C ARTIMANDUA, queen-to-come of the Fifteen Tribes of the Brigantes, Bright Arm of the Goddess, is also in a waking dream of her own. Her watcher and teacher is Aduna, grey and ancient, a stringy witch, the girl’s chief flamen, druid, wise in the ways of Earth.

Aduna, wise in Earthly things, is herself the inheritor of a worshipful tradition as old as the hills. But she is also known by and knows of things not immediately evident in the waking and living world. It is she who concocted the potion that courses headily through the young princess’s body and brain tissue.

And watching too is the Goddess Brigid, invisible guardian of the Brigantes. How do I, Her oldest confidant, know that the deadliest force in the worlds of the living and dead is alert and watching?

Because I am Her, and She is me. I am Her bridge. I can see and feel what She sees and feels. They call me a the bird of ill omen, but I am only a humble guardian of the sacred, channel for the triple Goddess—virgin, mother, and harridan—in what the unwise call the real world.

It seems to me today She is in the third and most dangerous of her manifestations, the hag, turning the world pensively in Her hand, as likely to dash it to the ground or swallow it and kiss it alive.

It is for Her that the cold world now hangs on a knife-edge, holding its breath.

Not a bird sings evensong. Above the valley mists, the Dog Star is a spear point of light in a still sky sinking bluer, bluer into night. It is a bleak evening—not a breath of wind but bitter and crisp.

It is Her own festival of Imbolc, ewe’s milk eve, a moment of change dedicated to the first stirrings of life in a world enfeebled and trapped in a long season of death and misery. After the winter, it’s time to renew the promises, rekindle the fires of life, marvel anew at the thrusting green life of stem and bud.

Time to commit a life to the Goddess’s service. The latest in a long line stretching unimaginably far into the past.

I, Hroc, Master of Flocks, watch from my hawthorn bush as unseen hands push open the leaning gates of Uellacaern, the palisaded fortress that the Romans will storm and reduce to ash mere years from now. Here, they will build their own fort and town of Olicana, Ilkley.

In summer, this is a garth, a pretty place on a gentle rise above the rushing river Isara, a haven in the midst of skirmish-torn Brigantian territory. But now, in February, it is shrouded in mist. Out of the stave-ringed fort emerges a single file of priestesses, angry light flickering orange at the head. Aduna, high flamen of the Great Goddess, holds a scion of the eternal fire aloft in its iron cresset.

Taranis, Thunder Man, turner of Heaven’s mighty wheel . . .

Twelve grey-cowled children of the old faith follow, chanting arhythmically—each speaking to their own patron god or goddess, each with a glimmering, smoking brand, each brand parting the mists like an eyot in a swirling river. And the fog clamps shut behind it.

Then comes the child-woman Cartimandua, nicknamed Sleek Pony by her tribespeople after her intense passion for and knowledge of horses. She is princess of the Fifteen Tribes of Brigantia, only daughter of Queen Cybella, the latest in a line stretching way beyond her present assumed nobility. Her genes are borne aloft, not always on the unsaddled horses of the mysterious Aryan, but from the unknown and unacknowledged tribes that rose before them, generation after generation, some the pursued, others the pursuers.

Her dazzling blue eyes are glazed and unseeing. Though her companions stumble occasionally, she walks proudly and sure-footedly, as if guided by inner lights. The potion administered to her before the stone altar in the sacred enclave of the stronghold is working in her mind, and she is travelling in another world, where the Goddess whispers in her ear and moves her soul silently on unknown paths.

Thirteen more of the torchlit faithful follow. Then the mists close like a tomb door, and Uellacaern is folded in the evening gloom.

I fly with them above the void of the mists.

The column weaves steadily out of the valley fog on to the bald moor on a path worn by time and tradition. A curlew’s bubbling lonely call, the spirit-voice of one long dead and buried in some moorland cairn, harries the dead silence.

The sacred circle they approach was built by unknown hands many lives earlier. The monoliths are roughly carved, giving the appearance of having only lately thrust themselves out of the gritstone and heather. But only those with the minds of brutes and savages can fail to hear Earth’s song in this spot, the crossing of lines of power so strong the ground almost vibrates.

Aduna and the leading twelve turn left; the thirteen following bear right; and both arms form a complete circle inside the standing stones.

But Cartimandua stops of her own accord before the flat carved central altar.

She is clad only in a simple shift of white linen tied at the waist, yet she is impervious to the chill. For her, the moors are alive with lights and whispers and the sky with the cruel omnipotence of her Goddess.

Her sole ornament is the torc that denotes her total allegiance to the service of the Great Mother, Brigid. It is of fine gold, wrenched from the beating heart of Gaia in times so ancient as to be unspeakable, beaten and twisted by saints into the likeness of the black rook, Hroc, symbol of life and death, perfect startling rubies inlaid for eyes. Among the grey hoods and undyed homespun of the druids, Cartimandua’s white robe gleams in the dusk, a perfect foil for the torc, which now seems to pulsate with the swelling power of the ley lines at whose nexus it is poised.

The princess carries a phial of her own menses, a token and sacrifice of her emergent womanhood.

The muscles of her pallid face are taut. Her long raven-sheen hair is tressed. In the waiting silence, her eyes seem suddenly to focus on the intricate carvings before her, their swirling symbols of eternity, their double fylfots intertwined and surrounded by a tau of cupholes and, at their head, the Crookstone, over which the Dog Star now hangs in the silent indigo sky.

She breathes deeply, reaching her full height.

O blessed Medb, would that I were safe among your sacred groves now . . . , she thinks, but she says, dreamlike, O blessed Brigid, Mother of All, give me strength to accept your will…

High priestess Aduna begins the ceremony.

And so it is that Cartimandua dedicates herself to the Goddess of many names, just as I do now and a million times in the past and future. The line is unbroken.

But something is not right. The Goddess is disturbed, doubtful and so, therefore, am I. What is wrong? It eludes us both. As sentry and servant, I watch with foreboding.

3

I T was raining—not the angry storm rain that provokes the spirit to rise and resist nor the drizzle fit only to irritate, but persistent heavy bone-wearing, bone-weary rain that seeps into the soul, curdling and disfiguring.

In the antechamber of Cartimandua’s square house in the centre of bustling Uellacaern, a column of smoke rose into the hut’s rafters and was whipped away into the cloudy night through an opening in the thatch. Drops of rainwater occasionally hissed and spluttered on the brands or hot stones below.

A huge wattle double screen, the gap between packed with insulating wool, divided the antechamber from Cartimandua’s throne room. It was lined on both sides with a glittering array of shields, spears, harnesses, and swords—not the workaday kind, but of the weaponry and tack created by the Celts’ most talented craftspeople, highly decorated with gold leaves and gemstones, filigreed and inlaid—in an arrogant and casual display of wealth.

Two men—one elfin, handsome and tall; the other, stocky, squat, muscled and brutal—stood warming their hands and drying themselves by the large iron brazier in the antechamber. The shorter of the two, Vellocate, had been initially attracted to a detailed examination of the wall-mounted arsenal but had exhausted his professional curiosity as an armour-bearer and was now showing signs of irritation and impatience.

The slimmer man, Venute, was holding back the first with soft words and subtle bodily signals as one would cautiously leash and hobble a blooded mastiff.

Though the two men were friends, comrades in arms, the slighter warrior was clearly master not only of the bull-muscled creature but of himself. His companion gave the appearance of being a servant to a master and a slave to his emotions.

Venute was lithe and hard-muscled, pale-skinned, bronze-haired, and dark-eyed, indicating a genetic part-inheritance from the pre-Celtic Beaker folk, those the Celts themselves named tylwydd teg, the beautiful people, the fairy-blessed. He moved with graceful confident economy or not at all; though even in perfect poise and stillness, his sharp eyes took all in, and the complex muscles of his face fleetingly echoed the faintest intimation of his thoughts.

Long flowing hair, plaited and held with a bronze pin grip, curtained a high, unlined and youthful forehead. He was in his midtwenties. His full, sensuous, almost sneering lips and prominent cheekbones, over which brown eyes burned like sleepless sentinels, spoke of control—of self and others—and of intelligence untrammelled by sentiment.

He wore an intricate patterned leather tunic, the baggy strong linen breeches dyed plain dark blue, the colour of royalty or at least of considerable wealth. His strong twin-ply leather moccasins were tall-sided like boots. He was bareheaded, and a large black cape fastened with silver clasp was thrust well back off his shoulders to reveal a wealth of bronze armbands and a large richly patterned gold torc round his neck.

Venute was young chieftain of the Denovii, a tribe or clan of perhaps fifty interlinked families, farmers, and herders from the South Pennines. Hardy secretive mountain and moorland folk, they were in the first wave of settler Celts many generations ago, who mingled and interbred with the ancient ones, the small dark-haired residents of the island of Pretan. Thus, they were linked with the Brigantian royal bloodline, which claimed ancestry almost as old as the soil and of which Queen Cartimandua was the corporeal and spiritual head.

The weave and pattern of their cloth and stitching of their leather gear identified the two men as tribal brethren. What ultimately separated Venute from his bucolic companion was not the wealth of his jewellery but an almost indefinable arrogance and sophistication—the dust of a culture that had stepped irrevocably beyond the tribal.

At his father’s behest, Venute had been educated in the southern fortress town of Camulodunum, Colchester, capital of the Catuvellauni, where his cousin King Cunobelin reigned over an ever-growing empire. King Cunobelin courted Roman culture and aped its architecture—a trait rebellious northerner Venute and his childhood companion Caradoc, Cunobelin’s eldest son, encouraged each other to despise.

The second man was Vellocate, armour-bearer to the prince, chosen for his compactness. At war, Venute needed to see past and over his armour-bearer, who was also his charioteer. Bulk obstructed his view, his aim. But no warrior of the noble caste would be driven by a weakling; an armour-bearer and charioteer was expected to hold his own in the thick of skirmish. And Vellocate was more than capable of that.

The charioteer was simply dressed in a linen vest, leather and bronze embossed skullcap, brightly dyed laced-up jerkin and coarse woollen trousers tied at the knees with thong. He was blond-haired with a huge moustache and eyebrows, square in forehead and shoulder, tanned, and built like a shaggy northern ox.

How much longer must we wait? he asked. This arrogant queen humiliates us. By what right—

By the right of the Great Goddess, said Venute quietly, his hand on his armour-bearer’s chest. Have patience. Go check the horses. There is no need for you to stay by my side. Venute glanced at the guards, posted at either side of the leathern doorway to the throne room. As you can see, I am in good hands. I give you leave to enjoy yourself. We passed an ale hall on the way from the gatehouse. The night’s young. When you’ve seen our animals are being looked after, go find a wench there. Think of ways in which you might cement the Brigantian confederacy.

After a moment’s consideration, a broad smile broke out on the royal armour-bearer’s face. You mean… ? And he made a crude sexual gesture. The prince nodded slightly, mirthlessly. Then I’m gone, grinned Vellocate.

Alone, Venute reviewed the reasons he and Vellocate had made the trip to the nerve centre of the Brigantian confederacy. Queen Cartimandua’s passion for horses was well known among her people, among whom she was known as Sleek Pony. She was an inspirational horsewoman.

Knowing these passions they had brought as gifts a string of fine-bred ponies from the Dark Peaks, the sandstone hill country south of Uellacaern—war animals they could ill spare.

Sometimes you must give much to receive much, he thought, consoling himself. This way we test the woman’s mettle. If, in the future, we need help, she must respond. If she fails to do so, we will seek alliances with… others. The North Cymri, for instance, or the Cornovii or Deceangli. She must understand the difference between friend and foe and that our loyalty has its price.

Venute!

Vellocate tore back the hide that protected the antechamber door from the miserable rain outside. His eyes were wide.

Come quickly!

Drawing his heavy sword, the prince rushed out into the muddy night. Vellocate was running backwards, pointing to the huge thatched roof of the palace. Venute was just in time to see the dark shadow of a bird’s wing in the light from the roof’s open smoke hole and hear the scratch of claw and feather as it disappeared into the palace.

Vellocate had placed both hands over his chest, warding off evil spirits. Venute smiled at the superstition, rested his long-fingered hand on the fighter’s shoulder. The High Queen’s consort is Hroc, the Black Rook, Vellocate, he whispered sarcastically in the warrior’s ear. I thought you knew. This bird from hell speaks to her, tells her which way the world turns. Don’t be surprised, my fine soldier, if she should choose its company over ours.

Louder, he added, And by your noise, I believed at least two legions from Rome were outside the gates, knocking to be let in. Off you go a-wenching, Vellocate.

Unlike the many traditional roundhouses inside the triple-walled fortress of Uellacaern, the palace was square-based, with immense smoke-stained timbers of oak reaching at an angle upwards to meet forty feet above the hearth. Thatched, it was adorned externally with black-eyed skulls skewered on high poles, the fallen warriors of the Carvetii, a northern tribe outside the Brigantian federation of fifteen, whose recent raids into Brigantia had been annoying the queen.

Inside the palace, a soot-bellied cauldron simmered centrally on the end of a chain slung from the massive beams above the fire’s heat, the cauldron’s shadow shuddering in the uneven dance of flames. Fumes rose from it into a golden mist that