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Ariana shook her head. The streaks of silver in her black hair caught the dying light of the evening. Her silence worried Emrys but he feared her anger more. Better to remain quiet and wait than break that silence. No telling what might emerge from its shattering.
She turned to him, her metal eye dull in the light that reflected against her living eye, and said, “Emrys, do you not worry for your soul?” The wind blew fiercely for a moment, her greenblack cloak whipping round her body, making her appear batlike while brightness fell from the sky.
Emrys turned away from her and the wind, towards the blushing horizon. The hills rolled down and away from the lone tree atop the barrow where Ariana led him. He swallowed, unsure how to begin. Those practiced words, the chants and the incantations, would not come with her staring down at him. Wanting to say so much more, he said only, “No.”
Ariana snorted. The wind gentled for a moment and her heavy limping steps came closer. “Your mother would weep could she see you now.” She stomped twice on the barrow where so many were buried. “A warlock,” she snorted again, her heavy metal hand landing on his shoulder, squeezing it tightly.
Tighter until Emrys knew it would bruise. The pinch of the steel grew sharp as she broke skin but still he didn’t make a noise or flinch away. She didn’t see how he clenched his eyes shut or balled his fists beneath his own greenblack cloak. When she relented, he took a slow, quiet breath through his nose and let it out through his mouth. “They found a giant in the earth, auntie.” He turned to her as the wind blustered, her wild windblown hair shrouding her face for a moment. “Buried a hundred feet deep and—”
“A golem, son.” She spat into the wind to ward off evil, drops of it caught by the wind and flung back into his face.
He swallowed and wiped his face. After the warmth of his cloak the frigid touch of the wind on his hand stung. His skin seemed to tighten against the cold as he stared at it. His hands of flesh and blood and bone and hers of metal. Ariana gazed off into the distance, her metal eye the only one visible to Emrys.
Carved there. That’s how she appeared. A statue carved from the very bones of the earth as a warning for all who would trespass on the barrow, on this land of the dead. A guardian challenging any stranger fool enough to stand beneath the sacred tree of her clan.
“Does your father know?” Her voice came harsh, like grinding stones.
Emrys sniffed, his eyes watering from the wind, from his inability to explain to her. “Not yet.”
She snorted and turned that metal eye on him. The wind quieted for a moment, her silver-streaked black hair revealing her living eye once more. “Think he does not know, son?”
“How did you know?”
“Ah,” she smiled. “You’ve not worked that out, eh? Come along. We’ll go to see him now.” Simple as that, she took his hand in her metal one. Cold and firm, but no longer pressing to hurt him, she dragged him along all the same.
Emrys stumbled after her. “My father?” His heart fell to his stomach and sank deeper, burrowing into the barrow with all his dead.
“Aye, my brother deserves to know.” She didn’t look back at him or wait for him to find the words to explain himself, to excuse himself. “Come on, don’t make me drag you around like a mutt.”
He found his feet and kept pace with her as they descended the barrow where his mother and all his ancestors lay resting. Rotting. That was what bodies did, no matter what they all said, what they all believed.
The long walk down from the barrow through the high green grass filled Emrys with tension, with indignation. They meant to force him to obey, to stay, simply because they feared the wrath of their god and the god of their clan and ancestors. But Emrys had grown past that. They could not make him go back, could not make him submit to the demands of a god he could not believe in anymore. He could no longer even pretend, as he had for so long.
The wind ripped all around him as the light bled out of the day. The earth rolled away from the sun and darkness swallowed the sky. Stars spotted the firmament forming constellations like a fistful of sand cast into the air. For all the many predictions the druids had made from their mad calculations, Emrys had found their interpretation endlessly flexible and therefore meaningless.
The moons, however, remained hidden from view. If ever there was something that made him want to believe, it was the three moons shining over his life. So many nights, sleepless and alone, he wandered the moors and sometimes by dayfall he’d be stomping through the fens and glens at the edge of Matauc land.
Ariana didn’t let go the long way down to his father’s longhouse. As they descended, he saw the smoke pluming from the chimney and the hundreds of candles illuminating the feast, but they walked past its wide wooden doors. Shouts and singing muffled by the thick stone walls told Emrys what kind of night his people were having.
“Where we going, auntie?”
She still gripped his hand. “Your father’s about his business.” She turned to him then, for the first time since they began their walk. “Do you even know him?”
Emrys snorted and wrenched his hand free from Ariana’s steely grip. “I’ll not be dragged there like a child.”
Ariana looked him up and down, then shrugged. “As you like.” She waved her metal arm forward, gesturing to the skinning shack. The soft glow of a fire filled the windows.
Emrys sighed, squared his shoulders, and pulled his cloak tight as he went to meet his father.
Shirtless and bald, his father stood on the far end of the room holding the severed elkhead by its antlers. A thin man grown skeletal as the years settled upon him, leeching the fat from his body and leaving behind only muscle and skin and bone. In the firelight, every vein stood out clearly on his arms notched with thousands of scars. Many of them self-inflicted during ritual bleedings over his many children and the children of his clan.
Emrys had not seen him in five years. He stopped at the entrance and watched his father set the elk head down with a sigh. “Aye, so they say, Madoc. So they say.” His rough voice sounded soft. Almost tender.
Something Emrys never would have associated with his father before. Something he had never heard in that familiar voice.
But his father went back to the immense carcass stretched over the table beside him. A beast so large, Emrys could not imagine what it might be. Perhaps some monstrous auroch. His father picked up the head of a small scythe and a flint blade glittering black against the fire. Weighing the small scythe in his hand, he set it down, preferring the ancient rite of flaying with his ageless blade.
The blade of clan Matauc.
Slowly, he slid the flint knife, cutting away the hide from the flesh.
Ariana’s metal claw of a hand landed once more on Emrys’ shoulder and she breathed, “Go on.”
Emrys sighed and cleared his throat, but his father didn’t turn. Didn’t hear over the howling wind. “Owain. I wish to speak with you.”
Slowly, his father worked his blade up the leg of the beast. “Come help me or wait there, as you like.” Still soft, his words fell without emotion or anger or even curiosity.
Emrys studied his wide shoulders and the ribs poking through his thin skin. He moved deliberately, calmly, as if the rest of the world meant nothing to him. His fingers dug into the space between the flesh and hide and Owain yanked them apart. The feasting in his hall forgotten or ignored while he went about the work of a slave.
Work he chose to do. Even a decade gone, the lessons returned to Emrys. Those long days with his father when they walked the land, his father showing him all the work that must be done, that must be managed. Unaware that he was being assessed, judged, and found wanting.
“Father, I am leaving. Perhaps as soon as the morning, or even tonight, if you choose to run me out.”
Only then did his father stop. His hands slick with blood appeared almost black in the faint light of the fire. His shadow cast wide and long over the far wall. Wiping his hands on his trousers, he finally turned to Emrys.
Time had not seemed to touch his father, except for the baldness. He had heard of that. How the moment he discovered his hair falling out, he’d taken a razor and removed every follicle. Dissatisfied with only his beard and eyebrows, he shaved them off too. By the looks of him, he’d begun shaving all the hair from his body.
Seeing his face for the first time in five years, hairless and skeletal, Owain appeared ghoulish in the firelight. Like he had died a long time ago and was animated by some deep and dark magic.
Owain narrowed his eyes and cocked his head. “Ah, it’s you.”
The words hung between them. Emrys heard the disappointment, the indifference. “Me.”
Owain raised his chin, addressing Ariana. “What’s he want?”
“I’m leaving,” Emrys said. “I’m going to university. The University. It’s west of here, across the—”
“What for?”
“Deviltry,” Ariana said.
Owain snorted. Just like his sister. Just like all of them. A clan of snorters. “What’s he want to do that for?” His eyes returned to Emrys. “Go on. What for?”
Emrys swallowed, his fists clenched at his side. He took a slow breath. The stink of death, of burning peat, of piss and blood. “I go to learn from—”
“Off to be a warlock,” Ariana said. She turned and spat, warding off evil.
Owain scowled. “That true?”
Emrys nodded. “I go to learn science. Great discoveries are—”
Owain snorted, spat. “Come here.”
When Emrys remained where he was, Owain wagged a finger, motioning for him to approach, and Ariana pushed him from behind to start him on his way. And so Emrys went to his father.
Though Emrys was nearly a head taller than Owain, he felt as if his father towered over him. He was a child again. The child he was five years ago when last they spoke.
Owain gestured towards the beast. “See that?”
“Hard to miss.”
His father snorted. “No, see it, boy. Look upon it.”
Emrys turned to the beast. His brow knit as he tried to make sense of the creature. Big. Bigger than any beast he’d seen. Legs thick as his waist and long enough that they’d reach his shoulders if the beast still stood. Rather than the hooves of an auroch or even the cloven feet of an elk, it had three wide clawed toes in front with two dew claws higher up. Its tail was short and blunt.
His father gestured to the far end of the table. “Go on.” No anger or condescension in his voice. The patient voice of a tutor, of the father he once was.
Standing close, Emrys saw that the beast was a deep red, nearly black in the light, but spotted with green. As he approached the far end, he saw how the head hung over the side. At the far end, he looked down at the face of the beast and gasped.
Owain laughed. “Aye, that’s what the fellas are celebrating. Ten dead. Fools, all of them. All of us. We fools who must yet live.” As he spoke, the strength fell from him. Resignation so heavy that Emrys wanted to look upon his face but could not turn away from the beast. “I did love her, you know.”
The antlers branching from the large skull were immense but broken off at places, no doubt from the struggle in capturing and killing the beast. A viscous liquid like sap dripped from the broken antlers.
But it was the face that chilled Emrys. The skull was large as his chest but the face was unmistakably that of his mother.
Wonderful start. Intriguing, mysterious and fun.
Looking forward to more of this!