Stephen Lawhead - Taliesin

A moment later Elphin heard a splash and jerked himself upright. Taliesin was halfway across the stream and heading toward the opposite bank, crying, “I see it! Hurry!” The dogs whimpered and stood with lowered heads and drooping tails at the edge of the water.

“Taliesin! Wait!” Elphin called. He snatched up his spear and plunged after the boy. “Wait, son!” He reached the far bank just in time to see his son dive into an elder thicket and vanish.

“Hurry!” Taliesin’s voice sounded far away. “I see it!”

Elphin listened and heard the boy crashing through the undergrowth and a second later… silence. He then began the tedious task of tracking the boy through the woods.

He found Taliesin an hour later, sitting on a lichen-covered slab of stone in a circular, oak-lined clearing, his expression blank, hands limp in his lap. “Are you all right, son?” Elphin’s quiet question echoed in the place.

“I saw it,” replied Taliesin, his voice hoarse with exhaustion. “It led me here.”

“What did you see?”

“A stag. And it led me here.”

“A stag? Are you sure?”

“A white stag,” said Taliesin, his eyes gleaming in the dimness of the clearing like two dark stars. “As white as Cader Idris’ crown… And his antlers! He had great spreading antlers as red as your Roman cloak and his tail was red.” He peered at his father doubtfully. “Did you see it?”

Elphin shook his head slowly. “I did not. You were too fast for me.” He looked around the clearing. It was bounded on all sides by stout oaks whose tough, gnarled branches spoke of an age beyond reckoning. A slight depression in the ground around the perimeter of the clearing indicated the remains of an ancient ditch. The stone on which Taliesin sat had once stood in the center of the enclosed circle. Although the overarching branches allowed a disk of sky to show pale and blue above, very little light entered the ring. “The stag led you here?”

Taliesin nodded. “And there is where I saw the man,” he said, pointing to a gap where the ditch-ring opened into the wood. “The Black Man.”

“\bu saw him?” Elphin regarded his son closely. “What did he look like?”

“He was tall, very tall,” replied Taliesin, closing his eyes to help him remember clearly, “and thick-muscled; his legs were like stumps and his arms like oak limbs. He was covered by black hair, thick stuff, with twigs and bits of leaf clinging to him all over. His face was painted with white clay, except around his eyes which were black as well-pits. His hair was limed and pushed into a crest with small branches worked through it and a leather cap tied to his head with antlers on it. He carried an antlered staff in one hand and with the other held a young pig under his arm. And there was a wolf too, enormous, with yellow eyes. It watched me from beyond the circle of oaks and did not enter the ring.”

“The Lord of the Beasts,” whispered Elphin. “Cemunnos!”

“Cernunnos,” confirmed Taliesin. “ ‘I am the Horned One,’ he told me.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“He said, ‘Lift what is fallen.’ That is all.”

“Lift what is fallen? Nothing else?”

“What does it mean?” Taliesin wondered.

Elphin looked at the stone on which the boy sat. “The standing stone has fallen.”

Taliesin ran his hands over the stone. “How will we raise it?”

“Raising it will not be easy.” Elphin pulled on his mustache and began pacing the perimeter of the ring. He returned a moment later with a limb of strong ash, which he wedged beneath the edge of the fallen stone. “Roll that rock over here,” he instructed, and the two began levering up the slab.

The stone came up slowly, but by working the lever and moving the stone they were able to make steady progress and found that once it was lifted high enough for Elphin to gain a good handhold, he could tilt it up still further. Stripped to the waist, both man and boy strained to the task, and little by little the stone came up, higher and higher, until with a groan and a mighty shove Elphin felt it settle back onto its base.

They beamed at each other and gazed at the stone, shaggy with moss. Stained dark by its long sleep in the ground and reeking of damp earth, it tilted slightly so that what little light filtered into the ring struck its pitted surface. Taliesin approached and put his hands on the symbols cut into its surface: intricate spirals and whorls, like circular mazes, all bounded by a border of snakes whose intertwined bodies formed the shape of a great egg.

“Is it very old?” asked Taliesin.

“Very old,” said Elphin. He glanced down at the bare place where the stone had lain. “I see why the stone fell.”

Taliesin followed his father’s gaze and saw that he was nearly standing on the long, yellow bones of a man. The weight of the stone had crushed the skull and ribcage flat, but the rest of the skeleton was intact. A golden gleam caught his eye and he knelt down and carefully brushed the soft dirt away to discover a chain made of tiny, interlocking links-a chain which had once hung around the neck of the man beneath the stone. At the end of the chain was a pendant of yellow amber with a fly trapped inside.

“What have you found, son?” asked Elphin as he knelt down beside Taliesin.

“A pendant. And look!” He pointed to the thin wrist bone. “And a bracelet as well.”

The bracelet was gold, inscribed with the same spiral and whorl designs as the standing stone around a blood-red car-nelian in the center. The bloodstone itself was carved with a figure, which could not be made out until Elphin gently freed it from the arm of the man who had worn it for so long. He rubbed the soil from the tiny grooved incisions and held it for Taliesin to see.

“The Forest Lord!” he exclaimed. He took the ornament into his hands and traced with his finger the outline of a man’s head with antlers.

Between the skeleton’s knees were shards of pottery where a vessel of some kind had broken. Beside one shoulder blade was a long flint spearhead, and just above the skull a bronze dagger, the blade corroded almost beyond recognition. The jet handle, though lined with a network of minute fractures, was still in good condition.

Taliesin stooped to retrieve the dagger and held it in his hand. He stood slowly and gazed at the stone, but it had changed: its corners were square and the designs on its face were sharp and freshly cut. The ditch forming the ring was sharp too, and deeper. A palisade of timber had been erected around the outer edge of the ditch and on every fourth stake the decaying head of a sacrificial victim, animal and human. Most of the heads were weathered, the flesh blackened and revealing white bone beneath. He could smell the death stench in the air.

He turned toward the gap in the ring and saw two pillar stones standing on either side of the gap which was the entrance into the ring. The stones were carved with niches, and in each niche reposed a human skull which had been daubed with a bold blue spiral.

As Taliesin watched, there appeared between the stone pillars a man dressed in a deerskin jerkin which reached to his knees. There were rabbitskins bound to his legs and deerskin boots on his feet. His face was a painted blue mask, and his hair was clipped very short except for a long braid which was folded and bound at the back of his head so that it stuck up like a horse’s tail. He wore a small rawhide cap with antlers attached to its crown. In one hand he carried a small blue-stained earthenware pot, in the other a skin drum.

The boy stood transfixed as the shaman stepped to the standing stone and lifted a much-frayed stick which he had dipped into the pot of woad. With this crude brush he began to paint the symbols etched into the standing stone. As he finished, another shaman, dressed and painted like die first, entered the ring, carrying a stone-tipped spear. Behind him came two others in rough skins and between them a third, whose wrists were bound with a wide strap of braided leather. The bound man was naked but for the leather mask over his head and tied about his neck. The mask bore a whorled maze like the marks on the stone.