S. Stirling - The Scourge of God

THE NEMED (SACRED WOOD)

CASCADE FOOTHILLS, WESTERN OREGON

LUGHNASADH, AUGUST 1, CHANGE YEAR 23/2021 AD

The five women fell silent as they climbed single file on the nar-row woodland track, higher and higher through the long summer twilight, with the soft duff of the forest floor quiet beneath their sandals-or in one case, boot-heels. They were dressed alike in black hooded robes belted with tricolored cords. The long rowan staffs in their hands marked each as a High Priestess, and each was tipped with a symbol wrought in silver; Hecate's threefold Moon for Juniper Mackenzie and her fellow clanswomen Sumina and Melissa, Pythian Apollo's wolf for BD of the Kyklos, the snarling she-tiger of the Wild Huntress for Signe Havel, the Bearkiller regent.

The air cooled, with night and with the height itself, dense with the scent of the resin the day's heat had baked out of the trees; the place they sought was three thousand feet above the valley floor. Stars appeared, glimpsed in fleeting instants amid black boughs silhouetted against the blacker sky, and the light died in the west. Eastward it tinged the snowpeaks and glaciers of the High Cascades with crimson for a last moment, like a dream of melancholy in the mind of a god, before they turned bone white beneath the stars.

At last they came out on a broad knee that jutted from the mountainside, perhaps three acres of nearly level ground. Juniper raised her staff, topped with a silver circle flanked by twin crescents, the Ever-Changing One's symbol, waxing and full and waning. A sigh went through the waiting crowd as she appeared out of the darkness; a few torches caught here a bright fall of hair or there a painted face, but mostly they were a restless mass of shadows.

Then the great drums began to beat; slowly at first, but building to a steady boom… boom… boom… like the heartbeat of some great beast. The sound echoed from the mountainsides and through the forest, and somewhere far distant a wolf howled, the lonely sound threading its way through the deep pulsing bass of the Lambegs. The nemed was a circle of tall oaks amid the stretch of dense turf, thick brown trunks rising to rounded dark green crowns that met a hundred feet above the ground, rustling with mystery. Within, the trees at the Quarters bore wrought-iron brackets where the lanterns would go, and a roughly chiseled stone block stood as an altar near the shallow central hearth.

Not far outside the trees a spring rose, bubbling quietly into its pool at this time of year and trickling off across the little plateau. The starry Belt of the Goddess was bright tonight; there was just enough light to show that the ground around the spring was matted with pink mountain laurel, with pale glacier lily farther out. Looming in the dimness was the figure of the Corn King, fifteen feet of man-shaped wicker frame woven shaggy with sheaves of wheat and barley.

The drums beat on, pulsing out dread, and the crowd parted for Juniper and her companions. She was a short, slight-built woman of fifty-three, with leaf-green eyes and streaks of gray in the faded fox-red mane; the hand on the silky wood of the staff had the worn long-fingered grip of a musician who'd also worked with hoe and milking pail and loom.

There was awe in the crowd's reverence; she was also High Priestess and Chief and Goddess-on-Earth, the one who had made the Clan and brought their parents through the wreck of the old world and the terror-filled birth of the new. The most of them were Changelings now-those who'd been born since the Change, or who'd been too young then to really remember the world before.

The tall image of wheat-sheaves waited, its head wreathed in darkness. She paced forward, the hood of her robe thrown back and the crescent on her brow; she held out her right hand and a burning torch was passed to her. The strong almost spicy smell of it went under the crackling, and the light blinded her for an instant.

A long ahhhhhhh went through the watchers as she raised torch and staff. The throb of Power was like wine in her veins, like pleasure so extreme that it trembled on the brink of unbearable pain, like an enormous love chiseled out of terror.

"Corn King!" she called.

"Corn King!" her four companions echoed.

"It is Your flesh that we cut with the grain and eat with the good bread. It is Your blood and seed we will sow in the Mother's earth. All hail to the King of the Ripened Grain, who dies for the Mother's children!"

"Hail the King!"

The crowd cried hail with a thousandfold voice, stronger than the drums for a moment as she touched the flame to the wheat-straw. It took with a swift crackling roar, reaching for the sky and driving back a circle of the darkness; she tossed the stump of the torch on it and picked up the tool that lay ready for her-a bronze sickle, its blade shaped like the waning moon.

As the cheer ended a man sprang out of the crowd. He was naked, save for the vermillion paint on his face and streaking his sweat-slick muscled limbs and torso; stalks of wheat were wound in his shaggy white-gold hair.

"I am Her lover, since first I wed the Maiden," he called, his voice a bugling challenge, hoarse and male and powerful like a bull elk; in his right hand was a flint knife, its pressure-flaked surface glittering in the light with an almost metallic luster. "Surely the Mother shall aid Me, as I fight for My throne!"

"I am become the Crone, and the Crone carries Harvest's Child," Juniper called, her voice as impersonal as bronze. "So must it be. So mote it be."

She crossed her wrists and turned the point of the sickle towards him; the High Priestesses raised their staffs. Another man stepped forward. He was a little older but in his full strength, slender and wiry. His hair was dark and bound with holly, red berries glistening among the spiny dark green leaves; black paint covered his face save for a rim around his eyes. The knife he held was obsidian, sharp enough to cut a dream.

"I am the King who will be," he said. "For the Wise One cleaves to the Keeper-of-Laws."

The Corn King gave a long roar and closed with him. The stone blades flashed in the light of the straw man's burning, until the tall figure collapsed in a shower of sparks. Hands grasped wrists as the men of flesh and blood swayed together, striving chest to chest. Then the Corn King staggered back, a long shallow cut across his breast. Blood runneled down from it, and dropped onto the ground. A sound halfway between a sigh and a moan came from the crowd, and the former King toppled gracefully to the dirt in a mime of death.

"The King is dead!" the four priestesses cried.

Women with unbound hair came forward and lifted the limp form of the Corn King, amid more who wailed grief and beat their breasts. Kilted warriors with their faces painted as if for battle surrounded the new King, circling and leaping, dancing as the razor-edged steel of their spearheads flashed in the firelight.

"Long live the King!" they shouted, and a ululating cheer spread through the crowd.

Pipers struck up, and bodhrans; the hoarse bellow of the long wooden radongs and the wild chill wailing of flutes. Behind the weeping pallbearers who carried his predecessor the new King walked towards the path that led downward to Dun Juniper. The crowd followed, singing:

"I sleep in the kernel and I dance in the rain;

I dance in the wind and in the waving grain;

And when you cut me down I care nothing for the pain;

In spring I'm the Lord of the Dance once again!"

Juniper smiled as they left and the tension ebbed; the young man who took the part of the new King was going to be very popular with the girls until next Beltane; it was one of the perks of the ceremonial role. Then the smile died and she shivered. The Initiates and the High Priestesses remained, and tonight was no ordinary Sabbat; not even an ordinary Lughnasadh Eve. Tonight she planned to ask a question of the Powers.