Call of the Kings (2 page)

Katre looked the drover in the eye.

‘We need a favour,’ she said boldly. ‘My daughter and I have been cast out of our hamlet because, as you have seen, she has special gifts. We have been walking for a week now and have nothing but the clothes we stand up in. They are getting a bit threadbare and are almost finished.’

‘Come with me to the market,’ said the drover. ‘And let’s see what we get for this animal.’

So with Tara leading the now docile ox, the three of them set off for the Cork market. After much shouting and waving of hands the ox was sold and the drover paid with a bag of coins. Delighted with the money, which was more than he’d hoped for, the drover took them to a large communal resting house down by Cork docks and paid for them to stay there for a week with a meal each every day. As he left he pressed some coins into Kate’s hand and told her to buy some clothes for them both.

‘I will never forget you, young lady,’ he said quietly to Tara. ‘But be careful, there are many out there that will never understand your gift and will hold it against you.’

‘I know that,’ replied the curly little redhead with bright green eyes, ‘but thank you anyway.’

Having bought themselves some linen and thread and bone needles, Katre set to making them tunics and head covers. By day three they were smart enough to walk outside and sat on the dockside watching the vessels and fishing boats come around Great Island and into Cork harbour. One vessel in particular took their fancy. Called
Celtic Lady
, she was a sturdy little vessel with green sails taking on a load of peat rolls. The three-man crew toiled all day loading the cargo up a narrow plank of wood with the captain, a big, raw-boned man with a long black beard, doing more than his fair share. Finally she was loaded and the three of them relaxed on deck. Two of them stretched out on top of the cargo and slept whilst the captain came ashore. As he walked away from the docks toward the settlement centre, the big captain suddenly found himself ringed by ten rough-looking men. They began to taunt him for being an English Celt and told him in no uncertain terms that he wasn’t wanted here. Then started to punch and kick him. Although he was big and strong-looking, he soon went down under the hail of blows. The two crew members on the
Celtic Lady
could only watch on helplessly as their master took the beating.

Then a strange thing happened.

The flying feet and fists of the attackers suddenly froze in midair and they stood in the last pose like statues, the hatred on their faces locked in the delivery of the last blow. The big, raw-boned captain scrambled up from the ground, his face bloody from the beating. Pushing a couple of the frozen attackers aside he ran back toward his ship.

Then he saw little Tara, her hands outstretched toward the immobile attackers, and stopped in his tracks.

‘You . . . you did that?’ he said incredulously, pointing back to his frozen assailants.

Tara nodded. Katre stood up from the wall.

‘If I was you I’d get back on your boat and cast off right away,’ she said quietly, pointing down the dock to where a group of other men were beginning to come toward them.

‘What about you?’ asked the sailor.

‘Where are you going?’

‘The port of Bristol, across the sea in Britain.’

Katre thought for a moment.

‘Can we come with you?’

‘Of course, you have just saved my life. It will be a bit tight on board but we’ll manage.’

He looked down the dock. Some of the men were beginning to run toward them.

‘We’d better hurry.’

The three of them quickly scrambled on board and the two crewmen cast off and began to pump the steering oar at the back rapidly. When they were well away from the dock, Tara waved her hands and the frozen group of attackers began to move. Soon there was a large group of men lining the dockside cursing and shaking their fists. Setting the green sails, the Celtic Lady began to head toward the open sea.

Katre and her special daughter were on their way to Bristol, somewhere they had never heard of in a country they had never heard of either.

Bristol was the major port of Wessex.

Three days later the
Celtic Lady
tied up in the muddy waters of Bristol dock. The passage had been smooth, the weather fine, and Katre and Tara slept on deck on the peat cargo. The big, black-bearded captain, now with a gashed lip and deeply bruised face and whose name was Anders Clovis, took them to his small dockside hovel and introduced them to his wife, Evie, and their two children, who were around Tara’s age. There wasn’t much room, but Katre and Tara didn’t need much and it was agreed that they could stay for a few days while Katre looked for somewhere they could live. Clovis and the
Celtic Lady
would be off again in a couple of days’ time but not back to Cork. That had been his first and last voyage there, despite the fact that he found a ready market for the peat he’d brought back. In future he’d stick to his home coastline.

But he’d served a great purpose in bringing Katre and Tara to Wessex, a purpose the importance of which he would never truly understand.

A friend of Evie’s had a brother who had recently died fighting for the king and, being unmarried, his hovel was empty. It was agreed that Katre and Tara could stay there until a much younger brother was old enough to take it on. As the boy was only seven, they had a few years to go. In return they had to keep the hovel tidy and in good order and tend the small vegetable patch at the back. It was on the old Roman road leading toward Glastonbury about an hour’s walk from the centre of the large, sprawling settlement and just could not have been better. It was a small country idyll where they could live in peace.

Except, as it was soon to prove, peace and Tara were unaccustomed bedfellows.

Occasionally, passing travellers making a pilgrimage to Glastonbury where, it was said, the Holy Grail was buried, stopped and asked for water. Katre was always happy to oblige as they had a fine, clear spring gurgling through the bottom of the vegetable patch. Tara would sit for hours with various animals in the woods, talking to them as if they were humans as she studied and sniffed the multitude of flowers and plants. With squirrels and badgers bringing her ever differing plants, and birds sitting on her shoulders chattering away in her ears, it was the perfect setting to understand and learn more about nature’s diverse abundance.

Until Magnus Groningen and ten of his men stopped for water.

A third-generation Viking whose grandfather had been a chieftain with Guthrum’s invading army forty-five years ago, which was defeated by King Alfred, Groningen had inherited a considerable estate when his father died recently. The estate came with a large number of retainers and a two-hundred-strong army of soldiers. Being from typical berserker stock, Groningen carried on where his grandfather and father left off by using his natural berserker belligerence and the small army at every opportunity to get his own way. Celts being basically peace-loving, poetic, and lazy, they rolled over easily as he built up his land holdings, terrorizing others in the area. His stated boast was that in ten years’ time he would be the most feared warlord in Wessex and the king would come begging to him for his prowess in battle and the use of his trained army.

Tara was sitting in the woods with a beautifully coloured red roe deer and her mate, a proud-looking roe buck, she had named Bramble and Bracken when she heard her mother’s scream from the hovel. The scream had an edge of terror in it. Tara had heard the horses’ hooves draw up at the hovel a few minutes ago but had paid it no mind. It was midsummer and folk were always stopping for water.

Jumping to her feet she ran through the woods and up the abundant vegetable patch to the hovel, noticing the horses tethered at the front, some of them with grinning riders on their backs. Inside her mother was screaming again as Tara charged through the open door at the back of the hovel. Two laughing men were holding her mother, one on each side, whilst a third man, big and broad with long blond hair and a full beard, his trousers unbuttoned, advanced toward the spread-eagled, twisting, and biting Katre. As he moved in toward her with a wolfish smile of anticipation beginning behind the beard, Katre lashed out and screamed again. Twisting her head to one side she saw Tara.

Suddenly the big blond man clutched both hands to his groin and he, too, began screaming as he collapsed on the floor.

From that moment on, female congress was impossibility for Magnus Groningen; due to Tara, he had lost the required equipment with which to do so.

Freezing the two men holding her mother’s arms, Tara helped the sobbing Katre to her feet. The agonized screams of the blond giant now curled up on the floor stopped as he passed out with the pain. Realizing that something was wrong, the seven mounted men outside rushed into the small hovel only to join their comrades in frozen immobility. Ten minutes later Tara and her mother galloped away on two of their horses, a few hastily gathered belongings thrust into a linen sack. As they did so, a pair of beautifully coloured purple, black, and white pica swooped low over them and chittered a greeting before disappearing over the trees. Tara hadn’t seen those two before and strangely, of all the birds who came right up to her in complete and open friendship in the woods behind the hovel, these pied poly devils had always kept their distance.

Now they had a reason for contact that she didn’t yet understand.

She had just performed some extraordinary magic, and someone else, besides the catatonically enraged, berserker, second-generation blond Viking called Groningen, whose libido she had just permanently disabled, wanted desperately to meet her again.

He was the current veneficus and defender of all Wessex, a hybrid of wizard, oracle, sorcerer, alchemist, hermit, magician, and wax-pale ghost.

His name was Twilight and little Tara was the answer to his prayers.

But, of course, she knew nothing of this as she and her mother fled west, away from the screaming Viking.

Chapter 2

‘Remember this. Evil is eternal and if it’s not dispatched will always return another day to continue its hideous practices.’

We’re always running away from someone or other,’ said Katre tiredly, stroking Tara’s red curls as they huddled under an old, spreading oak tree just off the dirt track they had been following. They had ridden as fast as they could until nightfall to put as much distance between them and the men left back at the hovel.

‘I wonder what’s to become of us this time.’ Katre sighed. ‘It was so idyllic at that little hovel for a time.’

Tara snuggled up closer to her mother. ‘Don’t worry,’ she said, her small voice coming from under Kate’s armpit. ‘We’ll be just fine, I know we will.’

‘Will we, darling?’ Katre closed her eyes. ‘I hope you’re right because we are at the mercy of whatever the Fates throw at us . . . again.’

Wearily Kate’s head slumped forward and she began to snore softly.

A man, tall, with black hair streaked with gray and dressed in a long black cloak, suddenly appeared in front of Tara as she eased herself away from her mother. The man’s black eyes blazed an incredible glow, bathing the scene in light. He put his finger to his lips in a friendly gesture not to make a noise and wake Katre and beamed a radiant smile down at Tara.

Strangely, she was not afraid. There was something inexplicably calming and magical about his presence. An instant trust of him took her over as a gentle voice came into her mind.

I mean you no harm and come as a friend. I have been waiting for you for a long time. Let us leave your mother to rest and talk for a while. She will be safe - my pica will look after her.

He pointed to the branches of the spreading oak tree above her head.

And Tara somehow knew what she would see even before she followed his pointing finger upward.

Row after row of silent pica perched on the branches, their dark eyes glittering in the glow as they looked down on her. Each one of them had a claw raised in a salutation.

Come, we can talk over here.

He sat down on an old log, well away from where Kate’s snores had taken on the steady rhythm of a deep and exhausted sleep. Tara stood and walked to the log and sat next to him.

‘I released those foul men you left frozen back at the hovel when you were far away and safe.’

He chuckled.

‘They carried off their young leader still screaming his head off. He’ll live but won’t bother any young ladies ever again, thanks to you.’

‘He was going to do bad things to my mother,’ said Tara simply. ‘I could not allow that.’

Twilight nodded. His black eyes studied her for a long moment, taking in the bright green eyes, the same colour and iridescent texture as his old mentor, the long magus.

‘What is your name?’

‘Tara Brogan.’

‘Tara. A lovely name. In Ireland the Hill of Tara, also known as the Womb of Ireland, at Cill Dara, is a very special place where the old Gael kings were crowned. Perhaps you were named after that special place. In the Hindi script Tara means ‘Radiating’ and is closely identified with the planet Jupiter. My name is Twilight. Do you mind if I ask you some more questions? Then I will explain what this is all about.’

‘No.’

‘Were you born on All Hallows Day?’

‘I don’t know when that is. I was born on the thirty-first day of October twelve winters ago. I don’t think they have an All Hallows Day in Ireland, at least I’ve never heard of it before.’

Twilight breathed a great sigh of relief.

‘All Hallows Day is the thirty-first of October. You also have something called an aura, an unmistakably superb one with a signature of great strength. I will also tell you what this means in due course. How did you get to Britain?’

Tara told him of their journey and the reasons they had to leave in a hurry. As the story unfolded with each one of Tara’s unknowing use of the enchantments, Twilight laughed and slapped his knee with joy.

‘I couldn’t have done it better myself,’ he said each time. Then finally, when she had finished, ‘It is wizardry of the highest calibre for one so young and untutored.’

Tara looked at him, her big green eyes widening with understanding.

‘I am a
wizard?
’ she asked incredulously.

‘You most certainly are, young lady, and a special one at that. Very special. You are the Special Tara with powers better, if I’m not mistaken, than my own.’

The little girl was silent for a while as she digested this information.

‘Is being a wizard a good thing?’

‘Depends if you’re a good wizard or a bad one,’ answered the old astounder. ‘If you’re a good one it can be the best feeling in the world. If you’re a bad one, and believe you me I’ve met one of those, you will be a scourge to the very enchantments that define you and make you what you are.’

‘What are enchantments?’

Twilight smiled.

‘Let’s start at the beginning, when a young man about your age called Will Timms was taken to a famous old wizard by his father because he was uncontrollable. The young man was me, and the old wizard was called Merlin . . . ‘

As dawn began to creep over the Wessex horizon, beyond the old oak tree Katre stirred from her deep sleep. As if suddenly remembering their predicament, she sat bolt upright, looking wildly around for Tara. Spotting her sitting on a log nearby with a black-eyed stranger, Katre struggled to her feet and looked around for a stick or something to use as a weapon.

‘It’s alright, Ma,’ said Tara, smiling and beckoning. ‘Come and meet Twilight, the veneficus of Wessex.’

Warily Katre approached the two of them as they sat on the log grinning at her.

‘We’ve been sitting here all night long. Twilight has been telling me a most wonderful story, and, Ma, guess what?’

Katre tossed her hair in an unknowing but still suspicious gesture.

‘I’m a tyro wizard, a venefica. One day I’ll have command of the enchantments and be just like him.’

Katre still looked confused and unconvinced.

‘Come and sit here,’ Twilight moved along the log to make room for one more, ‘and I’ll tell you the same story as I’ve just told your daughter. I’m sure Tara won’t mind hearing it again. Then you’ll understand what this all means.’

‘What about those men back at the hovel?’ Katre asked, sitting on the log with a worried look on her face.

‘Don’t worry, you won’t be hearing from them again.’ Twilight smiled at her and somehow Katre believed him and felt safe and protected.

Tara put her arm around her mother’s shoulders.

‘Ma,’ she said quietly, ‘you just will not believe this.’

Katre and Tara quickly settled into a hovel alongside Twilight’s in his Avebury compound. There was plenty of room as Twilight’s two children, Eleanor and Harlo, had long ago left to set up their own families, and his beloved wife, Rawnie, had been dead for five years. Desmond’s animals, the four bears and Sir Valiant the horse and Lord Scroop the parrot, were also long gone, although offspring from the bears’ lineage still roamed the mighty Savernake Forest close by. Eleanor and Harlo did not let it be known that their father was the Wessex veneficus, as those wishing to harm Twilight would do so through them, but both of them were doing well and Twilight was a grandfather six times over. Nothing delighted him more than to pay quiet visits to his children and grandchildren and watch their development. Indeed, the signs were that he would be a great grandfather soon, as Thea, Eleanor’s eldest daughter, would be going through the hand-fasting ceremony with a young man within weeks. Imagine, Twilight a great grandfather. It seems only yesterday that he was a ragged little skirmisher bringing the meeting house roof down on the heads of the other boys in the settlement of Malmesbury, where he was born.

Rawnie’s death had taken something away from him that would never be replaced and had left a great sadness in him. Despite all the violence of his life with hardly a week going by without an engagement with someone or other who wanted to dominate some part or other of Wessex, usually of Viking extraction, Rawnie had died peacefully in her sleep. Following the death of Desmond Kingdom Biwater by Freyja’s hand at Uffington, Rawnie had managed to take on the role she had always said she wasn’t cut out for. So besides being his beautiful wife and a princess, mother to their two children and all-consuming lover, she also took on the role of venefical companion. By his side always with practical, no-nonsense advice and support, she had become the perfect accomplice.

As Twilight approached his sixty-eighth year he began to slip into a deep, lonely void that had so far been impossible to fill since Rawnie’s death, especially during the long, dark nights. There had been many times when Twilight had wished he were able to sleep like ordinary mortals because that would have at least given him some respite from his loneliness. Instead he’d withdrawn more and more into the literature of the
scriptorium
left to him by Merlin, within which he had found great solace. And, of course, he was always in the vicinity of his guardians and other great love.

The bright, vivacious, and ever energetic pica. His daily communications with them were, as with everything else, time-driven, and the chattering cackles he received on his shoulder were now conducted by the great grandchildren of his former companions, Bell, Horn, Rho, Ceeba, and the others who had so faithfully served him back in the early days of his Wessex venefical stewardship.

Avalon still functioned as a leprosia, run nowadays by his remaining younger sister Meg, who was herself getting old. Guinevere had lived to a venefical-like one hundred years of age before finally, regally, succumbing to death’s embrace. Twilight had buried her in a casket alongside that of her great love, Arthur, in the hidden cave on Avalon, a dark and secretive space they shared with another great legendary casket containing the chalice known as the Holy Grail.

Wessex and the bardic runes and enchantment-driven crinkum crankum of its existence had become jaded and needed a boost. The continual fighting against the Viking invaders had taken its toll and they were weary of wars. The Celtic tribe are essentially peace-lovers, and although they do not lack courage and will fight as hard as anyone when they have to, waging an almost continual war for fifty years against the brutal savagery of the Norse invader and others picking over the weaknesses left by their raids went against everything their culture stood for.

In order to fight the invader, the Celtic artistic and spiritual indulgences had been put aside in favour of weaponry and battle strategies. The relaxed and gentle times - spent in idolatry, poetry, music, the shaping of cruciform-based objects, jewellery, and luck pieces in gold, silver, rock, wood, iron, leather, and any other material that took their fancy - had been ignored for too long. It was time to get back to the basic husbandry of their land and idolatry of their forefathers before whole generations lost forever the beliefs and skills such pastimes and gentle playthings offered. It was time to live like Celts again. To get back to their deities; to Nuada, the Goddess of the Sun, Diancecht, medicine, Amaethon, light, Dylan, darkness, and Keridwen, poetry. They would happily forsake Manawydan, their god of war, for the foreseeable future. They were sick of war; it was a never-ending cycle that didn’t seem to achieve anything but death and suffering.

The great stones of venefical destiny still towered above everyone at Avebury, and Twilight still officiated at the annual Equinoctial Festival of the Cowering Dead at Stonehenge. The next one would be his fifty-sixth, but there was bound to be a certain amount of inertia and apathy after such a long time. The mighty Merlin himself had retired into his literature for fifty years following his row with, and the subsequent death of, King Arthur until the worry of finding and training the next in line became so paramount that he had to shake himself into action before the sands of time began to run out.

And now, here at last, hope had sprung eternal in the shape of a redheaded, green-eyed slip of a girl with freckles from Ireland. The veil of the past was beginning to lift, and the future hopes of Wessex could once again burn bright.

And all Twilight had to do was train her properly.

He had decided to delay the appointment of Tara’s animals. She seemed to have an affinity with all of them and would often be found sitting outside the compound festooned with all sorts of bird varieties, with fox, deer, badger, bear, stout, dog, weasel, wolf, and other very wild animals that were normally part of one another’s food chain and sworn enemies - sitting in harmonious peace at her feet. Although unlikely, Twilight hadn’t completely discounted the fact that Tara could have any number of them in liegemen to her, a fantastic situation that even extended to fish in the water. Every time they walked along a river, schools of different species would track them along the bank, fighting, jumping, and wriggling to get close to her.

With thirty-one years left until his one hundred years were up, he had plenty of time. The seven short years he had with the long magus was not enough time to learn all that was required, and subsequent mistakes had showed it. Even though this young lady was exceptional, twenty years was around the correct time for learning.