Llangarlia, south-east Britain
The land was ancient, scarred by the traverse of glaciers, oceanic inundations, and, most recently, the axes and awls of humankind. Most of the island’s forests had fallen victim to the needs of men and women; in the past one thousand years 100 million trees had fallen, leaving vast windswept moors where once had been thick forests, and meadowlands where once had flowered dense thickets.
Even if the island had lost its vast enveloping canopy, then there still remained great swathes of green forests that ran through the land like the ancient mystical roads of the gods. In these dark strange woodlands ancient riddles gathered in the twilight shadows, and murderous giant badgers and grey wolves and brown bears roamed paths rarely trod by human feet. Here sprites and imps wived and died, and history itself sank deep beneath the virulent leaf waste that gathered at the base of twisted, prehistoric trees.
Save for those specially marked by the gods, the human population left these remnant forests and woods well enough alone. They worshipped the great stag god Og, who sheltered within the trees’ shadows, venerating him with song and dance and sacrifice, but spent their lives amid the sunlit meadows and fields their braver ancestors had carved out of the Neolithic groves. Here, hares and hedgehogs, robins and larks gambolled, lesser—and far more manageable—creatures than their forest counterparts, and no threat to the herds of domesticated cattle, sheep and pigs kept to feed the village populations of the land.
In the south-east of the island, a green and verdant land where the forests were fewer and the fields richer than elsewhere, dwelt the people of Llangarlia. The Llangarlians centred their lives, their culture and their religion about the great River Llan, which wound its languid and peaceful way across the island to its mouth on the eastern coast. As the forests were the home of the stag god Og, so the Llan and its tributaries, its lakes and springs, were the home of the mother goddess Mag, under whose benefices the Llangarlians grew their crops, bred their livestock and raised the strong-limbed children that graced their hearts and homes. Llangarlia basked in the union between Og and Mag, and in the marriage of forest and water.
To the south of the Llan lay the fields and villages of the Llangarlians, but on the northern bank of the river spread a series of mystic hills and mounds that the Llangarlians called the Veiled Hills after the mist that often enclosed them. These hills and mounds were the sacred heart of Llangarlia, resting as they did between the dark forest that spread to their north and west and the river to their south.
Here, amid the Veiled Hills, the ordinary people of Llangarlia walked only during holy festivals when their footsteps were directed and protected by the MagaLlan, the living representative of Mag, and the Gormagog, the living representative of Og. Between them, the MagaLlan and the Gormagog guided the spiritual lives of the Llangarlians and the physical health of the land, personifying as they did the holy marriage between Mag, the waters, and Og, the forests.
For the past fifteen hundred years, ever since the Llangarlians had replaced those strange, forgotten people who had built the Stone Dances, this union had been one of great soundness. The Llangarlians had lived in health and peace, the men reaping the wealth of field and river while the women bred children of exquisite beauty and wellbeing, the most elderly and respected Mothers among the women of the land presiding over the Houses, or families, of Llangarlia.
Now, however, a blight had fallen over the land. It had begun one dreadful night twenty-six years previously when the Gormagog, Aerne, had lain with his own thirteen-year-old daughter, Blangan. In itself this was not particularly unusual, for many Mothers asked the Gormagog to lie with their daughters and get children of exceptional beauty and power on them, but on this occasion the sexual act turned into a cataclysmic disaster. The instant the Gormagog spilt his seed into Blangan he felt his Og power torn apart. Half of it he managed to retain, half vanished into the son he had planted within Blangan’s womb. Divided, the Og power had become virtually useless. There was no point in even trying to abort the child; the damage was done.
It was a disaster not only for the Gormagog, as also for his son, but also for the god, Og. As the Gormagog was crippled, so also was Og. With every year that passed Og weakened yet further, and as he weakened, so his union with Mag, which kept the land healthy and productive, also waned.
There was nothing that could be done about it. No means existed to reunify the Og power now divided between Aerne and his son, Loth. If Loth had been a girl, it was conceivable that Aerne could then have lain with his daughter (and granddaughter, as she would have been) when she came of age, and the son thus produced could have reunited the Og power into one body…but the Gormagog had planted a son into Blangan, a son, a useless son…
For all of Mag’s power, and the power of the MagaLlan, the land itself began to wither and die. Cattle and sheep birthed thin, deformed offspring. Crops tended more to failure than to bounty, and winters extended well past their allotted span so that miserable sleet and destructive frosts afflicted the land even at the height of summer.
The daughters of Llangarlia, who traditionally had enjoyed healthy pregnancies and easy labours, now began to miscarry and, worse, die during childbirth. Even if both mother and child survived the perils of childbed, the infants often perished in the first few months of life, and their mothers proved barren of further children.
Older children fell victim to strange fevers, or unexplainable wasting diseases.
The dark creatures of the forests, the wolves and bears and the monstrous badgers, strayed from beneath the trees and into the fields and the sheep runs of the villages, not only destroying crops and hard-bred livestock, but mauling and ravaging adults and children alike.
Llangarlia was dying, and the powerless Gormagog, and his equally powerless and angry shadow, Loth, could do nothing.
Og was sliding towards death, and as he did, he dragged Mag with him. Unaffected though Mag might have been by the initial splitting of power when Aerne lay with Blangan, as Mag’s union with the crippled Og failed, so also did Mag’s power wane. Mag could do nothing for the land without a strong mate at her side.
Then, in the twenty-sixth year of the calamity, the MagaLlan, Genvissa (daughter of the MagaLlan who had presided over the disaster, and sister to Blangan), spoke to the Gormagog and to Loth, and said that she thought she could help. She spoke long and gently to them over many weeks, knowing they would resist her plan, knowing it would offend their male pride, but knowing that eventually they would also agree, for in this they had no choice.
Llangarlia must survive before all else.
They sat atop the most sacred of the Veiled Hills, the Llandin. It was dawn, the time when minds were the clearest and the power of the land was the nearest.
“Why?” said Loth, leaning forward, his dark green and faintly luminous eyes unblinking and intent. “Why must you do this?”
The MagaLlan, Genvissa, regarded him calmly. Loth’s malformed, horrific skull was scratched deeply in places, the blood scabbing into unbecoming lumps in his thin hair, and Genvissa idly wondered which daughter of which House had so marked him.
It must have been a wild night.
Impotent the Gormagog and Loth might be in the ways of power, but their maleness had not suffered when it came to bedding the daughters of Llangarlia. It was almost as if they both somehow hoped to redeem that one malevolent bedding with each subsequent girl they bore down beneath them. It was a useless effort, but Genvissa understood their need.
She was also a recipient of it herself, having borne Aerne three daughters over the past sixteen years.
“There is the why,” she said to Loth, waving a hand towards the settlements south of the Llan. “This season over eleven daughters have died in childbirth, barely half of the livestock born will grow into maturity, and a third of the crops have fallen to the mould blight. Can you help, Loth?” It was cruel, she knew, but the need was great, and if she didn’t persuade them soon then the chance would pass her by.
Loth’s lip curled, and he sat back, wondering if Genvissa hid a sneer behind her beautiful, serene face. His feelings for Genvissa were a mass of conflicting emotions. He resented and desired her, reasonable reactions given her power compared with his relative lack of it and her beautiful, seductive body which often had him sweating with frustrated desire.
But Loth also deeply distrusted Genvissa, and yet he could not say why.
Unable to hold Genvissa’s steady gaze, Loth looked at his father, Aerne, sitting hunched over his belly as if his impotency in the face of this crisis might send him to his grave.
“We should take this to an Assembly,” said Aerne. His voice was soft, but even if his spiritual and magical powers had diminished into infirmity, his voice still held a vestige of his traditional authority. “The Mothers of Llangarlia’s Houses should meet on this.”
“The Mothers are not due to assemble again until the Slaughter Festival,” Genvissa said, remembering how powerful Aerne had been when she had been a child. Now, all that power had seeped away, along with his decisiveness, and the remnants of Genvissa’s respect had vanished with it. He’d fathered three daughters on her, but their beauty and power was all from her, not him. He’d merely planted the seed. “That is almost a full year away. We cannot wait.”
“We could call an extraordinary Assembly,” said Loth, wondering why it was that Genvissa did not call an Assembly. Surely her plan demanded the consultation of the Mothers?
Why didn’t she want to call them?
Aerne looked at his son, and something he saw in Loth’s face made his back straighten. “We could indeed,” he said.
The skin around Genvissa’s eyes tightened momentarily, then she smiled, leaned forward, and put a warm hand on Aerne’s bare thigh. The movement made the material of her soft linen robe strain against her breasts and hips, accentuating both her sexuality and her success as a mother, and Loth, watching Aerne carefully, was appalled to see his father’s eyes actually water with desire.
“Aerne,” she said, her voice soft, persuasive, compelling. “Would it not be best to delay a consultation with the Mothers? Then we can see if my plan works. Why get their hopes up with an Assembly now? We should wait. Wait until we are sure of my plan’s success. Then we can put it to the Slaughter Festival Assembly. When we are sure.” Her hand tightened, gripping Aerne’s slack, aged flesh, and Loth looked away, sickened.
“Strange magic!” he said, spitting the words out as if they were pig filth. Genvissa’s plan repelled him, but only, if he was honest with himself, because its very existence highlighted his own inadequacies. “What need have we of foreign magic?”
“Every need, Loth.” Genvissa straightened, lifting her hand from Aerne’s thigh. She looked at Loth, her demeanour exuding certainty powered with a little impatience, as if Loth himself were the cause of the land’s troubles.
Then again, Loth thought, there was every chance that it is what Genvissa did think. She had ever been impatient with him.
If only Loth didn’t exist, if only he hadn’t been conceived that fateful night, then the Gormagog’s power would remain intact and Llangarlia would never have been overcome with blight. Loth could imagine the words repeating themselves over and over in Genvissa’s mind.
Loth had no idea how wrong he was.
“Og is impotent, perhaps even dying,” Genvissa continued. “We need a strong male magic to counter his lack and to combine with my womanly Mag power to weave a web of protection once more over this land. I know where I can find this maleness. This…potency.”
There, the cruel word was said. Genvissa saw Aerne’s face flinch, and Loth’s set into mottle-cheeked animosity, but she steeled herself against their hurt. What she did was for her foremothers from whom she had inherited her strange exotic darkcraft, and even darker ambition.
“Og’s power may revive—” Loth began.
“Og’s power has failed to revive in these past twenty-six years, Loth. How can you say, ‘Wait a little longer’? We must act now, or our land will die! I can bring that magic to Llangarlia, no one else.” Genvissa looked to Aerne, and he nodded, his face resigned.
“If we must, Genvissa. If we must.”
“We must!” she said. “Mag demands it. She needs a mate of potency…not what she must endure now.” She paused, looking between both men. “The Mag is strong in my womb,” she continued, referring to the Mag magic that resided in every Llangarlian woman’s womb, but which flowered at its brightest in hers. “I can act. I can save this land. How can you think to prevent me?”
Loth opened his mouth to speak, but his father silenced him with a heavy hand on the younger man’s arm.
“Then do it, Genvissa,” Aerne said, his voice thick with self-loathing. “Do it. Bring your strange magic here, and use it in a spell-weaving that will save us. Do it.”
Genvissa smiled, thankful that Aerne had summoned enough authority to override his son’s suspicions.
Eventually, of course, she would have to do something about Loth.