‘Oh, hellfire and tiny fleas,’ Wat swore.
‘Now then, Wat,’ Hermitage admonished.
‘Don’t tell me this is not the time for profanity,’ said Wat, ‘this is exactly the time for profanity. What the hell are we doing to do?’
‘We get out of here,’ Cwen confirmed the original plan.
‘What is going on?’ Ellen demanded.
Wat turned to her and looked right into her eyes. ‘The whole village is mad. They have brought us here to sacrifice us to their stone circle. They’re digging a special hole just for Hermitage. More, Leon and Stropit have probably already gone. Now the rest of the men are missing I can imagine what’s happened.’
‘Sacrificed?’ Ellen was in such a state of shock at the word that she could hardly speak.
‘Well, they put you in the bottom of a hole and drop a massive stone on you, if that’ll do.’
The look in Ellen’s eyes, said yes, that would do it.
‘So, we gather what we can save and head back over the hills,’ Wat explained. ‘We used to outnumber them, but not anymore.’
The whole group now comprised three women left in the group of stragglers, Hermitage, Wat and Cwen. Even the pilgrims had gone. Hermitage knew that if there was to be a battle to escape the village their chances would not be good. Evaluating the little band he reckoned their best chance would be to give the best weapons to Ellen, Cwen and Wat. Except of course they didn’t have any best weapons. They didn’t have any weapons at all.
‘But, the others?’ Ellen asked, plaintively.
‘I don’t think there’s anything we can do for them,’ Wat shook his head sadly.
‘We can’t go,’ Hermitage said plainly, having thought it through.
‘Eh, what?’ Wat and Cwen couldn’t understand what he was saying.
‘We can’t go,’ Hermitage repeated. ‘We cannot run away and leave all those people to their fate.’
‘They’ve already had their fate,’ Cwen pointed out.
‘We don’t know that,’ Hermitage was insistent. ‘It is our Christian duty to stay and find out what has happened.
‘We know what’s happened,’ Cwen went on, ‘that mad builder told us what happened. Holes. Stones. Squashed. Remember?’
‘No,’ Hermitage corrected, ‘Wem told us what was going to happen. To me. It seems very likely the same thing is planned for everyone else but we most certainly do not know it’s happened already. In fact if I’m the one who gets the master stone, they might be saving me for last. The others could still be held captive in the woods.’
‘No wonder they wouldn’t let us in,’ Cwen snarled.
‘So what do you suggest Hermitage?’ Wat asked, ‘the seven of us storm the druid stronghold, the one in the middle of the sacred woods, the one full of druids that want us all underground, and we release the prisoners?’
‘Could we?’ Hermitage asked, as if being invited to a tour of a cathedral.
‘No, we couldn’t’ Wat half shouted. ‘We’d get slaughtered.’
‘I think that’s the plan anyway,’ Hermitage observed.
‘If we leave, we won’t get slaughtered at all,’ said Wat, ‘and of all the options, I think that’s my preference. And don’t give me that look.’
Hermitage was giving Wat the look that said the weaver knew perfectly well what the right thing to do was. He just wasn’t planning to do it.
‘Yes, we could run away.’ Hermitage gave the words “run away” their own peculiar character, a frankly cowardly and disgraceful character. ‘But that might not work. As you said yourself, we’re in the middle of nowhere, we could easily be captured again.’
Wat glared.
‘And no one seems to be paying us any attention, Hermitage observed.
That was true. No one in the village was paying them the slightest notice. It was as if large groups of sacrifices turned up every day of the week. Perhaps they did.
There were only one or two people wandering about, and even Wem had stayed at the hut, presumably to get on with digging Hermitage’s grave.
‘All we need to do is go over to the woods and see if we can find out what’s happened,’ Hermitage explained.
‘And if they’re all lying around in holes with stones on their heads?’
‘Then we can leave,’ Hermitage granted.
‘Oh no we can’t,’ Ellen growled from somewhere very deep inside. ‘If harm has come to a hair of their heads it will be a day of druid disaster.’
The others looked at her with newfound admiration, if tinged with a bit of fear.
‘We can’t take them all on.’ Surprisingly it was Cwen who spoke up to soothe Ellen’s temper.
‘You don’t have to,’ Ellen replied, ‘but I shall take as many of them with me as I can.’
‘Leon,’ Cwen said, reaching a conclusion.
‘My son,’ Ellen confirmed. ‘Thick as a barn door and thinks with his fists, but if a druid hand has been laid on him, look for the druid with no hands.’
Wat looked hopelessly at them all, and longingly at the path over the hills which led out of the village. Hermitage looked at him pleadingly, urging him to search his conscience and consider whether leaving was really the right thing to do.
Cwen and Ellen glared at him, urging him to consider whether he’d still be able to leave the village if they chopped his toes off.
‘Oh, bloody hell,’ he cried aloud and headed for the woods.
…
Their entry to the sacred forest was not hindered this time, and the much reduced band made its way into the depths of the trees. Wat led the way. Hermitage suspected this was so he could prevent Cwen and Ellen diving head first into the first druid they came across.
Paths criss-crossed between the trees but the party followed what appeared to be the most well-trodden way. This was clear of leaves as if it had been swept religiously. Which seemed to be a good sign that they were heading in the right direction.
After a while there was a smell to follow as well. It was a sweet, sickly odour, with an undercurrent of bitterness which said that the cooking involved bits of the forest.
Without warning, the wood stepped aside and deposited a clearing at their feet. It was quite a sight.
Hermitage gaped at the stone circle which was laid out in neat and well maintained order. The thing must be a hundred feet across and some of the stones were pretty massive. As he gazed upon the construction he wondered why the villagers wanted another circle when they already had this one. Perhaps one doubled the power of the other. Not that stone circles had power, that was ridiculous. It was just that these people were ignorant pagans who were about to double their cursedness.
‘Look,’ said Ellen with a sharp command and point of her finger.
Across the circle, buried somewhere in the trees at the back, was the fire from which the smell was coming. Smoke wound up into the cloudy sky and hints of a wooden wall could be made out between the foliage.
Leading them round the circle, (Hermitage thought walking straight across it would be most sensible but it didn’t feel polite somehow), Wat brought the group to sight of the druid temple. The sight which knocked them back and drove all plans from their heads.
In the middle of the space in front of the temple was a large cauldron on a stand with fire crackling beneath. At the lip of the cauldron stood the Arch-Druid, stirring the contents with a large wooden spoon. Every now and again Lypolix would skip out of the undergrowth and throw something new in the pot. Wulf and the other druid sat nearby in relaxed conversation.
Scattered about at the feet of the cauldron, chatting amiably, or leaning against a tree trunk with eyes closed were the pilgrims, John and the rest of the stragglers. Leon, More and whoever Stropit was, were still missing. As was the entire band of robbers.
‘What the devil is going on here?’ Ellen demanded.
‘Welcome, welcome,’ the Arch-Druid called, pausing in his stirring for a moment, ‘I said we would welcome you when the time was right. And now it is. It is indeed.’
‘Where’s Leon?’ Ellen demanded.
‘Leon?’ The Arch-Druid looked to his fellows for some explanation. Wulf and the spare druid shrugged.
‘My son,’ Ellen pressed, ‘one of the stragglers.’
‘Ah,’ the druid nodded acknowledgement, ‘I don’t know I’m afraid. I think there are some people off in the woods, but they’ll come back in due course, no doubt.’
Hermitage couldn’t quite take this in. There was a whole village preparing to sacrifice them, him in particular, and now the Arch-Druid seemed to be hosting some sort of gathering.
‘What about the stones?’ Hermitage asked.
‘What about them?’
‘You’re going to sacrifice us all to the stones. I even have my own special stone, the master. You’re going to put me in the ground and squash me with it.’
The Arch-Druid burst out laughing. ‘Who told you that?’
‘Well, er, Wem the builder,’ Hermitage explained, suddenly doubting his own memory. ‘He was bringing the stone down to Hywel’s hut especially for the purpose.’
‘My goodness me,’ the old Druid chuckled, ‘the things people come up with when they’re left on their own.’
Wat stepped forward and looked at the Arch-Druid as if he was trying to see what was underneath. ‘What is going on then? You are building a stone circle.’
‘That’s true,’ the man explained. ‘We have discovered that young Wulf here is a stone seer. Very rare thing, a stone seer. Only a seer can build a circle, so that’s what we’re doing.’
‘And the sacrifices?’
‘For heaven’s sake, we aren’t primitives. We don’t really sacrifice people anymore. Is that what you thought?’
Hermitage thought that yes that was what he’d thought. And he’d also had good reason as people kept telling him it was going to happen.
‘No, no, no,’ the Arch-Druid protested, ‘we have a purely symbolic ceremony of blessing the stones.’
‘But Wem was most insistent there was going to be a sacrifice,’ said Hermitage, ‘of me.’
The Arch-Druid leant in close, away from Hywel’s hearing. ‘Do you think he’d have lugged a massive stone all the way down the mountain if he thought all we were going to do was sprinkle it with berry juice? These are simple people, you have to give them something of a sensation to stir them to action. We spun them a yarn about great sacrifices to get the stone circle going and so they started work.’
‘That’s rather dishonest isn’t it?’ Hermitage chided.
‘Better than squashing real monks with real rocks,’ the Arch-Druid observed.
‘So all this business about us being the chosen ones and summoned here across Wales was nonsense?’
‘Oh, not quite,’ the Arch-Druid confessed. ‘The locals are well known to the stones and so strangers were needed for the ceremony. You just happened to be the first ones we found.’
‘Well known to the stones,’ Hermitage muttered at such nonsense.
‘That still doesn’t explain where my Leon has got to,’ Ellen piped up.
‘Or More, or Stropit,’ Cwen added.
‘Or all the robbers,’ Wat noted.
‘It is a big place my friends,’ the Arch-Druid held his arms out to demonstrate just how large. ‘I expect they’ve just wandered off and will be back shortly. We’re not holding anyone captive after all.’
Cwen and Ellen still looked suspicious at this tale but the evidence was hard to deny. There was no one under threat. The missing people were just missing and the Arch-Druid seemed to be most concerned about his cooking pot.
Hermitage wasn’t sure he could stand much more of this. First they tramp through the countryside, then they’re going to be sacrificed, then they’re not. He just wished everything would settle down and he could get back to normal. Whatever that was now.
The whole situation was completely bizarre, never mind whether there was going to be any actual death or not. And they were still no closer to completing their mission. There was no sign of Martel. Yes, there was some druid gold, quite a bit of it draped around the Arch-Druid, but there was no way they were going to be able to get away with any of it for the King. Not that Hermitage would dream of stealing someone else’s gold anyway.
‘I don’t suppose you’ve seen a fellow called Martel have you?’ he asked the Arch-Druid. ‘A Norman. Came here some months ago, probably.’
‘No,’ the Arch-Druid boomed happily, ‘as you now know, we get very few strangers in these parts. We tend to make a song and dance of it when any do turn up.’
‘Hywel didn’t seem very happy at having to supply a feast,’ Hermitage pointed out.
‘Ah, well,’ the Arch-Druid explained, ‘Hywel is never very happy about anything.’
Hermitage felt rather deflated. He didn’t want to be sacrificed under a big rock of course, but he had been prepared to put up some sort of fight. Now it didn’t seem to be needed.
‘What now then?’ he asked the Arch-Druid.
‘It’s ready,’ the man announced, stepping back from his cauldron. ‘We all have the ceremonial libation, then we move on to the blessing of the stones. Then you can all do whatever you want.’
Hermitage looked very suspiciously at the cauldron full of ceremonial libation.
‘Oh, don’t worry, the druid reassured him, ‘it isn’t poisoned or anything. Look. I’ll take the first portion.’
He dipped a small ladle into the cauldron, extracted a full measure and blew across it to cool it. He took a cautious sip, as anyone would of a boiling hot potion that you about to stick in your mouth. Then, when satisfied it wasn’t going to burn him, he drank the lot.
‘Ah,’ he smacked his lips in pleasure, ‘may not be to everyone’s taste, but I love it. Here you go.’ He held the ladle out for the monk.
Hermitage and the others still held back but then the other druid, Wulf and Lypolix all queued up for their drink.
Perhaps Hermitage would try a sip. Just to be polite. He did wonder about the point of being polite to people who he had been assured were planning to sacrifice him under a rock. But if that really was wrong he ought not to hold it against them. It could be that Wem was a fanciful chap who made up ridiculous tales. He had come across people like him often enough. Most often they were his fellow monks.
After the druids had had their fill he took a small mouthful of the frankly foul distillation. If this was what druids drank he wasn’t surprised they were dying out.
No one else volunteered to taste what came out of a druid’s cauldron, so the Arch-Druid went amongst them with his ladle, doling out small mouthfuls. The universal conclusion about this creation of the woods, with its secret recipe of natural ingredients, freshly plucked from the floor and walls of the forest, was that it was revolting.
People spat and did what they could to clear their mouths of stuff that seemed determined to cling to their teeth. Perhaps chewing a nettle would take the taste away.
Hermitage thought that he would need to have a long discussion with a devout abbot or bishop after all of this, just to sort out what was sinful and what he needed to do penance for. If he could find a devout abbot or bishop that was.
This thought was still in his head when he realised that he was falling to the ground. He seemed to be at one remove from the body of the monk that was now collapsing onto the ground in front of the cauldron. He could watch it, as if from a great distance, and note with interest what a body looked like when it fell senseless.
As consciousness fled, his final thought was to wonder if this might have anything to do with the druid’s potion he’d just drunk.