A Treasure of Bone & Promises Read online

A TREASURE OF BONE & PROMISES

  By Hob Goodfellowe

  copyright (Story & Art), 2015, 2016

  SAGAS AROUND THE FIRE

  (Author's Note)

  This is the first installment in The Winter King. My aim in writing this and other tales in this cycle is to produce a set of fantasy stories that can be read individually, but also build towards an over-arcing storyline. A Treasure of Bone & Promises is a short introductory novella in which we meet a couple of the characters who will wander through later stories. At the time of writing this, the next two pieces (short novel length works) are complete as drafts and I am refining them. A few minor and perhaps academic points might be worth noting here. Mannagarm is a name adapted from one of the variants of the Norse mythic wolf Garm, although any resemblance stops there. Dapplegrim has been adapted and moulded out of the horse-creature that is the chief character of the fairytale of the same name. Wisht is an actual English word, though has fallen out of use. It is spelled variously wist, whisht and wisht, and means 'eerie', 'uncanny', 'eldritch'. The hounds of the Wild Hunt were in parts of Southwest England called Wisht Hounds, for example. What else to mention? I stole the idea for a sword dripped with the blood of nine wolves and poison of nine serpents from Beowulf. Writers that I have delighted in include Ray Bradbury, Ursula Le Guin, Alan Garner, Poul Anderson, J.R.R. Tolkien, Lord Dunsany, G.K. Chesterton, Peter S. Beagle, Peter Dickinson and the inimitable H.H. Munro, called also Saki (though I'd be a madman to claim my writing comes anywhere near the woven grace of just one of those taletellers). And that will do for now. Onwards then, to the tale told, the story unravelled, the saga around the fire.

  Hob Goodfellowe

  Melbourne, 2015

  www.hobgoodfellowe.com

  Two rooks flew in the sky. They flapped together through the pass in the mountains, southward—gliding on long and feather-stretched sweeps—beating their wings and climbing higher and higher, then floating down atop the winds. They danced together, weaving one over the other, much like rooks will do when in a playful mood.

  One of them was fat, almost chubby and sleekly black. The other was older, with a grey collar of feathers about his neck.

  The grey-collared one paused in mid-flap, and cried out in the language that all birds know, and some other creatures too, hares and foxes for instance, "Hoy! Harrier!" And the rook folded back his wings and dove.

  The marsh-harrier was perched on a dead old pine: a fawn-speckled, black and brown lord, surveying, waiting for some weak or sick or foolish thing to scurry into the open. It did not look up, and it did not see the rook until wings and beak mobbed it from above.

  Crouching its head and ruffling its wings, the harrier called out, angry, while the old rook flapped away, laughing in the laughter of birds. "Worm-eating, mange-ridden git!" the harrier yelled.

  "Egg-eater!" cried the rook. "Chick-robber!"

  The harrier was rearranging its feathers and resuming some dignity when the second rook knocked it on the back of the head, then flapped away.

  "Ugly, carrion-beaked... eh... something!" yelled the second rook.

  -oOo-

  The grey-collared rook spoke as they flew south. "Carrion-beaked something?" It chuckled in a rasping rook's voice. "A rook can do better than that."

  "Haven't mobbed many harriers, have I?" The fatter, younger rook was indignant. "I'm still young, I am—and we don't get many harriers up north of the Snowy Mountains. Do we then?"

  "Excuses, excuses," said the old grey rook. "Mind you, I do love a good mobbing myself. I wonder if we might see a lynx, or even a dog? Love mobbing dogs. They're all stuck on the ground, like rocks. Urm. Like rocks with legs. But furrier than rocks. If you know what I mean? Anyways, more fun to mob than harriers, for mobbing purposes."

  "I've never mobbed a dog neither," said the young sleek rook, hopefully. "Can they jump?"

  "Not high enough." The older rook turned on its wing. It added, "This way. We've things to attend to. No dilly. No dally. Work, work, work. That's our lot."

  "Suppose it is," said the young fat-sleek rook. "Wait up, then." He flapped to catch up.

  They drifted over green and rolling foothills, thick with meadows in burgeoning flower and just barely alive with the first active bumblebees of the new spring. Twisting across the white and blue and pink spattered meadows, with their shadows chasing after them, they came at last upon a small house in a secluded vale. It was ringed round with apples and hawthorns that were full of buds ready to burst. There were early season daffodils in the earth, and clover and daisies too: the fresh struggling flowers of the season were everywhere. Out back of the tidy cottage stood five beehives, of that sort humans weave from reeds and willow—a kind of upturned basket, that to a rook's eye looked something like the threadbare pate of an elderly bear's head.

  The two rooks lit on an appletree branch and waited—bobbing on the flimsy length of stick and twigs. In time, an old woman, a bit bent, a bit crooked, wandered out from the house and set herself to pressing flowers. She was pressing out perfumes for candlewax, and she sang subtle songs of power as she did her chores.

  "Well," said the younger sleek rook, "she is a witch. Is that good enough?"

  But the old grey rook shook his head. "No. Too old, too wise, too kind. She'll never go for it, and besides, even if she does, the bees will whisper in her ears and warn her about us, and tell her the truth. And that will be the end of that."

  "I hear there's a magician on the rocky downs. Near Chark, I think? Calls himself the Piper-at-the-Heather."

  "Pretentious."

  "Could look in on him next?"

  "Might as well."

  And the two rooks took to flight, winging away southward towards the Hills of Chark.

  But when they at last spied the Piper-at-the-Heather, they found him sitting on a rock, playing his small leather bagpipes in the growing warmth of day, taking in all the views of the wild westlands rolling away in heath and heather and sphagnum mossy tarns. He sang his songs, peacefully, and listened to the peacefulness of the world exhale from the moors.

  They watched him for a while, listening. But before too long the grey collared rook shook his head. He muttered, "Won't do. Too much peace in his soul. No fight. No spit. No anger. Won't be any good, will he?"

  The Witch of the Green Gloam Glens was too young, too pleasant and too flighty in her moods—and besides that, her songs, though earnest, were not skilful. It grated terribly when she sang. "Imagine having to listen to that all day!" said the young sleek rook, shaking his feathers, as they flew off.

  The Sorcerer of Alb Tor was far too kind. He threw the rooks some grainy black bread—which, of course they ate hungrily—despite the disappointment of his turning out to be more or less rather nice. As he tossed the bread to the rooks, he smiled, sitting at his little stone table beside his ramshackle tower in the sunlight.

  The Blue Magician of the Twilit Woods was rotund, brimming with laughter, and quite jolly. He didn't seem to have a nasty bone in his body.

  "You would think," said the older rook, "that somewhere in this rook-forsaken land there would be at least one cantankerous worker-of-magic. At least one unscrupled, nasty, weasel-hearted hexmonger. At least one bleak magician! What's a rook to do? Who's next on the list?"

  "Hrmmm... let me think..." said the younger rook. "I think his name is Mannagarm... Mannagarm of Dossel."

  -oOo-

  Mannagarm stood on the gravelly path that stretched from the threshold of his hilltop longhouse to the village below. The path twisted past the old dead mountain ash that clung to the cliff's edge there. And from where Mannagarm stood, beside the tree, he could see the trackway twist below him, down, down to w
here the houses and shacks and sheds of the village cowed together. The village was named Dossel, though it was the sort of small out of the way place that no-one important has ever heard of. Under the shadow of the great mountains that stretched like grey and white shards of a broken looking glass, there was little enough to farm and little enough for anyone outside the stoney hills to want. Kings and queens, raiders, traders and merchants: they did not cast eyes of avarice on these lands, not even the pettiest of them. And so these lands were mostly clan-lands—villages, hillforts and small wooden castles scattered about, and controlled by the family clans that in years gone by had travelled out of the south and west.

  Mannagarm's village was an exception to that rule. His village was his village. He was the self-proclaimed Witch-Chieftain of Dossel, Lord-Magian of All Purveyed, Watcher Over the Roads, Great Practitioner of Secret Arts... all titles he had bestowed on himself, of course... and he ruled his tiny chiefdom with ruthless, angry jealousy. It was his. All his. And no-one would take it from him. Never. Even the thought of someone trying to take away what he had worked so long to rule, well, it made bile rose in his throat.

  It was his village. He had, after all, been born to it in one of those small, drear cottages. He had grown up