Graynelore Read online

  ‘You do well to ask, my friend,’ replied the Beggar Bard. His fingers continued to draw fleeting shapes upon the smoke-filled air. ‘It is, of course, the Faerie Isle. Never yet seen by any mortal man, I would swear; only ever believed in. For such, you will agree, is true faith?’

  Again there came the knowing laughter from among our company, if slightly less certain now. The Beggar Bard continued.

  ‘Just as surely as he knew the Moon moves across our night sky, the Great Wizard knew the Faerie Isle moves across our sea (if, ever and always, just out of sight). He knew it was there, and so he marked it there upon the stone as best he could; adding waves and ripples in want of movement and effect. And he was well satisfied, for he also knew that it was from the Faerie Isle that all the creatures of the world first came.

  ‘Finally, and with flourish, all around the edges of the tablet inscriptions were made, numbering the natural laws of this land, though in a symbol and tongue known only to the Great Wizard himself; that no common creature might challenge their worth or seek to interpret their truth to its own advantage.’

  Here the Beggar Bard was forced to pause and take a breath. His sallow eyes briefly passed over us again, as if he was looking for the measure of our understanding. He smiled – at us, not with us – before continuing.

  ‘With that, my friends, the Great Wizard’s work was all but finished. The Eye Stone, almost complete. The world unmade, was at once a world made. Cut upon cut, line upon line. Only, in that very last moment of its making, he marked it with a name, and called it – Graynelore.’

  There were sudden, fervent cheers. Wolfrid hauled himself upright, applauding loudly (if his wine-sodden face carried something of a befuddled look). At my back, men and women in a jolly drunken fashion, clashed their drinking bowls together, slopped and splashed a rain of warm ale down upon our heads. Notyet yelped and jumped at the excitement of it, which only encouraged the Beggar Bard to more.

  ‘Now then…there came a solemn day, when The Eye Stone was at last revealed to the creatures of Graynelore. And, all at once, they believed in its truth and in its accuracy. They believed without question; because they believed in the Great Wizard without question. And, just as these things occur, just as the Great Wizard had set it in stone, so the world at large became…and still is.’

  The Beggar Bard fell silent, and for the first time stood suddenly stock-still. Though, his eyes continued to sharpen themselves upon us.

  As if it was a given signal, the elder-women of my house quickly stood up. They offered the Beggar Bard a bowl of the best wine and a board of fresh meats, which he quietly accepted and sat down upon the stone hearth by the fire to consume. Out of courtesy, he was also offered a young woman for his own close company, which he politely refused.

  Our general gathering sat on, unmoved, waited in eager anticipation of his return. Fortunately, his was a meagre appetite, soon sated. It was not long before he set his bowl and board aside.

  In his own time, and beckoning both my own mother and Notyet for their support, he carefully stood up, and prepared himself to continue. It was obvious his great age was getting the better of him. ‘That ancient stone tablet, The Eye Stone, stood out upon the exact spot where it had been created and weathered countless centuries. Until, at last, its guardian and creator, the Great Wizard died…(Aye, for even the greatest of wizards was not an immortal, whatever other men might tell you).

  ‘Across the ages many Great Wizards have come and gone. There were those who, when they came upon The Eye Stone, believed in its truth. Though there were just as many who came upon it and did not believe. In the fullness of time, The Eye Stone seemed lost to history. Perhaps it toppled, or crumbled to dust, or else was stolen away.

  ‘Copies were made from its memory, sometimes cut upon stone, sometimes scribed upon parchment, or woven into the threads of great tapestries. Though some believe the real Eye Stone was eventually found again…Lost, and found.’ The Beggar Bard drew out the last of these words, lightly rocked his cradled hands as if he was passing them between one and the other.

  Then his tone grew more sombre.

  ‘Upon a day, there came a calamitous moment in our history when, all at once, several Great Wizards claimed to be the only true descendent of the first. And each solemnly declared that the image of The Eye Stone in their possession was the only one made after the true original. Be it marked upon stone, or upon cloth, or upon parchment.

  ‘Their eager debates turned to sour arguments, turned to open conflicts…and war! Aye, and with truth and right on all sides and many—!’ The Beggar Bard smiled ruefully at this last remark. Around him, the light of the open fire grew suddenly dim. Its smoke belched black and thickened about his crooked form, leaving only the image of a ghastly golem in his place.

  Still, grown men laughed, babbies cried, and the eldest crone wailed her distress.

  The Beggar Bard’s performance was coming to its dramatic height.

  ‘I beseech you all, my friends. Turn away! Look no more upon me! Or else, if look you must, see only darkness here. I did not intend slaughter for an entertainment. We do not need to witness the destruction of war, need only understand its outcome and recognize the utter loss at its last battle’s bitter end.’

  Even as the Beggar Bard spoke these words, within the fire-smoke filled air a great turmoil erupted. The shadows of men and beasts came together and did gruesome battle. Dark elfin creatures with beating wings, goblins, gigants, and dwarves rose up together in great clashing swathes only to dissolve again into wisps of smoke. Thundering herds of unifauns bolted from the depths of the fire crying their distress. Spitting flames became the fiery breath of angry dragons. The sound of crackling wood became the clash of iron war swords, the death cries of men, the breaking of bones, and the voices of despair. And among it all, in their fury, the feuding wizards cast their bolts of magic and laid the world to waste.

  To my childish eyes it was all very real. In all my short life – though I had witnessed much – I had never experienced such pitiful dread. Between us, Notyet and I grasped at each other’s stiffened limbs and held on tight. Still the men of my house laughed and stamped their feet, and spat their approval, and demanded more, and more, and worse, and worse. The women wept a dreadful sorrow; and yet were still filled with eager anticipation. The babbies pissed themselves.

  The Beggar Bard gave us one final spectacle to behold. At the very last, as I gaped open-mouthed, with the battle of the wizards still at its height, all across the heavens a great shade, a tumult of raging black cloud, descended. A rolling blanket of darkness…Then the rain fell, the black rain. It was not water, but dust: Faerie Dust. Each drop as fine as a grain of sand, as sharp as a fragment of broken glass. And as it fell it smothered all before it – even as creatures and men battled on – covering great swathes of the earth, and finding its pinnacle upon the heights of Earthrise, a distant mountain…only, now and forever more, to be known as the black-headed mountain.

  And then – suddenly, quickly – it was all over and done with.

  With a simple shrug of his arm the Beggar Bard dispersed the smoke, as if he was tossing aside his winter cloak. It drifted upwards, a thing in itself, coming to rest against the wooden joists of the ceiling. And there, the skulking loathsome mass, seemed to hesitate, only to seep quietly away between the gaps in the wood and the broken stonework, until it was quite gone up through the house, to the very rafters, and out into the night. And the clash of battle, and the storm of war, and the black Faerie Dust, went with it.

  Our gathering hushed then, though whether through dread, or understanding, or anticipation for what was to come next, Rogrig, the child, did not have the wit to tell.

  The Beggar Bard waited there a long moment, as if to catch his breath; standing quietly, head solemnly bowed, until the silence was complete. Then, only then, he spoke again in hushed tones.

  ‘All the wizards are long dead now…and gone forever. There is little enough left of
their true magic here. And if our world…if Graynelore survives still, the Faerie Isle, its ethereal partner, was utterly broken by it, grounded, never to move again. A landed wreck, left a mere earthly prominence: you need only look to the furthest point of our own eastern shores – to the forgotten March, the Wycken Mire.’ For the first time the Beggar Bard hesitated in his speech, almost at a loss for words.

  ‘Out of the chaos of that war came a chaotic peace…a new world order was made, but without magic or rule of law. A world without reason, in which only blood-ties and the strength of a man’s arm has any worth. The ways of faerie diminished and quite faded away…Much that was good and true, much that was light and fair, faded with them. The warm hearts of men turned to cold, cold stone.’

  Was the Beggar Bard looking only at me when he spoke then? I was certain he was and shuddered for it. It was as if he had looked into my own stone heart and laid it bare; a thing to be despised. I tore my hand free of Notyet’s grasp, and roughly set myself aside from her. Upon Graynelore, the soft-hearted man is soon dead!

  The Beggar Bard’s eyes moved on; and his mouth…

  ‘What few poor faerie creatures remained soon disappeared from sight. They hid themselves away among the beasts of the fields and the birds of the air; or else among common men. Until, as the ages passed, neither was distinguishable, not one from the other, and little remained of faerie other than their names. Names the great families of this world – the graynes – stole, and took to wearing as their own. Names…And the taint of black dust that still lies scattered upon distant fields and covers the head of Earthrise, the black-headed mountain.’

  Sullen and forlorn, the Beggar Bard suddenly brightened. He stood up boldly before us, as a final twist to his tale came into his mind.

  ‘And what, you may well ask, became of the tablet that was the true Eye Stone of Graynelore? It has been told that it was destroyed. Already badly weathered through the ages, it was broken up and scattered to the ends of the earth. Symbolic of a broken land no doubt. But, see this—?’ The Beggar Bard thrust a withered hand inside his cloth and drew out a blackened shard of stone: a talisman, which was bound to his neck by a leather thong. (All Beggar Bards carried such a relic.) His was too distant, and the shadows too deep to see clearly. ‘This old-man’s Burden is, alas, only the smallest of broken fragments of the true stone. But do not despair for its safety; I am quite certain of its majority…You see, one day, a man they called Sylvane, who was the first Graynelord of the Wishards, built his Stronghold upon the very spot where it lay, forgotten. His stonemasons, not recognizing The Eye Stone for what it truly was, chose it for a foundation stone, built it into the very fabric of their walls. Which gave the building a great strength: greatest of all the Strongholds throughout Graynelore. An advantage the Wishards still make best use of. Though more lifetimes have passed since then than can be easily measured.’

  Unable to control ourselves, and for one last time, his willing audience erupted into a furious display of abandoned approval. How very easily we took the sweetmeat he so generously offered.

  Here, finally, the Beggar Bard’s tale came to its end. He quickly put away his stone talisman, tucked it out of sight within his cloth. And, suddenly exhausted by the telling of his epic tale, all at once lay down before the fire and slept.

  Chapter Three

  The Beggar Bard’s Burden

  If there had been any truth in the Beggar Bard’s words (which there was) there had also been nonsense: honesty with lies, fact with theatre and make-believe. Though, which was which mattered less, when none of it could be either reliably proved or disproved.

  Long into that night, there was much wild carousing and rough love-making among the men and women of my house. And there was enough warm ale and petty frolics to indulge its youth. Notyet and I took on too much drink between us, and were compelled – with a well-practised relish – to throw it up again, before we each found ourselves a piece of floor and a rag of cloth to call a cot and flounder upon.

  We were not a learned people; the Beggar Bard’s tale was truth enough for us. It was as good an explanation of our history as any (when we were in want of any other), and worthy of celebration and repeating. The more his story was retold – and it was often retold thereafter – the more it was believed in, until in the retelling it became the certain truth. And if its ending had been a deliberate bribe, a passing gift to satisfy his audience – a gift the Beggar Bard no doubt bestowed upon all his customers of a cold winter’s eve – it was a contrived entertainment, gladly accepted and revelled in.

  In the early hours, I was woken from my drunkard’s sleep by the sound of raised and worried voices. By the dim light of the night-fire I could see the outlines of men standing over the prone body of the Beggar Bard. He was still asleep, I thought. Someone was prodding at him, as if to wake him up. Only, the old man would not stir. There were a few more anxious, telling words; though the truth of the matter was becoming self-evident, even to a bleary-eyed child.

  The Beggar Bard was dead.

  Clearly, he had not been killed. He had not been murdered: upon Graynelore, a common enough method of dispatch. How fortunate the man…He had simply died, quietly, in his sleep.

  For the first time, the only time in my memory, the night-fire was quickly dampened, and in the sudden darkness the body of the Beggar Bard was lifted and removed to some other place beyond my knowledge.

  I was never to see any sign of him again; though the impression he had made upon me stays to this day. He had stirred something within me. A light was kindled. A curiosity uncovered. He exposed my own stone heart. But more than that; a truth was hinted at, if not fully revealed. I have heard the Beggar Bard’s tale retold many a time since, and with many an ending, yet it is with his voice and in his manner that I do best to recall it. I had seen it all so clearly: as real as the day. Or at least that was how I remembered it. And that was the same thing, was it not?

  In the morning, with the first light of day creeping under the door and through the battened wind-eye, I searched the spot where the Beggar Bard had stood and performed, and the place next to the fire where he had slept. In my childish way, I was searching for his illusions: his sleight of hand, the source of the tricks he had played upon us. Evidence he had left behind, only for me. I even raked about among the clinker: the snuffed out embers of the night-fire.

  What I found lay abandoned upon the ground. In among the rough, straw-strewn earth that made up the floor next to the hearth, something glistened. It was a roughly formed piece of stone, no bigger than the palm of my own hand. Much blackened, its jagged edges had been rubbed almost smooth with countless years of eager handling. It may well have been a broken shard from a much larger piece. The Beggar Bard’s Eye Stone? There were the faintest of lines marked upon its surface, and highlighted with real gold as if they were important, but if they had any literal meaning they were meaningless to a child. I could not make them out. Whatever the object was, it was obviously cherished. A sturdy metal clasp had been fashioned at its narrower end so that it could be hung safely from a chain or leather thong about the neck or wrist. I had seen nothing like it. The Wishards – Graynelord and his house apart – wore only base jewellery, cut from animal bone, or else we made do with staining our skin for decoration. Certainly, the object had belonged to the Beggar Bard; it had fallen from his body, been dropped unseen by the men who had roughly carried him away, in their eagerness to remove his remains. And if this treasure was the Beggar Bard’s to lose (even in death) then it was mine to find, and to keep to myself. I picked it up and quickly put it away out of sight.

  Soon after, I dug a hole and I buried the thing. It was too great a treasure for a common child to hold about his person. A thief and a liar, among a house of thieves and liars is soon found out, cannot keep a secret well. I marked the spot and let it rest there, hidden and untouched.

  Enough of this now, my friend! You have indulged Rogrig Wishard quite long enough for a fancy. Her
e my childhood stories end. After all, this is forever Graynelore. Its children must grow up quickly (if they are to grow up at all). And with this certain knowledge: there is no magic in the world; there is no faerie, real or imaginary, neither lost nor later to be found again.

  Remember this: Graynelore was a land continually – habitually – defiled. It was not a good land gone bad it was a poor land made ever poorer (and kept so). Men preyed upon men; family upon family; grayne upon grayne. It was a sore continually picked at; so much so its wounds could never quite heal properly. It was a scarred landscape; a broken scab, ever enflamed and sore.

  The fabled beasts of faerie – if ever they had lived – were far beyond the memory of any common men; long since dead and gone. There remained only the bereaved.

  Part Two

  The Bereaved

  Chapter Four

  At the Mark of the Wishards

  Graynelore has but two true seasons and a year equally divided by twelve months. Yet it has four Marches. How so? It is a simple babbie’s riddle, my friend. Look to the north of the country and to the south, look to the east and to the west. Mind, the naming of the Marches was not a strict territorial division. Rather, it was more the geographical convenience of a label. Every hill, every valley, every woodland dell had its recognized families: its graynes, both major and minor. And there were numerous surnames, if there were only four principle graynes. The Wishards kept themselves mostly to the South March; the Elfwych mostly to the West March; the Bogarts to the East March; and the Trolls to the foothills below the black-headed mountains in the North March. That said; this was not a settled land with hard and fast rules. There were no permanently fixed boundaries – except perhaps in the minds of a few covetous Headmen. Most men would have been hard-pressed to explain precisely where one March ended and the next began. Nor would they have greatly cared. Reivers did not draw lines upon the ground. They needed only the memory of what they believed had once been inscribed upon The Eye Stone. And if they were, more or less, always in bloody dispute because of it? So be it. It was a way of life.