The Roots Touch the Sky

Short Story

I was born in the stone circle, cut from my mother before an audience of priests and priestesses—they watched as one of their own bled on a slab of runes until her death, and her womb was examined by ancient fingers to prove the Wyrd right. I—I was to become a great seeress, blessed by the Gods. My mother, still warm, was the only one to know for certain if there be Gods or Wyrd or anything, but I was too tiny and untried to ask.

***

From the first breath in my lungs until my last, my life would be ruled by death. And after my last, I would be amongst them. Of course, this was not what I knew, but what I was told—and I was very good at spotting a liar. Oh, many of those priests and priestesses prayed many times, I’m sure, that my death would come sooner. It gave me a great, secret pleasure to know they would be disappointed for a long while yet—or so it felt, as a girl—now beyond my warm girlhood, those sixteen summers I lived are but a blink. The knowledge of a true forever is earned only through experience.

One of my earliest memories of my gift—I was taken to that same circle, those towering stones so tightly stood together only the wind could slice, but for two points through which the priests could march me forth to the slab, and out through the opposite side. It was through these gateways the sun would cast over the enclosure at dawn and dusk in terrible red-gold hues, lighting the runes so I might read them. I was barely old enough to speak, and there I stood, heavy with bronze discs that blinded all who gazed upon me as I recited the poetry of the dead. Or so it appeared to the crowd—in truth it was the dead reading it out to them through my little voice.

I didn’t mind at all, understand, I hold no bitterness at all to the dead.

***

My father was chieftain, and his influence spread wide. The neighbouring chiefs all tried for my alliance with their sons but of course a girl with a destiny such as mine could never know a husband. And still, I had dreamy notions of one day knowing what forever might mean, with a man alongside. I knew how lonely the dead could be and I would beg my father to not allow his daughter to cross alone.

“Is your mother alone?” he would ask.

“She waits for her beloved,” I would tell him. I would never confess that he was not the beloved that my mother meant. I did love my father, you see, despite our differences—I couldn’t bear to see his heart so broken.

My mother’s personal affairs before my conception aside, he was indeed my father by blood. All could see it, not just in looks but in the way we carried ourselves as we walked, in our haughty eyes.

It was his mother, a priest confessed to me once—my grandmother had the kindness to pass along her gift to me. As soon as my neck could bear the weight I wore her golden torque. My father wept when he saw me wearing it, that first time, and I told him he wept because his mother was weeping too—so full of joy was she, to be so proud of her son.

***

I would often break from a trance by grasping upwards through the bog of my dreaming. I would choke on air as I reached—for stone or a tree, anything to pull myself up by, to get out of the choking thick muck where all the other grasping hands tried in skeletal strength to keep me down with them.

“Soon, soon!” the priestess would say, holding me still, as the words of the dead escaped my mouth. “What is nine more years for the glorious dead gone nine-hundred?”

They couldn’t hear her, and that too I kept to myself. I would tell them on my own, in secret—at times, even so young, I would try to keep my gift for myself, no witnesses, no interruptions, no guiding by ceremony… Just myself and the dead.

Through mists I could see them, or from the bubbles of a brook I could hear them. Under the moonlight it was loudest, in the chill it was the plainest to see that they danced just beyond our reach.

My father’s stronghold sat high atop a hill, looking down over our lands and all the roads and waterways our people travelled. The hill itself was filled with memory, and many times I could see men walking along the wooden walls and through them, or they marched with their spearshafts held invisible up the trail that led from the gate at the base of the hill and curved up into the fort—those roads were old, maybe as old as the standing stones where I was born, and those memories still traced all the paths they knew in life.

But, the brightest place to see them were the middle-places. Marshes, fens, swamps—not quite earth and not quite water. One of those places I was certain would be my resting place, and I would be forever reaching upwards long after stones or trees or water meant anything at all.

***

When I told my father he would die in battle, he believed me. If it was Wyrd, so be it—regardless of the outcome of the battle. It was his duty to try, duty to die, if he must. No choice to the matter, whether I had wept to him his fortune or not. If he did not lead his warriors, what would the poets sing about him? This was his notion of immortality—I had a difficult time understanding this, as much as I didn’t really understand what I saw in the mists that night.

Our foes were not human, not another chief. They were elves, looking for forests to conquer and make their own, as our folk might look for farmland or a mine. This put my gift at a disadvantage—human dead had nothing to do with elvish things, and so new was the threat not even my grandmother, through her torque around my neck, had advice to give.

I hid in a cairn, one of several long ago looted, in a field next to the hill. I wore the skins of sacred beasts, a headdress of horns, and sharpened the bronze of my father’s sword—ravens had helped conceal me as I searched for his falling place.

My father whispered to me through it. He comforted me with the promise I could slay any man—or elf—that might try to take me as a spoil of war. I was a valuable prize, understand, being a seeress of great renown. I was terrified of what an elf prince might want with me, especially knowing my end, but not knowing what might come between the two points.

“This is not my time,” I told the elves that found me. I slew four, a great feat for a girl of twelve summers—the sight of blood was such a familiar thing for me, as it ran down the edge of my father’s blade it was simply a new ritual—and two elves fled at the sight of a horned creature that bathed in elvish blood, that caused the very stones of my hiding place to leak it to the earth.

We lost to the elves, but the cairn remained untouched, and the human survivors left offerings to me under midday sun, when the elves slept. Honey mead, gold rings, meat, cheese… I might have donned the disguise of a terrible beast but I was still a hungry girl, and would whisper fortunes to them if they promised to keep out of my cairn, and to torment the elves as much as they could—I told them to make charms and what herbs warded magic.

But it wasn’t long before the elves were using our cattle as targets, I could hear their laughter in the night as every cow fell stiffened by their poison elfshot. The crops were encroached on by the thickening forests, and harvests began to fail. Acres destroyed by rot and mischief.

The offerings the people left at the opening of my cairn became more desperate. One mother came with a babe wailing at her breast. She couldn’t feed it, her milk had turned sour like the cows’ had done—perhaps the babe might strengthen me, protector of the graves.

I decided instead to leave my cairn and go to my father’s hall, where the elf prince sat and feasted.

***

Elves have no use for a human seeress, I discovered. They have their own magic that we don’t understand. But as I stood before the prince, stripped of my sacred furs but the bronze and copper and gold decorations were left to reflect the hearthfire, I could sense him bristle in his chair. He was tall, slim, hair long and white, and strange cruel eyes like runestones hit by dusk sunlight. Everything my father had kept in this hall was gone, replaced by hanging cloth not woven of human hands, for I doubt a human could imagine such colour. All the elves were dressed in similar finery.

“Are you a gift, or a curse?” he asked.

“That depends on your use of me,” I said.

“Which will depend on what you ask of Us.”

I listed my grievances, and that seemed to amuse them—the prince was the only one not smiling. “And finally,” I said over their laughter, “you go against the Wyrd, and the Gods.”

“We are the Wyrd.”

“Then why do our dead not know you?”

“Why don’t you ask them?”

“I ask them every day.” I knew he was a liar, though he tried so hard to be convincing.

***

I was held prisoner. Treated well—they fed me and clothed me in their strange fashions and allowed me to pray. It was mainly to appease the human holds that hadn’t fallen. The prince might ransom me, eventually. He would have me stand beside him whenever a human entered the hall for an audience—almost always to beg. Leave my crops alone, heal my daughter, we promise not to cut this tree or that if…

He used me to spot falsehoods amongst the humans and the elves, to give advice before he made judgments. Often I was tempted to lie, but I knew it would only go badly for what was left of my folk.

And every minute, I was thinking of my father’s sword, still hidden in the cairn should I escape. They would have destroyed it if I had brought it with me… I had to have patience before I could seek vengeance.

***

Rarely did I have the chance to speak with another human directly, but one such chance came after nine months of my imprisonment—a priest I had known when I was very young. One that I liked.

“Three more summers,” was all he could say, and I knew what he meant. Everyone who had witnessed my birth knew what he meant, and I hoped he wasn’t the last.

***

I heard rumours as I poured the elvish ale, that there were humans making a stand to the east—the ocean, the very edge of our lands—and a great insult had been done to the prince. I overfilled the silver horn and the droplets that drummed the pressed earth at my feet told me it was time. If I could see the sky, I would know the veil was thin.

I hadn’t heard voices from the earth in so long, it took everything to keep myself calm as I filled outstretched horns, one after another, until dawn, when the elves succumbed to sleep.

Naked, after tiring the prince himself, I crept through the hall over long sprawled limbs, their green-tinged fingers softly curled, clay-like lips parted as they breathed slower than a human. Within the dust I disturbed were so many encouraging voices I was almost deafened to anything else, and I needed to know the Gods could hear us again.

I hadn’t seen daylight in months, I was startled by the heat of it. I hid in the shadow if my father’s hall—the hilltop now looked so strange to me, and yet I knew it—and made my way to where the ghosts walked their paths through their gates.

The elves were letting the wood become overgrown and rotten, their magic bringing nature to reclaim the place far faster than what I had expected. Soon, the fortress would be naught but a hillock. I was able to climb up and over, landing on one of the barely exposed old paths that twisted serpentine down to the ditches below. Bones filled the ditches, now. Some of them might have belonged to my father—or my mother, for the elves disturbed every grave after I heard word of the great offence done in the east—and they cracked under my weight. All I could do was beg forgiveness, as the evening sun scorched me, and I ran to my cairn, to my father’s sword and grandmother’s torque.

Too long—but I was almost sixteen summers. It wasn’t long at all.

***

The human chief that still held the sliver of land by the sea was glad to see me, sores on my feet, filth and sweat and all. They had thought me dead, even his priests were doubting the Wyrd. They asked me how I fared as prisoner of the elves—I told them I would endure anything if it meant vengeance with our human magics—of the dead, of the Gods that spurned the elves. I held aloft my sword and made oaths, ancestral poems from my throat, as familiar as the first time I spoke them.

They paraded me to the north, a ways up the shore, so I might see what feat they’ve done to anger the elves so much. First, before we began the journey, I was shown a lump of iron, rusted from the bog, and the chief said to me “it is this that keeps them at bay, here.”

I smiled at him, and said “Then I shall bless this iron with my blood, the Wyrd from above, to flow below, and the elves will quake betwixt.”

We came to a mass of people hauling a great old oak, only it hadn’t been cut—the roots were just as visible as the branches, as if a giant had ripped it from the ground. “And this you were guided to do?” I asked.

The old priest that I had seen last at my father’s hall now wore a great white-furred cape, amber beads tied to a walking stick made from carved ash, as grand a priest I had ever met. He held out a hand to my cheek and brushed a trembling thumb over my skin. “Many years ago, we were guided by a blessed womb.”

***

The work went at a feverish pace, despite the difficult nature of the bog. Everywhere there was activity—building walkways, planning the circles of stakes that would ring the great oak, draining and diverting water. All done by a people half-starved and grieving—and some days the work had to stop entirely, to skirmish with elves at the edges of the chiefdom. If I was not fighting, I was praying—if I was not praying, I was listening to others that I might take their prayers with me.

A runestone was found, it had toppled a few miles west, painted with elvish blood. It would be my marker.

The branches went in first, and the crowd chanted “heave! Heave!” to lift the mass foot by foot into place.

The roots that once touched the dead now reached upwards to the Gods.

We prayed for protection.

The evening came, all the stars in their right places, the last of the day’s sunlight hit the roots, and the elves came.

***

Few remained to witness the ceremony, but all were desperate for me to reach between worlds and see our magic strengthened. I held the staff, the chiming of amber beads in the wind. The priest had died during the night, as so many had. I would see them again soon. My mother I would finally meet, and I could ask her every question I couldn’t before.

Two soldiers helped me stand—the potion of mushrooms and banes made the earth thin for me to travel through, the air all whisped and thrummed to the chiming of those beads. The voices of the Gods were shouting gold along the dawn.

Over the runestone, I became liquid. A spear entered me and made me so. The soldiers held the rope that stopped my breath long enough for me to breathe the branches of the oak. And I am the middle-place.

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I’m working on a fantasy novel, it’s in the first-draft stage, and this story is based loosely on one of the characters. It isn’t her precisely, but I wanted to do something backstory-ish, kind of like an elaborate note, and this came out. Funny enough, the character this story was “inspired by” had already been cannibalized from an unfinished novel from many years ago. So, I guess I’m just really inspired by bog bodies and things, and refuse to give up the ideas they conjure.