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(Excerpt from Chapter One)
Archdruid Bran fell to his knees. His ageing eyes scanned the water for a vision.
Although he gazed long and hard from beneath bushed brows, the sacred pool would reveal no secrets. He saw only his own knotted features frowning back at him, and the reflections of lofty peaks peering over his shoulder.
A weathered hand gently caressed his greying beard as he concentrated.
His senses, finely tuned by years of experience, searched for omens in the nature around him: a shift in the breeze; a cloud crossing the summer sun; a change in the birdsong or in the laughter of the small stream dancing along the valley.
But there was nothing. No portents of the future to ease or curse his troubled mind. He took a berry of mistletoe from a pouch at the belt of his white robe and placed it in his mouth. He hoped the magical fruit would ease his passage into the realms of prophecy.
His lips trembled as he made a plea to the gods. “Give me a sign! Give me a sign I can present to the Warrior Queen!”
His pulse quickened as he remembered her words. “Go to your Sacred Pool in the Western Mountains,” she had ordered. “Find me a portent of defeat or victory. Let me take the advice of the gods.” Her eyes had gleamed with the passion of fire, matching her long red hair, her face hardened into a mask of determination. He stroked his beard once more.
For Boudicca, Warrior Queen of the Iceni, did not accept failure.
And still the Druid gained no response from the sacred water. He knew, with a sense of fear, that he needed more strength to reach the gods. He must risk his soul and call upon the ancient power of the earth to help him.
He dared not return to his queen empty handed.
His staff helped him to his feet and he took the few determined paces to the circle of stones, erected at a time in the primeval past, long before legends or heroes were born. He knelt in the centre of the ancient enclosure.
Beyond the stones his eyes met a burial mound, as aged as the megaliths surrounding him, and maybe even erected by the same hands. As always, he was grateful that the massive slab guarding the entrance remained sealed. He had no wish to meet the horrors lying inside the resting place of the ancestors.
He closed his eyes and passed into the realms of blackness. The mistletoe had cleared his mind to a blank, but his body consumed the fear that had been wiped from his consciousness. It did not take a soul to tell flesh and bone of the danger to come.
Apprehension coiled within Archdruid Bran as the ancient power of the circle coursed through him, over him, around him, like a river trying to drown him with the force of the earth’s energies. A powerful wind pounded his eardrums with the ferocity of a winter’s gale. The gods permitted the power to sting him like the pricks of a thousand needles as it entered his pores. He took the pain, knowing he was being invigorated with a potency to help him reach the future. He let the strength reach his soul until his body was numbed.
His eyes remained closed; he felt, rather than saw, the thick white mist embracing him. Was it his imagination, or were the ancestors calling him, telling him it was time to enter the mound and join them in the Otherworld? He recognised the voices, some close by and whispering in his ear, others distant, as if echoes reaching him from beyond the mountains. Their words held a musical beauty to rival the finest harp, bringing joy with the merest whisper. Some belonged to long dead parents or grandparents. Other voices were of childhood friends, long forgotten but now dragged from the recesses of his mind.
He hesitated. Tears filled his eyes as the voices reminded him of a contented youth; lost days fishing with his father, or playing with friends in buttercup-strewn meadows. Every part of his body ached to pull away the stone blocking the entrance to the tomb, to join the people he loved in the shadows beyond. His fingers tightened around his staff as he prepared to stand and take the few steps to paradise.
“NO. YOU ARE NOTHING BUT A DREAM SENT TO HAUNT ME. I WILL NOT BE TEMPTED,” he shouted with ferocity to dispel the sounds from his mind and send them back to the Otherworld.
He opened his eyes.
As quickly as it had come, the mist dissipated. The wind stilled. The energy of the stones subsided. Nothing remained of his experience except a hastily beating heart, a mild ache in his forehead, and the unnatural silence in the valley.
He had passed the test.
He raised his arms upwards, towards the gods.
“Give me a sign! I have endured and overcome your test. Give me a sign! I, Bran, Archdruid of Britain, demand of you, reveal the outcome of our strife. Will Boudicca throw the yoke of oppression from the shoulders of Britain? Are the Eagles of Rome destined to tighten their talons around our throats?” His voice had risen to a roar, echoing around the valley as the mountains trapped it between their grey walls.
A sudden touch of colour pulled his gaze to the ancient tomb. He gasped as blood seeped from around the entrance stone, at first no more than a couple of drops, but increasing in force until within a few heartbeats the red trickle had become a steady scarlet torrent. A puddle quickly formed. He blinked, but the blood remained. He watched in eerie fascination, a lifetime of training forcing fear to the recesses of his mind.
More movement caught the corner of his vision, and he turned his head around the circle of stones. Each was bleeding with equal intensity. His brows knotted as a red stream formed. It soon became a river which emptied itself into his sacred pool and tainted it scarlet. He raised himself up and knelt at the pool’s edge.
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