SEA HENGE

SEA HENGE, by Phil Emery, audio by the author, artwork by Miguel Santos

 

The ship sailed north around the coast. North was where the war of tempests was to be fought. What exactly that meant was anyone’s guess – the crew on the ship had no notion, but they were only seamen, not sorcerers, so that was no surprise. There was an archipelago, they knew that much. A place of gods and demons and adamastors and supernatural tides that was to be the watery battleground, though of course there would be precious little ground. Battlefield wasn’t right either for the same reason. Jack knew fields since he’d been a ploughman in his younger days. His stomach sometimes made him wish for solid ground still.

It was while leaning over the ship’s rail one evening and wishing hard for that very thing that he’d first met Toddy. The cabin boy was only some few years younger than Jack and though lame, walked the decks with an assurance of a born sailor. He’d grinned at Jack’s sickly grimace and after a moment Jack had laughed right back. That had been the start of the friendship and the start of Jack’s bragging of his travels making use of his talent, the talent that Jack felt sure would be of use in the adventure to come.

He’d been telling Toddy some of those tales while the ship was anchored off the Cape of Throes, a bleak part of the coast lurked with reefs. It was a last recruiting stop for men before setting into deep waters to join the rest of the armada. A boat had been sent to a meagre fishing town huddling on the rocky shore, and now it came back. Just two dreggy glum-eyed fishermen had been tempted away by the Kingdom’s Shilling. Probably more for rum than glory.

Then hands were put to up anchor. Three pairs hauled on the chain. Then four. The shipmaster’s shouts and curses were to no avail. Five pairs, six. It mattered not. The anchor’s grip on the sea bottom remained unaccountably firm. Then Jack laid his two hands on the chain.

And in a moment’s lightning he was plunging down into a swirling funnel of sensations that were both familiar and unfamiliar, echoes of something ancient and uncannily patient but at the same time desperate, slow but at the same time irresistible. Jack wondered without being strictly aware of wondering if he would ever return.

Until he opened his eyes and looked up into the perplexed faces of ship’s crew. And the shipmaster. And of course Toddy. All those faces except Toddy’s wore something more than puzzlement. Most of them had no particular love for Jack, but the wariness, that was new. Toddy’s face had a look of something more too.

“Tell ’em, Jack,” he blurted. “About your talent. It ain’t really a secret, is it?”

Jack smiled and shook his head. “No, not a secret, just none of anyone else’s business.” Which wasn’t strictly true. Jack would boast about what he could do to just about anyone who’d listen, ordinarily. He’d simply not been sure how the rest of the crew would take having a magic worker on board. Glancing around him as he got to his feet he still wasn’t sure.

But he told ’em. How he could sense the leavings of old gods and the like. “Tell ’em, Jack,” Toddy jumped in. “About that time you made an enemy of that famous minstrel in that squire’s cottage!”

“Manse, Toddy,” murmured Jack, still woozy. “It was a manse, quite a grand house.”

“And how you beat him at his own game, calling up the leavings of that musical goddess no one remembered and beating him in a psaltery contest.”

“Lingerings, Toddy,” Jack corrected. His crewmates were clustering closer now, and not in friendly interest it seemed. Nevertheless, against his better judgement, he went on. “I call them lingerings. The bits of ghosts of things that used to be worshipped that still have a dash of power about them. And it was ‘her’ not ‘him’,” Jack added, grinning meaningfully, unable to help himself. “It wasn’t the losing of the contest that rankled her, so much as having to ‘pay’ on the wager we’d made.” He winked, but if Toddy understood why it didn’t show.

“Y’mean you’re a magician,” the shipmaster growled.

“More a diviner.”

The master scowled into his beard. “But the lad said y’can call up gods?”

“Mebbe,” said Jack, and he got up and moved carefully through the pack of staring seadogs to the ship’s rail with the skipper following. “Mebbe,” he murmured again, thoughtfully, looking down into the fidgeting salt waves. It seemed to him that there was a god lingering about down there. He’d tasted something of what it was when he’d touched the chain. A god of becalmings, perhaps, lugubrious but once mighty, with teeth like ship’s timbers… He turned to the press of hostile faces behind. “If this ship’s to be set free, mebbe anchors too.”

The shipmaster’s growl rasped in Jack’s ear. “I’ve seafared all my days but never come across a sea roke like this one.” It was then that Jack noticed the mist that had cloaked down on the ship. It was unnaturally heavy – almost suffocating. The ship’s sails hung limp as shrouds, and there was something deeper than impatience in the mariner’s gruff voice.

“All right then,” said Jack, and strode back to stand astride the anchor chain. “But it’s not a matter of pulling up so much as going down.” The deckhands passed around twitchy glances at this. “There’s something down there, right enough. I heard it calling. The first thing is to follow its call, then we’ll see.”

Jack reached down to the chain, but before he touched it he shot looks around. “But if I’m to go down I’ll need hands on this chain ready to bring me back up.” At this the wary looks bubbled into reluctant mutters.

“All it needs is one of you,” Jack went on. The shipmaster barked an order but no one did more than shuffle uneasily. Then a voice piped up.

“I’ll do it!”

Toddy elbowed his way to the chain and took determined hold, grinning at Jack.

Jack grinned back. “Good lad.” And took hold himself.

The plunging lightning struck again, but this time he was ready for it. Riding the funnel into the depths he could feel the chill of the sea through to his bones, even though he knew those bones still lay on the deck of the ship. But he also knew only too well that some part of him just as necessary was being sucked down. That was the danger. Only Toddy’s young hands leant him hope of returning to those bones.

Presently, whatever that meant, he reached the seabed. The anchor was not something wrought of iron but a lump of stone, the only metal being the straps fixing it to the chain. Jack touched it with a palm that wasn’t his flesh and blood palm. It puzzled him. Some time in the past he could tell it had been part of a place of worship, a circle of stones, maybe. There was a call there, right enough, but so weak, so old, he had to strain to hear it. Hardly enough power to resist the hauling of half a dozen brawny sailors. Jack gazed around, studying the murky lay of the underland, musing…

Things pincered and crawled and scuttled along the seabed. Other shapes flitted through the water. Jack wasn’t sure if these were true creatures of the deep or lingerings. If he’d had a head he’d’ve scratched it.

And then he saw it. He saw something at any rate. Not too far off. A glow. Toward land there was a bank. At first he thought it was one of the reefs that lurked thereabouts, but now he looked it was no rising of rock or sand. It was trees. Sometime in the past the sea had claimed them, but they were still trees – a clump of ancient forest forever lost to the sky and wind. The sea had had its way with some and they’d fallen and lay as great logs. But most still stood, towering and dark and ominous. And glowing. At least the tops glowed. Skeletal branches straggled in weed motioned in the water, shedding a yellowy light, like corpse-candles, but the very tops threw out a violet radiance. And a call. This was where the call was really coming from. Jack was walking, if you can deem it that without legs, before he knew he was doing it.

It was an avenue of sorts that he was moving through, an avenue of beckonings. The anchor god’s summons was feeble but the god lingering in the forest, though far stronger, was akin. That kinship of lost gods had formed as much of a chain as the chain that bound Jack below to Jack above. As he neared the trees that chain of lingerings grew even stronger. And worryingly the chain of Jacks grew weaker.

No sooner had he entered the grove than it seemed to close in around him. He let it. He had to know the nature of the god lingering here in order to break its hold on the ship’s anchor and so on the ship itself. So, what exactly was closing around him? Not the trees but the folk who had passed through the trees so long ago, memories of generations of mothers and fathers and brothers and sisters and children, coming to worship. He could hear them all around him. Sometimes the feet and voices came a few at a time, but mostly there were processions. Formal. Heavy treads full of nervous reverence on meadow-rued ancestral paths. Such places were what Jack called churches-before-churches. Either stones or trees. Places of gathering. But there were all sorts of such places and all sorts of gods. He was almost at the middle of the grove when he knew what kind lingered here. And then it was too late.

Just ahead was the clearing where the worship had taken place all those times ago. It glowed with the same brooding light as the tops of the trees. But here the glow hissed. The anchor stone had the same call, the same summoning to prayer, the same desire for tribute. But it was the difference between the hunger of a feeble beggar and the hunger of a ravenous bear. The core of the grove was a dim murmuring glade, old, old cavern-deep murmurs, demanding bloodshed, claiming screams, exacting offerings of death.

Still demanding.

Jack could only imagine how many deaths, when the call was at its height. Even now its remains were almost irresistible. Jack’s heart was pounding and he knew with a terrible certainty that the only way to free his ship was to release that heart to the call, to sacrifice himself. And knew, even more terribly, that he wanted to, or at least was being made to want to.

His steps now were as heavy as the steps of all those processions that had made their grim way to the glade before the sea had swallowed it. His hands tugged open his shirt as if to receive the plunge of a long and wickedly sharp peg into his chest. Jack’s hands pulled unwillingly. Somehow they reached for the anchor chain that bound Jack to life. But the call still held him, his chest still heaving for death. Even now he couldn’t decide what the summoning god had been a god of, not because the summons was weak but because it was so strong, what it wanted overwhelming what it was, wanting so strong that Jack hadn’t the power to turn it back.

He tried but instead something else came. Either vision or memory. He made out a figure that was himself and a thousand others, peg pinned through the chest to one of the trees. The arms were pinned too, but somehow they still managed to wave… like weed. Blood flowed from the wound in the chest, but it drifted rather than ran… Drifted as on some weirdling current… It was all dim. Even the murmurs, seashell murmurs, faint but everlasting.

He tried to cry out, but all that happened was that blackness, which somehow glowed like the trees, took him. And then the glow faded and there was only the blackness.

Then, to Jack’s surprise, the blackness was gone too. He could feel the ship’s deck beneath him as the sharpness in his chest faded like a dream and he was once again staring up again into the bemused eyes of his skipper and crewmates. As the anchorchain was hauled up he looked about for the one pair of eyes that was missing. And then he saw them. They were a little way off, but the air was clear now of the haar mist and he could see them all too plainly. They were closed.

The lingering demand of the god below had been met, and Jack was never sure if at the last craven moment he’d turned that ghostly stabbing peg from his own life and sent it up the chain to the loyal young hands holding it above.

#

The voyage to the war went on. Jack was better regarded by the crew now, and when they weren’t working their ship’s duties his new friends would often ask him to recount his god-divining adventures as he had to poor dead Toddy. But Jack was reluctant for some reason he wasn’t entirely sure of. All he knew was that he’d begun to think of his old father and mother and his brothers back home as he hadn’t done for many a day…

 

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Phil Emery’s work has been published in the UK, USA, Europe and Canada since the 70s.  The novel “Necromantra”, was published in 2005 by Immanion Press, and reissued in a revised second edition in 2015.  Various stories have been published in US and UK fantasy anthologies.  Another fantasy, “The Shadow Cycles” was published in 2011.  Besides two collections of short stories and verse, ‘The Celt in the Machine’ and ‘Arabesques from the Edge of Time’, and a collection of gothic monologues, Recent publications include tales in four Parallel Universes’ S&S anthologies.  Another S&S piece  is included in the Rogue Blades Anthology ‘Neither Beg Nor Yield’ and the absurdist cyberpunk graphic novel with artist Toe Keen, ‘Razor’s Edge’, was recently published by Android Press.  

 

Miguel Santos is a freelance illustrator and maker of Comics living in Portugal.  His artwork has appeared in numerous issues of Heroic Fantasy Quarterly, as well as in the Heroic Fantasy Quarterly Best-of Volume 2.  More of his work can be seen at his online portfolio and his instagram.