Ancient Soil, Darkened Blood.
Only in patches where the grey mist parted in eddies could the ground beneath be seen: darkest brown, fleeting, then gone. The thick cloud covered the land like the rolling of the sea, thinning only briefly to allow the soil the promise of exposure, then swirling back together and thickening again; roiled like the ocean, its peaks and troughs undulating almost sensually, and then it faded as if struck by the morning sun at the moment that the witch appeared. The moonlight caused the sharp ground frost to glitter, making the entire landscape look like the heavens - black sky and bitter stars.
She moved slowly, painfully, carrying a large sack upon her bent and crooked back. And she muttered, her tone once high, then low, as if many tongues were voiced through her.
“Be come, now, never fear, come as needed.” She swung the sack around her bony shoulder and set it down on the wet and sucking earth. She straightened as much as her warped frame would allow and gazed about with her good eye.
“Quiet, it is. As I did think it.” Against the death-dark earth, she was darker still, her rags and wrappings seeming to leach light away into their stygian depths. Her skin was rough and gnarled, set about with bumps and blemishes and wayward hairs thick and black as rose thorns. Her name was Magrathea, yet all men called her witch. And, in the secret watches of night, when men dared not even to call her that, or to mention her in the least of ways, to give her name breath of any form, women called her Mother.
She was older than sin, and time, and old, old stone. She had endured and abided and she walked where it pleased her. It pleased her to walk here this night, where the armies raised by the family of Coulter had ridden to battle, had spilled the blood of many men that opposed them and had moved on to feast and make merry at their good fortune.
It was here, in the mud of good earth made slurry by the blood and viscera of men, in the darkest part of night when other things awoke, that Magrathea had come to be about her work.
From her sack she took a root, and a large, rough cloth which was the burlap hood of a dead rogue’s cloak; finally, what looked like a smaller bag that was carried on the shoulder, and this she laid carefully, even respectfully, upon the cloth.
She described a large circle, widdershins and perhaps seven hand spans across, in the dirt with the twisted root, whispering in an ululating tone, “Hoc, Och, Tye, ayr lan Mantiloc” over and again as she worked. This she did three times, repeating the litany of the incantation upon each turn.
Finished, she dropped the thus muddied root into the circle and said, “Here to you, be perfect, roundest shadow. This I give to you. I offer this.”
She sniffed the air sharply and long, dragging the miasma into her lungs and percolating phlegm into her throat, eventually spitting an accumulated lump of strange dark matter into the centre of the dirt circle. Then she hitched up her skirts and crouched within its confines, straining for some time until she had dropped a dry and painful turd into its dreadful mix.
“Aye, and that was the worst of it,” she complained to the air and all it hid, “that was near the end of me,” and she cackled gamely at her own joke. Far away, beyond the day’s battlefield, over leagues of dirt and blood and spirits wild, her sound travelled, and rabbits and deer looked up and fled, and tiny birds, evening still upon thin branches, died at once and fell broken to the earth.
Then the witch, without yet stopping to clean her befouled behind, picked up the small bag that she had lain previously upon the cloth. It shone dully in the light of the moon, and tiny drops fell from it as she hefted it upon her bone-thin shoulder, where it snagged in the hollow of her collarbone like a ribbon caught upon a plough.
Some days before, Magrathea had found, after much searching and scouring of the land, a young virgin girl on the eve of womanhood. This was not the difficulty, for the witch required more: that the girl, beyond even these attributes, had to suffer from an imperforate hymen, a perfect seal of her maidenhood from the sins of the outside world. The witch had reckoned this a rare thing, perhaps one in hundreds, yet it proved more hard to find even than that. Yet glamours and wiles had aided her quest and she had found such a girl in time for tonight’s task. She had led the maiden from her family, and many miles from home, before ending her days with such abruptness that the shock of her own death barely registered on the girl’s face. Then Magrathea had opened her, carefully removing the entire uterus from the body, tying the uterine tubes together and using them as a handle to carry the bloody treasure away.
“Here now, O Mantiloc, on this your death place, I bequeath to you the ages.”
She held it, the intact virgin uterus on the eve of first menstruation, over the circle, swinging it lightly in an arc as she walked about the outside of the magick she had formed. On her third revolution she thrust a small knife up into the unbroken hymen and held it there a small while. Then she pulled it out sharply, spat onto the slick of blood it had acquired and, falling to her knees, stabbed the blade into the centre of the circle. Carefully, she reached towards the base of the fleshy sack and, with a deftness surprising for her age and condition, nimbly undid the slim yellow cord that held it tight. The darkened blood of the girl’s menses dropped to the ground in a clot, covering the knife and spreading quickly and thickly over the earth. The cord, which was a full braided lock of the virgin’s hair, she scattered over the bloody soil, where it became quickly crimson and quite impossible to see.
“Hoc, Och, Tye, ayr lan Mantiloc” she repeated over and over. She continued in this way until every last drip had dropped from the uterus, which she then cast over her shoulder, where it landed some distance away and was fought over by a small family of foxes, and devoured, and these animals did live but one more day, then died.
Old Magrathea, soiled with her own shite, and blood, and some sweat of work despite the cold, drew then her blade from the ground and hid it away within her rags, producing between forefinger and thumb the tiniest, fattest of acorns which, if the witch had full feeling in her fingertips – which she had not since taking a blade of frozen hawthorn in the arm from a Caledonian warlock a lifetime before – would have been felt to pulse rapidly, almost like a vibration, as if it were the hastily beating heart of a small bird she held. This seed she had passed through herself every day for the month of October, swallowing the hard lump whole and collecting it upon its exit from her body. Other practices also she had worked upon it, none of which may be recounted here, for darker and deeper are they than those we know and may elect to hear aloud.
“Here, to you, I give Red Oak,” she said, and dropped the accursed acorn into the slim hole the knife had made, and at this it fell grave silent for miles around. All creatures ceased noisemaking, and men stopped their chatter, even those of the Coulter clan abrupted their festivities and drunken celebrations, as if somewhere a world away a dread bell had tolled for them alone, and so also the wind ceased its moan as it chased about the hillsides and vales around. It was at this point as if the world stopped in its spin and movement in the heavens.
Inside the world, something did move and groan. Something not yet dead was born and lived. It opened its eyes and looked about, its breath once more moved within it and, at this motion, the world began again, yet subtly altered from before.
The witch Magrathea, older still than time, whose face curdled milk to whey and ceased the hitching breaths of whooping cough, whose dry and rough touch could give or take the gift - or bane - of life, and whose touch had done both these things and more, sighed a fetid breath, and her work this night was done.
She picked up her burlap cloth, once the hood of a dead rogue’s cloak, and her root, itself a twisted mandrake born under the same rogue’s gallows, and she left this place, and this story, as far as it is known.
In time, a tree did grow upon this dreadful soil, and it grew strong and alone, and it was not touched. Men did not cut it down, and it was not trampled, nor killed by sun or snow. It grew and thrived and it did not die. In time, other trees grew upon the earth around it, as the land was never settled within its great shadow, but not one of these grew close, for whatever sustenance the great Red Oak drew from the land, it drew deep and guarded closely.
And the Great God King Mantiloc, He Whose Dread Name Shakes The Bones Of Men – and whose true name is never spoken or known to any who have yet breath, but is written upon a scrap of human flesh in ink of blood and semen and other such preciousness and sealed within the sun-bleached skull of a priest buried beneath stone and more stone in a place few men have travelled – He, Blood-Devourer from beyond time, who shall return again when all is set and the stars decree, slept darkly in the bowels of dirt, and He did live once more and He knew the name of the witch Magrathea, who would be repaid a thousandfold when His day came round again.
The Great Red Oak, its leaves the same bright and dark red as a long-dead virgin’s blood, which leaves displayed this colour even as the tree was still a sapling and at every time of year, which had within its sap the leavings of an old crone’s body, given freely and in servitude, did stand. Withstanding centuries of men and religion, it grew strong at the centre of its world, bridging the time of darkness and superstition, and days of wonders and explanation; it repaid sinister devotion and it protected its god and guardian well. For days and nights, and months and years, for all the time that clocks could tell, it fed its filthy roots upon dark and secret things, unseen beneath the world of men, and it lived in that place from that day to this, whenever it may be these words are read.
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