Between a Rock and a Hallowed Place
Dunsapie Loch, near the top of Arthur’s Seat
Two skinny, unremarkable looking young men stood shirtless on that bitterly cold Saturday morning. One of them held the stripped trunk of a felled Scots pine against the ground as the other jumped twenty feet straight up from a standing start, to drive it deep into the hillside with a single blow of his fist. Then they moved five feet away and repeated the process with another tree trunk.
Farther up the hill, the druids of the church of Morrigan were taking the best of the many tributes left by her worshipers every day and carrying them, reverentially, to lie at the foot of her throne. She never touched the food or drink, which they cleared away every night and replaced with fresh produce the following day. It wasn’t food that she lived on; it was pain, dread, fear and despair.
The paintings and statues made in her image were either stored to be displayed when she got a palace, or got thrown into the loch along with the decapitated artists, especially as the number of her followers grew large enough for the odd one to be disposable.
As the men who’d driven the posts into the ground walked away, the head druid moved in to take their place. He was a man in late middle age with a pudgy face and bald head, dressed in long, black robes. He held a claymore in a two-fisted grip, resting the tip on the ground, the gentle expression on his face filled with love for his goddess.
Two days earlier, in a very different life, he’d been the Reverend Doctor Elliot D. Roebuck, well-respected minister of the Church of Scotland, serving at Duddingston Kirk, about three hundred yards outside the eastern entrance to Holyrood park.
On that fateful morning, just before the world changed for him, he was trying to decide on whether to phone animal control since the kirkyard had become home to birds, toads, weasels, rabbits and anything that could run, scuttle, creep or crawl away from Morrigan’s domain.
It was the tenuous connection to Noah’s Ark that was troubling him as he wondered if God had sent them to be part of his flock, which, ironically, included almost everything but sheep.
That stopped mattering to him the minute he ran out of cigarettes and went to visit the corner shop. As he stepped over the threshold of hallowed ground, a terrible rage filled him, I’ve wasted my life when I could have been serving Morrigan, he thought. As he ran through the park, heading in her direction, he suddenly screeched to a halt, realising that he didn’t have a gift to give her and spun around, charging back into the Kirk to look for a suitable tribute, but when he crossed the boundary of sanctified ground once more he returned to normal.
He didn’t understand what had happened to him, but the grandfather clock in the hall had chimed two o’clock as he left now read three minutes past with no memory of the time passing.
Turning on the TV, he watched the heavily censored news broadcasts, then scoured the Internet for more information. That was why, when he added two and two together, he made six, deciding that he’d been the victim of demonic possession (which, to be fair to him, wasn’t that far from the truth).
An hour later, after more intensive googling, he drove out of the wrought-iron gates in the nearest his car could get to being a travelling church, crucifixes dangled from every available point, including several around his neck, a bible sat on his lap with more bibles and hymn books covering the seats and floor behind him.
He’d propped mirrors up around him (to reflect evil back upon itself) and even wore a tinfoil hat, on the principle that God helps those who help themselves.
Unfortunately for him, no ordinary Celt could resist Morrigan’s will on unconsecrated ground, no matter how many accessories they surrounded themselves with, and once again he became her thrall.
Unfit as he was, he still managed to run to her at over thirty miles an hour before throwing himself down as close to her throne as the Urraidhean Na Fine (her elite bodyguard) would let him get.
His heart overflowed with a religious joy and fervour that he’d never felt before, and the fact that it was being forced upon him would have made no difference, even if he’d known it. He cried out to her, told her of how he would spread the word of her glory, painted a verbal picture of choirs travelling with her army, singing hymns about her heroic exploits as they marched.
He fired her imagination with tales of special, devotional days: holidays in her honour, celebrated, not by taking time off, but by working even harder to please her.
On and on he went, stroking her ego, which took many hours, as something that size takes a lot of stroking and he only stopped talking when his voice gave out.
After that she made him her head druid, which was how he came to be standing there as a single guard dragged an eighteen-year-old woman, screaming and kicking, towards him, with one of his comrades following close behind.
“I’m not a virgin!” She sobbed hysterically over and over again. On Thursday night she’d passed out drunk and woken up ten hours later with a hangover in a world of nightmare and chaos where she was captured by a raiding party gutting the shop below her student digs.
“I lost my virginity nearly two years ago!” She bawled as they tied her, arms outstretched between the two tree trunks.
Standing behind her, Roebuck leant over her shoulder to whisper something in her ear that only she could hear, “We need the innocence and naivety that are the companions of virginity, and the act of sex did not rob you of those,” he said as he drove the claymore through her back until the blade stuck out of her chest. He stepped around and carefully studied her as she died, writhing in agony. “Well, what be the portents of her death throes?” Morrigan said impatiently.
Roebuck licked his lips nervously, he had bad news to deliver, and she had a habit of shooting the messenger, but only after boiling them alive first, “There is one, my liege, the strongest of his breed, who may have the power to challenge you, as has been done before.”
“Thou darest speak of mine most injurious past?” she roared, standing up as her bodyguards crowded around, ready to kill him at her most innocuous gesture.
“My goddess,” Roebuck said, managing to find enough room to prostrate himself between the legs of her surprised soldiers as he quaked in fear, “I expressed myself badly, I only meant to warn you of a man who menaces you, so you can strike him down, before his powers blossom, in the shadow of your greater glory.”
During her last campaign, a thousand years before, it had been possible for a new recruit to go from private to general, to death at her hands in less than a day and before going down that path again, she thought about the good work he was doing and how tiresome it would be for her to find a new head druid, “Very well, thou art forgiven… on this occasion, and this occasion only,” she said with an imperious wave of the hand, causing her bodyguards to back off, “now speak, what kind of irksome mortal doth thou describe?”
“Thank you for your kind forbearance, my liege,” Roebuck said, standing up and brushing the grass off of his robes before using a sleeve to mop his brow as her troops took a few steps back, “One known as Callum Cooper who, under the guidance of a woman called Cassie Sloane, is a growing threat more easily squashed before it blossoms.
She rose to her feet before slamming a fist down on the armrest of her throne, “Then I shalt maketh him one of mine generals or snuff out his life! The one who bringeth Callum Cooper unto me unharmed shalt have this benighted land to rule in mine stead, when I discardeth it like I wouldst abandon an errant child!” that statement, and for many other reasons, was why she’d never received any kind of parenting award.
Although Cooper didn’t know it yet, his active enemy count was rapidly approaching six figures.