Chapter 13: Back In The Fold
'We're going to need chocolate,' said Selkie, 'and an inexhaustible supply of tea.'
We padded about the kitchen together, both slightly feverish and entirely out of sorts, it was a two person job to make tea and find a packet of biscuits. Selkie disappeared upstairs and returned with a mountain of blankets which she took in to the lounge. I followed after with the tea like a lost puppy. There were two sofas facing each other, neither of them were leather and both of them looked extremely comfortable.
'We need to talk,' said Selkie, laying herself down and drawing half the blanket supply around her.
'You first,' I said, and similarly set up shop of the second couch.
She nodded, drank her tea, reached out to take a biscuit from the packet, and began.
She had not been certain in her own mind if she had wanted me along. Sometimes your subconscious acts for you, sometimes you alter the world around you without realising it. Magic works in an undercurrent of human interaction with their surroundings, it is the subliminal suggestion, the unconscious communication, it acts mainly on other people, but also on the physical world. Sometimes, because it is so interlinked with the inner workings of the mind, even the most knowledgeable practitioner will do magic without realising. Selkie was not sure, then, if it was her that had caused me to be arrested whilst she made her escape, did she make the white van appear at that precise moment, did she have us run at the exact right time, did she draw the policeman's attention to me just after she had disappeared around the corner but while I was still in view. These coincidences could be just that, coincidences, or they could be something more, she simply did not know. It was more than she could feasibly have accomplished if she had set about to arrange it, but that proved nothing.
What was certain, was that she let me go easily. It had troubled her the entire drive down, could we both have gotten away together if she had not been in such a hurry to get away alone. Her motives were not clear. Even to herself.
The Black Goat, once you had been a part of it, became a part of you. The Black Goat was the source of all modern magic, before she had gone there Selkie had been little more than an ordinary girl who knew a few tricks and harmless charms, it was the Black Goat that had taught her the underlying mechanisms, that had given her the knowledge she needed to understand what she could do, and extend her own abilities. They would forever possess part of her, there was no way around that.
She had thought over all of this on the drive down. For a while she had shared the front seat of the van with the lead singer of the band and the bass player but it was not a big van and after they were safely out of town she offered to move to the back. There she wedged herself in with the guitarist, the drummer, and the girl who played keyboards. They were all good kids, and tried their best to make her comfortable, and for a while she had tried to be sociable, but her mind was on other things.
She recognised the return of a mindset, being part of the Black Goat is like being a giant among men, she could, she realised, terrify these poor kids if she wanted, she could have them crawling the walls with just a few well chosen words, in an enclosed environment like the back of that van she could make them do pretty much anything she wanted. The thought scared her, it came with an inherent contempt for people, their feelings, and ultimately, their lives. She was no more powerful than she had been the previous day, all that she could do, she had been able to do for years, but the proximity to the Black Goat was causing her to think about her abilities in a different way. As she grew nearer, she was not sure how much she could trust her own judgement.
She withdrew from the kids in the back of the van, scared by the way they made her feel. She pretended to sleep, hoping that she would actually sleep, but she could not.
Memories of her time with the Black Goat returned, things she had long forgotten, the near monastic silence, all needs and communication simply understood, the nights curled up together like foxes in a den, the sense that she was becoming wild, and with that transition life was becoming closer, the taste of the air sharper, the smell of the earth stronger. Civilisation was a wall that kept you from the world and with the Black Goat they were breaking it down. Behind the wall it was dark, there were forces that scared her, but there was understanding, and understanding was the heady thrill of power. Civilisation was order and light, beyond the light there was chaos and darkness, but the darkness was stronger than the light, and one day the darkness would conquer and chaos would reign again. She remembered the sharp tang of hot blood. She remembered the thrill of the kill. She remembered the ecstasy of surrendering herself to higher powers.
In the end there had been a part of her that could not surrender, a part that was too strongly linked to civilisation, something that always held her back. It had not been the attitude of the Black Goat which had really scared her, that ambivalence to life and death, so much as it had been the dawning of the same attitude in herself. She was too strongly attached to a civilised notion of morality. But, riding back towards the Black Goat, she could not say which was correct, was she only really attached to the warmth and comfort and safety of modern life, was the contract of society an illusion, was the law of the jungle the only real law and everything man had built on top of it a crumbling, unsteady, impossible edifice that must surely collapse. She hoped not, but struggling with her conscience in the back of that van, she did not know for sure.
The drive took nearly four hours. Despite her protestations that she would be fine the band would not let Selkie out on to the empty streets of Newhaven with nowhere to go in the middle of the night. In the end the girl who played keyboards took her in, commanded to be very quiet in case they woke the girl's parents she was put up on the couch and given a suspiciously smelling sleeping bag which she only laid on top of her like a blanket. She let herself out early the following morning before anyone else was up. There was enough of the Black Goat in her by then that she would not have minded sleeping rough, but still enough of Selkie left, that she took the option of a roof over her head when it was presented.
In the cold, still raining then, streets of Newhaven she navigated by gut instinct and trial and error to the town centre and eventually to the bus station. From there she got a bus out to somewhere near Seven Sisters, near as made no difference to the middle of nowhere.
What to do? She had no idea where the Black Goat were if they were even still in the South Downs, or worse, what she was going to do if she found them. The bus had dropped her off roughly halfway along the ridge of seven cliffs, running towards Eastbourne in the east and the mouth of the Cuckmere in the west. It was morning, and despite the clouds she could not look east without being slightly dazzled, for that reason only she headed west.
The path wound its way across the top of the cliffs, the view out to sea all but obscured by the rain. She walked for miles, meeting only one well wrapped up couple coming in the other direction. The couple were walking a large Alsation, Selkie had no such excuse to be out in the wet.
After an hour or so she saw them. They were gathered at the bottom of the cliff by the sea. A less observant person, glancing quickly through the rain, would not even have recognised them as people, so much did they blend in to the environment, they were grey against the rock, green against the sea, brown against the mud, white against the surf, and black against the drying, dying kelp.
If Selkie had seen them there was every chance that they had seen Selkie, and if they had, no chance they had not recognised her. They ignored her though, perhaps more sure of her intentions than she was herself.
She walked on, and at the first opportunity took a slippery path down to the shore. As she retraced her steps beneath the cliffs and past rocky bluffs that jutted out towards the sea, she noticed she was frequently venturing well below the high water mark, and once the tide came in, there would be no way back.
She heard them before she saw them, a low chanting that echoed back and forth among the rocks. She did not recognise the chant, and could not guess why it needed to be chanted in the place. She walked forwards with a confident step, keeping herself in obvious view, there was not a chance of sneaking up on the druids, it was better to seem like she had nothing to hide. Eventually she rounded a monolithic outcrop of sheer rock and saw them gathered about in a semicircle at the edge of the water. There were about two dozen in total, they were all astonishingly bedraggled, long haired and dirty, wearing torn scraps of loose animal skin clothing, kneeling and standing, oblivious to the driving rain, the freezing surf, or Selkie looking on. She had seen them before of course, and their appearance was no surprise to her, but to see them looking so wild so close to towns, bus stops, couples walking their dogs, was still such an incongruous sight Selkie stopped for a moment to just look. What would, to her, have looked quite natural in the highlands of Scotland, seemed wierd and threatening on the south coast.
She walked forwards slowly and reverently, not wanting to interrupt a ritual she did not understand. She looked for a druid she recognised among the dirt covered faces, but even with the memory of her time with them rushing back it was hard to recall individuals, the Black Goat were not about individuals, they were about the sect as a whole, about the good of the pack. Nevertheless, a few names started to come to her, there was Tai, who she saw kneeling with her hands in the water, Mainchenn, who stood in the middle of the circle and seemed to be leading the chant, and Figol, crouching just half a step back from the rest and growling the chant low, and always near him, Dalgn. Selkie stopped a respectful distance from the circle, she crouched down herself and watched them, she tried to decipher the chant but it was in no language she recognised, let alone understood.
The chant lasted another twenty minutes, long enough for Selkie to start to feel herself hypnotised by the rhythm. Her mind wandered with the words, over the water, flying like a seagull low across the waves. She felt the inkling of something out beyond the horizon, something waiting, something dangerous, something stirring now for the first time in centuries. The chant ended just as she was on the verge of seeing it, whatever it was.
Mainchenn walked over to her, stepping lightly across the jagged rocks. 'Selkie,' he said in a soft velvet voice, drawing the sound out like a song, or a cat's purr, 'you've come back to us.'
Selkie bowed her head once, 'Mainchenn,' she said.
'It has been a long time,' said the druid, 'many here you will not know.'
'There is much that I do not know,' she answered.
Mainchenn laughed, 'remember,' he said, 'that is what you said to me the first time we met.'
Selkie forced a thin smile. 'I remember,' she said.
'But now, you refer to different things, a different kind of knowledge.'
She nodded.
'We shall see,' said the druid, 'what you truly learned last time you were with us, and what you will learn this time.' He turned and walked back to the others, Selkie followed.
'Tai,' she said to the first druid she recognised, 'it is good to see you.'
The druid called Tai looked her up and down, she was a woman Selkie had known from both before and during the Black Goat. They were about the same age, but after a decade spent living wild, Tai could easily have been twice as old. Selkie was taken aback by how much she had changed, her skin was craggy and hard, frequently scarred, and her eyes had grown small and suspicious, they darted like minnows in a pool, never settling long on any one thing.
'Selkie,' she said, 'have you come back?'
'Ay,' said another druid, stepping forwards, 'have you returned to us?' It was Figol, with Dalgn and several others Selkie did not recognise lurking behind.
The question was dangerous, a yes might imply a commitment she was not ready to make and did not understand, a no might be seen as hostile, a maybe might be seen as a no.
'It has been a long time,' she said, 'since you have come south.'
'There had been no cause till now,' said Figol.
'What cause is there now?' she asked.
Figol looked at her and laughed. 'You have dulled in your comfort,' he said, 'have you not heard the wind cry their name, have you not heard the rain whisper that they are approaching, have you not seen the writing on the stones at your feet.'
Selkie looked down to see nothing more than rocks, Figol and the other burst out laughing.
'My hearing is not so keen as it was,' she admitted, 'I have heard nothing in the rain.'
'Yet you come and seek us out.'
'The rain does not speak to me any more,' she said, 'but I can still tell when it something to say.' She held out her hand with the palm flat so that the rain collected in it, and tilted her face upwards so that the rain hit it and ran down over her eyes. She listened, there was whispering, there was knowledge there she could not decipher, a language she had once understood. 'It talks of you,' she said.
Figol smiled. 'It does,' he said.
Selkie listened on, the sense of how to do this coming slowly back to her. The sensation was intoxicating, the rain was ancient beyond memory, wise beyond the comprehension of man. She understood fragments of what it told, slivers of information that seemed to creep, unbidden, into her mind. She shivered, not with the cold but with excitement. She parted her lips, tasting the rain and allowing the rain to taste her. She wondered how she could have left this, how much more she could do, how much more she understood, through merely being in the presence of other druids. There was no doubt in her mind, she was one of them, her entire life since leaving them, eight years of it, had been a sham. She was a druid, she was part of the Black Goat.
She looked back down, at Figol, Tai, Dalgn and the others, many she did not know the names of, but knew, they were all her brothers and sisters. Figol smiled broadly, he knew what she was thinking. 'It says you have summoned something,' she said, 'but it does not say what.' Selkie lowered her head and dropped her arm back to her side. She stood differently than before, she no longer cowered from the rain, she stood comfortably and still, letting the rain wash over her, run down her lank hair, over her face, under the seams of her clothes.
'You are right,' said Figol, 'but there is much more to it than that.'
'Tell me,' she said.
'Have you come back to us?'
'Yes,' she said, and she meant it.
The druid smiled, they could not be lied to, they knew better than she did that she had returned. Tai reached out and stroked her cheek, Selkie responded in kind. The other druids gathered around and touched her, just resting hands on her shoulders, stroking her arms. The touches were brief and light, not sensuous, or even friendly, but comfortable, the comfort of feeling the warmth of another human being. They were taking as much as they were giving, the solace of other life, it was communication of the oldest kind, saying no more than that we too, are. Wordlessly, she was accepted back in to the fold.
