Chapter 14: The Offering
The druids gathered together close under the cliff, looking out to sea, they curled up together, sharing their warmth. None of them slept, they all watched the sea with expectant, unblinking, eyes.
'They are waking,' explained Mainchenn to Selkie, 'we must wait till the time is right.'
Selkie looked out to sea, she felt half blind, half death, slow and stupid. She was aware that there were things to be seen, things that were evident to those who understood, but she could still not see them, could still not understand. The sensation was agony, to be on the verge of something yet be unable to make the final leap. In a certain way ignorance is preferable to little knowledge, but the little knowledge was thrilling, she felt separate from the human race, raised above them. She had an invisible power surging through her, she looked the same but she was no longer an ordinary person, she was something else, something more primitive, something stronger, something closer to the real workings of the universe. She was a druid.
'Why are you doing this?' she asked Mainchenn, curled up together, her arm resting over his leg.
'Long ago,' he said, 'before you were even born, we made a bargain for land of our own.'
'The Black Goat made a bargain with other men?' she said.
'Black Goat is just a name, it and anything it embodies mean nothing. All that matters is those of us here now, and all that mattered then was those who were there then. We needed a place of our own, wild land to carry out our research, somewhere we would not be disturbed, somewhere a long way from civilisation.'
'So you made a deal.'
'Yes.'
'And what did you offer?'
'We were asked to make this country great again, to restore it to it's former glory.'
'You could do this?'
'Not then, no, but we have learned much since and now we are ready to fulfil our side of the bargain.'
'What will you do?'
'We will wake the dragon.'
'The dragon lives beyond the sea?'
'No, the dragon sleeps beneath the earth, beneath the land he will inherit. He does not stir, and only that which we have summoned will wake him.'
'What have you summoned?'
'An enemy he will recognise.'
Selkie stretched and yawned, she was no longer curious, all would be revealed in time. The druids lay there for hours, they watched the tide roll slowly in, trapping them briefly in their enclave but never reaching them. As it retreated some stirred and picked seaweed, limpets and small crabs from the rocks to eat. Selkie did not move, despite not having eaten for hours she was not hungry.
Mainchenn stirred sleepily, stretched and stood up, he looked at the sea slowly retreating, and over in the west the sun setting somewhere behind the ever present rain clouds. He went down to the sea and knelt in the surf, letting the water wash over his hands, a couple of the druids went with him. Selkie followed.
'They are not coming,' he said. The druids nodded and turned back. 'They do not wake,' Mainchenn called to the others underneath the cliff. The druids lazily disentangled themselves from each other and filed down to the water's edge where they all seemed to come to the same conclusion, they looked wistfully out to sea or knelt down in the surf trying to ask it what was wrong.
Figol waded out in to the water till it came up to his waste. He stalked back and forth, up and down the beach, and then seemed to find a spot suitable for his purpose where he waited, as still and as unyielding to the waves as any of the rocks he stood amongst. The other druids watched him, waiting, and after a couple of minutes, faster than Selkie could see, he disappeared under the water. He emerged a moment later holding a wriggling fish. He waded back to the shore, held the fish over a roughly flat rock, dug his thumbs into its belly and split it open spilling blood and entrails over the rock. Figol discarded the fish and spread the entrails about on the rock with the flat of his hand, and then examined them, picking through them and sniffing at them.
'They require an offering,' he said, and wiped the blood and gore off his hands onto his soaking clothes. The rain fell hard on the rock and swilled the blood away. Another of the druids picked up the discarded, still writhing remains of the fish, and began to pick it apart and eat it.
'Then,' said Mainchenn, 'we shall give them one.'
In single file the druids walked along the shore underneath the towering cliffs, Selkie fell into step, walking silently near the back. She barely even noticed at the time, but she walking over the same ground with far greater ease than she had that morning, she stepped now with a fluid grace, hopping nimbly from rock to rock, never slipping on the wet stone.
Eventually they reached the end of the cliffs, and the valley from which the flooded Cuckmere emptied itself into the sea. The sun had set, and the valley was shrouded in absolute darkness, but to the druids this meant little, the river sang to them, the flooded plains called to them, the stones on the shore spoke with every footfall. They could not see in the dark, but the dark saw for them.
Across the valley, they could see the lights of the coastguard cottage floating in the darkness. Mainchenn pointed at them, 'there,' he said.
The druids gathered around. 'I'll go,' said Figal. Dalgn stepped up behind him, not saying anything but obviously ready to accompany Figal.
'No,' said Mainchenn, 'they may be armed.'
'Then we all go,' said Figal.
Mainchenn thought for a moment, and then said 'I have a better idea.' He turned and looked at Selkie, 'you'd still pass,' he said, 'draw them out.'
'I don't understand,' said Selkie.
'You still look enough like one of them that they would trust you, go to the house, knock on the door, find out who is there, and get them all to come outside.'
'How?'
The druid laughed, 'are you so far gone you need to ask,' he said. He was right, it would be child's play for Selkie to lure the occupants out of the house. A little suggestion, or simply a made up story that required their help with perhaps a few tears for good measure.
'What then?' she asked.
'They will be offered.'
'To whom?'
'To the sea.'
'You will drown them?'
'We will leave them to the tide, the sea will do what it will.'
Once, when Selkie was first a part of the Black Goat, there was a time when she had been close to the point at which it would mean nothing to kill, at which life and death became just a small part of the larger workings of the universe. But now, just back with them for one day, she was nowhere near that point. There was never a doubt, she knew it and the druids knew it, from the moment they asked the question. Selkie said nothing, but looked behind her to see Dalgn and Tai and others waiting, a broad grin spread across Mainchenn's face, Figal took a step towards her.
'So,' said Mainchenn, 'you are not returned to us after all.'
For a moment she considered running, it would not have done any good. She felt hands take hold of her from behind. One set of steely strong fingers clamped over her mouth preventing her screaming. In eerie silence she was lifted off her feet and carried down towards the sea.
Tai talked to her as they walked. 'You could have come back Selkie,' she said, 'we would have taken you in. You were always the strongest of us, stronger than Mainchenn and Mog Ruith at times, far stronger than me. But you could never let go entirely and that always held you back. Perhaps,' she mused, 'it was the civilisation in you that made you strong, perhaps you remained tapped in to some vein that the rest of us left behind.' She held Selkie's hand, not the way the others held her, as a piece of meat to be carried, not even as she had earlier, taking comfort in the warmth of another's flesh, but as a friend, a real civilised friend. 'It is a shame,' she said, 'but it has to be, if you cannot surrender yourself totally you will never attain your full potential, you will remain part person, part druid, part pampered child. You are no use to us like that.'
'But,' said Figol, who held his hand over Selkie's mouth, 'you make a fine offering.'
'Better even,' said Mainchenn, 'because you are ours to give, and though you have no use to us, you have potential. And giving away potential is like giving away a child.'
Selkie only half listened to them talk. She panicked, briefly, the speed of her transition away from the Black Goat and back to her old self shocked her a bit. She said later, it was a bit like waking from a dream of flying and the awful realisation that it was only a dream. She regained her composure soon, she had never been one to worry about things that she had no power over, and now it was certain she was to be offered to the sea, she put her mind to the task of working out how she might survive. She had one cause for hope, the words 'we will leave them to the tide.'
She told me, not then, but much later, that she thought of me first. There were ways of summoning people, but, like all magic, they required ritual, ritual she had no way of performing. But magic was not ritual at heart, it was people, and if she was strong enough, ritual was not necessary. The strength of the Black Goat still ran within her, if she could summon it, she could do away with the ritual. Everything the Black Goat were, the source of their power, was their connection with the earth, their very primitiveness. She had to let go, to survive she had to give up her twenty-first century morality, she had to accept that life was nothing more than survival, that it lasted till death, that there was nothing beyond it except for other lives, and other deaths, that it did not matter, it had no purpose, it had no reason, and it had no value. To accept this was power. If she had done it earlier, she would have lured Jenny and John from the coastguard cottage to their murder, but it was too late now. Instead she had to accept her own death, in order to save her own life she had to realise it had no value.
So it was, that though they gave her no chance to demonstrate it, the Black Goat sect carried her willingly to her sacrifice. They tied her to a rock well below the tide mark and began chanting. Immediately the rain stopped. They chanted for hours, until the tide was nearly upon her. Unaware that their victim had, in their hands, become more powerful than they imagined. Without ritual, without a word, without a single outward sign, Selkie summoned me to her rescue.
