The Blood of Kings: Volume V of the Glastonbury Chronicles

By S. P. Hendrick

The Stone has sung, and once more Britannia has a King. Once more Stephen and Kevin Awaken to find the world they had left generations before seemingly secure and prosperous, yet they both know if they have been called back to serve the Lady and the Land there must be a Need. An old friend knows it too, and he has travelled light years to find the forgotten planet and the destiny which awaits them all, a destiny which began so far in the past that none of them can remember its beginning.

Their paths have crossed again and again as the threads of their lives have woven the tapestry some call history, some call legend. Now in this fifth instalment of the Glastonbury Chronicles we find a Tale of the Dearg-Sidhe as the two tales converge in the far future to determine what may be the fate of all mankind, for an old darkness threatens the new world, and even the Blood of Kings may not be enough to stop it.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pendraig Publishing
• Release date: Mar 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9781936922338

Book preview

Table of Contents

Dedication

Prologue

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Chapter Twenty-Seven

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Chapter Thirty

Chapter Thirty-One

Chapter Thirty-Two

Chapter Thirty-Three

Chapter Thirty-Four

Chapter Thirty-Five

Chapter Thirty-Six

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Chapter Thirty-Eight

Chapter Thirty-Nine

Chapter Forty

Chapter Forty-One

Chapter Forty-Two

Chapter Forty-Three

Chapter Forty-Four

Chapter Forty-Five

Chapter Forty-Six

Chapter Forty-Seven

Chapter Forty-Eight

Chapter Forty-Nine

Chapter Fifty

Chapter Fifty-One

Chapter Fifty-Two

Chapter Fifty-Three

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Other Fiction Novels from Pendraig Publishing

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Dedication

To My Dark Muse

Without Whose inspiration

there would be no words upon the pages

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Prologue

For years we lay together in the Blessed Isles, creatures of light only. The interval before the next beat was pure and untarnished. We were notes in the orchestration of all that was, notes joined in perfect harmony, and we vibrated together on pure clear tones of complete joy, needing no flesh to fulfil our happiness. This was our reward, our goal, and only the pleasures of the flesh and our Souls’ pledge and Duty to the Land and the Lady kept us from rushing headlong each time into this blessed bliss.

I always knew when the time was near, for then the sweet release of the body became more and more a calling back to this state and in the little death She gave me, the longing for the real thing became a siren song to lead me down the pathway to completion.

And he was my completion. The death he brought me was always with love and with joy, and in Her bounty and grace She had for the last several times allowed us to share in it together. The waiting had become shorter in time since that delicious day we had fallen together from the skies into eternity, the arc between our souls burning white-hot as that brief blackness swallowed us and we found ourselves here, again, waiting once more for the encumbrance of flesh, and in tacit prayer that the memories would soon return to lead us once more together here.

The times apart, those drab and dreary lives when our paths did not cross, were our penance for our wilful behaviour. Or perhaps they were our education in the lives of mortals that we might respect them more and use them kindly upon our return to days in which we must know power.

Or perhaps they were merely to remind us that we were, in fact, not Gods ourselves.

Something happens to the mind when the soul knows it’s worth and no longer fears death, something which can be wonderful or terrible. It can make someone of ignoble purpose mean and cruel, or take an altruistic soul to sainthood. We were neither. When we were flesh and blood we were fully pleasured by the delights of the flesh, and when the blood was spilled it was shed in equal joy with the shedding of the flesh, for we knew both had been only lent us by the Land and the Lady for a time.

He was the most dazzling creature ever embodied. His eyes glowed with the spirit which filled him. His nature was love, and even the desecration of that body through torture and mutilation by evil men had only made it more beautiful, for still in the day he no longer had those brilliant eyes his soul shone through and we both knew how unimportant the outward image was in the end.

I loved him shamelessly, the way he loved me. We had been one flesh for a time, conjoined twins unborn, the same blood flowing between us, together in the darkness of the womb, somewhere between life and death, and our flesh would always find each other as our spirits did.

This was not to say we didn’t enjoy the women or love them also, as devotedly as a man can love a woman. Those earthly embodiments of Our Lady were sweet to us as perfumed gardens. Time and again they returned to us as we returned to each other, and our passion with them was beyond words. So many times they had been our conduits to the Lady we both served, to the acceptance of who and what we were, and the joy of filling their bodies with our own had been like embracing the Moon. We had loved them together and separately and they had always been a part of the Pattern of the Maze of Life we walked and walked again, and yet…

He was the Sun and I gloried in his light, desiring no more than to ultimately be consumed by it. I used to joke with him that he would be the death of me, and he smiled, knowing it was not a joke at all, feeling the phantom sword within his grasp as I felt the cold blade, swift and true, rip through my soul and send my hot red blood to nourish the thirsty Land below, and I smiled too, for in that brief instant in which those images passed between us we both knew the ultimate Truth, and the brilliance of that light drove away any shadow between us.

I was the Chalice. He was the Blade, not in the joyous celebration of Life and its engendering, but in the blessed act of Sacrifice, the Sacrament of Death which ensured there would be life for the Land and those who lived upon it.

Our ways were old, older still than recorded time, and neither of us knew when it had begun. So many tales, so many lives, so many deaths, so many rebirths and joys and tearful partings, so many blessed and wonderful reunions in that split second of remembrance, of Awakening, when it all came rushing back in a torrent and who we had been in the past fairly washed away the lives of who those sleeping bodies had been before in that brief life.

Serial immortality was ours, which made my Anmchara, my soul-friend, a serial killer; though it was me he had killed again and again and would continue to do so throughout time, if we all were lucky. He had done me in with antler bone, with sgian dubh, with sword, arrow, anything that would make me bleed and send my living blood into the Land. The parachutes had been my idea, dropping like pearls over Stonehenge, but his knife had cut the chutes away, so once again the blade had been my cause of death. That had been the first time he had made the conscious decision to join me on my journey, holding me fast until our bodies broke together on the blessed Stones below.

Such peace we had never known before. There had been no parting, no longing, no waiting for the other half of the one true Soul we were. We were complete and inseparable, and above all, happy. As far as either of us knew we had not been separated again in life but from that day on had always come back together, though a few years night have passed before I took flesh once more. That is but a blink of the Lady’s eye in the scope of Eternity, though twenty, twenty-five or more years between the taking of flesh and the Awakening can be long for one who believes he is mortal and has no real purpose in the world. And yet…

With the heartaches and a thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to, especially with the growing pains and hormonal frustrations of an adolescent man, what might such memories do to one not yet mature enough to handle them? Suicide? Murder? It is amazing that one even at twenty-five could handle such self-realisation and maintain his sanity. My Anmchara always has had to endure the knowledge alone for a short while until my own Awakening, and then we at least had a tether to reality by having the same thoughts the same memories, and knowing we were not alone.

Perhaps this explained the brevity of our lives from Awakening to passing through the Veil. How much could a human brain hold? How much history and mythology and knowing which had been real and which transformed in the retelling and the misunderstanding of the teller? At times it seemed we knew it all, all the past lives and deaths which had measured us out in time, at least all the important ones…what had happened in the between times we were never certain, or how many there had been in which we did not come back together. On one occasion at least we had Awakened out of turn, myself as a red-haired woman and he as a man much younger, and we had known, and we had remembered and we had seen glimpses of our future. The knowledge had been both happy and sad, for as much as we treasured it we realised how frustratingly powerless we were in that world in which we had Awakened. And yet that experience had possibly spurred us on in both that life and those to follow, never taking anything for granted after that and treasuring each moment we had together, no matter the circumstance.

The mythology had been the most interesting to sort out. What of our pasts had been real and what elaborated upon by those who had tried to gloss over or Christianise our blatantly Pagan lives and deaths because they could not, would not believe they had been such. Britain had always been Christian, even before the birth of Christ. The Sacrifice of Jesus had been the be all and end all, the only noble sacrifice ever made by a King, and no other Sacrificial Kings need apply. So when Walter Tyrell pulled the bow and shot his liege lord William Rufus in the New Forest and the cart containing his body had been driven from town to town so he could bleed out all over English soil, it had been merely a hunting accident. And when his descendant Sir James Tyrell had slain the boy-king in the Tower of London, it had been a coincidence. The collection of his blood and the spilling of it upon Tower Hill had not been recorded and Richard III had been assigned the role of villain forever more by the writings of William Shakespeare, who had a hand in covering up more than ever the literary critics had sussed out in their oft jumped-to conclusions.

And when my spiritual ancestor or antecedent, my preincarnation Stephen FitzStephen had met his end at Savernake in a manner similar to William Rufus, but shot that time by the Man in Grey because the Man in Burgundy was afraid his skills as an archer were lacking, no-one even noticed. By that time the royal bloodline had passed from the Crown to do its work of keeping the kingdom safe and a Christian King, Stephen of Blois kept his throne and built church after church to atone for the bargain he had struck with the Pagan Gods, yet when death had come to him even the history books recount his dark-age river burial. Hardly the passing of a truly Christian King.

And here I sit, nearly two millennia later and a world away from where it all began trying to sort it all out and find my place once again among the living, Stephen once again, with my Kevin once more at my side, closer and dearer to me than if he had been a brother born, or son, or father, though I am sure that through time we have played those roles to one another and may do it all again.

Eternity is a long time, and Infinity a big place and in both we had perhaps only recalled half of it all absolutely, the ones the most important to the situations at hand, perhaps, for if they had all come rushing back unbidden into minds made flesh there would have been no time to ponder the present, or the future.

Still we knew, we sensed there were more lives lived, more journeys taken together or apart, more of who we were which would ultimately play upon who we would become, and in our wisdom or our folly we asked to know it all.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Chapter One

Britannia was at peace. The gaping wounds made by the weapons of the revolution had all but healed over; walls and edifices had been rebuilt or patched to within a good approximation of their original appearances. When the damage had been too great, historical markers had been placed so that generations to come might know their history in more than words. A schoolchild who could fit his or her hand into a breach in the walls of New Glastonbury was more apt to learn the lesson of the power of explosives when reading the brass plaque beside that hole than a student who read of it only on paper with a drawing next to it.

Our society had proven even more resilient. Those who had hidden away in the shadows of obscurity, afraid to speak for fear of torture and death, had at last come out into the light to be teachers and beacons of the Restoration. Relics long preserved at the risk of their custodians’ lives had surfaced over the years, some not for generations, as their families had believed them too sacred to part with and the elders of those families had not been certain how securely the Restoration factions would hold the government.

They held.

Four generations had passed. The Palace was even more resplendent than it had been when it had been taken over by the forces of Walter Blunt. To their credit, the vast collection of art had remained intact and most of the Palace had been turned into a museum for the appreciation of the people. That had been Blunt’s one good thought in all of his mad urge to destroy Religion and the Monarchy, yet he never seemed to realise that the three were as virtually integrated as an interlaced Celtic trefoil. The symbols in the art were the symbols of the Monarchy, and of our Religion. From the red rose which adorned the bosom in the portrait of Dame Kathleen O’Conor Eddings-Roth Tyrell, my many-times ancestor, which now hung upon the fireplace in the King’s Chamber, to the landscape of Stonehenge, to the Stag’s-head Candelabras with a candle on each tine, to the interlaced Celtic raven stained glass in one of the windows…all were our symbols and our souls’ joy, and each was a reminder of the sacred duty of the King to the Lady and the Land. Each reminded us, enjoined us, beckoned us and promised us that so long as we remained faithful the Land and its People would flourish, as it had done since our arrival from Earth so many distant years ago.

Even in the Dark Times, during the days of Rebellion and Anarchy when it seemed the Gods had slept, there were enough who had remained faithful, enough who had relayed the old teachings through symbols of their own, concealed in Tarot Cards and cleverly planted gardens, in symbols once ours, counterfeited by Christianity and then retaken by us to designate our meeting places. There was enough to keep the Land and the bloodline of Kings alive, for in the end, the Blood of Kings was sacred to the Gods and was what kept our world alive.

Whatever pact had been made with Them, however long ago, lay buried somewhere within our racial memory. The beginnings of it in unwritten time had long been forgotten, even by the wisest of us, yet we knew it was real. The King was the true High Priest of the Land. His hands were the hands of a healer, for through them the Gods worked and the energy of Life flowed. His life and his virility made strong the Land, guaranteed the abundance of the harvest and the fertility of not only crops, but animals and the People themselves. This was the Law of Harmony, the great sympathetic magic which made the Universe sing. When something caused a disharmony, when the Universe no longer sang in tune with the Land and the People, the Divine Right of Kings made way for the Divine Responsibility, and that sacred blood was shed, willingly and with love, to nourish the Land and renew the pact with the Gods.

So had it ever been.

So would it ever be.

My heart was as full as my head, crammed with the ancient precepts as I stood before the cleft in the natural pillar before me, the largest and most interesting of all the rock formations within this cave newly consecrated for Coronation. The carvings upon it were ancient beyond the dreams of my race, or at least so it seemed. They far predated any of us who had settled Britannia from Earth, yet the symbols and pictographs were not unfamiliar.

My attention had wandered, looking at the symbols and not at the pommel of the sword which protruded from that cleft. I almost missed my cue to pull it forth, so intent was my mind upon the one symbol…like a crescent moon with a broken arrow over it…

Stephen.

The man’s whisper was low and intense, and jarred me back to my place in the ritual. My hand closed upon the hilt, and as I watched the facets of the garnet catch the firelight and drew the ancient sword from the even more ancient pillar of stone I drew my breath and held it also, as if prescient of what was to come next.

The sparks which seemed to fly from the steel blade as it scraped the stone coruscated down my arm and throughout my body, bringing with them the oddest sense of bilocation. I watched myself walk, as if in a trance and saw myself kneel at the feet of the silver haired High Priestess, placing the sword in her outstretched hands. I could not hear the words either of us spoke, for it was not I who spoke them, nor did I feel anything again of that body until the weight of the Crown was placed upon my head and the stones set into and beneath the plaque upon which I knelt began to reverberate and send forth their resounding acclamation throughout the sounding board of the cave.

The Universe was in Harmony.

Britannia had a King!

Fortunately for the entire planet the King had no responsibilities for the next few moments but to rise and sit upon a throne and look regal, aided by a sandy-haired young man in a burgundy robe, for as soon as his blue eyes met mine the time-streams started rushing through me in torrents which might erode to nothing the very life of someone not familiar with them. Somewhere within the soul-engulfing cascade of faces and places and the deliriously fantastic feeling of falling headlong through Infinity and Eternity into the Here and Now I was more than familiar with all of it, as was he, my dear and glorious Knight with whom I had taken this journey so many times before.

The memories were intact, the visions sweet and perfect, from ancient Britain through Britannia with side trips throughout the lands of Earth, a death within a cave much like this one, a moonlight duel with onlookers, bracing myself for the blow as I stood between the stone uprights of a most ancient and holy circle of stones and three overlapping variations of standing at a tree, eager for the arrow to be loosed. So many more there were, each flashing by in a trice and yet I felt them all, every knife, sword, arrow, garrotte, all but the resounding thud when we had dropped together from the sky, for we had been so intensely locked upon each other’s eyes we had never known a thing, and found ourselves reborn still clutching each other in birth as we had in death. Every moment of passion was there too, each beautiful woman with whom we had lain together or apart, each moment of love between us and them and each breathless time The Lady had called us back into Her womb, singing that one perfect note to us which was both a lullaby and a keening and allowing us to see for one brief instant the pure light of which Her darkness was made. Each time we had survived to do it all again, each time we had learned lessons as well as taught them, and each time the love which bound us and those of our inner circle had been greater than before.

I could not have held my breath the entire time, for I know I had heard myself speak, yet it seemed when all had run its course I exhaled for the very first time, and with that moment of exhalation I knew who I was once more.

Anmchara?

Yes Stephen.

Was it you who whispered to me?

Yes Anmchara. I could see it was beginning, but you couldn’t hear me this way yet. I didn’t want you to get so lost in the process you missed your cues.

Thank you.

I suppose this is why they have two Coronations...one in private and one in public, just in case. It wouldn’t be at all proper for the King to fall down during his Coronation. And you nearly did.

I know. It was strange.

Strange? How?

I saw glimpses, just glimpses of things I don’t recall ever having seen before.

Even his mind was silent for a moment as he seemed to struggle with the concept. Then came the soft voice I had grown through the years to cherish above all voices.

I know. I saw them too.

* ~ * ~ * ~ * ~ *

Chapter Two

Kevin MacGregor was the very image of his ancestor. Had I not known for a fact our society did not have the technology to produce a human clone, I would have suspected him to be such. His eyes were the same pale shade of blue, his nose the same, long and slender, almost aquiline, the colour of his hair, his skin, the sound of his voice, his laughter, even the length of his stride as he walked beside me into the entryway of Stonehurst.

We had rebuilt it together in our last days as Geoffrey and Phillip, his mind recounting details of the original home in Scotland better than I, for following his blinding his sight had turned inward. He had been able to recall the most intricate details from the number and shape of brass studs which had bound the leather chesterfield, to how many shelves high the bookcases had been. How many lives had we spent together in that most cherished of residences, how many good times had we shared in its seclusion, away from London and Glastonbury and the concerns of public life, how many nights had we sat before the fire, recalling other pasts and dreaming of futures yet to come?

How different they had turned out to be.

The Grey Hills were not Scotland. They were bleak, devoid of the foliage of Earth, yet in the isolation of the place we had been able to recreate for ourselves a measure of continuity. There was no Mrs Stuart here, but the diminutive and equally resolute Lady Sybil Ashe was the most devoted of housekeepers, and always kept the larder full of whatever might feed our fancy. As Mrs Stuart had been, Lady Ashe (there was no Lord Ashe and the title had been my father’s sixty-fifth birthday present to her) was the soul of discretion. Unlike Mrs Stuart, a devout Christian of some sect I cannot recall, there was nothing in our behaviour about which she found cause to be discreet. Like Mrs Stuart, only a word and a nod that we wanted privacy for a period of time was enough to set her off on a holiday until such time as she would again be required.

It amazed me that having spent as much time at this Stonehurst as I had done before my Coronation that the place itself had not triggered an Awakening, yet had it done so I would have been the first to notice what was missing over the fireplace.

There should be a sword or two and that portrait hanging there, Stephen, Kevin said as we walked into the room.

He was right of course. Her portrait had been removed from the original Stonehurst by the last Geoffrey of Britain along with the Swords and Crown and all other important regalia. I remembered signing the order for their removal, hoping they might be recalled if the danger to Earth were to pass by without grave incident. Alas, that had not been the case, but the relics survived, and ultimately so did we, after a fashion.

Spirits can find new bodies. Somewhere within the vastness of the Universe all those who had perished along with Earth would be reborn, most of them never knowing they had ever lived before.

Art destroyed is lost forever. It is the one-time brilliant connexion between the soul of Man and the creative force of the Gods, that inward vision which some are fortunate enough to have the talent to bring into physical form. Reproductions never have the