Tundra

The plain was waking where the sun rose low and bloody, like the glow of a candle just hidden beneath the far-away hilltops, behind which waterfalls were rumoured to crash over the rim of the world. Bears were emerging for the last few days before hibernation, and kit foxes were returning to their dens and burrows to sleep away the brief light. Mammoths plodded the tundra at a cosmic pace, slow and fast at once.

Atop the oldest beast at the head of the party was Erasmus, seated confidently in a roped down caravan that swayed like the tide. He did not cling tenaciously to the leather strips or thin walls of stretched canvas and tusk that fenced him in, for he did not fear the fall. Nothing could truly hurt him now. He also did not mind the lack of conversation, for though he was an honoured guest, he had achieved that esteemed position through intimidation. It was not difficult, he had found, to convince the mammoth riders that his lack of bleeding when he slit his arm was because he was a god. He had not specified deified role, and so had been praised as a god of death. The riders left an uncomfortable circle of space around him. No-one wanted to touch him and so risk a quick passage to the underworld.

The long, winding line of the caravan was headed towards another place the mammoth riders feared– the edge of the forest. Here, it was said, druids lived who were both living and dead. Erasmus had likewise found that information easy to wheedle. Indeed, he had less begged than commanded it, just as he had demanded that the caravan change direction to suit the destination of his whim. His subjugation of the riders made him feel strong, and so he leaned forward in his seat, peering over the lip of the tent and over the head of the shaggy animal with the attitude of a king staring into an arena. The world, and the tundra, was his exhibition. He might have stood at the prow of a ship, staring off the continent’s edge and knowing no danger.

Finally, the caravan came to a dense tangle of green, and halted. There was no passage here, not even for tusks that could uproot the grandest oaks and roll boulders. The forest was simply too thick. In it, trails could be glimpsed, but it was untellable whether they were the escape routes of men or rabbits, tiny voles and other skittering creatures. Erasmus dismounted, sliding down the tusk of the mammoth as it inclined its head, bending its front legs for the descent. Then, with a cursory thanks to the people that had delayed their errands to escort him for miles, he vanished into the deep viridian.

The mammoth people had said that there were dead druids in here, he thought as he picked passages through the trees, squashing saplings and cracking branches. Their folklore inkling had better have been right. The further he ventured, the more he caught glimpses of standing stones, but they were grown over with moss, lonely and neglected. Those stones were all silent. There were no signs or traces of the men and women who used them as gateways to the spirit world at equinox and solstice.

What Erasmus did notice were the strange fungi that coated the slick, damp trunks of the elm and birch trees, and even the hoary willows that grew close to where creeks trickled through open glades. This strange plant matter was red and slimy, faintly luminescent in the dim light under the canopy. He ran his fingers over clusters of them, like eggs of some great insect planted in the forks of branches, and felt them come away warm and wet with a substance like blood. Curiously, he painted his own skin with it, streaking it over the area on his arm where the self-inflicted cut had already healed.

As he toyed with the mysterious ooze, a voice spoke. ‘A southerner?’ it asked, and it was close, despite the fact that Erasmus had heard no footsteps nor even a twig snap in his vicinity. He spun around, and found a man more lopsided and haggard than he had ever seen before. His face glowed an angry red, and the feathers of the Morrígan’s crows stuck out of his nest of white hair at odd angles. ‘The spirits told me of your arrival,’ he said. ‘Welcome. Sit, eat. We do not have your southern fare here, I’m afraid. It’s roots and walrus meat, but you will like it.’ He gestured at a woven mat, onto which a selection of foods had spread. He seemed indeed to have been expecting guests.

Erasmus was wary. He was cunning enough to expect trickery from others. ‘There’s many who won’t eat what a druid gives them,’ he said, recounting old lore overheard in whispers from the mammoth people and the men down by the docks. ‘But then,’ he said dismissively, ‘that’s a matter for them. I’ve come to talk to you about this fungus your people propagate. Is it true that it has magic powers?’

‘Magic?’ The druid laughed, but only one side of his face was pulled taut. The other remained slack and listless, and crimson in colour. ‘No such thing,’ he said. ‘The blood of the Otherworld is not magic. It simply is.’

'The mammoth people say you're hundreds of years old,' Erasmus replied.

'That's right,’ said the druid, offering him more walrus meat. ‘What of it?'

'Is that the fungus?' Erasmus asked.

‘Yes,’ the druid responded. ‘So long as the Otherworld flows through us, we move. It also makes you easy to possess, which is why I've been feeding it to you since you came in.'

Erasmus grinned a grin of knives. 'I suspected as much,’ he said, cheerfully. ‘Happily, for me, that's not a problem.'