of them, drowned, starved and frozen for year after year, met the dead god by the deep pool and was given a rune that sparkled like bright water. The minds of men fell open to her and she began to dream the dreams of children in faraway places, hear jealous whispers flowing through the mountain passes and feel the coursing currents of love and hate that washed over the farmsteads.
Another took a different path to knowledge. She dug her own grave and the sisters sealed her in with a rock. As her sanity collapsed she had felt the god lying next to her in that tiny space, touched the rope at the god’s neck and felt his body cold and lifeless next to her. Her rune seemed to grow and wither in her mind, now obscured by earth and weeds, now exhumed and vibrant. When she was lifted from the ground she was scarcely breathing, but she had won the most valuable rune of all. Now she knew the secrets of inheritance and how magic can be given as a gift.
From that moment on, death could not take the power of the runes from the sisters. Each could build on the knowledge of her teachers. Progress was possible. The witches grew more powerful, generation after generation keeping what they had and building on their knowledge until there were twenty-four sisters of the inner circle, each the guardian, nurturer and expression of a different rune.
Now, though, there was a twentyfifth witch. She was known to Authun as Gullveig, the witch queen, and to some of the local people as Huldra, but the sisters never called her that, or anything. She had been brought to the tunnels as a baby, destined - according to divination - to take on the rune of daylight. But when the witches started to work with the girl it became plain it was already within her, seeming to shine from the darkness from her first meditations, to rustle like the wind in a full-leafed tree in the minds of all the witches who looked at her. This was a puzzle for the sisters because it normally took years of suffering and denial to make the rune manifest - that and the death of the sister within whom it currently dwelled. At two years old the girl was put to further agonies and observed. A rune seemed to spill from her - silver like the sea on a moonlit night - then another, which twinkled like ice in the morning sun, and then a third, which seemed more a feeling than a vision, harsh prickles on the skin with a deep, blustery cold, and a fourth, with the scent of wild fruit, a fifth, like hunger, a sixth with the glint of gold, a seventh that smelled of roses and blood, and an eighth with the sound of the wind in sails. By the end of the girl’s third year all the twenty-four runes that the sisters spent their lives expressing, dreaming and using for their power were in the girl.
She represented a new stage in the witches’ evolution. Previously the queen had only held the daylight rune, that of the first witch. Gullveig had them all. Through her early years her ritual sufferings had propelled her mind on travels with the hanged god through dry tombs in arid lands where the dead seemed to claw at her from their crumbling graves, to mires and peat bogs where she had seen the fresh pink skin of the newly drowned whose faces seemed to implore her for help her as they sank, to battles where she heard the whispered names of lovers and children on the lips of dying men and where she picked the shrieking runes from their fingers. It was said she was mad, but had the farmers and warriors of the valleys known what she had been through, they would have marvelled she stayed so sane.
Reading the portents of rock, wind and water, Gullveig knew something extraordinary was happening. The foreboding that filled the caves, the heavy air, the sense of frustration waiting to break, told her she had no choice. She had to carve a rune, to force the future into the physical realm, to make it something that could be handled, discussed and, ultimately, manipulated.
For this she descended to
Another took a different path to knowledge. She dug her own grave and the sisters sealed her in with a rock. As her sanity collapsed she had felt the god lying next to her in that tiny space, touched the rope at the god’s neck and felt his body cold and lifeless next to her. Her rune seemed to grow and wither in her mind, now obscured by earth and weeds, now exhumed and vibrant. When she was lifted from the ground she was scarcely breathing, but she had won the most valuable rune of all. Now she knew the secrets of inheritance and how magic can be given as a gift.
From that moment on, death could not take the power of the runes from the sisters. Each could build on the knowledge of her teachers. Progress was possible. The witches grew more powerful, generation after generation keeping what they had and building on their knowledge until there were twenty-four sisters of the inner circle, each the guardian, nurturer and expression of a different rune.
Now, though, there was a twentyfifth witch. She was known to Authun as Gullveig, the witch queen, and to some of the local people as Huldra, but the sisters never called her that, or anything. She had been brought to the tunnels as a baby, destined - according to divination - to take on the rune of daylight. But when the witches started to work with the girl it became plain it was already within her, seeming to shine from the darkness from her first meditations, to rustle like the wind in a full-leafed tree in the minds of all the witches who looked at her. This was a puzzle for the sisters because it normally took years of suffering and denial to make the rune manifest - that and the death of the sister within whom it currently dwelled. At two years old the girl was put to further agonies and observed. A rune seemed to spill from her - silver like the sea on a moonlit night - then another, which twinkled like ice in the morning sun, and then a third, which seemed more a feeling than a vision, harsh prickles on the skin with a deep, blustery cold, and a fourth, with the scent of wild fruit, a fifth, like hunger, a sixth with the glint of gold, a seventh that smelled of roses and blood, and an eighth with the sound of the wind in sails. By the end of the girl’s third year all the twenty-four runes that the sisters spent their lives expressing, dreaming and using for their power were in the girl.
She represented a new stage in the witches’ evolution. Previously the queen had only held the daylight rune, that of the first witch. Gullveig had them all. Through her early years her ritual sufferings had propelled her mind on travels with the hanged god through dry tombs in arid lands where the dead seemed to claw at her from their crumbling graves, to mires and peat bogs where she had seen the fresh pink skin of the newly drowned whose faces seemed to implore her for help her as they sank, to battles where she heard the whispered names of lovers and children on the lips of dying men and where she picked the shrieking runes from their fingers. It was said she was mad, but had the farmers and warriors of the valleys known what she had been through, they would have marvelled she stayed so sane.
Reading the portents of rock, wind and water, Gullveig knew something extraordinary was happening. The foreboding that filled the caves, the heavy air, the sense of frustration waiting to break, told her she had no choice. She had to carve a rune, to force the future into the physical realm, to make it something that could be handled, discussed and, ultimately, manipulated.
For this she descended to
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