CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
ON THE MIDNIGHT OF THE hibernal ceremony, the practitioners cleansed their hands with ivory cloths, sprinkling seedlets onto the sacred grounds. The rain fields were filled with a quarter of a hecatomb of twenty-five cattle, oxen, and rams restrained in the frigid, bone-dry night.
Elliott swallowed. The gamy, fulsome clot of the flesh of the boar was still stuck in the back of his throat.
The ceremonial theatricality astounded him in its grandeur. As always for AEscwulf College, it was the year of the deer. The sacrificial elk were absent, except for the honorarium.
The brawny woodsmen entered the rain fields with their hefty boots, before they lurched the oxen’s necks back, then slit the throats.
Heads fell to the earth. In panic, the cattle screeched in their restraints; the rams drove their horns into the chests of the hunters that bent down to thrust their utility knives into the animals; the premonitory carrion circled the sky.
“ē?e tō ealdre!” The torchbearer woodsman roared. For all time, forevermore.
“?fre tō ealdre!” The students roared back. For eternity.
May their sacrifice to the earth be forever. The ancient Anglo Saxon words echoed in Elliott’s mind as he shouted in tandem with his peers. Elliott’s voice was drowned out in the throngs of packed, terrified students forced to stand before Banebury townsmen gathered to attend the hibernal ceremony.
After the death of the honorarium, the masterful play would begin–a triumphant haze of vengeance, war battles, political warfare, and low-lit candled scenes of the emperor’s intoxication by his wife with deadly fungus that Elliott would likely hardly recall after his blur of foreboding dread.
The hibernal ceremonies were held in the heart of town, deep in the fields where the harvest had already been taken for the year. Where the soil was aged and weathered, dying in the winter. Thousands crowded the fields for mercy in the highest devotion to art.
As always in Banebury’s liturgy, there were three high principles of barbarity:
Barbarity as a means of art.
Barbarity as a means of pleasure.
Barbarity as a means of psychological discipline.
The most cardinal principle of all for the ritual was barbarity as a means of psychological discipline.
Mercy was given unto the disciplined. Only the disciplined survived the dire winter that was the barren, unpoetic, unintellectual, unbearably prosaic outside world.
The ritual inured the students to the fragile thoughts, bathetic sentiments, and uninspired praxes of the outsiders that would otherwise stifle their greatness and blunt their potential for glory. Their mark on history itself.
If they must sacrifice themselves, let it be for the sake of psychological discipline.
Provost Aldous Tytheridge was known for his hostile laconic countenance, but he was further infamous for his dark presence on the throne of AEthelwulf, named after the Saxon king.
Crowned upon his head were massive, stern elk antlers for the ritual.
Tytheridge had been provost for nearly fifty years, and now he was ninety-one with a steel, elk head cane that plunged into the earth with every step as he stood forward in his long, funereal-black overcoat.
His withered hands were veined in his elderly age, his right eye milky and opaque with sightlessness. However, his gaze was still sharp. His voice trenchant.
The dark-cloaked professors stared up at the undergraduate students restricted onto the raised wooden platform. The timbered steps were smeared with muddied footprints and creaked beneath the weight of hundreds of nervous students.
War drums pounded against the icy air as the local law enforcement drove in from the interstate.
Several vehicle doors opened and slammed as uniformed officers entered into the umbrageous night.
They were required to witness the ceremony, temper crowd control, and ensure the sacrifice occurred without riot.
There were some years where the student fought, bit, scratched, and kicked viciously, refusing to be killed. When that happened, there was an appointed executioner. Sheriff Sangerfield and his pistol.
Already, the punishing frost was plundering through the town from the mountains, and the townspeople held onto their little ones and elders in the dangerous winds. The ill baited their breath, frightful of the penetrating cold that extinguished the torches that needed to be consistently relit.
While the rest of the nation sat warm by the television, lazed with grilled hamburgers and zealously entertained with comedy hour shows and sports championships, they were trapped at the stage.
With half-frozen fingers, Elliott stood with a woven basket of dried berries and wheat on behalf of his family’s offerings.
His hands shook terribly, spilling out wild currants and brambles, as the stringers strummed their lutes in the recitation rehearsal. Where was James Wilde?
The thick crowds were empty of him, which somehow made it all the more hypothermic outside for Elliott, who hyperventilated against the penetrating, bone-chilling squall.
The only source of warmth were the pyres of fire that glowed onto Elliott’s cheeks, however, he could hardly feel it. He was shivery with anxiety.
Soon, one of the students would be led through the pyres by the senior elector into the woodlands to be killed. Then, the recitation would start and in the grand conclusion, the body of the honorarium would be on display–openly exhibited in front of everyone.
Where was James? Elliott skimmed his eyes over the hordes of townspeople, praying for James to emerge through the shoulders of well-cut overcoats and mink fur coats.
Elliott hoped to find the upperclassman in his finest tie, well dressed as ever, with his hair perfectly styled as he irately grumbled in hatred of the yearly ceremony, standing beside Elliott, waiting to perform.
James never attended the actual ceremony itself. He typically was granted a glorious entrance for the recitation. However, now everyone expected him.
Elliott imagined they would share a bowl of sweets later, fussing over who had the larger tumbler of trail mix and honey. Their fingers sticky and warm, Elliott’s buttons would be ruined with James’s casual, reckless hands. As they did every year, roughhousing a game of hockey in the dormitories.
Elliott swallowed his rapid breath.
He closed his eyes, envisioning himself soon at the dormitory with its antique leathers and expensive, polished furniture. Kitty would be reading on the Common Room couch, James asleep at the fireplace, and Elliott drinking eggnog as he mapped the night skies.
If he won’t attend…That profane, insidious voice slithered into his ear, like a specter from the crypt. The woodsmen will track him down…
Elliott’s hair raised, feeling warmth at his nape.
“Am I late?” James asked in a winded rush. Elliott didn’t care that thousands of eyes were on him, gazing up at all of the students on the stern, rough-hewn platform, he threw his arms around James.
“No, you’re on time.”
James lit into a smile. “Perfect. I have something for you.”
Elliott’s eye caught the edge of a letter in his sleeve. James’s usual handwriting was hasty, haphazard, as though he spilled his thoughts all over the page. His pens never had enough ink nor time to fully express his words.
James rarely did anything that mattered to him half-hearted.
Elliott saw ‘To Starfall’ written in perfect script and his heart lunged to his throat.
Starfall was his nickname. The name James had called him for a year after they first met. All you do is paint the stars. I’m headed to the valleys. Are you coming, Starfall?
Elliott nudged him. “Don’t weep for yourself yet, Wilde.”
“Who’s weeping?” James grinned, as eager as a schoolboy, which made Elliott’s heart painfully skip. “Have you eaten yet, Elliott?”
“I never eat before the hibernal. I can’t stomach it.”
“Here. Don’t starve yourself.” James lent a handful of venison cuts into his palm. When did he have time to go hunting?
Down below, crammed among the rest of the orphans and foster children, Kitty’s eyes were glossed with tears, and her mouth was wet with vomit. She looked sickened as she gazed up at James with heartache.
As if it were the very last time she would ever lay eyes on him.
Elliott wished he could sprint down the steps to reassure her that James would be fine.
However, Mrs. Ledgerman would slap him across the mouth for it.
Mrs. Ledgerman stood right beside Kitty in the cold and she would not tolerate any disregard of tradition from him. It was unbecoming of a young man.
Elliott tried to nod at Kitty in solace, but she only cried harder.
James had worn his most formal attire, excessively handsome in full black. A lick of his moon-white hair fell in his eyes and Elliott held back the urge to run his fingers through the strand to set it back into place.
Instead, James kept the errant strand. With his right hand, he held his tailored coat over his right shoulder and he stared ahead at the ceremony procession in restless boredom. After an hour, he blurted, “How long do these last?”
It occurred to Elliott that James had not attended any services or ceremonies in years. That might’ve been his very first sacrificial ceremony in almost a decade. Perhaps ever.
“Two hours.”
“Two hours? You’re taking the piss,” James gasped out loud. “You stand here for two hours every winter?”
“It rained gruesomely last year.”
“You didn’t retreat to the dormitory after twenty minutes?” James pointed out, gesturing to the crowds. “No one would’ve known you were gone; everyone is here.”
That was exactly the reason Elliott faithfully attended.
There was a young person that was sent to die and they needed the comfort of everyone.
How could the entire town not show up to support them?
He couldn’t turn his back on them and head to sleep while they headed to death, it felt compassionless.
The chosen honorarium willingly went to burial on behalf of their tributary gift to the Crucian deity.
Elliott couldn’t be trusted with his thoughts on the mornings after the ceremony.
He often spiraled into despair. The guilt weighed on him and he drank for several nights afterwards.
All he could think of was Mr. Newton. He couldn’t stomach the provisions.
He didn’t partake at all in the honorarium feasts where everyone devoured the roasted rams, seasoned bull meat, and spiced oxen.
He merely drank himself to sleep in his bed.
Elliott participated in their death, and thus, he held himself accountable to attend their final ceremony. However, James was past the point of restless after thirty more minutes, which distracted Elliott from his prayers to God.
“Surely we can’t stand here for all two hours. When is the damn killing announcement?” James glanced at the woodsmen who knelt at the base of the platform beneath them. Not one huntsman moved from their position.
Elliott whispered, “At the very end.”
James rolled his eyes. “This ceremony is absurd. It’s a bastardization of the Anglo-Saxons, anyway.”
Elliott held his tongue as the practitioners delivered their panegyric, reiterating the necessity of self sacrifice to the winter deity and praising the profound bravery of contributing to the rites. The provost sat furthest behind, too far for Elliott to see, even if he squinted.
James checked his wristwatch.
At last, the two hours had passed. 1:59 AM.
The pale sun wouldn’t peek through the blanched-white sky, seeping light over the mountain range that enveloped Banebury until after seven. In the crude, early dark, the woodsmen rose from the weathered earth. It was time.
A few of the senior electors shot back a thimbleful of bracers and drams, preparing themselves for the moment. Callum Han’s hand quavered with regret, and he refused to meet Elliott’s eyes, nearly spilling the libation on himself. Elliott had never seen him that unraveled before.
Elliott narrowed his eyes on him. We have an agreement.
Callum kept his eyes fused on his feet.
The rector was in attendance with the provost’s bident.
His electors were swathed in obsidian robes behind him as he finally ascended the stage to extend the provost’s terse gratitude to the dutiful masses of Banebury.
Elliott’s breath stopped as the rector handed the bident to the smirking Lucien Montclair.
Wreathed upon Lucien’s head were broad, forked stag antlers for the winter forest ritual.
“By the merit of their peers, the AEscwulf College trust of electors have selected their chosen honorarium for this year’s hibernal ceremony. May Winterfyllet be merciful.”
“May Winterfyllet be merciful,” Elliott muttered with the rest of the breathless students. Who would it be this year?
Many seemed so certain it was James Wilde that Elliott felt the eyes of the entire audience directly stare at James.
Lucien smiled wolfishly at James himself and James returned his smile with a boyish grin as if he were sixteen years old again. James turned to Elliott. “Promise you’ll read the letter at the end of this? I plan to shake the hand of the provost as a…final gesture of farewell.”
Elliott stepped protectively in front of him, silently ignoring the eyes of thousands. “Farewell won’t be needed. The selection this year will be Lucien.”
Beware the Ides of March. Elliott’s heart thrashed in his chest as Lucien treaded forward to announce the selected name. Lucien gingerly clutched his lower left abdomen, Elliott noticed, and he still couldn’t fully stand straight several weeks after October.
“The trust of electors is privileged to announce…”
Not James Wilde. Elliott formed fists at his sides. Pinpricks of darkness tinted the edges of his eyes with raw anger. Not James Wilde or Finch Hudskin, you swore. I devoured that decomposed pig.
A wicked malignance swirled in Lucien’s falsely solemn voice.
“The winter’s pick of the honorarium will be…”
Keep our agreement. Elliott could still taste the smeared dirt and grist at the back of his throat. He was slowly losing his mind to fury. Keep your word.
Elliott felt James step past him to stand before all of Banebury. James gave a roguish tragedian bow before them all, accepting a chalice of wine, until Lucien declared the name.
“…Elliott Archway.”
James Wilde bit his tongue so hard, it bled through.