With a whoomph, Margaret triggered the schmoolies. Rockets fired hundreds of feet into the air and burst into a wide, white bubble of light that domed over the grave yard. Barry scrambled to his feet and half-ran, half-crawled back towards the others.
“Defensive formation,” screamed Marge over the stone soldier’s roar. Pete and Martin crossed batons and beat a fast-paced defensive rhythm forming a shield to resist the onslaught. The dome had almost fully formed, its defensive walls keeping all magick within an enclosed arena and re-rendering the scene from red to monochrome grey.
The soldier swung his arm in a wide arc. Headstones ripped from ground around him and flew towards Barry as he rolled under the lip of Pete and Martin’s shield. The debris exploded against the barrier, casting stone shards and dust up and over the shield – peppering Margaret who had hunkered down ten feet behind. As she spat out the dust a ripple of fear flowed across her stomach.
Pete uncrossed his sticks, dissipating the shield, and clattered out a military drum pattern on the top edge of his instrument. Barry took the cue. With a nod of understanding to Martin, they wide-stepped like sumo wrestlers. Stamping onto the wet, debris-strewn grass, their ankle bells crackled with magick. Two co-ordinated stamps followed by a double crack of their sticks sent a single combined blast of ley-energy towards the hovering soldier.
With barely any movement, Capt. Banks swung his rifle across his chest and nullified the incoming blast. He continued the momentum and began to rotate the rifle. Spinning it in front of his chest in a manner, Barry remembered fondly from decades visiting the Edinburgh Tattoo. Hastily, the team constructed another defensive shield, this time enhanced by Barry’s inclusion.
The shield formed just as the rifle emited a searing blast that gouged a trench from the soldier towards them. In a fraction of a second, the top metre of earth was funnelled in their direction. Their shield crumpled under the weight of earth and stone, rolling them all backwards, tumbling into Margaret’s chair, which toppled in turn, unseating Margaret and leaving them all jumbled on the ground.
“Tyr,” croaked Margret, the totem still grasped in her palm. Laying on her side, she pulled at the vape and exhaled the orange cloud.
“I call upon you, as my right to call,” The totem pulsed in her hand. “As our father’s father’s agreed. As a vassal, bound to our land: I call upon you in our time of need.”
The totem vibrated and warmed. Margaret’s fear almost gave way to relief at the familiar feeling of knowing their captive god would imminently arrive to mop up whatever mess they’d gotten into.
Capt. Banks was rapidly closing the ground between, his head down, bayonet drawn, charging towards the enemy along the channel his rifle had scored into the graveyard. As he neared the figure of Tyr shimmered into existence from within the orange vape cloud. He looked worse than ever. Barely able to hold his head up, with his one good (and one existing) eye he glared at the charging soldier.
Tyr clapped his hand together with his forearm stump in front of him. Pinning the bayonet between his palm and arm, halting the soldier in his charge.
Their coming together was as two container ships colliding. The immense forces held them in balance for a few seconds before Tyr buckled onto one, and then both knees. Capt. Tom drove the bayonet into Tyr’s chest.
“No!” screamed Marge, her eyes pinned wide, paralyzed in fear.
The stone soldier pushed forwards, his face expressionless, driving Tyr onto his back – the bayonet forced through him and into the earth.
—
Time ceased to function.
“This isn’t our land,” said a rasping voice in Margaret’s head.
“I can’t hold him back my love. He’s stronger than I am here.” said the voice, barely above a whisper ”I think he’s stronger than me wherever I am.”
“No, Tyr, don’t say that. You can fight him” insisted Margaret
“I can’t, Love. You and I both know it. I’ve been getting weaker for years. And—”
“Don’t, Tyr. We can’t do this without you—”
“You will.” said Tyr. “You must.”
Margaret suddenly saw Tyr in front of her mind’s eye renewed as the man she first summoned. Broad chested and thick haired, his leather armour only scuffed, not shredded as she had just witnessed him. He stood, straight-backed and smiled at her.
Her heart tore within her chest. Her foundations turned to sand. Eyes welling with tears, her throat closed with grief.
This wasn’t meant to happen. She wasn’t meant to out-live him and have to live alone. He’s a god, for fuck’s sake. Who out-lives a god! She was meant to bequeath him, like her father did to her, and his father to him. It isn’t fair if he abandons them all now.
But she could see the toll taken by Tyr. He is dying. Endlessly dying.
He’s already thousands of years past dead and we’re putting him through misery, forcing him to fight as he weakens each time. It’s not fair for him either.
Maybe all this keeping Avalon safe stuff is just nonsense. Safe from what exactly? We aren’t even in England at all. Why are we fighting in France against an enemy we don’t understand? An enemy who seems to look like… well, one of us. Putting Tyr through all this isn’t fair on any of us.
“You know I’ll be waiting for you when you come. Please let me go.” He said, smile lines peaking from behind his eye patch.
She dug her nails into the totem and thought the necessary words. Tyr’s image in her mind flickered and crackled. As his body faded away, the last thing she saw was his smile.
“I love you, Margaret,” Tyr’s voice said in her head. “We’ll be together soon enough.”
—
The van smashed into the stone soldier’s side. Airbags exploded out of the dashboard and door pillars as Barry headbutted into their soft embrace.
The soldier topped to one knee, his bayonet buried cross-piece deep into the ground – Tyr disapparated. The van’s bonnet remained buckled into the soldier’s silhouette, steam began to billow from under the hood.
Barry shook the muddle from his head, his ears ringing from the impact and punched at the CD player.
“The Maid of the Mill,” an Abingdon Morris classic, burst to life lopsidedly from the intact speakers. Barry turned it up to eleven. The soldier’s head whipped round to face the music.
His face flickered with the faces they had seen before. The old man in pain, the young boy in fear along with others rippling across in quick succession. Each face strained to hear the tune.
Barry kicked the van door open and collapsed out onto the grass.
“It’s Tom Banks,” he shouted over the music. “He’s one of us. Martin, don’t you remember? The Nine?”
The Nine? thought Martin, still tangled in a heap with Margaret, Pete and a wheelchair. “That does ring a bell.”
“The Nine?” asked Margaret.
“Give me a minute…” said Martin, trawling his aged memory banks for something he knew was filed away in there.
“Oh, take all day, Martin… who knows how long the stone-soldier will happily listen to Morris FM.”
“The NINE!” exclaimed Martin. The penny dropped painfully slowly. “They were a Morris troop in the early 1900s. I remember they laid down some of the early notation. Surely it’s not that Tom Banks… Is it?”
The soldier was still kneeling, his head angled towards the music. The faces cycling across his face were calmer now. The boy was almost smiling.
“Damn, well, looks like it might be.”said Margaret, struggling to free herself from the tangle of limbs. “Now get us up.”
—
Back in Kent, two days later, it was club night. Margaret sat at the front of the scout hut strategically positioned next to the whiteboard. Peter, Barry and Martin sat dutifully before her, awaiting the conclusion to this week’s lecture. Glenda, special guest tonight, perched on a table close to the door.
“Well, that’s about it.” said Margaret. “We four know how it went down, so this last little recap is solely for Glenda’s benefit.” Glenda shifted to show attention was being paid.
“Barry slammed into Tom with the van. Not sure how we’re going to explain this to the Insurance Meerkats, but that’s another matter. He followed the smash up with another stroke of genius, playing out something from the Morris back catalogue of greatest hits. And that did it. Tom was pretty much instantly subdued. A couple of tunes later, and he became communicative. Chatty even. For an apparition.
“Turns out Tom’s entire Morris troop had signed up to fight in World War One. The ‘Great War’ they were told. ‘The War to End All Wars’. They felt excited to fight side by side with their Morris brothers-in-arms, so they’d marched off gladly.
“Well, spoiler alert, it wasn’t a great war. They all died. One by one. Horribly. Needlessly. And Tom watched each one of them go before he was taken out by a mortar in 1916. Every last one of the Nine were killed, their bodies laid to rest on French soil.
“What the French didn’t realise was that they had built the Maroeuil Cemetery directly on top of a ley-line. The same ley-line that crosses under the channel and snakes its way up to Blighty.
“It took Tom a hundred years of pulling on that ley-line to manifest enough of himself, and his troop, into the entity we met.” Margret paused and took a sip of milky tea.
“So, the issues we were having along the ley-line here in England?” asked Glenda.
“Cock-ups. Well, that’s how he puts it. Trying to harness the power of ley energy to remanifest the souls of his entire troop without them all disintegrating was almost impossible. There were bound to be cock ups.
“The bursts of ley that fused into that Woeborn, the flare-up up north and the one that dropped a bingo hall into a sink-hole. That was all because Tom was playing with something he couldn’t control. He couldn’t keep a lid on that amount of ley-energy as he tried to keep the souls of his troop alive and it kept bursting out wherever there was emotional resonance along the line.”
“You say it like you’re still in contact with him, Margaret?” said Glenda, raising an eyebrow in Margaret’s direction. Margaret shared a knowing smile with the others.
“We are still in contact,” Margaret smiled and held up Tyr’s battered totem. “In fact, we have nine new helpers.”
“It wasn’t right to leave them all in France,” butted in Barry. “After they had calmed down and knew we were Morris just like them, it only made sense to bring them back here.”
“And with an empty totem,” added Marge, “the Nine were more than happy to fill the vacancy. The Nine get to defend Britain again, but this time, on British soil.”
Glenda’s eyebrow dropped, and a smile broke across her face “This will take a bit of getting used to. But, it’s the best news we’ve had all month.”
Inside Margaret’s head, the clipped speech of a British army officer said, “Thank you again, Ms Palmer. We owe you a great debt.”
“You are most welcome.” thought Margaret. “Welcome home, all of you.”