The King Under The Hill

*

I wield a short-handled hammer, but I am not Thor.

The Chalk Giant on the hillside raises his own hammer in centuries-long salute.

*

I make my living as a roofer. Traverse the County on my trusty white charger. A transit van, a bag of tools, a set of ladders and a box of tiles. My office is a mobile phone.

Sometimes, I sleep in the back. Sometimes, I doss in a cheap hotel. Sometimes, I make it back to my rented room above a lock-up garage.

Tonight, I will be kipping upstairs in this pub where I am eating dinner. It is a bit of a dive. Loud music and pole dancers. But the home-made curry and local brew are decent.

I ignore the girls as best I can. All jiggling flesh, lewd poses and bored disdain behind their eyes. I cannot afford their company, either in cash or good conscience.

Yet, one dancer catches my eye. She seems different to the others. Her body is lissome, lithe, with boyish hips and apple breasts. Her movements are athletic rather than erotic. I see wiry muscles flex on her arms and thighs. Her limbs are pale and gleam almost ghostly beneath the lights. No Tango-orange fake tan. No mask of make-up. Her face kabuki-clear, lit by the blazing torch of her hair. A forest fire leaping leaf to leaf across the treetops.

She dances close. Her hair brushes my face. I catch a waft of her perfume. Spice, stronger than my curry. I see the peach fuzz of down upon her skin. She leans closer. I feel her breath, warm as honey from the hive, as she whispers in my ear.

”Help,” she pleads. “Oh, help me. The iron in the pole is anathema to my kind. It chains me to this place. And it burns. Oh, Goddess. How it burns.”

*

Usually, I am quick to kick the dirt of each small town from the soles of my workman's boots. But there is something attractive about this place, on the borderland where the Downs begin.

Atop the hill, looking down at all the roofs in random array,I can see there is work enough here to last me a lifetime.

“Hello.” A voice calls, cool and clear as the breeze upon the rill. “Can you help me?”

There is a young girl waving to me from the slope below. I wave back and descend towards her. Crickets hail my approach and leap out of the long grass.

Her white dress is painfully bright in the unclouded sunshine. It shimmers like a mirage in the heat. Flutters, as if it is about to transform into a flock of Cabbage Whites and fly away.

Her upturned face blooms heliotrope and I see she is a woman rather than a girl. She is sitting on a couch-shaped rock. A tumbled dolmen, grim as a tombstone engraved with moss-grey script.

Her right hand is hidden amongst brambles. She gestures to it with her left.

“I seem to be caught,” she says. “I was going to pick some blackberries, but... Well, you can see...”

She smiles in chagrin. Her eyes sparkle green as a spring meadow, as sunshine on the morning dew.

I sit beside her and part the prickly branches to examine her hand. Her fingers are long and pale, her wrist slim and delicate. She is wearing a silver bracelet; a coiled celtic knot tight to her skin, which is somehow tangled in the undergrowth.

I cannot find a clasp to release it. There is a red weal where she has apparently struggled to free herself but only chafed her wrist all the more. Nor can I untangle or break the brambles' sinewy grip.

“I'm sorry.” I admit defeat. “I think I'm going to have to break your bracelet.”

Her smile does not waver. I am dazzled by the curve of her lips, like sunrise on the horizon.

“Oh, I'll be brave.” She briefly leans her head on my shoulder. Her hair is wilder and more tangled than the branches with which I am grappling. Her scent fills my nostrils like pollen and makes it difficult to breath. “I've been wearing it a long time. It's more manacle than ornament.”

The links are tiny and fiddly. I twist them with my thumbs and the metal bites into my skin. But they slowly bend and I am able to ease them apart.

She pulls her hand free. There is a scratch on one of her fingers and a bead of blood forming on the tip.

On impulse, I hold her hand and kiss the small wound. Her blood upon my tongue as sweet as blackberry juice.

*

It is a time of heroes, of Gods abroad the youngling world.

The Fey Folk station a Giant to guard the entrance to their tomb.

*

I could doze here forever beneath the blue canopy of sky. Starlings hang on the thermal updraught like a slow turning mobile. The synaesthetic drone of bees is a lead weight dragging down my eyelids.

I stir. There is an ache in my bones. A pleasant ache, from a long-held tension finally released.

Languidly, I roll on my side and prop myself up on one elbow to gaze at her sleeping form, cushioned by green quilted clumps of grass.

The floss of her hair reminds me of clouds tinged fiery by the setting sun. Like many natural redheads, she has an almost translucent complexion. There is a hint of blue tracery of veins beneath the surface.

I watch freckles appearing on the bridge of her nose and across her high cheekbones. I try to count them, but more are constantly materialising out of nowhere. I cannot keep track.

There is a further dusting across her collarbones, spreading down to the bee-sting swell of her breasts. She has no cleavage to speak of, but I still find myself trying to peek down the front of her dress.

She seems to feel my shadow falling on her face and opens her eyes.

“Hello, you.” She greets me with a quirky smile that crinkles her nose. “Watcha doing?”

“Counting your freckles,” I admit, feeling myself blushing. “Or trying to. I never seem to get the same number twice.”

“Like the Giant's Children.”

“The what?”

“The Giant's Children.” She sits up and shades her eyes, pointing in an arc around us. “That's what these standing stones are called.”

“Oh.” I had not registered their presence as any more than a few scattered rocks on top of the hill, before. But now, I can see they form a rough circle round the summit. They are all quite small and unremarkable, otherwise.

“People have been attempting to count them for centuries. And to plot their exact positions. Except they seem to move around and pop in and out of view.”

“That's daft.” I squint at one of the larger stones and dare it to disappear.

“The legend is that they are the children of the Chalk Giant. They dance and play when no-one is looking. Especially at Midsummer. And they're supposed to wreak mischief on non-believers. So watch it.”

There is a sincerity in her voice, at odds with her smile.

“Do you know a lot of these stories?”

“Of course.” She stands up in one graceful, fluid movement and gazes away from the town, towards the hazy horizon of the farther hills. “What are we but the stories we tell about ourselves?”

The breeze lifts the hem of her dress and I am distracted by the marble perfection of her legs.

“That's too deep for me,” I admit.

*

He calls himself King. He is but one tribal chief amongst many who claim to rule this County.

There are many stories, which partake of the truth of myth, without the ugly loose ends and inconsistencies of fact.

*

She emerges from the bathroom in a cloud of steam, with a towel wrapped round her skinny frame. A second towel adorns her head, folded into a turban with a casual skill that seems innate to women.

“And another thing,” she says, continuing a one-sided conversation from two hours ago. “I'm tired of sweeping up your muddy bootprints from the carpet.”

I am used to accepting the blame for things. It is a burden I do not so much shoulder as side-step. But this accusation stings because I know I am innocent.

“I don't know what you mean,” I protest. “I climb about on roofs. There's no mud up there.”

I waggle my booted feet in evidence. A bit worn and scuffed, but no mud.

She swears. Rips the towel from her head and chucks it at me. It hits my chest with a damp splat and I emit an oof! of surprise.

I am still coming to terms with what she has done to her hair. It is short and spiky. There is dried henna on the side of her neck, which makes it look as if her ear has been bleeding.

“Do something useful. Get me a drink.”

Is that wise? I stop myself from asking. Her eyes increasingly resemble two green olives floating in glasses of vodka.

She twirls the new bracelet round her wrist and slips her hand in and out of the silver band, as if reassuring herself that she could remove it at any time.

*

After the civic ceremony, we adjourn to the hillside above the town for the traditional blessing known as 'handfasting'. Something of a cottage industry in this area.

The local self-styled Druid officiates. His white robe of office is pristine and ornate enough to put any new bride's dress to shame.

He raises his staff and calls upon the Gods of Sun and Moon to witness our union.

We stand upon the Chalk Giant's Hammer and he invokes the King Under The Hill as we repeat our vows. Then he further binds our troth by interweaving cords of gold and silver to plait our hands together.

Thus, we are literally tied arm-in-arm for the remainder of the day – and figuratively for the remainder of our lives.

Being Midsummer's Eve, we are not the only couple who partake of this ritual. There is a suitably pagan party atop the hill. A marquee with a running buffet, a free bar and a generator to power a mobile disco and light show.

We dance close together – how else? - with our hands pressed between our hearts. Her hair is garlanded with flowers, but beneath their scent I still detect the distinctive perfume of her skin. An aroma sharp as new-mown grass. No. Something more animalistic.

When I was a young boy, I had a puppy. We used to play together in the back garden. We rolled about on the lawn. I buried my face in its soft fur and breathed the living warmth of its essence.

The sensuous movement of her body beneath her dress, in time with the throb of music, also evokes something akin to a memory. Something formless and unsettling, like the apprehension of a half-forgotten dream.

We step out of the marquee and continue to dance beneath the midnight sky. The Moon is a huge dead rock, crudely sculpted to resemble a skull. The stars wink in and out of existence and are too numerous to count.

I trip over a standing stone and sprawl giggling on a cold bed of grass. I feel a wrench as our wedding cords break. I thought they would be stronger.

In the shifting, multi-coloured light spilling from the marquee, I could swear there are chains of daisies and buttercups drooping from our arms.

*

She nudges me awake. “Did you hear that?”

I grunt in the negative, but it is a reflexive response. I may have heard something. I am aware of a sort of after-echo and my heart is beating too fast.

A muffled, shuffling thud from the hallway.

Every horror movie cliché is replaying in my head as I slide from under the covers and pull on a pair of jeans. Fumbling in the dark. Making sure they are not back to front. That I do not catch my dick in the zip.

Avoid the creaky floorboard by the door. Shit! I stub my toe and see my pain as comic-book flashes of light. Clutch my foot. Step back and cre-ee-eak! The floor shrieks like a tortured soul.

Fuck this for a game of soldiers. I fling the bedroom door open and step into the hall. Flick the light switch. Squint in the forty-watt glare.

There are lumps of dried mud on the carpet. In the rough shape of footprints. As if someone has walked in the door and caked-on dirt has fallen from their boots.

The King Under The Hill is here to reclaim his errant bride.

I could turn and confront the spectral figure. See the grave mud fall from his face and reveal the featureless stone beneath. Maybe scream as he raises his axe.

But I choose not to tell that story about myself.

I am shacked up with an ex pole dancer. I make a decent living mending people's roofs. I am not always happy. My life is full of loose ends and inconsistencies. This is just one of them.

*