A Feast Unknown by Unknown Author

Author:Unknown Author
Language: eng
Format: epub

25

The entrance was carved out of rock, delta-shaped, and only large enough to admit one at a time. It was a tight squeeze for me.

The cave was well-lit only in the center. Elsewhere, it was dim dusk for the space of a few yards and then blackness. The rough granite floor sloped downwards from all sides to the center. At the bottom was a tiny lake of black water, and in its center was a truncated cone of large rough-hewn oaken blocks and beams. On top of the island, which was about twelve feet high, was a circular oaken table, a ring. Inside the ring were nine high-backed intricately carved oak and ash chairs. The Nine entered through a trapdoor in the middle of the wooden cone.

The ceiling was covered with darkness except in the center, where nine massive crystaline stalactites hung down, like glowing hanged men, from the night of the ceiling. The light came from nine giant torches of wood and pitch projecting from moveable stone pillars set around the edges of the platform top.

We lesser beings stood on the slope—there were no chairs for us—throughout the ceremony. There was silence except for the inevitable coughing, occasioned by nervousness, not colds, since those who drink the elixir have no physical diseases. We were not allowed to speak except in reply to the Nine.

After a long time, the Speaker came up through the hole in the island and stood to one side of the chairs, leaning his staff with its ankh and hannunvaakuna outwards from him.

Slowly, one by one, the Nine appeared from the hole and took their assigned chairs. The last to appear was the most important, the old woman Anana.

Only eight of the Nine were here. The chair just to the right of Anana's was empty. It belonged to the giant white-bearded old man who wore a double-headed raven headpiece and a black patch over a good eye. We knew him only as XauXaz.

The eight were dressed in their monkish robes, but the hoods were hanging behind their necks, and they wore their headpieces. Anana's was the head of a wild sow, and the others wore the heads of a bear, a wolf, a hyena, a ram, a jaguar, a badger, and an elk.

The woman Anana looked us over for a long time. I have been close to her many times, so I knew that she looked as if she were 125 and kept Death away only by scaring him. I had reason to believe that she was 30,000 years.

Finally, she gestured at the Speaker. He walked to the empty chair beside her and lifted from its seat what the shadows had hidden. It was the two-headed raven headpiece of XauXaz. He placed it on the table before the chair and stamped the end of his staff against the oaken floor so that it boomed nine times.

He cried out in English in a loud voice that echoed back from the murkiness, “XauXaz has gone to his ancestors,

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