The Crone’s Stone

by Barb Taub

“Here, Luna. To me now.” Mhairi’s whistle carried across the heather and echoed back unanswered. No bark. No jingle of tags. No silky black-and-white rush out of the dark, the good dog answering her whistle every day for nine years.

She turned on the spot, torch beam swinging. Where was everyone? The whole walking-tour group was supposed to be here for the Samhain lecture, gathered before midnight, just as their guide, self-styled Shaman Jamie, had insisted. Instead, her beam found only trampled grass and three massive standing stones, ringed around her like a conversation stopped just as she walked in.

She lifted her carved walking stick and tapped the nearest stone. Cold shivered up the wood and into her wrist. Her feet moved where others had gone for thousands of years. She couldn’t have told what those ancient feet sought, but her feet knew. She moved on to the next, then the next, circling as she whistled. “Here Luna! Good dog.”

It was only when she reached the first stone again that she noticed she never once crossed the ring. Always the wide arc, always the edge. She couldn’t think why.

The clouds slid off the moon. Pale silver light poured over the great horizontal slab that capped two stones, creeping along it, slow as a spreading stain.

It wasn’t intended as a sacrificial table. Jamie’s voice rose in her memory from the pre-trip recordings, hushed and pretentious. Thirteen stones, one for each moon. A calendar, a matriarchy. A priestess for every month’s rites, and the great three: Maiden, Mother, Crone.

Mhairi counted the stones again. Four, surrounding the moonlit stone table.

She stopped whistling. She had counted three before. She was a retired teacher, she had a good dog, and she had never miscounted a class in her life.

The moonlight inched forward. Another shadow hovered at the edge of her torch beam, tall and monolithic, standing as though it had always been there. Five. Six. Behind her something settled into the earth with a sound like a held breath let go. Nine stones. Ten.

Later, Jamie’s recorded voice had said, almost relishing it, the priestesses were replaced by men, and men brought blood. The only grave ever opened here held two bodies. A young woman and a child were laid exactly where the Samhain moonlight would point to them. The calcium of their bones had eaten a ghost image of their bodies into the stone cairn where they were laid. Mother. Maiden.

The moonlight reached the exact center of the slab and lit what was lying there.

Jamie. Beads glinting in his braids, his shaman’s staff in hands folded across his chest, his face turned toward her as if he had been waiting.

She should go to him. Check for a pulse, try CPR. But her feet had stopped listening, and some small, ancient part of her recognized that what the stones wanted was not the sort of thing a retired teacher with a missing dog could argue with. Her hotel would be warm. There was a G&T with her name on it. Back home was her little cottage with her tiny flock of sheep to keep her and Luna busy in retirement. She did not belong in a moonlit ring of stones that could not possibly be here.

She backed away and her shoulder struck rock. Red jasper, faintly glowing, that had not been there. The stone Jamie had called the Crone.

Her torch shook as she raised it. Letters had been cut deep into the stone, furred with lichen, soft with centuries of moss.

MHAIRI.

Not fresh. Not fresh at all. Someone had carved her name before her grandmother’s grandmother was born.

A sound came behind her, small and wet: the huff of breath through a nose.

She turned slowly. At the far edge of the light, flat to the heather, a dog was watching her. Black and white. Belly down, head low, shoulders rolled forward. That border collie stare. The one Luna used on sheep, the one that said don’t you dare, the one Luna had never once in nine years turned on Mhairi.

Luna wasn’t missing. Luna was working.

Every step of the night came back to her at once. The arc she walked around the edge of the ring. Every gap she’d turned toward, and the stone that had risen to close it. She hadn’t wandered here. She’d been herded, round and round and inward, exactly the way Luna brought her own flock down the glen.

From the table came two soft rising notes. A whistle.

Her whistle. The one she spent nine years teaching a dog: to me, now.

Luna’s ears flicked toward the sound, then back to Mhairi, a good dog awaiting orders from a new handler. The moonlight lay perfectly still on the stone. Mhairi’s feet were already moving.