I'm very pleased to welcome the fabulously smutty and fantastic Kay Berrisford
to my blog, to talk about the inspiration behind her own 'Wild Hunt'
creatures of myth in her new book, 'Bound to the Beast'.....
Over to Kay!!
The
Wild Ones
There’s
a part of every novel that’s a nightmare to write. In Bound to the
Beast, there’s little doubt about that part that
gave me the most grief – bringing life to the Wild Hunt.
Ah
yes, the Wild Hunt. A pack of the undead who maraud across the land,
terrorizing the natives and sucking blood! Ghosts! Zombies! The evil
dead, with their eyes drooling from their sockets and their flesh
hanging off! That’s going to be fun to write, huh?
Well,
you’d think so, and it
was fun to research. The origins of the Wild Hunt are obscure and
diverse, encompassing the Germanic ‘Wilde Jagd’ and the Nordic
‘Ride of Asgard,’ their leaders including Odin, Woden, and in
England King Arthur, Sir Francis Drake, and the devil himself, as
well as Herne the Hunter, the hero of my novel (for more on Herne click here)
The
hunters themselves have variously been portrayed as the rotting
corpses of condemned criminals, hellhounds, fairies, or the souls of
deceased, unbaptised infants (the latter two, of course, sometimes
perceived as one and the same.)
And their purpose?
Well, usually the
Wild Hunt were seen as harbingers of doom, scourging the land on the
eve of great disasters, and that’s the angle I used in my book,
where my tortured anti-hero, Herne, has led the Hunt across England
on the eve of Viking pillaging, the Norman Conquest and the plague of
the black death.
Bad boy!
There
are plenty
of awesome descriptions of the Hunt too, not least in the romantic
literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when so much
‘ancient’ folk lore was (re)invented.
Arguably most evocative is
W.B. Yeats, ‘The Hosting of the Sidhe,’ from his collection
inspired by Gaelic faery lore, The
Celtic Twilight
(1893).
The
Hosting Of The Sidhe (by William Butler Yeats)
The host
is riding from Knocknarea
And over the grave of
Clooth-na-Bare;
Caoilte tossing his burning hair,
And Niamh
calling Away, come away:
Empty your heart of its mortal dream.
The
winds awaken, the leaves whirl round,
Our cheeks are pale, our
hair is unbound,
Our breasts are heaving our eyes are agleam,
Our
arms are waving our lips are apart;
And if any gaze on our rushing
band,
We come
between him and the deed of his hand,
We come between him and the
hope of his heart.
The host is rushing 'twixt night and day,
And
where is there hope or deed as fair?
Caoilte tossing his burning
hair,
And Niamh calling Away, come away.
Hmmm,
a bit of a hard act to follow, maybe?
Yes, but I really shouldn’t whinge. Reinventing the Wild Hunt for
my own purposes was hard work, but a hell of a lot of fun. The main
trouble was representing the Hunt as anything other than a monolithic
mass, so I turned, as so often, to research.
I discovered a plethora
of colourful characters, including Wild Edric, once a Lord of the
Welsh Marches, and his fairy wife Godda, who apparently led the Hunt
to terrorize the people of Shropshire before the British campaign in
Crimea in the 1850s, and prior the First and Second World Wars. It’s
always good for a character to have challengers snapping at their
heels, so I made my Herne work hard to keep control of his hunters.
The
Wild Hunt, then, has haunted imaginations for centuries, and after a
little exploration, they certainly took root in mine. When the wind
moans and rattles through the trees of the New Forest, it’s hard
not to prick up one’s ears, listen for the bay of the hunting
hounds and the pounding of the hooves, and shiver at the prospect.
Could it be time for England to fall again?
Well,
I bloody well hope not. But I wouldn’t say ‘no’
to a fleeting glimpse of Herne and his fairy band...
Thank you
so much Melanie for letting me blog here today.
Bound to the
Beast (A Greenwood novel) by Kay Berrisford. Published by Loose Id.
Art work by Anne Cain. Genres: m/m,
paranormal, fantasy, BDSM, historical. Novel, 68,000 words.
Blurb:
England, 1588. When a fairy betrothal ritual goes wrong, village lad
Tam is bonded to Herne the Hunter. Warrior, legend, and Greenwood
spirit, Herne once led the terrifying Wild Hunt, an army of the
undead who rode as harbingers of doom. When his passions are stirred
and his blood is up, Herne sports the antlers of a mighty stag.
Herne could be the lover Tam secretly craves, but Herne’s
past makes him fear the brooding warrior will enslave or kill him.
While Herne admires Tam’s toughness and humor, he has rejected
love—as he has sworn off leading the Wild Hunt—and wishes only
for solitude. To break their betrothal, they must travel into the
Greenwood, a realm of magic and bondage where their desires for each
other grow dangerously irresistible, and the Wild Hunt bays for their
blood. As the threat rises, Herne’s mastery and compassion
realize Tam’s darkest sexual fantasies. Soon he’s no longer
fighting for his freedom, wishing to be bound to this beast forever.
But can Herne’s tortured heart be reawakened? And if so, will their
love destroy them both, or prove Herne the Hunter’s greatest
weapon?
Excerpt:
The
ghosts of the abbey are real. They are here. Why was I such a fool to
trust Herne the Hunter?
As
a dark whirlwind of ghosts rushed toward him, fright rioted in Tam’s
guts. His gaze fixed on one who wore a shirt of white hair spattered
with blood, surely one of the massacred monks. The cowl shrouding his
face and the upside-down crucifix dangling on his bloodied breast
confirmed all.
Tam
turned to run, skirting the pool, but they gained on him too quickly.
He heard the bray of a goat, and the tempest engulfed him. As he
crumpled to his knees, men, horses, and beasts of all kinds swirled
about him as if he were caught at the heart of a child’s spinning
top. White hounds snapped teeth like razors, and death had mutilated
each.
A
creature reached toward him, once female. She possessed a single eye,
and straw-like hair streamed from half her head, the other side bald,
her scalp flaked and peeling. Tam gasped in the foul stench of a
rotting corpse, and then the storm dashed her out of the way.
The
monk reared inches from Tam’s nose, ripping open his own horsehair
shirt to reveal gaping entrails, gore, and pus. Then the monk leaped
onto the back of an ox. The animal’s flesh crawled with maggots and
worms, and it uttered a rasping wail.
Storm
clouds brewed overhead, but the pool reflected only the faint, pink
light of a smothered sun. His stomach clenched so hard he gagged. He
hugged his arms over his head, whispering a frantic prayer to
whichever god or spirit would care to deliver him. The only response
came from the devilish company surrounding him.
He
heard a high-pitched voice, grating and undeniably male. “Look at
us, boy. Use those eyes before we gouge them out.”
He
whimpered, refusing to open his eyes. Bony fingers grasped his hair
and wrenched his head back.
“Look
at us.”
He
had little choice but to obey, his breath hitching on the next
unnatural sight. The speaker wore a long cloak that parted at the
loins, revealing in place of his cock a curved horn tapered to a
point. The ivory gleam of this beast’s horn matched a white grin
that glowed beneath a black hood, unattached to any discernible face.
“You
cried out for the power of the horned one, boy. Is this
what you begged for?”
Oh
Lord, the ghostly monks must have seen every dark craving within his
soul to have summoned this demon. He knew of the brutally crafted
tortures that gods and kings inflicted on sodomites, even those who
just thought on such sins.
The
demon’s fingers pressed into Tam’s skull, and he stared at the
barbed cock, his throat too tight to yell.
The
pure note of a hunting horn shattered through his fear-racked body,
so powerful his heart might burst. He heard a bestial cry, the heavy
swish
of a sword, a dull thud, and another sickening scream. The
horn-cocked demon let him go. The ghosts that possessed lips rolled
them back, snarling and hissing. They rushed across the water toward
the forest in a mass of claws and fists and teeth that raked over
rotten flesh and bones, each demon fighting to scramble past the
others.
Tam
gaped up at Herne, who alone towered over him on the bank of the mill
pool, his sword smeared with blood and his antlers spreading toward
the clouded skies.
“Come
with me.” Herne stooped and caught Tam under both arms, pulling him
up. Tam let him, too shaken for words and gasping as if he’d nearly
drowned. When Herne wrapped his thickly muscled arms around him, Tam
melted, burying his face in Herne’s shoulder. His body still quaked
with mortal fear, yet for a few moments, he felt safe.
Before
he could think too hard about why he trusted the huntsman so, Herne
released him. “Get dressed.”
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