Beguilers Read Free Page A

keep children at home in bed. There hadn’t been an accident in all the time that I was alive, or at least not one that could realistically be attributed to a beguiler. I had always had a secret fascination for the night and chafed against the customs of the village. But now, alone on the mountain with those strange and silent creatures, I wasn’t so sure.
    I lay down on my stomach among the puffberry bushes and put my hands over my eyes. I couldn’t hear them, but I could sense them some other way, still flitting about above my head. At least, I believed I could. There was no question of my being in any danger unless I looked at them; of that I was sure. The legends say that it is only when you look into the eyes of a beguiler they become a danger to you. Even so, I was afraid. There’s no sense in pretending that I wasn’t.
    I kept my eyes covered for as long as I could. With my head there close to the ground I thought at first that the world was filled with some enormous noise, appropriate to the fear that I was experiencing. But before long I realised that the sound I was hearing was the sound of fear itself. My heart was pounding, causing the blood to roar in my ears, and my rapid breathing was amplified because my face was pressed against the ground. When I relaxed for a moment and held my breath, I found that the world was almost silent.
    I became aware of the night insects in the grass among the bushes, and a stray creeper of spinescutch was pricking into my stomach. I moved a hand to pull it away and saw only darkness all around. Carefully I looked up. The beguilers were gone. Slowly, cautiously, I got to my feet and looked out. Far below, the soft lights of the village were visible but that was all.
    The moonlight was cool and distant, comfortless. As my fear subsided and my circulation returned to normal and was forgotten, I realised that my knees were trembling. What had happened to me there on the mountain was one of the most frightening experiences of my life, but it was also one of the most exhilarating. Even as I stood there with the sweat of fear cooling beneath my shirt, I was aware of an authenticity within, a correspondence of circumstance with my own nature.
    If I had assumed anything while I lay among the puffberry bushes it was that if I survived the ordeal I would return straight home. But now I had no desire to do so. The faint, twinkling lights of the village were not suggestive of comfort but of suffocation and retribution. Whatever had brought me up on to the hill-side in the darkness had not been weakened by my encounter with the beguilers, but strengthened instead. With little sense of purpose but with a great sense of freedom, I turned away from the village.
    The particular formation of land where our village is built is called Ambarka, which means ‘The lap of the Great Mother’ in the old language. It’s like a bulge; a lap is a fairly good description if you think of the flat part at the top of the hill where the village stands as the ‘Mother’s’ thighs. Above the village and below it, the mountainside is steep, almost sheer in some places. The path has been made to zig-zag across the steepest parts but even so it is a stiff climb. I had gone about half a mile and was just passing a pile of rough planks that my father and Lenko had been cutting together at the edge of the forest when the beguilers returned.
    They took me by surprise, sweeping across my vision again in a triangular formation, their long, translucent tails fanned out behind them like comets. Involuntarily I followed them with my eyes and then, before I knew it, I was following them with my feet as well towards the lake.
    The drowning pool we call it. It is a dark and dangerous place, a hole made by a meteorite in the side of the mountain which forms a natural reservoir. It is fed by an underground stream that comes straight down from the melting end of one of the glaciers, and it is never empty. When it has been dry