“Drink!”

A forest of drinking-horns, cups wooden and gilded, and skulls stoppered with the wax of forest bees rose to clash with each other like blades on the field of strife. Drops of thick dark mead, sour braga, fermented berry-juice and thicker, redder, less mentionable things splashed over their edges, running down grey-skinned fingers and dented bracers. Where they spilled into the fires amid the celebrants, the flames crackled and turned crimson for a brief moment; where they flew over their shoulders and pooled on the grimy stone floor, crawling things with bulging eyes crept over to them, leaving trails of slime as they went, and lapped them up with lashing pale tongues.

At the head of the gathering, behind the largest cauldron, in truth more akin to a great bronzed sarcophagus, a towering figure stood up. A thick, rough brown pelt hung down her back, its eyeless snout resting over her wild mass of steely hair, and the patchwork of purple rags from far lands that formed her robe was adorned with braids of black feathers. A huge, bloated toad sat on each of her shoulders, throats nauseously pulsing in their own raucous feasting-song. She raised her crooked talons to the blackened ceiling, and all eyes turned to her as the mismatched jewels on her gnarly arms jangled, calling them to attention.

“One for Vroha atop the trees!”

A reveller stood up from the row of benches to her left and, vaulting over the bench between the shuffling of his neighbours, made his way to the closest edge of the platform. He cast the liquor in his horn into the warm evening air, watching them fall among the mounds of bones and stretched, dried-out flayed skins that adorned the tiered steps below.

“One for Keben among the brush!”

Another feaster stood from the opposite row and hurried to his own ledge, and down hurled his share of the libation.

“One for Zhaav under the stone!”

A third one, who had sat facing straight against the great hag across the length of the many pots and roasting ember-beds in the chamber, rose to her feet and followed suit after the other two, sending her offering in a third direction yet.

“And one for us all!”

There was naught behind the witch herself but a sheer wall, and so she raised her enormous, finely carved wooden cup and overturned its contents into her mouth, emptying it to the last drop in a single draught. A roaring cheer went up from the benches, and the feast began in earnest.

Who was not to be found there as dusk fell upon that day? Truly, it seemed that every drevič who dared bear the name proudly was in attendance at the great gathering atop the Bone Ziggurat. There was Lujko, great chief of the stryvesti, a mighty man with a broken nose and a scarred eye who guffawed as he jested with his sworn brother-warriors and bit into sizzling chunks of meat. He was the one that had led the raids into the wild eastern lands that were being celebrated, and it was his good right to be the loudest and merriest. There was Velnin, ruler of the kolche, the urshi and the moresti, who was old and withered, but cunning, and received tribute from many tribes of wood and field. There was Arzna, wise woman of the strakhne, who had made her people rich by being the first to sell the secrets of working the ores from the mountains down south. And there were Yarog, and Perevest, and Gleva, and Tmutin, and many many others.

And, of course, there was the host herself, the Beast Hag, looming over even the likes of the brawny Lujko, and biting chewing almost louder than him. She did not sit on a bench like her guests, but crouched in a great wooden seat, padded with human skin and inlaid with bones. On the wall behind her, fastened to the stone or heaped at its foot, were the skulls of those she had bested in either arms or wits, whether as she roamed abroad herself or as they came to challenge her in her home. Foremost among them, marked with a circle of dried blood that was renewed every day, was something warped and yellowed by age, crumbling and worn at the edges. That was, so the tales told, all that remained of the being whom Kulgha had devoured long ago, before she had been the Charnel Witch, and thereby gained her strange might; yet that had happened many years before, and no one knew for sure whether it had been a man or something else.

Anon, however, no one paid it much mind, for they all had seen it before. Everyone had better things to attend to in the heat of the feast, and so did Kulgha and her table-comrades. They thrust long knives into their great bubbling vat of bronze, which none but the boldest of the other guests dared touch, and drew morsels from its churning reddish depths. A few of them had clustered around a younger kinsman, and were putting to trial how fine his tongue was.

“What’s this?” one asked, holding a linen strip over his fellow’s eyes while another put a knife with a steaming, brew-soaked bit on its end in his hand. The one being tested gnawed off a mouthful, briefly ground it between his teeth, thick rivulets running through his dark beard, then exclaimed: “Game!” A whole section of the attendees around him, both of Kulgha’s acolytes and not, bellowed out applause, drawing the curious look of the Crone herself.

“And this?” Another knife was offered, and again the man blindly tasted its prize. This time he chewed down a few more times before confidently calling out: “Man!” The celebrants cheered again, but the one who drew forth the knives stilled them with a gesture, and brought out a new morsel from the depths of the stew, staining his grey forearm with the boiling red. “And this?”

The blindfolded sampler took a bite, chewed pensively, then took another. He frowned. His nostrils twitched as he tried to discern it by smell, but found it even less helpful. After some more laborious gnawing, he conceded: “Can’t say, the spice’s too strong. Wager you that Sovnij here won’t tell you either!”

The audience’s jeering hoots quieted down as over a dozen faces turned to the one who held the linen strip. With an air of bravado, he took over the knife and bit in himself. His certainty visibly faded as he strained his face, grinding down his mouthful to little avail. However, he, too, was not found witless when the howling mockery turned on him. “What’s that, I’ll say nobody here can know a bit from that deep in the pot from another!”

Most began to nod sagely, but a piercing hoarse cackle cut them short. Stretching out an enormous branch-like arm over several heads, Kulgha snatched away the knife and brought it to her face. She did not even taste of it, but held it briefly under her long crooked nose before saying, loud enough for half the room to hear: “It’s man, and one of the southron blood!”

This time everyone who had heard gave out calls of admiration, a good few not knowing what the occasion was but joining in either way, as Sovnij growled “‘Course, she’s not count.” It was thus not clear when exactly it was that someone first noticed the strange thing that flew in from the darkened sky. By the time almost everyone was more or less quietly following the dozen pointing hands with their gaze, it had alighted on one of the wooden stilts that supported the bronze cauldron. It was a bird, yet not quite a bird; its head was like a skull, and its skin like that of a lizard, and those who saw it close marvelled greatly at this. In its mouth it held what seemed to be a blossom, but as strange as its bearer, for no one present had ever seen any that was quite like it. The beast gave a few sharp nods towards the hostess and screeched through its closed beak as she watched, as puzzled as anyone around her.

Finally, one of the attendants found his own tongue. “What’s that, Kulgha,” he cheerily shouted from across a roasting body, “you got a suitor?”

The words carried well over the stillness in the room, and so it was that this time everyone knew why they burst out in bellowing laughter, not least among them the witch herself. Still wiping out tears of mirth from the wrinkles around her eyes with one hand, she reached over and slapped the joker on the back of his head as a matron would a riotous grandchild, knocking him off the bench amid everyone’s merriment. In the same motion, she took the flower from the winged messenger’s teeth, quickly smelled it and made it disappear into one of her many pouches and sacks - before deftly snatching up the bird and snapping its neck with a hold practiced over decades and decades.

“Keben gore me if I know what this is,” she said to the expectant acolytes to her right, “but we’ll find out fast [i]how[/i] it is. Bring me my sharpened knife!”

An eager hand cautiously held over a redoubtable curved blade with a bone hilt, and the Crone cut the bird’s belly open with it in a slash. The entrails went into the bubbling cauldron while she went to work on the skin, which came off far easier than feathers. The cleaned carcass fell onto a ready metal vessel on a bed of sizzling embers, where sharpened sticks held by those sitting nearby prodded and turned it over now and then while Kulgha did what she did best.

From a pouch came pinches of dried-up and ground woodland herbs, spread over the pale roasting flesh with murmurs of appraisal or incantation. A clay jar of honey was brought over at her call, and it was evenly poured over breast, wings, back. Some drops from the pot added a red hint to its colour.

“It’s plain, for sure,” she absently replied to someone’s remark, “but that’s how you try a new thing the first time. Else how you’re going to taste it?”

The smell that rose as the bird was cooked was sharp, not unlike that of a burning snake, but that did not make the Crone any less impatient to get to the promised end of it. It was barely finished when she grabbed it with nary a concern for the heat and bit off a piece, though the whole beast could easily have fit between her jaws.

“Neither fowl nor crawling thing,” she mused as everyone looked on expectantly, “Not as good as the one, not as bad as the other. But what do you think’s the strangest to it?”

“What?” Lujko asked.

“That there’s things coming from out there like which we’ve never seen, ‘course. Any of you catch what side this one’s flown in from?”

“West!” someone said; “South!” another dissented; “Not quite either!” a third added.

“I’d never heard of this kind of beasts past the woods in the south,” Kulgha scratched her nose, “but maybe times’re changing there. We’ll think of what way to look first on the morrow if anyone else’s got a head that can think, and if not, then the one after. Let’s empty our pots first, and then we’ll think of filling them again!”

“Just so!” agreed everyone, “Let’s not leave a good meal go cold while we chase a measly bird!”

And indeed did the feast not end for a long time yet, for it is a poor feast that is over before dawn!