The astronomy club began arriving half an hour later wearing heavy blue parkas and scarves and hats and mittens. With their large bags of equipment, they looked like they were prepared for an expedition for the far reaches of the north in frozen wasteland rather than a star gazing party. They took up position in a little clearing a ways from the farmhouse but surrounded by low growing thicket. The astronomy club was a diverse group. Most of the members were adults, but there were a couple of teenagers, most of them in glasses, braces, or both. The adults ranged in age—some in their twenties all the way to an old seventy-year-old codger who complained about the cold and refused any offer of potpies. He did, however, drink large quantities of hot cider.
Mel found it amusing to watch the astronomy club in their predisposed air and stirring certainty as they peered up at the sky and complained about the cloud cover. Some of them took out their telescopes from their large equipment bags and set them up on tripods before obsessively turning the knobs and tuning them for the night. Someone else, perhaps the farmer since he was not so much a star watcher than a host, had built up a sizeable bonfire which crackled in fresh orange flame. Someone had also passed around skewers and marshmallows. Some of the younger members of the club were busy roasting the sweet treats as their elders puttered around the equipment.
In the darkness, occasionally punctuated by the flickering light of the fire, she could hardly make out the faces of any of the members of the astronomy club. They talked and laughed and generally made the journalists part of their group after they introduced themselves, but she had the impression that she was talking to no more than bundled up shadows. It was her imagination again. She admonished herself. These were real people, not wisps in the night. One member of the astronomy club seemed awfully familiar though. The older gentleman with the moustache named Lloyd made a memory flicker—did she see him earlier in the day, perhaps at the swimming competition or even the opening ceremony for the Harvest Festival?
“Other than the moon and maybe the North Star, you can’t make out anything at all,” complained one of the members of the astronomy club. “It’s too overcast today.”
“Maybe your eyes are giving out, gramps,” snickered one of the younger members.
“My eyes are as sharp as when I was a young ‘un,” declared the first member. “I can still sharp shoot quite a ways away. It’s overcast, I tell you.”
The older man that Mel thought looked familiar, lit up a cheroot and puffed a stream of smoke into the crackling bonfire. “All’s not lost on an overcast night.”
“Eh? But the weather has rendered pretty much all the telescopes useless! What do you propose, Lloyd—that we go to the nearest city with its own observatory?”
“Sarcasm doesn’t become you, Gary. No, we don’t need our telescopes for this. Does anyone know any of the stories and old myths about the stars and constellations? Since it’s the Harvest Festival, a story relating to it would be appropriate.”
“Hey Lloyd, tell us about the North Star and what supposedly happened in the first Harvest Festival.”
Lloyd was silent for a moment, puffing on his cheroot. The smoke curled up around him, and in the glare of the firelight, his dark eyes gleamed. Finally he said lowly and almost out of hearing, “All right, although I would have preferred the telling in a cozy room instead of the chilly outside. But maybe it is better this way. It’s more atmospheric.”
Mel shivered. Did she want to listen to a story in an atmospheric setting?
* * *
The founders arrived one month after they left the cities. In the early spring, they could see that the land was wide an open, the game was plentiful, and the soil was rich for planting crops. The only problem was that the land was already occupied by the natives. I won’t pretend that our ancestors were nice men. On the contrary, they did whatever they could to take what they thought was rightfully theirs. The historians can tell you all the gory details. All I’ll say is that our ancestors forced the natives off this land by whatever means they thought necessary and then started building their farms and the town centered on their own god.
The natives believed in a pagan deity that controlled the seasons and the harvest. They called him the Horned One—or at least that’s what it’s roughly translated to in our own language. The Horned One had two faces. The lighter side of the Horned One corresponded to the first of the year when it is spring. His power is at the strongest during the planting season and the rains. The natives had held many playful festivities during this time to honor their god and to pray for the fertility of their crops among such things. It was a time for growing and life.
The second face of the Horned One was darker. This manifestation began to grow during the summer and waxed in power at the end of the fall when the harvest had come in. This was the god of the dying things and the underworld. The natives, at the end of the harvest, would burn effigies as sacrifices to appease this dark side of their god. Mostly they said prayers and did rites to ensure that the coming winter would not be an unbearably harsh one. This is perhaps where the origins of our Harvest Festival started from, that the competitions we have for the Horned King is actually a rite to the natives’ Horned One.
One of the natives’ myths about the Horned One involved the constellation that most of us call the Bear. The natives called this the Stag. In their myth, before the Horned One actually became horned, their god was chasing down a magical stag through the forest. This magical stag wasn’t like the deer we know, oh no. This stag was a ferocious beast with teeth as sharp as daggers and dangerous hooves. The stag had red eyes and an awful bellow that made everything around it cower in fear. And it was extremely swift. This malicious stag had killed the god’s firstborn and in vengeance, the god was chasing the magical stag down.
Eventually, the god caught up with the stag and there was a ferocious fight. After a fight that lasted a year and a day, the god won after cleaving the evil stag in half. He cut off the beast’s antlers and put them on his head and the antlers fused to his scalp. These antlers were the source of the stag’s power and personality. Now that the god was wearing the antlers, he also became somewhat like the stag—malicious and demanding of sacrifice. To immortalize the stag that had given him the dark powers, the now Horned One put the stag’s body up as the stars in the constellation.
Before the natives were finally booted from this land, the elders of the tribe put a curse on the founders. For them and their descendants, they would have to endure the haunting of the Horned One during the darkest of the seasons, during the Harvest Festival. The founders would have to offer up some sort of sacrifice or to appease the god at harvest time or they would risk untold wrath. The only way they could tell if the god was appeased was through the constellation of the Stag. If the stars shone at the end of the Harvest Festival, then they would be free for another year.
* * *
“So is the curse true?” asked one of the members of the astronomy club. It was one of the teenagers with coke-bottle glasses. He looked rather bored though as if he could care less at what the answer would be.
Lloyd blew out a stream of smoke before answering. “The first year for the founders was pretty rough. Any historian could tell you that—most of them say that it’s because they were settlers and the first year is pretty much hard on anyone because you’re trying to establish yourself in a new place. There were quite a few deaths and stillbirths and accidents in the first year. But after that, as far as I’ve ever heard it passed down, the nights have always been clear on the last day of the Harvest Festival.”
“Always?” said Stuart. “What about the first year the settlers came to Gavot?”
The older man shook his head. “Yes, it was cloudy that year, but it was just unfortunate for them.”
An owl in the thicket loudly hooted. Mel looked up in the sky. It was a bit breezy and she could see the dark forms of clouds obscuring part of the sky. Even if she could see the sky clearly, she would have never been able to tell which set of stars was the constellation of the Stag. She could still see a bit of the moon though, but if there were any more clouds, even that would be covered up.
