Druids (12 page)

The sparics, the living golden sparks on their way outward!

Slowly the passion ebbed. I clung to it for as long as I could. But at last I could not deny the walls of flesh around me, the weight of my body holding me.

I opened my eyes.

The druids had gathered around the pyre. I joined them. I was numb; my eyes looked at but refused to see the twisted, blackened shapes amid the seething coals, the horribly familiar angles of bent knee and elbow. If I closed my eyes I could still see the sparks against my eyelids.

Behind me I heard song swelling from countless throats. The Camutes were raising their voices in a hymn of praise for the sacrificed Senones, describing their courage in the most extravagant terms.

The druids were singing, too. We were all singing, putting the sound between ourselves and death and fear and horror.

Singing for joy.

Much later, the bones and ashes would be gathered and a ritual performed for them.

When we returned to me fort, I fell drained. I had at least not disgraced myself, I had taken my place and added my voice, sending my effort of will out with the rest.

Out … where? Into a void where Something watched. Had we won its favor, its protection?

Who could know?

Druids knew.

As our procession returned homeward, I followed Menua’s broad back, grateful for its solidity. I was attempting the impossible feat of thinking and not thinking at the same time. No one seemed in the mood for talking. Some of the faces around me wore the rapt expression of those who have briefly touched the immensities. I wondered what they had felt, amid the chanting and the flames.

I wondered what was on my own face.

The silence of Gaul’s russet and gold autumn enfolded us. We heard no whoosh and crash of a tree being felled, no herder singing to his animals, no crack of stonemasons at woric. The woodsmen and herders and stonemasons were with us.

Neither did we hear the clatter of spears or the thud of thousands of feet marching to a single rhythm. For though they would

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soon appear in ever-increasing numbers elsewhere in Gaul, the

warriors of Rome would come last to the territory of the Camutes. In the meantime I would have replaced Menua as chief druid. And found Briga.

SEX MAGIC WAS wonderful. My first experience had left me avid for more, which only amused Menua. When I kept suggesting an application of sex magic to solve every problem that came along, he laughed at me. “The ritual must be appropriate to the need, Ainvar, and is never celebrated for the gratification of the celebrant. You’re letting your body think for you again.”

I could hardly help it. My body was young and virile, I could feel the tension building in me, waiting to burst out again, to explode like a star.

Could stars explode? I must ask Menua.

In the meantime I was preoccupied with Suits. Menua had turned me over to her during the short, dark days of winter, for instruction in the healing arts, which did not always require that we be outside. Drying herbs and preparing potions could be learned within the warmth of a lodge.

I did not seem to be learning much, however. “You are not paying attention, Ainvar!” Sulis snapped at me. “You are supposed to acquire some knowledge about every aspect of druidry, but that does not mclude the construction of lodges. Why are you staring into the rafters?”

How could I tell her I was staring at the rafters to avoid staring at the roundness of her breasts?

‘ ‘What was I just saying to you?” she demanded to know.

I cleared my throat and struggled with my rebel thoughts. “Ah … about mistletoe …”

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“Indeed. And why is the Oak’s Child the most sacred of all plants?”

“Because … because …”

“Because the decoction of its berries is the only thing that can stop the burning growth that eats people from the inside out.”

“Ah. Yes.”

‘ ‘And is the simple essence enough?”

I was thinking hard, trying to hear her recent words in my memory. “Ah, no. You add other things. …”

“Which are?” She was not quite, but almost, tapping her foot. Her lips were pressed into a thin line.

Just before she completely lost her temper with me, I was able to name the ingredients to be combined with essence of mistletoe. I understood the value of the brew well enough; to die from the burning growth was a prolonged and shrieking agony. I had seen a man who put off coming to Sulis until too late, when the monster had taken hold of him to such an extent even she could not kill it.

I would prefer to be burned in the cage than suffer what he suffered.

Because the druids knew how to use me Oak’s Child, very few of us ever succumbed to the burning growth, however. Using her healing magic, Sulis could shrink a tumor away night by night, as the moon shrank in its waning.

Everything about Sulis was wonderful. Her square, capable hands with their spatuiate fingertips could touch an aching head and relieve me pain at once. She could stroke broken limbs …

… she could stroke my limbs… .

“Ainvar, you are not paying attention!”

“I am! I was thinking about healing. Could sex magic be used to heal people?”

“Perhaps it’s time you moved on to study with someone else, Ainvar. You could be memorizing the law with Dian Cet instead of wasting my time.”

“But couldn’t you and I together use sex magic to restore strength to the earth?”

“Perhaps, hi the spring. IfMenua feels it is needed.”

“Or even now,” I insisted. “With sex magic couldn’t we encourage the wool to grow denser on the sheep?”

“They are so heavily fleeced now they pant like dogs,” Sulis pointed out. “If you are so eager for a woman, Ainvar, go look for one! Beyond the walls of Ais fort there are many not of your blood who would smile at you.”

“But will there be magic?”

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There was something sad in her smile as Sulis replied, “Ah, Ainvar, magic is not so easily found.”

I was tall and well grown, and when I took her advice I found there were, indeed, women to smile at me. Women who licked their lips when our eyes met, and women who turned away but glanced back. There were warriors’ daughters and women who tended the land; there were girls who were ripe for marriage and widows who were ripe. In due course I tried every one who encouraged me within a half-day’s walk of the fort.

But Sulis was right. Magic was not easy to find.

I enjoyed myself anyway and tried my best to give as much pleasure as I took. My best, the women assured me, was very good indeed. Not a few openly expressed their interest in dancing around the symbolic phallus at Beltaine and bearing my children. References were made to sizable marriage portions.

A druid, however, need not concern himself with his wife’s property. His tangible needs were provided by the tribe in exchange for his gifts. If I married at all, I could marry a woman because she pleased me, whether her father sent twelve cows with her or she arrived at my lodge with only a needle and loom.

Winter faded into spring, and we repeated the ritual that had begun with Rosmerta’s dying to speed the process. We no longer sacrificed a living person, however; the oldster we chose to be winter only pretended to die, yet winter died anyway and a bright, hot spring followed, making the blood run quick in me. I lost myself in women, in touch and taste and scent. One had creamy skin and one had grainy flesh and another was doughy and dimpled, but every one was a new experience. A fresh exploration. Each in her turn was dear to me.

But none had the gift of magic.

Marrying Sulis was out of the question. Her clan of craftsmen was not blood kin to me, so that prohibition did not stand in our way. But when I made the suggestion she bluntly refused. “A woman marries to have children, Ainvar, and I am not going to have children.”

“But why not?”

‘ ‘Try to understand this; I have given it much thought. My body is an instrument of healing. You have watched me sponge my urine on burned flesh and seen the blisters disappear. My other fluids are also useful in healing preparations. If I carried a child in my body, its properties would affect my own. My sweat, my saliva, my very tears would be changed. My gift might be com-promised and I will not take the risk. When I take part in sex

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magic I use certain precautions to prevent conception, but if I married I would have to give my husband children if I could. So what you ask is impossible.”

“Other healers have children. You once told me your own grandmother was a healer. *’

“She made her choice, I have made mine. I am following my pattern and ask you to respect that, Ainvar.”

I was too young to know that emotional climates change, and mat the independence Sulis wanted might someday weigh heavily upon her. I accepted her at her word, but with sorrow in my heart.

Occasionally Menua used the two of us for sex magic, which somehow made everything more painful for me. Yet I never refused. I had learned that sex at its most magical is a sacred rite of such power and excitement that anything else ieft me strangely

unsatisfied.

Tarvos the Bull did not seem to require magic from his women, I observed, watching him enviously as he rutted through the fort. He would marry whoever was nearest when he was ready to mar-ry, and she would admire his scars and bear him a litter of warriors, and they would be content.

At night I walked beneath the stars. Among the lodges, with no roof over me, and the darkness for company. Through open doorways I overheard random bits of conversation, no thought completed but only half spoken between people who knew each other well enough to guess the rest. Comments on food and work and weather, personal criticisms, a rumbling laugh, the sharp edge of anger erupting.

People encased in timber shells.

Theirs was the tripping tedium of walls and chores and living crowded together, climbing over each other sometimes, smelling each other’s farting, suffering each other’s snoring. They were embedded in the ordinary.

I was not. Mine was the vast dark sky and the spaces between the stars that called out to me; mine was the promise of magic.

Perhaps Sulis was right, I thought.

Beneath the stars I walked dreaming, and the families in their houses did not hear me pass by.

The wheel of the season turned and turned.

Thirty years was considered a full generation among us, but the passage of time was not so simply measured. I spent long days studying the sheet of bronze upon which was incised our calendar, dividing and delineating the year so the festivals were always observed on their proper days in relation to Earth and sky. The

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calendar consisted of sixteen columns representing sixty-two lu-nar cycles subdivided into light and dark halves, with two additional intercalary cycles to make the whole correspond to the solar year. I studied it until I knew it as my tongue knew the roof of my mouthAnd this was but one of many lessons I must master. I could feel my brain stretching inside my skull.

My teachers were legion. I learned from the stems of wheat and the exhalations of cattle, or the arrangement of pebbles on a streambed or the pattern of geese winging overhead. But my chief instructor was always Menua. I studied him until I could assume his mannerisms like a cloak.

The seasons were passing for him, too. Each winter found the chief druid more crusty and irascible. “You will be my last student,” he told me. “You are the one who must follow me.”

My spirit soared inside me and I began gobbling wisdom, staking my claim to the dominion of the mind. Working in the cold heat of concentrated intellect, I memorized the law contained in the rhyming syllabic verse called rose, a chant of stressed, allit-erative lines. The law was beautiful, I discovered.

At the annual Samhain assembly when all judgments were rendered, Dian Cet always concluded by reminding us, “Our decisions are made in accordance with the law of nature, for na-ture is the inspiration and model of-law. No law counter to nature can be upheld.”

Menua taught me the language of the Greeks he had learned in his youth, and polished the smattering of Roman I had picked up from traders, though he dismissed the language as harsh and guttural and of no value. He showed me the writing of the Greeks and the Romans, shapes cut into wood or on tablets of wax or painted on parchment or calfskin. “Put no trust in these, however,” he cautioned me. “What is written can be burned or melted or changed. What is carved in your mind is permanent.”

He also taught me ogham, which was not the written language of the druids but merely a way of leaving simple messages for one another by slashing marks on trees or stone. No wisdoms were committed to ogham, yet it was useful enough, and the common people were in awe of us for understanding it.

“Always maintain that sense of awe in them!” Menua insisted.

He was putting more and more responsibility on my shoulders. When I needed a runner to carry messages between myself and other druids, Menua had Tarvos seconded to me.

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I would have asked for Crom Daral if things had been different between us, I thought sadly.

One morning I came around the lodge and almost collided with Crom, From the other side of the fort came the sound of a hammer beating iron at the forge. “I didn’t hear you for the noise,” I apologized, though in truth the noise was not that loud. But I had to say something.

Crom shrugged without replying and started to edge past me in the narrow laneway.

I caught his arm. “Crom, what’s wrong between us? Can’t it be mended?”

“Mended?” He swung around to face me. “How? Are you willing to admit you*re no better than me?”

“Of course I’m no better than you. I’m just different.”

“You say that, but you don’t mean it.”

He is right, my head observed. “You don’t know me at all,” I said aloud, too quickly.

“You don’t know yourself,” he snarled. “You should see yourself as I see you, walking around here as if your feet were too good to touch the mud.” He pulled free of me and hurried away.