Druids (2 page)

I did not run; I flew.

If I could only reach the grove I thought, in my panic, that I would be safe. The grove was sacred, everyone knew that. Even the animals of the forest were said to revere it; surely the wolves would not kill me there.

Surely.

At fifteen, one believes any amount of nonsense.

I had run until I thought my lungs would burst. Frozen grass crunched under my feet. Another howl sounded, closer than the first. My heart was pounding so hard I thought it would leap into my throat and choke me. Could a person die that way? I did not know, but I could imagine. I was always imagining.

The ground lifted, the ridge rose before me, black against black. Miraculously my feet found the way without stumbling over a stone and pitching me headlong. The trees swallowed me. But even then I was not safe, I had to get to the grove of the oaks, the sacred grove. I pushed through a tangle of undergrowth, holding an up-flung arm in front of my face to protect it. My harsh breathing was so loud the wolves could have tracked me by the sound

alone.

A stitch of pain tore through my side like a bolt of lightning.

Perhaps it was lightning. Perhaps I had been struck dead and would not have to run anymore. Then the pain ebbed and I struggled on, tripping over roots, sobbing for breath, trying to hear if

the wolves were behind me.

The undergrowth thinned; I was on the last steep rise leading to the grove of ancient oak trees. I gave a gasp of relief. Next moment I stumbled and fell forward into a hollow filled with dead

leaves.

The leaves closed over me.

I lay panting, listening for the patter of feet. Nothing. Only the thunder of my blood in my ears. I dared to hope the wolves had not been after me at all, but on the trail of some smaller, easier

game.

When it seemed I might be safe, I settled deeper into the bed of dry leaves. It was as good a place as any, and warmer than most. I could wait in relative comfort until the dawn, knowing I was well concealed at the very edge of the grove. The druids would come with the dawn… .

Then I heard singing and the night was over.

DRUIDS 9

They must have come right past me on their way to the grove.

Cautiously I crept forward, trying to get closer to the clearing in the center of the grove where the most powerful of druid rituals took place. An immense holly bush barred my way. It stood at me very edge of the glade; if I could get inside it I could see without being seen. Or so I thought.

I flopped down on my belly and wriggled forward, propelled by knees and elbows, smelling cold earth and leaf mold, until I was beneath the lowest outstretched arms of the holly. Meanwhile, the druid song for the oaks gave way to a rhythmic chant that hid any sound I was making.

When I reached the holly trunk, I wormed my way to my feet between the branches, only to discover my view into the glade was still blocked by its evergreen leaves, impatiently I started to push a branch out of the way … just as the central figure in the glade turned in my direction.

Brandishing the carved ash stick that was the symbol of his authority, Menua, chief druid of the Camutes and Keeper of the Grove, seemed to be looking straight at me. I froze. Cold sweat ran down my bare legs below my tunic.

If I were already counted as an adult, which I should have been after surviving fifteen winters, I would have been entitled to wear the tight-fitting woolen leggings grown men wore. But I had not

been initiated into adulthood. My legs had not officially reached their final length. My manmaking was to take place in the spring, and spring would not come-The full weight of the danger struck me. I could be classed as a criminal for breaking a druid prohibition. Criminals were, at the option of the druid judges, fodder for sacrifice.

I stared in horror toward Menua, convinced that he with all his powers could see me through me most solid leaves.

But to my enormous relief, he did not. The chief druid continued the slow turning of his body. Murmuring in counterpoint to the chanting, he began weaving designs in the air with his hands, letting the ash stick fall.

There was a sudden tingling on my skin such as one feels before a storm breaks. The hair stirred on my forearms and lifted on the nape of my neck, moved by the inrush of unseen forces. The murky morning dimmed and the air grew colder, denser, thick with tension.

In the glade the druids began circling sunwise around a central hub. Between their moving bodies I glimpsed something white lying on the raised stone slab used for sacrifices.

10

Morgan Llywelyn

I thought I understood. A gift of life would be offered in exchange for a gift from the Otherworid.

The adult members of the tribe were privileged to attend all the sacrifices except those which involved some secret ritual, like this one. Children, however, were forbidden. But we boys sometimes re-created the sacrifices for ourselves, using some hapless

lizard or rodent.

For the son of a warrior, I was strangely squeamish about see-ing blood shed. It troubled my belly. I always let someone else take the role of the sacrificer, and I dropped my eyes at the crucial moment when the others were watching the knife. I was great at chanting and exhorting, however.

Now the real chanters and exhorters were at work. Their voices filled the grove, calling on the sacred names of sun and wind and water while their feet wove a complex pattern on the earth. Chanting rose to thunder amid me oaks.

Then Menua lifted his arms. Like the bare twigs of the trees, his fingers clawed space. By his gesture, sound was torn from the grove, hurled into the air, gone. The other druids halted in mid-step, freezing the pattern.

The air crackled with gathering magic.

Menua flung back his hood. In me style of the Order, his head was shaved across the front from ear to ear, leaving a bald dome

of forehead surrounded by a flaring mane of white hair. In sharp contrast were the black eyebrows that almost met above his nose. Menua was only of average height for a Gaulish man, but he was wide and solid, and the voice booming from his chest was the

voice of the oaks.

“Hear us!” he cried to That Which Watched. “See us! Inhale our breath and know us for a part of you!”

I shrank inside my tunic. My crawling flesh informed me of a Presence, larger than human, occupying visibly empty space, aware of Menua and the druids. And of me. A terrible, awesome power, gathering itself in the grove.

“The seasons are entangled,” Menua was saying. “Spring cannot free itself from winter. Hear us, heed our cries! Your sun does not heat the earth and soften her womb so she will accept seed and grow grain. The animals will not mate. Soon we will have no cows for milk and leather, no sheep for meat and wool.

“The pattern of the weather is damaged. Our bards tell us that we came to Gaul many generations ago because the patterns of existence had been damaged in our homeland to the east. We had

DRUIDS

11

too many births and not enough food. We fled here to save ourselves, and in this land learned to live in harmony with the earth.

“Now that harmony has somehow been disturbed and must be put right. The confusion of the seasons threatens not only the Camutes, but our neighbors the Senones, the Parish, the Bituriges. Even such powerful tribes as the Arvemi and the Aedui are suffering. All Gaul is suffering.”

Menua paused to draw breath. When he spoke again, his voice was thick with pleading. “We implore the help of the Otherworid. Aid us in healing the pattern. Inspire us, guide us. In exchange we shall offer the most precious gift we have to give, not the spirit of a criminal or an enemy, but the spirit of our oldest and wisest, a person revered by all the tribe.

‘ ‘We send you the spirit of one who bore the deaths of her children with courage and never failed to give good counsel in the circle of elders. Her spark comes to join yours, life moving to life. Accept our offering. Help us in our need.”

Gesturing to Aberth the sacrificer, Menua lowered his arms. Aberth stepped forward, throwing back his hood to reveal himself to That Which Watched. He had a foxy face and fox-colored hair behind his tonsure, and a curly red beard that never grew below his jaw. On his arm a circlet of wolf fur denoted his talent for killing.

Strapped to his waist was the sacrificial knife with its gold hilt.

The chanting began again, low but insistent. “Turn the wheel,

turn the wheel, change the seasons.” The druids were circling again. “Turn the wheel, change the seasons, join with us, accept our gift, now. Now!” The voices rang with desperate urgency.

Aberth paused beside the shrouded figure on the altar stone. He pulled away the cloth, baring the body for his knife. In the moment before I meant to drop my eyes, I had a clear look at his intended victim.

My grandmother lay with her gentle face turned toward the sunless sky.

«L ^ wou

At first I could not imagine who screamed. Who

Then I realized I was screaming. Like some madman, I had burst from concealment and was running recklessly into the glade, waving my arms and yelling for the druids to stop.

I expected lightning to strike me and shrivel me into a cinder at Menua’s command.

Instead, he and the others merely stared at me. Aberth’s upraised arm hung in the air, holding the knife above Rosmerta. Only the chief druid seemed able to move; he tried to catch me as I flung myself protectively across my grandmother’s body. I beat him off with clubbed fists, then took the old woman in my arms. I was surprised to discover how thin she was. It was like holding a bag of sticks.

We lay together on the stone of sacrifice with the knife poised above us. I did not look up. I pressed my lips against Rosmerta’s cheek, feeling the dry old skin, inhaling her scent, her individual odor of woodsmoke and desiccation.

Her flesh was cold to my lips.

Menua’s hand clamped on my shoulder. “Step aside, lad,” he said, more kindly than I expected.

I intended to obey him; we always obeyed our druids. But instead my arms tightened around Rosmerta. “I won’t let you kill her,” I said in a muffled voice, my face against hers.

“We aren’t going to kill her. She’s already dead.” Menua waited for his words to sink in. Aberth took a step backward, perhaps in response to some signal from the chief druid.

I lifted my head so I could look down at Rosmerta. Her eyes were closed, sunken into pits lost amid the wrinkles. When I

12

DRUIDS 13

raised myself higher I could see her scrawny neck, where no pulse beat. Her chest did not rise and fall.

“You see?” Menua asked in the same gentle tone. “The knife is only a formality to conform to the ritual of sacrifice. Rosmerta chose, with nobility and fortitude, to die for the common good. When she thought you were asleep last night, she drank a potion we had given her. Winter-in-a-bottle, we call it. She took winter into herself, she became winter, the season of death. Then she came to my lodge and we brought her here before dawn. Her spirit left her body just before sunrise, which is the time spirits prefer for migrations.

“This is the new ritual, Ainvar. Rosmerta shows winter how to die so spring may be born. In such ways, with such symbols, we encourage the healing of the pattern.”

He was only speaking words, they meant nothing to me. All mat mattered was my grandmother, who could not be dead. As clearly as if I still saw it, I remembered the look on her face the night before as she gave me my meal—a thin gruel and a lump of badger meat. She had claimed she was not hungry.

Now I held her with arms nourished by the food she had denied herself. I would never surrender her.

Above my head Menua said to the others, “This may be the help we sought. The Source of All Being has sent this lad to us. Think on this symbol. What better way to show the seasons how to change than by tearing a boy in the spring of his life away from the corpse of winter?”

He seized my shoulders and tugged. I sobbed in grief and defiance. Later they told me I had actually twisted around and bared my teeth at the chief druid.

“She isn’t dead. I won’t let her be dead.”

“You have no choice. Come now, Ainvar.” He pulled harder. There was an edge to his voice; the time for handling me gently had passed.

I shouted again, “I won’t let her be dead! Rosmerta? Live, Rosmerta!”

Then it happened.

The corpse opened its eyes.

The knife fell from Aberth’s fingers. One of the other druids muffled a cry by cramming her knuckles into her mouth. They fell back, leaving us alone.

Rosmerta’s body shuddered. Air hissed into her mouth.

“Grandmother! I knew you couldn’t be dead, I knew it… .”

14 Morgan Llywelyn

I shook her bony shoulders, I rained kisses on her defenseless

face.

Her voice was the papery whisper of dry leaves. ‘ ‘I should be dead. I’m so tired. So tired. Let me go, Ainvar. I need to go.”

Tears choked me. “I cannot. What would I do without you?”

She fought to draw another breath. “Live/* she whispered.

Menua urged, “Listen to her, Ainvar. The law says we must respect the requests of the old. Rosmerta’s body is worn out. Would you have her remain in a collapsing dwelling?”

I could not think, I did not know what to feel. I was all knots inside. I looked from Rosmerta to Menua and back.

When my grandmother breathed she made a dreadful rasping noise, a sound of agony. The next breath she drew was worse.

Menua was wrong. I did have a choice, but making it was the most difficult thing I had ever done. Something seemed to tear loose inside me as I gave Rosmerta one last, urgent hug, and pressed my lips to her ear. * ‘If you truly want to go,” I murmured, “go. I salute you as a free person,” I added, the words one Celt customarily said to another when parting.

She sank in upon herself. A rattle sounded in her throat. A strange, bitter odor came from her gaping mouth.