Meri (29 page)

Her own eyes were riveted to his.
He is telling me something. He is telling me
....

She stopped walking and stared at him. “The Osraed Bevol
would have done the same thing—that’s what you mean, isn’t it? He would have
gone back to help the boy.”

Skeet shrugged. “I’m sure I don’t know. Do you think tha’s
what he’d’ve done?”

Meredydd grimaced, but her heart began to lift as if it had
found wings and an updraft. “You
do
know.
That’s exactly what he would have done. And he would also have waited for you
to be able to travel; he wouldn’t have left you behind or caused you to break a
promise.”

Skeet looked aside, poking the inside of his cheek with the
tip of his tongue. “Well, what might it mean, then—all that about ‘let nothing
distract you?’ Was that a riddle, d’ ye think?”

“A riddle—yes, perhaps a riddle.” She began walking again,
slowly. “My goal isn’t getting to the Sea, I know that. It’s becoming like
Osraed Bevol. Becoming wise and pure and mighty with kindness and love. My
obsession with getting to the Sea—
that’s
the distraction.”

She shook her head and laughed, feeling numb and giddy and
light. “By God, Skeet, if you could have known what I felt when I heard Owein’s
horse behind us—the visions I was having. It was like a dream I had. A dream
that was given to tell me how obsessed I had become with avenging Lagan. That
horse always carried me home—home to the ruin. To my dead family.”

“Owein took you to a living family,” observed Skeet. “And
you brought Gwynet into one.” He scratched his cheek and sighed. “Must be
another riddle.”

“What digs about the ashes of a dead village?”

“Huh?” Skeet grunted.

“What digs about the ashes of a dead village? It’s a third
year riddle from school. I’ve never really understood it until now.”

Skeet glanced at her sideways. “What’s the answer, then?”

“The human heart, always seeking to live in the past.”

“Ah,” said Skeet and smiled. “Wise Meredydd.”

“Silly Meredydd!”

“Well, so, the Meri may come take a look at you after all.”

“Why should She? I didn’t help Taidgh-a-Galchobar because I
was striving for nobility or purity or kindness or anything. I just did it out
of-of habit. Because it was there to be done. Because I couldn’t stand the
thought of the poor little thing—What?”

Skeet had begun to laugh. He laughed—at her—loudly and
profusely. In a matter of strides, he was completely out of control and past
hearing her protests.

They trudged on, side by side, Meredydd silent, Skeet still
chuckling, until they rejoined the Bebhinn at the far side of the hill it
sundered. From that point, the land fell away—a carpet of mostly deciduous
forest and patches of green velvet sward and meadow. Beyond the emerald stole,
glistened the azure of the Western Sea, an imposing, distant gem.

Meredydd’s heart turned over in her chest. It was within
sight, within scent. She inhaled deeply of the balmy sea air, wafted to her on
the landward breezes. The tang of brine mingled pleasantly with the pungent
perfume of cedar.

Essence of Pilgrimage
,
Meredydd thought.
If one could only bottle it
....

The path grew rougher now, sloping downward to the low sea
cliffs. The two slid down along a rocky defile, winding their way carefully
among the boulders and brush to the lower forest.

Only miles now
! she
thought.
Only miles to the shore, to the sand, to
the Sea, to the Meri.

When she had been old enough to understand the Pilgrimage,
when she realized that it would be her destiny, she had first asked Osraed
Bevol about his own journey. How long had he waited? How had the Meri come?
What did She look like? She had learned, then, that he had waited a full day
and half the next night. And that, when the night was darkest, the water had
been suffused with light—sinuous, undulating light. And the light had
coalesced, become too bright to be borne, too glorious to look upon. And then,
She had come. Out of the glorious waves. Gleaming. Refulgent. Jewel-like.
Sun-like.

Bevol had called Her beautiful, but could not or would not,
describe Her. She was not human, he said. She was Eibhilin—Divine, Angelic. She
could not be described in human terms. She was embodied light. She was Light
with eyes like emeralds.

Meredydd had read the Book of Pilgrimages and the old
commentaries and journals written by the Fathers of the Osraed—the first ones
to be called by the Meri. They had seemed like dim fiction to her until then.
Osraed Bevol had rendered them suddenly vivid and real.

“But Master,” she had said, “the Journal of Osraed Morfinn
says Her eyes are silver—like the face of a cloud.”

“They were like emeralds,” Bevol repeated. “Emeralds. I will
never forget.”

Meredydd set one unworthy foot before the other and prayed
she would be blessed enough to see those eyes herself—whether they were silver
or emerald mattered not at all.

o0o

“Meredydd!” Wyth Arundel sat up with a start, his heart
pounding like a woodpecker in his chest, his face feeling frostbitten. He had
dreamed of her again as he had done each night of her Pilgrimage, as he had
done whenever, as now, he dozed over his studies.

He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Fiery light filtered into
the room from the window before his worktable and set his books and papers and
crystals ablaze. Ah, and they might as well burn for all the good they did him.
He could think of little besides Meredydd and the Meri and he thought of them
both in guilty turns.

Most of his thoughts were prayers—prayers that the Meri
would show mercy to a well-meaning cailin, prayers that Meredydd’s purity of
heart or sincerity or honesty would incline that Being to mercy. He prayed much
and studied little, spending an inordinate amount of time imagining he was
feeling Meredydd’s moods and was privy to her emotions.

Just now, he felt a peculiar fluttering hope. It stood in
stark contrast to the abject despair he’d experienced at times over the last
several days, to the terror he’d fled from in last night’s dream. He wanted to
believe it was what she was feeling just now, watching the sun set over the
Western Sea.

He watched the ruddy glow, himself, as it receded from his
room, then rose to light the lamps.

Know that the worlds of the Spirit are countless
and infinite. No man can number them, no man can encompass them, but only the
Spirit of the Universe, which men call God.

What a wonder is your dreaming state! The thing you see
tonight in dreams is experienced in the waking world only with the passage of
time. If the world of your dream and the world of your waking were the same
world, then that which occurred in the dream must also occur in this waking
world at the same moment.

This cannot be, and it follows that the world in which
you wake is separate from the aislinn world in which you dream. Indeed, this
aislinn world has no beginning and no end.

Now, where is this world? It is true to say that this
world is within yourself and is wrapped up in the cloak of your existence. It
is also true to say that your spirit, transcending the limitations of physical
sleep, has slipped from this contingent world and has passed to a place which
lies hidden in the innermost reality of this world.

Is not the creation of God infinite? There are more worlds
than this one. Meditate on this that you might discover the aim of God, the Spirit
of this infinite Universe.

— The Corah, Book I
Verses 34-38

The Sun was sinking behind them when at last they reached
the low line of bluffs that gave onto the beach. They had been traveling in the
deepening shade of the forest, nibbling on twists of bread and jerky as they
went. Beside them the Bebhinn played a constant and constantly variable
song—notes of liquid crystal cascading over rocks, gliding through narrow channels,
spiraling and eddying in momentary pools. Bird-flutes added their woodwind
piping to the chorus and the wind soughed high in the trees, counterpoint to
the river.

At the rim of the bluff the trees simply stopped, opening
onto an overpowering vista. Meredydd gasped. To the south, the Bebhinn plunged
to the beach, her frothy column falling, bride-white into the arms of her
lover. Ruddy gold light from the dying Sun washed over the trysting place,
turning the Sea to wine. The river shed its bridal veils and flowed over the
marshes to receive the wedding cup.

“It’s endless!” breathed Meredydd. Her eyes scanned the
horizon, seeking some break in the dark, featureless plain of violet water.

“Everything on Earth has an end,” commented Skeet.

She glanced at him sharply.

He grinned up at her, his teeth and eye-whites gleaming in
the deepening twilight. “Tha’s what Master Bevol says.”

Meredydd nodded, then sent her attention back to the beach. “How
do we get down?”

After some exploration, they found a rocky path that
followed the cascade of white water down the scarp. It was difficult to
navigate in the near darkness, but at last they set foot on the sand.

Meredydd stood, quivering, her heart beating against her
ribs like a captive bird. Now she must find her own spot in the sand from which
to focus her meditation—her Pilgrim’s Post at which she would await the Meri.

“I’ll build a fire,” Skeet told her, pragmatic as ever. As
Weard, it was his duty to be pragmatic. “Then you should eat, mistress.”

Skeet had, Meredydd thought, as she went through the motions
of gathering dry driftwood, an amusingly irritating and endearing way of
issuing orders obsequiously. She couldn’t recall having ever disobeyed or
contradicted him—his own occasional and inconsistent care to call her “mistress”
not withstanding. When the fire roared up from its sheltered pit, spilling
uncertain light over the sand, Meredydd sat cross-legged beside it in the lea
of a shoulder-high tussock of grass and ate the food Skeet provided. She ate in
silence, then took up her waterbag and, wrapping her cloak about her shoulders
against the chill of the night sea air, she began to walk toward the water.

Just above where the sand glistened with wetness, she turned
north and scanned the beach. The moon had risen and scattered its ethereal
radiance over every grain and pebble—gold to copper to silver.

She had only gone a few yards down along the wet-line when
she found the Spot. Situated between two grass-crowned tussocks, the sandy seat
presented the aspect of a draperied sack chair. She took up her position there
at once, wind-sheltered by the tussocks, and tried not to sleep.

For the first hour she kept her eyes on the water, praying,
hoping to see a gleam of white upon the water that was not the reflected moon.
But no, she thought, the radiance of the Meri would be beneath the water,
in
it.

She recalled the description given in the Book of
Pilgrimages by Osraed Ben-muir. Like milk, he said. The waters of the ocean
were so permeated with white light as to look like fresh milk.

Osraed Bevol and others had corroborated that description,
but added that the milk had a greenish tinge. She closed her already burning
eyes and opened them again, hoping for a change in the cast of the water. But
it was still merely an ocean—vast, dark, beautiful, mysterious, alight with
moon-weave and wave-glow.

She looked around her after that, realizing there was no
need to stare so intently at the waves. She was not likely to miss the coming
of the Meri. Instead she checked the position of the moon and stars to gauge
the time of night; she watched Skeet at his fire up the beach; she let her eyes
stray across the line of trees atop the bluffs. Several times she came near to
sleep, but kept herself awake by singing simple Cirke lays. During that
exercise she recalled more of her readings from the Book of Pilgrimages. The
Meri, it was recorded, had only once been seen during the first twelve hours of
a Pilgrim’s watch.

Don’t be discouraged, anwyl.
Don’t ever be discouraged
.

“Yes, Osraed Bevol,” she heard herself say. She blinked
drowsily. Where had her thoughts been? Had Skeet said something to her? He must
have, for the Osraed wasn’t here.

She frowned. What was that red glow on the water? That wasn’t
right. The Meri’s radiance was pale, luminous. This was...this was....

Sunrise.

Chilled to the heart, Meredydd sat bolt upright. She had
slumped sideways, her head finding a pillow on one sandy tussock.

She had slept. Tears welled up into her eyes before she
could contain them. Another failure. Another—

“Mistress?”

She looked up to find Skeet perched on her left hand
hillock, her breakfast in his hands.

“Skeet.” She rubbed at her eyes with the sleeve of her
tunic.

“I’ve brought you some food. Some bread and berries.”

“I slept, Skeet. I
slept
.”
She made no attempt to keep the anguish out of her voice.

Skeet frowned and gave her a long, hard look. She waited,
silently aching, to hear his condemnation. He put the food down before her on
the hem of her cloak.

“Meredydd,” he said. “Why must you always heap ashes on your
head? Why must you always say you’ve failed before you’ve even finished your
task? In what have you failed? So, you slept. Then, you must have needed sleep.
Now you need food. Eat.” And he was gone, heading back over the low dunes
toward his smoldering fire.

In what had she failed?

She chewed slowly on the now tasteless portion Skeet had
furnished her and pondered that imponderable. She cringed mentally from
approach. In what way had she
not
failed?
She had been an unruly child, sweet natured, but wild-willed and stubborn. Her
mother had called her “spirited;” her father said she would try the patience of
a saint. He always smiled when he said that...at least, more often than not.
But he was right.