The Forest House (16 page)

The priestess followed them to the door, laughing, and cried out something in a high voice, like the cry of a falcon. Then she slammed out the surging wind and all was still once more.

When they had gone, Caillean sank down on the settle by the hearth and Eilan, who was shaking to her very toenails, went to her. "Who were they?"

"Raiders, a mixed band, I think, from the North and from my country," Caillean said. "More shame to me, for I am a woman of Eriu, brought here by Lhiannon." She stood up and began to mop up the rain water that had come in.

Eilan quavered, "And what did you say?"

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"I told them I was a
bean-drui,
a she-Druid, and if they laid a hand on me or on either of my sisters I would curse them by fire and water; and I showed them that I had that power." Caillean stretched out her hands. The slim fingers that Eilan had seen her thrust into the coals were white and unharmed. Was this all a dream?

Eilan, remembering what Caillean had cried out after them, said hesitatingly, "Sisters?"

"By the vows I have taken, all women are my sisters." Her lips twisted. "And I said if they went away and left us in peace I would lay a blessing on them —"

"And did you bless them then?"

"I did not; they are wild wolves of the forest, or worse," Caillean said defiantly. "Bless them? As soon bless a wolf and his teeth in my throat."

Eilan's gaze returned to Caillean's fingers. "How did you do that? Was that a Druid's illusion, or did you really take fire in your hands." Already she was beginning to wonder if her eyes had deceived her.

"Oh, that was real enough." Caillean gave a short laugh. "Anyone with my training could have done it."

Eilan stared at her. "Could I?"

"If you were taught, certainly," said Caillean with a trace of impatience. "If you had the trust, and the will.

But I cannot show you now. Perhaps in the Forest House, if you come there."

The reality of what they had escaped burst over Eilan then and she dropped down upon the seat next to the priestess, shuddering. "They would . . .they would have -" Eilan swallowed. "We all owe you our lives."

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"Oh, I think not," said Caillean. "A woman in childbed is small temptation even to such as these. And I might well have been able to frighten them from me; but you, yes; rape is the least you could have expected from them. They do not kill fair young girls; but you might well have ended a captive wife, if you so call it, on the shores of wild Eriu. If that is a fate that would have pleased you, I am sorry to have interfered."

Eilan shuddered, remembering the feral faces of the men. "I think not. Are the men all like that in your land?"

"I do not know. When I left it I was still very young." After a moment's silence Caillean went on. "I do not remember either my mother or my father, only that in the hut where we lived - all of us - there were seven children smaller than I. One day we went to the market and Lhiannon was there. I had never seen anyone so beautiful.

"And something - I know not what - reached out to her, for she cast her cloak over me, thus claiming me in the oldest of rites for the gods. Years later, I asked her why she had chosen me from all the others there. She said that she had seen that the others there were cleanly dressed and that their parents clung to them. There was no one to cling to me," she added somewhat bitterly. "In the home of my parents I was only another mouth to feed. Nor was my name Caillean; my mother — I do not really remember her —

she called me
Lon-dubh,
Blackbird."

"Is Caillean a priestess name then?"

Caillean smiled. "It is not," she said. "Caillean, in our tongue, means only 'my child, my girl'. So Lhiannon called me whenever she spoke to me; I think of myself now by no other name."

"Should I call you that then?"

"You should, though I do have another name given me by the priestesses. I am sworn never to speak it aloud or even whisper it, save to another priestess."

"I see." Eilan stared at her, then blinked, because for a moment a name had echoed in her awareness as loudly as if it had been spoken.
Isarma . . .when you were my sister, Isarma was your name . . .

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Caillean sighed, "Well, dawn is still far off. See, your sister has already fallen back into slumber. Poor lass, the birth exhausted her. You should sleep as well —"

Eilan shook her head, trying to bring the world back into focus. "After such a disturbance, I do not think I could sleep even if I tried."

Caillean looked at her and suddenly laughed. "Well, to be truthful, neither can I! Those men terrified me so that I could scarce speak. I thought I had forgotten their dialect - the last time I heard it was so long ago."

"You did not look terrified," said Eilan. "You looked like a goddess standing there." She heard once more the other woman's bitter laugh.

"Things are not always as they seem, my little one. You must learn not to put all your trust in how folk look, or in what they say."

Eilan stared into the fire, whose embers, stirred back to life by Caillean's raking, snapped and sparkled on the hearth. The man she had learned to care for as Gawen had been an illusion, but even as Gaius the Roman, the thing that made her love him was the same. And he had spoken truth to her.
I would know
him,
she thought then,
if he came to me as a leper or a wild man.
For a moment she grasped at something that lay beyond face or form or name. Then a coal snapped, and it was gone.

"Tell me what is true, then," Eilan said to fill the silence. "How did that cotter's child you say you were become a priestess who could hold fire in her hands?"

Tell me what is true . . .Caillean stared at the girl, who had lowered her fair lashes over those changeable eyes as if frightened by her own boldness. What other truths might come back to haunt her, as her mother tongue had returned on the lips of those monstrous men? She was twice Eilan's age — old enough to be her mother if she had married young, and yet at this moment the younger woman was like a sister, a twin soul.

"Did you come at once then to the Forest House with Lhiannon?" persisted Eilan.

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"I did not; I think that Vernemeton was not yet built then," Caillean pulled herself together enough to answer her. "Lhiannon had come to Eriu to study with the
bean-drui,
the priestesses at the shrine of Brigid at Druim Cliadh. When she returned to Britain, we dwelt at first in a round tower on the shore far, far to the north of here. I remember that there was a ring of white stones laid around the tower, and it was death for any man, save only the Arch-Druid -not Ardanos, but the one who was before — to come within this ring of stones. Always, she treated me as her foster daughter; once she said, when someone asked, that she had found me abandoned on the seashore. It might as well have been true; I never saw any member of my family again."

"Didn't you miss your mother?"

Caillean hesitated, shaken by the flood of memories. "I suppose you had a good and a loving mother.

Mine was otherwise. It is not that she was evil, but I cared little for her nor she for me." She stopped herself, eyeing the younger woman warily.
What power is in you, girl,
she thought,
that you can
conjure such memories from met
She sighed, trying to find the right words.

"For her, I was only an extra mouth to feed. Once, years later in the market at Deva, I saw an old woman who reminded me of my mother. She was not, of course, but I did not even feel regret when I realized it. It was then that I knew I had no kinfolk but Lhiannon and, later, the other priestesses of the Forest House . . ."

There was a long silence. She could see Eilan trying to imagine what it would be like to grow up without a family. Caillean could see that Mairi's bossiness had held affection, and, from what Dieda had told her, she had been like Eilan's twin. And yet, she realized suddenly, just as she herself had never unburdened her heart to her fellow priestesses, never could Eilan have talked to any of her family as she was speaking with Caillean now.

It is like talking to myself, to say these things to her,Caillean thought ruefully,
or perhaps it is like
talking to the self I should have been, forever innocent and pure.

"The darkness and the fire glow here remind me of my earliest years," the priestess said at last, and as she spoke the dull light captured her vision and she was falling down the tunnel of the years, the words pouring out of her as if she were under some spell.

"All I truly recall of the hut is that it was dark and always smoky. It hurt my throat, so I was always running alone down to the seashore. Mostly I remember the crying of the seagulls; they were about the
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tower too, so that when I came here to the Forest House many seasons ago, for more than a year I could hardly sleep for being out of the sound of the sea. I loved the ocean. My memories of my . . .home . . ."

she continued hesitantly, "are all of children, always a baby at my mother's breast, always the whimpering and squalling, and tugging at her skirts and at mine when I could not escape them. But even beatings could not keep me within the house to pound barley, or to be pulled around by the whimpering naked brats. It is surprising I can endure babes," she added, "but I have no dislike for such as Mairi's who come where they are much longed for and are well cared for once they are born.

"I must have had a father, but even when I was very small, I knew he did nothing for my mother except to make sure that there was always a new baby at the breast." She hesitated. "I dare say Lhiannon pitied me as a starveling."

Caillean heard her own words, surprised that they held no bitterness; as if she had accepted all this too long ago.

"So I do not even know how old I am, not really. It was about a year or so after Lhiannon took me away before my body showed the first signs of womanhood. I think I was about twelve then." She broke off suddenly, and Eilan looked at her in amazement.

I
am a woman, a priestess,
Caillean told herself,
a sorceress who can frighten armed men!
But the fire trance had taken her too far into memory, and she felt like a terrified child. Which was the truth? Or was the deception only in the flickering of the fire?

"I must be more shaken than I knew," she said in a stifled voice, "or perhaps it is the hour, and the darkness, as if we had stepped outside time." She looked at Eilan, forcing herself to honesty, "Or it may be because I am talking to you . . ."

Eilan swallowed, and steeled herself to meet the other woman's gaze.
Truth . . .tell me the truth
-

Caillean heard the thought as if it had been her own, and could not tell which of them had a greater need for it.

"I never told Lhiannon, and the Goddess has not struck me down . . ." She felt the words dragged out of her. "But after all these years it seems to me that perhaps someone should know."

Eilan reached out to her, and Caillean's fingers closed hard on her hand.

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"It was the sight and sound of those raiders that made me remember. In my old home there was a man I sometimes saw on the shore. He was, I suspect, one who lived there apart from other men, an outlaw driven from his clan. I would not wonder at that," she added bitterly. "At first I trusted him; he gave me small gifts, pretty things he had found on the shore, shells, bright feathers." She hesitated. "More fool I for thinking him harmless; but how would I have known better? Who had there ever been to teach me?"

She stared blindly towards the fire, but there had been no light in the hut, and no light could reach her now in this place of memory. "I suspected nothing, I never knew what he wanted when he dragged me into his hut one day —" She shuddered, racked by memories for which, even now, she had no words.

"What did you do?" Eilan's voice came from a great way off, like a distant star.

"What could I do?" Caillean said harshly, clinging to that little light. "I - I ran away, crying - crying till I thought I would melt, and filled with such horror and disgust - I can't speak of that. It seemed there was no one I could tell, no one who would have cared." She was silent for a long time. "To this day I remember the smell in his hut - filth, bracken, seaweed, and being pushed down on it while I whimpered

— I was too young to imagine what he wanted. The smell of the sea and of bracken still makes me ill,"

she added.

"Didn't anyone ever know? Didn't they do anything?" asked Eilan. "I think my father would kill anyone who had touched me so."

Caillean had said it at last, and breathing was a little easier now. She let out some of the pain in a long, shuddering, sigh. "Wild as our tribe was, women could not be molested, nor a child so young. Had I accused my attacker, he would have come to the wicker cage and roasted in a slow fire. He knew it, when he threatened me. But I did not know it then." She spoke with a strange detachment now, as if it had all happened to someone else.

"It was about a year afterward that Lhiannon came. She would never have suspected that a girl so young could already be impure -and by the time I came to trust her and believe in her goodness, it was too late; I feared I should be sent away. So, after all, that divinity you thought you saw in me is all a lie," she said harshly. "If Lhiannon had known, I should never have been made priestess -but I made sure she never knew." She turned her face away. For a moment that seemed far too long, there was silence.

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"Look at me -"

Caillean found her gaze drawn back to the child and saw Eilan's face, one side Goddess-bright and the other in shadow.

"I believe in you," said the girl gravely.

Caillean drew a shaken breath and Eilan's image was blurred by her tears.

"I live only because I believe that the Goddess forgives me as well," the priestess said. "I had already received my first initiation before I understood the enormity of my deception. But there were no evil omens. When they made me priestess I waited for a thunderbolt, but none came. I wondered then if perhaps there are no gods, or if there are, they care nothing for the doings of humankind."