The Forest House (22 page)

"Caillean said something like that, soon after I came here," Eilan said and shivered, though the day was warm, remembering the cold winds during the scrying. "But I have not seen much of her since then. I wonder sometimes if I have angered her."

"You must not pay too much attention to what Caillean says, or does not say." Miellyn cautioned. "She has suffered a great deal, and she is . . . immoderate in her opinions sometimes. But it is true the Romans do not think much of what women can do."

"Then they are foolish."

Page 148

"I know that. You know that," Miellyn said. "But there are some Romans who do not yet know it. Let us hope that they learn it during our lifetime. Our own priests can be foolish too. Someone told me you wished to learn to play the harp. Have you heard Caillean play her lyre?"

Eilan shook her head. "Not often." Suddenly she remembered the occasion where Caillean had taught her to handle fire, and shivered.

Miellyn said, "You really must not mind Caillean's strange ways; she is very solitary. Sometimes for days she speaks to no one, except perhaps to Lhiannon. I know Caillean likes you; I have heard her say so."

Eilan looked at her and then quickly away. It had certainly seemed so that night at Mairi's, after Caillean had driven the raiders away. She realized now how unusual it had been for the older woman to reveal herself that way. Perhaps that was why she had avoided Eilan so much since then.

Miellyn had spotted a place where wild thyme grew beneath a tree and was using her little curved knife to cut the stems. The scent came sweet and sharp to Eilan's nostrils as she bent to gather it.

"Speak to her of her harp," Miellyn added then.

"I thought you said it was not a harp -"

"Indeed, Caillean went to considerable trouble to explain the difference —" Miellyn grinned. "The strings go into a box at the base instead of the side, but the sound is much the same. She knows many songs of Eriu. They are very strange indeed; somehow they all sound like the sea. She knows all of the old songs too, though because of our training we all remember more than most people. If they had been willing to train women as bards before so many of the priests had been killed, perhaps she would have been one."

Irresistibly, Miellyn began to giggle. "Or she might have been the High Druid - if it is not blasphemy to say so - after your father."

"Ardanos is my mother's father, not mine. Dieda is his daughter," Eilan told her, gathering up the last of the thyme.

Page 149

"And your foster brother is one of the Sacred Band?" Miellyn asked. "Truly you come from a priestly family. They will probably try to make you a priestess of the Oracle one day."

"No one has said anything about it to me," Eilan answered her.

"Would you dislike it?" Miellyn laughed at her. "The rest of us have our duties, and I, for one, am happy with my herbs. But the seeresses are the ones the people worship. Would you not like to be the voice of the Goddess?"

"Shehas not said anything to me," the girl answered, a little sharply.

It was no business of Miellyn's what Eilan might secretly long for, or the feelings that had stirred in her when she saw Lhiannon lift her arms in invocation to the moon. The longer she stayed here, the more vividly she remembered her childhood dreams, and every time she carried offerings to the shrine at the spring she stared into the water, hoping to see the Lady once more.

"I will be whatever my elders say. They know more about what the gods want than I."

Miellyn laughed. "Oh, perhaps some of them may; but I am not sure," she said. "Caillean would not say so. She told me once that the knowledge of the Druids is that which was given to all people, both men and women alike in the old days."

"And yet even the High Druid defers to Lhiannon," Eilan said, as she bent to cut a few leaves from a bunch of stitchwort she had found growing on the sunny side of a great rock.

"Or seems to," Miellyn said. "But Lhiannon is different, and of course we all adore her —"

Eilan frowned. "I have heard some of the women say that even my grandfather would not dare to cross her."

Page 150

"Sometimes I wonder," Miellyn said as she sorted through the leaves Eilan had cut. "Cut them closer to the branch; we cannot use the stems. Do you know, I have heard that in the old days the laws required that any man who cut a tree must plant another in its place so the woods would never be less. That has not been done since the Romans came here; they cut trees and plant nothing, so one day there will be no trees in all Britain —"

"There seem to be as many as ever," said Eilan.

"Some seed and grow of themselves." Miellyn turned and gathered up the plants they had cut.

"What about the herbs?" asked Eilan.

"We have not cut enough to make any difference; enough shoots will grow up in a day or two to replace what we have taken. That is enough. I think it may rain; we should hurry back. The priestess who taught me herb lore used to say that the wilderness is the garden of the Goddess, and men cannot gather from it without replacing what they use!"

"I had not heard before, stated in just that way, but, but I think it is beautiful," Eilan said. "I suppose, if you think in centuries, that to cut down a tree is as foolish as slaughtering a breeding doe -"

"And yet some men believe - or seem to believe - that they have the right to do what they will to anything weaker than they are," Miellyn said. "I do not understand how the Romans can do what they do."

"The better ones among them would be as angry as you and I at some of the outrages," Eilan ventured.

She was thinking of Gaius. He had seemed almost as angry as Cynric when he heard the story of the Romans on Mona. She could not imagine him slaughtering the helpless; and yet he must know perfectly well how short and dreadful a life could be expected by the Roman levies in the mines, ill-fed, poorly clothed, and breathing the poisoned dust of the ore they mined. If this punishment were limited to criminals and murderers it would be bad enough, but the byre-woman's husband?

Yet Gaius believed that the Romans were making civilized people of barbarians. Perhaps he had never really thought about the mines, because being taken to them had never happened to anyone he knew.

Even she had not thought about it much until it happened to one of their own. But if she did not know
Page 151

what was going on, surely her father and grandfather did, and they had done nothing to stop it either.

The wind gusted round to the west and suddenly the clouds let loose their burden of rain. Miellyn squealed and pulled her shawl up over her head. "We'll be drowned if we stay here!" she exclaimed.

"Pick up your basket and come! If we run, we'll be indoors before we're wet through."

But the girls were soaked by the time they came into the central hall of the priestesses. Eilan felt Miellyn had welcomed the opportunity to run.

"Get yourselves dry now, lasses, or you'll catch a rheum and I'll be using up all my medicines nursing you!" Latis, who was so old now she could no longer go into the forest to gather the herbs, cackled with laughter and shooed them towards the door. "But mind you come back then to lay out the herbs you've brought me, or they'll mildew and both the plants and your labor will be wasted!"

Skin still glowing from brisk rubbing, Miellyn and Eilan returned to the still-room. Built on behind the kitchen where heat from the ovens kept the air warm and dry, the rafters were festooned with bunches of hanging herbs. Woven trays upon which roots or leaves were spread to dry hung beneath them, turning lazily. Shelves with earthenware crocks stood along one wall, and bags and baskets of prepared herbs were stored along another, neatly labeled with the sigils of the herbalists' craft. The air was pungent.

"You're Eilan, are you not?" Latis peered at her. She looked rather like a dried root herself, thought Eilan, seamed and wrinkled with age. "Goddess help us, they get younger every year!"

"Who does, Mother?" asked Miellyn, hiding her grin.

"The girls they send to serve the Priestess of the Oracle."

"I told her she would be sent for training to the Lady soon," Miellyn said. "Well, Eilan, do you believe me now?"

"Oh, I believed you," Eilan said, "but I thought surely it would take someone older and with more skills than me."

Page 152

"Caillean would say that they do not want anyone too learned near Lhiannon for fear she would ask too many questions. If the Priestess were forced to think about what she was doing, the Oracles she gives might not always serve the Druids' policies so conveniently."

"Miellyn, hush," Latis exclaimed. "You know you must not say such things — not even in a whisper!"

"I will speak the truth and if the priests object, I will ask them by what right they ask me to lie." But Miellyn lowered her voice. "Eilan, be careful; you are holding that basket aslant. We took enough trouble to gather these leaves, I do not want them dirtied by a fall to the floor."

Eilan readjusted the angle of the basket she was holding.

"There are some truths which should never be spoken aloud, not even in a whisper," Latis went on soberly.

"Yes," Miellyn said, "so I am told; and usually they are the truths that should be proclaimed from the rooftops."

"In the sight of the gods this may very well be true," replied the other. "But you know very well we are not in the presence of the gods, but of men."

"Well, if the truth cannot be spoken in a house built by the Druids," Miellyn replied stoutly, "where in the name of the gods can it be?"

"The gods alone know!" said Latis. "I have survived so long by sticking to my herbs, and you would do well to do the same. They, at least, speak true."

"Eilan doesn't have that choice," said Miellyn. "She'll be tied to the High Priestess for the next six moons."

Page 153

"Remain true to yourself, child." Old Latis touched her chin so that Eilan could not look away. "If you know your own heart, you will always have one friend who does not lie."

The priestess had spoken the truth. With the coming of the next moon, Eilan was brought to Lhiannon and taught the ceremonious etiquette for attending upon the High Priestess in public, which, in effect, meant every time that Lhiannon went out of her own dwelling in the Forest House. She learned the rituals of robing Lhiannon for the ceremonies, which was more complicated than it looked; for from the beginning of the ritual, not even with a fingertip's weight could any human being touch the Priestess. She shared with Lhiannon the long ritual seclusion with which the Priestess prepared for the rites, and helped her through the physical collapse that followed.

That was when she learned the price Lhiannon paid for the great reverence in which she was held. For the delivery of the word of the gods there was a heavy reckoning. Vague and forgetful as Lhiannon, in her own person, might sometimes be, when she assumed the ornaments of the Oracle another power came upon her. She had been chosen, Eilan realized, not so much for force of will or wisdom, but because when it was needful, she was able to let her own personality go.

It was then, when the human identity had been put off with her ordinary clothes, that Lhiannon opened herself so that the Goddess might speak through her. And in those moments, she was a great priestess indeed — almost, Eilan thought, more than human. The price of becoming the vehicle for so great a power was both physical and mental, and Eilan's respect for the older priestess grew as she saw Lhiannon pay it without grudging the cost, or at least without complaint.

When Eilan left the Forest House and the woods around for the first time she was accompanying Lhiannon. It was then that she realized how the preceding weeks had changed her. Even the House of Maidens seemed remote and strange. When the newest novices scurried out of her way she scarcely noticed, and only afterwards realized that they had seen in her the same unearthly serenity she associated with Lhiannon.

It was, she supposed, a fairly ordinary Midsummer Festival. She had seen the Games and the market and the lighting of the big sun-fire many times before, but after her months of seclusion in the Forest House, the yammering of so many people was painful, and she shrank from the strong scents of humans and horses. Even the bright cloths the merchants had put up to shade their wares assaulted her senses.

Midsummer was a time when men put forth their strength in competitions, to entertain the gods and the people, and to strengthen the crops as they grew. But as Eilan watched the footraces and the wrestling it was the sweating bodies of the competitors that seemed the most gross and distorted of all. She could not imagine why she had ever wanted to lie with a man.

Page 154

The winner of the Games was garlanded with summer flowers and escorted to preside over the ceremonies. Remembering what she had learned of the Mysteries, Eilan watched with a new appreciation. In time of need, or in some tribes every seven years, the new Year-King would have watched his predecessor burn, and even now some of the old sacredness attached to him. The Empire had killed or Romanized the heirs of the British princes, but so long as men were willing to offer their lives for the people, they could not eradicate the Sacred Kings, who each year stood surety for those who no longer understood their role.

If there were some great disaster, and a sacrifice were needed during the coming year, despite the Romans' prohibitions it was on this young man that the blow would fall. And, in recognition of his risk, he alone of all men was allowed to lie with whichever woman took his fancy - even a maiden from the Forest House if it was there that his eye should fall.

Eilan kept close to Lhiannon, watching as the warriors snatched brands from the great bonfire and vied to throw them high to make the crops grow. The people had grown rowdy with drink and the release of the festival. But no one would trouble her while she was with the High Priestess. Even the Year-King had never been known to push his rights that far.

She sat with Caillean and Dieda, glad of the protection of Lhiannon's presence and the hulking strength of her bodyguard Huw behind them, and hoped that the other priestesses who had come with them to the festival had fared as well.