Ashes Under Uricon (The Change Book 1) (10 page)

The book she loved to read above all others was the one including her parents, ‘The Mabinogi’. Many of her anecdotes were of people mentioned in this book, as well as of others who had discovered the book in later years. She had a copy that had been given to her by her mother, but she jealously guarded the place where this lay hidden, much to Taid’s sorrow and Matthew’s anger. The copy she used, which I had seen the day before, was from much later.

If you think all of this sounds incredible, if not downright impossible, the ramblings of a woman damaged by life in the country, just as the Apostles told us, you may be right. At the time I just did not believe it, although she certainly told it as if it was true. Long after Eluned told me, I mentioned her fantastic tale to Taid, who passed it on to Matthew and Mererid. At first disbelieving, when they researched the anecdotes they were able to find evidence for more than half of them. Taid, at least, ended up convinced that she was telling the truth, and that she was a more than a thousand year old woman who managed to remain looking like a twenty-five-year-old. Matthew could never accept it as truth, preferring to believe that somehow this same woman had read prolifically in her short life and retained the gobbets of knowledge she related.
 

Mererid rejected the idea wholesale, claiming that she had always known Eluned was a fantasist who was capable of telling the most outrageous lies. Yet it was she who retained Eluned’s services in the house as her ‘companion’. It was also she who knew that Eluned had been the ‘companion’ to her mother and her grand-mother. Yet she had not aged.

It was this final point, definitely attested by Mererid and her immediate ancestors, which led me to eventually accept that perhaps Eluned was telling the truth. Somehow, beyond the limits of our knowledge, this woman had existed, unchanged in outward appearance, for many hundreds of years. It was, in the end, drawing on this ability to accept the unacceptable that enabled me to set out on the task to which my life is now devoted. If I learned anything from my time with Eluned, it was exactly that ability to not reject what we cannot understand. As a child of the Change, my world had all but succeeded in eradicating such a capability. We were told ‘Before Was Chaos’ and we believed it, without thinking. ‘Without thinking.’ Precisely what The Apostles set out to achieve.

Now we must return to that strange dark room in that – to me at the time – strange house, Plas Maen Heledd.

Slowly, over the next several months, I learned to accept where I was and what I was doing. My fear of being discovered by the Guards receded as time passed and I was able to relax more. I gave up worrying about my schoolwork, having realised that there was no likelihood of me returning to the old way of life in the near future, if at all. The sense of freedom that gave me was immense and refreshing. It dawned on me that what I was required to learn in my lessons with Eluned was much more exciting and enjoyable than the dull plod of reading and translating The Bible, and especially the chore of translating my Ovidian.

I was introduced to the other members of the household who were all similar to Taid in that they had been teachers in universities before the Change. Mere Rhiannon would need a chapter to herself, but my first knowledge of her was that she was from a place called Brittany, a part of France. She spoke, read and wrote French and a language known as Breton, which was very like the Welsh that Taid knew. Curiously she did not speak English, a fact that Taid informed me was often true of French people.

Of the three men apart from Taid and Matthew, one, called Campbell, was from Scotland. He spoke English in a very strange manner that I found difficult to follow until I became used to it. He also spoke and read a language called Gaelic. Another, called Aidan, was from Ireland. His English took some getting used to as well, but his other language was a Gaelic that was similar to but different from Campbell’s.
 
The last was a man called Eguski from the Basque country. Matthew described this as a ‘region of Spain’, but Eguski would fiercely deny this, claiming that he had nothing to do with Spain. He spoke Spanish, nevertheless, but his main language was Basque.

Of the women, apart from Mere Rhiannon, who did not seem to have a name of her own, one was called Cordelia. She came from a part of England known as Cornwall and, besides English, spoke the old language of that region, known as Cornish. The third woman, called Jennifer, was from the Isle of Man, an island out in the sea to the west of England. Her particular language was Manx, like Cornish an old language once spoken on the island.

Mererid and Matthew, it turned out, knew all these languages. Taid’s particular skill was that he knew all the many variants of Welsh, right back to the earliest times, as well as the oldest form of English, called Anglo-Saxon or Old English. Taid liked to refer to Matthew as the ‘Old English’, which was not taken too well.

Over time, I discovered that they were all there as experts in what are called the Celtic languages. Each one was an expert in his or her field, and, incredibly, they were all teaching each other’s language to each other. They hoped, in time, to become experts in all the Celtic languages. It was years before I discovered the reason for this. For the first few years I simply assumed that they were a group of men and women left over from before, who had somehow come together in this place in order to pretend that the Change had not happened. How wrong I was.

Meal times, which was when I met with the others, was dominated by a babble of these Celtic languages, as they argued and debated about subjects that meant nothing to me in the early years. Several times I asked Taid what the conversations were about, but he would simply laugh, saying “Stuff and nonsense as far as I can make out, cariad. Stuff and nonsense.” I would eat my meal in silence, turning to left and right, fruitlessly trying to make out what one or other was saying. On those occasions when there was a reading during the meal they would listen in silence, only to break out again once the book was closed.

They were an incredibly friendly group, despite their arguments, and I was always greeted with a ‘good morning’ or ‘good evening’, usually spoken in their own particular language. All I could do at first was nod dumbly in reply, but over time I picked up some of them, causing much merriment when I replied in the wrong language. Apart from at meal times, they seemed to spend most of their time either in the library, which I did not get to see until much, much later, or in another room Matthew called the ‘Study’, which I did see, accidentally, early on. Filled with small tables and chairs, all overflowing with papers, with charts of some sort pinned to all the walls, I was hastily pushed out of the room once I was spotted. Mere Rhiannon came up to me, tut-tutting, repeating, “Interdit. Interdit.”

My life, at all other times than when we were eating, was entirely spent with Eluned. In the first few months this was only in the dark room where we worked and slept. Once she had realised that I was accepting my situation, I was allowed to go outside the house, accompanied at all times by Eluned, who walked close by my side. The gardens and grounds of the house were absolutely amazing to me. Here, I slowly discovered, was the order that belonged to the natural world, unshaped and untouched by human hands.

Immediately to the side of the house was a huge field of grass that was kept short by a herd of sheep that moved slowly across it. Just beside the entrance was the beginning of a wooded area, which we eventually explored, venturing deeper and deeper inside. Behind the house was a lake, deep in a valley that we reached by means of a winding pathway. At the foot of this pathway, just before we reached the side of the lake, there were the ruins of a small village. Each time we went that way, Eluned would hold my arm and pause, looking around, as if she was searching for someone. If I asked what she was doing, she would only shake her head. Once she said, “‘
Therefore shall a tumult arise among thy people, and all thy fortresses shall be spoiled’.” Not that the ruins looked anything like a ‘fortress’ to me.

Over time, our walks in the surroundings of the house became increasingly silent, as I exhausted my questions about what I could see and hear. I never saw any of the other inhabitants of the house outside, which I found increasingly odd as I came to enjoy more and more these occasions. Life in Plas Maen Heledd was so different from the life I had known before. My fears diminished with the passing of time: fears of our being discovered, fears of what I was doing in this place, fears of who the strange people who lived there were, fears of the things outside that I had never encountered before. In the end I was able to look forward to each day simply for what it brought me, even though there was a very strict routine to be followed.

The simple, tranquil life that I became accustomed to was to end all too soon. After nearly four years of living like a child in paradise, one day Taid came to our room just after we had washed and dressed. He hammered on the door and Eluned, looking frightened, unlocked it. He opened the door and stepped inside, something no one else had ever done the whole time I had been there.

“We need you in the library, cariad. Now. Eluned, you will remain here until you are sent for.”

He turned and left, pausing only to make sure that I was following him.

I stepped through the door of the library, for the first time in all the years that I had been in the house. It was far bigger than I had thought, a long room with three walls covered in bookshelves from floor to ceiling. The fourth wall consisted of two huge windows, overlooking the grounds at the front of the house. Between and either side of the windows, narrow strips of wall contained tall stands on which were three bronze heads. The centre of the room was dominated by a table that filled the space from end to end, and nearly from side to side. Along the side facing the window sat the men and women whom I had come to know affectionately as the ‘Professors’. Matthew and Mererid were in the middle, with the women on her side and the men on his side.

Taid directed me to the single chair that faced them on the other side of the table before taking his seat in the chair on the end of the table furthest from the door. Hesitatingly, I took my place and sat down. I fussed with my shift for a moment, embarrassed at this new event. As no one spoke, I looked up and down the table. Each of the Professors had a black folder on the table before them, while Taid had a neat stack of papers. He had a pen in his hand from which he removed the cap, but he did not look at me.

“So,” Matthew eventually said, looking to his left and right. “In a month’s time you will be nineteen years of age. Is that right?”

I nodded.

“Speak up, girl,” Mererid said. Her tone was sharp. I looked her in the eye and said, “Yes.”

“You have been with us now for what? A shade over four years. Is that right, Richard?”

Taid said, “Four years and two months. She was nearly fifteen when we arrived.”

“In all that time you have never been inside this room. Yes?” Matthew continued.

“No,” I replied, vaguely conscious of answering a positive with a negative. I was nervous. “No,” I repeated, “I have never been in this room. I was told it was out of bounds.”

Mererid spoke again. “Just answer the questions, please. We don’t have time for lengthy explanations.”

Matthew carried on. “While you have been here you have been working with Eluned. Mostly in her room, but I understand that you have been outside on some occasions. Is that right?”

I started to say something about this, but a stare from Mererid stopped me. “Yes.”

“You have met with myself and my colleagues at meal times. But at no other time have you seen or spoken to them.”

“Once, a long time ago. Just after I arrived, I accidentally went into the Study. Mere Rhiannon made sure I left immediately.” I looked at her for some sign of support, but she kept her head down. As did all the others. Taid seemed to be writing something at his end of the table. He also did not look up.

“Yes, but apart from that one unfortunate instance, you have had no contact with them?”

“No.”

“Have you ever wondered, then, why they are here? What they are doing?”

“At first, yes. More recently I haven’t really thought about it.”

“Has your grandfather ever told you why we are here?”

“Never.” Taid had become more and more distant as the years had passed.

“Do you speak to your grandfather at times other than when we are in the dining room?”

“I used to.” Again I looked at him. “I haven’t done for a long time.”

Mererid spoke. “When you are outside the house, I take it you are always with Eluned.”

“Yes. She never lets me out of her sight.”

“Of course she doesn’t, child. Did you expect her to leave you alone?”

“Once it became clear that I wasn’t going to run away. I did think that I might have been allowed to go without an escort.”

I could not understand why they were asking me these questions. Surely they knew the answers to them, anyway. I had felt monitored the whole time I had been there, and I was sure that they monitored Eluned in the same way. She certainly seemed to act as if she was being watched.

“Why are you asking me these things?” I said.

“Just answer the questions. There’s a good girl,” Mererid said.

‘A good girl’? I felt hugely patronised. I was nearly nineteen. In my world I would have completed my last year of Schola. A young woman, fully educated, entering into her designated role in the world of work. Instead, I was in this house, still being treated as if I was the girl who first arrived here all those years ago.

Matthew took up the questioning. “When you go outside - with Eluned -” He dipped his head to Mererid who nodded slightly. “When you go outside with Eluned, where do you go?”

“The field. The woods. The lake. It depends on the weather. And what mood we’re in.”

“We? You mean you and Eluned?”

“Who else?”