Druids (11 page)

“How do we do that?” I asked eagerly.

His face was somber in the sunless dawn. “We are going to sacrifice the prisoners of war.”

ATTENDANCE AT THE public sacrifices was a privilege afforded to every adult member of the tribe. Being denied that privilege was considered the most cruel punishment the druids could inflict, for it meant denying an individual the right to participate in direct communion with the Otherworld.

But there were not as many human sacrifices as had once been offered in Gaul. In recent generations the number had dwindled drastically, and since my own manmaking there had been none. Only oxen went to the sacrificial altar.

Seeing the Senones sacrificed would be my first such experience. As Menua’s apprentice, I would be expected to assist in the ritual; I, who looked away when the blood bubbled from the throat of a sacrificial animal.

The meat on the roasting spit was sacrificed for your sake, my head reminded me. And you ate it with a good appetite, you even licked the grease from your fingers.

That is different, I argued with myself. My brother-in-creadon died that I might live, and its spirit was propitiated before the slaughter. When I eat flesh I always do so in full knowledge of the gift given me.

My head replied, The prisoners will die that you and the tribe

may be protected, and their spirits will be propitiated. It would be cowardly not to witness their dying, when they are giving so great a gift.

Cowardly, I agreed. But the thought chilled me just the same.

k ‘For this aspect of your education in druidry, Aberth the sacrificer will be your instructor, of course,” Menua informed me.

Of course.

It was whispered that Aberth loved shedding blood for its own

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sake, that it gave him the sort of pleasure other men found in women.

He came for me at dawn. Standing in Menua’s doorway, with his narrow features half concealed by the folds of his hood, Aberth infected the air with a chamel reek. I drew back involuntarily.

His thin lips tightened over his teeth and his eyes glittered. “You do not welcome me, Ainvar?” he asked mockingly.

“I welcome you as a free person.” My voice was thin.

Aberth looked past me to Menua. “That isn’t a very warm greeting for such an auspicious occasion. Has mis man no enthusiasm for sacrifices?”

“He has not yet had his deathteaching, so he isn’t fully prepared. In the normal course of events … but the pattern has presented us with the sacrifice of the Senones long before Ainvar was ready for deathteaching, so it will be his first experience. Take him, Aberth.” The chief druid surrendered me to the sacrificer and turned away.

Aberth’s lodge was as crammed with objects as Menua’s was free of them. On a shelf stood a long row of stoppered containers. Winter-in-a-bome, my head surmised. Various types of knives, finely honed, were fitted into slotted containers of yew wood. Following the direction of my eyes, Aberth said, “Yew is the wood of rebirth. A yew’s branches grow down and into the earth to form new trunks while the center of the tree rots away with age. No man can tell the age of a yew, since it is dying and being reborn simultaneously. Sacred is the yew, which is why we use a club of yew wood for the blow of mercy to stun a sacrifice before the knife.”

He selected a blade from its holder and ran his thumb caressingly along the edge. A thin red line appeared. Tiny drops oozed. Aberth licked them from his thumb with dreamy eyes.

The sacrificer showed me every knife in his extensive collection, explaining how one was specially designed to be driven into the back of a heavily muscled man—“so he will fall forward on his face and our diviner can read his death throes without being

distracted by his facial grimaces.” Another knife, smaller and finer, was for the tender throat of a baby goat. The curved blade with the gold hilt was reserved for the sacrifice of the Oak’s Child, the tumor-shrinking mistletoe.

When I had examined, with an inner revulsion, me entire assortment, Aberth squinted at me and folded his arms. “Now you tell me, Ainvar. Use your intuition. Which of these would be most

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appropriate for the Senones, the prisoners of war who were not willing to die in battle?”

I had no idea. The voice in my head told me nothing. How does one kill thirty people at once? In my all-too-vivid imagination Aberth stalked among bound and kneeling victims, scything them down until he waded in a sea of blood.

He read the sickened conjecture in my eyes and laughed. k ‘You will not make a sacrificer, Ainvar, no matter what other talents you may possess. But you will assist anyway; in a ritual of this magnitude we need everyone.

“As it happens, I shall not be using any of my beautiful blades. The Senones lost their courage or they would not have allowed themselves to be captured alive. We shall give them an opportunity to correct the balance, a second chance to meet death in heroic style. Theirs will be the glory of returning to the Source on wings of fire!”

Aberth’s face was radiant, his voice resonant. He seemed to envy the Senones the death he had planned for them.

I, however, was appalled. “You’re going to bum them alive? All of them?”

“You don’t understand, do you?” he asked almost pityingly. “Sacrifice is not an act of cruelty, Ainvar. The most gifted sacrificer is the one who can release the spirit from the body with the least pain. When a person, or an animal, dies in agony, its spirit is dazed and confused.

“Remember that the purpose of sacrifice is to return a spirit to its Creator as an act of propitiation, always. And remember, fur-thermore, that every spirit is a part of that Creator-If we send one of its own parts back to the Source frightened and bewildered, we are insulting the very power we wish to propitiate.

“Therefore the Senones will bum, but they will not suffer. I am the best sacrificer in Gaul. Before the prisoners go to the fire they will be given myrrii in wine to drink to dull their senses and enlarge their courage. Then they will be placed in wicker cages raised high above the ground. Certain powders thrown into the flames will thicken the smoke and suffocate the capdves before the fire reaches them. Knowing this will enable them to face death more bravely, so the bards of the Senones can sing of them afterward with pride.”

To hold the prisoners, three massive cages were built of osiers

lashed together with leather bindings. Fire would cause the wickerwork to disintegrate quickly, so it was doubly important that

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the captives be unconscious by the time the flames reached them, or they might escape.

As in so many other druidical customs, the practical blended seamlessly with the mystical.

When the cages were ready, Aberth supervised the workmen as they set each one atop a tall pair of wooden pillars. The fire would be kindled around and between these pillars so the smoke would rise upward through the slats of the cages. The entire assembly looked like a pot-bellied giant on sturdy legs, lacking only aims and a head ID make the illusion complete.

Keryth the seer declared me most auspicious time for the sacrifice would be the next dark moon day. To my relief, Menua took me with him when he went to prepare the Senones for their ordeal. I was not sorry to leave Aberth.

I stood to one side listening as the chief druid explained what would happen and exhorted the Senones to die nobly so they would be a credit to their tribe. He promised to see that word of their courage was carried to their people.

‘ ‘We offer you an easy death and a good death,” he told them. “Not many men have that assurance. That is, we offer you an easy death provided you do what we ask.

“We request that once your spirits arc freed from your bodies and rejoined with the Source of All Being, you use all your powers to implore the protection of the Olherworid for the Camutes. If any one of you is, in his secret Bean, unwilling to do this, I promise you that man will feel the flames!”

Most of the Senones stared tensely at Menua as if devouring his words, though a few appeared almost indifferent and sat or stood propped against the wall of the pen, gazing dully into space. Mallus, the former Aeduan, I noticed crouched in a comer by himself, his eyes darting incessantly like those of a trapped ani-mal.

Another man caught my attention. Tall and strong, with light brown hair and a broad brow, he was looking straight at me with an expression of hopeless longing. It is not you he wants, my head told me, but the life inside you, the future you possess and he does not. I turned away, unable to meet his eyes.

On the morning of the sacrifice the entire fort gathered for the song for the sun. Then the gates were thrown open and the procession set out for the grove. Excitement flickered through the crowd like a grass fire. This would not be the simple sacrifice of a docile animal.

The druids led the way. The prisoners came next, shambling

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sleepily, their faces flushed as if from drink. A guard led by Og-mios accompanied them, spears at the ready. The inhabitants of the Fort of the Grove followed, their numbers constantly increasing as smallholders and herders from the surrounding area hurried to join us. Many of them had little idea of the reason for the ritual;

the prospect of spectacle was enough.

I must behave well, I reminded myself. Menua will be watching me. I was queasy and very nervous.

The earth lifted, the trees rose above us. We passed through the forest to the mighty stand of oaks on the crest of the ridge. Chanting, the druids circled the grove sunwise while the rest of the crowd jostled for position, each person trying to get where he could best see the three cages waiting just beyond the grove itself.

At first sight of them one of the prisoners cried out.

Around the legs of the headless wickerwork giants we had stacked trimmed branches to form crisscrossed layers as high as a man’s head. Leaves and green wood had been stuffed into every crevice to create more smoke. Wooden ladders were propped against the cages, just below the open doors.

Ogmios did not give his charges time to panic. “Send them up the ladders quickly,” he ordered his warriors. A wail of armed men suddenly surrounded the Senones and pushed them forward. Drugged as they were, some stumbled. Our men helped them, not unkindly. The prisoners were up the ladders and in the cages almost before they realized it. The doors were quickly barred behind them.

Aberth stepped forward, carrying a lighted torch. Suddenly everything was happening very fast.

Looking at the men in the cages, I saw that most were standing with deliberate fortitude, setting their jaws in the heroic image for which they wished to be celebrated. If their eyes were glazed, at least their hearts were stout. I was proud of them. They were not of my tribe, but they were Celts.

Mallus, however, was clutching the bars and whimpering. One or two others appeared on the verge of collapse. The stench of someone’s bowels opening filled the air.

The chanting rose in volume as the spectators added their voices to those of the druids.

“Faces of the Source!” cried Aberth. “I appeal to the three gods who accept sacrifice, to Taranis the thunderer, Esus of the water, Teutates, lord of the tribes. Accept our offering!’* He put his torch to the wood beneath the first cage.

Flame leaped. He ran to the other cages and set them alight.

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The men inside stared down, white-eyed. Smoke began to pour

from the stacks as the green wood started to smolder. Suits opened a bag of white doeskin from which she flung handfuls of powder into the fire. A haunting fragrance arose like that of sweet hay. Menua motioned us to step back so we did not breathe the fumes.

Among the stacked branches flames twisted and glittered. The first of them licked at one of the cages, and a high, thin wail rose above the sound of the chanting, a disembodied shriek of despair.

But only one of the victims screamed. The rest were already slumping in the cages as the smoke did its work. Some of the druids had brought rolled oxhides, which they now unfurled, wav-ing them to keep driving the smoke into the cages. Mercifully it soon obscured our vision.

This isn’t so bad, I told myself.

A second, more agonized scream tore the air as the fire exploded into an inferno.

The billowing smoke receded long enough to reveal flames devouring the cages. Soon whatever had lived within lived no longer and screamed no more. Above the gleeful gobbling of the fire, those who stood nearest could hear the sizzling of fat and the popping of bones. My belly heaved.

Three headless giants writhed, blazing. The heat pouring from mem scorched my face. The druids were frantically flapping their oxhides to keep the fire away from the trees. The rest of us leaped back just in time as the cages collapsed in a shower of sparks.

Sulis told me later that I screamed then. I only recall standing transfixed, staring at the glittering spaiks. Some arced out and down like a fountain of burning gold. Others—in memory I would count them as thirty—did not fall but rose on a wave of heat, leaping into the sky above our heads, above the oaks, rising up and up and up and …

Gone.

“Gone to me Source!” Menua exulted. “Plead ourcause, brave Senones!”

A force as mighty as a thunderstorm boomed through me grove, a colossal drumbeat that seized and shook us. Aberth shouted in triumph, “Taranis the thunderer accepts our sacrifice!”

Awe rose in a flood we could not contain, expanding our spirits until they burst from our bodies in a frenzy. We were all screaming now, lost in the roar of the fire, leaping upward and outward from the grove to storm the vault of the sky, to claim me protection of the Otherworld, not to be ignored, not to be denied, the combined will of the people expressed as one will, one cry, one sac-70 Morgan Llywelyn

rifice, one moment when there were no barriers between worlds and earthly events could be transcended and reshaped.

I threw out my arms and wheeled and tumbled amid the stars.