Druids (9 page)

“Our winterweary warriors are going to need a strength they do not have, something the Greeks call ‘energy.’ The energy of bulls fighting, of rams rutting, of young men hot with passion.

52 Morgan Llywelyn

Energy is the life force and it flows through everything created by the Source, even through stone. The trees, always our teachers, sink their roots into the soil and draw out energy. Life. Take off your boots as we walk and feel the earth with your bare feet. Feel, as you have learned to hear.”

I did as he commanded, drawing off the soft leather boots that covered my feet and were tied around my shins with thongs. When I stepped barefoot onto the ground at first, I felt only pebbles and hard-packed dirt. Then there was … a flicker like a whisper running through the earth.

Only a flicker, but it startled me into awareness and I stopped walking.

Menua stopped with me. “You felt it?”

“I think so. It was like putting my fingers to my throat and feeling the blood hum inside.”

“Very good, Ainvar. Some druids have such a feeling for the life force as it courses through the earth that they can follow it like a pathway. Its paths intersect in certain, special places, where the life force gathers so strongly that-—”

“The grove!” I interrupted with a flash of intuition.

“The grove.” Menua’s voice rumbled deep in his chest. “Yes. There, more than any other place in Gaul, the paths of power meet. The great grove of the Camutes is sacred not only to Man, but to the earth. You sense it; all who go there sense it.

“There are other places with similar properties. Some are forceful and invigorating, others are peaceful and contemplative. Men are drawn to them; they become holy sites. Some places excrete noxious forces from the earth as your bowels excrete waste, and they are to be avoided. If you listen, your spirit will warn you of them.

“As for this grove, we druids discovered long ago that me life force here is so intense it heightens our own abilities many times over. Therefore we hold our most powerful rituals in me grove - . . like the sex magic in which you will take part tonight. Ainvar.”

We were walking again. My forgotten boots dangled from my fingers. My eyes were fixed on the ridge rising before us with its crown of trees dark against the sky.

Menua said, “In the grove we will add your young male energy to the power of the sacred place and hud the combined force after our warriors like a spear. When it reaches them they will have strength they did not know they possessed. They will win their battle against the Senones and come back to us free persons.”

We were climbing toward the grove. My feet found their way

DRUIDS 53

along the path of brown earth, studded with occasional sharp-edged stones of mottled reddish-brown. My lips moved of their own volition, silently imploring That Which Watched to make me capable of the task before me.

The druids had brought torches; the one Sulis carried was lighted. From this the other torches were now set ablaze and then positioned at intervals around the glade in the heart of the grove. Beyond the forest the setting sun still shone, but among the trees was twilight.

Menua had me stand in the center of the clearing. Narlos led a chant and the druids circled me, sunwise. A wind rose and sang with them, movement and movement and flowing.

I saw Sutis looking at me from beneath her hood.

The chanting stopped. Menua stepped forward and took a handful of leather thongs from a pouch tied to his waist. He motioned me to hold out my hands, and he bound each wrist separately with a leather strip tied so tightly my fingers grew cold at once. Then he repeated the procedure with my ankles.

Sulis stepped out of the circle and took off her robe. Beneath it she was naked.

Her skin gave off a scent like warm bread. I had seen naked girls before, but Sulis was a woman.

“Lie down,” she said to me.

I did, feeling awkward-The druids and the trees watched, expecting me to participate in something I did not understand.

There are many kinds of fear.

Sulis knelt beside me and arranged my body, head to the north, arms extended east and west. She began stroking me, slipping her warm hands under my tunic. This time hers was not a healing touch. Wherever she touched me, I burned.

The chanting began again.

Sulis smoothed her palms along my rib cage. She pulled up my tunic, working it off my body, and I squirmed to help her. My skin was unbearably hot, I longed for the cool air.

When I lay back down, she gently pressed the balls of her thumbs into the base of my throat. My pulse beat against the pressure. Her thumbs moved along my body, pressing at various points. All my awareness of self followed her thumbs. I could hardly breathe, I could only feel.

Feel feel feel.

Feel the pounding excitement building in me like floodwater behind a log jam, desperate for release, trapped by the thongs strangling my wrists and ankles.

54 Morgan Liywelyn

Sulis’s hands stroked down the centerline of my body, her fingers trailing fire. I felt as if ants were swarming over me. When her hands reached my belly, my penis stirred and rose like a creature with a will of its own, so achingly sensitive I was afraid I would scream if she touched it.

She separated my legs and knelt between them. Using her thumbs again, she caressed the insides of my thighs. My fingers flexed and my toes curled in spite of the tight thongs. Leaning forward. Suits breathed on me. Her warm breath stirred the hair of my groin. I shuddered.

Sulis began to sing.

Her song had no words. It was pure melody, a skein of sound spun round us, becoming part of the chanting as I became part of the chanting, and my penis became part of the chanting, all creation expressed in vibrant sound, heard in my soul as I had heard the music of the night.

The energy Menua had described pulsed through me, and Sulis sang. and touched me, until pleasure became excess became ag-ony.

I would die without release of the force building in me. I would burst like an overripe fruit.

But there was no release. There was only Sulis caressing me and singing to me, using her fingernails and her teeth on my flesh in patterns of torture, dragging her unbound hair over my body until the force in me grew to an intensity beyond bearing. Without my head’s permission, my body began to writhe. Instantly four druids seized my hands and feet, holding me in place. Menua had my left hand; when I twisted around to look at him his hood was thrown back and his eyes were closed in the torchlight, but his lips were moving, chanting, part of the power, power, flowing through me now, scalding through me now, thundering with the rhythm of the chant and the gorgeously insistent hands on my body, the power gathering itself …

… the power in the grove, gathering itself…

and exploding out of me in great aching spasms that arched my spine and made me cry out as Sulis gasped and the trees spun around us and the strength sped from me, the magic released like a spear to go singing invisibly through the air to our distant warriors, to strengthen their arms, to add vigor to their bodies, to bring them home alive and safe.

And free.

DRUIDS 55

They returned victorious. The Senones had been routed and driven back to their own land, northeast of ours. Our warriors abandoned the pursuit and came home to celebrate.

Tarvos sought me out to tell me about the battle. In spite of victory he had not avoided pain. A spear had thrust through the fleshy part of his upper arm, and a sword had laid one cheek open from eyebrow to jaw. Using the wounds as an excuse, I went to find Sulis to ask her to care for the Bull personally. I watched as she poulticed his arm with herbs, then stripped a sheep’s kidney of its membrane, which she dipped in milk and spread very carefully over the gaping wound on the warrior’s cheekbone. Recalling the touch of her fingers, I envied Tarvos his injuries.

When she dismissed us I took him back to the lodge with me to give him some wine and plunder his memories.

He sat with his back against the wall, exploring the drying membrane on his cheek with tentative fingers. “It doesn’t hurt,” he said unbelievingly.

“You were talking about the battle… .”

“Ah. Noise. Noise is what I remember most. It’s always that way in a war, Ainvar. Yelling, swearing, screaming, grunting, bashing, clanging, one terrible roar that goes on and on until you think it will split the stones. I did what I always do. I ran into the middle of the noise and tried to make a louder noise.”

“Why?”

He shrugged the shoulder above the uninjured aim. “We all do it, that’s all. It gets you through. As long as you’re running and yelling you don’t have time to think, and you believe you’re going to be all right.” He drew a deep breath and winced as some new soreness surfaced. “While the battle is going on noise is the center of it and everything else is off at the edges.”

I pondered this after he left the lodge. Later, at the celebration feast, I told Menua what Tarvos had said. Menua did not seem as surprised as I had been. “Noise is sound and sound is structure and structure is pattern,” he told me.

“The harmony that holds the stars on their courses and the flesh on our bones resonates through all creation. Every sound contains its echo. Before there was Man, or even forest, there was sound. Sound spread from the Source in great circles like those

formed when a stone is dropped into a pool.

“We follow waves of sound from life to life. A dying man’s ears still hear long after his eyes are blind. He hears the sound that leads him to his next life as the Source of All Being plucks the harp of creation.”

56 Morgan Llywelyn

As so often before, I marveled at the scope of the chief druid’s knowledge. A thousand years of observation and study and contemplation, stored in one head …

Our warriors had taken prisoners. Some thirty of the Senones were brought to our fort with halters around their necks. We greeted them with the contempt they deserved for having let themselves be captured rather than dying heroically in batde.

As prisoners of war they were turned over to the druids. When Nantorus formally delivered them to Menua, he had one request to make. “Before I go on to Cenabum I want to question one of these men. He is said to be a runaway Aeduan who has been fighting as a mercenary for one of the princes of the Senones.”

“A runaway from his own tribe?”

“He committed some crime and feared the punishment of the druids, it seems. But that’s not why I want to question him. I’m more interested in rumors I Ve been hearing of the increasingly close relationship between Rome and the Aeduans. There are reports of Roman soldiers serving with Aeduan warriors. If that is true, I want to know, and I am hopeful this disaffected Aeduan can tell us.”

“I’ll question him with you,” Menua said. “I am doubly interested in his story.”

No one had invited me to go along, but I had learned that if I looked as if I knew what I was doing, I was rarely challenged. So I trotted in Menua’s shadow as he and the king went to the pens where the prisoners were being held under guard. The man they sought was soon identified by his companions and taken to a low, dark shed for questioning.

The space was small and stank of woolen dyes. The guard pushed the man inside and then stepped back so Nantorus and Menua could enter. I scuttled in behind them. The guard only gave me a bored glance. He knew me well enough.

When the prisoner realized one of us was wearing a hooded robe, the blood drained from his face. “Don’t touch me,” he hissed in a thickly accented voice.

“I can do anything I want with you,” replied Menua in a tone of mild reproof. “You know that. You let yourself be captured. No one escapes the judgment of the druids.”

A sly expression flitted over the captive’s face. He was a meat-less man, all bone and gristle, with lank brown hair and prominent teeth. “I did once,” he whispered.

“No, you merely prolonged the inevitable. I understand you fled druidical punishment before, but now you see you cannot avoid that which is meant for you.”

DRUIDS 57

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“I think you do. And if you don’t want to make things worse for yourself than they already are, you will cooperate by answering a few questions.”

Nantorus stepped in by saying, “Tell us what you know of your tribe’s relations with the Romans.”

The sly look intensified. “The Senones do a little trading with the Romans.”

Menua gave such a roar even Nantorus jumped and the guard, who was waiting outside, poked his head around the door and pointed a spear at us all indiscriminately. “Not the Senones!” the chief druid shouted at the prisoner. “Don’t try to deceive us, your accent tells your origins. We want to know about the Romans and the Aeduans.”

Defiance oozed out of the man like sweat from his pores. He was naked except for the plaid battle kilt; his heaving ribs revealed the pounding heart beneath. tt! am Mallus of the Aedui,” he admitted reluctantly.

“Then, Maltus, answer every question put to you or we shall return you to the Aeduan druids tomorrow.”

Mallus’s eyes rolled in his head. ‘k What do you want to know?”

“Are there Romans among the Aeduan warriors?” Nantorus asked.

The prisoner hesitated. “Some, perhaps. It’s a complicated situation. There has been a certain, ah, alliance between the Ro-mans and the Aeduans for a long time now, surely you know that. We are not too far from their territory and we do a lot of trading with them. They are a powerful people-””

“They are foreigners and not to be trusted,” interrupted Menua.

Nantorus had been watching the captive closely. “I think this is a person of some rank,” he remarked.

Mallus inflated his chest and lifted his head. “I was a captain of Aeduan cavalry. Before.”

“Before?”

Another hesitation. Menua leaned toward him, and the man spoke up hastily. “Before I killed a Roman ambassador in a quarrel over a woman.”

“Ambassadors, even foreigners, are sacrosanct,” said Menua

in a shocked voice. “No wonder you fled to the Senones to escape the reach of Rome.”