Lady Churchill's Rosebud Wristlet No. 12 (5 page)

We could marry. We could have children. We were not cloistered, but learned women of the world. There were men among our ranks too, of course, but the school I went to was for girls. We could own property; it did not go over to our husbands at the marriage ceremony, and that was true of all women then, legally and in regards to our rights as females: we were no more privileged than a milkmaid or a baker's assistant. Our knowledge didn't earn us privilege, but duty.

We were not afraid of death. We knew we would return. This was part of our practise, our learning: to study techniques by which we might remember previous lives, when we came again, so that all our twenty years of studying might not all be for naught, to illuminate only one brief candle's flicker of a life. The candle, blown out, might be relit and remember its past burnings. That was the highest teaching at our disposal and the most difficult. I was one who was successful in learning it. But only in part.

A druidess, I crossed Maeve's path, and she asked me to go to war with her, to be her Seer, help her plan. An October path it was, just before Samhain. I was on my way home from Alba where I'd been studying for a turn of the year. Yellow leaves on the forest paths, sorrow at the sacred well. She never let a living soul see her cry except the little goddess of the well. She'd creep out of her war tent at dawn to weep there. Proud and mighty queen, fierce and fearless, for whom did you weep? Did you weep for Cuchullain who might yet have died in your raid had not the Morrigan herself, goddess of war, come to heal him? Eel, raven, she-wolf, hornless red heifer: she was the original shape shifter, her origine divine. Mortals could learn from her but never make more than the palest copy. Not even the two druidic pig keepers, who, after generations of battling in one fantastic creature's skin or another, turned in the end into two bulls, the most powerful two in all Ireland. Settled in two provinces, so many transmigrations later all was forgotten; no one living remembered they'd once been men, and plotted mischief still, as men do. When Maeve woke one day to banter with Ailill, her kind husband, to compare and contest over who owned more, did she know it was a wizardly man and not a beast she hankered after, when Ailill's property turned out to exceed hers by a bull?

She didn't know. She went to Ulster to capture the other, so she and her husband could be equals. They believed in equality, she and Ailill, as much as possible for a royal couple who kept servants, something not well looked upon in my time now, and for good reason. She sent her forces, in single combat against Cuchullain, sole defender of Ulster, of the Brown Bull of Cuailnge. She could have sent thousands and overwhelmed him, but they wanted to play fair, she and Fergus and Ailill. It is Cuchullain's story of course, that is told in our time and not Maeve's, less even mine. I met him and could add another word or two to his legends but to what purpose? His exploits have been well documented. For my own part, it's not the battles at all I miss but the school: I long for that life among the trees, green beings both worshipped and worshipping. I long for the company of my sister students, their eyes alight with the fire of learning. How proud we were of our quick and subtle minds, the difficulties of our course of study.

Sometimes now, I long for that look so; I spend whole afternoons walking this city's streets, watching for just one with that light in her eyes. But I never see it. I think too, there might be another girl here from then who remembers, and she might be the one to carry that light in its little cage, guarding it forever. Yet, when I look in the mirror before I leave for work in the mornings, rearranging my scarf and retouching my lipstick, my eyes are much duller than they ever were then. They used to say I had triple irises, and I thought I was lucky to be born so pretty and with such eyes but looking back I think I earned them; my remarkable eyes reflected my hard-working soul. So few opportunities for a soul to do her work in this world, in this life. If I was to cross paths with a fellow student on a dusty gritty street today, as I crossed Maeve's path in the shadowy Irish forest two thousand years ago, would we even recognise one another, our eyes and spirits so dulled as they are?

"Fedelm,” she asked me that October morning, “Have you the Imbas Forasnai, the Light Of Foresight?"

"I have,” I replied.

"Then tell me what you see,” she said.

"I see crimson. I see red,” I answered, yet my prophesy of bloodshed wasn't enough to make her turn back.

"All wars shed blood,” she said, sounding rather like the Morrigan herself. “It's what they do best."

Later on the march, tired and hungry and enervated, my light began to recede and Maeve cut down a forest, thinking it would clear my mind, improve my vision. I cried that day. To cut trees down for a druid is to poison water so we might drink it.

Still, it's funny how in this new world it's still Maeve I miss the most, her strength and cunning and fierceness, her glad heart and her generous charm. It is her hand I would like to hold, sitting beside a slow moving river. But she I will not see, and if I did, we wouldn't know one another, for she went to the famous Scathac's school for warriors while I took the gentler path, and went to my beloved academy. And they no more taught warriors how to remember countless incarnations than they taught druidesses how to take an army into battle.

Perhaps they made a mistake, and I should've gone to her school for a turn or two and she to mine.

A queen alone on a windswept hill. She travelled with an army of fifty-four thousand, was never alone, and yet I remember her as being alone. She carried the fate of her men in her hands. It was a heavy burden and not even her husband could share it with her, though he went beside her to war, he too thinking she had a right to the famous brown bull. They had separate tents, but visited often, many times each day. They loved each other very much, she and Ailill; that I know for certain. You could see it by the way they looked into each other's eyes.

She stood alone on the windswept hill, looking out at the herds of cattle, knowing what she must do. Caught in the terrible inevitability of her time, that moment where she stood, before the Ulstermen awoke from Macha's curse, the last battle ensued.

A queen caught in a cosmic snare, so large she couldn't see it for what it was, know she was caught, that if she yet saw she was trapped, there might be a way out. I tried to tell her, but she was too proud to listen, even then, in days when the druid spoke thrice, even before the king.

She could not change the tale, only live it out. She was a warrior, confined not just by armour but by blood. How often seeing her just as the first light began on her hill overlooking Murtheimne Plain, I longed to ask her to leave her way, to join us, be a druidess and not a queen and I did ask her once and she laughed at me, and slapped my thigh, roughly, as if she were a man. Maeve's deep throaty laugh, so rich; there is none other.

"But Fedelm,” she said, “I'm a bear and you're a kitten, if a very wise kitten who remembers all her nine lives. You, like the Maureen, might be able to change shape but I could no more take on your still quiet form than I could be subservient to anyone, man or woman. I'm made for war. I serve Macha, goddess of war; only she may hold her head higher than I."

Yet, what if she'd come with me, spent the rest of her life beside me, wandering the forest paths, teaching and learning, hand in hand as they are best, looking into still salmon pools to laugh at her own reflection broken suddenly by the nose of a magic fish? Would they have fought without her leading them, I often wondered. Let them, I felt. Or perhaps they'd go home to their thatched huts, their decidedly ordinary wells, their women and babies, their calves and ewes, their mare and their little ploughed field.

The goddess is stern. So much better to lead an everyday life. What do we know of the gods’ ways in the end? When the raid was at last over, the bull brought home to Connaught, thousands upon thousands dead, I too longed to be ordinary, to grow potatoes and have babies of my own. But by then I already knew too much, and knowledge exacts its own price. I felt I'd seen too many horrors to ever enjoy an ordinary life; I'd wake my husband with nightmares, screaming, “Death, death, death,” just like the raven. In the end I no longer felt my way was better than Maeve's, my gentle wooded path. We were equally stained.

Those damn bulls were a curse. And they had the last laugh. What did they become when they died the last time, died out of their bullish selves? What secret plot are they yet hatching to lead gentle men and proud women astray? They were men once, and they had the last laugh. Oh yes, they most certainly did, summoning Macha, staining all those people's hands and yes, my own. What might I have said to Maeve, if I'd known then what I know now? The eternal regret of age for its misspent youth, my young life two millennia ago?

"Mother, you can capture as many bulls as you like, just stay a few seasons at the druidic school, learn a trick or two, so that, reborn in this time we might yet arrange to be together. We'd both be single, but have lovers. We'd share an apartment and give dinner parties. Standing at the door together, putting on our lipstick as we left to go to work at different jobs, we'd look into one another's eyes and laugh. See for a moment the salmon pool, the salmon of knowledge swimming there, the knowledge of who we were never far from the surface."

I never told you she was my mother, did I? That is the thing of it; Maeve was my mother. And I could stand this darkened time where the birds no longer sing in great multitudes as they did then, darkening the skies, I could even enjoy it, if she was there beside me, sharing it with me, as she was then.

It was all written.

I saw it in the stars, as irrevocable as the turn of the seasons.

I will tell you all of her story but first let us make merry, we'll do the spiral dance one last time as we used to do it at the castle of the same name. Beltane fire festival at Spiral Castle; bonfires on all the high sacred hills of Eire, including Brigid's, mother of us all. We danced like this, inwards to the centre of the spiral galaxy.

Author's Note: Rhonda Payne was a well-known Canadian activist and theatre director, writer and actor. She passed on in 2002. I originally wrote a slightly different version of this story for “The Maeve Project,” based on the “Tain Bo Cuailnge,” part of the epic Irish “Ulster Cycle.” A theatrical production funded by the Laidlaw Foundation and the Ontario Arts Council, co-created by Payne, Pflug, Martha Cockshutt, and Kate Story, “The Maeve Project” was presented as a staged reading in Peterborough, Ontario, but was never completed.

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Found folded in the back

of the Wunderkammen

A cloudy green stone from the mountains of China,

left by a thin pale boy; flower specimens edged with petals

like daggers or lace. My bones had iron, father,

they sang so strong, undid me.

You'd understand, if you'd grown up in that house.

I wandered through it like a ghost in perpetual twilight.

Scraps of white paper—measurements, degrees—

all sailed in my wake.

An enormous beetle with an emerald back,

a statue of Diana, fleeing headless. The iron

in my bones, father, undid me like the ribs of a ship

before it goes over the edge.

Soon these gifts—I awaited something—

soon these gifts too held the smell of mold and brine

cut through by wine spilled on the floor,

fowl from the kitchen.

The sound of boots in the foyer, feet edged

the promise of wonders: didn't you think I would have left

anyway, with all that pulled me, there was iron in my

bones, I would have anyway.

I stole into your workroom, faintest glimpse into a world of men,

indecipherable tools, I awakened from monsters, weary

travelers, bleary-eyed with wonder, wrapped in the drapes.

Such silks. Such flowers, like mouths.

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He could take his hands and make animals

on my room's walls.
A bird. A crocodile.
Perfected,

I suppose, from prison, from many nights spent

half obscured in the shadows, bored and waiting.

That winter, I put on a play. From my window to

the street. Thin ricepaper from Manchuria, candles

backlit my cardboard mermaid and the waves moving below

like the water reflected on the walls of his waterfront prison

her dancing legs, the knives I stuck in my hands and feet.

A Father's Collection

His collection was known far and wide

for its cape of feathers, skins no bigger

than the palm of your hand, the males

louder, glossier, redder. I was expected

to be brown, safe, until of age. Discovering

love tokens infuriated him.

The nautilus is a many-chambered creature,

its beginning hidden. My attacks worsened.

No, she cannot come to dinner.

Please give the lady my word.

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The day she ran away was St. Catherine's, early. Cups lined

the table from the night before, rimmed in wine

stains, sulky set of her mouth, like blood.

I could tell something was amiss because the room

was filled with flowers. In the night she had stripped

her garden bare, peonies still-wet

leaves crumbling on the table, crocus and daffodil

bulbs neatly slashed in half. A lily

split lengthwise, a stalk of translucent green exposed

to yet-unopened orange petals. Her leaving deliberate.

She hadn't bothered to clean the roots, clay and loam

damply clung to the tulip, reset like a broken bone

which falls with a touch. She left everything else