Lady of Avalon (36 page)

“Hush, I am here.” She got an arm around the girl and guided her to one of the benches. “Take a deep breath, and another. You are safe now…” She held Lina until the girl’s sobs became shuddering gasps and her trembling stilled. “Tell me, daughter, what has frightened you?”

“The well.”’ Lina drew a shaky breath. “The moonlight was shining on the water, mirror-bright. I looked into it, and suddenly mist swirled around me and I saw men fighting with swords. It was horrible! So much blood! I was glad I could not hear their screams.”

“Was it the Romans? Did you see Allectus?”

“I think so-Roman soldiers were attacking a British camp. Tents were blazing. By the light of the moon and fire it was easy to see. The Romans were fully armed, but our people had been sleeping. Some of them had time to grab their shields, but most had no armor at all. The fiercest battle was around a thin, dark-haired man with a golden headband. He fought bravely, but not very well.”

Allectus!
thought Dierna.
At last my curse strikes home.

“One by one the men of his guard were killed. The Romans called on the King to surrender, but he would not, and so they speared him, again and again, until he finally went down.”

“He is dead, then,” Dierna said aloud, “and Carausius avenged. Be at rest, my dear one, and you, who betrayed him. In another lifetime, perhaps, we will meet again.”

That autumn, while Emperor Constantius basked in the adulation of the capital he had reconquered for Rome, rains lashed the land. In the Vale of Avalon, clouds swathed the Tor and lay low across the waters, as if the mists that protected it were blotting out the world. But despite the leaden skies, Dierna felt as if a great weight had been lifted from her, and her priestesses, taking heart from her mood, began to speak of building new walls around the sheep pen and replacing the tattered thatching of the meeting hall.

On a morning shortly after the equinox, the maiden in charge of the sheep came in weeping because one of the ewes had gotten through the temporary fencing and disappeared. And because, after a week of solid rain, the clouds had thinned to a misty drizzle that might even soon admit a few rays of sun, and after so many months of lassitude she found herself actually wanting exercise, Dierna volunteered to search for it.

It was not easy going. The waters had risen with all the rain, and some places that were usually dry had become marsh as well. Dierna chose her path carefully, wondering what the silly creature had been thinking of to leave the hill. But the soft ground made for easy tracking, and she followed the trail around the hill above the holy well and down through the orchards. Still it went on, back along the edge of the lake toward the low hill of Briga, whose shrine was circled by apple trees.

Dierna paused, frowning, for the hill, ordinarily on an isle by courtesy, had become in truth an island. Mist lay low across the water, as yet too thick for her to see the sky, though it glittered in the light of the sun. And yet it seemed to her that she could see something grey beneath the trees. She knew where the path must be, though she could not see it. Picking up a pole that had drifted onto the shore with which to probe the ground, she began to wade out into the water.

Mist swirled around her, at the first step a veil, but by the third a curtain that hid both the place from which she had come and her goal. An ancient panic stopped her, muddy water lapping her ankles.
This is my own land!
she told herself.
I have known these paths since I could walk-I should be able to find my way blindfolded or in a dream!
She took a deep breath, calling on disciplines she had practiced to induce calm for almost as many years as she had lived on Avalon.

And as the roaring in her ears faded, she heard a call.

“D’rna-help me!”

It was faint with distance or exhaustion, hard to tell which, for the mist deadened sound. But Dierna splashed forward.

“Someone, please…can anyone hear at all?”

Dierna gasped, her sight darkened by memory. “Becca!” Her voice cracked. “Keep calling! Becca, I’m coming for you!” She stumbled ahead, feeling out the way with her staff.

“Oh, Goddess, please-I’ve tried so hard to find my way…” The words faded to disjointed mumblings. Butthey were enough. Dierna turned and found herself in deeper water, reached out with senses beyond sight as she had when she searched for Carausius, and at last glimpsed the shape of a tree and, clinging to its roots, a woman’s form.

She saw draggled dark hair, limp as waterweed, and a thin, mud-smeared hand. The body she hauled onto the higher ground was as light as a child’s. But it was not a child. Dierna cradled the woman against her breast and gazed into Teleri’s eyes.

“I thought…” Her mind reeled in confusion. “I thought you were my sister…”

The wonder in Teleri’s face faded, and she closed her eyes. “I was lost in the mist,” she whispered. “Ever since you sent me away I think I have been lost. I was trying to come back to Avalon.”

Dierna stared down at her, wordless. When she heard of Teleri’s marriage to Allectus she had wanted to curse her too, but she had lacked the energy. It would appear that, even without her cursing, Teleri had been punished by the same powers that brought Carausius’ murderer down. But Teleri was still alive. Mist drifted around them like a clammy veil. In all the world, she could see nothing living but Teleri, and herself, and the apple tree.

“You came through the mists…” Dierna said slowly. “That can only be done by a priestess, or by passing through Faerie.”

Thought came slowly, as if from deep waters. Could she forgive this woman, for whose love Allectus had turned against his master? Could she forgive herself, for being so certain she knew the will of the Goddess that she had tangled them all in this doom? Dierna sighed, releasing a burden she had not known she bore.

“I am not the one you were looking for… Forgive me…” Teleri whispered then.

“Are you not?
I promise that I will treat every woman in this temple as my sister, my mother, and my daughter, as my own kin…
” The voice of the priestess gathered strength as she repeated the oath of Avalon.

“Dierna…” Teleri gazed up at her, those dark eyes, still so lovely in her ravaged face, filling with tears. Dierna tried to smile, but now she was weeping herself, and could only hold the other woman close, rocking her like a child.

She did not know how much time had passed before calm returned. A cloud of white still surrounded them, and it was cold.

“We seem to be trapped here, until the fog goes away,” she said with a cheerfulness that belied her words. “But we will not starve, for there are still apples on this tree.” Gently she settled Teleri against the trunk and stood up to pluck one. As she did so, she saw a stirring in the air beyond the island, and then, as if it had precipitated out of the mist, the shape of a woman poling a small flat craft of the kind the marsh folk used.

She stilled, squinting as she tried to see. The woman seemed familiar, and yet, as the priestess reviewed the people of the marsh villages, she could not remember her face or name. Despite the chill, the stranger was barefoot and clad only in a deerskin wrap, with a garland of bright berries on her brow.

“Hello.” She found her voice at last. “Can your craft carry two lost ones back to the Tor?”

“Lady of Avalon that is, and Lady of Avalon that will be, that is why I am here…” came the answer.

Dierna blinked, and then, understanding at last who had come for them, she bowed.

Swiftly, lest the Queen of Faerie disappear as she had arrived, Dierna lifted Teleri into the boat and clambered after her. In another moment the punt was sliding into the cloud. The mist was very thick here, and bright, the way it sometimes appeared when one passed through it to reach the outside world.

But the radiance that encompassed them as they emerged was the clear light of Avalon.

Constantine, the son of Constantius, now rules the world, and the Christians, who for a time seemed about to be destroyed by their own quarrels, have been united by the persecutions of Diocletian, and now reign as the favorites of his successor. The gods of Rome were content to share in the devotion of the people of Britannia without supplanting them. But the god of the Christians is a jealous master.

In Avalon, Teleri ascended the high seat, her dark hair falling like a veil around her, and the sacred herbs granted her a vision of what shall be.

She saw Constantine ruling in splendor, to be succeeded by unworthy sons. Another, coming after, strove to bring back the old gods and died young in a distant land. In his time, the barbarians once more raided Britannia, and after them, the men of Eriu. But despite all, our island flourished as never before, except for the temples of the old gods, despoiled by the Christians, who called our Goddess a demon, whose roofless ruins reproached the sky.

In time, another British general, inspired by Carausius, proclaimed himself Imperator and sailed with his Legions to Gallia. But he was defeated, and the men he had taken away remained in Armorica. Now wave after wave of barbarians began to pour into the Empire from Germania, marching at last through the gates of Rome. Britannia, abandoned by the Legions, proclaimed herself independent at last.

More than a century had passed, and the Painted Peoples were sweeping down from the north, devastating the land. Teleri spoke then of a new lord, whom men hailed as Vortigern, the High King. In blood he was of the old line, like Allectus, but, like Carausius, to protect his people he brought in Saxon warriors from over the sea.

I tried to halt the flow of vision, to ask what part, in this strange future, might be played by Avalon.

She cried out in wordless answer, possessed by images too chaotic for comprehension. I acted quickly then to bring her back to herself, for indeed she had journeyed far.

Teleri sleeps now. It is my peace that is broken, for, as I rest, the images she saw live in my memory, and I fear, in a land which rejects the Goddess and all Her works and wisdom, for the priestesses who shall come after us on this holy isle.

Viviane was all the more surprised, therefore, when she looked out the door of the cowshed to see a traveler turning up the path leading to the farm. The big, rawboned mule the stranger rode was mud-splashed to the belly; the stranger’s own body so swathed in cloaks and shawls she could make out nothing but his feet. She blinked, for a moment certain she knew him. But of course that was impossible. She bent to lift the heavy pail of milk, then started back to the house, her small feet crunching through the ice that had formed in the puddles on the path.

“Da, there’s a man coming, an outlander-”

Her speech had the musical lilt of the north, though she had been born in a place they called the Summer Country. Her foster-brother had whispered once that she was from a place that sounded even more unlikely, an island called Avalon that was not really part of this world at all. Her father had hushed him, and in truth, when she was awake she did not believe it, for how could a place in the middle of the land be an island? But sometimes in dreams she almost remembered, and would wake with an odd sense of loss. Her real mother was its Lady, and that was all she did know.

“What sort of an outlander?” Her father, Neithen, came around the corner of the house from the woodshed with an armful of kindling.

“He looks like a rag heap, all bundled to keep off the cold, but, then, so do you and I.” She grinned up at him.

“Get in with you, lass”-Neithen made a shooing motion with the wood-“before the milk freezes.”

Viviane laughed and stumped through the door, but Neithen remained outside, watching as the mule picked its way up the path. Viviane, setting down the pail and shrugging off her cloak, heard voices and paused to listen. Bethoc, her foster-mother, stopped stirring the pot and listened too.

“Taliesin! So it is you,” they heard Neithen say. “What ill wind has blown you this way?”

“A wind from Avalon, that will not wait for the weather to smile,” came the answer in a voice of peculiarly resonant beauty, even when it was hoarse with cold.

“Somehow, I do not think you have come all this way only to give Viviane Samhain greetings from her mother!” they heard Neithen reply. “Come in, man, before you
do
perish of cold. I’ll not have it said that the best bard in Britannia froze on my doorstep. No-go on, I’ll stable your beast with my cows.”

The door opened, and a tall figure, slender beneath the wrappings, came through. Viviane backed away, staring, as he began to unwind them, scattering little chips of ice to melt upon the well-scrubbed stones of the hearth. Underneath all the layers he wore the white woolen robe of a Druid. The thing that had distorted his shape was a sealskin harpcase, which he eased off his shoulder and set carefully on the floor.

He straightened gratefully. He had beautiful hands, she saw, and hair so pale she could not tell if it was gold or silver, receding from a high brow. He would look much the same, she thought, until he grew old; indeed, he seemed old to her. Then he saw Viviane watching and his own eyes widened.

“But you are only a child!”

“I am past fourteen, and old enough to be married!” she retorted, drawing herself up, and was astonished by the sudden sweetness of his smile.

“Of course you are-I had forgotten you are just like your mother, who is in truth no higher than my shoulder, only one always remembers her as being tall.”

He bowed to her foster-mother, whose glower softened to a kind of bleak acceptance. “A blessing on this house and the woman of it,” he said softly.

“And on the traveler who honors our hearth,” Bethoc replied, “although I do not think it is a blessing that you bring.”

“Nor do I,” said Neithen, coming through the door.

As he hung up his cloak, Bethoc poured cider into a wooden cup and offered it to their visitor, adding, “But I will bid you welcome. Supper will be ready soon.” She turned back to the cauldron that hung over the fire, and Viviane began to get out the carved wooden bowls.

“So,” said Neithen, “what is your news?” Viviane paused to listen, a bowl still in her hand.

Taliesin sighed. “The Lady’s daughter Anara died a moon ago.”

My sister,
thought Viviane, wondering if she ought to feel sorrow, since she could not remember the girl at all.

“Was that the one who was married to the son of Vortigern?” asked Bethoc in an undertone.

Her husband shook his head. “That was Idris, but she is dead too, in childbed, I have heard.” He turned back to Taliesin. “I am sorry to hear it…” He waited, clearly wondering why the bard should have made this journey to tell them so.

“The Lady Ana has sent me to bring Viviane to Avalon…” Taliesin said.

“My home is here!” exclaimed Viviane, looking from her father to the bard.

Taliesin’s face grew somber. “I know. But the Lady Ana has need of you.”

“Father! Tell him you will not let me go!” she cried.

Startled, Taliesin looked at the other man. “You have not told her?”

“What has he not told me?” Viviane’s voice rose. “What does he mean?”

Neithen flushed, and he did not meet her eyes. “That I am not your father, and have no right to keep you here, a truth I had hoped you would never need to know.”

She turned on him. “Whose daughter am I, then? You say you are not my father. Will you next say the Lady is not my mother?”

“Oh, she is your mother, right enough,” said Neithen glumly. “She gave this house to me and Bethoc when she gave me you to foster, with the promise that the land should be ours always, and you our daughter, unless by some chance both your sisters should die without leaving a female child. If the elder, whom she kept by her to train as a priestess, is dead, then you are her only heir.”

Viviane felt her face turn pale. “And it makes no difference if I say I do not wish to go?”

“The need of Avalon outweighs all our wishes,” Taliesin said gently. “I am sorry, Viviane.”

She drew herself up proudly, fighting tears. “Then I will not blame you. When must we leave?”

“I would say now, but my poor mule must be allowed a little rest or he will founder. We must leave with tomorrow’s dawn.”

“So soon!” She shook her head. “Why could she not give me more warning?”

“It is death, my dear, that has given no warning. You are old already to begin your training, and soon the weather will make travel impossible. If I do not bring you now, you could not come to Avalon before spring.”

As Viviane climbed into the loft to begin her packing, the tears began to fall. She felt orphaned. It was clear that her mother’s summons had been motivated by need, not love. Avalon was a fair dream, but she did not want to leave the man and woman who had been her family, or the rocky island she had learned to call home.

Taliesin sat by the fire, a cup of heated cider in his hand. He had slept warm and well, for the first time in days. There was peace in this house. Ana had chosen well when she gave her daughter to Neithen to raise. It was a pity she could not have left her here. Memory brought to mind the face of the Lady as he had last seen it, the broad brow marred by new lines, mouth drawn tight above the pointed chin. A little, ugly woman, some might call her, but from the day Taliesin first came to the Druids twenty years before, she had been the Goddess to him.

Ana had been trained by her own mother, and she by her aunt, as he had been told. The inheritance was not always mother to daughter, but over the centuries many children of Avalon had married into the princely houses of Britannia, and sent their own daughters back to the holy isle to become priestesses in their turn. Indirectly, Ana’s child could trace her descent all the way back to Sianna, who was said to be a daughter of the Queen of Faerie.

A movement caught his eye and he looked up. A pair of legs, swathed in breeches and leg wrappings, was emerging from the loft. He stared as the odd figure, topped by a loose tunic, made its way down the ladder and, on reaching the bottom, turned to face him, frowning defiantly. Taliesin lifted one eyebrow, and the frown became a crinkle of amusement that transformed Viviane’s face.

“Are those your foster-brother’s things?”

“I have been taught to ride like a man; why should I not dress like one when I do so? You are glowering-would not my mother approve?”

His lips twitched with quickly suppressed mirth. “It will not please her.”
Holy Briga,
he thought,
she is
just
like Ana. How interesting the next few years are going to be.

“Good!” Viviane sat down beside him, elbows planted on her knees. “I don’t want to. If she objects I shall tell her I object to being taken from my home!”

Taliesin sighed. “I cannot blame you.”
It was ill-done of her to send you away so young and then call you back with no warning at all, as if you were a puppet to be jerked this way and that for show,
he thought then,
but Ana has always been too fond of her own will. And I too have felt her hand on my strings…

He saw Viviane’s face stiffen in shock and realized she had heard him. Without thinking, he made a subtle gesture with his left hand; her surprise faded and she reached for a cup. He must be more careful. This little one might well have all her mother’s talent, though it was still untrained. And he had never been able to hide anything from the Lady of Avalon.

The sun was declining a little from the height of noon when they set out, Taliesin on his mule and Viviane on one of the tough little hill ponies of the north. The water between the isle and the mainland had frozen solid, and they were able to ride across. They passed through the village that had grown up near the legionary fortress at Segontium and started along the road the Romans had built across the top of the Deceangli country, heading for Deva.

Viviane had never ridden farther than across the Isle of Mona, and she quickly grew weary. Nevertheless, she managed to keep up with him, without betraying fatigue or weakness; though the Druid, trained to ignore the claims of his body, scarcely considered that a young girl might find such long hours in the saddle hard. But Viviane, small and fine-boned though she might be, had the tough constitution of the dark people of the marshes from whom she had gotten her looks. She had not seen her mother since she was five years old, but she was determined to show her no weakness. She could not help wondering who her real father might be, and whether he too lived in Avalon. Perhaps he would love her.

And so she rode with the tears freezing on her cheeks and lay down at night too tired, almost, for sleep, aching in every limb. And gradually, as they moved south through the valley of the Wye, she grew accustomed to the exercise, though she still did not like riding, or the pony she rode. The beast appeared to be possessed by some demon of independence-he insisted on going his own way, and it was not hers.

Between Deva and Glevum, Rome had made little mark upon the land. At night they sought shelter with herdsmen, or little families who scratched a living from the hills. They reverenced the Druid as a visiting god, but Viviane they welcomed as one of their own. As the two approached more southern lands, though the cold was still fierce, the roads were better, and now and again they would see a tile-roofed villa surrounded by broad fields.

Just north of Corinium, Taliesin turned up the road leading to one such, a comfortable old place with buildings set around a courtyard.

“The time was,” the Druid said as they rode in, “when a priest of my calling would have been an honored guest at any British house, and treated by the Romans with respect as a priest of a kindred faith. But in these days, the Christians have poisoned so many people’s minds-calling all other believers worshippers of demons, even when they follow kindly gods-that I travel in the guise of a wandering bard, and only to those who hold by the old ways am I revealed.”

“And what sort of household is this?” asked Viviane as the dogs began barking and people stuck their heads out of doors to see who had arrived.

“These people are Christians, but not fanatics. Junius Priscus is a good man, who cares for the health of his people as well as his animals but lets them worry about their own souls. And he dearly loves to hear harp-playing. We will get a good welcome here.”

A strongly built man with a fringe of red hair was coming out to greet them, surrounded by dogs. Viviane’s pony chose this moment to try and bolt, and by the time she had it under control Priscus was welcoming them.

They dined in the old Roman way, the men reclining while the women sat on benches near the hearth. Their host’s daughter, Priscilla, a wide-eyed child of eight who was already nearly as tall as Viviane, found the visitor fascinating and sat on a stool at her feet, offering her more to eat whenever she finished what she had. This was often, for of recent days their hosts had been poor folk, and Viviane had feared the food they were sharing would be needed as the cold season went on. It seemed to her now that it had been a century since she had eaten her fill, or been truly warm. She ate without paying much attention to the conversations around her, but presently her hunger began to ease, and she realized the talk had turned to the High King.