Magdalen Rising (37 page)

At breakfast I sat down next to him and told him that I needed to speak with him urgently and alone. We both knew that the only way to have a private conversation was to take a walk. Under Nissyen's escort, I finally made it beyond the confines of Caer Leb Crowless. It was a cold, grey morning. Beyond the straits, the Snowdonia range was, indeed, being snowed on. Their peaks had disappeared in circling squalls. The ground on Mona was still bare and hard as bone. Our footsteps sounded sharp as the fall of hooves. Because of the cold, we walked briskly. I headed us in the general direction of Caer Idris where the ovate students lived. I was so bent on my destination, so exhilarated to be on my way that I forgot that I'd asked to talk.

“So, Maeve,” Nissyen prompted. “At last.”

“At last,” I agreed.

“At last,” he hinted again after a few more paces.

“At last?”

“At last you're going to tell me.”

“Tell you what?” I stalled.

“Tell me what I already know.”

“If you already know, why should I tell you?”

“Ah,” he considered. “Well, you may be right at that. Not to tell, that is. Unwise speech is like a leak in a boat. Say too much and you're sunk. So we'll just turn around and say no more.”

He did an about face and started back to Caer Leb. Wily old druid.

“Nissyen!”

The cold was so bitter I could see my blast of breath on the air. He pivoted at once. Old softy.

“I need your help.”

“I would gladly help you.” He stood still as he spoke. “But not to get into more trouble. You don't need any help with that.”

“Let's just keep walking, Nissyen. Please.”

“Not too much farther.” He gave in. “Have some consideration for my old bones.”

“Your old bones are so tough, the Other Folk will be using them for hurly sticks.”

“None of your cheek. Out with it, girl. You said you had to speak with me.
Ur
-gent-ly.” He drew the word out dramatically.

“It's just this, Nissyen.” I decided to come clean. “I've got to see him. Everywhere I go I'm surrounded by Crows. I don't stand a chance unless you're with me.”

“Whoa, Maeve, slow down. First of all, who's him? Not that I don't have my suspicions, mind. But I might as well have them confirmed.”

“Esus.”

Nissyen stayed his steps and let out a long, low whistle. His exhalation turned to ice crystals in the air.

“I can't countenance it, colleen. I'm with the Crow ladies on this one. After all, it was sneaking off to meet the stranger that got you into trouble in the first place. That makes two of you now. On my watch.”

So Nissyen had already jumped to the obvious conclusion.

“No!” I spoke as forcefully as I could. My teeth had suddenly begun to chatter uncontrollably. “It's not what you think.”

“Perhaps you had better tell me what it is then,” Nissyen sighed.

I opened my mouth. Words rushed to my throat tumbling against each other. The Fox. Lovernios. Bryn Celli Ddu. Rape. My father. They stuck there. I did not know how to choose first one, then another to construct a sentence that might not make sense to anyone. And if it did?

“Don't tell me,” Viviane had said. “I already know too much.”

I looked at Nissyen standing patiently in the cold, light as the feathers of snow that were beginning to fall. Viviane was right. Anyone I told would be endangered. Nissyen, especially. However lax he was, Nissyen was a druid, a member of the college with two counts against him already. If I told him what had happened, he would be forced to choose between me and the Order that was his whole life and livelihood.

“Please just believe me, Nissyen. Esus didn't do it. But everyone will think what you just thought. I've got to warn him. Don't you see? I've got to!”

I grabbed hold of his skinny arm (to tell the truth, his bones would make better toothpicks than hurley sticks) and began dragging him forward again.

“Take it easy, Maeve! Warn him of what? Suppose everyone does think he's the one. What of it? It's all in the natural order of things. What did anyone expect,” he grumbled, “what with you girls away from your mothers and your foster mothers, your grannies and your aunts? How did they think such a frail reed as I am was going to prevail against the hormonal equivalent of high tide at full moon? I ask you. Well, that's just the trouble. No one thought this so-called experiment through. If they had, they might have realized that opening the mind does not automatically close the womb. And why should it? All the orifices have their offices....”

Nissyen was off and running. His pace quickened. He was a druid all right. He liked to think out loud, to walk along with his head surrounded by a flock of words.

“But Nissyen,” I interrupted, “what if it's not in the natural order of things?”

“Not in the natural order of things? What can you mean? You need more rest. I shouldn't have let you walk so far.” As if he'd had any choice. “Come on now. We're turning around.”

I planted myself. I knew I outweighed him two to one.

“What if I'm the misbegotten child who's carrying the misbegotten child?”

“You misbegotten!” he snorted. “A great, strapping, redheaded, gloriously-breasted creature like you with a fine, if undisciplined, mind. You misbegotten?”

I was touched by his kind bluster, but I could tell he was uneasy.

“But if I am, or if people think I am, and if they think he....” Oh, forget complete sentences. “Anyway, I have to warn him.”

“Maeve, Maeve.” Nissyen stopped and took my shoulders between his hands. “If people are going to think you're the one and he's the one, then it's better for him if you keep away. Better for you both. Look at me, Maeve. Look me in the eye and tell me you don't see the sense in what I'm saying.”

I did look in his eyes. They were kind and old and rheumy, tearing with the cold. Or I told myself it was only the cold. But I didn't see what he meant me to see. (Let that be warning to you. Eyes are like scrying pools and you never can be sure what somone will see in yours.) Instead, from their watery depths, a white deer swam into focus and raced across each retina. The next thing I knew, the frozen ground was ringing under my hooves as Nissyen's cries grew fainter. Huge trees rose before me and plunged into the sky. Then I found myself leaping among the oaks, my full belly swaying beneath me, each four-legged stride taking me deeper into the Dark Grove.

The once impenetrable roof of leaves had disappeared. Cold light spilled unchecked on the ground. But if it was less dark, the Dark Grove was no less forbidding and forbidden. The bare, intersecting limbs of the trees looked like ogham sticks some grim god had cast across the sky. The air retained its unnatural stillness. No winter birds sheltered in the branches; no squirrels raced from limb to limb. The only sounds came from trees contracting with cold and from the delicate (yes, delicate) fall of my hooves whispering through the dried leaves on the ground. Soon I leapt the Afon Braint and continued swiftly up the bank on the other side.

I did not think about where I was going. If it ever happens to you, you'll find that shape-shifting has its own momentum. When you're winged, you fly; when you're hooved, you run. Or at least I did until I came upon a gathering of druids and ovate students, their golden sickles casting the only warm light in the bleak grove. The grey-bearded druid held forth on the healing and mystical properties of mistletoe and why this day of all the days was the most propitious for gathering it. The students, who had their backs to me, listened intently, or so it seemed from the angle of their heads, all hooded because of the cold. No one had heard my approach, and, being a deer, I naturally froze in the presence of potential danger.

Then (who knows why?) one of the ovate students turned around and looked directly into my eyes. And I looked into his.

“Follow me.” I willed him to read the words in my eyes. “Follow me.”

I turned and began to lead the way, making no more sound than a bead of water detaching itself from a leaf and falling onto soft earth. The voice of the instructor droned on. Through my hooves I felt the infinitesimal trembling of the earth as he took one step away from the group,
then another and another. Across the half-frozen Afon Braint, among the stillness of the oaks, I led him slowly to the edge of the Dark Grove. Once in the open, I broke into a run, glancing once over my shoulder. He followed at full speed, his hood blown back, his hair whipped by the sudden wind, fanning out from his head like the rays of a dark sun.

W
HEN I REACHED THE yews, I sank down and leaned back against the trunk of the tree. Under my cloak, I spread my hands over the roundness of my belly that grew larger and tauter each day. In case you're wondering, I did not think: Oh, I'm back in my human form again. I was too tired. If I thought anything at all, I thought: Good, I'm here. Even as the shade of the yews was cool in the summer, their shelter made the spot warmer in the winter. Or maybe I was just overheated from the long run in my condition. I closed my eyes and let myself drift in the brightness behind my lids.

“Maeve.”

His voice. Have I told you about his voice? It could split the husk of a seed. It could make the dead want to dance. Beneath my hands, I felt a movement in my womb like the hammering of some Otherworldly smith deep in the earth. There it was again.

“You were the white doe!” His voice held both wonder and accusation. “Our form hasn't even begun to study shape-shifting. Why do you already know how to do everything?”

“Esus.” I opened my eyes and a smirk spread over my face. “I'm a woman. Women are smarter.”

“If you're so smart, why are you in so much trouble?”

“Who says I am?”

“You're under watch night and day.”

“And you're not?”

“I seem to be able to move about freely—except when I try to see you.”

“Oh, Esus. So you
have
tried.”

“Sure”

He was still standing, making circles on the frozen ground with his toe, not looking at me. Why wouldn't he come and sit down next to me? Why was he making it so difficult? I was about to ask when I felt the movement inside me again, not just the faint hammering this time. Something hard and distinct sailed under my palm.

“Esus! Come here. Quick!” I shouted.

I wonder how many men over how many thousands of years have been called just like that to a woman's side. He kneels before her. She places his hands over her womb. Nothing.

“What is it?” Esus asked. “Are you ill? Do you have a canker?”

Maybe in response to his voice, it happened again: a good swift kick, then another, followed by what could only have been a half turn of a whole little body.

“What in the name of the Most High! How did you do that?”

“I didn't,” I laughed. “It's the baby.”

For just a moment, heartbreaking in its fleetness, we might have been any pair of lovers, awed by their miracle. Except that we weren't. Esus lifted his hands from my womb and sat back on his heels.

“How did it get in there?” he asked after a silence.

“Don't you know how babies are made?”

I knew he wasn't asking that. I knew something was wrong, but I didn't understand what it was yet. I started to feel afraid.

“Of course, I know.”

His voice was as chilly as the air. I pulled my cloak closer and held myself tighter to keep from shivering.

“What I don't know is how you got with child. Who had knowledge of you?”

“Had knowledge of me?” I repeated.

In the midst of sudden bitterness, I could taste the sweetness of that phrase. Had knowledge of me. I could not connect those words with the jagged fragments of the night in Bryn Celli Ddu. Instead it called up the green-gold light of summer, Esus tracing the veins of my breast, naming them for the rivers of paradise. You, I wanted to say, only you have had knowledge of me. Now he wouldn't look at me. He sat scraping at the hard earth with a sharp rock. I stared at the lines he was making and hoped they would turn into ogham or some other clue that would tell me what to do.

“Went in unto you.” He jabbed at the ground. “Does that make it plainer? Because I know it wasn't me.”

No doubt you understand better than I did then how touchy men are about their girlfriends getting pregnant. How do I know it's mine? are often the first words out of a man's mouth (or in his mind) even if it couldn't possibly be anyone else's. Well, that is the question, isn't it? The one at the root of all patriarchy. How do I know it's mine? No matter how angry I was with my mothers, I was still virtually clueless about
patriarchy. Though two millennia separate your time and ours, I am sure you know more than I did then about how an upright first century Jew would regard a despoiled virgin. You are familiar with the epithet:
whore.
Things haven't changed all that much. In your time, politicians win points in the polls for proposing to punish unmarried teenaged mothers like me, not to mention our children. No father? No food.

Yet you are disappointed in him. Admit it. You wanted him to be perfect. All-wise, all-loving, all-compassionate. Hey, give the guy a break. Not that I was about to.

“I know it wasn't you.” I tightened my voice to keep back the tears. “It could have been, but you were too afraid.”

“That wasn't the reason. You know very well—”

“Anyway,” I cut him off, waving his words away like so many gnats. “Everyone will think it's you. That's why I came to find you. To warn you. Excuse me for doing you a favor.” I started to get to my feet, but it took more maneuvering than it used to.

“Why would anyone think it's me unless you say so?”

“Is that what you think I'm going to do!” I was furious now, all the more so because I had to roll to the side and get on my hands and knees before I could stand. “Don't flatter yourself!” There, I was up now, and he was still down. I could squash him like a bug. “The father of my child is no second-rate, second former who can't even figure out how to shape-shift without taking a class, who thinks he's such hot shit because he can cast a guard into a trance. The father of my child is no less than a god!”

I paused for breath and also because I had to make a quick decision about which god to name now that the god Esus was definitely out of the running. The other Esus was still sitting scratching in the dirt. I'd make him sit up and take notice.

“As a matter of fact, it was Yahweh. That's right. You've never seen him. Even Moses has only seen his ass. But
I've
seen his face.”

Esus was on his feet now, facing me, his face paler than I'd ever seen it. No doubt he expected a lightning bolt any minute. Or maybe the ground would gape and swallow me. Well, that was just fine with me. Let Yahweh do his worst.

“Do you want to know what he looks like? Well, I'll tell you. He's a bird. A big fucking bird, that's all. With a horrible beak and talons that tear you to pieces, and—”

Suddenly I was screaming. The scream that wouldn't come out that night ripped from my throat and tore into the wind. I screamed and screamed until my whole body was nothing but sound. There was nothing else in the whole world but my voice.

Then there were arms. Someone contained me. My mother, Grainne of the golden hair, who could call the sun and hold it in her hands. The screaming air calmed. I let myself be gathered and rocked.

“Ssh,” he murmured. “Ssh, ssh, my sister, my love, my dove, my undefiled.”

I did not know what undefiled meant. I did not know the Song of Songs. I only knew that Esus held me close even though I'd insulted his god, his precious god.

“Esus,” I whispered, hoarse from screaming. “I'm sorry. It wasn't Yahweh. I've never seen him. I just said that.”

“Hush. I know. And I knew before that you had been badly hurt. I should have guessed what happened. I'm sorry, Maeve. I'm so sorry.”

Somehow we were sitting down again. His arms were around me; my head lay against his heart.

“Esus, I want to tell you something.” I waited for a moment, sorting out the words, ordering them with care. “The father of my child and my father are the same person.”

I spoke into his chest, but I knew he heard me. He became very still. Incest was more horrifying to him—and to you—than it was to me. I didn't even have a word for it. I only knew that a man I wished I could have loved, hated me, wanted me and my child dead. That seemed quite bad enough.

“What are you saying, Maeve?”

“My father—”

I stopped. If I told Esus I would put him in danger. Then I realized: he was already in trouble because of me. Or would be soon. He'd better know just how serious this trouble might be. Maybe then he'd agree to the plan that was taking shape in my mind.

“Tell me, Maeve.”

“My father.” I took a deep breath. “My father is the druid Lovernios.”

Silence. What if he didn't believe me?

“I haven't known for very long,” I went on. “I know I told you my father was Manannan Mac Lir. That's what my mothers always told me. They did not tell me the truth.”

Even now the concept of lying was alien to me.

“How did you find out?”

He did believe me. I could hear it in his voice. So I told him everything, beginning with the nightmare vision I'd had beneath Bride's breast of my face turning into Lovernios's face and ending with the almost deadly encounter I'd had with him on the shore by Dwynwyn's Isle.

“But I still don't understand,” I added. “Why is he so furious with my mothers and with me? I just don't get it. When King Bran hears the name Tir na mBan, he practically swoons with ecstasy. As soon as he retires, he wants to go there. To me, my mothers are just my mothers. But the way some men talk about Tir na mBan, you'd think my mothers were goddesses or something. My mothers clearly expected him to be thrilled when he woke up. Why wasn't he?”

I looked up at Esus, who was chewing his cheek the way he always did when he pondered something.

“I don't suppose Moses would have liked it either,” he said at length. “King David might have. Maybe King Solomon, but I'm not so sure. Even with all his wives, seven hundred I believe, Solomon was in charge. The wives were his. That's the sticking point. You see, when a man goes to your mothers' island, he theirs.”

“I still don't get why that's a problem.”

“It's a problem, Maeve. At least for some men it would be. Trust me on this one.”

“Would it be a problem for you?”

“I don't know.” He looked thoughtful. “To tell you the truth, I can hardly imagine it. I'd like to think we could work something out.”

Never mind him, I suddenly realized. If my mothers took charge of Esus, it would be a problem for me.

“Well, we're not going to Tir na mBan. So don't worry about it. That's out. We've got the whole rest of the world. Where should we go first?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Us. You and me. Our escape.”

“Escape?”

I sighed. How could somebody so smart be so dense?

“Esus, didn't you pay any attention to the
Samhain
prophecies? Don't you get it? I'm the misbegotten child who's going to give birth to a misbegotten child. Do you think Lovernios wants anyone to figure out that he's the misbegetter? No. So, who does that leave? Who's the Stranger
that some people feel should not be initiated into druid mysteries? Who went into a frothing-at-the-mouth-falling-down trance on
Lughnasad
and went on about the Menai Straits running with blood? You may not remember what you said that day, but everyone else does. Trust me on this one.”

“Wait a minute. Let me get this straight. You think that because of some garbled prophecies and some scattered hints, you and I should run away?”

I nodded vigorously.

“You can't be serious.”

“Why not?” I demanded. “Don't try to tell me that you were seriously thinking of staying here for the full twenty-year course. What about your people? What about Yahweh?”

“What about
your
people?” he countered. “You're not seriously thinking of running away and letting Lovernios get away with what he did to you. What about justice? What about truth?”

“Truth,” I repeated.

No, I didn't say: What is truth? I just said the word, hard and sharp. Truth is a knife blade of a word, a jagged shipwrecking rock of a word. A word that snags your cloak as you try to scramble. A word that can tear you open.

“Who would believe me?”

“Is that the measure of a truth?”

I held my head in my hands and rocked back and forth for a moment. I didn't feel equal to Esus's abstractions.

“What do any of us have but the truth, Maeve?” he persisted. “It is the one thing that can't be taken from us.”

“Esus.” I took my hands from my head and looked at him. “This is the truth: I want to leave here with you. Now.”

“You want to let people go on believing that Lovernios is a Druid paragon while you're a....”

He didn't say the word. He just shook his head. I didn't yet know words like slut. I didn't know enough to care about my reputation.

“Don't you at least want to confront him?”

“But I have confronted him. Esus, I told you. He wants me dead. And he'll want you dead, too, if you cross him.”

As soon as I spoke I knew I had lost my cause.

“I am not afraid of him. Or of anyone.”

His boyish chest expanded with manly assertion. Then he turned to me, his eyes full of the sweetness and uncertainty that made his righteousness sufferable.

“Maeve, listen. I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know how long I'm going to stay. But I'm not going to run away. There is something I am meant to do here. Or to learn. I don't want to leave until I find out what it is.”