Magdalen Rising (8 page)

I began to scream then, though I hardly knew my own voice. This wave of vision did not roll away. It broke over me or I felt broken, dashed on the rocks. Then I was staring at the wide, dusky sky, my eyes following a flight of cranes, their wings beating together in perfect time. At a slower rhythm, I felt the rise and fall of waves beneath me. I was somehow floating on the sea. A new moon drifted down the sky. Then, reaching out over the water, came the sound of many voices singing:
“Hail to thee, thou new moon, jewel of guidance in the night.”
The sky turned black, and the stars sent down their burning roots.

I don't know how long the visions went on. The Cailleach hardly needed to caution me about clinging to time. There was no way to reckon time here, unless I'd wanted to keep count of the rhythms: the waves, the heartbeat, the breath. In and out. No time and all time. Though I must tell you the story in time—first this happened, then this—think of time as a snake shedding skin after skin, revealing layer after layer of one primal pattern.

After the visions, I went into what might be described as quiescence rather than ordinary sleep: the state of trees when the sap slows; animals in hibernation. I came to consciousness again when something touched my foot. It had an almost watery quality, yet, at the same time, it was hard, muscular, sinuous. It coiled round my ankle and all at once I knew: it was a snake, a real snake, not a metaphorical one, and it was moving steadily up my leg. I stiffened and held my breath.

My mothers had taught me to revere snakes as beings wise in the secrets of the earth. I had handled snakes more than once. But it's one thing to stroke a snake in the sunlight surrounded by eight mothers eagerly offering lore and instruction; it's another to be underground, in the snake's turf, so to speak, naked and at its mercy. So I was faced with another of those subtle choices life offers in profusion. I could surrender to fear or I could just... surrender. The snake, perhaps sensing my alarm, had stopped mid-sliver halfway up my calf. I let out my breath and relaxed.

The snake began to move again, and I began to enjoy the feel of living snake skin sliding against my own skin. I gasped when I realized another snake was moving over my hand up my arm. But after a moment that felt delightful, too. Do you begin to get my drift? The two snakes coiled closer and closer to the quick of me. The one winding up my arms moved to my breasts, gliding over, around, and between them. The other snake, yes, slid back and forth between my thighs, along the opening petals of my vulva. I could feel myself moistening, flooding as if some underground spring had suddenly gushed to the surface. When the pleasure became unbearable, I found myself shuddering, quivering, blossoming. Yes, that's how I saw it, how it felt, as if I were some huge, hot, trumpeting flower erupting from the quaking earth.

Afterwards the snakes and I rested, both of them coiled together on my belly. I was drowsing when I heard a voice. “The snakes are within you: the male and the female, the right and the left, the bright and the dark, the sky and the earth. Never forget.” Then the snakes slipped from my belly and were gone.

After that, whether delirious from hunger or from being too long in the timeless dark, I let go completely. When I felt my moon blood beginning, I overflowed the boundaries of my separate self. Distinctions between who I was and what I saw dissolved with the red tide. Vision literally flowed from me as I finger-painted all over the cave. Though I could not see with my eyes, I retain an image of glowing walls, bright with birds and snakes, spiral mazes, dripping breasts, and long-tailed stars. When the pictures faded, I rolled around on the ground. I licked the rocks. They tasted of honey and milk mixed with the faint, salt tang of blood. At last, I immersed myself in the hot spring, bathing and drinking at once.

It was then that I heard the sound, muffled and far away, coming through layers of earth, barely audible above the sound of the spring. I crawled out of the water and curled into a ball on the ground. I heard the sound more clearly.

“Maeve! Maeve Rhuad!”

I listened, but I did not connect the sound with myself or even recognize it as words.

“Maeve Rhuad!”

Mead. Meaning came to me. Red mead. I ran a finger over the cave wall, then tasted it. My mouth, I remembered, my finger, my tongue.

Me.

Still not fully comprehending, I got to my feet.

“Maeve Rhuad. I call you from the depths of the earth.

I began to move and soon found myself in the passage, spiraling up, just as the snake had climbed my leg.

“Come forth, Maeve Rhuad. Rise. Live.”

I walked up and up. The darkness began to tatter and fray. The air changed, too, no longer close and still. It came to meet me, wild, sweet, insistent, plunging into my lungs, pouring over my skin like water. Then, in the thinning shell of earth, I saw a crack of brightness. I shielded my eyes.

“Come forth. Be born. Live.”

It felt as though the passage was narrowing. I squeezed forward.

“Now!” the voice cried. “Head first!”

I bent my head to the brightness and butted.

“‘Atta girl. You can do it. Push!”

My head eased through; the rest of me followed, and I was out, gasping and blinking, in the bare air. Then the earth tipped crazily over the sky and came smack down on my face.

“A
ND?” THE CAILLEACH PROMPTED.

We were in the Cailleach's earth shelter, built into the side of a hill. I was lying on some fur-covered heather by the fire. As she probed what you might call my traumatic memories of the future, the Cailleach wielded a drop spindle. You know about the Fates, don't you? They show up in lots of mythologies. Whatever their names, there are always three of them, messing around with the threads of our lives: spinning, weaving, snipping, catching us like fat foolish flies in their beautiful webs. They are often, though not always, pictured as old women. If you pay attention, you will find not just one but three know-it-all old women in this story.

“That's about it,” I sighed.

We'd been at it for days, going over and over what I had seen when I was underground.

“There is something you haven't told me.” She made this remark as an observation, not an accusation, as if she could care less. If I wanted to withhold vital information, that was my business—and my problem.

“I can't think what.”

“The Well. What did you see in the Well, I wonder?”

“I told you. The horrible face. My face turned into that face with bristles like a boar.”

“No,” she said. “Not the pool in your vision. Your vision in the pool here in the Valley. Before I found you. On the day of your first blood. I wonder what you saw then?”

She fell silent again. I could hear the almost soundless sound of the thread she twirled, the peat-fire hissing. No, I hadn't told her about the One I'd seen, the One with the dark eyes and the bright stream. For all her knowing, I knew something she did not. I did not want to give away my secret, but I was also bursting with it. I wanted more from her: hows, wheres, and whens.

“I saw my destiny,” I announced.

“Did you?” She was maddeningly calm.

“Yes.” I wanted it to be true. “What I saw in the other pool, the bristled face, that was just a nightmare.”

“The great grey mare that gallops through our dreams never shows us anything true?”

“It can't be true,” I insisted, afraid that it could be. “My face won't change into that face even if I live a thousand years. Even if I live to be as old as you.”

You may think I was being rude, but neither the Cailleach nor I thought there was any shame in great age. That's an equation your century has invented.

“Change into a man's face?” she mused.

“A man's face? How do you know I saw a man's face?”

“Because the hair you describe grows on men's faces when they are no longer boys.”

“But I don't want to be a man! I only want to see one!” I protested, as if men were some alarming species akin to purple cows.

“Maeve, Maeve,” she laughed, not unkindly. “Set your mind at rest. You are not destined for manhood. No, not in this lifetime. You are about as female as they come. Terribly female.”

“Then that proves it.” I was triumphant with relief.

“Proves what?”

“That what I saw in that nasty vision is not true.”

“No, dear. I'm afraid it doesn't prove anything. You are being too literal. A common failing among the young. How things appear is only the thin, papery outer skin of the onion. Of course, when you cut open the onion, your eyes will sting and water, and then you can't see at all. You're lucky if you don't slice your finger.”

“It helps to hold it under cold water before you cut it.”

“Hold what?”

“The onion. Boann always does. Liban doesn't. She likes to cry.”

“That was a metaphorical onion, Maeve,” she said severely, as if she had not just followed her extended metaphor into a literal thicket. “Now as to your vision. You might have seen your what-ya-ma-call-it” She searched her mind for the first century Q-Celtic equivalent of animus. “Or you might have seen someone you are going to encounter. Now suppose you tell me more about your destiny, hmm?”

“I thought you were supposed to tell me,” I said crossly.

I heard her sigh. Then she paused in her spinning.

“You are going to go on a long journey. A very, very long journey. You will meet a dark, handsome stranger.”

This was more like it. “Go on!” I urged.

“Crap.”

“What!”

“Generic fortuneteller's crap. Want to hear the rest of it? You will have trouble. Trouble with your love luck. In your case I might add, you'll be trouble. Trouble to that boy with the dark eyes. The boy you saw in the pool. And he will be trouble for you.”

“You know about him!” I sat bolt upright and turned around to stare at her.

“It's my job to listen as carefully to what you don't say as to what you do say. When you hold such a strong image in your mind, I can catch and echo of it. He seems to be standing in an alley of a city I once knew well. I can't make out what he's doing there.”

At least some things were still secret, and, to me, sacred.

“So,” I fumed, “whether I choose to tell you things or not, you pick my mind.” I began pulling out tufts of sheepskin. “But you! You don't tell me anything!”

“If you want you yank at wool, there's a whole basketful that needs carding.”

She set down her spindle and brought me the wool and some carding combs. For lack of an alternative, I began to drag the comb through the tangled mass.

“Consider this wool, Maeve Rhuad.” She sat down with her spindle again. “Let's say I have a vision of a beautiful cloak I want to weave. In my mind's eye I can see the colors, the patterns. The wool I sheared from the sheep was all tangled with thorns and thistles, matted with mud, the hindquarters hung with dingle berries. I can understand women's lust for horses,” she offered as an aside, “but I've never understood the proclivity of some men for sheep. Anyway,” she resumed, “this wool was boiled in a cauldron, dried in the sun, carded, dyed, and spun. Only then do I begin to weave. It's the same way with a life's story. However the cloak shimmers in your mind, you have to start with sheep. Do you understand? I'm speaking metaphorically, of course.”

Of course. Metaphorically speaking, my life story was still running around some little island on a sheep's ass. I dragged so hard at the wool I could feel the fibers breaking.

“Knowing too much is as dangerous as knowing too little,” she went on dispensing wisdom. “It can more easily mislead you. You may not know this, because you have not yet traveled beyond Tir na mBan. You will, don't worry. Or perhaps I should say: do worry. Believe me, when you come to a place where roads meet, if you strain hard to remember what someone else had told you—right? left? where's the landmark?—you won't hear the road calling you. You'll be deaf to the sound of your own sixth sense. If you look too hard for signs and portents, you'll see them everywhere, and you'll miss the real thing.”

“Then what's the point?” I demanded.

“The point of what?”

“The point of my going down into the earth, into the dark, seeing those visions. What's the point of my telling you anything?”

“I will answer those questions one at a time,” she said, unruffled by my rudeness. “But first, remember: not everything that has a purpose is pointed, as you and every woman should know. As to going down: now a gate has opened between you and the deep places. Most of the time you will be on this side of the gate, but you can come and go at need or at will.”

“What? In and out of the passageway on the hill?”

“Watch it, Maeve, you're being literal again. There are many ways between the worlds. You contain the spiral passage and the deep chamber just as it contained you. And you contain the snakes. Oh, yes, I know about the snakes.”

She laughed a rich, throaty laugh, and I felt that shock of embarrassed indignation that comes to adolescents when they are first confronted with adult sensuality.

“We're all made of earth, Maeve Rhuad. You got that much, didn't you?”

I nodded.

“Now you will never forget what many never know. Now you are an initiate to the mystery.”

“Oh.” I felt somewhat mollified to be acknowledged as an initiate.

“As to your second question—or was it your third? I've lost count. Never mind. To answer: you don't have to tell me anything at all, but giving words to your vision accomplishes two things. One, the visions you speak will travel with you between the worlds instead of sinking back into the earth. Then when you encounter them in another time or
place, or even another form, you will be alert. Second, the more I know, the better I can prepare you.”

“Prepare me?”

“For whatever is to come. Surely you understand that's why you're here with me.”

“Yes, but what I still don't know is do you or don't you know what's going to happen to me?”

“There's knowing and knowing,” she said unhelpfully. “I may catch glimpses of the cloak—the metaphorical cloak, remember?—but I don't know the exact pattern or how it will look when it's not just wafting in the air but flowing from your shoulders. Still, with my experience, there may be things I recognize, even at a distance. Places, languages.”

“How did you recognize the place with all the walls? I thought you had always lived on Tir na mBan.”

“Not always. For a long time, but not always. For an even longer time, I wandered. I spun a very long tale before I wound it back into this Valley.”

Her voice changed its tone. It was no longer the voice of admonition or instruction or wry observation. I don't know how to describe it, except to say that it was no longer her voice alone. It seemed to come right up through the earth floor. It resounded in my head, as if the voice were also mine.

“I have lived for ages and ages on this earth. I have been a queen. I have been a warrior. I have been a renegade. My life has been full of endings. Full of last battles and bitter retreats. Now I am a spinner of cocoons, a weaver of shrouds, a keeper of one of the secret places of refuge. There are others like me. We stir the cauldron of changes. We gaze on the moon's dark face. We know that what seems dead and gone forever will one day return, throw off the shroud, burst from the cocoon.

“O Maeve Rhuad!” She suddenly wailed my name.

The hair rose on my neck. Inside my head bees woke and swarmed. She stared, the thread suspended in the air. She wasn't seeing me, there before her in the earth shelter. She was seeing. And true seeing is a wild, alive thing.

“O Maeve Rhuad,
thou new moon, jewel of guidance in the night.”
She chanted the words I'd heard in my last vision. Then she added a new one:

She cried out and stretched out her hand as if to stop someone or something.

“Is it too soon?” she muttered to herself. “Is it too soon?”

I could not see what she saw then, or know what she knew: how fragile those wings, how easily torn.

When the Cailleach came out of her trance, she was tired and cranky. She scowled at me. Never mind that she had just called me jewel of the night, bright butterfly, and so forth. She didn't seem to remember any of that.

“No more late hours on a school night,” she snapped. “Class begins tomorrow at dawn.”

And it did. That morning and every morning for almost a year and a half I stayed with the Cailleach. It's not easy to learn three and a half languages in that amount of time. (In case you're wondering, I am counting as the half the P-Celtic more commonly spoken in Britain and Gaul.) The other three languages I acquired were Greek, Latin, and, yes, Aramaic. I also learned the rudiments of their alphabets, including the Celtic Ogham alphabet.

It was a hell of an immersion course. I was awash in a rolling sea of languages. I'd no sooner master one vocabulary and grammar when another loomed, broke over my head, and took me under again. This crashing course might have been cruel if it had not been so necessary—the Cailleach insisted it was—and if I had not been so apt a pupil. I love words. I love to play with them. To me they are real and substantial. Forget the pen is mightier than the sword. Who needs a pen or a penis or a sword when we all have tongues. Don't you love it that another word for language it tongue? We speak of our mother tongues. Say it: mother tongue. Taste it.

My other course of study was geography, the lessons conducted in the language of whichever region we were studying. She would draw maps in chalk on a big, flat rock near the shelter. When the rain washed the maps away, it became my task to draw them from memory. My understanding of the world's shape traveled back and forth through my hand and arm. As I scratched on the stone, I also traced the outlines of coasts and mountains and borders in my brain.

The Cailleach's maps not only delineated what scholars call the known world, she also made maps of the secret world, the mythic world,
so called because it was retreating from consciousness. Disappearing under the waves, into caves. Wherever there were far-flung isles like ours or dense forests or sheer mountains with hidden valleys, there were people, often women alone, living in secret, the Cailleach said. Though she also drew these maps on the rock, I fancied I could see a map more clearly and indelibly in the lines of her face.

I was so engrossed in my studies that I hardly noticed the seasons changing, except when my mothers, who seemed much smaller than I'd remembered, came to visit on festival days. The moon waxed and waned. I paid scant attention with my waking mind. Relentless study is almost as effective as running laps and taking cold showers for keeping hormones in check. But now and then, perhaps when the moon drew closest to the earth, I'd be so restless that I'd walk and walk. Usually I'd climb one or the other of the Bride's Breasts. I'd stand at the top and try to make out the shape of the distant lands in the dark, bringing to bear the full force of my imagination to try to flesh out those maps into masses of land, rivers, mountain ranges, cities, peopled places. More than once I went to the Well of Wisdom at just the right time to catch the reflection of the moon's face. But that was all I saw: the moon round and ripe and self-contained. I never saw the face I longed to see.