Meri (31 page)

“Not ’til you’ve changed your tunic. And you can wear my
jacket until your cloak dries. Come.” He tried to lead her up the beach.

She resisted. “I have to go back, Skeet. She could come at
any time.”

He gave her a concerned look, softened by the mist winnowing
between them, then sighed exaggeratedly. “Oh, g’on then. If you won’t come to
my fire, my fire shall have to come to you.”

He was as good as his word. Within minutes of her return to
her Pilgrim’s Post, he had a fire laid and blazing just below and to the left
of her seat in the little dune.

“Now,” he said, when he was sure the flames had taken hold, “Here
is a fresh tunic and stockings and my jacket. Your leggings will fire dry, I
reckon. I’ll go away a bit while you change, but you’d better call when you’re
done or you’ll get no dinner.”

“Dinner?” she asked. “What time can it be?”

He glanced up into the dense wool. “I make it afternoon, by
the shadows. I drove a stick into the ground up yonder.” He jerked his chin
back up toward his base camp. “Now, you get changed. I’ll go back and get the
victuals.”

Meredydd nodded, but he was already gone. She marked his
footfalls until they were eaten up by the fog, then she pulled off her wet
things and got herself into the dry.

Dinner! she marveled, as she consumed that meal, sitting by
her fire. Could she really have been so wrapped in her visions that time had
become pleated into such a narrow fabric? Had she really stepped into a world
where Skeet could neither see her nor hear her voice?

She asked him when he come back with more hot, strong tea, “Did
you hear me, Skeet? While I was...” She wasn’t sure what to call it—dreaming?
She gestured at her little dune.

“I heard you shout,” he said cautiously. His hands clutched
his tea cup, white-knuckled. “Just before you went into the water.”

“But before that—did you hear anything?”

“I heard you sing a duan...I thought. But that was earlier
on.”

His eyes were intent upon her face, but he did not ask what
had happened to her—what she had seen, heard, felt. She thought Osraed Bevol
must have instructed him as to how a Pilgrim’s Weard was to behave, so she said
nothing except, “I saw several aislinn wonders, Skeet. But I haven’t seen the
Meri.”

He merely nodded, then returned up-beach to his own fire.
Meredydd took up her watch once again, perched in her tussock chair. Afternoon
wore on, evening came and passed, night dropped over the shore like a dark
veil. The fog stayed, wrapped protectively over the dunes and their two
inhabitants. Meredydd’s fire died down and Skeet built it up again, tending it
only briefly. He kept it burning all the night while she sat and stared, her
eyes wandering the shifting tunnel to the sea. The waves could barely be seen
as tiny, wriggling serpents of phosphor crawling endlessly up onto the sand.
Their rhythm was lulling, hypnotic and Meredydd rocked to it, humming duans and
lays well into the night.

o0o

He cried without knowing why he cried. One moment he was
sitting in the garden, meditating on its beauty, and the next he was overcome
by a wave of anguish so complete it all but knocked him over.

He clambered to his feet in a wallow of sudden self-loathing
and staggered toward the house. He must lock himself in his room. He must let
no one see him like this.

But it was too late for that. A movement above him made him
glance up to the balcony that overlooked the garden. It was his mother. He saw
her face for only an instant as she turned and went into her rooms, and what he
read there only made his anguish worse. She believed him bewitched and, he had
to allow, he sometimes half-believed it himself.

He prayed desperately that the time until his Pilgrimage
would pass more quickly, that he would be freed of these agonizing twists of
heart and soul. But, for now, the tears continued to fall, driving him to the
sanctuary of his chambers, where he lay down and tried to sleep.

His dreams were busy but anonymous and he woke, hours later,
in the failing light of day, feeling as if a burden had been lifted. He was
ravenously hungry and he felt oddly light and giddy. Still, there was, in the
back of his mind, the conviction that Meredydd was trying to tell him
something. Something very important. But he couldn’t grasp it and so traveled
lightly downstairs to see if supper was anywhere near ready. He smelled the
answer to that as he reached the top of the stairs. Ah, now that was wonderful!
He smiled to himself and began to sing.

Perhaps his mother was right. Perhaps he was bewitched. But
at moments like these, that didn’t seem such a terrible thing at all.

o0o

Morning came and the fog lifted to hang over the cliffs,
creating a strange, narrow world where the sky seemed reachable by fingertips.
Through occasional crevasses in the top of the world, the higher clouds shone
like a polished pewter bowl and raindrops spattered here and there like errant
tears. Meredydd, who loved the rain, enjoyed it at first, but after hours of
ceaseless watching, even she began to feel a sympathy with that which cried.

She ate a small breakfast of bread and fish and berries,
then stretched her legs and stood and breathed deeply of the tangy air and
wondered if today the Meri would come.

She did not.

Meredydd passed the day trying not to fall asleep. She moved
only to relieve cramps in her limbs and the promptings of her body and then
returned to her place. She got out her book of meditations and recited prayers;
she sang contemplative duans; she tried to meditate, but found herself counting
larger pebbles among the tiny grains of sand within sight. She made up stories
about twists of driftwood and the ruin of the old fisherman’s hovel she could
just see from where she sat. Her mind was restless, then lethargic. Impatient,
then content. It never soared to that exalted state she desired so much; she
settled for mere tranquility.

All the while, she tried to remain optimistic, reminding
herself that she was still within the frame of the historically set time
period. While the shortest watch had been only ten hours, the longest was three
days. Beyond that temporal boundary, the Meri had not been seen. She still had
time, she told herself. The Meri could come tonight.

But she did not.

And Meredydd, growing weary and anxious, began to lose the
spark of hope she’d worked so hard to nurture. No aislinn worlds opened to her.
No bright revelations crowded her brain. She went back over the ones she’d had
(or thought she’d had) while sitting on her tuft of sand and grass. They opened
no new doors and, though she thought long and fondly of her childhood and of
her mother and father, she remained stranded in the present, alone.

She found sympathy in her for Prentice Wyth—no, more than
sympathy—empathy. He had lost his father, too, no less horribly than she had.
And he was innocent of his father’s stain of greed. There was no avarice in
Wyth Arundel, whatever other faults he might possess.

She contemplated the aim of God as an academic might—with
warm, expectant detachment—and held up her own goal and studied it. She
imagined it as a jewel—a crystal, not unlike the one she had received at the
Farewelling. It floated in the dark before her eyes, a gem of pale gold—a
topaz—multi-faceted, gleaming. It was flawed, of course, and must be so,
because she was flawed. She turned it over and over, searching for the
imperfections.

In the end they went uncounted and she set the crystal
aside, bored with her own blemishes. She began to relive her Pilgrim’s journey,
beginning before she even stepped out the door of Gled Manor. She followed
herself through morning ablutions, prayers and meditations. Were her prayers
sincere enough? Were her meditations pure enough? How could she know?

She was swept into the aislinn state of being without even
sensing the transition. Gone from the beach where her body sat, unmoving, she
set foot on the road to the Nairne Crossing and began her Pilgrimage again.

She experienced the same combination of uncertainty and
contentment at Mam Lufu’s, the same futile wonder at the Pool of the Gwenwyvar,
the same trapped terror in the village of Blaec-del; she pined for the absent
Bevol and Gwynet and for the missing amulet, knew a deep affection for the
family of Galchobar Mill and could not help but feel that her decision to help
the child was the right one. She knew it was the only one she could have made.

She resisted the temptation to exult in that; instead, she
moved on and found herself on a beach just being touched by the first dusting
of twilight.... Or was it dawn that seeped beneath the blanket of overhanging
cloud, staining the world with rose amber? Meredydd was caught, for a
breathing, between worlds existing neither here nor there, but somewhere in
between.

Then Skeet was there with breakfast. It was dawn.

The scent and feel of the air pulled her back into the
waking world. It was pungent, heavy, sweet and filled with a trembling static.

“Storm coming,” she said. “Soon.” No sooner were the words
out of her mouth than a gust of moisture-laden wind rushed by, tickling.

Skeet glanced up and around, then handed Meredydd her food
and scurried off to batten down his camp. She felt him coming and going as she
sat in the darkening morning, scenting the breeze and listening to the wind and
waves. She went back over her journey yet again, step by step, entering the
aislinn world at will. The beach ceased to be real.

There was a composure about her contemplation now that had
not been there before. The frantic search for a sense of her worth was at an
end. She merely accepted that, acting out of her natural inclination, Meredydd
had done this, felt that, decided one thing, chosen another. What she had
become in the loving hands of her parents, under the fond companionship and
careful tutelage of Osraed Bevol, was already determined. It was already written
indelibly on her soul. It piloted her life, her thoughts, her feelings, her
action and inaction, her decisions.

That was not something she could alter at the last moment,
and that was what the Meri would accept or reject.

Now, Meredydd did not fret over the kind of jewel she could
not become while sitting on a beach many miles from home. Now, Meredydd merely
waited.

The Meri is not reachable by the weak, or by the
careless, or by the ascetic, but only by the wise who strive to lead their soul
into the dwelling of the Spirit.

Rivers flow to the Sea and there find their end and their
peace. When they find this peace and this end, their name and form disappear
and they become as the Sea.

Even so, the wise who are led to the Meri are freed of name
and form and enter into the radiance of the Supreme Spirit who is greater than
all greatness.

— The Book of the Meri, Chapter II, Verses 5-7

The storm was heralded by a slash of lightning that rent
the sky nearly in two. Its thunder followed close behind, shattering the
relative quiet of the beach. The breeze turned into a wind that blew brazenly
across the water, whipping waves to frenzy.

Dark clouds scudded like circling predators, drawing closer
and closer to their defenseless quarry. Then, the rain came; huge, hard drops
that seemed to be made of material much sharper and stouter than water cascaded
from the hemming sky, beating down upon the beach and its occupants.

Meredydd sat, keeping herself determinedly upright against
the growing force of the wind. She had to clutch the cloak Skeet had returned
to her, dry, to keep it from blowing about. It was dry no longer. Her braid
came unbound in a matter of minutes under the gale’s unloving touch and her
hair flailed about her head in tangled banners.

Skeet scrambled to her side and flopped down beside her on
the rough sand.

“You must move, mistress! The water is rising!” he shouted
and pointed a finger at the encroaching waves.

Meredydd shook her head. “No,” she mouthed.

“Please, mistress. I’ve dug a burrow just behind you. You’ll
be safer there—warmer.”

“No.”

He stared at her for a moment in consternation, then
withdrew. But the gale worsened, lashing the shore with waves higher than
Meredydd could reach. They crashed upon the sands, rolling threateningly to the
foot of her sandy dais and showering her with spray. Skeet reappeared to shout
in her ear.

“Now will you leave?”

She shook her head.

“Meredydd,
please
! This
is not a good time for your stubbornness!”

“No!” she shouted back.

Again, he withdrew. He returned when the wind began to blow
sand and spray horizontally up the beach, bombarding Meredydd with stinging,
salty, sodden grit. He had to wade through ankle deep water to reach her. He
shouted her name.

She was still sitting mulishly upright, her eyes clenched
shut against the assaulting blow, her body rocking arrhythmically to the beat
of each gust. She was freezing, wet and miserable, and ignoring that with every
ounce of mental and physical resolve she possessed. She was building an aislinn
wall about herself—a wall made of invisible stones that would take the misery
away, that would keep even the tiniest tendril of wind-blown spume from
reaching her. Already the storm was fading from her consciousness. All she need
do was lay the last stone.

The wave was twice as tall as a man and Meredydd, intent on
completing her aislinn sea-wall, did not see it until it broke over her, nearly
toppling her from her perch and bathing her in hard, freezing water.

Concentration devastated, she found herself engaged in a
physical battle against wind and wave...and Skeet. He reached her as she
scrambled to regain her seat upon the tussocks, caught at her flailing arms and
tried to drag her away up the beach toward relatively dry land. She fought him,
struggling to pull away, to return to the Pilgrim’s Post. Another huge wave
broke over them as they strained in opposite directions, felling them in
knee-deep brine that swirled about them, sucking and pulling seaward.