Meri (33 page)

Under her hand the crystal shed sudden warmth. Its Light
pulsed brighter—just for a second. It dimmed, then pulsed again, heat flaring
into Meredydd’s sheltering palm.

She breathed out again and felt an answering tickle of
warmth on her cheek as her fingers loosed their hold on Skeet’s nose. A banner
of steam sailed from his nostrils into the night air. The rhythmic Light pulse
of the crystal steadied, the banners of steam lengthened. He coughed then,
freeing his lungs of the residual moisture, spilling it onto the already
drenched sand.

Meredydd, weeping, dashed across the sand to his burrow and
came back with dry clothes and the ground cover. Carefully, she moved him,
stripped and redressed him, bundled him into the ground cover and built a fire
near her own cozy den. She found his tins and pots and heated water for tea. He
drank without waking, his eyes looking sunken and bruised in the firelight,
then slid swiftly into a deep, natural sleep.

That was when Meredydd remembered that other Light. The
Light she had all but ignored until now. The Light to which she had issued her
final, desperate supplication. Now she looked up and around and realized that
the only light on this shore was from her own fire. The Sea was black once
again, the beach, nearly so. The Eibhilin Light of the Meri was gone.

Skeet coughed again as if to remind her of the nature of her
choice. He moaned a little in his sleep and fully captured her attention once
again. She made him comfortable and warm and encouraged him to drink a little
more tea. He slipped back to deeper sleep effortlessly, curled beside the fire.

Unable to sleep herself, unable to think of what else she
might do, Meredydd seated herself once more at her Pilgrim’s Post and let her
eyes stray to the darkened Sea. The Meri had come and Meredydd had chosen to
ignore her for Skeet’s sake. Now She was gone, the Sea, empty.

Meredydd knew better than to ascribe the events on this
beach to coincidence or happenstance. She saw her Pilgrimage, now, for what it
was—a series of choices between obedience and compassion, between the Meri and
the creatures to whom She gave her guidance. Choices: What was life but a
sequence of choices? To live or die, to seek revenge or knowledge, to follow
duty or intuition.

Something deep within struggled to understand the nature of
the choices she had made and their consequences. She could grasp neither. So
she sat, mind empty, waiting for dawn.

She was aware of the tingling for sometime before she
reacted to it. It seemed to trickle from the crown of her head downward, cold
and hot like the static shock she had received from one of Master Bevol’s
experiments with electricity. It scurried just beneath the skin, up and down
her arms and legs, over her face, around her neck. She merely shrugged at
first, wriggling against the fabric of her sous-shirt and leggings in an
attempt to quell the odd sensation. It only strengthened.

She rubbed at her arms and legs with both hands; the
tingling refused to abate. In a matter of moments, it raged beneath her skin
like polite fire, making her scratch. Finally, she pushed back the sleeve of
her shirt and stared at one forearm. It looked normal enough in the firelight
except....

Her narrowed eyes peered at the shadowed side of her arm.
The flesh there seemed to be covered with a sheen of tiny, pin-prick stars.
Gingerly, she touched the skin with the tips of her fingers. It felt
warm—warmer than she expected.

She shifted her position a bit so that her entire arm was in
shadow.
All
of it sparkled. She hastily
pushed back the other sleeve; her left arm, too, was spangled. Was this a sign?
Was this the Meri’s way of consoling her?

The burning sensation was consuming her, now, and Meredydd
scratched and rubbed at her bare arms, praying for it to stop. She felt a
strong urge to tear off her clothing and roll in the sand, but somehow knew
even that would not relieve her. A whimper of panic slipped from her throat
when she realized the results of her chafing—the tiny glints had bled together
so that her arms glimmered with a pallid yellow phosphorescence. And the skin!
Her skin felt blistered, as if she had sustained a terrible sunburn. It
sloughed away beneath her fingertips like snake-skin, turning to oily powder
and disappearing into the sand.

Frantic, Meredydd pulled down her sleeves and folded her
arms tightly across her stomach. She began a prayer duan, struggling for
control. Whatever this was, surely it was supposed to happen. Nothing she could
do would prevent it or alter its course. She glanced over her shoulder at the
dark wooded slope behind. She could run.

Oh, yes, and leave Skeet where he lay. Her lip curled with
self-disgust. Running would not help. She glanced over at Skeet, asleep by the
waning fire. He looked perfectly normal.

Whatever this was, it was affecting only her. That was good.

She could throw herself into the water, she supposed. Maybe
the cold salt-water would assuage this horrible burning. It seemed a sound
idea. In fact, she was certain it would work.

The frigid water, the sting of the salt—yes, that would take
away the burning.

She jumped to her feet, ready to bolt across the sand when
she caught herself. Was it this that had enticed Taminy-a-Cuinn into the Sea?

She wavered for a moment, then dropped back to the sand. If
this was what Taminy had succumbed to, then she would resist it.

She turned her face downward into the darkness of her lap
and saw tiny rinds of flesh sift down to lie on the cloth of her tunic. She
lifted a trembling hand to her cheek, stroking it gently with her fingertips.
The flesh crumbled and fell. Horrified, she stared at her fingers. The fleshy
remnants clung to them and they, too, glowed.

She did not take her eyes from her hands as she rose from
the sand. Once on her feet, she rubbed at her cheeks, at her arms—desperate
now, to discover what lay underneath. Robbed of its covering flesh, the
substance of her arms gleamed gold-white in the darkness of the night, brighter
than the gold-white heart of Skeet’s fire.

Transfixed, Meredydd removed her tunic, her boots and
leggings, her shirt. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she stripped off her
undergarments and stood, naked, upon the Meri’s beach. She was not cold, for
heat radiated from her pied body, leaking, along with the light, from patches
where flesh had come away with cloth.

With hands that no longer trembled, Meredydd continued her
task, shedding what was left of her outer self, shaking her hair to free the
flame hidden within the drab strands, until finally she was bare of flesh,
blazing and lustrous like a tiny sun—like a star.

When the last scrap of slough had dropped, when she had
surveyed her new body with wonder and fear, she raised her eyes to the Sea and
beheld there a green-white flame that equaled her own. It filled the water with
glory and washed, like translucent milk, upon the shore.

Meredydd stepped down to the waterline, letting the Sea lap
at her bare toes. She waited calmly now, though her heart beat a quick tattoo
within her fiery breast, and her eyes, garnet-dark, sparkled, expectant.

The water seethed and roiled before her and then, a glorious
Being rose out of the foam and hovered just offshore. It was like nothing
Meredydd had ever seen nor any she could ever describe. Only one feature could
she mark with any certainty—the Creature’s eyes. They were like emeralds—deep,
bright and verdant, and they laughed.

“Beautiful Sister.” The voice came from nowhere and
everywhere, and filled the cloudless sky and covered the milky waters. “I have
waited long.”

Meredydd found her own voice, but it didn’t sound like her
own. Still, it worked her will, though it said words that seemed strange when
she was so full of questions. “I have traveled far.” That was all.

“I have traveled with you, Sister.” The Meri extended her
radiance toward the shore. “Come home, Sister. Come home. This is that for
which you have been created. Not to be Osraed, but to be the Mother of Osraed.
Not to carry the torch of Wisdom, but to light it.”

Meredydd had no words, only a great sense of unworthiness.
She was disobedient, inattentive, stubborn—

“You are kindness; you are compassion; you are obedience
tempered with love; you are justice tempered with mercy; you are strength of
purpose; you are faith and reason. You will be the Mother not of the bodies of
Osraed, but of their spirits—the Channel of the Knowledge of the First Being.
For this you have proven worthy.”

The radiant “arms” extended all the way to the shore. The
beautiful, world-filling laughter sounded again, flute-like.

“Come into the water, Sister, and do you get wet.”

Meredydd laughed, too, then and raised her own arms of Light
and stepped from the shore into the milky Sea. It was warm—warm with love and
delight and acceptance. She was home, for her mother and father were here and
Osraed Bevol and Skeet and all she loved. She could touch them, feel them, know
about them what she had never known.

The Meri met her in the surf and embraced her, drawing her
down beneath the waves. She could breathe here just as she had above in the
air—but, no, she realized—it was only that she no longer needed to breathe. She
was wrapped all about by luminescence—her gold, the Meri’s green—she was
embraced in it, embraced in the arms of the Meri.

The great emerald eyes locked with her own.
Now, Sister
, said the Meri, and could be heard
without sound.
Now, hold the knowledge of all that
has been
.

The banners of their individual radiance mingled—green and
gold—and Meredydd ceased to be Meredydd and began to be Something Else.

When at last the brilliance separated—the gold and the
green—two which had been one floated apart, still touching.

Emerald eyes gazed into eyes like garnets.
The Lover and the Beloved have been made one in Thee.

The Meri smiled a smile that could be felt and heard, if not
seen.
And I had wondered what that verse meant
.

Now you know.

Now We know
.

The green radiance withdrew now, separating completely from
the gold.

Farewell, Sister Meredydd
.

Farewell, Taminy
.

Toward shore, she went, the green brilliance fading as she
neared the beach, dying as she stepped out onto the sand—merely a glimmer now,
as of moonlight on wet skin. There was a boy there, sitting beside a fire.
Waiting, with his eyes on the milky gold water. Beside him sat a little girl
with moonlit hair, and beside her was a man—a copper-bearded Osraed—holding out
a robe.

She took a deep breath of winy sea air and laughed. “Ah,
Osraed Bevol! I have not breathed for a hundred years!”

o0o

She watched them as they left in the first light of dawn.
Watched them in a way she had never been able to watch anything before—from
outside and inside all at once. She felt Skeet’s anxious gaze prying at the
waters she had inherited and understood that now, as never before on
Pilgrimage, he was only Skeet, no longer Osraed Bevol’s eyes, ears and hands.

She understood a great many things now. Things about
Taminy-a-Cuinn and Mam Lufu and herself—and about Osraed Bevol as well.

He had been at her Name Tell, she knew, and knew why her
mother, who had meant to name her Airleas, had spoken instead the name
Meredydd, which means “guardian from the Sea.”

It would be said in Caraid-land that yet another young woman
had walked into the Sea. But this time, the Weard would not lie. He may not be
believed, but he would not lie. And there would be a new legend to add to the
old.

She gazed down history lines no mortal being could see and
knew that now was a time of deep and difficult change. There was glory if
Caraid-land was ready for that change, devastation if it was not.

The Meri listened to the Voice of the Beloved within Her—the
Voice of the Spirit which men call God—and learned the Duan that no living mortal
had sung but for the Star of the Sea.

Let the arrow in your hand be an arrow of love.

Let it not hurt any living being.

Let it be an arrow of love
.

— The Corah
Book II, Verse 11

Within sight of the Sea, Aelder Prentice Wyth hesitated. What
sense did it make to go on? He could only fail. Dear God, he had failed
already. He’d tried to obey the instructions of Osraed Calach, but it seemed
that every time he tried to focus on his goal, some unavoidable dilemma would
arise, forcing him to abandon his Path. That steadman’s flooded field, that
little boy’s broken arm....

And it seemed that no matter how inept his aid had been, the
people to whom he gave it praised him as if he were some great, sainted Osraed.
If he believed the half of what they said about him—

“Prentice Wyth?”

He glanced away from the Sea’s sparkling carpet. His young
Weard, Prentice Killian, gazed up at him through tired, red-rimmed eyes.

“Are we going to descend? I think we can make it to the
seashore by early evening if we keep moving.”

There was some reproach in that, for Wyth was wont to pause
for introspection at odd intervals, during which poor Prentice Killian (and he
thought of himself in exactly those terms) was forced to champ the bit until he
rose from his stupor and moved on.

He had thought, had poor Killian, that being Weard for an
Aelder Prentice would be glorious, or at least interesting. It had proved to be
neither. He’d had to pile peat bags right alongside his Pilgrim when a stream
flash-flooded some steadman’s corn field, and had been forced to sit up all
night at the bedside of some wee imp with a busted limb. He prayed his own
Pilgrimage would be more exciting.

Prentice Wyth nodded his head and began shuffling forward
again. The Sea drew him like a magnet, notwithstanding he knew it would be the
scene of his ultimate humiliation.