The Forest House (20 page)

After a moment Eilan began to tell him about the girl in the house of the priestesses, not very coherently, but he knew at once that this must be the child of Valerius's sister. "But this is amazing,” he exclaimed. "I think this must be the same girl I came here to speak about to you, the niece of my father's secretary. How old is she?”

"The Goddess must be guiding us indeed,” said Eilan. "I do not think she has passed her tenth year.”

"Oh, well, she is not old enough to be marriageable,” he said, for Roman law did not permit the marriage of a girl under twelve. He added lightly, "That's good; otherwise Valerius would probably feel in honor bound to make some arrangement. Now he'll just have to marry someone else to have a home for her.”

"That is not necessary,” said Eilan. "The girl is well and happy where she is, and you may tell him so.”

Gaius frowned; he knew that for Valerius, who came of a good old family, it would not be considered suitable that a kinswoman should live away from the family's protection. But Valerius had no other family to take care of the girl now, and perhaps Eilan's insistence that she would personally watch over the child's health and safety would be enough for him.

After all, in Rome, it was the greatest possible honor for a little girl to be taken into the temple of Vesta. For as long as she retained her ritual position she was treated like a queen, or an empress at least. Somehow he would make Valerius understand.

He realized that he was still making ineffectual remarks about the little girl, whom he had not even seen, when he saw Caillean glaring at him. They had already said everything they could legitimately say to one another, and were beginning to repeat themselves. It was time to say goodbye.

He paused, eyeing Eilan wistfully. He supposed he would never have another opportunity to speak with her in even this much privacy. He would have liked to bid her a proper goodbye, but he could certainly not do that under Caillean's eyes. And he should probably not expose himself to that kind of temptation anyhow. But Eilan was still looking at him, a question in her eyes.

"Eilan—” he stammered, for Caillean was watching as well. "You know what I would say to you…” He held out his hand, not daring to touch her, and then, as Caillean coughed, turned it to a formal salute of farewell. But he read Eilan's answer in her smile.

When he had withdrawn, Eilan ran to Caillean.

"So that is the Roman who has had you daydreaming to the point where you can hardly be trusted to stuff a mattress with bracken. I cannot understand it; he does not seem in any way special to me.”

"Well, I did not suppose that you would particularly like him,” Eilan protested, "but he is well favored, is he not?”

"I cannot see that he is any more so than any other Roman,” Caillean remarked. "Or for that matter any other man. To me your foster brother Cynric is much better looking. He has a gentler face and does not appear to think the world must revolve about his comings and goings.”

Eilan supposed there was no accounting for taste; she herself did not think Cynric was particularly attractive, but Dieda certainly did. But Gaius was something different; to her he did not seem typically Roman, not in any way. Nor did Gaius himself appear to think of his Roman lineage as anything very special.
Certainly he could not if he was for a time thinking of abandoning it for marriage with me,
she told herself then.

She had never for an instant considered marrying anyone else; and as for men, the world was full of them. She hardly realized how much thinking of Gaius had come between her old life and what now seemed natural to her.

"Eilan, you are daydreaming again,” Caillean remarked sharply. "Go and find Senara and tell her what you have discovered; and then go to Latis for your lesson. If you can manage to pay attention, some day you may be as skilled in the lore of herbs as Miellyn.”

Thus admonished, Eilan went about her duties; but she could not resist going obsessively over and over every word she had said to Gaius and every word he had said to her. She could not believe she would never see or speak with him again; he seemed too much a part of her life even after their formal goodbye.

That night when she went in her turn to wait upon Lhiannon, the older woman looked at her with dismay.

"What is this I have heard? That you have been out of the temple to meet with a man? This is not the behavior expected of a priestess of the Forest House. I am disappointed in you,” she chided.

Eilan colored angrily. But this was why she had asked Caillean to witness their meeting, after all. "I said not one word to him that could not have been spoken in the presence of all of you.”

Lhiannon sighed. "I did not say you did, but the fact of the matter is that it was not spoken in the presence of all of us, and there will be talk. The Goddess be thanked, Caillean was there; but she should have known that we cannot afford to have even the suspicion of scandal, so it is she and not you who will be punished for it. But I beseech you before you do anything of this kind again, think that you have brought punishment down on the head of another. You are young, Eilan, and the young are always thoughtless.”

"Punished? But that is not fair! What will you do to her?” Eilan asked apprehensively.

"I will not beat her, if that is what you are thinking,” Lhiannon said smiling. "Even when she was a small child, I never beat her; perhaps I should have done. As for her punishment, that is for her to tell if she wishes.”

"But, Mother,” Eilan protested, "it was you who told me to find out if the child had any family.”

"I did not say that you should inquire among the Romans,” Lhiannon said irritably. Eilan wondered how in the world she could have been expected to find out about the relatives of a Roman child in any other way.

Later, among the priestesses, Eilan found an opportunity to speak to Caillean. "Lhiannon told me she had to punish you. Can you forgive me? Will it be too bad? She said she would not beat you.”

"She will not,” Caillean said. "There is a house in the forest where she will probably send me to spend time meditating on my sins while I clear away the brushwood and weeds with which it is surrounded and put the place in order. It's not much of a punishment; Lhiannon probably does not realize that it is actually a luxury to me to be alone with my music and my thoughts. So you must not think I am being ill treated.”

"Alone in the forest? But won't you be frightened?”

"What should frighten me? Bears? Wolves? Wandering men? The last bears in this part of the world were trapped over thirty years ago. How long is it since you have seen so much as a wolfskin rug in the market? And as for men, you have good cause to know that I could frighten away any man alive. No, I am not afraid.”

"I should be terrified,” Eilan said somberly.

"I am sure of it; but I am not afraid of my own company. And I can think of my music as much as I wish, without a lesson or a duty interfering. So I shall be quite content,” Caillean assured her. "There is nothing in this punishment—if she will call it so—to trouble me.”

Eilan said no more, and she knew that at least when it came to waiting upon Lhiannon, she and Dieda would willingly share Caillean's duties between them. Well, that was no hardship; she loved Lhiannon in spite of her flaws, and she knew that her kinswoman loved her too. She would miss Caillean, though.

Now it occurred to her that if Lhiannon had been a different type of person she herself might have been beaten or severely punished. Whatever Caillean made of this penalty, it was Eilan who had brought it upon the older woman. For that she felt guilty, but not enough to regret her meeting with Gaius. She only wished she had been able to say half of what she wanted to, though what that was she could not have named.

 

When Caillean departed from the Forest House, Eilan realized that the older woman was really not much of a favorite with the other women there. Only Miellyn and Eilidh seemed to be truly her friends—and of course Lhiannon.

The weather changed as summer moved towards autumn. As the equinox approached there was rain, and late one evening, while the women in the House of Maidens were seated around the fire, Eilan found herself thinking of Caillean in her exile. Was the roof of the hut leaky? How did she react to the solitude and the silence of the forest?

The women had been inventing riddles, and at last, tired of this pastime, they asked Dieda to sing or to tell them a story.

Dieda acquiesced. "What would you like me to tell you?”

"Tell us a tale of the Otherworld,” said Miellyn. "Tell us how Bran, son of Febal, voyaged to the western land. All the bards learn that one.”

And so Dieda half told, half chanted, the tale of Bran and his encounter with the sea god Manannan, Lord of Illusion, who turned the sea into a flowering grove of trees, the fish into birds flying in the air, the waves into flowering bushes, and the sea creatures into sheep; so it seemed as if they sailed through a flowering grove. And when Manannan fell out of the boat, the waves rushed in, so that the sea god was cast upon the shore and all the other men drowned.

When she had finished they called for another tale, like little children sitting spellbound.

"Tell the story of the King and the Three Hags,” suggested one of the women, and Dieda began as all tales were begun.

"A long time ago, times were better than now, and there were more gates between the Otherworld and this, and if I had been there, I should not now be here…well then, in a longer time ago than the oldest grandfather can tell, in a house on the borders of the Underworld, there lived a king and his queen…

"And it was on the eve of Samaine, when the gates between the worlds are open, and at the time between times, between the midnight of one year and the dawn of the next, there came to the door three hags. The first had a snout like a pig, and her lower lip hung down to her knees and concealed her garment; the second had lips both on one side of her head and a beard which hung down concealing her breasts; and the third was a hideous creature with one arm and one leg. Under her arm she carried a pig which was so much better looking than she was that it was as if the pig were a princess.”

By this time all the women were laughing. Dieda herself smiled a little and went on. "The three hags came in and took three seats by the fire so that there were no seats by the fire for the King and his Queen, who were forced to take seats by the door.

"Then the first of them, the one with the long lower lip, said, ‘I am hungry; what have you to eat?' And they hastened to make her a pot of porridge; and she ate up the pot of porridge, and it was enough for a dozen men, and she cried out, ‘You are stingy; I hunger still.'

"Now on this night no request of a guest can be denied; and so the Queen set herself and her serving maids to make more porridge for her guests and put some oatcakes on the hearth to bake. But no matter how much food they set before the guest, she growled, ‘I am still hungry.'

"Then the second, the bearded one, complained, ‘I am thirsty.' When they brought out a barrel of beer, she drank it all down at one draft and complained that she was still dry. And when they began to fear that the hags would eat all the provision for the winter to come, the Queen and the King went out and consulted together what they should do with their guests. And then one of the fairy folk appeared to them from out of a mound and gave the Queen good-day.

" ‘All the gods preserve you, good lady; why are you weeping?' And the Queen told them of the three hideous hags and their fear that the creatures meant to eat them out of house and home, and then to eat the King and the Queen. And the Fairy Woman told her what she should do.

"So the Queen went in and sat down to her knitting; and finally the first hag asked, ‘What are you making, Granny?'

"And the Queen replied, ‘Knitting a shroud, dear Aunty.'

"And the second hag asked through her beard, ‘Who is the shroud for, Granny?'

" ‘Oh, for anyone I can find who is homeless this night, dear Aunty.'

"And after a while the third asked, kissing her pig, ‘And when will you be using the shroud, Granny?'

"And just then the King rushed in and cried out, ‘The black mountain and the sky over it are all on fire!'

"And when they heard that, the three hags cried out, ‘Alas, alas, our father is gone' and rushed out of the door, and they were never seen again in that country by any living man; or if they were, then I have not heard of it.”

Dieda fell silent. After a long pause, while the wind wailed loudly around the building, Miellyn said, "I heard Caillean tell a story very like that, long ago; did you learn it from her?”

"I did not,” said Dieda. "I heard my father tell it once when I was a very small girl.”

"I suppose it is very old,” said Miellyn, "and of course he is one of the greatest bards. But you told it as well as any Druid. You or Caillean could head the College as well as he.”

"Oh, no doubt,” Dieda scoffed. "And why not make us judges as well?”

Why not, indeed?
Eilan wondered. Caillean would have had an answer to that, but Caillean was not here.