Magdalen Rising (36 page)

I
DON'T KNOW ABOUT YOU, but I need to pause for breath. Even the best-trained bards, who could sustain a story all night, for days, even weeks at a time, took a break now and then, just to breathe for awhile without shaping air into words. They left silences for their listeners that later became the wordless stretches of white between one body of text and another. Listeners as much as storytellers need those pauses to empty the contents of the mind, to pick things up, examine, reflect, discard, or store away. That is how the story lives, becomes not just one person's but another's.

All right, you say, but we've had our chapter break. Well, just give me a moment, will you? I'm not ready to go on yet. I've just found out I'm pregnant. By my father. Who is not who I thought he was. Who has tried at least once to murder me. And who is to say he hasn't succeeded?

There's a stench of death in the air. Remember that cunt-sure little girl whose eight adoring mothers told her she was the daughter of a god? Where is she, now that she no longer has a divine, if absent, father? Where is she, now that one hard-hoofed truth has trampled a whole pack of pretty stories? Where is she, now that she knows her mothers knew all along and didn't tell her? And did they also know that he was here when they left her motherless on Mona?

Maybe every child dies a thousand deaths. First, we're expelled from the womb, then the whole maternal world. Maybe every mother tries to create the world all over again for her child, according to her rules. Maybe every mother forgets the limits of her power. If she can create a life, why not a world? I had eight mothers playing that game competitively. Suddenly, all their stories had been broken off violently mid-sentence, participles dangling precariously over a cliff edge, not one of them substantial enough to grasp. In such a position, how do you begin to construct new sentences? Without sentences, how do you make sense? Without a story, how do you know who you are?

I had lost my mothers' stories, and my father had said: “There will be no telling. No telling now. Now there is no story.” Like my mothers, he connected stories with control, and he was clearly not in control. The
story had him in its grip as mercilessly as a hawk some hapless rabbit. It was tossing him about like the wreckage of his boat on the roiling seas of that fateful storm. Even as he tried to take charge again, setting that clever trap for Esus and me with carefully phrased warnings about strangers and trespassers, the story seized him and made him babble about the misbegotten child of a misbegotten child.

Now that prophecy was flapping about loose, its wings filling everyone's peripheral vision. It was only a matter of time till it settled on my head. Then everyone would know that I carried the misbegotten child. Next, they'd look for the misbegetter. I didn't need an oracle to figure that one out, though I was no more in control of this story than Foxface, maybe less. He, at least, had the protection of his public record and persona. Well, no matter whose story was unfolding (or unraveling); no matter who would (or wouldn't) live to tell it, I had to find a way to warn Esus. One thing I knew for sure (and maybe it's all anyone ever knows): when the shit hits the fan, no one goes unspattered.

Every day from that night on, I tried to get to Esus. Though no one confronted me in words, it seemed I was already under suspicion. Whenever I ventured off on my own in any direction, I soon encountered three Crows blocking my path. They didn't ask me where I was going. They didn't say that I was confined to Caer Leb. They were just there at every turn, silent and grim. Although in my spare time I rehearsed both convincing lies and defiant speeches, whenever I found myself face to face with them not a word would come out of my mouth.

Twice in my life, though one of those times might have been a dream, I had found myself flying through the air. It occurred to me that what happened willy-nilly could perhaps be willed. One day I sat out on the embankment and brought all my concentration to bear on shape-shifting. Just as I was mentally constructing myself a serviceable pair of wings, a mouse ran across my foot. I tried to get back to thinking bird, but the image of brown fur and pink scampering feet kept intruding. Then, without being quite sure how I did it, I found I was racing along on all fours. It was hard to have any sense at all of where I was from a mouse-eyed perspective. But when I sat and tried to collect my wits, I saw a gigantic fox moving towards me with terrible swiftness. I would have been mince mouse if three equally huge black birds had not swooped down to peck at the fox's eyes.

When I recovered my human form again, I was trembling all over and my tunic was soaked with pee. Seemingly out of nowhere, Crows appeared beside me. One of them handed me a hot drink.

“Don't try that again, Maeve,” said one of them. Morgaine, I think.

“You don't have enough control,” added another. Morgause?

“Give us a break,” said Moira. “We didn't sign on to be your full-time body guards.”

That was when I realized I wasn't being punished, I was being protected. It's hard to tell the difference sometimes.

After the mouse and fox incident, I gave up trying to reach Esus directly for awhile and attempted telepathy. After all, I had seen him in the well of wisdom when he was a world away. I had flown to him as a dove in the Temple of Jerusalem. Now he was only a couple of miles from me. Maybe that was the problem. The distance was not extraordinary enough. Or maybe the baby growing inside me somehow shortcircuited the connection between us. In my mind I spoke to him every night, but I never felt any assurance that he had heard. Nor could I feel him reaching towards me with his mind.

Sometimes I managed to dream of him, but they weren't those lucid dreams, like the one of him at the Temple. They were ordinary dreams: jumbled, fragmented, and frustrating, as if I'd glimpsed him across a crowd and couldn't catch his attention, however frantically I waved and shouted. I must have cried in my sleep sometimes. More than once I woke to Branwen's murmured reassurance: It's all right, Maeve. It's just a dream. Just a dream. That's what I was afraid of: that this story I had been telling myself since the day I saw Esus in the pool was as flimsy as my mothers' gossamer web of lies.

Meanwhile, precious time was passing. Forget whatever philosophical notions you may have about time being an arbitrary human construct or about past, present, and future being part of one eternal moment. For all of us mortals, but especially for a pregnant one, time had a literal, organic meaning. In fact, ever since human beings stumbled upon the idea of time, they've measured it by the movement of heavenly bodies not so different from my own body. The moon waxes and wanes in shape; the sun waxes and wanes in strength. As the sun retreated further and further, my pregnancy advanced, though as Dwynwyn had noted, my husky build obscured my condition longer than a frame like Branwen's would have. Also, a tunic is a very forgiving garment, and the cloaks we wore almost constantly now covered everything. I pictured the hidden
flame inside me burning brighter every day, a secret sun that would one day burst upon the world in a blaze.

Now that the berries were gone, I was faced with the problem of how to fake my menstrual blood. The way they were watching me, you could argue that the Crows had not only guessed my condition but also suspected that Foxface's prophesy resided in me. Still, they had not confronted me with their knowledge, and I had no intention of confiding in them. They were women in the collective, and since my mothers were not handy, the Crows stood in as representatives of treacherous maternal authority. Withholding trust was the only vengeance available to me.

During our bleeding times, I tried to go to the trenches when no one else was there. My old berry-stained cloths were looking less and less convincing. One afternoon before full moon rites with the Crows, Viviane took me by surprise at the trenches. I might have heard her coming, but I was too absorbed in braving a nearby thicket of brambles. I had decided to scratch myself and smear the cloth and my thighs.

“What in the name of Anu are you doing now, Maeve!”

I whirled around, cloth in hand, one thumb already bloody, my tunic hiked up above my thighs. I experienced a rare moment of utter and complete embarrassment. With the deductive powers of what was to become one of the finest legal minds in the Holy Isles, Viviane assessed the evidence and reached a conclusion before I had time to think of a plausible lie.

“Give me the cloth,” she sighed. When I hesitated, she snapped her fingers impatiently. “I'm going to help you, idiot.”

Still tongue-tied, I came out of the bramble patch and handed it to her. Though her intent should have been obvious, I was nevertheless stunned by what she did next. Casually, almost contemptuously, she lifted her own tunic and pressed the cloth between her legs. She handed it back to me generously stained with her own blood. Then she dipped her fingers into the same source and came over and smeared my thighs.

“Why are you doing this for me?” I demanded ungraciously.

“You saved my life. What else?” She shrugged. “I'm not sure I've really done you a favor, though. I have to tell you, I think you're crazy to go through with this. For Bride's sake, Maeve! Dwynwyn could have helped you that day. That's why she sent the rest of us away, isn't it? Well, isn't it!”

I nodded.

“Then why in the three worlds didn't you let her take care of it for you? No.” She changed her mind. “On second thought, don't tell me. I don't want to know how it happened. I don't want to know why you're being such a fool. The less I know, the better. I already know too much.”

With that, she turned and stalked away.

One problem was solved—for another change of the moon or two. Would I
really
come to resemble that woman of the Atrebates who seemed eclipsed by the huge round protrusion she carried in front of her (or which dragged her after it)? Despite Dwynwyn's pronouncement, Foxface's prophecy, and the changes I'd already felt in my body, I still found the very idea of pregnancy strange. I wasn't just a person anymore. I had become a habitation, a cocoon for some unimaginable life form, a cave for some tiny, hibernating being.

As the longest night of the year drew near, we all slept more and dreamed more. On foul nights we kept to our hut and fell asleep listening to one or another of us sing or chant stories. When the nights were fine, we'd gather outside and hear older, more accomplished bards perform. Stories bled into dreams and dreams lingered longer in waking minds, working their way into poetry.

Though I didn't seem to be making any progress with telepathic communication, on each of the last three nights before the solstice I had a short, vivid dream. In the first one, the Cailleach appeared to me as a huge bear. (Don't ask me how I knew it was the Cailleach. You just know these things in dreams.) She was in her cave. With her huge claws, she scratched a series of ogham into the earth floor, but I couldn't read the inscription, no matter which way I looked at it. I begged her to tell me what she had written, but she just stared at me with her golden eyes, arresting as ever in her brown, furry bear face and just as inscrutable.

As soon as I woke up, I tried to reconstruct the ogham on the floor of the hut. I was sure if I could read them, they would reveal a vital secret. Every now and then a prickle of excitement would tell me I'd gotten one or another right, but no combination of ogham seemed to work.

I went to sleep that night willing myself to dream of the ogham again. Instead I dreamed of my womb mother, Grainne. She was sitting alone by the fire, carding wool and weeping. Her tears were more than tears. They grew bigger, heavier, colder. They mixed with sleet. The whole hut became grey and full of rain. The fire hissed, and the damp wool steamed and steamed until Grainne, the hut, and the fire all disappeared
in vapor. I woke in a panic, crying over and over, “The sun is gone. The sun is gone.”

“Of course it's gone. It's still night time,” grumbled my hut mates. “Shut up and go back to sleep.”

On the third night, the eve of the shortest day, I dreamed of Esus. He was wearing a druid's hooded robe. His eyes were so dark within the white, dark as the dark grove where he stood holding a golden sickle in his hands. In the dream, I knew he could see me, but he gave no sign of recognition. He just gazed at me, as if I were the water of a scrying pool. He looked through me, as if I were the space between two standing stones. When I tried to call out his name, my throat wouldn't open.

I woke that morning full of rage and vigor. I'd had it with dreams and visions. I made up my mind that I was going to see Esus that day. In the flesh. Nothing and no one in the three worlds was going to stop me. And although he didn't know it yet, Nissyen was going to help me.