Magdalen Rising (38 page)

I wanted to say: You came here to find me. Your task is to get me out of here alive. But I couldn't. I needed him to say it. I needed him to make it true. Truth was much more complicated than he thought. It wasn't just there waiting to be discovered and proclaimed. You had to choose it. You had to invent it.

“What could you possibly learn from a bunch of unclean, barbarian pig-eaters who worship false gods among trees and unhewn dolmen,” I snarled instead. “Before you went into your little trance on
Lughnasad,
you made us out to be as bad as Romans. Slave-dealers, you called us.”

“The
Keltoi
are no worse than other people. No worse than my own people.”

He sounded so sad, I forgot my anger and touched his hand.

“You're right,” he went on. “I'm not meant to be a druid. I can't stay here for twenty years. But the druids—not just the druids, but all your people—know things. About death. About life. Things I need to know. Things....”

His voice trailed off. He wandered into the wilderness of his own thoughts. I knew the signs. And I was left in my own wilderness, different from his. In mine there was always the sea: pounding, pounding, pounding. And a woman watching and waiting. Shit, I was born shipwrecked.

“I have no right to tell you what to do,” he said, returning from wherever it was his mind had gone.

“You are telling me.” I was relentless. He wanted truth? I'd give him truth. “By refusing to go with me.”

He sighed. “Even if I agreed, we couldn't go on our own across those mountains in winter with neither of us knowing the way.”

“Maybe I could get word to King Bran. He could help. He could send an escort.”

“Maybe you could.”

Maybe I could. His implication was clear. He was shifting the full weight of my destiny to me. I hated it. I preferred moral exhortation.
Even unsolicited advice would be welcome. Then I could argue with him. I wanted to argue with him. Let me tell you something, Yeshua Ben Miriam. Destiny is like bread and wine. You're supposed to share it with your friends.

The baby kicked again. I put my arms around the small world in my lap and stared out across the straits. I didn't need him, I told myself fiercely. I would speak to Branwen today and ask her to send a message to her father for me. Then I realized that without Esus, I not only had no destiny but no destination. What I wanted was to go with him to his world, to sit in the sun with him eating salty, black olives and sweet figs, exotic foods that I knew only by his description. If you have ever been pregnant, you will understand that longing for this food, and knowing I could not have it brought tears to my eyes.

“Maeve, my dove.”

At the tenderness in his voice, I broke down and wept.

“If you want to say the baby is mine, I won't deny it. I'll stand by you.”

I turned towards him, but my tears blinded me. I felt as though I had just stumbled through some labyrinth and arrived unexpectedly at its heart.

“Esus,” I managed. “What about the truth?”

“I am not abandoning the truth, and the truth will not abandon me.”

“You can't save me,” I found myself saying, though surely I had been asking him to do just that. “I will tell the truth. Or I will tell one of what you call my stories, but I will not name you.”

“Why not!” he demanded, both peeved and relieved.

I couldn't help laughing. “Because you're not the only hero around here.”

“Hero? Who said anything about being a hero?” He sounded cross. “Anyway, in your stories only warriors and kings are heroes.”

“Don't forget queens,” I reminded him.

“Well, druids and ovates aren't heroes. They just manipulate them. And poets just sing about them.”

“If that's all you're learning at druid college, you might as well go back to Hebrew school.”

I pushed him, then he pushed me and we started to tussle. Soon we were rolling around on the ground like two puppies in a litter.

“And what about you?” he teased. “Is there anything anyone can teach you?”

“Probably not. Anyway, I'm afraid I'll never be a great poet. That's what Dwynwyn said. Well, she didn't actually say I wouldn't, but she said Branwen would be.”

“Who's Dwynwyn?”

“The old woman who lives on the island by the dunes.”

“You and your old women. No wonder you know everything first. They give you the answers. You cheat!”

“I don't cheat. I just receive the wisdom they're itching to bestow.”

“So did she give you any other useful information?”

“As a matter of fact, she did.” I took a deep breath. “She told me I was going to be a great lover.”

Sometimes you just have to wait, wait till the moment gains just the right amount of weight to fall like ripe fruit into your hand. I looked at Esus, then I looked past him at the green yew boughs reaching down to root again and again in the earth. I did not have to wait long. Soon I saw no branches, no sky. Only his eyes, dark and deep as the well of wisdom with my reflection swimming in them like the salmon. I reached up my arms and drew him down to me.

Beyond the yews a cold, stinging snow begins to fall, blown by a bitter wind. The tracks of a fox circling the yews are erased as soon as they are made.

Beneath the yews is gold and green and heat. Esus and I have gone to the Summerland of the Shining Isles. We have gone to the orchard of Tir na mBan with its impossible bloom and fruit. Then we go deeper, deep inside the fairy mound where the two snakes live. They twine around us, they rise inside us.

That night in the Dark Grove I was broken. Now I break like a wave. We break together, wave on wave pounding madly, joyously on the shore.

S
O, HOW WAS IT for you, I wonder. Do you take the it's-about-time-took-them-long-enough-to-get-to-it view? Or do you prefer to believe that I have an active fantasy life?

According to Christian orthodoxy, my foster brother was incarnate, meaning he lived his life in a mortal body and suffered death like all the rest of us. Though his conception was a little out of the ordinary, a mortal woman gave birth to him. (Never mind that she remained a virgin and was later lifted bodily to heaven. Hey, I'm not the only one with a fantasy life.) The church has always been skittish regarding his knowledge of the other mystery, the one that links life and death, the little death that makes life.

There have been rumors and speculation, but basically the church fathers come down firmly on the side of sublimation. After all, backed-up sperm can win battles and baseball games. A lifetime supply might lead to resurrection. Our Lord may have been incarnate, but he held on to his vital fluids. Not begetting for the only begotten. No wife with swollen ankles. No squalling brat in soiled swaddling. No, sir. It's straight to the cross and into the tomb. After a brief tour of hell and a reprise with the apostles, it's up the right hand of god. Then a dove (rumored to be female) descends to do all the dirty work.

I like my version better. Heretics and mystics (you know, the hysterical types) agree: he is the divine lover. His suffering has been well chronicled. Do you begrudge him a moment of joy? Do you begrudge me?

Because it is one moment we're talking about, however momentous. Maybe all moments are momentous, each one connected to all the others, each act setting the old web of life aquiver. I've notice that the web is in vogue now as a metaphor for nonhierarchical inter-relationship. It's a healthy corrective to seeing life forms as isolated units of enlightened self-interest, just as the concept of free-wheeling atoms must have been a relief after seeing ourselves neatly stacked in hierarchical tiers somewhere between the earthworms and angels with almighty god sitting alone on top of the heap.

But don't forget: Those sticky, near-invisible threads are designed to be a trap. If life is a web, everyone is caught. You. Me. Him.

After our idyll under the yew trees, I was deliriously happy. In the middle of one night, I annoyed my hut mates by sitting bolt upright and shouting aloud the P-Celtic equivalent of: Yahoo! No more geis! Esus had become my lover. Our lovemaking had beaten back danger and destruction to wherever it was they lurked while they waited for someone rash to invoke them. I pictured danger and destruction sulking in a hole somewhere, lamenting their lost opportunity. Nothing and no one could harm Esus or me now. We were eternally paired, hermetically sealed, forever protected by true love.

I was also enjoying the robust vitality that accompanies the second trimester of a healthy pregnancy. I was all but impervious to the discomforts of the unusually harsh winter that held Mona in an icy vise. Ordinarily Mona's climate is mild, even in winter, with frequent thaws and an early spring. The cold that winter was so severe, people feared it must have an Otherworldly source. Some speculated that at Samhain, the veil between the worlds had not just thinned but torn. A wind unfriendly to humans blew through the tatters unchecked.

There was lots of illness, too, in the college and on the farmsteads. Many days classes were suspended because the Crows and Cranes were called to sickbeds. Out of desperation and to keep an eye on me, Moira—I had finally learned to distinguish her from the other Crows—took me on as her unofficial apprentice. I was pleased to be learning the arts of diagnosis and prescription that were usually taught only to ovates. I also had the chance to hone my other healing skill. At first Moira was reluctant to let me use my hands, but there were so many baffling cases that she came to rely on me more and more. Gifted herself, she taught me how to open to the fire of the stars without burning my own stores of energy. More than once on our rounds, we encountered Esus in the company of a Crane. His hands, too, were in demand. Best of all, the Cranes and Crows occasionally rewarded us for our extra labors by looking the other way when we slipped off to the yews.

So for Esus and me, the winter passed swiftly and sweetly. We worked hard, but we weren't weighted by worry. We had no families (yet) to feed. Unlike the Cranes and Crows, we had no populace holding us directly accountable for the well-being of the
Combrogos.
We slept
soundly at night, unaware that our perplexed elders regarded us with increasing awe and suspicion.

Soon it was lambing time, and the sense of crisis intensified. Birth after birth went wrong, with lots of ewes and lambs lost. The ewes who survived with living young had only the scantiest of milk. Then the feast of
Imbolc
(the name means ewe's milk) dawned cold and grey, confirmation that the cosmos was seriously out of whack.

As a child on Tir na mBan, I had always loved this holiday.
Imbolc
marked the quickening of the year, the first secret stirrings of green life in the softening earth, the rekindling of the Bride's sacred flame. Since the formal version of my childhood name was Bride's Flame, I had always taken the holiday personally. Now, despite my almost unassailable sense of well-being, I felt troubled.

Imbolc,
later celebrated as St. Brigid's day or Candlemas, was a particularly female holiday, bright with flame but also sweet and rich with new milk. Snow melted on mountain breasts and mammal breasts became fountains. Bride was the inspiration of poets and smiths. She was also midwife, wet nurse, and foster mother. Now that I felt so far removed in every sense from my mothers, I needed her to be my foster mother. As I looked around on that bleak, frozen morning, Bride was nowhere in sight.

Despite the bitter weather (why, I wondered once again, were the Crows and Cranes so inept at climate control?) the women who lived at Caer Leb gathered to begin the rites. Men would not be part of the ceremonies until later. We fashioned a Bride doll, dressed her in white, bedecked with shells and ribbons, then set her in a wicker cradle with an oak wand crowned with a shapely acorn lying across her. Singing songs of praise, we processed with her from Caer Leb towards a spring that welled in the lap of an ancient oak, both the oak and the well being sacred to Bride. On the way, we were joined by women and girls from the farmsteads and all their bony, female cattle. The maidens wore white (under their warmest cloaks) like the Bride doll. The women of childbearing age and older painted their faces with woad to honor the departing blue hag of winter. Except that she wasn't departing, and the pinched faces of the young girls looked almost as blue as the woad-painted ones.

What should have been a joyous procession was all too somber as we shivered in the cold wind, bruising our feet on the frozen hummocks of winter fields that should have been ready for the first planting. The
almost-dry ewes and their spindly lambs did not have the strength to bleat back and forth to each other as they usually did. There were no new greens in the fields to encourage them. Still, we sang as loudly and bravely as we could, praising our Bride, invoking her power and protection.

When we reached the spring, all but a small hole was covered with ice. We gathered round and breathed over the water, as if we had Bride's power to breathe life into the dead. Some of the ice melted. Between songs, women spoke to Bride and importuned her to bring them safely through childbirth. They made offerings of torques and brooches to the half-frozen well. As unobtrusively as I could, I removed the brooch pin from my cloak and tossed it into the cold, dark water. I had not thought much about the actual birth of my baby. It sounded as though I was going to need all the help I could get.

At sunset (such as it was, there being no light or color) the men arrived at the spring, headed up by the Cranes. They formed an outer circle around the women's inner circle. We had been singing and offering devotion to Bride all day. Now, with the Cranes present, the ceremony suddenly became official and formal. It irked me, this presumption that a rite could not seriously begin until the druids were there. I deliberately unleashed my attention and let it wander while the archdruid sang the quarters. I couldn't see much in the gloaming, but I thought I glimpsed the red of Foxface's beard across the circle from me. And could that be Esus standing next to him?

Then one of the Crows from Holy Isle came forward with a live ember from the sacred fire the Crows tended in a cave among their cliffs. This fire was never allowed to go out and was never extinguished, even on
Samhain.
With the coal, the ancient Crow (possibly the one who had shirked guard duty on
Lughnasad)
lit the bonfire that had been prepared next to the spring. Bride's flame leaped toward the heavy, starless sky. Above a mass of dark cloaks, faces appeared, suddenly bright, glowing in the light. I was right; Esus was standing next to Foxface. Their proximity made my stomach knot. The baby, sensing my disturbance, twisted restlessly. Then Esus caught my gaze and held it. The heat from
the fire felt like a cool breeze in comparison to that one look passing between us.

In spite of my preoccupation, I began to pay attention again when the old archdruid stepped into the circle again and rooted himself there. He stood until it seemed as though he had grown there like the huge oak he so resembled. Like any ancient tree, he looked storm-rocked, scarred, bereft of a branch or two after the hard winter. But he was there, his being a testimony to endurance. In the presence of that potent stillness, the crowd calmed, more than calmed. We fell into a collective trance.

At a sign so subtle it must have been no more than the flickering of an eyebrow, the crowd shifted and made way. Flanked by two Crows, a white cow with red-brown ears stepped into the circle and approached the archdruid. Like all the cattle on Mona that winter, she was gaunt and her udder looked shriveled. Her horns had been decked with furze (the only live bloom to be found), dried heather bells, and rowan berries. Around her slack neck she wore a gold torque, specially fashioned for her, of twining snakes. No matter how much the winter had ravaged her, we knew who she embodied.

A cry of greeting and beseeching rose from the crowd: Bride! Bride! Someone struck up a drum and we all began to sing to the docile (possibly sedated) cow as she came to stand before the druid, who greeted her ceremoniously. He bowed his head to her, then kissed her eyes and her nose. With a little help from the two Crows, he stooped and kissed her dry teats. Throughout his attentions, the cow remained calm, only flicking her tail now and again as if the archdruid were a pesky fly. When he straightened up, he came back to her head and began speaking to her in a low voice only she could hear. She appeared to pay grave attention, her head bent towards him, her tail perfectly still.

Gradually, the volume of the archdruid's voice rose so that we could all hear him addressing Bride, with consistent poetic meter, in formal Q-Celtic. He told her of the hard winter and the hard ground, the hard births and the hard, ungiving teats of the ewes and the cows. (As if she didn't know, being a cow herself at the moment.) At last he beseeched her for a sign. Tell us what is wrong, he begged her. What must the
Combrogos
do?

The old cow listened ruminatively—cows are ruminators, after all—moving her jaws in the same rhythm as the druid's speech. When he had done, she continued to chew thoughtfully for a time, apparently unmoved by all the expectation focused on her. Then slowly, serenely, she
lifted her head, looking around the circle—until she locked eyes with me.

You must have looked into a cow's eyes before. You know how mild that gaze is, how benign and bemused. Bride, in her form as a white cow with red ears, looked at me that way, without urgency but steadily, leaving me in no doubt that she had a message, and the message was for me. Despite Bride's reputation as a poet, she did not speak in words. She sent images to my mind. I saw the bleak, grey cloud that had covered Mona all winter, the high, unyielding cloud that doesn't temper the cold but seals it in. Then I saw beyond the cloud cover to the clear, shining, near-full moon. That image dissolved, and I saw myself from the outside, as if I were someone else. I saw myself cloaked and concealed in my heavy, grey cloak. Just as I had seen beyond the clouds before, I saw though my garments to the round, glowing moon underneath. All the while these images came and went, I saw her eyes—the cow's, Bride's. The reflection of flame flickered in their depth.