Ashes Under Uricon (The Change Book 1) (14 page)

Matthew stepped forward, revealing his face. “That is what it is, young lady. Pray listen. For once in your life.”

“Why should I put up with this?” I said, too loudly. “Who are you to say such things?”

Eluned took my arm. “Pray be patient, my lady. You needs must listen.”

I shook her off, roughly. “Not if she is going to malign my world. Why should I listen?”

Mererid stepped out of the light. She raised her hand and pointed at me. “What did we tell you?” She looked up and down the table. “You were all too eager to accept that she has had her eyes opened. How wrong you were. She is still one of them. She will always be one of them.”

She threw the paper she had been reading from onto the table and stormed out of the room. Matthew followed her. The others shook their heads as, one by one, they also left the room. I was left standing with Eluned standing beside me, Taid still sitting facing me.

“Well, that went well, didn’t it?” he said and laughed loudly.

The following day we all met again in the library. After a few words of encouragement from Taid, who explained that Mererid had a tendency to exaggerate in order to deliberately antagonise, I reluctantly took my place.

Mererid and Matthew made a dramatic entry once more. This time, Mererid began reading from her sheet without waiting for any words from Matthew.

She coughed. “An uncanny ability to describe what has happened to us since the abomination known as the ‘Change’.” She paused, looking directly at me. If she expected me to react again, she was mistaken. I would play her at her own game. She continued. “We have since discovered that a version of this same text exists in all the ancient languages of this island. That is why, after many, many years of waiting and searching, we were finally able to bring together the experts assembled here. In the years that we have been working we have slowly realised that there can only be one conclusion to our studies.

“The ancient writers, who were so much wiser than we will ever be, were aware that the patriarchal society in which they lived was illusory. The petty little ‘kings’ and ‘princes’ mentioned in the text may have believed that they were controlling things, but they were mistaken. There was only one real power in the world – the feminine. The Lady. The Domina. She controlled – she controls – all that exists. Men, in their pathetic attempts to assert themselves, have corrupted her world time and time again.

“Ladies and gentlemen. All your hard work has brought us to one conclusion and one conclusion only. When the author of the ‘Armes Prydein’ spoke of a future ‘leader’ she was not referring to a
man
. She was referring to a
woman
. A woman who lives outside the boundaries of masculine imagination. And so we have to accept that the words of the text point to one thing. When the events she mentions come to pass, then, and only then, will the ‘leader’ reveal herself.

“I have to tell you that it is now clear, much though it goes against my personal judgment, that she
has
revealed herself.”

There was a gasp from everyone in the room. Two of the women used the sleeves of their shifts to dab at their eyes.

Matthew stepped forward. “Non. Would you please stand up?” Looking around in confusion, I did as he asked. “Ladies and gentlemen. I humbly present that woman.”

This time the gasps were even louder. Mere Rhiannon stood up, screamed and ran from the room. I sat back down heavily in my chair. I was too stunned to say or do anything at first. Then I laughed. “You’re mad,” I said in a controlled manner. “You two. And the rest of you if you believe any of that nonsense. Taid. Please don’t tell me you believe her. You’ve all been locked up in this place for too long.”

Mererid stepped forward. “Despite the fact that all our research confirms the fact, nothing will convince me that this … this … creature is the one the world has been waiting for. I can no longer bear to be in her presence. If you people wish to continue, then you do so without my blessing. I have not lived so long to see this … this ...”

Once again she stormed from the room. This time, however, no one else followed her. They sat in silence, their heads bowed, some sobbing quietly, both men and women.

PART THREE

Getting Ready

We did not see Mererid again. She did not come to meals. She was not seen in the library or the study. We all assumed that she had left the house. Matthew, while taking no part in what the rest of us were involved with in the ensuing months, always appeared at meal times. He would be careful not to join in any debates or discussions in the dining room, and spent much of the rest of the time alone in his room. The rest of us read, studied and wrote ferociously.

There were times when I fell forward onto the table, too exhausted to carry on. Always, I would wake the following morning in my bed. We worked from immediately following breakfast until the candles in the library burned down, late into the night. As the months passed, the Professors must have read every book in the library, hunting down scraps of information. I spent much of my time reading and re-reading what I was told were the crucial texts. It took me a long, long time to work out quite why all this industry was so important.

Of course, things did not begin easily, or well. Being told that you are not who you have thought you are for nineteen years would be a shock to anyone, I think. Perhaps to discover, as you were about to exit adolescence, that you had been adopted, or that your father was not the man your mother had always led you to believe it was, or vice versa come to that, perhaps these things would be shocking enough, but I am sure you could come to terms with that sort of news. What I had been told just seemed far worse.

I had one small thing in my favour. I knew absolutely nothing about whoever it was that I was supposed to be. In a strange way I was grateful that this was as a result of my education in the world of the Apostles. With no other books besides The Bible and Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’, and that only where it concerned my own Ovidian name, I was not likely to know much at all, realistically. As I know now, that was indeed their purpose. Narrow your children’s education to certain parts of one book and one chapter of a second book, without teaching the critical faculties needed to understand or question them, and you will very soon have a gullible population capable only of believing anything you tell them. Those few for whom this education does not ‘work’ are swiftly ‘eliminated’. A fact I only discovered much later.

But in the beginning I could not understand what I was meant to be. Mererid’s words -
 
“I have to tell you that it is now clear, much though it goes against my personal judgment, that she
has
revealed herself” rang loud and clear in my head for days after they were uttered. I must confess that my immediate reaction was to check that I was still fully dressed. I was. Next, I struggled to see how I could be this ‘revealed’ person, even though she did not want to believe it. Mererid had shown very little indication that she thought much of me – in fact the opposite – yet she was claiming that I was apparently sent to save the world. Whatever that meant.

For the first several weeks I resisted all attempts to convince me. Taid spoke to me earnestly every morning while we remained in the dining room after the others had left. Eluned spent the evenings filling my head with her solemn phrases. In those weeks I was not allowed to walk in the grounds of the house. They appeared to be afraid that I would run away for the first time in years. Where would I go? I could not return to the world I had left – so much had changed. The thought that, in time, I would indeed return did not enter my head.

In the end, Taid gave me what amounted to an ultimatum.

“Cariad bach,” he said, pacing round the dining room table that morning. “Whatever you may want to believe no longer matters. None of us expected this to be the outcome of our studies. Nevertheless, we are the experts and all our learning demands that we accept this truth. You
are
the revealed one. None of us expected the one who bears that burden to be a woman. None of us expected it to be a woman as young as yourself. As lacking in experience, in knowledge, in wisdom, in the simple faculty of critical thinking, as you are. Yet the texts tell us – inescapably – that you are the revealed one. Everything fits as it has never fitted in the past long history of this country. And because everything fits in that way, it is inevitable that a girl – a woman – just like you … no, indeed, not even that. A woman who
is
you, not
like
you, must be the expected one.”

He paused. As always, by now I had my head down on the table, my hands tucked under. I lifted my head slightly. “How many times do I have to hear these same things? No matter how many times you tell me, I cannot accept what you say. Your books may tell you one thing. My head – my heart – tells me another. My name is Semele0442. My family calls me Non. I have lived for nineteen years, fifteen of them in a world from which I was ripped, whether I liked it or not. And you expect me simply to agree that I am now someone else completely?”

He stopped pacing around the room. His breathing was becoming shallow.

“My lord,” Eluned said. “If it please you, be seated.”

I had forgotten she was there. She was always there. Taid pulled back a chair opposite us and sat down. His breathing eased.

“Thank you, Eluned,” he said, slowly. “Non. Cariad. This cannot go on. We are none of us getting any younger. Our brains are becoming fuddled. It is vital that we take this opportunity now that we are faced with it. If we do not, then our world will end. All our work will be lost. The work of those hundreds, those thousands, of men – and women – who have gone before us. All will be lost. For ever. There will be no way back.”

I sat up. I had never heard him speak like this before. He had always told me that it was ‘written in the texts’. Repeated it endlessly. This was a different approach. It was more personal. I listened.

“Those men and women waiting patiently in the library for us – for you – to join them. They did not come here for a holiday. They have risked so much just to be here. Some of them have families – just as I have, or had, a family. Where is my daughter? Where is my other grand-daughter? I do not know. Do you think I don’t care? It is the same with the others. Where are their wives, daughters, sons, grand-children? Do you think they don’t care?

“They came here for one purpose. Knowing that they could be subjecting their loved ones to the wrath of the Apostles. Yet they came. Why? They knew there could only be one escape from the hell that the Change has wrought in this world.”

I opened my mouth to speak.

“No, now is not the time for argument. You may not see things in the way that we see them. It is no longer important. That is how things are. Unless we find a way to overcome them. And we can only find a way if you are there to help us. You are the key. Through you we may unlock the door to the future. If you turn away from us now, that door will remain forever closed. The Apostles will have succeeded. Perhaps beyond even their malign intentions. Without your help, that is what will happen.”

He dropped his arms to his side, exhausted by the animated way he had used them while he spoke.

“Taid,” I said, “what on earth can I do to help you? You and the Professors have read more books than I ever knew existed. You have spent your lives discussing, pondering, arguing about things that no one else has ever heard of. You have spent your lives locked away in places just like this one. Reading books that should be thick with the dust of centuries. Yet you tell me to abandon my world in order that it may be replaced. Replaced with what? Maybe the world you replace it with would be worse. And how is this to happen? Through me?”

He looked at me, tears in his eyes. “You are the seed. From you will spring everything.”

Eluned touched my arm. “My lady. ‘I
t is like a grain of mustard seed, which, when it is sown in the earth, is less than all the seeds that be in the earth.’ You must believe this is your true worth.”

Taid said, “‘E
t cum seminatum fuerit ascendit et fit maius omnibus holeribus et facit ramos magno’. How true, my dear. How true.”

And that was when it happened. It was as simple as that. I looked at each of them in turn and said, “‘And when it is sown, it grows up, and becomes greater than all herbs, and shoots out great branches.’ I understand, Taid. You spoke in DogLat and I understood it. I did not have to struggle with a dictionary or a crib. You spoke in a language that I know. I know it.”

Eluned clapped her hands, a gesture that shocked me in a way as she rarely showed any sign of emotion. “My lord,” she said to Taid. “How wondrous are her ways.”

Taid looked confused. “I’m sorry, my dear. Whose ways?”

“The Domina. The Lady,” I said, excitedly. “The Lady spoke through Eluned as she always does and you continued her words in DogLat. And I understood them. Perfectly.”

Taid got heavily to his feet. “At last,” he said, raising his arms on high. “At last. We are of one mind. At last we can communicate.” He came round the table and took both Eluned and me in his hands. “Shall we join the others, ladies? They have been waiting ever so patiently, I think.”

As we approached the door to the library I held back. Taid paused.

“I think I’d like to go outside first, Taid,” I said.

“Why is that?”

“I have not been outside my room for many weeks, as you know. Now I have agreed to join you in your research, surely you wouldn’t mind if I spent an hour in the grounds before we start?”

Taid looked at Eluned. “Are you prepared to go with her?”

She nodded. “My lord.”

“Very well, then. For one hour, mind, cariad. We cannot keep our colleagues waiting longer than is necessary.”

I took hold of Eluned’s hand and, rather than entering the library, took my old route along the hallway towards the front door. As we stepped onto the threshold I heard a door closing behind us. I turned briefly, but Taid had gone. Eluned closed the front door.