Ashes Under Uricon (The Change Book 1) (9 page)

Her increasingly cryptic comments when I asked a simple question were, in the beginning, very annoying, although over time I became accustomed to them. I never learned how she knew so many verses from the Bible yet claimed not to know of it.

Soon she returned with the same milk jug, one cup, and a plate with a slice of bread. I began to wonder if there was ever anything else to eat and drink in this place. She lifted me from my bed, still clutching my blanket, and led me to the table. She poured a cup of milk then moved over to the lamp and turned it up. The added light showed that she was as naked as I was. Her long blonde hair covered much of her body, but she did not seem at all concerned about this.

“Where are my clothes?” I asked her, as the blanket slipped down when I picked up the cup.

“Later, my lady. First it is good to take refreshment. It is long since you have taken any. No man will enter this room. You may leave aside the covering.”

She took away the blanket and laid it back on the bed. Now hungry and thirsty as I shook off sleep, I shrugged and took the food and drink. The single slice of bread, thinly covered with butter, did little to ease my hunger, but the milk was at least refreshing. Eluned took a seat next to me. It struck me as curious that in this room, which was quite clearly ‘her’ room, she seemed to be more relaxed than she had been in the other room at breakfast. She did not see any need to wear clothes, or stand behind me as she had done in there.

“This is good,” she said as I finished eating. “May we take up our lessons now, my lady?”

I was stunned. “What, now? But it’s the middle of the night, isn’t it?” I turned to face her. “And, besides, I’m not even dressed yet.”

“This matters not, my lady. The lord will require progress. I fear we have lost much time.”

“But I’ve been asleep. You can tell him that. It has been a long time since I slept so deeply. I must have needed it. And I still don’t understand why I’m here or what it is that I’m supposed to be doing with you. What on earth can be so important that I have to do it in the middle of the night? When I’m undressed? He’ll just have to wait for his progress.”

“There is no time to wait. ‘She hath established the world by her wisdom, and hath stretched out the heaven by her understanding.’ Our lessons lead to that understanding.”

She was quoting again, but it meant nothing to me. Her constant references to ‘she’ and ‘her’, presumably the person she called the ‘Domina’, was certainly beyond my understanding. I could not see why I should have to do anything she said.

“Look, Eluned,” I said, trying to remain calm, “I do appreciate that you want to do everything for me. You have been very kind and generous, not that I need or want a servant, but as for lessons, you cannot possibly teach me anything. Out here in the countryside you have no access to the sort of learning that I am used to, and that I need, if I am ever to go back to that world. I have been given tasks to complete, but it is very difficult to complete them without the proper resources, which I’m sure don’t exist here.”

“I know your task, my lady,” she said. Her face was sad.

I raised my voice. “You can’t possibly know my task, Eluned. Don’t you understand? That is what I am trying to tell you. I’m already half way through my Ovidian. I’ve probably missed the deadline for completing it, but that doesn’t mean I can stop doing it. And ClassLat is a stinking bore. As for my Bible work, I haven’t looked at that for I don’t know how long. I’ll have to relearn half the vocabulary we covered in the first two quarters, and it’s now probably well into the third quarter. Does any of this mean anything to you?”

Her face grew increasingly sad. She closed her eyes. “You need not speak loudly, my lady. If I displease you, I will pray for your forgiveness.”

“Oh, Eluned.” I felt like putting my arms around her and giving her a big hug. “I’m not displeased with you. You have been so kind to me, but we are just from different worlds. Not long ago, where I am now would not have seemed even possible. Sitting in a dark room, unclothed, arguing with a lovely young woman who seems as baffled by my life as I am by hers. You have to understand. Taid ripped me away from the life I have always known. He brought me here, wherever this may be, to meet with people who seem to know him, and seem to be known by him. I know no one, and now I only see my grandfather at meal times. You must see how this frightens me.”

She put her hand on my knee. I flinched and she took it away. “You are known in this place, my lady. You need not fear. Your coming was foretold. I have been waiting for you for many long years.”

“That’s impossible.” Again, I tried to keep my voice calm as she seemed to be disturbed when I raised it. “I have never been here before. I have spent my whole life in the caster. There is no way that you can have known about me. I’m not sure what they have been filling your head with in this place, but you have to understand that what they have been telling you is clearly untrue. Everyone lives in a caster. People like you and the others here, people who are outside the casters, are outside the law. In time the Guards will find you, as they do with everyone who tries to leave the casters. Don’t you see? They will find you.” I banged my hand on the table, rather harder than I had actually intended.

Eluned shrank away from me. She put her hands over her face. “My lady, forgive me. I did not know that I would displease you. I believed that you would be filled with joy, as I am filled with joy in your presence. That a maiden must help you to learn in the final days has long been foretold. That I should be that maiden is a wonder to me. The Lady pours her blessings upon me, though I am nothing in her eyes. Yet now you are displeased with me. I have failed.” Tears rolled down her cheeks and she sobbed quietly.

I could not bear to see her so upset. She genuinely seemed to believe what she was saying, strange as it all was. What was all this business about being ‘foretold’? And what did she mean by ‘the final days’? The final days of what? We sat for many minutes, each in her own confused world. We were shattering each other’s certainties. She believed that I was this mysterious person who was somehow expected, and that it was her role to teach me something she did not seem to be sure about. I knew who I was, where I had come from, the life I had led until very recently, and it certainly didn’t seem to match with what she was saying.

In the end, I broke the silence. “Eluned. It seems we need to resolve this problem. Let’s go right back to the beginning. I will tell you all about my life, then you can tell me all about yours. That way, we may perhaps discover whether there really is a thread that holds us together.”

She took her hands down from her face and smiled at me. “My life has only been awaiting you, my lady. There is nothing more to tell.”

“Well, I’m not convinced of that, Eluned. I’ll start by telling you all about me. But before we do that, do you think we could put on our clothes? I am really not comfortable with this being naked.”

She laughed, stood up and found our shifts. She pulled hers on and then helped me to put mine on. Now dressed, we sat back at the table. She held both my hands in hers and nodded for me to begin.

You have heard most of what my life had been about in the few short years I had lived until this point. What she told me about her life turned my world on its head.

Eluned’s Story

It is best that I report Eluned’s life in my own words. Her manner of speaking I find difficult to sustain over any length of time. Also, she did not tell me in chronological order. Rather, she spoke of anecdotes from her life, chosen apparently at random. It was only in later years, once I had overcome my fear of writing in English, that I managed to put them down and sort them out, starting from the beginning and moving forward. If ‘moving forward’ is a phrase that can actually be applied to Eluned at all.

To explain what I mean by that last statement, let me tell you one of her anecdotes. She was talking about people who I later worked out must have included her parents. With no introduction, she began to speak of two men and a woman. One of the men was called, I think, ‘Gwydion’. The other sounded like ‘Llew’. I never learned the name of the woman. The one known as ‘Llew’ had been cursed for some reason by yet another unnamed woman.

(Her anecdotes were filled with ‘he’ and ‘she’, making it difficult to understand which of the named persons she was referring to at any time.)

As a result of the curse, Llew could never find a woman willing to marry him. Until, that is, Gwydion intervened. I’m not sure what the relationship between Llew and Gwydion was, whether they were related or they were just friends. Whatever it was, Gwydion was sufficiently concerned about the fact that Llew could not find a wife that he went to see the local lord. Once the lord was convinced that Llew needed a wife, he produced a suitable woman. I distinctly remember Eluned added at this point ‘as if by magic’. I found that odd but dismissed it. Llew and the woman got together and eventually they produced Eluned.

That anecdote was then followed by something entirely different from a totally different part of her life. While she was telling me these things I grew more and more confused. She seemed to be simply plucking memories out of her head as they occurred to her. The one thing about these that really baffled me was the apparent length of time they covered. She kept repeating the phrase ‘many years
passed
’, which I initially interpreted as ‘many years
past
’. Once or twice she said ‘hundreds of years later’. This would be by way of introducing another anecdote, which led me to wonder why she was telling me about historical events rather than about herself.

Eventually, another thought began to seep into my consciousness – she
was not
telling me about history, she
was
telling me about herself. Which could only mean that she was suggesting that she was many hundreds of years old. As this was plainly impossible I began to think that perhaps she was deranged. People who lived outside the casters were subject to all sorts of fantastic thoughts, we had been told, because outside the casters there were still pockets of the chaos that existed before the Change. Eluned seemed to be proving that this was the case, and I began to feel sorry for her.

The woman who sat beside me, telling me these weird stories, was, I believed, probably in her mid to late twenties. Her skin was still soft and supple, her blonde hair thick and lustrous. I had seen her naked once or twice and there was no sign that she was any older. The idea that she was claiming to be hundreds of years old was simply preposterous. Or so I thought.

As I mentioned before, Eluned told her story by means of random anecdotes. When I managed to order them and support them with historical evidence, the timeline did range over at least a thousand years, starting in around what Taid called the ‘tenth century’. As far as she was concerned, she was a living witness to every event that she recounted during all these years. The men named in the anecdote about her parents appear in a book known as ‘The Mabinogi’. These were stories thought to have been first written down in the ‘thirteenth’ or ‘fourteenth’ century, but they tell of events that happened in the ‘tenth’ century, or earlier. As a woman from that time she spent most of her life either as a servant or in a convent, which was a place where women lived together to worship a god.

At one time or another she had been a servant to several lords in Wales, all of whom are mentioned in a book known as the ‘Welsh Genealogies’ – lists of so-called ‘kings’ and ‘princes’. Incidentally, she always referred to herself as a ‘hand-maiden’, never a ‘servant’, as if there were some distinction to be made. At the time, none of these names meant anything to me. Later, with a great deal of help from Taid and Matthew, we did manage to find most of them in the books in Plas Maen Heledd’s library.

Following the early princes, she spent many years in a convent, after the Normans invaded Wales. She became a hand-maiden again when the great Welsh princes named Llywelyn came to power. One of her anecdotes about the Llywelyn known as ‘Fawr’ – the ‘great’ – told of her discovering a man called William in bed with Llywelyn’s wife, who was the king of England’s daughter. She clapped her hands with glee as she told me that ‘William’ had been hanged as a result.

Another anecdote told of the Llywelyn known as ‘The Last Prince’, to whom she was a hand-maiden and had been present at the birth of his daughter Gwenllian. The child’s father died just before she was born and her mother died soon after her birth. As a consequence, the king of England sent her away to a convent in England with the child. It was here that she first learned to speak English, having only spoken Welsh before.

She was rescued from this convent by a man who eventually became king of England himself, called Henry Tudor. An anecdote from this period was about one of the wives of another King Henry. She discovered this one in bed with her brother, so she said. Both the wife and the brother were executed. She was returned to a house in Wales as hand-maiden to a group of women following the death of a Queen called Elizabeth. This was not a convent as these had been abolished.

She remained in this house until the ‘eighteenth’ century when she left to join the households of various religious men. The first was a man called Howell Harris. The anecdote about him was again to do with a woman. Eluned discovered that this man was living with a woman called Sidney who was not his wife. He was disgraced this time, rather than executed, but she still enjoyed telling the tale.

Towards the end of the ‘nineteenth’ century, she came to Plas Maen Heledd, where she had lived ever since, no longer called a ‘hand-maiden’, but now a ‘companion’ to the women who lived there, including, of course, Mererid.

If this ‘life story’ was not incredible enough in itself, there was a deeper level yet. From beginning to end, even though she passed through different languages and religions, Eluned was born as, and remained as, a hand-maiden to one person alone – the Domina, the Lady to whom she referred frequently, and who, she claimed, spoke through her in phrases which I always thought were distinctly biblical. She had been educated to sufficient a level for her to be able to read both Welsh and English, but she had never been taught to write in either language.