B007IIXYQY EBOK (77 page)

“Will I…will I see him again?”

Ramis smiled and shook her head, like a mother with a precocious child who tries a trick to get something she cannot have. “Some fates are not set and cannot be known.”

“Why did you summon me at night?”

“Ah. If you knew the answer to that,
you might dash your head against that rock. You’re not
near
ready to hear it. Later, much later, you will hear it and welcome the news.” Ramis paused; with a long, delicate forefinger she stroked the head of an adder that regarded her with needle-sharp eyes. Auriane knew that variety to be highly poisonous.
Has she enchanted it, or does she consider death of so little account?

The next question welled up in her against her will, like sickness in the throat. “I must know it….” The words were barely audible. “I beg you…tell me…why was I led to commit the most horrible of crimes?”

Ramis regarded her in compassionate silence for a time. Then she deliberately teased the snake. After a moment the evil head flashed out, and the adder bit her. Bright droplets of blood appeared on the fleshy part of her palm.

Aghast, Auriane started to struggle to her feet. “You let it strike you! Why! Do you wish to die?”

“I will not die,” Ramis said calmly.

She is inhuman. She did not even wince in pain.

“That same measure of venom in your body would have you writhing on the ground, for you have so much venom in you already, poor child. You poison yourself day by day—without the aid of a viper. You poison yourself with the venom of shame. My body is too intimately acquainted with death. It moves with it, it does not fight it. I am death’s bride. I bed down with it every night.” She resumed affectionately stroking the snake.

“The horse test showed you your innocence,” Ramis went on. “Yet still you speak of your ‘crime.’ I thought if I refused to give a judgment in that case and left it to the horses, it might help you believe. Evidently it has not. Why?”

Auriane felt hot tears collecting, filling her eyes.

“I, too, once caused a death,” Ramis said, voice low, speaking with effort. “She was my own daughter.”

Auriane felt uncomfortable, as though hearing a confession she was not certain she had earned the right to hear.

“In the sacred precinct of Seven Alders, where, as you know, I served long ago as apprentice to the great seeress and Veleda of those times, Raganhildis,” Ramis continued, the barest hoarseness in her voice indicating the hurt was not completely healed, “we were required to be adept with one weapon. I was accomplished with a bow. One night a band of Hermundures attacked, and in the confusion and darkness…I shot her and killed her…my own heart’s blood…. Freawaru was her name. The arrowhead was smeared with hellebore—she died painfully, but at once. I was younger than you then, and like you, I poisoned myself for years. My grief was larger than the Nine Worlds. I sorrow still, yes, but now my blood is cleansed.” Auriane was even more astonished to see a single tear travel down that smooth cheek. “As I was cleansed, so too can you be, Auriane.”

Auriane could scarcely breathe.

“Life is never,
never
what it seems,” Ramis continued gently. “That stone, which is so hard against the flesh, is truly emptiness. Baldemar
lives.
Your suffering pains him. I will try to show you, while you are here, your true enemy. It is not, as you suppose, death.”

“Will I ever be able to return to my people?”

“There
is your true enemy.”

“What? Wanting to return to my people?”

“No. Not questioning that which you desire. Your desires are idols, worshiped blindly. But returning to your people is not even your greatest idol. Greatest for you is
vengeance.”

Auriane felt her body tauten; a vast distance seemed to spring up between herself and Ramis. This could not be discussed. Of course she would avenge Baldemar’s death, as spring follows winter. Of course, she would one day challenge Odberht, and kill him. What proud person of noble parents would not? It was sacred law, and all peoples followed it—all except the followers of Ramis, known everywhere for their strangeness.

“Well, we’ve come to a barrier high as the clouds, and it’s a fine place to stop,” Ramis said easily, arising. Auriane rose with her. Before quitting the circle, Ramis inclined her head, took Auriane’s hand, and shut her eyes. Facing the fire, she began to chant a familiar prayer to Fria:

“You who are pure light shed from the moon…you who are the radiant one, whose raiment is the sun…you who generate all things and bring forth ever anew the sun that you have given to the nations…victory is your divine name…”

Auriane spoke it with her; it was a prayer every child knew. When it was done Ramis cast a bundle of dried vervain into the flames as a token-gift to Fria. Then she took up a torch and lit it from the fire. Walking in silence, she led Auriane to one of the small lodges.

She means for me to stay here on the island.

Auriane felt weak and emptied, so great was her relief. There was no safer place—no emissary of Geisar would dare cross this water.

The lodge was spare and simple; on a crude pine table were a jar of water, a hollowed gourd and a bird-bone flute; on the floor was a comfortable bed of straw.

She fell at once into sleep and dreamed vividly of Ramis. The sorceress was conversing with frightful spirits that possessed animal heads. Of all the words she spoke, Auriane heard clearly only one line.

“Yes…she is the one.”

CHAPTER XX

M
IDWINTER AND THE DAYS OF
Y
ULE
approached, and the mud began to freeze. At dawn Ramis often walked round the island with Auriane, her stream of talk smoothly weaving the visible world with the realm of spirits; she might begin by speaking of the habits of water birds, of which she had made a study, then shift to the nature of death and why so many peoples represent it by the flight of a bird. Once when Auriane spoke of her sense of foreboding about the coming spring, Ramis paused and looked out on the smoking water as if considering carefully what to say. Then she answered, “Remember this, Auriane: That very turn of fate which, in its day, you find most relentlessly cruel—one day you will turn round and know it as your
deliverer.”

Auriane carefully considered this, but it made her feel no more secure. She scented gathering war as beasts scent a storm.

In late morning Auriane would row herself ashore and take Berinhard out to let him run riderless over the bare grassy hills; often she practiced with a spear on these journeys to keep herself conditioned for battle, ever hopeful she would be called back. As the child grew within her, she felt a new sort of love: a warm, diffuse tenderness for the unknown being within. She felt an ardent curiosity about this new creature. Who are you? she wondered a hundred times a day, her hand on her rapidly growing belly. Will you have Decius’ nature or mine? Or will you be hideous because of Geisar’s curse and have a calf’s head and the body of a black dog?

At the same time she despised this new ungainliness that made it increasingly difficult to get easily about. And then grim thoughts would come: The old must give way to the new. My body will swell and burst, and I will die so new life can arise. The mare is not so encumbered, nor is the doe. Why does nature descend so heavily on the human mother, leaving her staggering about and prey to the wolf?

While Auriane was off the island, Ramis saw the petitioners. Most wanted an oracle or advice in matters of sacred law, land disputes, marriage, or war, and Auriane trusted this greatest of Holy Ones even more when she saw how joyful the petitioners often were when they left her presence. At times Ramis was absent for days, leading delegations to the legionary fortresses to take complaints to the tribes’ common enemy, the Romans, or if it was the time of the new moon, traveling to the nighttime gatherings of the Holy Nine in their elm grove a half day’s ride to the east. Frightful rites were performed there, it was said, that maintained the harmony between the old and new gods and the balance among the Nine Worlds. Once she was called to a law assembly by the neighboring Tencteres to settle the case of a battle chief who had broken the law of vengeance, striking at the offending clan by slaying an unblooded, half-grown boy. And so Auriane was often alone with the dour, distant Helgrune.

As the year’s shortest days approached, evergreen boughs were nailed above the doors in the little community about the lake—charms to ensure the return of the green in the spring. On Midwinter Day the lake community set Yule logs alight to ensure that the light of the world would not go out entirely in winter. The mead they drank was sent by noblewomen of the Tencteres. The Boar Feast consisted of barley cakes shaped in the image of boars, because they did not eat flesh in this place. Auriane went ashore for the Yule Feast and sat before Helgrune’s glowing oak log in bitter loneliness, fearful for her mother and for Decius. Often in years past she had gotten a dim sense of events of the coming year by divining from the flight of the Yule log’s fiery embers, and what she saw for the new year she could scarcely bear to look upon—something dark and catastrophic loomed; she could not make out its precise shape.

Two days later, snow came in earnest, first laying a light shroud over the withered ground, then a solid blanket; it weighed down the boughs of the evergreens until the branches drooped low. Like me, she thought, those boughs sag under a cumbersome burden, and like me, they will not be relieved of it until spring. The snowfall sealed the great pathways through the forest, shutting out all but the most determined travelers. This year she despised the winter—it heightened her sense of isolation from her people.

Through the winter the lake remained black and still, strangely free of ice because of its magical warmth. When at last the snowstorms relented and many of the trails first became passable, just when Auriane was near maddened with need of news, Fastila did come, riding with a party of six novices from the Ash Grove temple in which she had been raised. This was nine days into the third moon of the new year; Auriane was so heavy with child she ventured nowhere now, contenting herself with struggling about the island. Fastila came on a day the sanctuary was deserted but for Auriane; Ramis had gone to give a judgment in the case of a man of the Bructeres accused of setting a temple afire.

Helgrune rowed Fastila across the lake. Auriane was startled to see her in the gray robes of an ash priestess. As Fastila embraced Auriane, she explained that she had wanted no more to do with the Companions after Auriane was so shamefully driven off, and she had returned to the slow, predictable life of her mother’s temple.

Auriane saw much of the playfulness was gone from Fastila’s black eyes. No longer did she stumble excitedly over her words; now her speech was careful and considered, as if she measured out pinches of herbs for a potion, and an elder-woman’s heaviness of mind had settled into her face.

Fastila settled herself on the bearskin by the fire before Auriane’s lodge. Auriane waited until the younger woman pulled off her hairy calfskin boots, wrapped her cold-numbed feet in a blanket and took a long, appreciative draught of mead before she demanded to know the news.

“Athelinda is well protected—have no fears for her,” Fastila answered to Auriane’s first question. “Geisar tried to claim two hundred cattle from her in payment for your ‘crime,’ but the Companions prevented it. Now they sleep in arms at the Hall. A hundred of her cattle froze to death anyway—spring will see a forest of bleached bones. As if it were not enough, Geisar cursed her crop. There’s no end to his vileness and his hatred of your family.”

“Take a good measure of our Yule ashes when you go—Ramis will let me have them if I ask,” Auriane replied, eyes bright with concern. Yule ashes sprinkled on the fields were held to ensure the land’s fertility after a hard winter, and the presence of Ramis would render ashes from this place particularly potent.

“Athelinda will bless you. She will not believe ill of you, Auriane. You have a noble and loyal mother. ‘No daughter of Baldemar would lie with a foreigner,’ she insists. If you are with child, it was fathered by Wodan or some other great spirit of the wood.”

Auriane dropped her head into her hands and made no effort to stop a quiet upwelling of tears. “She makes it powerfully difficult to tell her the truth. My poor mother. I should let her believe what she will. Fastila, I am ashamed of some
things, but of this I am not ashamed. I just do not want her to suffer.”

“Well, of course,” Fastila responded amiably. “I’ve always held with the older law. Does great Fria know shame when she parts from her lovers? Her love-acts bless all nature. The Fates guide all you do, Auriane.”

“If I could believe that!” Auriane said, smiling companionably. “What word have you of Decius?”

“This was sent to your mother.” Fastila pulled a damp, grimy strip of papyrus from the leather pouch that hung from the belt of her robe; it had been torn from Decius’ book,
The Art of Siege Warfare.
Auriane’s breath caught in her throat; she seized it out of Fastila’s hands. It appeared Decius had washed the original writing from the beginning of the roll and added letters of his own, penned with some mixture of dyes.