Daughter of Albion (27 page)

The hardworld and the Mothers' world
are bridged by our Kendra.
Only she can witness the making of time.

T
HE SUN ROSE
and set three times as we sang. Sometimes the women lay down to sleep. They left to drink water, to piss, or fuel the fire, but the song remained unbroken.

During these days I learned the songs that made the mountain, the wind, the trees and the seasons. I heard the words that made the human and animal shapes, and I echoed them until I knew I would never forget them. Each circle of Mothers had a song for their part of the country. I remembered them all.

By the Singing, I knew that I would never see the hardworld in the same way now. I would always hear the songs that gave it form. By the Singing, I knew the counsel that I would offer Llwyd and Fraid when I returned: we would fight the Roman forces. We would defend the songs with our lives. For without it, there would be no life.

It was the dawn of the fourth day. My legs ached from standing, my vision was blurred from tiredness but still I sang.

The old woman summoned Tara and two others of the Fire Mothers to my side.

Tara drew her knife.

I knew what they were about to do. I trembled as the two Mothers braced my arms and Tara released the fastening of my robe. She placed a wad of tightly rolled linen into my mouth and raised her blade. The old woman summoned volume in the song. Every Mother was singing me into being. The sound was deafening.

I buckled, biting hard on the linen as Tara cut a spiralling shape into my chest with her knife. The hot pain brought a deep release as blood dripped in the dirt at my feet. This was the wound that would hold the song. The scar that would mark me in the hardworld.

Tara left my cut untended and returned with her women to their circle.

I tried to resume my song but, in my exhaustion, my voice began to fail, and with it, my vision. The temple house emerged before me, its stones not solid but sheer as a veil, the circles of Mothers still visible behind it.

I squeezed my eyes closed, but when they opened, the temple was yet clearer and I saw Sulis push through the door and walk toward me, a jug in her hand. ‘Sulis!' I cried. I stood directly before her but she neither saw nor heard me. She did not witness that I stood with the Mothers as they sang.

The Mothers' song shifted, strengthened, and Sulis faded from sight.

I stared hard at the circles of Mothers, watching and listening, before once again the temple huts and gardens took shape before me. My sister initiates were tending the temple grounds, chattering as they filled buckets from the pools. They were not firm-fleshed, but wrought of some mist that thickened then waned with the rise and fall of the song.

This was no trick of the eye. This was my return to the hardworld.

For most of the day I was cast backward and forward between these two visions. The Mothers' song poured forth unbroken while the temple initiates carried out their tasks in the same place, the same moment. I saw both truths at once. One a little clearer, then the other.

As the sky deepened, the temple at last grew solid and the circles of women ebbed away. As I watched them fade I felt a wash of grief, then I recalled Tara's words and they hit me like a slingshot: I would not be called to the Mothers again.

‘Taliesin! Tara!' I shouted, calling them back, swaying with the effort and the pain of my wound.

The shape of the Mothers strengthened once more. I ran among them, searching and calling.

Shrouded by trees, beyond the edge of the circle, he stood alone. At the sound of my voice he turned. I had never seen him look so fragile or so beautiful. He wore a summer tunic, dyed with bark, as dark as the shadows that ringed his eyes. The bones of his shoulders hunched forward as though caging his heart.

‘My light,' he whispered into my hair when I reached him. ‘Can you free me? Have you learned of your skin?'

I shook my head against his chest. ‘The woman who knows it will not yield.' His heart quickened beneath my cheek and I tightened my hold. ‘There will be a way.'

He pulled back to stare at me. ‘There is no other way.'

Through the translucence of his throat and arms, I saw the faint forms of the temple huts. ‘No,' I cried. I could not let him fade from me. By the force of my intent I hardened the realm and he was once again solid. But there was little strength in me to hold him much longer.

Think, I commanded myself, over the crash of my heartpound. I searched my memory for the ways I had journeyed forth and back from the Mothers: by the drop in the pool, by the Mothers' song, by cutting the mist in the gully. The mist! I gripped Taliesin's forearms. Why had I not seen it before? ‘My love,' I gasped, ‘when you come to the hardworld, is it always through water?'

‘Yes. As fish. I have told you—'

‘There has been no threshold, other than this?'

The bones of his wrist started to soften as I grasped them. He was slipping. ‘There is another threshold.' He frowned. ‘But one I cannot breach.'

‘Describe it,' I urged.

‘It is a thickness, a barrier that rises near the river when you call to me. I have tried to push through it as man. Sometimes I see you beyond it. Once you even heard me call through it. But only as fish, beneath the water, can I pass.'

I was shaking in my excitement. ‘Is it a mist? A watery barrier?'

He nodded. ‘It is that.'

Then I was laughing and sobbing. ‘Mothers be praised, Taliesin. If you can stand at that veil, then I have means to cut it. I can bring you through as man.'

‘How?' he asked, unbelieving.

‘This!' I cry, lifting the weapon still bound to my waist. ‘My sword has cut such a mist before. My sword will cut your passage.'

‘No.' His face knotted with doubt. ‘No sword can cut the realms.'

‘But it has! It has cut through when skin could not.'

His smile was unsure.

My hold of him was weakening. In moments he would be gone. ‘You must go to that place,' I told him. ‘You must stand at that mist.'

‘When?' he breathed. ‘Now?' His flesh grew yet sheerer.

‘Not now,' I cried, desperate. ‘If I cut from here, I do not know where we will emerge. I must cut from Summer and bring you there.' I looked to his face. ‘Beloved Taliesin, can you wait a little longer to come home?'

He answered me with a kiss that turned my flesh to water.

‘Wait for my call,' I instructed when he pulled away. ‘I will go to the forest and call for you. I beg that you hear it. But do not sink beneath the water. Do not come as fish. Find the mist and stand before it as man. That is my only chance to make you free.'

He stared at me, his dark eyes ebbing. ‘Are you true?'

I staggered. His wounds were deep to question a heart as sure as mine. He was dissolving quickly now.

‘Listen for my call!' I commanded as he faded.

He nodded, and met my gaze for one last moment. For the first time, I saw an echo of Cookmother's eyes in his. It was too late to tell him now. I would tell him when he was free.

He turned as he disappeared.

It must be true,
I assured myself. My sword would cut what lay between us. The Mothers had promised me this: if it took no life, it would do my will. And this, above all else, was my will. At last my legs, which had stood for four days, could carry me no longer and I sank to the ground.

‘Ailia?' The sharp voice was familiar.

I opened my eyes to see darkness had fallen.

‘Rise, girl.' Sulis crouched beside me and aided me to sit.

The temple garden was quiet now. The Mothers were gone.

‘Am I returned?' I murmured, dizzy from change.

‘Yes,' she said, scowling, ‘and I do not need to ask whether you have been with the Mothers. I see how you are drunk with journey.' She offered me her water pouch and I drank thirstily. ‘How did you reach them?' she asked. ‘By medicine? By chant?'

By my love of Taliesin, I wanted to answer, recalling the pool, the swim. ‘By their ways,' I said.

‘By skin?' she persisted.

My face fell. ‘No.'

Her eyes closed then opened, her brow furrowed. ‘You will not disturb the initiates with any account of this. You will sleep this night in my hut and resume training at sunrise.'

I stared at her, terrified that she would not release me. ‘But—I cannot go back to my training,' I stammered. ‘I must return to Cad—'

‘You have been almost three summers gone from temple. There is much you have missed.'

Breath caught in my throat. Yet another year passed in a matter of days. I wanted, with all my being, to free Taliesin, but even more than this, I wanted to give my people their Kendra. Was it too late? ‘There is counsel I must give Fraid and Llwyd—'

Sulis shook her head. Her voice could not contain her displeasure. ‘You have journeyed again to the Mothers without skin, without sanction. You are in breach of our most sacred laws.' Her hands trembled as she interlocked them. ‘You will stay and resume your learning. And try to make right what you have wronged by these journeys.'

‘I have been given knowledge, Journeywoman! I must bring it to Cad—'

She crouched unmoving. ‘What knowledge have you received?'

I paused, suddenly frightened to utter it. But there could be only truth now. ‘The song,' I answered. ‘I have heard the song.'

Her eyes widened. ‘Whose song?'

‘The Mothers' song. The creation song.'

‘And you, girl…did
you
sing?'

‘Yes,' I said, my heart soaring at the memory. ‘I sang.'

‘You lie,' she hissed.

We both looked up as an initiate passed, holding a blazing torch. Suddenly there was light enough for Sulis to see the dark stains that soaked my tunic. ‘Mothers of earth, what is this wound?' she cried.

Before I could tell her she tore open my robe and bade the light be held nearer to my bleeding cuts.

The initiate gasped.

‘As the moon is my witness.' Sulis was trembling. ‘It is the cut of the Kendra.'

‘Yes,' I murmured.

Sulis stiffened. ‘Was it you?' she whispered. ‘Have you wrought these cuts to claim the Kendra's title?'

‘No. They are true.' My voice was a whimper.

Slowly Sulis placed her fingers to the edge of my wound and her eyes closed.

I watched her. These cuts were my only evidence. Why did she touch them?

A frown twitched across her brow as if she battled another expression. Her eyes sprang open. ‘I hear it.' Her voice was unsteady. ‘I hear the song.'

I slumped, weakened, as though her touch had drained me of blood. But even in my frailty, my whole being was lit by the revelation: this was how the Mothers claimed me as their own. Their song was in my wound. This was what I would carry back. And no one could deny me.

Knowledge is shared only between the initiated.
Only the initiated have the power to prevent death, recapture
souls, and understand the depth of the human mind.

AD 46

W
E REACHED CAER CAD
in the bright light of the next afternoon. Sulis had brought me by boat across the lake and we had walked the day's journey back to my hillfort home at a tireless pace. Save for the brief words of wayfinding and the sharing of dried fish, our travel had passed wordlessly. I was unsure of how I stood in her eyes. She had recognised my mark, she had heard its song, but she had not yet called me Kendra.

Spring blossoms dotted the hedges along the laneways. Three seasons. By hard time, I was seventeen summers. How close would Rome be now?

‘Speak nothing of your marks until I meet with Fraid and Llwyd,' said Sulis, as we reached Cad Hill. ‘We must determine what shall be done.'

‘But they must learn that I have been made Kendra straightaway,' I said. ‘There may be little time to wait.'

‘Hush,' she spat, panting with the ascent. ‘I know not what skewed spell-craft you have used to purchase the marks at your chest, but you will stay silent now.'

I pushed down my protest. Sulis did not recognise me. Would anyone? The Mothers had made me Kendra, because they were not beholden to skin. If the tribes were to accept me as Kendra, I would have to convince them of this new truth. But would they hear it?

The gates were unattended as we entered Cad. My heart swelled at the sight of the familiar houses and roadways, yet something was altered here. The township was too quiet. I glanced to the daylight moon. It was no wane day. Where were the craftsmen and the sellers? ‘Perhaps there has been a death?' I wondered aloud. ‘Are they all at burial?'

There were no deer antlers adorning the doorways of the central street and many houses were emptied of their shrines. ‘The totems are abandoned,' said Sulis. ‘This is not well.'

Both wary of what we might find, our pace slowed as we approached the Tribequeen's compound. We passed through the gateway, and what we saw brought us to stillness.

Clustered around the entrance to the Great House was a large gathering of my townspeople, some sitting, others sprawled on the ground. At the sound of our footsteps, they turned to us with an inhuman slowness. Their eyes were dark and staring, their faces gaunt.

‘What is this, Journeywoman?' I whispered, filling with dread.

‘This is Troscad,' said Sulis with shock in her voice. ‘The ritual fast. They are hungering against the Tribequeen's injustice.'

‘But why? How does Fraid betray them?'

‘We cannot ask them. Troscad prohibits both word and food. Go to your kitchen house,' she commanded under her breath. ‘Wait there for me. Speak to no one. Not a word. I will go to Fraid and learn what has happened.'

Cah was alone in the kitchen, at the quern stone, grinding wheat. ‘You are back,' she said, standing.

‘What has happened?' I asked. ‘Why do the townspeople make Troscad?'

She knelt back down at the quern. ‘Your bedfellow has taken Caer Cad.'

It took me a moment to realise she spoke of Ruther.

‘Ay,' she said, working the stone. ‘He appealed for clientage with Rome but Fraid would not agree. Then he worked secretly last winter to gather support from the warriors. He challenged for the kingship and won it by one vote in the council.'

I gasped in astonishment. ‘Where is Fraid?'

‘One of the farmhouses gives her refuge. I know not which.'

‘And Llwyd? Surely he has not sanctioned Ruther as Tribeking?'

‘Of course not. But Ruther does not care for the ways of the journeymen now. Amusing,' she snorted, ‘that his great love is a journeywoman in training.'

‘I am no love of his.'

She poured a fresh cupful of grain into the quern hole. ‘Do not say so too loudly. It is rumoured that he is still angered by your marriage refusal, despite that it is three seasons past. If you were clever, you would keep far from his sight.' She chuckled and looked up at me. ‘Not the welcome home you were expecting, eh?'

‘I must find Llwyd,' I murmured, too distracted to respond.

‘Be careful,' she warned. ‘Ruther has cast Llwyd from the walls of Cad. He forbids the townspeople to see him and he is not a forgiving Tribeking. Many townspeople are fasting against his kingship and he'll see them die for their effort, I'm sure of it.'

‘And you? Do you not fast against this wrongdoing?'

‘I'm busy enough cooking here with only Ianna to help me. Whether I make bread for Fraid or Ruther, it is all the same to me.'

I flinched at her heartlessness, then realised that she had mentioned only Ianna. ‘Where is Heka? Does she not help you?'

Cah raised her eyebrows. ‘She serves in Ruther's house. He looked favourably, as I did, upon her spine and grit and likes her to attend his person.' She looked at me. ‘I miss her being here,' she said. ‘She was good company.'

Ignoring her, I turned and walked to the door. ‘Cah,' I said, turning back. ‘Where is Neha?'

‘Heka took her. She preferred Heka to all others when you were gone.'

I took a sharp breath then turned and left.

I stood at the southern gate, looking over the fields of Summer in the afternoon light. Any one of the farmers could have been hiding Llwyd and would not have said so. But if my sense of him was true, he would be ritualling in response to this crime and there was a place I might find him.

The shadows were long when I reached the Oldforest. If Llwyd had been challenged—if he could not ritual freely by the river—he would come here.

I held to the river track, peering among the trees. At last I saw the shape of his pallid robes, stark against the dark trunks that ringed my journey pool. He had marked out a circle of branches close to the river and had placed within it small carvings and statues that honoured the deer. I stopped at the boundary, still wary to enter a journeyman's circle without my skin. ‘Journeyman?'

He startled at my voice. ‘Who is there?' His vision had weakened.

‘It is Ailia. Returned.'

‘Ailia!' His steps were laboured as he came forward to embrace me. Through his woollen cloak, I felt the bones surfaced by his fast. ‘Have you learned of Ruther?' he asked.

‘Ay. But little else. I know nothing of the invasion—'

‘We are to fall, Ailia.' His voice was empty. ‘The Romans have claimed Stour Valley, Brae Cad and Caer Hod. We are clear in their sights.'

I stared at his face, ashen with hunger. ‘How does Ruther propose to meet this attack?'

‘With full submission. This is his purpose. We are to be slaves of Rome.'

I shook my head. ‘He cannot be Tribeking without your sanction.'

‘He does not observe our laws now. And he has the support of the warriors who betrayed Fraid.'

‘But the township hungers against him.'

‘Yes. They still love Fraid. There is great division.'

Evening had began to dim the forest. Llwyd motioned to a fallen log, covered with moss, and we sat. ‘We will go to him together,' I said. ‘He is a tribesman of Durotriga. He must listen to his Journeyman Elder.'

‘He will not. He is of the Roman mind. He listens to his own counsel and that of other warriors.'

Llwyd shivered in the cooling air and I moved closer to him, placing my hand at his back. ‘Stay steady, Journeyman,' I whispered. ‘We will survive this.'

He turned to me. ‘Will we? It is the journeymen and -women who are first slaughtered. Most violently. Most publicly. There is no better way to subdue a tribe than by destroying those who hold its knowledge. The Romans know this. Whole towns are made subject by the slaughter of wisepeople.'

My heart quickened.

‘If we are killed,' he continued, ‘who will ensure the laws of skin are not broken? Who will listen when the Mothers speak?' His voice, so resonant at festival time, was hoarse and feeble. ‘I did not think this could happen, Ailia. I thought our knowledge was beyond destruction.'

I looked to the coursing river, to the oaks rising like warriors around us. I remembered the Singing and it filled me with strength. ‘It
is
beyond destruction.' My voice was steady. ‘This land is our knowledge. They are one and the same. Come.' I reached for his hand, bidding him rise.

Llwyd did not move. ‘It is too late. They are too strong.'

‘We will be the first to fight and win against them,' I urged. ‘The first of Albion to keep the laws of our choosing. They will not have us. Others will see our triumph and be strengthened by it.'

Llwyd stared at me. ‘How will we succeed where Albion's greatest fighting tribes have failed?'

‘Because…' My answer crumbled. Sulis's doubt had seeped into my sureness. I could find no words to tell him. Yet I was the being he had yearned for, the soul that would protect the knowledge he loved.

With shaking fingers, I unfastened the neck of my robe and pulled away the soaked wad of dressing. Then I took his hand and pressed it to my chest. ‘Because we will fight with the blessing of the Kendra.'

I flinched in pain as his gnarled fingers traced over the raw crusts of my cut. A deep ache arose as he touched.

Slowly his face lit as he read the round, spiralling shape of the mark. Then his breath caught. ‘There is song in the wound,' he gasped. ‘You are made Kendra—?'

‘Yes,' I said.

‘But what of your skin?' he whispered, hope thinning his voice.

I re-pinned my robe, terrified to answer. How would I hold the title if Llwyd would not acknowledge it? ‘The Mothers have marked me without skin.'

His face blackened. ‘No,' he muttered. ‘They have not. They cannot mark a Kendra without skin.'

‘But yet they have,' I said, praying that he would hear me. ‘And there is sense to it…there is a reason—'

‘Stop!' He rose to his feet. ‘There can be no reason. You are in grave breach of law with this. I can hear no more—'

‘Wait!' I cried as he walked away. ‘I told them I was skinless! I asked them to return me, and yet…' I paused.

Llwyd stopped.

I took a long breath. I could be shunned anew, or worse, for the words I was about to say. ‘The Mothers have no need of skin.'

Slowly, he turned to face me. Never, even in the peaks of ritual, had I seen him so inflamed. He sank to the ground, where he knelt, calling on the Mothers, bidding me to silence my violation.

I crouched before him, clutching his arms, which shook me away with unexpected force. ‘You speak against skin!' he cried. ‘Against the very source of skin!'

‘I do not, Llwyd! Hear me!' I pleaded. ‘It is ours!
Our
truth! It belongs to the hardworld. Skin is
our
understanding of what
they
create.'

He stilled for an instant and looked at me.

‘Their creation is beautiful beyond measure,' I said, ‘and skin is how we know it, and how we protect it, but they themselves do not need skin.
We
are bound by it. But the Mothers are not.'

A deep confusion darkened his gaze.

‘For us, skin is life itself,' I continued, ‘and by the Mothers, I would give my own eyes and tongue to have it. But I do not. And yet the Mothers want me as Kendra. And if you want my knowledge, Journeyman, you must accept me.'

Llwyd's stare was cold and bewildered. ‘I have loved you and protected you and trusted in your gift. But you are asking me to speak against the truth upon which my life is built…'

My heart clenched. Could I ask this of him? I had no other choice. If he did not hear me, there would be no Kendra, no future. ‘It is a greater truth that I bring,' I said. ‘A new understanding of the Mothers' greatness. How powerful are they who are more powerful than skin?'

I watched his face closely as this new truth—that our spirit beings, our Mothers, did not need skin—moved through him, shifting, turning, then embedding.

‘Perhaps,' I continued, ‘the Mothers have chosen me precisely because I am unskinned, because they want us to know that skin is
not
theirs. It is ours.'

He sat motionless.

We both turned at the rustle of an animal close behind us. A honey-coloured doe lifted her head from the forest floor, tasting our scent on the breeze. It took two delicate steps toward us, then paused before taking flight into the evening. ‘My totem appears…' murmured Llwyd, staring after it.

He turned to me then dipped his head to kiss my fingers. ‘Kendra,' he whispered, his breath warm against my knuckles.

Llwyd knew where Fraid was hidden. As he led me north through the laneways in the last drifts of dusk, we shaped a strategy.

‘I will speak with Ruther,' I said. ‘There is still a chance I can turn his view and gather the allegiance of his fighting men.'