Druids (25 page)

waves until we reached the end of the passage, where more druids waited in a circle. They were hooded, officially invisible to the eyes of the worid of men.

Dian Cet ordered me to remove my soft leather boots. As I stood barefoot on the earth, it began to resound with the rising volume of the chanting.

I tried to feel nothing.

The chanting came up into my bones like the voice of creation, refusing to be denied. At last I began to ring with it too, my bones becoming a sounding board while loss and pain and grief ran through me like music. I tried to cling to my thin edge, to the safe, numb place where nothing hurt. But it was too late. I could not escape the sound-My naked feet felt the living earth.

Tears scalded my cheeks. I am a Celt. As I surrendered to the chanting, I heard periodic exclamations of gratitude for the wis-dom passed from Menua to me, and now stored in my head.

“Druids do not belong to themselves, but to the tribe,” said a familiar voice somewhere nearby.

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Startled, I opened my eyes … and found myself staring at a huge cobweb suspended between the bare branches of the oaks. It was a network of silver spun out of season, for such webs are a summer creation. Yet this one remained intact and shimmering, no higher than my head.

Of their own volition my feet stepped forward. The circle of druids parted to let me pass.

When I reached the great web, I walked through it. The delicate strands brushed my face. Menua’s voice, strong and vital and living, reminded me, “Death is a cobweb we brush through; not the last thing, but the least thing.”

My throat constricted with joy. I looked eagedy around for him but saw only the trees and the druids. Yet he was there! The senses of my spirit recognized him. Menua permeated the grove so totally I knew, beyond words, beyond faith, that he continued to exist. The essential Menua was a permanent part of me immortal Source, creator of stars and spider webs.

As are we all.

OF THE RITUAL mat followed I cannot speak, for the initiation of a druid is known only to druids. Many familiar faces were present. With my numbness swept away, I recognized them and was grateful for their company. I managed a special smile for Secumos of the Arvemi, who must have come by horse to have arrived so quickly.

They had all come as quickly as they could, and some from farther away than Secumos. They had not come for me, of course, but to honor Menua.

Menua who was watching us with the senses of his spirit. When we left the grove, intuition prompted me to look back.

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The great silver web still hung among the trees as it had when I walked through it.

It hung unbroken.

Singing of life, we returned to the Fort of the Grove.

At sunset we made the trip once again with Menua’s body. This time I wore the hooded robe, made of tightly woven fabric fresh from the loom, sunbleached but undyed. As the events of my life unfolded, symbols representing them would be embroidered upon the robe by the women of my clan. Now it was blank, waiting.

Led by Narios the exhorter, Menua’s burial rites were solemn but not sorrowful. We who did not believe in death were celebrating life. At the end we gave the chief druid to the trees.

No constructed tomb would have been appropriate for him. Instead we dug a grave among the roots of the oaks. There his discarded flesh would decay as a fallen tree decays, sinking back into the earth thai is mother to all flesh. Roots would be nourished by the substance of Menua; living things would grow containing part of him.

I liked to think of Menua becoming part of the oaks.

We buried him wrapped in his robe and accompanied by the grave goods of aristocracy, for he was of noble blood. Each of us in turn placed a stone on the caim we erected above him to keep the wolves from him. We did not weep; there was no reason to weep. Nothing is ever lost, merely changed.

The druids from other tribes would remain at the fort until the Samhain convocation, which was only four nights in the future. Our women were kept busy tending to the needs of these honored guests—

Amid the bustle, the arrival of Lakutu with Baroc did not go unnoticed. When I heard the sentry shout, I headed for the gate, only to be intercepted by Sulis. Waving an arm at the scurrying women carrying piles of bedding and baskets of food to the guests, she said, “See what I have escaped, Ainvar. The burdens of women.”

“The pleasures of children,” I retorted, looking toward me gateway, where torches wavered in the night.

She followed my eyes. “Who is that?”

“My porter. He’s just catching up with me.”

“No, not him. Who is that strange-looking woman?”

“She’s my …” I stopped. There was no word for what Lak-utu was to me. I really did not know what Lakutu was to me.

Sulis was regarding me suspiciously. “She’s your what?”

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“His slave,” volunteered Tarvos, coming up behind us. “Ain-var bought her in the Province.”

I could have killed him.

Sulis stepped back from me as she would have from a snake. “You bought a woman?”

“A slave,” Tarvos explained helpfully,

“Go away, Tarvos,” I said.

“Stay here, Tarvos,” Sulis said. Then to me, “For what possible use did you buy a woman?”

“It wasn’t like that, you don’t understand. She was on the auction block and Rix and I were …”

“You and Rix bought her to use together?” Sulis took another step back from me.

“No!” I was reaching out in desperation to take hold of the healer’s arm and make her listen to the full explanation, but at that very moment Lakutu caught sight of me and ran to me, throwing herself at my feet with an inarticulate cry.

With her eyes Sulis withered me where I stood, then stalked away.

I took Lakutu by the hand and led her to the lodge I had once shared with Menua. Tarvos trotted behind us as if oblivious to the problem he had helped aggravate. People stared.

I kepi my face impassive, but it was not easy.

By sunrise, everyone in the fort knew I had bought a slave. No Celt bought slaves. We kept women captured in war, of course, and most princes had bondservants, but outright slavery, the idea of being owned by someone else, was anathema to a people who cherished freedom above life. Even women taken in war— invariably Celtic women, in Gaul—had the rights and status of the freebom. But a slave had none. A slave was a tragedy.

I had bought one. Everyone knew.

No one dared question me now that I wore the hooded robe, but when Damona brought me food in the morning after the song for the sun, I read the unspoken question in her eyes. She looked from me to Lakutu and back again.

Lakutu had made herself busy sweeping the floor.

“Is that one to do my work now?” Damona asked in a restrained tone of voice.

“If she likes. She is my … guest; she can do as she pleases.” In truth, I had no way of stopping Lakutu from sweeping the floor or anything else. Although apparently devoted to me, she would make no effort to leam my language. Some part of her mind had closed.

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Damona served the food and was about to leave when I asked her, “Do you remember the Sequani women who were captured just before I left?”

“I do.”

“What happened to them?”

“They were all claimed.”

“All of them? Even the one who said she was a prince’s daughter”

Damona gave me a look I could not decipher. “She was the last one to accept a man. Briga, the short one, is that who you mean?”

I nodded.

There was a definite gleam in the eye of the smith’s wife as she told me, “The other Sequani women seemed happy to accept whatever warrior asked for them and settle down to home and family. But that Briga, she was difficult. She kept insisting she would wait for the tall man with the bronze hair.”

I stared at Damona. Her lips twitched with a smile she could not hide. “In time Menua lost patience with her and told her if she did not accept someone else, she would be turned out of the fort and left to survive as best she could. Still she held out for … the tall man with the bronze hair. Until someone told her he was Menua’s own apprentice.

“The next day she told Menua she would go with whoever asked for her.”

My mouth was dry. “Who claimed her?”

“Someone who had shown no interest in the women until he heard that Briga wanted you, and after that he asked for her almost daily. CromDaral.”

“Briga is married to Crom Daral?” I asked incredulously.

“Not married. By the time she accepted him it was after Beltaine, so they will not dance around the tree together until next Beltaine. But she lives in his lodge and for all I know she has begun carrying his children.”

Damona left me with my thoughts; doubtless she was hurrying back to her own lodge to speculate with the other women about why I might have purchased a woman when I had a prince’s daughter waiting for me.

I sat on my bench letting my food grow cold.

Lakutu bustled about the lodge, neatening and tidying. I had not expected her to possess the domestic arts. She examined the accounterments of the house with intense curiosity, squatting on her haunches in the ashes to run her fingers over the swelling

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curves of Menua’s iron firedogs. She had shown no interest in the other lodges we had visited along our way, all of which had been more richly furnished than this and must have seemed very exotic to her.

Or perhaps I had not noticed.

I was not really looking at her now. My eyes followed her, but they were seeing Briga. With Crom Daral.

My head tried to reason with me, reminding me I was a druid now, that I had more important concerns than who slept in whose lodge, that I already had a perfectly good woman in Lakutu, that …

The head is not always able to reason with the emotions. I sat for a long time on my bench, lost in myself, shaken by an unexpectedly deep sense of loss having nothing to do with death.

Death is a small loss. Some are larger.

Briga lived with Crom Daral in the fort, so I would see her; it was inevitable. I dreaded gomg out the door.

Yet I must. Fortunately, for a while I saw neither one of them. I busied myself in preparations for the Samham convocation instead.

On Samhain eve the judges of the tribe adjudicated the criminal and civil disputes brought before them, a tiresome process that began at sunrise and lasted throughout the day. Then the great fire was lighted, the chanting began, the feasts were served to the spirits of the dead, inviting them to join with the spirits of the living as one year ended and a new cycle of seasons began.

In case the spirits of the dead were malign—a very real possibility since many living people had malign spirits—special gifts of propitiation were offered to them, and protective amulets were worn by the weak and by children. Samhain, on the cusp of the seasons, was a time of power, and power is neither good nor evil but both together, like life and death.

No one slept on Samhain eve. We were aware that the dead walked among us in the peopled night. Some were frightened, but I thought of Menua, and of Rosmerta, and smiled.

The next day, first of the new year and birth day of winter, the druids of Gaul met for their annual convocation.

I climbed the ndge with Narlos the exhorter. Sulis was avoiding me, and I never deliberately sought the company of Aberth. We, and the other druids of the Camutes, led the procession to the sacred grove; the other druids followed by rank, according to the size of the tribes they served.

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When I looked back, my heart sank to see what a small procession we made.

The need to select a new chief druid was uppermost in everyone’s mind. Though I knew Menua had wanted me to succeed him someday, I was still too young, of course, and having Just been initiated, I would not even be considered. I understood and accepted. But like the others, I wondered just who could follow Menua; where would we find his equal?

The discussions began. Before long Secumos asked me to rise and speak, to tell the other druids what Menua had sent me to discover in the Province. “So we shall acquire the last gifts of Menua’s wisdom,” Secumos said.

I reported to the convocation what I had learned and what I surmised of Caesar’s plans. I also repeated what I had said to Secumos about the nature of Roman gods and the duties of their priests.

“According to the Roman way,*’ I explained, “priests are the only people who can deal directly with the Otherworid. This in spite of the fact, as we know, that the Otherworid is all around us. In their ignorance the Romans refer to druids as priests also. The Greeks in their wisdom understood us better.”

“Wisdom did not help them,” remarked a voice from the crowd. “Rome subjugated the Hellenes.”

“Indeed—as they intend to subjugate us, Menua foresaw it,”

Aberth stepped forward. Without looking at me, he addressed the assemblage. “Ainvar has reminded us how wise Menua was;

I shall give you another example. The Keeper of the Grove trained the ideal replacement for himself, a strong young man with large gifts and a good head.

“Now Menua has gone to the trees, but he has left us Ainvar. Of us all, Ainvar is the best equipped and most knowledgeable to deal with the threat that preoccupied Menua in the last seasons of his life.”

My ears burned red. I gazed resolutely at my feet.

“Although it is unprecedented,” Aberth continued, “I believe the pattern is clear. If, after having heard Ainvar’s report you agree with me that Menua was correct in his concern, I ask you to vote with me to make our newest druid the new Keeper of the

Grove.”

I was stunned. The btankness of the faces turned toward Aberth told me the other druids were equally astonished. Then one by one those faces turned and looked at me. I felt the judgmental weight of their eyes. Enhanced by the power of the grove, trained

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senses of the spirit probed me, examining and measuring, assessing my weaknesses. I stood naked before the Order of the Wise.

“Leave us, Ainvar,” said Dian Cet. “We must discuss this.”