The Greener Shore (20 page)

“Look down at your hands. Four fingers and a thumb, each with a slightly different function, yet all able to work together. Should one be missing, the ability of the entire hand would diminish. Now consider your toes. Only the largest has much strength, but if you lost any one of them, even the smallest, your balance would be compromised. The most insignificant part of your body is needed. The most insignificant person has a place in the tribe.”

I gave them a few moments to digest this. Even the smallest child needs to know he has value.

“No part of your body is as important as your head,” I said. “You can lose a finger, an arm, even a leg, and still be yourself. But that which is
you
is contained in your head. Take care of your head and every part of it. Without eyes to watch, ears to report, a nose to smell, and a tongue to taste, the spirit that dwells in your skull would be alone in total darkness.”

Little Senta, who had a vivid imagination, shuddered.

Glancing up, I saw Cormiac Ru half-hidden among the trees, watching us. It was the habit of the Red Wolf to appear and disappear, always silently. There was something comfortable about his presence, though I never told him so. One did not need to tell Cormiac Ru things. He simply knew.

“Which of your head’s servants do you value the most?” I asked my listeners. Niav, who loved music, chose her ears. Chubby Eoin preferred his tongue. Cairbre inhaled a great deep breath, unfortunately laden with pollen, and sneezed so loudly he frightened the birds.

We all laughed.

Standing between trees, Cormiac Ru touched his fingertips to his eyelids. I beckoned to him to come and sit with the children, and after a moment’s hesitation, he did.

Soon the lessons in the glade were a daily occurrence. Sharing topics of interest with receptive listeners provided me with unexpected pleasure. What had begun as a chore became the height of my day.

As always happens when one teaches, one learns as well. I learned that the way to gain the attention of a noisy, energetic audience is not by outshouting them. The more quietly I spoke, the quieter they became. It was the only way they could hear me.

I made sure that what I had to say was worth hearing. Even the most prosaic subject can be invested with magic.

Dara, filled to the brim with discoveries, returned from his travels among the Slea Leathan. He was disappointed to find that the promised harp was not yet ready, but decided to come to my little school in the forest glade while he waited. There he spent his days listening to me. At night in our lodge Briga and I listened to his stories of the Túatha Dé Danann. Wondrous tales of a vanished race whose magic was as mysterious as the birth of the wind.

And, perhaps, as natural. All true magic has its roots in nature.

In the Source.

I went out under the stars and whispered, “You are not forgotten, Eriu. You are not forgotten.”

Soon quite a few young ones from Fíachu’s clan were among my students, too. Drawn by curiosity, retained by interest.

Even Labraid joined us in the forest glade. I did not flatter myself that the son of Vercingetorix came on my account. Labraid simply wanted to do whatever Cormiac did. He was intensely competitive with the older man, yet loved him too, in his way. The Red Wolf occupied more than one space at the same time. He was almost my son. He was almost Labraid’s father.

When my students had finished exploring the cosmos of their bodies, I introduced them to the cosmos overhead. On clear summer nights we lay on the grass and read the glittering face of the Source. In Gaul, druid healers had aligned a sick person’s body with the stars that were present at his birth, thus helping return him to the state of newborn health.

Sadly, we had no druid who had dedicated his life to studying the stars. Yet as a chief druid I had learned something of every discipline, so I pointed out the pinpricks of light I recognized, and we discussed the pictures they formed.

The young people enjoyed our exploration of the sky. Labraid in particular wanted to know how to find one’s way by the stars. He, who usually took an opposing view to whatever was said, listened avidly to my every word. It pleased me to think I was finally getting through to him.

To my surprise, one morning Fíachu’s firstborn daughter came to the school in the forest glade. Aislinn, whose name was the Gaelic word for dream, was a slim reed of a girl who arrived unobtrusively and seated herself at the back of the gathering. Taking my lead from her diffidence, I did not call undue attention to her. But I was glad that she joined us.

I had long since observed that like my Niav, Aislinn could twist her father around her finger.

She soon became an accepted part of the group. No mere dreamer in spite of her name, she asked intelligent questions. But my eyes noticed that she paid a great deal more attention to Labraid than she did to me.

I encouraged the members of my clan to share their skills with my students. “Everyone has something to teach,” I told them, “and everyone has something to learn.” The girls were intrigued when Lakutu demonstrated how to fold a simple length of cloth into a flattering garment. The boys watched attentively as Teyrnon showed them how to build a forge.

As was our custom, on the first night of the full moon the Order of the Wise gathered to discuss those things that only interest druids. Dian Cet commented, “You’ve become a fine teacher, Ainvar. You’re opening doors in those young minds.”

I began a self-deprecatory shrug. My head reminded me that the gesture was not Gaelic. My shoulders froze in midlift.

Keryth the seer saw my thoughts. “Don’t be so hard on yourself, Ainvar. None of us find it easy to become different people.”

“Briga does.”

“Briga’s different. She was meant to be here from the beginning, it’s her Pattern. The rest of us are simply caught up in it.”

“Let me remind you that coming to Hibernia was my idea, not hers,” I said rather testily.

“And what gave you the idea, Ainvar? Did you drink it in wine, or eat it in bread? I think not. The Great Fire shone on your forehead and drew Briga’s Pattern in your mind.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Why not? Did you think you were the center of everything?”

Sulis gave a wry little smile. “If that’s not just like a man.”

One autumn evening I returned to our lodge on shaky legs. The youngsters with their boundless energy had prolonged our discussions until I was exhausted. For some time I had been bothered by a slight cough, not uncommon in a damp climate that encouraged coughs and sneezes. I tried to hide it from Briga because she would fuss over me and give me some vile-tasting potion to drink.

My senior wife was scrubbing one of her iron pots with sand when I entered the lodge. She glanced up and twinkled her eyes at me. My head ached; my bones ached. I felt every one of my years, but squared my weary shoulders and gave her my brightest smile. Perhaps a little too bright.

Briga put down the cooking pot. “What’s wrong, Ainvar?”

“Nothing’s wrong.”

“Are you hiding something from me?”

“I’m not hiding anything.”

Briga knew when I was lying. She might not know what the lie was about but she could smell its existence as a cat smells a rat. So she made a guess. “Have you been talking about Gaul to those children and making them unhappy?”

That was unfair; I never discussed Gaul with the children. “What if I have?” I snapped.

“Oh, Ainvar, I’m disappointed in you. Gaul doesn’t exist for us anymore. Everything we cared about there is gone. You have to forget.”

Angrily, I cried, “Can you forget our Maia so easily?” I was irritable because I did not feel well—but there is no excuse for making excuses.

Briga’s face crumpled; her eyes filled with tears. At that moment Cormiac Ru entered the lodge. He took in the scene in one scorching glance.

The Red Wolf turned on me with his teeth bared. Actually bared. I thought he would kill me where I stood.

So did Briga, who threw herself between us. “Don’t, Cormiac!”

“I won’t let anyone make you cry.” His fingers twitched dangerously close to the hilt of the knife in his belt.

Briga put her palm against Cormiac’s chest and pushed him back. “Ainvar didn’t mean to hurt me. Sometimes he speaks without thinking.”

That was not fair, either.

Laying his hand over Briga’s, Cormiac said, in the gentlest voice I had ever heard him use, “You still weep for Maia.”

“Of course I do, she was my child. I’ll always grieve for her. But she’s gone and nothing will bring her back.”

Over Briga’s head, Cormiac looked at me. “Is that what you believe, Ainvar? Is Maia truly lost to us? Is she…” He forced the next words out. “Is she dead?”

By this time my skull was pounding like a goatskin drum. Ba-da-
boom,
ba-da-
boom.
“I don’t know, Cormiac. My cousin Crom Daral hated me because he had wanted Briga for himself. Crom had a bad head. As an act of revenge against me, he stole our daughter to sell to the Romans. That was a long time ago, though. Anything might have happened since then.”

The last words came out in a croak. My mouth and throat were parched, yet I felt as if I were drowning. It was impossible to draw a deep breath.

Ba-da-
boom,
ba-da-
boom.

Helplessly, I looked around for my bed. I could barely see it because the interior of the lodge was fading away in the mist.

The mist. The Túatha Dé…

I tumbled down into sleep.

The night lasted much longer than a night should. I knew it had passed when I could hear, as if far away, the sound of people talking. Then hands touched me. Someone started to bathe my face but I flinched away. “No,” I think I said. When I opened my eyes the light hurt them, so I screwed them tightly shut again and lay listening to the buzzing in my ears.

After a time my nose reported that food was simmering in the pot. My only reaction was nausea.

I tried to sleep but it was impossible. Something with claws began tearing my chest apart from the inside out. Soon I was gasping for breath. Then breathing became torture. The skin of my throat felt as if it were being flayed. Meanwhile the clawed thing redoubled its efforts in my chest. The pain went on and on, like waves washing onto a shore.

When I thought I could not stand any more, the waves of agony mounted higher and crashed over me.

My head observed that I was burning with heat and freezing with cold. Yet this phenomenon did not interest me. Nothing interested me except the possibility that I might escape my torment by dying. Ainvar of the Carnutes might die.

I have no fear of bodily death. My spirit is a permanent part of the immortal Source, creator of stones and stars and spiderwebs.

As are we all.

Initiation into the Order of the Wise included Deathteaching, the most secret of druidic rituals. A prospective druid must experience dying in order to understand the true nature of death; what it is, and what it is not. Such knowledge—personal and firsthand knowledge—eliminates fear.

Before being accepted into the Order, I had been stripped as bare as an infant emerging from the womb. Dying is the reverse of being born. If we survive injury or illness for long enough we grow feeble and infantile. This is as it should be; in old age we are prepared to return to the unborn state. Death is the condition of being unborn. Death washes memory clean of burdens that are too painful to carry. Death rests and refreshes the immortal spirit, until it is ready to begin a new life in a new body woven from the strands of creation.

Every person’s experience of dying is different, shaped by the Pattern that has governed his life. When Menua and his fellow druids initiated my dying I had found myself in a place of lurid red light. There I had confronted the Two-Faced One. When I could have gone either way, I had chosen the face that looked toward life.

Much had happened to me since those long-ago days. I had accumulated a number of memories too painful to bear, and Ainvar’s body was exhausted with pain. Now I longed to be unborn. My spirit would rest in a quiet backwater of the Otherworld and wait for a new future to unfold.

Would I meet Rix there? And what of Briga?

At the thought of Briga a gentle light shone behind my closed eyelids and I could see again, though not with the eyes of my body. My spirit saw Briga as a young girl, with eyes the color of bluebells. Why had I never realized that her eyes were the color of bluebells?

Dizziness overcame me and I spun away. Or she spun away. Into the mist.

I was choking; drowning. Someone was piling boulders on my chest. Yet in spite of my agony I struggled to hold on to the essential Ainvar. It is important to pass through dying intact. The more of our selves we can retain, the more of our gifts we can take with us into the next life.

Ainvar’s mortal body was on fire inside.

After a measureless time the pain receded slightly and Briga appeared to me again. A mature Briga, woman and mother. How ripe her figure was. Every lush curve was known to me, memorized by my hands and eyes and tongue as a bard memorizes the history of his people. Briga was my people, she was my whole world.

Spinning away, away.

I did not want to die after all! No matter how savage the pain, I wanted to be alive in Thisworld with Briga. Had I made that discovery too late?

Regret has fangs and claws.

Even after he was brutally tortured and publicly humiliated, Vercingetorix had fought to live. Accursed Caesar threw him into a dungeon to starve to death, but his courage had so impressed the noble matrons of Rome that they smuggled food to him. At last it had been necessary to strangle Rix in order to kill him.

How could I face my soul friend in some future life if I had willingly surrendered what he strove so valiantly to keep?

I made a mighty effort to push death away as my mouth filled with the coppery taste of blood. For the first time I fully understood why the head was sacred. If I could keep Ainvar’s head alive and thinking, I might stand a chance.

The tide of darkness rose inexorably. Lapping around my trembling knees. Climbing toward my laboring heart.