Druids (14 page)

The strip on which I stood was shrinking with every beat of my heart.

Inevitably I must fall. But which way? That seemed the only decision left to make.

Which way?

Think.

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Was the dreamlike meadow the Otherworld, reachable only

through death?

Were Aberth and his bloodthirsty blade still in the land of the living?

Or was it the other way around?

I cried for help but only in my head; I had lost the use of tongue and jaw. I want to live! I protested silently. I have so much yet to leam, to experience. Which way? Which way to life?

Out of the red mist a figure approached. At first I thought I had an ally and I redoubled my eflbrts to keep my balance until help reached me. Then I saw the thing cleariy. Saw a massive disembodied head, like some monstrous version of the trophies our warriors used to take from their enemies in battle.

This head, however, had two faces, one on either side.

The faces were not identical. Nor was either human; they were stylized distortions of humanity. One, noble of feature and serene, with a pointed chin and long-lidded eyes, resembled a man en-tranced. The second was coarse, brutal, with glaring and rapa-cious eyes. Yet this face was vividly alive. The other’s aloofness might have been the distancing of death.

“Do you look toward life?*’ I cried to the savage face.

The soundless answer thundered in my head:
do. But before I could seize upon this as a sign, the voice continued,
also look toward death.

And I, murmured the enraptured other, look toward death. And life.

“Is there nothing to choose between you, men?” I cried despairingly.

Nothing, they answered in unison.

I stopped struggling and let myself fall. Fall into one of the abysses, not caring which, spinning down, endlessly down. And in my failing I was not alone. The void was filled with presences mat cushioned my falling, turning me gently this way and that, guiding me without hands, murmuring to me without words. And among them was Rosmerta; I was certain, though I could not see her. But I knew her as in the long nights when she had bent over my bed to tuck my blankets around me or soothe me after a bad dream.

A voice said, Whichever way you fell she would have been there; she and the others.

“What others?” I tried to ask, but I was falling again, falling away, tumbling down and down until…

… until gradually I began recalling concepts of direction and

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distance and time. Concentrating on them, I found myself spiraling amid stars. Constellations bloomed around me like fiowery meadows and I reached out… .

Hands touched me. Someone smoothed my hair back from my forehead. Someone else caught me under the arms and helped me sit up. I was an emptied husk. When I touched my neck with my fingers, I felt the stickiness of blood.

Sulis bent over me to spread a salve on my wound. Beyond her I heard Aberth say, “There is no harm done, I know my art. I merely parted the outermost layer of skin, so stop fussing over him.”

My voice creaked as I asked, “Am I dead?”

“What do you think?” said Menua somewhere above me.

I fumbled for the truth I had glimpsed. “I think … life and death are … two aspects of one condition.”

He crouched down and gazed earnestly into my eyes. “Good. Good! It went well for you.

“Death is not the last thing, Ainvar, but the least thing. Remember that. Death is a cobweb we brush through. It has lost its power to frighten you.”

I recalled one of the many sayings he had taught me. “The dark moon is but a passing phase of the bright moon.”

The chief druid nodded and started to stand up, but I caught hold of his arm. “Why is deathteaching limited to the Order?”

He bent toward me again and something flickered at the backs of his eyes. “Different people are born with different abilities. The gifts that dispose one toward druidry include a certain strength of mind and spirit that allow the person to survive deathteaching intact. A warrior or a craftsman or a plowman has other gifts; the experience would destroy him. But because we can walk into death and out again, it is our responsibility to make that journey on behalf of the tribe and assure others there is nothing to fear.”

A dozen eager hands helped me rise to my feet. Druids crowded around to congratulate me. I was hugged repeatedly.

I felt as if I were filled with bubbles.

Then I realized that one of the druids hugging me was Aberth. Before I could stop myself I pulled away. He smiled at me without rancor. “Did you recall living before?” he asked pleasantly. ” Some of us do, you know.”

“Don’t question him,” Menua ordered. “Deathteaching is private. If there is anything Ainvar wants us to know of his, he will tell us himself.”

That night the members of the Order held a private feast in

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celebration. Looking around at the others, I wondered how many of them remembered living before. If they did, then death did not always wash away memories. The recollection of sorrow could travel through time with us.

Or the recollection of joy. Two faces.

What waited in the future for me, I wondered, beyond my dying? It was like wondering what lay outside in the night.

A tingle of anticipation prickled down my spine.

When I had drunk enough wine to make my tongue dance, I leaned over and whispered to Menua, “I know another reason why druids reserve deathteaching for themselves.”

“Oh?”

“Professional jealousy,” I explained with drunken assurance. “If anyone could do it, who would need us?”

Menua laughed. “You are definitely growing wiser, Ainvar.”

Still later, after a lot more wine, I had something else to tell him. But I saved it until we were alone in the lodge. Then I described the figure I had seen as I teetered between two worlds.

Menua’s reaction was jubilant. “You saw him! You actually saw the Two-Faced One! Such a vision has not been granted to a druid within living memory, though I have heard of it, of course. Ah, Ainvar, you fulfill my expectations for you!”

“You know of him?” I was astonished.

He nodded. “My predecessors described him as the eternal observer, looking ahead to the next world and simultaneously back toward this one. A representative of the duality of existence,” he added.

“Is he … it… a god, then?”

“If you will. An aspect of the one Source. I always longed for such a vision but it was never given to me. And now you … such a powerful symbol. I envy you,” he said wistfully, heaving an old man’s sigh.

I was not prepared to think of Menua as being old, in spite of the fact that the white hair beyond his domed forehead had grown very thin, and he had become increasingly peevish and demanding. To me Menua had seemed eternal. He had so often stressed the immanence of the Creator in creation that I had come to equate him with both.

How could he be old? Yet when I looked closely, I saw how loosely the flesh sagged from his bones.

‘ ‘But perhaps I should not be surprised that he came to you in the deathteaching,” Menua was saying. “You were no stranger

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to him. Had he not once before helped you to cross the gulf between worids?”

I stared at him. Suddenly I knew where this was leading. “What do you mean?” I asked, however, playing for time.

“You know what I mean! Don’t think you can misdirect me. Why do you suppose I’ve lavished so much time and effort on you? The tribe is approaching an era of trials, according to the omens and portents, and the chief druid who succeeds me must be the strongest and most gifted ever born to the Camutes. Who should that be, Ainvar, but a man capable of bringing the dead back to life?”

My first reaction was a sense of wrenching disappointment. There had been no love, he had not cared for me as a father cares for a son. His only interest in me was because he thought I couid restore a spirit to its body.

I was as furious as if he had willfully deceived me, and I was suddenly, totally, sober. I opened my mouth to lash out at him and smash his erroneous belief into splinters.

But he had taught me to hear.

The ears of my spirit heard the hope underlying his words. His desperate hope. He had survived more than sixty winters and he was tired. The responsibility of the tribe was weighing heavily upon him. He needed to believe he would pass that responsibility into capable hands and was staking everything on me because of a gift he hoped I possessed.

I bit my lip and said nothing.

Into the silence his voice came with an old man’s querulous-ness. “You can do it, Ainvar. Can’t you?”

I drew a deep breath. “If it should ever become necessary, I remember what I did for Rosmerta,” I said very carefully.

Which was not a lie. I remembered exactly what I had done for Rosmerta: nothing. But I intended him to draw a far different, and reassuring, inference.

“Ah,” he said. “Ah. Good.”

What else could I have done? No matter how he felt toward me, I loved the old man.

Soon I heard him begin to snore, but sleep did not come so easily to me.

The next morning I went to find the Goban Saor.

True to his name, which meant “the smith-builder,” Sulis’s brother could make anything with his hands. He had begun as Teymon’s apprentice but far surpassed his master, and now had a

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shed of his own, where he Grafted everything from jewelry to weapons.

He was applying a bellows to the forge fire as I approached. I saw a muscular man stripped except for a leather apron. Sweat oiled his body, his hair lay in wet strings along his broad shoulders. When he saw me he straightened up and wiped his forehead. “Ho, Ainvar.”

“I need a figure made,” I told him.

“Of what?”

‘ ‘Of something you*ve never seen. But I can describe it to you. It’s to be a gift,” I added.

Menua presented me with the gold amulet to identify me. Aberth killed an animal from the herd we bred solely for sacrifice, white cattle with black muzzles and thin, upright manes on their necks. Wrapped in the hide, Keryth the seer lay nightlong beside the Autura, and returned with the prophecy of a successful undertaking.

Then when all was in readiness, we had word of invasion. The warning shouts rang from the hills. A band of Sequani had detached itself from the vast main tribe beyond the eastern mountains, had crossed through the fringes of Parish territory, and was attempting to settle on Camutian soil not far from us.

The shouters passed the word along and Nantorus soon arrived from Cenabum with an army of followers, and those of his sworn princes, at his back.

After the battle Nantorus was carried to our fort on his shield, severely wounded. He had won, but at a cost. He was taken to our healing house, where Sulis and her helpers hovered over him. Men worried, women wailed.

“Will I have to postpone my journey?” I asked Menua, secretly resenting anything that might keep me from the adventure.

“I think not. Even if Nantorus is permanently incapacitated, which I doubt, we would not elect a king to replace him without a lot of discussion. The election could take place without you, but without your journey and the knowledge you bring back to me we will not have sufficient information about current Roman affairs to guide whatever king we have wisely. So you shall go. But there is just one more thing I would like you to do first, as I have little time for it right now.”

“Gladly.”

“Our warriors have driven the Sequani away, but they took their best breeding-age women in reparation for Nantorus’s injury.

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The women should be examined by one of the Order—or at least

a well-trained apprentice—to be certain they are of sufficient quality to mate with our men. When I was much younger I encountered a similar situation and let Ogmios take a woman with a serious blemish, and I’ve regretted it ever since. Don’t make the same mistake.”

“I can take care of it,” I assured him.

“I’m certain you can.” Menua’s eyes twinkled in their network of wrinkles in spite of himself.

The old fox, I thought. He is fond of me after all.

The Sequani women were being quartered in our assembly house, a rectangular building with two firepits, one at either end, and benches around the sides. The captured women were crowded onto the benches and had overflowed onto the floor, where they had made beds for themselves out of straw and blankets our own women provided.

As I entered, they gathered into a herd to face me. There was much giggling behind hands and nudging with elbows.

“Who speaks for you?” I demanded to know.

A woman cleared her throat—but it did not help. Her voice was naturally both soft and hoarse, curiously but pleasantly roughened like the purring of a cat. “I am called Briga,” she announced, stepping to the fore of the group. “I am a prince’s daughter.”

I was amused. “Everyone claims to be of noble rank when far from home.”

She flushed but stood her ground. Wide blue eyes challenged me. “And who are you to speak to me at all, you great gawky pine tree of a man?”

I stiffened. ” Ainvar of the Camutes,” I replied with the hau-teur of a man bom to horse rank. “I am your captor.”

She sniffed. “Not mine. I never saw you before.” She was glaring at me as if I were a bondservant offering her a platter of rotten fish. There was nothing remarkable about her; she could not make beauty’s claim to pride. Her eyes were fine, but her body was short and sturdy, her hair a commonplace dark flaxen color. There were longer-limbed women in her group with more vivid coloring; some of them were as beautiful as me women of Ae Parisii. Yet for some reason the one called Briga held my eyes.

“Be advised that I have authority over you,” I warned, “and show respect.”

“Why should I?”

Perhaps I made a mistake by smiling at her in the beginning, I

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thought. I scowled instead. It made no difference. Her look remained one of frozen disdain.

“I’m here to examine you,” I explained, “so if you will—”

“Oh no you’re not’” She doubled her fists and came toward me as if she meant to hit me in the face. “We’ve been through enough already, get out of here and leave us alone.”