The Greener Shore (10 page)

I decreed that Grannus and Sulis share a lodge with her brother, the Goban Saor, and Keryth the seer. Dian Cet would live with Teyrnon and Damona, who were quiet in their ways. To avoid overcrowding in my own lodge—and give the boys the benefit of steady example—I assigned Dara and Glas to Teyrnon as well.

Once the lodge sites had been selected, the women drew a supply of water from the river and milked one of our new cows. Rather, they attempted to milk the cow. She was not cooperative.

“Perhaps she’s too young,” I remarked to Grannus, who was sitting on a stone in the sun. Grannus was a great believer in sitting whenever possible. He claimed it conserved his strength. Perhaps it did. Grannus had neither druid gifts nor a warrior spirit, but he was the strongest oak in the forest, a man of immeasurable value in circumstances such as ours.

“In my experience females take a lot of coaxing, Ainvar,” he said to me.

“Are we talking about cattle, or women?”

“Females,” Grannus replied succinctly.

Sulis had long refused to marry anyone. As she once explained to me, “Carrying children in my body could interfere with my ability to heal others, because I would be concentrating on the life within myself.”

If my Briga had been willing to join the Order of the Wise she could have demonstrated the fallacy of that belief.

Grannus had waited until Sulis was past the age of childbearing, then pursued her as few women are ever pursued. Sober, serious Grannus had, for three full seasons, been charming and witty and endlessly attentive, and won himself a great prize.

Our conversation was interrupted by Damona, who announced that the work had proceeded to the stage where male strength was required. No druid exemption was allowed. So after conducting a ritual to placate the spirit of the trees, we began cutting oak and spruce to build our lodges. Only the oldest trees were used, those nearing the end of their lives. Nothing young was harmed. New life is sacred.

I enjoyed using my muscles instead of my head. The body is not as cruel as the mind.

Our work did not end with woodcutting. While hiding in the forests of Gaul we had deluded ourselves into thinking the situation was temporary, and had made do with temporary expedients. But Hibernia was not temporary. We would be here for the rest of our lives and the lives of our children’s children, and our women wanted permanence. They provided us with an endless list of tasks. As long as there was light, we labored.

Once or twice during those early days I glimpsed Cormiac Ru on the mountainside. He did not come near, but it was reassuring to know he was keeping an eye on us. On Briga.

By the next change of the moon a lot of hard work had produced three sturdy timber lodges in the Gaulish style and a fenced enclosure for our livestock. We also built a roofed lean-to for Teyrnon, where he could set up a forge. Otherwise it might be difficult to keep the fire going. The Gaulish summer, which I recalled with a yearning heart, had been filled to the brim with sunlight. The Hibernian summer was cobwebbed with gentle rain.

My senior wife came to me with a handful of grain. “I don’t think our wheat will sprout here, Ainvar.”

“Why not? You can see for yourself how fertile the soil is. Vegetation is positively leaping out of the earth.”

“Look up,” she replied.

I looked up.

“Now look in that direction.” Briga nodded toward the east. “And that.” She gestured to the west. “Do you see any sunshine?”

“Not at this moment, no.” I had to defend our newfound home; I was re sponsible for bringing us here in the first place. “But the sun does shine, Briga. I’ve seen it break through the clouds twenty times in a single day, and when it does, the land sparkles.”

“Oh yes,” she agreed, “the land sparkles, it’s beautifully green. But the sun is not hot enough for long enough. Our wheat won’t grow here.”

“How can you be so sure?”

Assuming a listening expression, she held her hands close to her face and poured a few heads of wheat from one hand to the other. “It tells me so,” she said.

I knew better than to doubt her. All sorts of things talked to Briga: flowers, grain, broken bones….

“What do you expect me to do about it?” I asked reasonably.

“I don’t know, you are the chief druid.”

She said “are” instead of “were,” although she knew better. Apart from myself she was the only one who did. Perhaps it was a slip of the tongue. “Planting crops is women’s work,” I reminded her. “Men only plow the fields, and a chief druid does not even do that.”

“Then what good are you?”

Briga said it with a laugh, but I wished she had not asked me that question.

We would not go hungry. Grannus and young Glas kept us supplied with game. The river teemed with fish unfamiliar with the craftiness of man; laughably easy to catch. There also were edible roots and herbs, wild soft fruits, and delicious mushrooms. Yet we would have no more bread made from the sort of wheat I had eaten all my life. I never appreciated it until I knew I would not taste it again. At night I began dreaming of crusty loaves hot from a stone oven.

We wanted more than subsistence, however. We longed for what we had possessed in Gaul: our culture, our way of life. I began thinking of ways to restore a semblance of it to my little band. One way was through art; the art of the craftsman.

Perhaps I had been hasty in refusing to offer a prayer of thanksgiving to the Two-Faced One. Without him we would not be alive today. Perhaps, my head suggested, I should ask the Goban Saor to carve another when he had more time.

One of his first tasks was to make a churn for Briga. He was using only wood from the oaks. “Wise wood makes wise butter,” my grandmother used to say.

As we re-created our community, many of those old sayings came back to me; came back to all of us. We think we build new lives for ourselves but we build on old foundations.

My senior wife was very particular about her butter. Churning was never done during the dark of the moon. The milk must be no more nor less than three days old. Cream was carefully skimmed from the top of the milk with a wooden spoon, poured into a cool stone bowl, then covered with a strip of clean linen to allow it to ripen. The result was a butter so delicious it could be eaten by itself. The children were fond of scooping a treat out of the churn when no one was looking.

So was I.

Halfway up the valley stood a solitary dead tree. Bees had colonized the rotten cavity, but whenever we tried to gather their honey the creatures went wild. Both Grannus and Damona were badly stung. Then one day my small daughter Gobnat walked up to the tree and casually thrust her arm into the cavity. Briga gave a shriek of alarm, but her fear was ill-founded. The bees were charmed by Gobnat. They would let her take a handful of honeycomb dripping with golden sweetness whenever she liked. We put honey onto almost everything until the novelty wore off. My clan was delighted.

I had another reason to rejoice: The druid gift had appeared anew.

Not everything was lost after all.

As the wheel of the seasons turned, we surveyed our handiwork with pride. Our roofs were snugly thatched with reeds from the stream. Firewood was stacked against the north wall of the lodges to break the wind. We had sufficient butter and soft cheese and salted meat to see us through the winter. For anything else we must apply to Cohern. That too had been part of our agreement.

As the autumn evenings drew in upon us, and in the darkness before dawn when only druids are awake, I brooded on our situation. We had a place to live but no real freedom. Cohern was adamant that we not wander beyond our allotted space. “That’s all your clan’s entitled to, Ainvar. If they stray outside its boundaries anything could happen.”

“Would one of the other tribes attack us?”

“
Anyone
might attack you,” Cohern had replied.

So here we were. Penned in by mountains, with no view of the far horizon. Penned in. Penned in.

I regretted having agreed so readily. A druid with a wise head would have made a better deal. But I was no longer a druid.

Fraud, Cohern had called me, as if he knew my deepest fears.

When Briga got out her shears and razors and offered to restore my tonsure, I declined. “I’ve decided to let my hair grow. If druidry is in bad odor here, it might be best not to proclaim ourselves so visibly.”

“As you wish,” said Briga. I think she was secretly pleased. In spite of all that had passed between us, and her own demonstrable gifts, she still had misgivings about the Order of the Wise.

Letting my tonsure grow out did not change my true self. Druids are always drawn to trees, which is one of the early indications of a druid spirit.

Superficially the Hibernian autumn differed little from summer. The days were shorter and cooler, but the trees stubbornly held on to their leaves for as long as they could. The grass stayed green. Change was revealed in small ways. The velvet covering the deers’ horns was stripped away by repeated, ferocious assaults on the trees, until the branching antlers were transformed into a warrior’s magnificent headgear. The bellow of rutting stags reverberated through the forest.

During our first autumn I set out to explore the slopes from which we took our timber. Trees are equally beautiful when clothed in leaves or standing bare, with their spirits naked to the sky. They feed the eyes.

The extended family of trees and shrubs consists of four ranks, ranging from the most noble to the most humble. Some of the trees I knew in Gaul did not grow in Hibernia. Either their gifts were not required in this climate, or others with similar abilities had been substituted for them.

Nature ever strives to maintain balance.

Among the noble trees, primacy was claimed by the oak, the wise and mighty chieftain. With my first sight of an oak in Hibernia something had eased inside of me. I had been like a child who lost its father and then found him again. The world, which had been tilted, came aright.

Other members of the Hibernian nobility included the yew, which kept its foliage throughout the year and therefore was the tree of death and rebirth. We druids would make our staff from yew wood. The red berries of the holly recalled the Great Fire of Life. Hazelnuts contained a wealth of hidden knowledge, while hazel twigs could find underground water. The prolific ash was the symbol of good health. The long cones of the native pine emulated the shape of the human phallus, thus embodying fertility. Last but not least among the nobility was the apple, whose freely given fruit was invaluable.

In the second rank were hawthorn and willow, birch and rowan, elm and alder and wild cherry. Although commoners, they were revered as hardworking and productive. The third rank comprised blackthorn, which is valued for its sloes, elder, aspen, juniper, spindle-tree, arbutus, and the shrubby white hazel. Lowest of all were the “slave trees,” yet even they had value. Bracken was used for making soap and bleaching linen; likewise, brambles, heather, bog myrtle, furze, broom, and gooseberry all had contributions to make. The Source created them; we respect them.

As the days grew still shorter I began to spend more time inside my head. Briga’s rescue of Labraid was haunting me. When I tried again to question her about the incident, she turned my words away with a laugh. “It isn’t important, Ainvar, I don’t even want to think about it. Please, let it go.”

At day’s end my little clan liked to gather around the hearth in my lodge before retiring to their own beds. The fire on our hearth never went out. Briga considered tending the fire to be a sacred rite, as it had been for our ancestors in a much colder climate. Fire was heat; fire was life. If the fire was allowed to die, calamity could follow.

Sometimes my people talked among themselves. Sometimes we were content just to be together while the stars wheeled in the cold sky and the friendly fire warmed our bones.

One evening Briga asked the seer, “Can you see far into the future?”

“How far? Tomorrow? Or next season?”

“How about…the future of my grandchildren’s grandchildren. A hundred generations from now.”

My senior wife was being fanciful, as she sometimes is, but Keryth took her seriously. “Give me your hand, Briga.” Keryth ran her fingers up Briga’s wrist and closed them tightly over the place where the blood pulsed most strongly beneath the skin. The seer gave a slow, thoughtful nod and closed her eyes. Her breathing gradually became deeper. She might almost have been asleep, but her grip on Briga’s wrist remained firm.

Slowly, the atmosphere in the lodge changed. Tingled like the air before a thunderstorm. We sat very still, scarcely daring to breathe.

Keryth was working magic.

“One hundred generations,” she murmured. We waited. The seer’s eyes rolled beneath her eyelids. She drew a swift intake of breath. “They think they are rich. But, ah! They are poor.”

“How poor?” Briga asked. Knowing my senior wife, I knew she would want to help; to find some way to alleviate poverty a hundred generations in the future.

“They have many possessions,” Keryth told us. “I never saw so many
things.
Countless man-made objects whose purpose I cannot even imagine. Yet the people are starving.”

Briga was alarmed. “Have they nothing to eat?”

“They have more food than they can ever hope to eat,” Keryth said from that distant place where she was viewing through other eyes. “They build immense lodges to store the excess in, and still throw away enough to feed a hundred tribes. Their problem is not a want of food. The grandchildren’s grandchildren are starved for what we have in abundance.”

“I don’t understand. We have nothing in abundance.”

“We have time,” Keryth replied. “We have space.”

She said nothing more. After a while she opened her eyes, bade us good-night, and went to her bed. But I lay awake long that night, trying to imagine a world starved of time and space. Surely there could be no worse fate.

I would prefer to be slaughtered by the Romans.