The Oath

by A. M. Linden

  Chapter 52

  The Last Solstice

  Caelym stared into the depths of the pool. Ripples from the upper stream traveled across its surface, breaking up the shape of the half-moon’s reflection, stretching it out so it took on the appearance of a ghostly female figure floating under the water. Annwr’s questions seemed to come at him from far off in the distance. At first, he didn’t see how he could respond, but once she made it clear that they would speak no unspeakable names and say nothing that was forbidden, he heard himself answering her as conscientiously as he had answered Arddwn.

  It was the night of the last winter solstice. That night, like every winter solstice night since the founding of their cult, the celebration of the reconciliation between the earth and the sun began with the opening of the main hall of the shrine to the common people—replacing its usual solemnity with revelry as villagers wearing brightly painted masks danced to the music of drums and flutes. The sound of the ram’s horn halfway between sundown and midnight signaled that it was time for the priests and priestess to withdraw from the public festivities and prepare to conduct the most important ceremony of the year—the enactment of the time when the first Druids gathered together on the highest mountain in the world, pleaded with the Sun and the Earth to put aside their differences, and convinced the Earth to call the Sun back to Her.

  They filed up the stairs to the uppermost chamber of the shrine’s highest tower without so much as a candle to light their way. Entering the dark room, they began the ritual by milling around the unlit hearth in what appeared to be random circles but were actually rigidly choreographed dance steps and reciting overlapping lamentations in a portrayal of the despair of humankind, who feared they would be left to freeze in eternal night.

  Gradually, the priests and priestesses took their assigned spots in preparation for the next and most critical phase of the ritual—the recitation of the chants that must be said in precise order and without the slightest deviation to ensure the sun would indeed return this year.

  The moon was full that night, making the winter solstice all the more auspicious, but in spite of that, there would have been a growing tension in the chamber as they became aware that the place in the woman’s line to the right of Feywn was vacant. There were, as Annwr would recall, seven stanzas that must be chanted by the chief priestess’s closest female kin—and this, it went very much without saying, would have been Feywn’s daughter, fathered by Rhedwyn, if such a daughter had ever been.

  Caelym would have seen Feywn’s lips tighten from where he stood but wouldn’t have been worried himself because if Feywn had ever had a daughter fathered by Rhedwyn, then that daughter would have been forever coming late to meals and rituals, almost certainly with the express purpose of annoying her mother.

  And true to form, at the last possible moment, she would have arrived. Only instead of taking her place in line, she would have stepped into the center of their circle, pulled a silver cross— the disdained symbol of the uninvited and unwelcome Christian god—out from under her robe and thrust it up like a war banner. She would have boasted that she was going to marry a powerful Saxon prince and reign with him over the vast lands around them. Then she would have openly defied her mother—saying that there were no goddesses but only a god, and that god was Jesus! Then, as they all stood frozen in their places, she would have told them that they all must convert as she had done, and never again listen to the sham of a mother goddess.

  Feywn would have moved forward, lifting her staff higher than the cross.

  Everyone in the chamber would have drawn back—except for Cyri, who would have stepped between the two of them in a vain attempt to make peace.

  Not deigning to respond to the vile attack against herself, Feywn would have proclaimed that what they saw before them was a demon in the shape of a woman, sent by their enemies’ god. Then she, Feywn, would have begun chanting the chant casting out demons and condemning their mortal manifestations to death.

  At that, the demon—as she was revealed to be—would have dropped the cross and drawn her knife, would have grabbed hold of Cyri and used her as a shield as she backed out of the chamber.

  He himself would have stood still, stunned and disbelieving, until he heard Feywn’s voice ordering him to take up his bow and arrows and go after them.

  Knowing she had no chance to escape hampered by a struggling hostage, the demon in woman’s form would have hidden behind a pillar at the bottom of the tower stairs and shoved Cyri into Caelym’s path as he came out. Cyri would have lurched into him, clinging to his robes as if she were trying to hold him back. He would have broken loose and taken up the chase. Cyri would not have understood. She would have run after them, calling out and pleading with him not to shoot, while his quarry dodged from one hall to the next, out of the shrine through the lower gate, and down the winding path that led to the tunnel through the underground caverns. All along the way, the demon would have been laughing—taunting and teasing him, as though this were nothing more than a game they would have played as children.

  He would have reached the end of the tunnel, coming to the mouth of the cave, at the same time that she reached the edge of the pool outside. There, she would have had the choice of taking the path around the edge—making her an easy target against the cliff wall—or diving into the pool that was too wide to swim across without coming up for air.

  Trapped but too proud to admit it, she would have turned and looked straight at him, her head held high, her red hair glowing golden in the moonlight, her white ceremonial robes billowing in the cool night breeze—daring him to shoot. Then, almost lazily, she would have lifted her arms and leapt headlong into the pool while he dropped to one knee, fitted his arrow to his bow, and waited.

  The night sky was cloudless and there was—had he said it already?—a full moon. The water was so clear that he would have been able to see her lithe, silvery form skimming below the surface.

  The echoes of Cyri’s cries—pleading with him to hold his fire— would have bounced off the walls of the cavern behind him, growing louder as the shimmering white form rose up to break the surface. He would have drawn back his bowstring and launched his arrow. And then he would have doubled over in agony at what he had done. Cyri, herself racked with grief beyond tears, would have helped him to his feet, and they would have gone the long way back to the uppermost chamber of the shrine’s highest tower together. He would have taken his place in the men’s line, while Cyri would have stepped into the vacant place at Feywn’s right side. When the time came, she would have recited each of the seven vital stanzas as though they’d been her lines from the beginning.

  And when the night’s ceremonies were complete, the priests and priestesses would have done what they could to fortify the shrine—setting guards at the valley’s upper and lower entrances and warning their servants and the villagers to be prepared for the coming attack—before retiring to their chambers to get what rest they could before dawn.

  Relieved to be done with the part of his account that required wary circumlocution, Caelym stopped rocking. He wiped an errant tear from his eye and sighed. “When we woke in the morning, it was to find that our servants and laborers had vanished overnight, taking most of the shrine’s stores and all of the sheep, leaving only the herd of goats kept for milk and sacrifices—maybe out of fear of stealing animals intended to be tribute to the Goddess, or maybe they just couldn’t catch the wily old ram that led the flock and trusted no one except Cyri, who’d made a pet of him years before.”

  “Even if,” he went on, “we could have barricaded our gates against the coming invasion, we could not have withstood a siege. But then, when all seemed lost, Feywn spoke—reminding us of the prophesies of a time when we would leave Llwddawanden and return to Cwmmarwn, our ancestral home. Our hopes restored, we followed her commands. Herrwn drew the maps to guide us. What provisions we had left were gathered and packed. I, as you know, was tasked with finding you and the boys. It was thoug
ht safest for the others to travel in four groups, each to be led by a ranking priest or priestess. What hardy men we had left—the last three of the shrine’s guards and our metalsmith—were parceled out between the groups like the smoked meat from the slaughter of our remaining livestock.”

  “Darfwyn lived, then?”

  Briefly confused over what time he was in, Caelym looked around. He saw Annwr, now kneeling next to him, and recalled that she’d been carried off before any of the bodies but Rhedwyn’s had been brought back to the shrine.

  “Not Darfwyn. His son, Darbin, who inherited his father’s place at the forge and who, alone of all the shrine’s artisans, remained loyal to the Goddess.” (Or, at least, to one of her priestesses—there was a story in that, but Caelym needed to finish what he’d started out to say.)

  It was just as well Caelym didn’t interject another topic while Annwr was grappling first with the realization that they weren’t going back to Llwddawanden and then that they were heading off to who knew where, following Caelym’s wildly inaccurate understanding of geography and Herrwn’s useless map in hopes of somehow stumbling into those groups that had left Llwddawanden when he did. Suppressing a groan, she asked, “And how will we find the others?”

  This time, Caelym anticipated her question. “There is an inn, marked by the sign of a sleeping dragon, located at the last valley below the mountains that hide our next sanctuary. It is known to be a safe haven where no one questions other visitors, and there is reason to think that the innkeeper is a secret adherent to our ways. We are to meet there. When all have arrived, we will go on together.”

  A cloud passed over the moon, and the pool went dark.

  Caelym seemed, for the first time since Annwr had known him, to have no words left to say. He sat in the shadows, so motionless that he might have been a shadow himself.

  Annwr knew the feeling—and she also knew that sometimes you just go on, whether you see any reason for it or not, so she got up and said firmly, “We are going back to camp now.” When he didn’t respond, she took hold of his arm, dragged him to his feet, and pointed him in the direction of their makeshift shelter. After he stumbled his way into the tent, she added another log to the fire. Instead of going back to lie with Aleswina, she settled herself next to Caelym, thinking that he was the one who most needed a mother just then.

  Chapter 53

  Pine Needles And Wood Smoke

  The first thing Arddwn was aware of when he woke in the morning was that his clenched fists were empty, and his father was gone. The next was the sensation that he was lying on a warm, dry bed instead of the damp, splintery floor of the woodshed. Teetering between being asleep and awake, he held his breath to keep from losing the last lingering remnants of his dream to the stench of mold and rats’ nests and stale pee. But when he couldn’t put off breathing any longer, what he smelled was pine needles and wood smoke and roasting fish.

  He didn’t remember his dream having smells before.

  Cautiously, he half opened his eyes and looked out of the tent— the tent, not the woodshed—to see five fat fish sizzling on sticks propped over a glowing campfire! If this was a dream, Arddwn wasn’t going to waste it. He scrambled up and out of the tent just as Caelym came through the thorn bushes, carrying the refilled water skin in one hand and holding a second string of gutted fish in the other.

  Once he’d stumbled back to camp and dropped down next to Arddwn, Caelym had plunged into a deep, dreamless sleep, like a rock dropping to the bottom of a deep, still lake. He’d woken up feeling healed and well—as he had on the morning after his festering arrow wound had been lanced, only then his thoughts had been fuzzy and confused and now they were sharp and clear.

  He was on a mission from Feywn to rescue Annwr and recover his sons, and he had done both. Now he just had to take them through the forest and over a few mountains and find the inn with a sleeping dragon carved on its door, where Feywn and the rest were waiting to start on the last leg of the journey to their new sanctuary. So long as getting Aleswina to her Christian convent didn’t take them too far out of the way, there was every reason to hope that he would see his sons back in their mother’s arms in two or, at most, three weeks.

  He eased out from between Annwr and Arddwn, stood up in the tent’s doorway, stretched, and drew in an invigorating breath of the fresh forest air before setting off to collect the fish from his weir, meaning to have breakfast ready by the time the others were stirring.

  Annwr woke up when Caelym did. Stiff and sore, feeling every year of her age, she got up to stoke the fire.

  Cuddled together with Annwr’s wimple pulled up over their ears, Aleswina and Lliem slept through the sounds of Arddwn yelling his father’s name, only opening their eyes when Caelym called to them to come and get their breakfast, “before Arddwn eats it along with his own!”

  No sooner were they out of the tent than Caelym had his cloak pulled off the cedar trunks. In as much a hurry to find a village market as Caelym was to reach his “sleeping dragon,” Annwr joined him in doing the little that needed to be done to return the clearing to its natural, desolate state.

  After paying perfunctory respects to the local spirits, they left, the cheeky squirrel chattering at them from overhead.

  PART VII

  Lliem’s Story

  Lliem would always remember that morning as the beginning of the greatest adventure of his life, and that was how he would begin the story that he would tell his own children many years later.

  “But it really began when you and Uncle Arddwn were imprisoned by the horrible ogre, Barnard, and the goddess, Ethelwen, in disguise as a serving boy, came and rescued you!”

  Eilwen, the first-born of the twins was a stickler for detail.

  “That was last night’s story! Tonight, the story will be how they went through the woods and over the mountain and to the fair where they almost got caught by the evil Christian priest!” Edriana made up for the indignity of being a quarter of an hour younger than her sister by disagreeing with everything that Eilwen said.

  “Christian priests aren’t all evil! There are nice ones!” Eilwen made a point of exerting her seniority by self-righteously parroting their mother’s most moralistic admonitions.

  “That one was! And he was going to drag Papa off and make him be a Christian!”

  “But Papa escaped because he remembered what the trees said!”

  Before the bickering between his two equally strong-willed daughters could go on any further, Lliem intervened in the calm but firm voice that Caelym had used to settle the innumerable squabbles he’d had with Arddwn.

  “Now hush, you both! This is my story, and so you must listen and let me tell it.”

  Before either of them could say it was the other one who wasn’t listening, he began again.

  “That morning was the beginning of the greatest adventure of my life. After we ate breakfast and thanked the spirits properly, we all followed your grandfather along the bank of the stream until we reached the swift-flowing river, and from there we turned northwards and traveled through the woods for days and days, living on fish and frogs and wild roots and birds’ eggs and even”—here the girls chimed in, “bugs and slugs!”—“until we finally came to the place where forest ended and the mountains began, and then we climbed—”

  “Up and up and up,” the girls chorused together.

  “But you never complained or said that you were tired!” Eilwen spoke up before her sister had a chance and was the one to be rewarded with her father’s proud smile as he agreed, “But I never complained or said that I was tired.”

  This was a story, and, like all stories, the better sections were embellished while the not-so-good ones were left out, but that part was true—Lliem had never complained about being tired. He hadn’t needed to, because all he’d had to do was look up and lift his arms and Aleswina had picked him up and carried him. And, of course, there were the other parts that he either forgot or never noticed because he was only
five years old at the time.

  Chapter 54

  Annwr’s Rule

  Just as the hills and ridges and mountains they’d crossed would all blend into a single long climb in Lliem’s memory, their trek through the forest would stretch out longer than the seven days it actually took. Each night, after a supper of whatever they’d been able to catch and gather along the way and after Caelym had told a story, Annwr tucked Aleswina and the boys in for the night, whispering “sweet dreams” to each in turn, as Caelym played his flute and sang soft, sleep-inducing songs.

  Once the last of the three, which was usually Arddwn, nodded off, Caelym and Annwr would slip out of their makeshift shelter to debate what to do about Aleswina, a question that got no closer to an answer even though either of them could have repeated the other’s side of the argument from memory by then.

  While Caelym no longer interspersed his objections to taking Aleswina with them with disparaging remarks about her intelligence or usefulness, he was, if anything, more adamant that she be left behind, “Safe and secure in another convent, where she will not be troubled by her evil cousin’s lustful pursuit!”

  To which Annwr would snap, “And where is that? I failed to notice the place on Herrwn’s map labeled ‘The Abbey of Saint Caelym,’ where hapless girls are safe from marauding packs of Gilberth’s vicious guards!”

  “But what you did see were hostile giants and forbidding mountains and a path leading from one danger to the next!” Caelym would sigh. “Is that the fate you wish on her?”