I had messages from Roisin that year too, so I knew that King Lugaid had indeed remembered Berach and welcomed him into his service. But it was not until the following Samhain that I was able to see her.
Late in the summer, Tlachta called me to the small cluttered room where she had first interviewed me and made her proposal.
“I do not usually invite the less experienced apprentices to assist me at Samhain,” she said. I had taken my vows the week before and was now a “true” apprentice. “However, you have proved to me the seriousness of your calling, and I believe you may take a special interest in observing the judgments in the days that follow. Also,”—and here her lips twitched into a rare smile—”I am aware that you have dear friends in the area. I’m sure we could manage to free you for a visit.”
I needed no persuading. But Tlachta had not finished with me. This journey, she explained, brought to urgency a problem she had been mulling over for some time.
“You do not strike me as a person who will wish to spend her life hidden away on the Isle of Women,” she said to me. “Yet if you leave these shores, how long will it be until word reaches Conchobor of a young woman of the same name and age as his wife, her face blemished as though by a poet’s curse? And given such news, how long will he believe in your death, which was never proved?”
“I have worried about this also,” I confessed. “I suppose I thought that I would be here for some years, and that...well, that the king was not likely to live a great deal longer.”
Tlachta had none of my squeamishness in anticipating another’s death.
“You could wait for him to die,” she agreed frankly. “But Conchobor has been a strong man all his life. Despite his age, he may have a good many years left to him.”
I was trapped, then. Except...I glanced up quickly. Tlachta’s hazel eyes, tinged gold in their intensity, were trained on me like a hawk’s.
“You have a plan,” I said. “You would not have invited me to the Hill of Tlachta if you did not. What am I to do?”
She leaned forward, her eyes never leaving my own.
“You must leave Luaine behind and become another,” she said. “You must dream for a name.”
I had wondered how I would ever manage to sleep. To seek a true dream, I was to sleep on the wattles of knowledge. And while the very name filled me with awe, the reality—a lumpy rack of woven rowan whips erected under the great yew tree—looked very uncomfortable indeed.
But the dream draught is powerful, and so is the body’s demand for rest after the long vigil that precedes a dreaming. Indeed, as I lowered myself gingerly onto the wattle bed, I realized it did not matter if I even closed my eyes. I had been two nights without sleep, and fatigue had made my waking into a series of fragmented, brightly colored episodes as strange as dreaming. If there was a vision meant for me, it would find me.
The stars wheeled overhead like an endless tapestry recounting the deeds of a strange world, framed at one corner of my vision by a black fringe of yew branches. The bright patterns coalesced and scattered before me, so that at one moment my eyes beheld a familiar constellation, or a fanciful picture of my own invention—a warrior’s steed, a handled mirror—and the next nothing but a random infinity of light. And then it was as if a heavy black cloak was drawn over the sky, and the stars became darkness, and I slept.
The lawn is studded with stars. No...I see now, not stars at all, but the tiny white flowers that used to nestle in the grass around our house in the spring. There is no sign of a house, though, nor any familiar landmark to say where I might be.
Movement catches my eye—it is a seedling, pushing out of the grass and into the sky. Another grows beside it, and both of them stretching up and unfolding leaves so fast that in the space of several breaths they have become young saplings: a sturdy straight oak tree and a graceful white-skinned birch. They reach to the sky, and as they swell in girth the two trunks first touch and then grow together so that they form one inseparable column and their branches intertwine and mingle in the sky. And neither beauty nor strength are lost, for the oak grows straight and true, and the birch branches dance lightly in the wind, and each is a perfect specimen of its kind. Together they are a marvel.
Then the skies darken. Heavy clouds cloak the sun, rain beats down on the oak leaves and wind lashes the delicate birch branches. But the two trees stand proud and strong and pay as little mind to the weather’s violence as they do to a passing breeze. The winds cannot touch them.
But they are not unassailable. Even as a sudden foreboding grips me, there is a rumbling in the sky. The white fire forks out of the clouds. My head swims with the crack of it, and for a heartbeat, two, my eyes see only darkness punctuated with jagged phantom flares of light. The strange burnt smell hurts my nostrils.
I know what I will see when my vision clears. The two trees are cloven to the roots, felled to the ground with a single stroke. Smoking, writhing, they darken to black and crumble away.
Such desolation. I want to turn away, but I can’t. I am compelled to watch until the last blackened twig collapses into ash and earth. And it is because I cannot turn away that I see the tiny green shoot that trembles into life. Slow and fragile at first, it sprouts from the very place where the two great trunks were sundered. The sun kisses it, and now it brightens to a dark and glossy green, leaves unfurling proudly, leaping up to the light. Strong, shapely, it is a plant I have never seen. Its upward rush slows, stops, and from the topmost branch the hard bump of a bud appears. Swelling and lengthening, the bud bursts into glorious bloom. White, luminously white, its beauty shines in that dark place and banishes despair.
I awoke at the first thin light of dawn, shivering in the chill dampness, dew heavy on my hair and blanket and the imprint of the woven rowan branches engraved painfully into my skin. The dream’s grip was still upon me, so that I felt I was only half in this world. It was an exhilaration in my blood, for I knew it was a dream of power. I had not been given a name, but I had been given something. I rushed to the little boat pulled up on the shore and started across the water. I must speak to Tlachta before the dream faded.
“But it is your name, plainly.”
I shook my head. “Mistress, there were no words at all in my dream. I heard no name.”
Tlachta looked at me sharply. “You have a bright mind, Luaine, and are keen in understanding. Do not tell me you have not seen in the oak and birch trees your own peerless parents, their rise and fall?”
“I did think of it,” I admitted.
“Well, then.”
She was not making this easy for me.
“Well, I suppose then that the plant that rose from their ashes could be me.” Or the legend that lives on after a great life, or Ulster itself, which my father gave his life for, or King Lugaid whom he trained, I thought. It seemed presumptuous to push myself into that place.
“Of course it is you. Are you not their offspring, and did you not come close to your own death at that time and rise back up into life?”
She rose then, and bade me kneel before her. Macha and Rathnait rose and stood on either side of Tlachta as she laid both hands on my head. They gave a long prayer of greeting, inviting all beings—those of our world and those of the worlds beyond—to bear witness to their words. And then Tlachta said in a loud voice, “I name you Finscoth. Let you be known by this name henceforth, and may you live true to the course this name sets for you.”
White Blossom. I knelt and kept silent, struggling within myself to accept Tlachta’s words. I understood the charge she put on me: to cultivate that flower in my heart, to strive for a soul as luminous and pure as my dream. Yet my cheeks burned when I pictured the years to come. No one who met me would be thinking of the flower of my soul. They would be thinking, with amusement or pity or scorn, of the inescapable contrast between my name and my face. It was a name for a great beauty. I did not think I would ever feel it my own.
“It is your true name,” Tlachta told me, when the cere
mony was over and we were alone. “You have only to believe it to make it so.”
I tried to believe, as I made my way to breakfast. It was my first proper meal in two days, and I had been ravenous when I awoke. But the thought of announcing my new name to all those women made my stomach buzz and jump. I would have a hard time eating.
CHAPTER 24
THE HILL OF TLACHTA
Tara is the sacred jewel in the territory of the high king, a territory that borders each of the four provinces and thus gathers all of Ireland to itself. It is, in fact, a good deal closer to Muirthemne than to the Isle of Women. And so I found myself, sooner than I could have foreseen, journeying north toward my homeland.
We traveled in comfort this time, by main roads and well protected. Chieftains were honored to lodge us, and the weather held crisp and clear. Orlagh was frisky as we set out, dancing through the drifts of leaves, and my heart was as glad as hers. But I awoke on the second morning of our travels with my high spirits of the previous day vanished. At first it was just a vague uneasiness that I put down to restless sleep, but hour by hour, mile by mile, a foreboding grew that I could not shake. Though I told myself it was only my own nervousness at this first venturing out of the protection of the island, by nightfall I knew it was something more. I ate my supper in near silence, unable to enjoy the lively banter of our host’s table, wondering what, if anything, I should do about the shadow that had settled over my mind.
It was a relief when Tlachta asked to speak with me. I was hovering at the edge of asking her counsel, held back by my reluctance to burden her when she had already so much to see to.
There was no privacy to be had—not unless we braved the night chill—but we found a low space under the eaves, far from the fire and the conversation, and settled ourselves on the cold flagstone floor. Tlachta was direct, as always.
“How are you feeling, Finscoth?” The name was so new I hardly recognized it as my own.
Once, perhaps, I would have felt foolish confessing such vague fears. I had learned better. If Tlachta thought my feelings worth discussing, then they were worth discussing.
“It is uneasy I am, Mistress, without knowing why. The feeling has grown on me all this day. In truth, I can think of little else.”
Tlachta nodded. “I, too, sense some darkness ahead. I thought it concerned you in some way. Now I am sure of it.”
A flicker of panic licked at me. I was remembering the other times, the times the black hand had squeezed at my innards and the message its dark fingers had delivered. Someone is dead, I thought. Roisin. Berach. Maybe the high king himself. Lugh save me, what has happened?
I must have spoken that last part aloud, for Tlachta raised an eyebrow at my appeal to my father’s patron, Lugh of the Long Hand. He is a sun god too, of course, and with a greater name than Mug Ruith. To this day he is closer to my heart than the god of our island, for he is the god who shone on my childhood.
That single eyebrow was enough to check my runaway fears, and Tlachta’s next words brought them under rein.
“Stop now. It is not a time to let wild imaginings take hold. Let us see what can be learned from this message.”
She questioned me for some time: What, exactly, did the foreboding feel like? It was the first time I had ever described the black fingers to another person, and though my words were halting and unsure I could see she understood me.
“And is it the same this time as it was before, when your brother was killed or when you foresaw Deirdriu’s death?”
This brought me up short. It was not the same, was it? Or only in general type (the scrabbly feeling in my guts, the uneasiness, the sense of shadow) but not at all in its particulars. My vision of Deirdriu had made me cry out in fear and sorrow; my certainty that the youth of Ulster would be killed had squeezed my heart with grief. And in the sacred grove, when I saw Conlaoch killed, the horror had been a black vise that all but crushed me.
“No, Mistress,” I told Tlachta. “This is not the same. It is milder. And it does not fill me with grief.”
She was nodding. “Now you are learning to look at these things head on. And what you describe matches my own foreboding, though it comes to me in a different manner. Now, let these feelings take hold of you, and answer me this: Do you still think something has happened?”
I took a deep breath, closed my eyes and surrendered to the shadow that had been tugging at my mind all day. I let it take me, unpleasant as it was, but I tried to keep one part of myself apart, to listen and watch. I felt it all, yet I could observe it too.
I opened my eyes. Tlachta waited patiently.
“No.” I was sure of it.
“Then what do you think the feeling means?”
“It is a warning. I think it is a warning. And...” I hesitated, took a deep breath, plunged on. I was so new at this, so likely to be wrong. But Tlachta knew this. She asked only for my best try. “I do not think it is an omen of death. I think...I think there is danger for me at Tara.”
Tlachta was silent, considering. Then she found one last question for me.
“Finscoth, may I borrow your Messenger?”
If Cathbad had been at Tara, I could have sent Fintan with a more useful question. As it was, we had to send him to one of Lugaid’s druids, who would have no knowledge of me or my history. It was Tlachta’s message Fin carried, as she at least was known to the druids there, and knew where to direct him.
The question, though. We could come up with nothing more specific than, “Is all well at Tara?” If Tara was under attack, or in the grip of a plague, we would find out. But I doubted very much there was anything so dramatic amiss.
“Do you wish to remain here, or go on? I’m sure our host will make you welcome, and we can pick you up on our return journey, if that seems best to you.”
Fintan had left at first light and returned by midmorning. As expected, he had no alarming events to report. Now Tlachta, to my surprise, was leaving this decision to me. I had spent half the night mulling over the same question.
“If it is permitted, Mistress, I will go on. It might be wiser to stay, but I would discover what awaits me. And if my foreboding is indeed a message, then I am thinking the message is not to turn back, but rather to be cautious in my going forward.”
I don’t know where I got the nerve for such a speech. As if I had any business even interpreting such vaporous inklings. It was like trying to assign a shape to smoke. But I had my own reasons, and not only my eagerness to see Roisin, that propelled me. In the darkest hours of night, a kind of pugnacious determination had come over me. I had already lost my old life. But I had begun again and I would not now be turned back from my new path. I would go forward and meet my fate.
We did not go into Tara, but straight to the Hill of Tlachta, arriving mid-afternoon. Preparations for the Samhain were already underway, and I was put to work, as the previous year, hauling and greasing the wood. It felt odd at first to work side by side with the male apprentices from Tara, but in a strange way my scar made it easier. Because they were not interested in me as a woman, we were more quickly comfortable as colleagues.
The fire here would be huge, half again as tall as a man, and constructing it was a job that would take much of the next day. And there were other preparations—the torches to bind and soak, the altar to clean, the sacrificial tools to sharpen. The site was open and smooth from long years of use, but patches of gorse and thistle still sprang up each summer and had to be cleared.
After inspecting the site and assigning us our duties, Tlachta and Rathnait rode on to Tara in the late afternoon. Evidently the apprentices were to stay overnight, sleeping in the circle of small tents that had been erected by the foot of the hill. I hoped that one was set aside for Tlachta’s women.
By the time we stopped to eat—long after the sun had gone down—I was sweaty and redolent of pork grease and had worked my jumpy feelings down to a quiet murmur. I wondered how long it would take for us all to wash, sharing pots of hot
water heated over our campfire.
Ah, but there was no need. This was sacred ground and a sacred ceremony, and all who assisted at the rites, however humbly, were to come to Samhain thoroughly clean. They had built a sweating house, a structure very like the little hot-air hut we had on the Isle of Women for drying clothing and herbs, but big enough for five or six people to go in at one time. I had heard of them, of course. Healers use them with fragrant herbs to ease labored breathing or old ones’ joint pains, but I had never been inside one.
Myself and the two older female apprentices, being guests, went first. We scrubbed our greasy hands up to the shoulders with brushes and warm water, shucked off our clothes and entered the tiny building. The pit in the center was piled with hot stones, dragged from the core of the fire that burned beside the house. New stones had already been added to that fire, ready for the next group.
It was the hottest place I had ever been. So strange, it felt, to leave behind the chill nip of a late autumn night, stoop into a dark doorway, and have a wall of heat hit my face, solid and thick and almost suffocating. As soon as we found our places around the fire, the door was closed, and now the heat was black: an invisible all-surrounding presence. It seared my nose when I breathed, penetrated my lungs, heated my eyeballs. It was frightening at first, but as the heat seeped into my limbs, it became comfortable and finally, comforting. Sweat began to prick out on my skin—in my armpits and the crease of my neck, on my forehead and scalp. It was stinging and acrid at first—I could smell the other women too—but as the perspiration increased it ran clear as water. I was slick with it, even my hair, and I felt cleaner than ever in my life.
Damnhait, on my left, began chanting softly—a simple prayer that I had memorized mechanically as part of my training. Now, in that dark place, it became luminous in my mind as we sang it over and over.
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