Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  He looked at me uncomprehendingly for a moment. Then he rolled his eyes.

  “Don’t be flattered on my account. That’s not why I detained you.”

  “Oh, now it’s detained, is it?” I said. “By what authority? For what purpose?”

  “Now that you’ve attacked the guard of a Roman port city, as a general in the Roman imperial army I can detain you indefinitely—or worse.”

  I decided it was my turn to roll my eyes.

  “You are, to put it bluntly, at my mercy,” he informed me. “So you and I are going to have a little talk.”

  “Talk?” I was wary. Were we going to delve into our deep dark pasts again? Was he worried that I knew too much? “Talk about what?”

  “The weather.”

  “Very well,” I said. “Lovely weather we’re having, isn’t it?”

  “You tell me,” he countered. “Are you steady enough to walk?”

  I nodded, then shook my head, but he already had his arm around me and was helping me to my feet. Maybe my old nemesis Paul of Tarsus had a point about the weakness of the flesh. My body, despite its sprains and bruises, was altogether too happy. And damn it, I liked how he smelled.

  “Come on,” he said. “I want to show you something.”

  He led me out of the room into a courtyard where I shielded my eyes against the light, afternoon light I guessed by its slant. He kept his arm around me and guided me to a staircase that climbed to a watchtower. My eyes now better adapted to the light, I saw that we were in a Roman military fort, laid out on a grid pattern like all Roman forts and towns. I scanned the complex to see if I could figure out where prisoners might be kept, but my opponent hadn’t brought me up here to gather intelligence about my immediate surroundings.

  “Look,” he said, keeping a firm grip on me with one hand, pointing with his other across the channel.

  The same bank of fog was still there, maybe halfway across the channel, even thicker if possible. Now it also swirled and billowed as if it were not a low-lying fog but a huge tumbling thunder cloud that had come down too low and gotten caught in the narrows.

  “Looks like nasty weather on the other side,” I observed, keeping my tone light and conversational.

  He said he wanted to talk about the weather. If he wanted anything else he’d have come out with it. He remained silent. I sensed he was having some inner debate with himself.

  “What do you know about it?” he said at length.

  I didn’t look at him, but I could feel his tension.

  “Why should I know anything more about it than you?”

  “You’re a weather witch,” he stated.

  I stopped myself from saying, how do you know. I knew very well how he knew. It was my own fault. I had been showing off that morning. Shamelessly.

  “I know enough about weather magic myself,” he added, “to know that there’s something strange about that fog bank.”

  “Maybe there is,” I said noncommittally. “But just because I cleared a little morning fog so you could get back to your post doesn’t mean I have anything to do with what’s going on across the water.”

  “I didn’t say you did,” he said. “I thought you might be interested in clearing it.”

  “Why would you think that?”

  “Don’t play games with me,” he dismissed my evasion. “It’s a waste of time, yours and mine. You want to cross the channel. Don’t bother asking me how I know that. No one travels to Portus Itius for any other reason. You’ve clearly come a long way and on some very fine horse flesh. Last night you were out gazing across the water. You’re going back to find that long-lost child. You’re going back to where you came from—and I’ll lay odds you’re druid-trained.”

  There was no point in denying any of that, but I wasn’t going to confirm it either.

  “You must want to cross the channel yourself and in a hurry,” I observed. “Or else you could wait until the weather clears and not beleaguer innocent travelers.”

  “Not innocent anymore,” he reminded me. “But yes, I need to cross the channel. I have an appointment in Pretannia.”

  “And a son you’ve never seen before,” I added.

  “How do you know it’s a son?” His grip tightened and he turned me to face him.

  “Who was it that just said it’s a waste of time to play games?” I demanded, struggling not to lose myself in his eyes. “What do you want from me?”

  “I want you to see,” he said fiercely. “I want you to look into that fog and see.”

  I knew, whether he did or not, that he wanted more than weather magic.

  “If I agree, what will you do for me?” I stayed cool. “None of my services has ever come cheap.”

  He looked at me disbelievingly. He clearly was not accustomed to being challenged.

  “Did you forget that you’re at a disadvantage?”

  “Just answer my question,” I said.

  “I’ll let you and your women go without the punishment your crime merits.”

  My women. His men. Amusing to think of myself as a fellow commanding officer—especially as nothing could be farther from the truth. But if I could bring off the deal I had in mind, my women would be immensely pleased with me.

  “Not good enough,” I said.

  “State your terms and be done with it.”

  “I want safe passage across the channel for us and our mounts, no matter what I see or don’t see, no matter what I can do or not do about that fog. And your pledge that any troops under your command will not trouble us further in any way.”

  He just stared at me.

  “Take it or leave it,” I said for good measure.

  “I could take or leave you,” he retorted. “Leave you to rot in prison.”

  I shrugged and turned back to the view.

  “As you will.”

  Now it was a waiting game. I kept my head down, to prevent any inadvertent visions. In fact, I was not at all confident that I could see anything. But he didn’t need to know that. I wondered why it hadn’t occurred to him that I could just make something up.

  “I agree to your terms,” he finally spoke. “Just tell me the truth, and don’t think I won’t know if you are lying. I have something of the sight myself.”

  “Then why do you need me?”

  “I don’t know,” he admitted, sounding honestly perplexed.

  In that moment I couldn’t help but like him.

  “All right,” I said. “I’ll do my best.”

  CHAPTER FOUR

  THE VIEW THROUGH THE FOG

  PART OF ME remained standing on the tower, close enough that I could feel the heat of his arm that almost touched mine. The rest of me flew out over the water, feeling the low sun graze the underside of my wings, hearing the cries of other birds, catching the prevailing wind from the west until, all at once, I found myself flying blind, swirled and tumbled in a knot of winds. I was inside the storm, and there was nothing to do but surrender to it, follow its chaotic pattern, its wild logic.

  I don’t know how much time passed. For awhile I lost all sense of myself even in my bird form. There was only the sound of the wind, and then not even that. When I came to myself again—if I did actually take form—I was on a tiny tidal island, gazing out at a stretch of sand and a body of water much narrower than the channel I had just left.

  “About time you showed up,” someone spoke from behind me.

  I turned and saw Dwynwyn, the old woman with whom I had changed shapes when I rescued my beloved so long ago. The old woman who had spoken a prophecy neither of us had ever forgotten. You are the lovers of the world. She was still wearing her blood-red robe, her necklace of small skulls stark in contrast. Her white hair still floated on the wind.

  “Not that either of us is really here,” she added. “I just thought it would be as good a place as any to talk.”

  “You don’t live on your island, anymore, Dwynwyn?”

  For, of course, now I recognized it; it hadn’t cha
nged in all the years I had been gone. The sheep still grazed. The wind still blew over the wild grasses of what was little more than a tidal dune. No doubt the oracular eels still swam in their well waiting for foolish young girls to come feed them.

  “Only in the way you will always inhabit that swanky cave they’re going to name after you.”

  “Are you dead, then?” I asked uncertainly.

  “That’s a crude way to describe the comings and goings between the worlds, lamb chop.” Dead or alive, terms for food and endearment were still one to her. “Haven’t you learned anything in all your years of wandering to and fro, loving and losing, losing and loving? Are you still as young and brash as ever?”

  Considering recent events, I thought the answer might very probably be yes.

  “Dwynwyn,” I said remembering my errand. “Did you brew that storm?”

  “What storm would that be, cabbage?”

  “The one,” I said with effort, as if speaking aloud in a dream, “the one, well, it’s far from here, that is, if we’re here, away to the southeast.”

  “Away, far away,” she sang, “far away, along the hard stone road that leads from here to there. That leads from there to here.”

  I was starting to feel cross. What was the point of coming and going between worlds, shape-shifting your way through magical storms, only to feel young and helpless again in the face of an old woman’s maddening wisdom?

  “Let’s have a look in the well,” she said.

  “I have no interest in love luck,” I protested.

  “If only that were true, sweet pie,” she sighed. “But there are other things to see. You know that better than most.”

  It was true, and I felt afraid. The last time she had dragged me to the well, I saw my own begetting—or misbegetting, as the druids had called it. That well was bottomless, a repository of things people could not bear to know.

  “You can bear it,” she spoke to my thoughts. “That’s why you’re here. And that’s why you will be here on this island, taking my place, when the terrible things happen.”

  Oh, jolly, I thought. Then why did I need to bother foreseeing anything?

  “I’ll leave you my red robe and my skull necklace,” she added. “You’ll have to make do with your own hair. Come along. I don’t have much time.”

  Who needed time when they had timelessness?

  The well was still there in its cleft between rocks, almost in a cave. For a while I could see nothing but the curving swish of an eel tail lashing the surface. And then the tail turned into a road, that hard road, a rock vein or spine crossing a green body of land, for the land seemed so like flesh, hills rising and falling, like breasts, like breath. Something moved over the hard road. At first I thought it must be a plague of insects, some life form with a relentless path, like the ants that would pass through Temple Magdalen each spring.

  Then I lost the wide view and plunged headlong into the vision. And for a time I saw nothing, but I could hear the sound of a horse’s hooves pounding, of someone’s heart pounding. Mine. I was on that road. I was riding for dear life, but not just my life, I had to bring a message; I had to warn someone.

  Then I saw her.

  How could I not know her in all the worlds, even though I had last seen her when she was a tiny newborn with a red, puckered face, sleeping in the crook of my arm? I tried to cry out to her, to call her by the name no one knew but me, but no sound came out. And then a terrifying thing happened: her eyes changed, her eyes became just like the eyes that had haunted and terrified me all my life, my father’s eyes full of hatred, my father’s face twisted with rage. I called to her again, but she couldn’t see me, she couldn’t hear me, and then everything went dark.

  I waited but nothing happened. Was I trapped in the well, stuck in some lightless passageway between the worlds, with no sight, no self, no voice? Then I sensed I was not alone in this dark, nor was the darkness complete. Close by, someone held an oil lantern he was trying to keep hidden. He was giving furtive orders to several other men. In Latin. Now I could smell brackish water. I could hear the sound of a boat being rowed, then pulled onto a shingle beach. The men loaded some heavy casks into the boat. For just a moment the man with the lantern turned towards me, and I glimpsed his face. He looked familiar, but I didn’t know why. Before I could get a closer look, he was gone.

  Or I was gone. Or not gone but in several places at once: galloping over the green land, the soft land, flying over it, the hard road like a weapon, a scar. I was inside the storm, tossed by forces that hurled themselves at each other without mercy. And I was surfacing from the well, meeting Dwynwyn’s blind and sighted eyes.

  “Warn him,” she said. “Warn him.”

  “Warn him?” I felt utterly confused.

  “Warn who?” Someone gripped my arm.

  I turned and there was the general whose name I still didn’t know.

  “Don’t go,” I heard myself saying. “Don’t go over the water. Don’t go.”

  “What do you mean, don’t go?” he said, moving to stand behind me and placing a hand on each shoulder. “Look!”

  The fog had gone, and the cliffs on the other side of the channel caught the last light.

  “Wherever you went, whatever you did, you opened the way for us.”

  “No,” I said. “You have to understand, I did no weather magic. That fog, that storm….” The words I wanted wouldn’t come. It was as if that fog had not dispersed at all but merely changed location: inside my skull, which still ached. I didn’t know how to say something I had barely intuited. It wasn’t druids, it wasn’t weather witches, it was the very land that made that strange, tumultuous fog, the land with its soft flesh, its hard bone, its terrible knowing. If only the Holy Isles could stay shrouded in mist forever.

  “No matter, it’s over now.”

  “It’s not over,” I insisted. “It hasn’t even begun.”

  But he wasn’t listening. Putting his arm around me, he led me back to the stairs.

  “You will eat something and then rest,” he informed me.

  “I am not resting until I see my women.”

  “Of course,” he said, going ahead of me on the stairs in case I fell. Such a gentleman.

  “Are you planning to keep us confined, as you so delicately put it?” I asked.

  “Should I?”

  “I wouldn’t, if I were you.” I hoped I sounded both mysterious and menacing.

  “All right,” he said, taking my elbow and leading me across a courtyard. “Then you will be treated as guests and given the use of the baths and a private suite. But if they—or you—try anything, our deal is off. Make sure they understand that. Be ready to sail at first light.”

  My women were not as pleased or impressed with me as I might have hoped. Their noses were still out of joint from being outnumbered and forced to surrender.

  “We could have fought to the death, Mother of Sarah,” sighed Bele, easing herself into the caldarium. “And we would have, if they’d killed you. But when we saw you were alive, and that the general was most insistent on your staying that way, we figured we’d have a better chance of rescuing you if we pretended to surrender.”

  I decided it would be tactless to state the obvious, that it was, in fact, I who had saved them.

  “Well, I say once we’ve had our baths and a good meal to hell with safe passage. Let’s go commandeer one of those ships,” said Alyssa, stretching out full length in the bath. “It’ll be like old times. Besides, I reckon they owe us a ship after stealing the Penthesilea.”

  “Which we stole from the Romans in the first place,” Sarah reminded her. “Anyway, the channel’s too narrow here, and we don’t know all the hidden coves or where the tide would work for us or against us.”

  I looked at Sarah. Was she seriously weighing the pros and cons of stealing a Roman vessel? I couldn’t read her face, and she seemed to be avoiding looking my way. I gave up trying to make sense of anything and lay back and closed my ey
es, almost falling into a doze.

  “What did you trade for it?” Sarah’s voice, low and quiet as it was, startled me awake.

  “For what?”

  “For our release, for our so-called safe passage.”

  Now she was looking straight at me, but I still couldn’t fathom her expression.

  “The general believes I cleared that strange fog.”

  Sarah said nothing for a moment, and the other two fell silent, watching us the way you might watch two cats lashing their tails.

  “And you didn’t?”

  “No,” I said without elaboration.

  “You mean you hoodwinked him?” Bele kindly tried to relieve the mounting tension. “Nice work, Mother of Sarah.”

  “No,” I said. “I didn’t have to. He believes what he wants to believe.”

  “And he believes you did.” Sarah was relentless. “Tell me, mother, how did he know you were a weather witch? He clearly had the watch on the lookout for you. Why?”

  My daughter was interrogating me. Would I ever have any maternal dignity or authority? Somehow I didn’t think it would help my standing to confess I’d met him on the cliffs and spent the night screwing his brains out, or my brains, whichever.

  “That is not important,” I said, and before she could say I’ll be the judge of that, which would have really pissed me off, I threw everyone a curve. “What matters is this: I told him he shouldn’t go to Pretannia. Come to that, we shouldn’t either.”

  “What do you mean, not go?” Bele and Alyssa were speaking at once. “We’ve just crossed the whole of Gaul. We’ve got a Roman general escorting us, for Artemis’s sake.”

  Sarah just looked at me, and I looked back, lost for a moment in her eyes, their light like the morning in the garden with my beloved.

  “Tell me what you saw.”

  I don’t even know if she spoke aloud but I could hear her. I tried to speak to her, mind to mind, send her images of the woman’s rage, of the furtive man, of my own mad heart-racing ride along the hard road, of the way the storm winds writhed and twisted and flung themselves one against the other with such fury. Then I heard Dwynwyn’s voice again, “You will be here on this island, taking my place when the terrible things happen.”