Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  “Who is that?” wondered Bele. “Do you think our general is his replacement? He doesn’t look very pleased.”

  “He’s not military,” I said. “He’s probably the procurator.”

  Like Pontius Pilate, I thought with distaste, a petty official put in charge of an outpost of the Empire. Maybe that’s why he seemed familiar to me. He was a type.

  “Look,” said Alyssa,” I think our general’s about to strut down the gangway.”

  “He’s not our general,” objected Sarah, teeth definitely still clenched.

  “Ease up, Black Sarah,” said Bele, “and enjoy the show. I always love to watch men in a pissing contest. My money’s on the general.”

  There could be no contest, I thought. The man waiting on the shore, despite all his signs of rank, was a child compared to the general. His presence had no command; his was the kind of authority you inherit or buy. The general, in contrast, couldn’t disguise his authority even when he had tried. Jesus had been like that, too. But I decided not to follow that train of thought. It led nowhere I wanted to go.

  I was diverted by watching the meeting of these two men, heads of the civil and military occupation of the Holy Isles. They saluted, right arms outstretched in the Roman fashion, which put the procurator at an automatic disadvantage, as he was shorter. The general, wearing his dress helmet, had his back to me, so I could not see his face. The procurator had replaced his look of petulance with one of bland politeness, which I found unconvincing. Then he began to speak—or orate, as Alyssa had feared. I couldn’t make out the words, but there was something about the procurator’s voice that bothered me. I tried to think what it was, but it was like searching for a familiar word that is for a time utterly lost to you. So I gave up and listened instead to the sound of the water lapping against the ship and the dock workers further down the harbor loading or unloading other vessels.

  Then, all at once, it came to me where I knew his voice. It had been night in my vision, and the boat had been a small one pulled onto a shingle beach. But it was the same voice, raised now in formal speech, that had given those hushed commands, and it was the same face that I had glimpsed in the lamp light.

  “Warn him,” Dwynwyn had urged.

  The stranger who was so familiar to me, I had to warn him. I had to warn him about this man.

  Now the new governor was making a speech in return. I caught a word here and there. Great joy. Honor. Happiness. There was something wrong with his voice. It almost broke here and there. Then the speech was over, far more quickly than the procurator’s had been. For a moment, the assembled dignitaries seemed at a loss. Then the two men saluted again, and the parade began to re-form with the procurator and the governor at the head. Just before they began to march, Gaius turned and looked towards the ship, scanning it till he caught my eye. He smiled and nodded his head almost imperceptibly towards the procurator. And all at once, I understood.

  The procurator of Pretannia was his son, his beloved son in whom he was determined to be well-pleased—no matter what.

  I had to warn him.

  But when at last I set foot on the ground of the Holy Isles—or the Roman pavement that overlay it—I forgot all about Governor Gaius Suetonius Paulinus and his secret son. A woman in a black cloak and tunic approached me. A breeze sprang up and her garments flapped in the wind. She might have been any one of the priestesses on Mona, the ones we called the Crow ladies. She could have shape-shifted and blown here on a storm wind. Though I was as old as she was now, my hair as grey as her long grey braids, I felt young again, confronted with a female authority figure so obviously in charge.

  “Maeve Rhuad,” she addressed me solemnly in the Celtic of the Isles. “You will come with me to a place where we can speak. Your women, too.”

  And she strode on ahead.

  “Uh oh, looks like you’re in trouble, Mother of Sarah,” whispered Alyssa.

  “I thought you said the druid college was on the other side of the country,” said Bele. “That no one would bother to meet you.”

  “I told you Mother of Sarah was being too modest. She is a major bad-ass,” insisted Alyssa.

  I began to wonder if she was right. Could the druids possibly have sent someone all the way from Mona to enforce my exile?

  “Don’t worry, Ma,” said Sarah. “Whatever it is, we’ll handle it.”

  It did not occur to any of us to refuse to go with the woman or to demand more information first. We followed her, our horses on lead, away from the wharves, through the streets of shops and houses, past a military barracks and out of the town. We stayed on the Roman road only a little way; then our guide turned and disappeared (or so it seemed) into the marsh. Sarah, Bele, and Alyssa, marsh dwellers for years, kept on unperturbed and soon picked up the path our guide had taken through tall grasses loud with invisible birds.

  We found the black-robed woman waiting for us beneath a huge white swamp oak just coming into spring leaf. She had a campfire over which she’d hung a small cauldron. While we tethered our horses, she ladled something steaming into a round wooden cup, something that smelled sweet and earthy at once. We each took a drink, honey ale, I guessed, brewed with marsh herbs. After one sip, I felt I had taken the spring sun inside me. Bees hummed over early blossoms. The Roman town, the whole Roman Empire, seemed far, far away, far-fetched even, nothing more than a dream.

  I was home.

  “Maeve Rhuad,” the priestess, for so she must be, spoke again at last. “My name is Aoife. Joseph of Arimathea sent me for you.”

  “Joseph!” I cried out.

  Joseph, who had taken my beloved back to Galilee when he escaped from Mona. Joseph, who had found me and taught me to read when I was a whore at The Vine and Fig Tree. Joseph, who had secured Jesus’s body and laid it in his own tomb. Joseph, who had wanted to marry me and bring me back to the Holy Isles. Joseph, who had rescued all of us in Ephesus. Sarah and I had tried to send him word when we began our journey, but none of us had heard from him for more than a year.

  “Where is he?” I asked the priestess. “Why didn’t he come himself?”

  “He is dying,” she said simply, “in Avalon. Will you come?”

  I did not have to translate or confer with the others. There was no question. It was only when we were miles away that I spared a backward glance or thought for Gaius Suetonius Paulinus and the warning I had failed to deliver to him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  TOO LATE

  BY NOW YOU are probably not surprised that a priestess from the other side of the country, who had never met me, should know of the time and place of my arrival and be there to meet me. That is the way things were in the Holy Isles. It is not that other peoples did not have seers and soothsayers. (My mother-in-law set herself up as an oracle in her last years; she had gossipy angels giving her inside information.) But in those days, the island Celts did not rely on the written word, and so they found messages everywhere: the pattern of birds’ wings, the way a stick fell or a leaf rode the current of a stream. They gazed into wells and skies. And because they were paying attention, the earth, the water, and skies, animals and birds yielded secrets.

  Though the Roman settlers were busy building roads and towns in the south and the east and though there were plenty of Celtic tribes happy to share in the wealth and to enjoy imported luxuries, that other wilder world of marsh and wood still existed. Aoife, our guide, clearly preferred it, choosing sometimes barely visible paths even when a Roman road was near. We skirted the towns, sleeping in makeshift lean-tos and catching our own game, something all of us were used to. What we weren’t so accustomed to was a companion who was mostly silent, who emanated silence. Have you ever heard wind roaring in the next field, tossing the trees, but it hasn’t reached you yet, and where you are the air is still? Being with Aoife was like that. Her silence was neither restful nor awkward; it was a force, a living thing, a fifth element.

  Sarah took to this silence, absorbed it, as if it were her second nature, w
hich no doubt it was. She had grown up a solitary mountain child. But Bele and Alyssa were clearly spooked. By our third day of travel, they’d had enough and confronted me while we were out gathering firewood.

  “Mother of Sarah,” said Bele, “you’re the only one who speaks Aoife’s dialect. Why don’t you talk to her, ask her some questions at least?”

  “What do you want me to ask her?” I wondered, and I realized Aoife’s silence had infected me, too.

  “Oh, just little things,” put in Alyssa, “like where are we going and when are we going to get there?”

  “We know where we’re going,” I pointed out.

  “All I know is we’re going west,” said Bele. “Wasn’t our original plan to go east to find that tribe that fostered your daughter?”

  But we are in Holy Isles now, I did not say, going west to go east makes a kind of sense, like Celtic knot work.

  “We’re going because of Joseph,” I reminded them. “We have to see him first.”

  “I know,” acknowledged Alyssa, “but could you at least ask how far it is? Could you try making some conversation? I don’t want to spend another evening listening to everyone chewing. I thought your people were famous for talking, battle challenges that go on for hours, stories that go on for days. Get her to tell a story for Artemis’s sake—or tell one yourself.”

  “All right,” I sighed, thinking it might be easier to ask a boulder to regale us with tales. “I’ll give it a go.”

  That night we had fresh rabbit stewed in the honey ale with wild spring onions. We were camped in a grove of old growth hardwood trees. I couldn’t help but notice that the further west we traveled, the more abundant were the trees. Romans were famous deforesters, hungry for wood to heat their houses and baths and for grain to feed city dwellers on the dole, not to mention their huge armies. Would they do in Pretannia what they had already done in Ostia, Ravenna, Ephesus, strip the hills of trees so that erosion inexorably filled the harbors with silt?

  A light rain began to fall, but the canopy of the forest was so thick that even with the trees still in early leaf, we hardly needed more shelter. We just pulled our cloaks over our heads and moved a little closer to the fire. The sound of the rain pattering on the leaves and hissing as it hit the coals lulled me into a half trance, and I forgot my promise to Alyssa and Bele till I felt their knees pressing against mine on either side.

  “Aoife,” I began, feeling awkward. “Do you mind if I speak?”

  She turned her large, mild eyes on me, not startled exactly, more bovine in expression, curious, as if my request was an oddity to her but not frightening. Sarah, sitting next to Aoife, regarded me more warily.

  “Speak,” said Aoife when I hesitated.

  What was it Alyssa and Bele had wanted me to ask? Words felt like unfamiliar objects now, heavy compared to silence, and clumsy on my tongue.

  “Will we reach Avalon soon?” I asked.

  “If nothing impedes us, by tomorrow sundown,” she answered.

  I felt the silence settle on me again, fine as the rain.

  “Did she say we would arrive tomorrow?” Alyssa prompted softly, and I realized I had forgotten to translate.

  “Yes.”

  “Ask her something more,” urged Bele.

  Sarah frowned at all three of us, but Aoife almost smiled.

  “You have nothing to fear from me, Maeve Rhuad, or from anyone at Avalon. Say what you will. Ask what you most want to know.”

  She said it as if she already knew what it was. Then suddenly I knew, too. Alyssa and Bele had wanted a story. I would ask Aoife to tell it, if she could.

  “Were you there,” I began, “I mean in Avalon, when Joseph of Arimathea first came to that place? Do you remember who he brought with him?”

  She took such a long time answering, I wondered if she had thought better of her offer or simply not heard me as the wind picked up and the rain fell harder.

  “Let’s move under the lean-to where we can be dryer,” she spoke at last. “I will tell you what I remember.”

  So we all re-arranged ourselves, Aoife at the center, Bele and I on one side, Sarah and Alyssa on the other, all of us close enough to feel each other’s warmth, hear each other’s breathing.

  “I was only a young girl then, barely fourteen,” she began. “I had just come to Avalon. My parents and siblings had been taken in a raid when I was out in the marshes. The priestesses found me, half-starving and half-crazed and took me in. But my story is of no matter here, except as a witness.

  “On a night like this one, of mist and rain, three women on horseback came to our shores. They were strangers and didn’t know the waterways through the marshes. But one woman, with a Hibernian accent, sang out in a loud voice that carried across the water.

  “‘We need succor and asylum. And you might as well know at outset we’re desperate outlaws who’ve committed any number of outrages, not least the stealing of a human sacrifice from under the long snouts of the druids of Mona, though it was the Hag of Beara herself put us up to it, melting our shackles with her bare hands, so she did, but in exchange foisting upon us a young stranger, who has been raving in a barbarous tongue all the way over the Cambrian mountains. And I won’t lie to you. In Nidum we tried to foist him off on a merchant who speaks the same gabble. But in Brigid’s name the lad needs a healer, so we’ve brought the pair of them here. Send us away or take us in, but do not leave us standing in the muck.”

  Aoife paused to catch her breath. As I translated, Sarah caught my eye and nodded. She knew who had melted the shackles in the guise of the hag. She knew the name of the boy they’d reluctantly rescued.

  “The priestesses could not resist the Hibernian woman’s frank and spirited appeal,” Aoife went on, “so they came in several boats and took the whole party to the island where we house guests. When the women went off to bathe and eat and tell their own stories, the merchant refused to be parted from the boy.

  “I remember when I first saw the two strangers,” she resumed after another pause for translation. We heard the shift in her tone, the shift from the story to her story. “The healers had tended to the boy and given him a sleeping draught. They sent me to watch over him, with orders to fetch a priestess if there was any change or if he woke.

  “I sat down on a low stool beside him. I remember thinking that he could not be much older than me. His hair was so dark and springy. I wanted to touch it, but I didn’t dare. Even though he was asleep, his face looked sad, old and young at the same time. The merchant, who sat on his other side, looked sad, too, sad and full of yearning as if the boy were his own son. Though I felt shy of these strangers, I summoned the courage to speak.

  “‘He will be all right,’ I told the man. ‘The priestesses will heal him.’

  “He looked at me, startled, as if he had not realized I was there.

  “‘What is your name, child?’ he asked in my language.

  “When I told him, he spoke to me in words I did not fully understand.

  “‘He is so like him, he is so like him. This one I will not lose. This one I can save. We will save him, Aoife, won’t we?’

  “‘Yes,’ I told him, ‘yes.’ And I wondered if I should fetch a priestess for him, he seemed so distraught. At last he accepted some of the ale I offered him and ate a little bread.

  “‘You are weary,’ I said to the merchant. ‘Sleep. I will stay awake with him. I will stay with you both.’

  “And I did.”

  Aoife fell silent and remained silent long after I translated. None of us spoke or stirred. It was as if we were all sharing that long ago night vigil, listening to the sound of rain, the fire, the tides of breath. I wondered if Aoife’s deep silence began that night, watching over the sleep of a beautiful lost boy.

  “I had red hair then.”

  Her words surfaced from the silence, bright and strange.

  “When he opened his eyes that is what he saw first. My hair. He reached for one of my braids and wound it aroun
d his fingers. I knew I was supposed to get the priestess, but I couldn’t move; I couldn’t speak. Then he looked at me.”

  I knew better than anyone there what it was like to look into those eyes. You could set sail in them and never return or return to find everything utterly changed.

  “‘Maeve.’ That was the first word he spoke, and then he said, ‘You are not Maeve.’”

  Sarah looked at me again. I didn’t have to translate this part. She understood everything Aoife had said—and not said.

  “I ran to get the priestesses then. By the time I got back, the merchant was awake and vainly trying to restrain the boy from getting dressed and charging off. The only words I caught were Maeve and Mona, which he shouted again and again. At last Madrone, the chief priestess, slapped him hard across the face, and he fell silent.

  “‘You will not go back to Mona,’ she told him. ‘From what the Hibernian women have told me, that would be certain death for you, and no help at all to the one you call Maeve, who as I understand it is about to have a child. Now you will sit down and when you have had something to eat, you will tell us the whole story, from the beginning.’

  “And the young stranger did just that,” said Aoife, “spinning us a tale to rival any a bard could tell.”

  Except, I reflected, he didn’t know the whole story then. He didn’t know that I had been the old woman who loosed his bonds. He didn’t know that I raised the tidal bore that prevented the druids from pursuing him or that Lovernios, my father, the one who had rigged his sacrifice, had walked into the wave and disappeared. He didn’t know that I was to stand trial not only for meddling in high mysteries but for murder.

  “He went on spinning his tale all night, till the dawn crept into the hut.

  “‘So you must see now,’ he said, ‘I have to go back for Maeve. I should never have left her.’

  “No one answered him for awhile,” said Aoife. “As for me, I think they had forgotten I was there or they might have sent me away. I was the only one who thought he was right. I was young, too, and had lost so much myself. I did not understand or care then about the predicament the priestesses found themselves in.