Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  The warriors went on listing the benefits provided by Bride’s lineage, and I joined in. We were all a bit breathless by the end, but I was sure we had bonded. What better credentials could I offer?

  “Right, then,” the man cleared his throat. “But who is your father?”

  Who’s the father, who’s the father? That’s all anyone ever wanted to know.

  “Manannan Mac Lir,” I said automatically. Sarah, next to me, gave me a small, discreet jab in the leg. “That is what my mothers always told me,” I hedged. “My foster father is the late great King Bran of the Silures who gave his life to the resistance against Rome. Bran Fendigaid, ab Llyr Lleidiaith, ab Baran, ab Ceri Hirlyn Gwyn, ab Caid, ab Arch, ab Meirion,” I launched into Bran’s lineage, amazed that I remembered it. “...ab Ceiraint, ab Grei-diol, ab Dingad, ab Anyn, ab Alafon—”

  “You can stop now,” the guard instructed me. “We all know of King Bran, may he rest in the Isles of the Blest and his bold sons after him. State your purpose.”

  Another tricky question. I was glad I had prepared for it.

  “If you know of King Bran and his sons, then you know that he also has a daughter, Branwen, now a druid on the Isle of Mona where your queen once studied. I have a—”

  “We will speak no more of this out of doors,” the guard cut me off. “To show your good faith, you will disarm and cast your weapons on the ground.”

  Oddly enough for someone who wasn’t all that keen on carrying a weapon in the first place, I felt balky. Queen Boudica had organized a whole rebellion to resist disarmament, but she expected her guests to make themselves, well, hostages. I looked at Sarah, waiting for her to object. To my surprise, she was unbuckling her sword, and Bele and Alyssa, after a moment’s hesitation, followed her lead.

  “It’s the only way we’ll get in,” Sarah said quietly. “We’ve come this far. We’ll just have to risk it.”

  We’ll have to risk it, the same words I said long ago when a Samaritan with a sick man had knocked at Temple Magdalen’s gates.

  “All right,” I agreed and laid my weapons down.

  “Now,” the guard continued, “you will dismount and follow me. My warriors will take your horses.”

  I did not even wait for my companions to protest.

  “Take our horses?” I said. “I don’t think so. Not until we see exactly where they are to be stable or pastured.”

  “Woman,” the guard was indignant, “do you take the Iceni, a tribe renowned for our herds, as common horse thieves?”

  I waited a beat.

  “Not common.”

  Another beat; everyone tensed, the horses, too, and then the chief guard burst out laughing.

  “By Andraste, if she had not said she comes from the west, I would swear this old witch is one of ours. A woman after our own queen’s heart.”

  Yes, I agreed silently, after her heart.

  “Come then,” said the guard. “You will inspect your horses’ quarters while we send word to the queen that you are here.”

  We dismounted and led our horses inside the stockade.

  “Well done, Mother of Sarah!” Alyssa clapped me on the back. “Well done.”

  “How did you know it would work to insult them that way, Mother?” Sarah wanted to know.

  I didn’t, I started to say, and then I decided to take credit for having what Dwynwyn once described as nice impulses.

  “Simple,” I said. “They’re Celts. Nothing like a well-turned insult to win their respect.”

  “Keep it up, Mother of Sarah,” said Bele. “Keep it up.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  FACE TO FACE

  MY REST ON MY LAURELS was all too brief. We saw our horses to a shed where a young boy was summoned to rub them down and feed them hot mash, and then one of the guards returned with a message.

  “Boudica our queen welcomes her combrogos from the west. Follow me.”

  No straight streets here, just winding round and round a cluster of round houses until we came to a large one, seemingly at the center. Our guide lifted the heavy plaid door covering and motioned for us to go in. I wanted to go last, but my companions conspired against me and I found myself stepping inside the familiar curved contours of a round hut, just a little larger than the one where I was born. The light came from a central hearth fire. In the shadows someone strummed a harp, a bit off tune in the damp. A cloaked figure sat on a low stool before the fire; nearby a young girl held a drop spindle. The girl leaned in and said something I did not catch to the cloaked one.

  A woman.

  She turned as she rose, slowly, majestically, an oak tree spiraling to full height. Thick gleaming braids fell to her waist, brighter than the bright plaid tunic she wore beneath her cloak, bright as the heavy gold torc around her neck. Just brighter than her eyes, red brown eyes, the color of a fox.

  My father’s eyes, her father’s eyes. Lovernios alive again, standing before me in this strange, familiar form.

  “I’ve got you,” whispered Sarah, her arms around me, but she was trembling, too.

  The young girl put down her spindle and went to stand next to the woman, a slender birch leaning into this massive greatness.

  No one spoke. The harper stopped playing. The fire, too, seemed to quiet itself. Outside, rain began to fall, now and then a drop leaking from the smoke hole and hissing on the coals. I could hear my heart beating.

  “Why. Have. You. Come.”

  She spoke like that, each word with its own separate weight, a low voice, stone rolling against stone in a cold rising tide.

  “I wanted to see you again.”

  I heard my voice as if from outside myself. It sounded faint, insubstantial, like a wind seeking a way through a crack.

  “Again?” she repeated.

  I waited, waited for her to ask me what I meant by again. Waited for her to ask me what deep in her body she must know, waited for her to name me, to accuse me. I looked at her, silently beseeching her to say it. For a fleeting moment, I saw not my father’s eyes, haunted, wary, but the infant face I had never forgotten. Little flame, little flower, the words sang themselves inside my mind. My arms lifted of their own accord, reaching for her.

  Then, although I had not touched her, I felt hurled back. She herself looked startled, as if she had wakened suddenly from a dream. Just as my father once shook off his nightmare madness to become again a calm and reasoned druid.

  “I am Boudica,” she said, drawing herself up to an even greater height, so that her hood grazed the roof and fell back, revealing a gold crown of finely-wrought knotwork. “Queen of the Iceni, daughter of the great druid Lovernios.”

  And she began to recite her whole patrilineage…our patrilineage.

  “This is my younger daughter, Lithben,” she added when she had finished her recital.

  Her daughter, my breath caught in my throat, my granddaughter. I noticed that Lithben’s patrilineage was not invoked.

  “We welcome you, combrogos,” Boudica continued, “and we shall receive with gladness the messages you bring from the west. But first you must rest and take food and drink. You have had a long journey. Lithben, draw up stools for our guests, then tell the kitchens we are ready.”

  When we were all seated, Boudica regarded us silently, apparently feeling no need to put us at our ease with small talk or polite inquiries. I remembered Branwen saying that at school Boudica had been aloof and yet capable of great eloquence when she addressed a crowd. Apparently she seemed to feel she had made her welcoming statements, and the onus was now on us. Sarah concurred. After a few moments I felt her foot nudging mine. How it must madden her to have to let me be spokeswoman. And frankly it was a responsibility I wouldn’t have minded shirking.

  “I am Maeve Rhuad,” I began, “as perhaps your guard has told you.”

  She scarcely blinked, just waited for me to continue with my lineage. Shit.

  “Foster daughter of the late King Bran of the Silures.” And scarcely pausing for breath I recited
the whole long line farther back than I’d gone with the guards. By some miracle, I remembered accurately. If I hadn’t, Boudica would have known, for she had stayed in school long enough to memorize the lineage of anyone who was anyone. By the time I was done, I had broken a sweat, and I prayed—yes, to Jesus—that she wouldn’t ask about my birth father.

  “And this is my daughter Sarah,” I said. “I can recite her patrilineage. Upon request. It’s very long and not one known to the druids.”

  I didn’t look at Sarah. I could feel her glowering at me. And technically the druids did know Esus’s lineage; or anyway they had heard it recited at admissions. Whether or not they memorized it I had no way of knowing. I wish I had thought to ask Branwen if the memory of Esus had been expunged from the college along with mine.

  “And these are our combrogos, Alyssa and Bele,” I added.

  I hoped they had patrilineages handy. I had never thought to ask these daughters of the lost Amazonian tribes about their fathers.

  “So,” Boudica said after a moment of painful suspense. “Branwen is your foster sister.”

  Thank you, Jesus. I breathed a sigh of relief as Boudica moved on from the subject of patrilineage. But my relief was short-lived.

  “I wonder how it is that I have never heard of you.”

  “Branwen never spoke of me?” I stalled.

  “Never.”

  Now was the moment. Was I going to tell the truth or, as Sarah had put it, concoct a story? Surely there must be another alternative.

  “Well,” I said. “I suppose it might have been too painful for her. To speak of me, that is.”

  “How so?” Boudica was not making much effort to hide her wariness of me.

  Then the gods in their mercy, or perhaps all the credit should go to Jesus, saw fit to have the food arrive at that moment. Lithben stepped in and drew back the blanket to let in half a dozen men and women, bearing pots and platters. Their garments were duller and more threadbare than the queen’s, but I had no way of knowing if they were poor relations, servants, or captives that had been taken in a raid. Boudica, I noticed, thanked them but then dismissed them. She invited us to spoon a venison stew out of the common pot. There were also honey oat cakes and mulled red mead. We were all hungrier than we knew and fell to, not noticing at first the lack of conversation, how loud our slurping sounded in the silence, how intently our hostess watched us.

  I stopped first and sat back, feeling sleepy and hoping Boudica might suggest that we retire to bed.

  “Queen Boudica,” I began. “We thank you for the feast.”

  “Simple fare,” Boudica dismissed any excess gratitude, “such as we can hunt and grow for ourselves.”

  No Roman imports, was the subtext. I heard it.

  “Tomorrow we will roast a pig in your honor. Then we will feast together.”

  “You honor us indeed,” I answered.

  I was about to make polite inquiries about the herds, the crops, the weather, when Boudica took up where she had left off.

  “Tell me why it would have been painful for Branwen to speak of you.”

  There was no doubt who was queen here. This was not a question; it was a command.

  “You know that her father King Bran was captured by Roman forces?”

  “Yes.”

  “Did Branwen ever speak to you of him?” I took a gamble.

  “Everyone knew what happened to him.” Boudica frowned.

  “But did she ever speak of him?”

  “No,” Boudica admitted.

  I had guessed right. Branwen, poet though she was, would have found it painful to have her father made into a poem, a public legend sung by bards, someone that belonged to everyone. In order to keep her own memory of him, she would have kept silent. I understood that.

  “Well, it was the same for her with me.”

  I felt Sarah stiffen beside me; I was teetering on the perilous edge of partial truth, a slippery slope on either side.

  “You were also captured by Romans?” Boudica tried to follow my gist.

  “Yes,” and I breathed a sigh of relief at this unequivocal truth.

  “How did this capture come to pass?”

  Boudica was relentless and completely without delicacy or nuance. Her daughter, who had not yet spoken, looked at me round-eyed, fearful. I couldn’t tell whether she was alarmed by me or by her mother’s interrogation. I began to feel resistant. I considered saying: I don’t like to talk about it. Not in front of children. After all, my capture did involve being drugged and raped, trussed and sold in the Roman Forum. Then my own daughter took the matter out of my hands.

  “My mother was exiled from the Holy Isles in her youth.”

  I watched Boudica turn her gaze on Sarah, as if she had not fully taken in her presence before. She appeared to ponder her, not with curiosity, but with gravity, thoroughness. I turned to glance at Sarah’s profile. I could see some tension in her jaw, but she sat absolutely still on the low stool, her legs crossed in front of her, her back straight. She had everyone’s attention, including Bele and Alyssa, though Bele, bless her, did catch my eye and shrug. She didn’t need to be able to understand every word to know that Sarah had, in effect, grabbed the reins.

  “What authorities exiled her?” Boudica asked with eerie calm. Just another point of information about her guest. “For what crime?”

  I felt as though I was in some awful game of hide and seek. Boudica was “it,” and with each question, she got closer to my hiding place. Now here was Sarah poised to blow my cover.

  “If you want to know what happened,” I yanked the reins back, “ask me. Sarah wasn’t born yet.”

  I readjusted my own posture so that my knee connected briefly and sharply with Sarah’s.

  Boudica nodded and duly turned to me again. And waited, waited for me to answer her question.

  “The druids of Mona exiled me, if you must know,” I finally said. “I interfered with a human sacrifice. I stopped it. Later, much later, after I was freed from slavery in Rome, I found him again and married him, the escaped sacrifice, Sarah’s father.”

  Boudica continued to regard me in that unnerving way of hers, while Lithben’s eyes darted back and forth from me to Sarah, who, as the daughter of an exile and an escaped sacrifice, took on quite a bit of interest for the girl. I caught her eye once and tried to smile at her, but she looked away and hid her face in her mother’s massive shoulder.

  “Do the druids of Mona know that you have returned to the Holy Isles?”

  There were so many other questions Boudica could have asked, it was interesting that she chose that one. The druids of Mona were the authorities she revered; the ones she had obeyed despite her own desires. Did she fear that she was harboring a criminal, a traitor to the combrogos?

  “Branwen knows and Viviane, too,” I answered; at least they were druids in the plural.

  Though her expression did not change, I could sense Boudica weighing this answer, considering whether or not it was adequate, whether or not she was obliged to probe further. I realized it had been that way the whole evening: advance and retreat, wanting and not wanting to know. Boudica was as ambivalent as I was.

  “You said you had a message for me from Branwen,” she spoke at length. “I would hear it now.”

  I took a deep breath for such a brief message.

  “She sends her love.”

  “Her…love.”

  She said it that way, with a vast expanse between those two simple words, as if she could not comprehend them, as if the word love felt strange on her tongue.

  “Yes,” I said. “And Viviane sends her love, too. They say they both know you have always kept faith with the druids of Mona.”

  Sarah had warned me that this message was not adequate to explain the journey I had made, but what I saw in Boudica’s face was nothing like the skepticism I expected or deserved. Her cheeks became blotchy, the bane of some redheads, and she abruptly turned her eyes from me, as to hide whatever strong emotio
n had overcome her. Again I had an urge to touch her, to enfold her, to protect this massive, awkward woman as if she were still my child.

  “Do they know?” she spoke with that gravelly river bottom voice of hers, but I could hear it shaking. “Do they know how it is with us here?”

  She looked at me again; tears stood in her eyes.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “They told me they had not heard from you often since your return to Iceni country. They know you are queen. They hope for the best.”

  The tears began to fall. She let them, as if they had nothing to do with her. Her face remained still.

  “How is it with you here?” I asked gently. “How is it with you, Boudica? Please tell me. I want to know.”

  She just kept looking at me, almost as if she knew, almost as if she remembered who I was. Then her tears stopped suddenly, as if a cold wind had blown them back, frozen their source. Her face became impassive again.

  “You shall know,” she said. “Tomorrow I will tell you. I will show you. But now you must rest from your journey. Lithben, show our guests to their quarters.”

  Boudica did not get up or acknowledge our thanks or good nights with more than a vague nod.

  We were dismissed.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CIVIL DISUNION

  YOU MIGHT THINK that the four of us would have been eager to talk, that we would have pushed past our fatigue and stayed up analyzing Boudica’s every gesture, every word. Maybe you wish we had. You Boudica’s every gesture, every word. Maybe you wish we had. You would have liked to know what we said. But that is not how it went. Perhaps people spoke less in those days, at least when emotion was high, mystery deep. Perhaps the rain and the wind spoke for us, shrouding our silence with their own sound, making any tears or sighs of our own redundant, tossing back any reproaches before they could reach our lips.

  We were wakened early next morning by Lithben as she ushered in a big pot of stirabout carried by two servants, who set about tending our hearth fire. After the night of rain, the dawn was coming up cold and clear. We made our way to and from the latrines, and I was pleased to see that Lithben was still there waiting just outside our hut when we got back. I wanted to get to know my granddaughter, and clearly Sarah wanted to know her niece. Last night Lithben had dashed away as soon as she had shown us to our door.