Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  “It’s one thing to wander off,” she started in without even acknowledging me, “though it’s a foolish thing to do in country you don’t know. It’s another to ask a child to lie for you.”

  “I did not ask Lithben to lie for me, Sarah,” I sighed, suddenly feeling very tired.

  “No?” she looked up at me and raised an eyebrow. “But you seem to know what I’m talking about.”

  “Lithben came and found me,” I explained. “Now if you don’t mind, I think I really will go and have a rest before the feast.”

  “But I do mind,” she said, and I instantly regretted my phrasing. “Found you where?”

  I plopped down beside Sarah. I ought to put Sarah in her place, refuse to answer any questions, but it seemed too much effort. Also, I was tired of secrets. I needed someone to know.

  “On my way back from visiting King Prasutagus.”

  “I knew that was where you had gone!” she said, as if it had required great powers of deduction.

  “Then why did you ask?” I said, feeling querulous.

  “I wanted to see if you would lie.”

  I was silent for a moment, listening to Sarah scrape away at the blade and wondering how and when I had gotten a reputation for deceitfulness. I had always thought of myself as being honest and outspoken, perhaps to a fault. But Sarah had her own view of me, which did not always square with mine, and was often not very flattering.

  “Stop testing me, Sarah,” I said without much heat. “Just ask me what you want to know and I’ll tell you.”

  “Well, everything,” she answered. “Obviously.”

  But I could not tell her everything, I realized. I had the confidence of a dying man to keep.

  “The king is very ill,” I said. “Gwen, the older daughter, takes care of him, rarely leaves his side.”

  “What’s she like?” Sarah asked, and I heard more than idle curiosity in her tone, questions she would not voice: what’s it like to have a father you can see and touch and tend?

  “She’s very smart and strong-willed,” I said. “She doesn’t look like Boudica, but she is more like her than Lithben is. She believes—or wants to believe—that her father can do no wrong.”

  Just as Boudica believed in her legendary father.

  “But Prasutagus has done wrong,” Sarah asserted. “Boudica told me. The price he received from the Romans for accepting their rule is now a debt. The tribe is bankrupt.”

  “I know,” I said. “Prasutagus told me the same thing. She can’t reproach him any more bitterly than he reproaches himself. I wonder if Boudica knows how remorseful he is?”

  “I doubt she would care if she did,” Sarah shrugged.

  “But they need to talk, Sarah, they need to talk before it’s too late.”

  “What would talk accomplish?” Sarah was skeptical. “Talk can’t undo what’s done. Talk can’t drive away the enemy he let in the door. She wouldn’t talk to him unless he’s ready to fight.”

  “He’s dying, Sarah. They need to talk about what will happen when he’s dead. They need to prepare. They need to talk about their daughters, how to protect them.”

  He needs to tell her what he said in the will, the will I helped him write, against my better judgment, I added silently.

  “And Lithben needs to see her father before he dies,” I added.

  “There is that,” said Sarah quietly. “What will you do about it, Mother? Do you intend to meddle?”

  “Me?” I attempted to make light of her question.

  Sarah looked at me shrewdly.

  “Tell the truth,” she said.

  “There are some truths that are not mine to tell.”

  And with that, I went inside to a well (or un) deserved rest.

  Roman occupation and bankruptcy notwithstanding, Boudica’s feast was a fine one, not excessive like a Roman feast with all sorts of exotic delicacies such as lark’s tongues baked in pastry, not like a Temple Magdalen feast, bread, olive oil, figs and grapes, fresh fish and maybe a goat or spring lamb. Boudica feasted the way the combrogos always had: a whole roasted pig on a spit, stuffed with apples, onions, and root vegetables. There were barley and oatcakes in abundance sweetened with honey. She eschewed imported wine, but strong mead and barley beer flowed in abundance in a feast hall under the heavens, for the night was a fine one.

  It seemed the whole village had gathered. Just as the pig was being lifted and carried to a carving table, men, some young, some a bit older, all armed, began to steal in from the shadows, in ones, twos, small groups, from all directions. All of them first paid respects to Boudica, saluting by holding their spears aloft, and she answered the gesture with her own upraised spear. Then many turned to seek out mothers, sisters, and grandfathers.

  “These must be the warriors who went into hiding to avoid conscription into the Roman army,” said Sarah. “I saw a couple of the women riding out earlier. Boudica must have a system for getting word to them quickly.”

  “But can it be safe?” wondered Bele. “Couldn’t the Romans ambush us here? Now?”

  “I’m sure Boudica must have sent scouts out,” put in Alyssa. “From what we’ve seen, the Romans have pretty much plundered the place already and gone back to the south.”

  “Also,” I added, “it’s not one of the known times for a tribal gathering. The Romans probably keep an eye on those. This is an impromptu feast.”

  “In our honor. Or maybe I should say your honor,” Sarah added a bit ominously.

  I reached for a horn of mead and took a generous swig. Then all our attention was drawn to the roast pig. Boudica stood over the sizzling carcass. With great precision, she sliced into a haunch, making what I recognized as the hero’s cut. Before she could even finish two young men had drawn their swords.

  “Do you dare to claim the hero’s cut, Dylan, you son of horse thieves, who would steal the fastest steed and ride like the wind—away from the enemy?”

  “Who else could claim it? Not you, Brian, who is always first among men, in retreat. You accuse me of your fault.”

  “What are they doing?” Bele asked.

  “I think they are about to fight, I hope not to the death, over the hero’s cut of meat,” I explained. “It’s something Celtic warriors do.”

  The insults went on and on, one jumping in whenever the other took a breath. Meanwhile, Boudica carved on unperturbed, nodding impartially whenever one or the other scored a point. Everyone else watched as if the duel were a part of the entertainment.

  “Well, if they are going to kill each other, I wish they’d stop yammering and get on with it,” grumbled Alyssa. “I’m hungry!”

  “Yes,” I agreed. “It’s worse than prayers, but that’s how it’s done. A fight isn’t worth anything without the challenge first.”

  Then all at once, the swords were clanging and the fight was in full swing, with people shouting encouragement from the sidelines. At first blood, not a serious injury, just a scratch on the face that might result in an interesting scar, Boudica stepped between the men, who fell back, confused but deferent.

  “Well done, Dylan and Brian. It is good to keep the old traditions alive, but I can’t afford to lose either of you. Tonight the hero’s cut will go to our honored guest from the west. Though she is not a warrior, she is the mother of warriors, and after we feast I trust she will in turn honor us with a hero’s tale.”

  And before I could quite take it in the full implications, Boudica approached me, unsmiling for all her cordial words, and presented me with the hero’s cut of meat.

  Honored guests or not, Boudica paid scant attention to us during the feasting, but spent her time conferring with the warrior leaders. Bele, Alyssa, and I sat with the women and girls (those who had not slipped away for amorous visits). My three companions, who had spent the day on the practice fields, seemed to have made friends. Sarah had pretty much mastered the local dialect, and Bele and Alyssa were making admirable progress, since the main subject seemed to be weaponry and fighti
ng. Lots of animated gesturing filled in any linguistic gaps. Eventually some young men sidled closer and joined in what became a bragging contest, with my women being as full of hyperbole as the brashest of the men. None of them, I noticed, had the least inclination to flirt—at least not with the men who seemed to hold no interest for them except as fellow warriors. I had never asked, because Sarah could be prickly about what she perceived as prying, but I suspect she preferred women as lovers, though as far as I knew she had never given her heart to anyone.

  I sat back, replete after the huge cut of meat, which was as succulent and savory as any I have ever eaten, content to watch and listen. I must have dozed off, for I did not notice Lithben coming to sit beside me till her question startled me fully awake.

  “Who is your other child, Maeve Rhuad?”

  “My other child?” I repeated, not sure what she meant.

  “My mother called you the mother of warriors,” explained Lithben. “So I thought you must have another child or maybe more than one.”

  This child didn’t miss a thing. Boudica had said mother of warriors.

  “Perhaps she meant that Bele and Alyssa are like daughters to me,” I ventured.

  I glanced at Lithben who was frowning and gazing into her lap, then suddenly she looked up at me, her expression sweet and grave and so like my own mother’s face it took my breath away.

  “Then you have no other child?” she asked. “No other child than Sarah?”

  How could I lie to her and imply her mother was mistaken or speaking only rhetorically? Perhaps she hadn’t meant Bele and Alyssa at all. Was Boudica trying to tell me something and only her daughter had heard it?

  “I did have another child once,” I answered carefully. “But she was taken from me and sent out to foster when I was exiled.”

  Lithben regarded me, her eyes filled with a sympathy that seemed beyond her years.

  “Maybe my mother knows her,” she said. “Maybe she can help you find her.”

  “Maybe,” I said, not able to get more words past the lump in my throat.

  It was not a good moment to be called on stage.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  HERO’S TALE

  “MAEVE RHUAD.”

  “Boudica’s voice was like a catastrophe starting, an avalanche, a flood. Everyone hushed, hairs standing on end—or at least mine were.

  “Foster sister of the renowned bard Branwen and foster daughter of King Bran. You were at school with Branwen for a time, I believe. Surely you have some tales by heart. It would please me to hear you tell one, a hero’s tale.”

  There were a lot of excuses I could have made and thought of making. That was a long time ago. I never finished my course and earned a silver branch; I barely lasted a year. Before I could begin to demur, Boudica spoke again.

  “Your daughter Sarah tells me you are an excellent storyteller.”

  I did not know whether to feel flattered or set up. I turned to look at Sarah. She looked back at me, but I couldn’t read anything in her face, neither hint nor warning. Her eyes shone with reflected firelight. Boudica rose, crossed to where I was sitting, and extended a hand to me.

  “If you stand here,” she said, raising me to my feet and moving me to what would become center stage, “we will gather round you and everyone will be able to hear.”

  The reconfiguring of the expectant crowd gave me a moment to collect myself, which is to say, panic. I ransacked my brain for tales of cattle raids, elopements, wonder voyages, heroes doomed by geasa, standard bardic fare. I had stood like this before, mind suddenly blank, during my first recital when I could not remember the tale I had memorized and had winged it instead. I had told my own story, the story of Maeve and Esus. It had been a crowd pleaser, even though my departure from tradition had got me placed on academic probation. The tale I had told long ago had barely begun. Now I knew the end. Or did I? How do you know when a tale has ended?

  People rearranged themselves, and at a sign from Boudica, the talk and laughter subsided again. Then she took her seat between Sarah and Lithben, the three faces with all their differences and similarities, side by side. My knees shook, but my voice, as I began to speak, held no tremor. If she wanted a hero’s tale, a hero’s tale she should have.

  “Once upon a time, and timelessness, on an isle faraway and yet as near as your dreams, there lived eight warrior witches who knew all the heroic arts and the arts of love, and yet they lacked one thing: a hero to train. Every day they scanned the curve of sea and sky for a hero-bearing boat bound for their isle, but none ever came until one of the witches, who would not wait for fate, called a great storm that blew a small boat off course where it shattered on the rocks, and a young man, more dead than alive, washed up on their shore.”

  I paused, not for effect as my audience no doubt believed, but because I had never begun the story this way before, with my mothers’ drastic action, the wreck of my father’s ship. The story had always begun with me and Esus, but that was not the story I was telling now. I glanced at Sarah, whose eyes were round and rapt as when I told her stories as a child, this same story and not this story. She gave me an almost imperceptible nod: Go on. And I did.

  After awhile I was hardly aware of my own voice, I was so inside the story, seeing it from my father’s point of view. I experienced his humiliation, how the thwarting of his ambition turned to madness. I was with my mothers, too, and I felt the tensions mount between them as the dream of a hero to love and train became as wrecked as his boat. I told parts of the story I had never known, how my mothers turned a blind eye as the man scrabbled for drift wood among the rocks and cobbled together a boat and finally left one dark moon night riding the tide out to sea.

  “And from all this wreckage and sorrow, a child was born, a girl child, with hair as bright as flame, and so they called her Little Bright One. The witches resolved that she would be their hero child, and they also swore they would never tell her the truth of her begetting. Instead they wove pretty tales for the child of how her father, the god of the sea, came in the night to court the fairest of them all. And their daughter grew strong and lived happily in their midst.”

  I paused again, wondering if I could possibly get away with ending the story here. If I kept on, the story could go on all night, and who knew where it might end. Well, I knew. That was the trouble.

  “Did she grow up to do heroic deeds?” Queen Boudica prompted when I had waited too long. “Did she ever find her father?”

  “Yes to both questions, Queen Boudica,” I answered. “But the tale is a tragic one, and the hour is late.”

  “Heroes’ tales often are tragic,” observed Boudica. “We would hear this tale to the end.”

  I looked at Sarah again, sending her a silent question.

  The truth, answered Jesus’s daughter.

  Help me, beloved, I prayed silently. It is your story, too. Help me.

  And so I resumed the story where, for me, it really began, with the young hero-to-be running away from her mothers and glimpsing her beloved across the worlds in the well of wisdom at the heart of the holy island. When the two met later at druid school, I did not give a location, but I noted a change in Boudica’s expression, a shift from benign interest to wariness. As the plot thickened and a brilliant but disturbed druid began to menace the young pair, wariness gave way to alarm. She had no chair with an edge to sit on, but when I came to the part where the young girl decided to trespass in the sacred grove during her beloved’s initiation rite, I saw Boudica’s hands gripping each other; her knuckles were white.

  “Why would she do that?” Boudica suddenly interrupted the narrative with a voice that was almost a growl, as if the trespass was happening now on her watch. “She knew the rules, and she was forbidden expressly. The druid warned her!”

  In the silence that followed her outburst, I could hear the hissing of the coals as the fire burned low. An owl screeched, and people shifted uneasily and exchanged furtive glances. The evening’s entertainment
was more than they had bargained for. I sensed everyone wondering what I was doing—and if I knew what I was doing. Mine was no predictable tale to be recited to the reassuring strains of a harp.

  “She was a hero,” I said quietly, looking only at Boudica. “Heroes often do foolish things, and sometimes terrible things happen to them.”

  The owl cried out again, and someone rose to stir the fire. It was a moment of decision, Boudica’s or mine.

  “Go on,” she said grimly. “I would hear this tale to the end.”

  It did not escape me that she said I this time instead of we.

  “Sarah,” I said, “you know the story already. Will you take Lithben to bed? Mothers with children, I wish you good night now.”

  You might have thought Lithben or the other children would have protested. They had been caught up in the story so far, for until now the boy and the girl had been children, like them. But everyone sensed Boudica’s ominous mood. They were afraid, even if they didn’t know of what, and glad to be taken away and comforted with familiar beds and embraces. Lithben slipped her hand into Sarah’s and followed without a backward glance.

  I took a deep breath and sent my roots into the earth and my branches to the cool burning distance of the stars. Then I let go and gave myself to the story, telling not only what I remembered but what my father might have seen and felt. There was that girl, his nemesis, following him, plaguing him, pulling him back into helpless chaos. I felt his rage towards the witches, towards her, I felt how hot and wild it made him. I felt him throw the girl down and tear her open. Then I knew his horror when he came to himself again, his self-loathing that made him loathe her more.

  Someone screamed then. I do not know who it was.

  I stopped and looked at Boudica; her eyes were cast down, and then she lifted them to me, lifted her chin. With the barest flicker of an eye, she said: “Go on.”

  So I told how the girl almost lost her mind, even while a baby grew inside her. When I came to the part when the boy healed the girl, I saw that Sarah had returned. She reached for Boudica’s hands and held them in her own. Boudica did not seem to notice, but I saw her grip Sarah’s hand hard as I revealed how the girl learned that the druid who had raped her was her father, how he tried to kill her then. Even with my new understanding of my father, how he could see the boy as both salvation and nemesis remained, to me, a strange and twisted thing, true and distorted at once. When I came to the part where the druid plotted to kill the boy by rigging the lot for sacrifice, Boudica sprang to her feet.