Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  “NO!”

  Boudica and I were in the guest hut where I had asked to sup with her alone. Her answer to my request that I take Lithben with me to Mona was thunderous. You could practically smell lightning in the singed air between us. I was surprised I hadn’t been struck dead. I did not expect her to say more.

  “How could you?” she spoke again, her voice quieter now but just as full of fury and something else, not so easy to identify. “How could you even ask?” She did not wait for me to answer. “Has there not been enough separation? You lost to your mothers, me stolen from you, your younger daughter running away from you, lost to you for years. And now you want to take my daughter from me? Enough, enough! The curse of this matrilineage ends here. My daughter stays at my side where I can protect her as no one else can.”

  The silence after this speech was so charged, I did not want to touch it. I sat in it hardly daring to breathe. There seemed no opening for simple explanations, like: I want to take her out of harm’s way. Besides, in truth it might not be safe for her to go to Mona, or not safe for those left behind. Hadn’t her mother been called away from druid school, because that association was dangerous? And hadn’t Dwynwyn prophesied terrible things for Mona? Still, I couldn’t shake the feeling there was greater danger to Lithben here—and to her sister.

  “What about your older daughter?” I found my voice again. “If you want to end what you call the curse of our matrilineage, which I think is overstating the case, why are you estranged from her?”

  I had hit her in an undefended place.

  “I am not estranged from her,” Boudica said; this time the pain in her voice was unmistakable. “She is estranged from me. She took her father’s side. She chose to stay with him. There was nothing I could do. There is nothing I can do.”

  I waited a beat.

  “That is not true, Boudica, and you know it.”

  Both of us had been speaking without looking at each other. Now our eyes locked and our wills.

  “How dare you chastise me?” she demanded, and underneath the outrage, I thought I heard wonder.

  “I am your mother,” I said lightly, almost as if it were the punch line of a joke.

  If only we could have laughed. Would everything have changed? But we didn’t.

  “You are my mother,” she repeated, sounding so bereft it broke my heart.

  “I am sorry,” I said.

  “Don’t be,” she had the grace to say after a moment. “It’s just hard to get used to. Everything has changed, and yet nothing has. I don’t understand.”

  “I don’t either,” I agreed.

  Our silence this time was not peaceful, exactly, but slower, like water seeping through ground layers, becoming cool and dark and clear again.

  “Will you do something for me?” she said at length. “For us?”

  Oh my dear lost beloved child, I did not say out loud.

  “Of course.”

  “I can’t let you take Lithben. I can’t. But if you are going back to Mona, tell the druids what is happening here. Tell them about the payments and the conscriptions. Tell them about Prasutagus. Tell them to send us help.”

  I dared to reach out and take her hands. She let me.

  “I will. And I will also ask you to do something.”

  “What?” she said warily.

  “Take Lithben to see her father. Go see your daughter. The four of you need to be together again before it’s too late.”

  She let out a long sigh, and then she astonished me.

  “All right, mother. If you say so.”

  “So soon?” said Sarah

  The four of us were together in our quarters later that night. I had just told them I wanted to leave as soon as we could provision ourselves.

  “We just arrived two days ago,” Alyssa agreed with Sarah. “It seems to me we could make ourselves useful here.”

  “Boudica has asked me to go on her behalf to the druids of Mona,” I explained.

  “Who are as likely to exile or execute you as listen to you,” Sarah pointed out. “Surely she could send a more welcome and well, reliable, ambassador.”

  “She can’t spare any warriors,” I pointed out. “Even the older ones.”

  “Maybe she just wants to be rid of you, Mother of Sarah,” fretted Bele. “Have you thought of that?”

  “That’s possible,” I agreed, “but if she does, that is all the more reason for me not to impose on her hospitality. Besides, I want to go back to Mona.”

  I did not tell them of the vision I’d had on the Tor of myself standing on Dwynwyn’s isle wearing her robes, looking out at the blood-red straits. It was not a happy vision, but no less compelling for that.

  “Isn’t that carrying nostalgia for your youth a bit far?” suggested Alyssa.

  “You need not come with me.” Then I surprised myself by saying, “In fact, you must not come with me.”

  Bele and Alyssa sputtered and protested, but Sarah just looked at me, as if she were trying to see into my mind’s eye.

  “Bele and Alyssa,” Sarah spoke at length, “if Boudica will have you, I think it would greatly relieve my mother’s mind to know you are here to look out for Lithben and befriend Gwen.”

  “Yes,” I agreed, and then suddenly everything became clear to me. “Sarah, you must stay, too. You are their kinswoman.”

  There was a perturbed silence as everyone took in that I meant to go alone.

  “But Mother! That is a long journey,” Sarah objected. “And you are an old—”

  “That’s right,” I cut her off.

  I stood up and the little hut filled with a wind that swirled my garments. I loosed my hair and let it float.

  “I am the Grey Hag. I am the daughter and mother of the holy earth and the holy isles, the mountains are made of my bones. I am the ragged edges of her rocky shores, the breath of her tides, the depth of her seas. Whoever harms me brings down my curse and whoever lends me aid is blessed.”

  I’d intended to mock myself by intoning the lineage I’d boasted the other day, but suddenly my claim seemed true.

  “You’re scaring me, Mother of Sarah,” said Bele.

  “I believe that’s the idea,” answered Alyssa.

  “Right,” I said, and the strange wind I’d called ceased as suddenly as it came. “If I have enough provisions, I can ride straight through. It’s not all paved Roman road, but I believe the Wyddelian will take me all the way to the Menai Straits. If you would see me back to the main road, I will go on from there alone.”

  “Mama,” Sarah hadn’t called me that since long before she ran away. “I can’t. I can’t let you go.”

  I sat down again facing her and she flung herself into my lap.

  “You can, cariad, Colomen Du,” I said, stroking her hair, her black springy hair that like her father’s seemed to have a life of its own. “You can let me go, for a time, for a little time only.”

  Though we both knew it might be forever.

  Sarah sat up and looked at me quietly. I lost myself in the golden light of her eyes. Maybe we both traveled back to the tree in the garden of Tir nan Og where I had stood with her father, and with her, too, just conceived. Then slowly and so subtly I almost didn’t see it, she nodded. And she sang me a blessing I had taught her as a child, the one I had given her father long ago.

  The blessing of Isis go with you

  queen of stars, mother of grain

  she whose tears are the rain

  she whose embrace is the sky

  her wings of protection enfold you

  her breast be your place of rest

  her river with you wherever you wander

  her river to guide you home.

  PART THREE

  Earth

  The Song Of The Stones

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  GREY ONE, RED ONE

  EVEN AT THE HEART of Pretannia, you are never far from the sea. And in this misty land there are rivers everywhere. Many of them run with the Wydde
lian for a time. In their rush or quiet flow, I hear Sarah singing to me and I sing myself, the song becoming an invisible river running between us.

  I soon lost count of the days, though the moon, when the night was not overcast, kept a record for me, waxing from new to full to waning again. I encountered other travelers on the road, and sometimes, if the night was cold or wet, sought hospitality at a village or farmstead. No Celt would turn away a wandering old woman, Grey Hag or not. No Roman soldier or civilians molested me, though some looked at me curiously or askance. And to my great relief no one tried to commandeer Macha, for though a good sturdy horse, she was old and grey like me.

  Sometimes for hours I would see no other human. My days as a hermit in the cave stood me in good stead. I slipped back into solitude as if I had never left it. Yet it was different now. In the cave, memories and old friends, dead and living, had often visited, especially in dreams. Maybe it was being in motion, riding, riding, riding to the west, but even memory fell away. At times, I could barely remember who I was. My name, when I thought of it, seemed unfamiliar and arbitrary. I did not know why it belonged to me. Perhaps I was going a bit mad, but it didn’t trouble me much. I simply felt free in a way that might have frightened me when I was younger. Free of myself, free of my story. I had shifted beyond any recognizable shape.

  Alas, my blissful amnesia was all too short-lived.

  The day I saw the Roman fort rising from the plain, it all came back to me. Wary of riding right past the gates, I decided to leave the Wyddelian for a bit and urged Macha up the ridge, so that I could survey the fort unseen. Unlike the last time we had passed this way, the fort was bustling: a flow of supplies converging on the gate, soldiers practicing maneuvers on the plain, and the constant sound of sawing and hammering. The flag of the general’s own Fourteenth Legion, twin thunderbolts, was flying from the watchtowers. None of this activity augured well for the west. I would have more than Boudica’s news for the druids of Mona—if they would hear me.

  And if I ever got there.

  For I suddenly had an idea, no doubt a crazy idea, but Sarah was not here to stop me. If she knew what I was contemplating, she would kick herself for letting me go alone. But she didn’t know; she would never know unless I succeeded, and perhaps not even then. I turned Macha and headed back down to the road. Whatever the dangers of approaching the fort, at least I would avoid that valley this time, and there was the slimmest possibility that what I was about to attempt could undo the disaster I had foreseen.

  My request to see General Suetonius was met with scorn and even a guffaw from the guards at the gate, which I thought was very bad form, but I am afraid Roman military discipline did not extend to manners. Who should know that better than someone whose husband had been tortured and ridiculed en route to his crucifixion where the soldiers played dice while they waited for him to die?

  “At least she speaks decent Latin, which is more than most of these natives do.”

  I was glad he left out any adjectives before the word native.

  “I can speak Greek, too, if it’s any easier for you to understand,” I added. “Not to mention Aramaic and dozens of Celtic dialects.”

  “What? Are you applying for a job as an interpreter? Or perhaps an informer?” he asked sounding slightly more interested.

  “It could be. That is for the General to decide. After I speak with him. Alone.”

  “Look here,” said the other guard impatiently. “The general is a busy man. No one gets an audience with him, unless he asks for it. Not the other way around.”

  “He will ask,” I said with more assurance than I felt, “when you tell him I am here.”

  “And just who might you be?” he asked, his voice full of condescension.

  How I wished the man was a Celt, and I could wow him with one of my lineages—my descent from the goddess Bride, my relation to a hero of the resistance, my Grey Hag number, but none of those would help me here, and might well land me in the brig. And I had no intention of giving these men my own clearly Celtic name.

  “Tell the general,” I began, not knowing what I would say, “tell the General that the woman you have kept waiting at his gate is…the lover of the world!”

  I expected renewed sneers and rude laughter. Instead both the men looked terrified; blood drained from their faces. I swear I could hear armor rattling. Then the wind lifted, and blew back my cloak; out of the corner of my eye, I glimpsed a flash of bright red hair.

  I was the one who laughed.

  “You shouldn’t go around doing that!” the general fulminated when I was whisked away to his private quarters. “Soldiers are superstitious and easily spooked. Now they’ll be running after—or away from—every old woman they see.”

  He, for one, wasn’t looking at me, but rather pacing while I took my ease sipping the wine he had ordered, eating dried figs and enjoying the warmth of the charcoal brazier.

  “And I will admit, it disappoints me to discover it’s just a cheap trick when I thought—”

  “You thought I would only shape-shift into a ravishingly beautiful young woman for you?” I cut him off. “Well, it was for you. They weren’t going to let me near you otherwise. Besides, whether or not you believe me, it isn’t a cheap trick. I didn’t do it on purpose. It surprised me as much as it surprised your soldiers.”

  Finally he stole a glance at me, as if fearful of what he might see. Which form alarmed him most, I wondered?

  “You can’t do it at will?” he demanded.

  “Perhaps I could learn. But it may be that some circumstance has to call forth the change. Or some person,” I suggested.

  He sighed and stopped pacing abruptly, sitting down on a stool, facing me on the couch where I reclined, and he finally looked at me, as if I were a conundrum, a pending battle on treacherous ground. Or maybe that is how he looked to me.

  “Why are you here?” he finally asked.

  For a moment I forgot or maybe I just didn’t want to remember, didn’t want to think about the enmity between his people and mine, our problem children. I am here because you’re here, I almost said, because you remind me of my beloved, and yet could not be more different. Because I want to go to bed with you again right now.

  “Stop doing that,” he said sharply.

  But he didn’t mean it. The next moment, he was on the couch with me, kissing me as if he was starving and only my mouth could feed him. He pulled back my cloak and I glimpsed my hair again, grey as clouds, and I saw my hands on him, thin and spotted with age. I looked at him, confused.

  “It doesn’t matter,” he said.

  “What doesn’t?”

  “Whether you’re red or grey. It doesn’t matter.”

  And it didn’t.

  * * *

  “Where is the rest of your company?” he asked.

  We were enjoying a late night feast after he returned to his quarters from his rounds of inspection. Until we stopped to eat, we hadn’t spent much time talking.

  “They have stayed on with my daughter, my older daughter.”

  “So you found her,” he said. “Why aren’t you with her, too?”

  Of course we had to have this conversation, this delicate, tricky conversation.

  “I am not with her,” I began, “because I am here.”

  He gave me a look of mixed wariness and amusement.

  “And you are here because?”

  I gestured at our mutual state of undress. He smiled the way he often did with just the corners of his mouth and eyes as if showing his teeth would give away too much.

  “The other reason,” he persisted.

  I sat up and pulled a shawl around me. I did not think I should be so naked when I broached the subject of his son.

  “I wanted to tell you something,” I began. “About your son’s financial policies.”

  He also sat up and instinctively felt for the whereabouts of his sword, though he did not close his hand on it.

  “You mean the policies of the p
rocurator of Pretannia,” he corrected me. “How would you think that as governor I would not be fully aware of them?”

  “Well then, you must be aware that his policies are rapacious.”

  “Why do you say so?”

  “If you give someone a gift and later declare it a loan to be repaid immediately and with high interest, what do you call that? That is what the procurator of Pretannia is doing to the tribes who cooperated with the invasion of their land. He is bankrupting them, taking all their wealth as so-called payment as well as conscripting their men into the Roman army by force. Are you aware of this policy!”

  He didn’t answer right away, but just gazed at me, almost losing focus. I wondered if I had shape-shifted again. If he dared to say something like, You’re so beautiful when you’re mad, I might have to run him through with my own sword (which yes, at Sarah’s insistence, I had brought with me, and which was close to hand).

  “I asked you a question,” I prompted him. “Are you aware of this policy?”

  “Yes,” he said at length. “And as you note, it is his policy, and he was appointed by Emperor Nero to make all such civil policies, just as I am appointed to command the army and protect the peace. They are two distinct offices. As I’m sure you are aware.”

  If he meant to appease me with a nod to my knowledge of the inner workings of the Empire, his attempt failed.

  “Of course I am aware,” I said. “But I am not stupid, and I didn’t think you were. Your job of protecting the peace is going to be a lot harder if civil policies oppress the tribes, even the friendly ones. If Rome wants people to accept the Pax Romana, which is a pretty bitter draught in the first place, you’d better sweeten the deal, make it worth their while, give them something to lose.”

  “You don’t need to lecture me on Roman foreign policy,” he said stiffly. “I know perfectly well how it works. Put simply: people who cooperate are rewarded; people who don’t are dealt with. Swiftly.”

  “But that’s just the point,” I argued. “Plenty of tribes did cooperate, and they are being punished anyway. By your son.” Wisely or unwisely I drove the point home.