Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  It was not an unpleasant way to spend the last days of our lives, and I might have been quite content if it hadn’t been for the pain, constant yet also stabbing and sudden, when I thought of my daughters and granddaughters. Their names became a ceaseless litany in my mind. Lithben, Gwen, Boudica, Sarah. Lithben, Gwen, Boudica, Sarah. It was all I could do for them, however useless. Though I gazed and gazed into the well till my eyes ached, the fickle water would not reveal how they were faring in the aftermath of the Roman attack.

  But then, I did not have need of visions to know there would be more trouble. I did not know if I was sorry or glad that I would not live to see what would happen on the other side of the Holy Isles.

  It was on Beltane when we first saw the Roman troops. Our warriors and the remaining farmers had lit the Beltane fires and were keeping the rites with as much spirit as they could muster. It was a beautiful full moon night, perfect for bedding down and making love in the fields, lovemaking all the more poignant with the rites of fertility shadowed by pending battle. We old priestesses left the others to it and kept vigil on Dwynwyn’s Isle. By the full moonlight we saw the warriors descending the mountain, crawling like some infestation over the moon-soaked rocks. The Romans moved without torches, perhaps hoping we would not see them as clearly as we might by day. But we did; we watched all night as they kept coming and coming. We imagined we could hear their footfalls, and the squeak of their wagon wheels even over the sound of the sea and the wind, our silence was so intent. At last we turned to each other and spoke among ourselves. Some went to warn the warriors and farmers. The rest of us laid our battle plans.

  Given my lineage (daughter of the eight weather witches) and the tales I had told of my travels as a wind whistler, it is no wonder that my fellow priestesses urged me to confound the enemy with foul atmospheric conditions. So the next morning dense fog, the kind that is indistinguishable from rain and terrible for armor, settled on the Roman camp while the remaining combrogos, now making their own camp on the beach, enjoyed a perfect Spring morning.

  Then something disconcerting happened. The fog moved to our side as if it was being pushed by something—or someone. I whistled for the wind and sent it back, and the same thing happened again. Only once had I experienced anything like this push-pull. Then it had been a tug of war with the wind. Ma and I were traveling on a merchant vessel to Ephesus when our ship was pursued by pirates. The captain ordered me to call a wind to help us outrun the other boat, but the wind kept shifting in the pirate’s favor. I soon realized that there was a weather witch among the pirates—who turned out to be my long-lost daughter.

  But this time it was not Sarah who drove the fog, laced with hail, back to our side of the straits.

  I looked up into the swirling, stinging grey sky, and then I saw fleetingly the snowy flash of a hawk’s wing. If I had any doubt of what I had seen, the sight was followed by the hawk’s scream. I pulled my grey cloak over my head and huddled in the shelter of a rock, as if I were a small creature of prey.

  I didn’t want him to see me.

  “What is it, Maeve Rhuad?” asked Moira.

  “They have someone on their side who knows weather magic,” I told her. “Someone who knows what I am doing.”

  I did not tell her that I thought I knew who it was.

  “Ah,” was all she said.

  “It may be best if we can see them,” I reconsidered. “We can’t delay them forever.”

  I stood up, listening intently. The hawk was gone. I made a chalice of my arms and called the sun to burn away the fog.

  By noon the remaining population of Mona had made camp on the beach, while the Romans constructed their camp on the opposing shore, an efficient but laborious process. They would not do anything hastily; every nut and bolt of every machine and weapon would be in place. All armor would be oiled and ready. Our side had fewer weapons, no armor to polish, so we busied ourselves with making our appearance terrifying, painting the warriors with woad in patterns both intricate and bold, sculpting their hair with lime, so that it stuck out from their heads like branches, lightning bolts, horns. Everyone sharpened daggers and swords, readied the tips of spears, oiled the wheels of chariots.

  At dusk of that long day, the druids who had been allowed or chosen to remain came down from their own rites in the ancient groves. To my surprise, Ciaran was among them. I caught his eye and he approached me, somewhat sheepishly, but also clearly pleased with himself.

  “What are you doing here?” I demanded, as we fell into step together, walking towards Abermenai Point. “Viviane told me that you, she and Branwen were all shipping out to different places. Viviane would have your head on a platter if she knew you had snuck back.”

  He grinned at the thought and looked for a moment not like a venerable archdruid but like the young Ciaran of the blue-black hair, ridiculously handsome and well aware of it.

  “Well, of course I deceived her, or she wouldn’t have gone. As for my head on a platter, perhaps that can be arranged,” he said. “If anyone survives, they could send her my skull, gold-plated, of course. A lovely gift for the new archdruid.”

  “Oh, yes,” I agreed. “Lovely. A chalice made of your dead lover’s head. What every woman wants.”

  “Viviane is made of stern stuff,” said Ciaran. “She’s a druid, and don’t forget we were rivals, too. If she had my skull, she’d get to imbibe all my power, all my wisdom.”

  “Such as it is,” I added.

  “Such as it is,” he said agreeably.

  When we reached the point, we turned away from the sight of the new-sprung Roman camp and looked west towards the Hibernian Sea. Our silence was sweet, companionable, two old friends watching the sun go down as if it were not the eve of our almost certain doom.

  “We will be telling stories tonight,” said Ciaran. “To give courage to the combrogos. Will you tell one?”

  “I got kicked out of druid school after only a year,” I reminded him. “I hardly know the canon. I don’t know any battle stories at all except Queen-Maeve-Takes-a-Leak.”

  “Tell your story,” Ciaran said, his voice suddenly serious. “Your story and Esus’s.”

  It was a strange and wonderful thing to be telling our story for the last time on the island where we first met in the flesh, where we became lovers, where we parted on the very shore where the combrogos would make their stand tomorrow. A few of the remaining bards had told rousing stories before mine, encouraging the combrogos to bravery in battle. Mine did not fit any of the traditional categories—invasions, conceptions, cattle raids—though perhaps it could be considered a wonder voyage. I took up the tale with Esus escaping with his life across the straits and myself exiled beyond the ninth wave to faraway, exotic lands.

  My story served one purpose at least, distraction from our current plight. That is, until the feeding of the five thousand, the exact same place the general had interrupted with the exact same objection.

  “But why did Esus not let them make him king?” one warrior demanded, incensed enough to get to his feet. “Surely they would have fought for him against the plaguing Romans, and the more stings to the beast in the more parts of its hide, the better.”

  I did not have a chance to answer before an old, cantankerous druid jumped in.

  “He was under a geis, same as all druids, and he could not bear arms.”

  “But he wasn’t a druid,” another warrior objected. “You druids planned to murder him. He never finished his studies.”

  “He was an initiated dedicate,” another druid insisted. “It comes to the same thing.”

  “Well, even if he was a druid, and couldn’t bloody his precious, useless hands, he could have directed the army. Look at Lovernios. He was a druid, and the best strategist we ever had.”

  None of the druids answered him, out of embarrassment or tact. For all the druids who remained were old enough to remember that Lovernios had lobbied for the Stranger’s sacrifice. They also knew that he was my father—and B
oudica’s father—and that the tidal bore I called had been his death. An awkward bit of back story.

  “Maeve Rhuad,” Ciaran took charge. “Please continue. Perhaps Esus’s reasoning will become clear to us as the story unfolds.”

  And perhaps not, I thought. It had not made sense to the general, who even now was probably walking through his camp, rallying his troops. I suddenly wished I had not agreed to tell our story, a story that could be interpreted as defeat. How could I tell it so that they would understand it? Had I ever understood it myself?

  I had to trust the story. I had told it so many times, or rather it had told itself through me. It was alive, not a set piece. I never knew what the story would reveal or how each listener would hear it. When I got to Esus’s crucifixion, some people wept openly, others became very still, and some declared that his death would be avenged. I waited until everyone had had his say, or his silence, and then I told them about the tomb. I sang for them the song I sang to my beloved, chanting over and over, love is as strong as death, love is as strong as death.

  At last I came to the part I hoped would speak to all of them—the dawn garden, the leaves that shone with their own light, his beautiful healed and wounded body, our eternity together under the tree.

  “And then I said to him, cariad, what is this place? Do you know what he answered?” I asked my listeners.

  There was a pause; I thought I could hear everyone’s heartbeat, scattered bits of life, bright as the stars. Then all at once, the combrogos cried out.

  “Tir nan Og! Tir nan Og!”

  “Yes. We were in Tir nan Og,” I said when it was quiet again. “We are in Tir nan Og. That is all we need to know. That is the end of the story, and that is the beginning. Rest now.”

  “Maeve Rhuad,” someone called out, the man who had lauded my father. “There is one more thing I’d like to know.”

  “What is that?” I asked, suddenly feeling uneasy.

  “Will you be calling a tidal bore tomorrow? To destroy our enemies, to avenge your Esus?”

  Holy Mother, I silently called out to Isis, to Ma, to Brigid, to Anna, to Dwynwyn, to all my long-lost mothers. How do I answer that? What is the answer?

  “I don’t know,” I heard myself say.

  I closed my eyes and remembered that day: Esus escaping across the straits with the Hibernian women, the druids hard on their heels.

  “Call the wind,” Dwynwyn had ordered me. “Call the tide.”

  And I did. I don’t know how I knew what to do. I don’t even know what I did. Somehow I opened: my mouth, my arms, my heart, every orifice and pore, every cell. Standing there howling on the dune, I met and mated with the elements. They took on my passion; I took on their power.

  I called the wave to save Esus’s life, not to drown the druids, even though they were my enemies, the ones who wanted to kill my beloved three times over. The druids had all wheeled around and ridden to safety, except for one. Except for one.

  Dismounting, he sent his horse after the others. For one moment, he stood still. Then with his arms open, he walked straight towards the bore. As if his eyes were mine, I saw the black water blot out the sky.

  Later the druids accused me of murdering him.

  “Lovernios,” I said out loud, opening my eyes and looking at the combrogos gathered around me. “My father. I will call on the spirit of my father, who gave himself to the wave, who died and lives in Tir fo Thuinn.”

  I laid claim to my paternity, which I guessed had never been fully accepted or openly acknowledged by the druids, who had turned me into a seducing silkie to avoid tarnishing their famous druid’s name. That, after leaving me to the mercy of the sea as the late archdruid had so poetically expressed it.

  “Why call on your father?” Ciaran asked. “I thought it was your legendary mothers who taught you weather witchery.”

  “My mothers, the warrior witches of Tir na mBan.” I spoke the name to see if it still caused men to fall into a trance—of terror or delight.

  It did. They all sighed at once. Some of them swayed. One began to sing a song without words. Another wept. For a moment I thought I could smell the blossoms of our magical orchard where the trees always bloomed and bore. All at once, I felt homesick, for Tir na mBan, for Temple Magdalen, for pleasure, for peace.

  “My mothers,” I said when they had come back to their ordinary senses, “have no allegiance to you, the people who exiled their daughter. It is through my father that I am one of the combrogos. It is his daughter Boudica who has just been grievously wronged; his granddaughters who have been raped by the Romans, as he once raped me. Yes. Raped. Me. He would have killed me, too, if he could. He tried to kill Esus.”

  I paused for breath. I didn’t know what I would say next, but I knew there was more.

  “Did you know that Esus taught his companions to love their enemies? Anyone can love their friends, he said. I say sometimes it is hard to know who your enemies are or how your friends are any different. You can love your enemy, and turn your enemy into a friend.”

  I thought of Paulina, who seemed so far away now and long ago, a Roman who had once abused me, and then become my follower, benefactress and finally a true friend. I remembered how she had come to warn me of the danger to Jesus from one of her compatriots, Pontius Pilate.

  And there was another Roman enemy I had loved, so close now, if I whistled, the wind might carry the sound to his ear. And yet his son had ordered the atrocity inflicted upon my daughter and granddaughters.

  “What does it mean?” I went on. “What does it mean to love your enemy on the eve of battle? Do you spare your enemy even though he won’t spare you? Do you kill him, because he will kill you? Which is worse, death or murder?”

  I fell silent again. No one jumped into the breach. I could hear the tide turn, beginning to go out. By dawn it would be near low. That’s when they would cross.

  “I do not know the answer to my own questions,” I said at last. “I only know I will stand with you. I will call on my father Lovernios; I will call on my father Manannan Mac Lir. The son of the wave will answer for the wave.” I paused for a beat, and then I added for good measure, “I have spoken.”

  That night we all slept on the beach near Abermenai Point where it was likely the Romans would cross. (If you are wondering, I had left Macha on the far side of Dwynwyn’s Isle with a geis on her, if such a thing can be laid on a horse, not to leave the island until I came back or danger had passed.) The priestesses stayed together, a huddle of folded black wings, tucked heads with me gathered into their midst, though I was the only red-robed priestess, like the flash of red on a red-winged blackbird.

  I didn’t expect to sleep, but I must have, for I dreamed two dreams, if they were dreams.

  In the first one, I am a child on Tir na mBan, alone on the cliff tops on a full moon night waiting for my father Manannan Mac Lir to come to visit me. At last I see him striding on the path the moon makes on the water. He’s big enough to scoop the moon right out of the sky and drop it into the magical bag made of cranes’ skins that he carries slung over his shoulder. But he doesn’t need the moon; he has treasures enough, which he will spread out for me to see, bright and shining in the moonlight.

  Now he is scaling the cliffs as if they are nothing more than small beach rocks, and then he is with me, not huge anymore, but old and sad and tired, his once bright hair as grey as mine has turned.

  Lovernios.

  Without a word to me, he opens the crane bag and lays out some dusty looking treasures. I know what they are but am shocked to see them looking so ordinary, so diminished: the king of Caledonia’s shears, the king of Lochlainn’s helmet, Goibne’s smith hook, the bones of Assail’s swine, Manannan’s own shirt, and a strip from the great whale’s back.

  “You have saved these treasures,” he says to me.

  “I don’t understand,” I say. “How did I save them? I thought they were yours.”

  He doesn’t answer, but as I gaze at the objects, I se
e them coming to life; they are ogham, letters encoded with stories, songs, histories, powers. They are the wings of the cranes inscribing their secret wisdom in the sky.

  Then they are just objects again. Slowly, Lovernios puts the treasures back in the bag. Then he stands to face me. Now we are on the narrow spit of tidal sand near Dwynwyn’s Isle, where we recognized each other fully for the first time, where he tried to kill me and the life I carried within, the life he had begotten.

  “You are my daughter,” he acknowledges me at last. “You are my daughter.”

  “Then, father, save me,” I plead. “Save us all. Come in with the tide and save us.”

  Almost, but not quite, he shrugs. The sadness remains in his face, etched there, and yet he seems to have nothing to do with it.

  “The hazelnut is already safe,” he says. “The hazelnut of wisdom.”

  Then he shoulders his bag and walks over the water, following the moon across the Hibernian Sea until he disappears under a distant wave.

  In the next dream, I am walking to Abermenai Point. Dawn is in its early stages, the world all shades of grey: water, sky, sand, woods, the mountains across straits, the lone figure standing there, waiting for me.