Red-Robed Priestess

by Elizabeth Cunningham

  We walked southwest. We walked in a daze, so numb we could hardly feel the ground under our feet or notice our own hunger and thirst. The weather cooled and the sun covered itself in cloud, so the smell of Boudica’s body did not overwhelm us. On the fourth day, we saw the Tor in the distance. On the fifth day we entered the mists shrouding the isles and waterways of Avalon. Aoife was waiting for us in a boat. Priestesses came to take Macha and Sarah’s Blackfire to the stables. The four of us, Sarah, Lithben, Gwen, and I, lifted Boudica’s body into the boat. Aoife rowed us over the dark waters to the healers’ island.

  There in the hut, where Sarah and I had kept vigil with Joseph, the priestesses gave us wine mulled with herbs, bitter and sweet. We lay down on mats woven of river reeds and slept at last without fear, without dreams.

  The next day, with all the priestesses attending, we buried Boudica on Beekeeper’s Island, a place that Saint Brigid later visited on pilgrimage to honor a shrine there dedicated to me. No historical accounts will tell you of this burial. You can believe my story or not as you will. This you cannot doubt: Boudica was as great and flawed a hero as any who ever lived. She knew very little happiness in her life. It comforts me to think of her body turning into the earth of a place that has a different kind of power than the powers she fought against so fiercely.

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  THE END IS IN THE BEGINNING

  WITH MANY OTHER homeless refugees from the war, we spent the winter in Avalon. I watched as numbness gave way to grief, Lithben and Gwen grieving for their mother each in her own way, Sarah grieving for companions she’d lived with for longer than she’d lived with me. I just grieved. Grief cut deep channels around islands of respite. I traveled on these channels, visiting different times and places, different loves, different losses. It was winter, time to pull in, to gather wool and spin, spin a cocoon, a shroud, a dream within a dream.

  Then spring came. The quiet refuge went wild with the sound of birds migrating, mating, nesting. Willows burst into gold and the alders flamed red. The waters surged with rain and snow melt. Joseph of Arimathea’s thorn tree bloomed and bloomed. Lambs were born, herds of white clouds in the green grass. Beautiful as it was, I wasn’t sure how I felt about all this burgeoning life. Begin again? I thought. Begin all over again? Resurrection can feel relentless. I wandered about grousing a bit to my beloved about his part in it—and mine.

  One day Aoife came looking for me and found me helping Gwen and Lithben gather swamp marigold.

  “Maeve Rhuad, I would speak with you.”

  Eventually, I thought, knowing Aoife’s long silent preambles. This was no exception. We walked to a boat and she rowed me silently through the loud marsh till we came to the isle of the Tor. We disembarked and sat on greensward at the foot of the Tor where Aoife set forth a small feast of honey cakes and mead.

  We ate and drank in silence, the spring sun strong, the air still cool and fresh, two old women enjoying their creature comforts.

  “Maeve Rhuad,” she finally spoke, “we have been observing your granddaughters. Your daughter Sarah we already know has the gift of healing in her hands, and we see now she has claimed her gift, though I will also say she seems restless, as if part of her is not here.”

  I had noticed that, too, and wondered what to do. Ever since she ran away from the mountain, Sarah had been a wanderer. Even when she lived in the Camargue with the other sometime pirates, she had lived in a wheeled tent.

  “Gwen has a different gift,” Aoife continued. “She has patience. She has discipline. We’d like to train her to be a priestess of Avalon.”

  “And Lithben?” I asked, though I hardly needed to ask.

  “There has not been a seer of her skill in my lifetime.”

  “Not since Miriam,” I said aloud, forgetting that Miriam was Sarah’s foremother, not Lithben’s.

  Aoife was quiet again and did not seem to need to ask who Miriam was.

  “Lithben needs no training that we could give her, but she is welcome to stay with us, as you are, Maeve Rhuad. We would be honored.”

  Now I was quiet. Aoife wasn’t finished. There was a but somewhere.

  “What are you saying, Aoife, what are you asking?”

  “I am asking you what you want, Maeve Rhuad.”

  Want. Did I want anything? Must I want anything?

  “Maeve Rhuad, I will leave you to walk the spiral path of the Tor.”

  And that’s an order, she might as well have added, as she packed up our picnic and hotfooted it to the boat.

  “Aoife,” I protested. “Have mercy. Climb that thing! Again? There are plenty of ways to divine that don’t involve sore feet and sweat.”

  Aoife’s only answer was her laughter as she rowed away.

  So I climbed, or rather I wound around and around, I spiraled, I wove. Each step got lighter and lighter, and so did my heart as I rose and rose. Finally I stood at the top, the water and land spread below me reaching the round horizon of the whole world.

  I turned slowly in a circle, then faster, till I spun. When I stopped spinning and the world stopped spinning, I saw in the far blue distance the shape of a woman’s body, reclining in the sea, rising from the sea.

  Sarah is at the helm; all her old pirate skills have revived. We have a boat, a brave little boat with oars and sail. We sail west northwest past Mona, past Man, past the shore of Caledonia.

  “Is Tir na mBan in this world or the Otherworld, Grandmother?” asks Lithben.

  “It is between the worlds,” I say.

  “When will we get there?” she asks, more to hear my voice than because she needs to know.

  “When the moon is right,” I tell her.

  At last one evening, we see the island, rising dark from a red sea, the daughter moon hanging low between her breasts. From her thighs, the breeze carries the scent of apples towards us over the water.

  Sarah starts the song, and we all sing with her.

  Hail to thee, thou new moon

  Jewel of Guidance in the night

  Hail to thee, thou new moon

  Jewel of Guidance on the billows

  Hail to thee, thou new moon

  Jewel of Guidance on the Ocean

  Hail to thee, thou new moon.

  Jewel of Guidance of my love.

  Then we are home.

  Between Bride’s Breasts is a green valley. The light there is gold. People have spent lifetimes trying to paint that light. They’d fill skies with it and place the earth-colored robes of saints before it. Or birds would fly there, delicate specks of darkness. Painters would take that gold and put it around his head and his mother’s. But to me the light in the paintings looks too heavy and dead, gold cooled to metal, something you can take off and put on.

  This light isn’t like that, though I won’t say it isn’t heavy. Its heaviness is warmth and sweetness and languor. Living gold. It lives in that valley. You can taste this light. It’s food, you see, and drink. You can feel it flow through the rivers of your arteries and veins. In the heart of the valley wells a pool. Nine hazelnut trees grow around it, bending their branches over it, dropping their wisdom-ripe nuts to the salmon swimming there. Five streams flow out from the pool into all the holy rivers of the world.

  That is where I live now. I listen to the song of the stones—and the wind and the water and the stars. Years pass, if time passes at all in this place. I sit and gaze into the well of wisdom where I first saw my beloved across the worlds. Sometimes I catch glimpses of him still; sometimes I just look at the sky reflected in the water that leads the way into some unknown depth of earth.

  One day I see the Temple of Jerusalem as if I am looking at it from the Mount of Olives. The Temple is burning. Soldiers swarm in the Kedron Valley and the air is full of wailing and smoke. At the same time, I see the soldiers storming the beach on Mona, the burning groves blackening the sky. And then I see Boudica standing alone, gazing at the end of her world.

  “All temples fall, Maeve,” my beloved
says.

  Wild roses overrunning Temple Magdalen, a stork taking flight from the last pillar of the Temple of Artemis.

  Then I see him, walking through a field, flinging seeds into the sky, letting them fall where they will, among stones and thorns, onto soft earth, into cracks of the sky, the cracks of parched lips.

  Slowly I get to my feet, bare feet, the most beautiful feet I have ever seen, surely the feet of a goddess. I admire them for a moment.

  Then I look into the well again; it gives back the gold of the sky, the gold of the tree whose leaves shine with their own light, the gold of our daughter’s eyes. He is waiting for me there. His hand is open. The way is open.

  With my beautiful feet, I step into the water.

  EPILOGUE

  All temples fall, all temples fall.

  It’s all in the hazelnut

  the fire in your head

  it’s all in the mustard seed

  flying from your hand.

  All temples fall, children, all temples fall.

  Seeds grow in the night

  no one knows how

  the trees fill the heavens

  the birds crowd the bough.

  All temples fall, sisters, all temples fall.

  The dead take the field

  at the end of every fight

  from the last ruined column

  a stork takes flight.

  All temples fall, brothers, all temples fall.

  The roses grow wild

  where lovers lingered late

  and black smoke billows

  from the beautiful gate.

  All temples fall, beloved, all temples fall.

  Deep in the hazelnut

  the fire still burns

  and the mustard seeds rise

  on the wings of the birds.

  All temples fall, all temples fall.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I WOULD LIKE to thank my martial arts teacher, Hawksbrother, for his keen insight into the character of Gaius Suetonius Paulinus. I also have Hawksbrother to thank for Maeve and Suetonius’s love affair, their penchant for shape-shifting, and their parallel quests for long-lost children. Without these key plot elements, the story would have been much less complex.

  Thanks to my dear friend and fellow writer, Cait Johnson, for her suggestion that Jesus and Suetonius could have been brethren in a literal, not just theological, sense. Thanks also for her steadfast encouragement.

  I send gratitude and appreciation to Hilary Belden, my gracious hostess in England when I researched Boudica’s story.

  Jhenah Telyndru, author of Avalon Within, a Sacred Journey of Myth, Mystery, and Inner Wisdom, augmented her splendid book with additional consultations about where in Avalon events in the novel might have taken place. My thanks to this generous author.

  Thanks to my sister-out-law, Debbie Stone, first reader and tireless proofreader of all my books. I can’t imagine bringing a book to birth without her.

  Thanks also to my combrogo, Tim Dillinger, whose journey with Maeve brought him to late-night proofing with Debbie and me as well as to the magnificent team at Monkfish. Thanks always to Paul Cohen, and to Georgia Dent, whose brilliant design illumines this book. And thanks to my steadfast agent, Deirdre Mullane.

  And finally gratitude and love to my husband Douglas who is my ground.

  SOURCE ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Much of my research for the parts of the novel that take place on Mona dates to my writing of Magdalen Rising. My exploration of Celtic lore and literature began then.

  Jhenah Telyndru’s Avalon Within (aforementioned) was an excellent guide to the Glastonbury Tor and the surrounding sacred sites.

  Boudica’s story is well known, and there are several re-enactments of her final battle available on YouTube. The book I relied on most was Boudica, The Life of Britain’s Legendary Queen by Vanessa Collingridge.

  Like anyone writing about Boudica, I also read the accounts of the Roman historians Tacitus and Dio Cassius.

  The hymn “Hail to thou new moon” and the blessing “Bride be taking charge of you in every strait” come from Carmina Gadelica: Hymns and Incantations collected in the Highlands and Islands of Scotland in the Last Century (really the 19th) by Alexander Carmichael. This work is now in the public domain.

  ONSITE RESEARCH

  During the writing of each of The Maeve Chronicles, I have been fortunate to be able to travel. For Red-Robed Priestess, I visited Iceni country in Norfolk as well as Colchester, London, and St Albans (Camulodunum, Londinium, and Verulamium), the sites her army razed. I also went to southern Britain and saw the ruins of the port town where Maeve and Suetonius would have come ashore. No one knows for certain where Boudica fought her last disastrous battle. Following the story line of a BBC program, I traveled to Mancetter, a small village near Atherstone in Warwickshire, where I wandered the countryside until I found a valley that matched Tacitus’s description. Having walked there from the broad plain where Boudica’s army might have assembled, I realized that she would not have been able to see the trap Suetonius had laid for her until it was too late. For a fuller account, please see “Boudica’s Last Battlefield” on my website.

  In addition to Hilary Belden, who provided me my home base in London, I would like to thank the following:

  Bernard Penny of the Verulamium Museum for detailed information on items in the museum and for many entertaining stories about Roman times.

  The Re-Enactor at Verulamium Museum for his dramatic presentation about the life of a Roman Soldier in the Fourteenth Legion.

  Gerry and Angela Evans of Quarry Farm who pointed me the way to the footpath and on whose farm I found what I believe is Boudica’s last battlefield.

  The Reverend Canon Adrian Mairs who told me how to find the site of the fort where some of the Fourteenth Legion were stationed.

  Donna Davis and Martin Silcock of the Blue Boar in Mancetter for helpful information, directions and the best breakfast ever.

  John Grigsby of the Roman fort at Richborough who told me where Suetonius would have departed from and landed en route to his governorship in Britain.

  In closing, I want to thank all my sources, literary and personal, on both sides of the Atlantic. Any historical, military, or geographical inaccuracies in Red-Robed Priestess are mine.

  MAEVE

  Who can say what we are to each other?

  Who imagined whom?

  You have called me forth

  as much as, more than, I have you.

  Your folly and bravery

  are all I aspire to.

  Do not forsake me

  in the hard or beautiful time to come

  though our daily work is done.