“Open your eyes now,” she said. I could hear and feel her breath against the back of my neck. I blinked a few times as the strange, trance-like haze lifted.
“How do you feel?” she asked at a whisper. It seemed she knew before I could respond, but fatigue dragged me down like gravity turned up a notch; my body was heavy, and it was difficult to hold my head straight.
“What the hell was that?”
“Rest a moment,” she said. “It will take time to clear.”
Aline pulled me gently to her and eased my cheek against her shoulder until my vision sharpened once more. The experience was fresh in my mind, and the questions mounted to make my confusion all the worse until she spoke again.
“I know how it must seem to you right now, but this is no different than before: you wouldn’t be able to understand unless you saw and experienced it for yourself.”
“I have no idea what I just saw,” I replied. “I hope you’re going to explain because I’m about as confused as I can be right now.”
She took my hands in hers the way she always does when another bizarre surprise is about to be revealed.
“I brought you there so we could start at the beginning,” she began. “I know it seemed strange and unrecognizable to you, but what you saw were moments from my past. I will show you many more of them later, but for the moment, it was important for you to see from the earliest days.”
I stared at her as the uneasiness returned.
“I don’t understand what you’re saying; that looked like walking around inside a scene from a weird movie, not the memories from a little kid in Cardiff!”
Aline smiled and said, “When we sat in your living room that day, would you have believed if I only told you the things I can do?”
“Well, no, but…”
“As it was then, it was important for you to see and feel before I explain.”
It was clear her next words would take me down a similar path, and I felt my stomach churn when I nodded and asked her to continue.
“I was first born in a small village on the southeastern coast of what is now called Anglesey. I’ll take you there, but our village was near to where Pentraeth stands today.”
“Wait a second,” I interrupted. “I thought you were born in Cardiff.”
“I was born in Cardiff, but not the first time.”
“The first time?”
“This person—the one you know as Aline Lloyd—was born in 1980 at University Hospital in Heath, north side of Cardiff.”
I could feel my brow furrow as confusion and the suddenness of fear and worry wrapped me like cold tendrils.
“But you just said you were born Pentraeth!”
“Yes, I was.”
I shook my head quickly, trying to keep track of the confusing and contradictory words.
“This is starting to sound like some half-ass version of Who’s on First!”
She smiled and nodded because, as usual, she was waiting for me to catch up—to walk a solitary path of discovery and reach her where she waited patiently.
“I can’t tell you something like this in easy to understand stages, Evan, so here goes: the images you saw were from the early days in the life of a young girl called Tegwen merch Nyfain. It means Tegwen, daughter of Nyfain.”
“The woman looking at me was Nyfain?”
“That’s right. I don’t know exactly when or even the time of year because we didn’t keep track of birthdays on anything like modern calendars. By today’s calculation of time and era, the closest I can put it is sometime around 460 AD.”
“Those were her memories?”
“They’re very much like memories,” she replied quickly, “but not the way we think of them now. It’s difficult to explain, but those images are places in time; you can call them memories, but that’s not what they are.”
“Then what are they?” I asked, fighting back against the confusion.
“They’re rather like living snapshots, I suppose, waiting inside to be found and experienced whenever we like through a sort of portal, or doorway. We can’t go back in time physically, but I can take you to some of those moments, and you can see and experience for yourself a distant past and places now gone from history.”
“How can you see memories…moments…from a kid who lived fifteen hundred years ago? How do you know her name?”
“I know because those moments were mine, Evan; I am Tegwen.”
I could hear my heart begin to pound and the ringing started low in my ears, growing to a high-pitched screech, just as it had on my first day sitting with Jeremy. Aline was inside again and I could feel the uneasiness begin to ebb. She was moving to calm the storm gathering in my imagination, where yet again, the impossible was held up before me as an inescapable truth I couldn’t avoid. When the ringing stopped, I looked at her.
“This is ridiculous; are you telling me you’re…reincarnated?”
Though I didn’t understand, Aline had been preparing for that moment since the earliest days of our relationship, and she answered immediately.
“Not in the way most people use the term today, but yes—I have lived other lives and my first was a girl called Tegwen.”
“How can you know when this happened?”
“The old ones who visited our village spoke of a time long before when foreign soldiers came and conquered our people. They endured, and the soldiers went away, but many hundreds of seasons had passed, and I now understand they meant the withdrawal of Roman legions from Britain.”
I could feel the blood drain from my face where I sat in the darkness. I couldn’t move, and Aline’s words brought a single, spirit-crushing realization: the girl I loved was delusional at best and perhaps a criminally insane murderer at the very worst. Seeing and feeling what she claimed was a moment in the past as though I lived through it myself was a powerful experience, but not enough to pull me across the dividing line between us.
“Reincarnation is just a perception of life people use to make themselves feel better about death, Aline. Heaven, Paradise, Nirvana…it’s all the same. You have the power to make me see or think anything you like, but what you’re saying is just not possible.”
She took in a deep breath, and I could see her smiling in the dim light.
“If this wasn’t real, why would I bother to show you? What would be the point?”
“You tell me!”
“Think about it, Evan. What could I possibly gain by dragging you through such a thing? None of it matters for Renard’s purpose or Burke’s, so why would I go through the bother? You don’t believe, and it only confirms your suspicions about madness and the reasons they kept me in that hospital. In my place, would you perpetrate a lie and the turmoil it will bring?”
The seconds ticked by as I considered, but there was no easy answer. Clever people can make logical arguments and still be stark raving mad, I reminded myself, but none of them can walk into my conscious mind and make me see, think, or feel. I needed to buy time, even at the risk of obvious condescension.
“Okay, let’s say it’s all real and you’re not jerking my chain; how many times have you lived?”
“Six,” she replied firmly. “This life is my seventh.”
“And you say you were born in the middle of the fifth century…”
She smiled sadly and said softly, “I knew you would resist this. It’s not something most people could grasp, but you must see and understand what was before I can show you what is.”
“After all that stuff in my living room, I was ready to believe anything, but this is just…”
“Crazy?” she said quickly.
“It’s not something you hear every day, is it? And anyway, I thought each life that ended was supposed to blend immediately into the next; you’d live a hell of a lot more lives than only seven in fifteen hundred years.”
She leaned forward on her hands like a teenager at a slumber party, neither overexcited nor shying away from a description she waited a year to mak
e.
“When I was first born, we did believe the soul passed seamlessly through from one life into another, but it turned out to be something quite different. I can’t explain how or why it happens because there was no one who ever explained it to me—it simply was. When it happens, and we recognize the moment, we accept it.”
“Are there more of these moments from that first life?” I asked. “Beyond what you showed me just now?”
She nodded and said, “Many more, and I’ll take you there when we have time. If it makes you feel any better, I had no idea what they were when I first experienced them. As I grew older, I learned what they really are and how to move through them. It’s hard to describe in words, but over time, I knew without understanding why. Does that make sense?”
“Not really.”
“It will become easier as we go because there are qualities that allow you to simply know things without being told—you won’t have to ask.”
We moved closer; the process continued, and I felt myself shifting to another place. It wasn’t fear holding me, and I didn’t need rescue, but other thoughts pulled at my sleeve.
“Who were those people?”
She paused for a moment so that her reply could be made without adding to my confusion—careful and precise.
“The old man you saw speaking to me alone was called Cadwal; he was a very wise, very learned man—a bard.”
“I didn’t understand a word he said.”
“Today’s historians and linguists would call it an ancient Brythonic dialect—a dead language, obviously. We didn’t speak Welsh or English the way we do now, at least not yet.”
“What was he saying?”
“It was a warning,” she said. “I was different than the other children in my village, and he knew it.”
“Different because of your special abilities?”
“The old ways were dying out, and he wanted to make me understand those things I could do would become dangerous in the eyes of others one day.”
“The arrival of Christians.”
“Not specifically, but they were a part of it. The Romans were gone more than a century before I was born; by then, Christianity was spreading everywhere—it wasn’t new or strange to us.”
“But the old man had a problem with it.”
“He was one of the last who kept strictly to the old ways, but that wasn’t what worried him. Instead, he knew there were very few like me and what I could do would make people afraid. He simply knew where it would end, and he demanded that I keep that knowledge to myself—to never reveal it.”
“Afraid and violent,” I said with a sad smile. “That sounds a lot like Claude Dumont.”
“Yes, and now you can understand why he was compelled with such desperation. For him, the things I did that day in Brugge could only be described as either a miracle and the work of God or some sort of Satanic spell,” she said with a sad expression. “He saw the impossible and it frightened him.”
“And the old man,” I continued. “He worried the Christians might see you as a threat?”
She smiled and shook her head, knowing at once I didn’t understand.
“Many of our people were Christians by that point, Evan—there was no conflict.”
“But Cadwal wasn’t buying it?”
“He listened when the holy men came through our village from time to time, but I don’t remember him resenting it or fighting against them. The images are incomplete, but it wasn’t the old ways he was worried about or the acceptance of Christianity; all of it was inevitable and I think he knew.”
“What bothered him?”
“My abilities had nothing to do with faith or religion. He was very wise and making me promise to never tell or show anyone was a practical matter, not a theological contradiction.”
I pictured again in my mind the old man and the solemn expression he wore as he spoke to her. I couldn’t understand his words, but his sincerity was obvious.
“Who was he,” I asked after a pause. “An elder?”
“Cadwal didn’t live in our village, but he came to us quite often. I never knew where he was born, and it’s likely he had no longer kept a home at all, moving from village to village in a routine circle to teach some of us. My generation was among the last who were trained in the old ways.”
“When you say ‘old ways,’ you mean he was like a Druid priest, or something?”
“That is exactly what he was,” she answered, “but it was a normal part of life and not the way they characterize in the modern era; he didn’t pop up one day and say, ‘Right! I’m a powerful, mystical Druid, so everyone pay attention.’ The Romans drove Druids to near extinction long before I was born, but the traditions were still practiced during my lifetime…Tegwen’s life.”
“But the term is accurate and what historians would call him today?”
“It’s who we were. Cadwal was an influential and revered person—a seer and interpreter of auguries—but mostly, he was a teacher and judge who was called upon to hear and settle disputes. Those duties were always ours.”
“He must’ve been a powerful man.”
“Cadwal didn’t carry a title or some kind of badge, but he held considerable authority, and it was never questioned even when the Christian holy men came to the village. He told me to keep our traditions—and my abilities—inside and hold them for another time.”
“What time did he have in mind?” I asked, suddenly riveted to Aline’s description.
“He believed the old ways would be embraced again one day; he didn’t trust the Christian God would be forever powerful as the holy men did.”
“But he understood your special abilities?”
“Not the way you mean; I didn’t develop telekinetic, physical abilities because I was too young. As I moved from childhood, Cadwal knew I could hear thoughts however, and it was the reason I was chosen to learn from him. We to visit neighboring villages and I assisted as he heard complaints or disputes.”
“A roaming magistrate?”
“In a sense. People would offer their arguments and he would consider them. I could hear the thoughts of others and when he discovered that, I was brought along to listen. When a difficult dispute became one that could go either way, I told him if I heard truth or a lie in a person’s thoughts and he would give his judgment accordingly.”
“You were inside their heads, too?”
“I could hear it well enough.”
As I sat in the darkness a scene paraded through my thoughts and with it, images that gave form to her description. I knew only bits and pieces about our ancient ancestry and nearly nothing about life in post-Roman Britain. The mysterious Druids held considerable power and influence over their people for centuries as Celtic tribes spread west and north across Europe. There was clearly a deep connection to the land and elements, but Druidic traditions were much more than a charming environmental activist’s dream; there was a practical application of their learning that observed the physical world and obeyed natural law. Understanding those things, and the seasons that rose and fell each year, meant the difference between thriving or dying from starvation.
I imagined her in that place and time, sitting at the elbow of a grand Druid who was a judge, a healer or diviner to summon the favor of nature’s gods. But Aline—Tegwen—was special and a powerful resource to root out the truth and hand down equitable solutions to disputes. Like hidden eyes above a poker table, any Druidic judge armed with her abilities would get it right every time and the distinction could only have made her a favorite student. I smiled at the likelihood Aline’s power wasn’t regarded as an abnormality but instead an understandable quality for those revered men and women who guided the course of a civilization for a thousand years.
“Did you become a priestess, or whatever they called it?”
“I learned from Cadwal because he took me on as a student and it was a huge honor to be asked. I remember my parents were very proud of me but also they were sad because
it obliged me to a life often far from our village.”
“Couldn’t they say ‘no’ when Cadwal selected you?”
Aline smiled and shook her head slowly.
“Nobody said ‘no’ to a man like Cadwal, Evan; they accepted it and that was that. I studied and learned from him, traveling great distances to meet with others who kept the old ways or to see after disputes in neighboring villages.”
“How long were you with Cadwal?”
“He was very old when I first knew him but he prepared me to carry on. I was in my early twenties when he died, but I continued with what I knew until my own authority nearly equaled his. I can’t say with certainty how long, but my hair had gone gray and many years passed until the moments stopped. Maybe sixty or even seventy years.”
“And there’s no way to know exactly when you…when Tegwen died because they didn’t keep records back then.”
“We had no written language at all and because of it nothing to show what became of me. The Christians brought Latin as the old ways died out and our people shifted from oral, pagan traditions, but that was never part of my life.”
Just the thought held me like an invisible hand as I came to understand what it meant. If what she said was true, how strange and confounding it must be to think of yourself as another person who lived fifteen centuries before. Could there be any other condition as surreal, I wondered? But the dreamlike state was more than a description in mere words; I saw and experienced it for myself, just as she said I would, and the effect was stunning. Who among us can discuss such things without fear of being heard and labeled a crank or outright lunatic? How could she manage in the twenty-first century, I thought silently, knowing what she had been so long ago? But as I allowed the thoughts to drift through, the inevitable question slammed into me, and I looked at her where she knelt on the bed.
“That was a very long time ago, Aline.”
“Yes, it was.”
“But you said it was your first life—that you’ve lived six more times since?”
“Yes, that’s right,” she answered simply.
The Seventh Life of Aline Lloyd Page 24
