“What is the ‘modern interpretation,’” I continued. “Are they missing something?”
“A few have worked to revive our traditions but mostly in the last century and from beliefs they either created or interpreted to a deliberate purpose,” she answered. “People today who call themselves ‘Druids’ are not, but their chosen lifestyle celebrates nature’s power, just as we did. They cause no harm and you can’t say that about all religious or spiritual pursuits.”
Aline’s characterization was honest and made without the prejudices and personal dislikes from my own limited perspective. I admit many are drawn to modern Druid culture by the inspirational qualities of their Celtic heritage and a powerful sense of ancestral place. (I suppose I am, too.) Either way, it was surprising she, of all people, rose to their defense until I came to understand the difference because Aline judges with a better, more generous spirit than I. Neither magical nor harmful, she sees people who look toward a time in a distant past from the uncertain chaos of the present, reaching for meaning among the same trees and grassy hills she loves so much. Today, I admire her for it even more.
She stood at the window beside me for a while, and I wondered if her mind wanders as any other person’s might or if it takes her instead to the places where she lived long before, always there and waiting for her return. There would be time, she said, to show me more images and moments from a remote, post-Roman village in the late 400s, but I anticipated a description of the next.
“And the second life?” I asked with suddenly growing interest.
“I wish I could tell you,” she replied, but her answer seemed distant, disaffected, and nothing like the breeze of nostalgic joy she’d brought with the description of Tegwen’s existence.
“What’s stopping you?”
“My second life is not the same,” she answered. “I have no idea when or where it was, and I can’t even tell you what I was called because I never knew.”
“Then how do you know it was your second life?”
“I can see moments, and they appear between Tegwen and my third life, but they’re distant and vague as it would be in a very short dream,” she said. “There are faces but little else; those images were likely my mother and father when I was very young and then the moments end abruptly.”
There was no doubt what she meant and the sad conclusion was obvious.
“You died in early childhood.”
Aline nodded the confirmation, but she did so with an odd expression of detachment I couldn’t decide was either reflective contemplation or simple lack of interest. The time could have been any point between Tegwen’s life and the eleventh century—almost six hundred years—but there was nothing to indicate where. Her young life, as it was for most children during the Middle Ages, was fragile and always at risk of disease, starvation, or genetic malady, and because of that truth its early end was hardly surprising; Aline only knew she was born.
I asked her if she regarded her second existence differently than the others, simply because it was so brief, but she looked away and said, “It wasn’t the only time that happened.”
The moment seemed longer than it was, and I expected her to elaborate. Instead, Aline turned to me and pointed to a photocopy of a textbook page with notes scrawled in the margins. I looked and saw a name underlined and bracketed to indicate its importance.
“Enydd merch Uuin?”
“My third life,” she answered. “I spent hours living again in the moments because there are no records to tell me where and when. I went there, searching for clues or an indicator from discussions between my mother and father but also neighbors who spoke with travelers passing through.”
“What did you learn?”
“I was born in or near Aberffraw and I know at least that much hearing my father tell another where we were from. I think we were traveling because the place looked strange and different; it was clearly not our home.”
“Could you deduce the timeline from those moments?”
“Yes, but only because of a power struggle in the southern kingdom of Gwent and news that arrived in our village telling of a Danish king called Canute who invaded. The history texts today show this happened around 1030.”
“How old were you?”
“I was probably nine or ten because the images are quite vivid, which they would not have been if I was much younger.”
“Which means you were born around 1020.”
“I can see moments near the end of my life and another war that changed Gwent when Gruffydd ap Llywelyn took control in 1055. I didn’t survive to old age and died probably in my thirties, which aligns with these historic dates.”
A new life—another person. Aline began her third existence at a time when the kingdoms of Wales (and all of Britain) were often violent, ever-changing, and unsettled places. She sat patiently while I scanned through her documentation, most of it culled from library books or internet sources, and it was clear her homework was thorough. She told me about life and how it was lived, but the reality she described was sobering to the ears of a twenty-first century man.
“It was always hard going then,” she said, “and the moments I can see are the first since Tegwen’s life that bring physical sensations.”
“Physical?” I asked. “In what way?”
“In Enydd’s time we were usually cold and always hungry. A lot of dreadful odors—everything smelled of smoke and shit…unwashed bodies. We scratched constantly at lice, and my mother pulled a fine-tooth comb through my hair to remove the nits. I remember the snapping sound when she crushed them between her fingernails…it wasn’t very pleasant.”
“I can’t understand how anyone lived that way,” I said with a slow shake of my head. “What kept you all from going mad?”
“That’s just the way life was lived then; we had nothing to compare it against and so we didn’t really notice. When I tell you about it now, a thousand years has passed and many things we consider normal today weren’t possible in the eleventh century.”
“What did your family do?”
“My father was a sawyer,” she continued. “I liked to watch them cut logs into boards and beams. There was a trench dug out of the ground—a cousin down inside and my father up on the log. They pushed and pulled a big saw up and down. In summer it usually attracted hornets, though…the sap.”
“Food must’ve been a challenge in those days,” I offered.
“My father and mother tended what crops they could grow in a sort of garden behind our little house, but much of what they earned went to the local Lord and the Church anyway.”
“What did you eat on an average day?” I asked.
“Bread and vegetables, mostly,” she answered. “Meat was rarely on our table, and chickens were eaten only when they stopped laying eggs.”
“It sounds to me as if your family and neighbors were…I don’t know, serfs?”
“Most common folk were,” she replied. “Unless you were noble-born, you worked the fields and used whatever skills you had to feed your family; that’s all there was.”
More than once my mind wandered to Damon and what he would make of it had Aline taken him on equivalent trips through the magic of her mental time machine. As an archaeologist, my brother might well have offered her every penny he owned in exchange for personal views of those moments and a chance to see what no one alive has ever experienced.
“How did it end up for Enydd…for you, I mean?”
“I can’t be certain, but I believe I died from complications during childbirth,” she replied softly. “I was married off to a young man in town called Cynwrig. I didn’t like him, but he stood to inherit a tannery from his father and that meant stability.”
“It was arranged?” I asked.
“My father simply wanted me to have a roof over my head and food to eat; Cynwrig had both but he needed a wife. The match was agreed and I had to accept it.”
“You don’t often visit that time in your thoughts, do you?”
I asked.
“Not very,” she replied. “He wasn’t cruel, and he never mistreated me, but Cynwrig worked hides all day and the vile smells were always there, a persistent odor of death. He was acceptable as a husband but certainly not preferable. I did my duty without complaint and we had two children: a boy called Gwion and a girl, Angharad.”
Aline’s voice softened suddenly, and I saw her head tilt gently to one side the way people do when a memory takes them to another, more solemn place. I wondered if it was the lingering power of maternal instinct and helplessness knowing her children were long dead and gone, but her silence was made by something more. I sat beside her and watched for a moment until she seemed to recover and finish the story of Enydd’s life.
“I became pregnant again and Cynwrig was worried because we would have another mouth to feed. He softened on the idea after a while, but there was a conscription and they took him to fight in the king’s army against soldiers from Mercia far away to the east…I never saw him again.”
I knew most rulers in that time didn’t maintain a standing army unless their kingdom was under attack, or alternatively, when they wanted to attack somebody else’s kingdom.
“They said he died in service to the King.”
“You were left alone?” I asked.
“I was left without a husband; Cynwrig’s younger brother, Hywel, would inherit the tannery, but I wasn’t thrown out. There were lots of war widows in those times and I carried on with it until…”
Her expression changed again and I think she just needed to move beyond the memory.
“When it was time, my mother-in-law and my own sister were with me, and I remember they were terribly worried and there was a lot of pain. I know it was the day our third child was born but the moments stop so suddenly.”
“Are you sure?” I asked gently. “Your description sounds as if…”
“I didn’t survive,” she replied at nearly a whisper. “I have few memories of my child, and only those made when they held him up for me to see. There was so much blood...”
While Aline moved through time in her thoughts, I felt badly for her but there was nothing to say. After a while she smiled when the memory of her final breath as Enydd merch Uuin slipped away. I found myself stuck at an uncomfortable place, looking on without the slightest idea how it must feel for her to relive that time and endure its cost a thousand years gone.
“No public records in villages back then?” I asked.
“The Church kept most but we were illiterate and wouldn’t know what to do with them anyway.”
I understood what that problem meant in tangible terms.
“It’s impossible to know what became of your kids.”
“I’ve wondered,” she said. “But no; there isn’t a chance to research an ordinary family in a poor village so long ago.”
“Then it’s possible you have descendants from that life, or your others, running around out there today?”
“Yes,” she answered, but there was no hint of excitement at the prospect, and I knew enough to know it was time to leave it alone and change the subject.
“Obviously you couldn’t in your second life, but when you lived as Enydd, did your abilities surface?”
Aline seemed to brighten up when I asked the question, relieved perhaps of continuing a painful narrative.
“They did but it wasn’t in the way you mean.”
“How so?”
“I could hear thoughts of others, as I had in Tegwen’s life, but I couldn’t manipulate the physical world around me the way I can today.”
“Did Cynwrig know?”
“Absolutely not,” she replied at once. “In my early life as Enydd, I didn’t know if it was the voice of a demon or an angel speaking to me from Heaven. It was frightening, at first, but as I grew older it became easier to accept when I began to see the moments from Tegwen’s life and understand again.”
“If you were frightened at the prospect of the devil inside your mind, why didn’t you say something to your husband, or maybe the priests?”
“I remember considering it,” she said, “but Cadwal’s warning was always there and it frightened me enough to keep quiet.”
“You mean it scared Tegwen enough.”
“Yes, but remember, Evan, the wrong person could just as easily regard me as an agent of Satan. In that time and place, faith and superstition were often the same thing; telling anyone I could read minds could have gotten me killed.”
The image of Enydd beneath an executioner’s axe or chained to a stake and burned alive made me shudder. I looked at her and waited as she closed her eyes. For a moment, I thought Aline was finishing a last stroll through a life that went dark a thousand years before, but when she reached for me it was only fatigue. I pointed her toward the stairs and followed quietly; there would be time enough to return and wander through events of the past. She wanted to watch television for a while, but another thought crept in and I waited for a decent opening to bring up the sore subject.
“Okay,” I said at last. “I can’t argue with this, any of this, but the endgame is still coming, and Burke isn’t going away.”
“No, he’s not,” she replied softly.
There was little doubt she read and felt the swirl of competing emotions inside my mind, but I needed to talk it out with her just the same.
“He’s got a lot of firepower behind him, Aline.”
“Those people live in the shadows, Evan,” she replied. “They can’t discuss what they do outside their world because they know pulling it into the light would make questions they can’t answer.”
“What are you saying?”
“Burke has no interest in Renard’s plan to have me arrested.”
“Does that matter?”
“Of course! He may be a smarmy bastard, but Burke has been down this path before, and his desire for knowledge outweighs anything the government might do to interfere.”
Aline’s words suggested something deeper, and the imaginary, “yowling cat” sounds went off inside my head when I thought it through to its obvious conclusion.
“What do you mean ‘down this path’?”
She looked with a strange, momentary distance in her eyes, perhaps taken by her thoughts to another place.
“I could hear it when Burke was just leaving the shop,” she said. “There were signals…clear and easy to find. This is not the first time he’s encountered people with abilities like mine.”
“He didn’t seem overly skeptical, I’ll give you that; as if it was expected.”
The Colwyn Bay scene played out in my memories and the meaning became clear: Burke’s conspicuous calm hid something more.
“He wants to talk,” she said. “It’s clear he knows at least some of the things I can do, but he needs to understand how.”
“He’s afraid of losing containment,” I added. “No one beyond his sphere is supposed to know, and Renard’s little road trip to Wales has forced Burke’s hand.”
Aline turned suddenly to me and said, “I know you won’t, but it’s all right if you want to leave for a while.”
My shoulders sagged and the expression I wore only confirmed what Aline already knew: I wasn’t going anywhere.
“I’m sorry, Evan, it’s just that…”
“I don’t need to escape, Aline.”
She smiled to let me know the question was only a formality.
“We’ll have to call him sooner or later,” I added.
“Yes,” she replied softly, “and it may not end well.”
A WEEK WENT by and inventory duties at the shop kept Aline in Colwyn Bay until late afternoon most days, but I sat at the counter in her kitchen while she emptied steaming linguini from her colander into a shallow bowl.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course,” she answered.
“The others…your earlier lives.”
“Yes?”
“Why are some of the moments easier to find than others?
”
She leaned against a wall for a moment and her eyes narrowed as she considered the best way to describe the things I needed to know. There would be time to show me all of it, she said, but the process is lengthy. I knew there was more but teasing it out of her had become an interesting investigation aimed at a past no one else could see. Aline sat beside me and took in a deep breath, pausing a last second or two before she began.
“In this life,” she said, “with all the power of technology and history at my fingertips, it’s been much easier to study and research the time from my memories—those moments.”
“Libraries, the internet…” I echoed.
“Yes, but even still, there is so much that cannot be described with precision. I’ve had to piece together the things history knows and try to weed out the things it doesn’t.”
“Isn’t it frustrating to know when they’re wrong and not be able to tell them?”
“When I was younger, perhaps, but would it make any difference?” she asked warily.
“It might to a history PhD trying to get tenure!” I said, snorting.
She laughed at the notion to remind me of Cadwal’s words and a promise she made. There was a reason he insisted on her silence, she said, and his wisdom had proved correct too many times for her to ignore. I think of that promise now and it holds me as firmly as Aline; I have accepted the responsibility of her secrets as my own whether I like it or not.
WHEN I met Aline on our shared hillside, our first moment of change passed by unnoticed because I simply didn’t know then what I know now. Andre Renard’s ill-fated visit created another, and Aline’s willingness to expose who and what she was became the next. On a cool day of mist and drizzle, the next steps in a long and indescribable journey were about to begin.
Aline told me about Enydd’s life, and I listened with a different ear because of its direct connection to her, but also for the unique view of history her description allowed. During quiet moments in bed or on her couch, she found and guided my thoughts beyond the here and now, and I went along with her like a tourist admitted through the gates of ancient, forbidden places. In an odd moment, I felt a wash of gratitude for the gift of my place as the only one to see backward in time along so vivid and personal a path, privileged to watch and listen for myself as if I too had walked there.
The Seventh Life of Aline Lloyd Page 28
