A wind stroked the high grass of the plain, and when it passed, the scene had changed once more. Fascinated, Eilan watched as one image followed another. Coloring and cast of feature changed as each new people came into the land. But again and again she recognized an expression or gesture that was familiar — her grandfather's touch on a harp; Lhiannon's regal grace; and even herself, riding in a chariot like a queen. A tall man rode beside her, and she knew that it was he whose touch had given her access to her own power.
"All that has been will ever be;
The dragon rises from the sea;
Only the wise are truly free -"
came that clear voice from beyond the world.
The last image was of a hill of knobbed granite where the purple heather grew. Chill winds swept eastward from the sea, scouring the rolling fields. In this windswept place real trees grew only along the strait where the island fronted the grim bulk of the mainland. Even as she realized that she was seeing Mona, the scene changed, and Eilan saw men of her own race clad in white, and women in robes of midnight blue, their faces grim as they piled wood into great pyres.
For a moment she did not understand. Then a shiver of light rippled along the opposite shore. She blinked, recognizing Roman armor. The people of Mona saw it too, and suddenly the pyres were blazing. The priestesses danced forward, their shadows contorting as they screamed their spells. For a time the Romans hung back and their leaders harangued them, then the first rank went splashing into the water. The strait frothed as the Legion pushed across it. They came out dripping, but their swords gleamed red in the firelight. With grim precision they pursued the Druids, and their swords dripped with a brighter crimson as they slew all those they found.
For a time then all was silent. The fading firelight gave way to the cold grey of dawn. Ravens were already busy at the bodies. As Eilan watched, they rose suddenly upward, screaming, their wings darkening the sky.
"While Eagles gorge, the Dragon sleeps,
When Ravens fly, the Lady weeps,
What hate has sown compassion reaps . . ."
As she heard the song Eilan felt her heart pierced by sorrow, and the vision blurred as tears filled her eyes.
When she could see again, she was standing beside the pool once more. But she was no longer alone. Mirrored in the water she saw a figure, and looking up she realized that it was a man wrapped in a spotted bull's hide with a headdress framed by hawk's wings and crowned by the antlers of a great stag. Her eyes widened, for this was a costume the Druids wore only for their most sacred ceremonies.
"Lord —" she gave him the salutation due his rank, "who are you?" For a moment he had reminded her of her grandfather, but she realized now that he was younger, despite the silver in his beard, and in his eyes shone a wisdom and power she had no more than glimpsed in any mortal man.
This is what Ardanos was meant to be! she thought then, like the great priestess she had glimpsed sometimes shining through Lhiannon in the rituals. This was the reality.
He smiled, and it seemed to her that the light brightened around them until the pool shone. "I have been in many shapes, and had many names. I have been the Hawk of the Sun, and the White Stallion, the Golden Stag, and the Black Boar. But here and now I am the Merlin of Britannia."
Eilan swallowed. She had heard something of this in her studies, for the Merlin was a title that had been borne by the Arch-Druid in previous years. But the soul to whom it belonged did not take flesh in every generation, and it was said that only the greatest of the Druids met him in the Otherworld.
She licked her lips. "What do you want of me?"
"Daughter of the Holy Isle, will you serve your people, and your gods?"
"I serve the Lady of Life," answered Eilan steadily. "And I would do Her will."
"This is an hour of omen, when many paths may meet, but only with your consent, for the way that opens before you will require that you give everything, and if you follow it you will find scant understanding or reward." He moved around the edge of the pool.
"And what do the omens say this hour is propitious for?" Close to, the reality of his presence was overpowering. Eilan was glad the old tales had taught her how to reply.
"It is propitious for the making of a priestess in the ancient way," he said gently. "They have told you that a priestess must be physically a virgin, but it is not so. A priestess of the Goddess gives herself at her own time and season, and when the power has passed through her, resumes her sovereignty. She gives, but is never taken. She is the initiator who sanctifies the Sacred King, that he may bestow the blessing on his queen, and life may be renewed in the land."
"And that is what you want of me?" Eilan realized that she was trembling. "How can I do it? I do not know how!"
"Not you, but the Goddess within you —" Eilan's breath stopped as he smiled. "And it is my office to awaken Her."
He released the hide, and as its stiff folds fell away she saw that he was naked, his body the image of the potent god. He smoothed the hair that curled away from her temples, and it seemed to her she would have fallen without the support of those strong hands. Then he bent to kiss her upon the brow.
Goddess! her spirit cried, and felt consciousness ignited by a white flame that surged downward as he kissed her lips, her
breasts, and knelt to bless her womb. In that moment she was aware of her own essence as she had never been before, and yet at the same time, all selfhood was subsumed in Another, and whether that Presence was a part of her or she of it, or Her, Eilan could not say. What she knew beyond question was that in a sense that surpassed even the comfort of Gaius's arms around her, she was no longer alone.
Eilan burned and was not consumed, and it seemed to her that the voice she had heard sang in tones of flame —
"The enemy you would conquer, you must love . . .The law you would fulfill, you must defy . . .The thing that you would keep, you must now
give . . .
Thus will you have the victory . . .Daughter of Druids, through you the Dragon will
be reborn."
Her awareness flared with images of blood and splendor, battles and stone cities and a green tor above an inland sea, fire and sword and finally a fair-haired man with Gaius's eyes who rode to battle with the image of the Lady on his shield.
"I will!" came her reply. "But do not leave me alone—"
"Daughter, I am always here" came the reply. "Thou art Mine, from age to age, while Time endures."
She knew that she had heard those words before, that this was only the renewing of an ancient bond, but the love that lapped her was becoming a sea in which she drowned, a light in which all awareness was consumed.
Eilan's next conscious thought was of floating in cool water. She sensed dark trees around her, and moonlight, and in the next moment many hands had hold of her and were lifting her to the shore. She blinked in amazement as she realized that she was lying beside the bathing pool in the stream below the House of Maidens.
Eilan tried to speak and found she could not. She realized then that what had happened to her was a mystery too deep for telling, even here. And yet she wondered that they could not see it, for the Divine Heat still blazed within her so that her skin dried as soon as they helped her rise from the pool. In silence the other women clad her in a robe of new linen dyed the deep blue that the consecrated priestesses wore.
"You have journeyed between the worlds; you have seen the light that is without shadow; you have been purified . . ." said a voice Eilan recognized as Caillean's. She looked up, but it was the woman she had seen on the parapet in her vision who seemed to be standing there. "Daughter of the Goddess, arise, that your sisters may welcome you —"
The priestesses helped her to her feet and fell in behind her as she followed Caillean along the path that led to the Sacred Grove.
By the light of the torches that flickered among the trees Eilan saw that Lhiannon was waiting, attended by Eilidh. Beside her stood Dieda, her eyes as huge and dazzled a
s Eilan knew her own must be, and her hair clinging to her brow in damp tendrils. What, Eilan wondered, happened to her? Their eyes met, and all the barriers that the past years had built between them vanished; they remembered only that they were sisters now.
I am glad that we will be making our vows together . . .she thought. The testing was always the same, but each priestess received the vision the gods willed. Dieda, she supposed, would have found music. She looked at the other girl, and it seemed to her that the Goddess smiled back at her from Dieda's eyes.
Eilan looked around her and saw that they were all here — Miellyn and Eilidh and the others who had taught her for the past three years. But in each woman's face she saw a reflection of the light of the Otherworld, and in some of them, something more, a hint of faces she had seen in her visions, constantly changing and yet always the same.
Why do men fear death when we will live again? Eilan wondered then. The Druids taught that the soul could take many forms through the circling years, and she had always thought she believed it, but now she knew that it was true.
At last she understood Caillean's serenity, and the holiness that despite her fragility and fallibility, she sensed in Lhiannon. They too had been where she had gone, and no mortal accidents could change the truth of it.
She heard the words of the ceremony as if in a dream, and made her vows without hesitation, for the most important promise, the one that included and commanded all others, had already been made to the Goddess in the Otherworld. With the blood still singing in her veins, and the light of the Lady in her eyes, she scarcely felt the prick of the thorn as the blue crescent that proclaimed her priestess was drawn between her brows.
Fourteen
It was the tradition in the Forest House that after the priestesses took their vows they should undergo a period of seclusion. Eilan was grateful. During the days that followed her initiation she lay as exhausted as Lhiannon after giving an Oracle, and even when she recovered physically, she found her attention focused inward as she tried to understand what had occurred.
Sometimes the Druid's words to her seemed impossible — a demented dream born of her frustrated love for Gaius. But when the priestesses gathered in the frosty darkness to salute the winter moon, Eilan would find her spirit lifted as the women's voices soared. At such times, when the moonlight filled her like a silver flame, she knew that what she had experienced was no dream.
Sometimes she found Caillean watching her rather curiously, but not even when the older priestess taught them the secrets of the Wise Ones who had come over the sea — the lore that only the sworn priestesses were allowed to learn — did Eilan feel free to speak of the Merlin and the destiny she believed he had offered her. For gradually she had realized that whatever ecstasies the other priestesses experienced in their initiations, this mystery had been for her alone. And so the dark days of winter passed and lengthened into spring, and the mark of the Goddess healed upon Eilan's brow.
Gaius lounged on the bench in his father's office at Deva, breathing deeply of the breeze that came through the open window and wondering how soon he could get away. For a year he had been attached to his father's staff, and he was tired of fortress walls. Spring was overwhelming the fields and woodlands. He could smell apple blossom on that breeze, and it made him think of Eilan.
"Most of the men will be taking leave for the Floralia, but I don't want too many of my officers away at one time." His father's voice seemed to come from far away. "When you're up for leave where will you go?"
"I hadn't thought about it," Gaius blurted out. Some of the officers used their free time to go hunting, but killing things for sport no longer particularly interested him. Really, there was nowhere he wanted to be.
"You might go and see the Procurator," his father suggested. "You haven't met his daughter yet."
"And if the gods are kind to me I never will," Gaius returned abruptly to the present and sat up. His father looked pained.
"Now, how could it possibly hurt you," Macellius inquired, obviously holding on to his temper, "just to see the girl? I think she's already fifteen years old."
"Father, I know she's marriageable. How stupid do you think I am, anyway?"
His father only smiled. "I haven't said a word about marrying her."
"You don't have to," Gaius said sullenly. If he could not have Eilan, he was damned if he would marry any woman in Britain -let alone one his father suggested.
"You don't have to be rude," his father said. "As a matter of fact, I was thinking of spending the holidays in Londinium, and -"
"Well, I wasn't," Gaius said, no longer caring what his father thought of his manners. He did not know where he would go but it would be as far away from Londinium as he could possibly get.
"I hope you're not thinking of that British girl again," Macellius commented, almost, Gaius thought, as if his father were reading his mind. If only he had left it at that. But Macellius went on to say, "I'm sure you've had the sense to put her out of your mind for good and all."
And that decided him. "As a matter of fact," he said deliberately, "I was thinking of going to see Clotinus." It had been after staying with the British lord, after all, that he had first met Eilan, and he could at least enjoy the memories.
Gaius enjoyed the trip southward, thinking of Eilan, and of Cynric who might have been his friend and was lost to him, through no fault of their own. Spring was advancing like a conquering army, and the weather was beautiful; mornings clear and cold, making him glad to be warmly clad, and days warm, bright and almost dry except for a sprinkle of soft rain late in the day.
Clotinus greeted him gladly and welcomed him, and although Gaius knew it was mostly that Clotinus wished to keep on the best of terms with the powerful Romans, he enjoyed it anyway. Gwenna had gone away to be married, so there was no one to trouble him.
The household of Clotinus, he realized, was not at all a bad place to spend a vacation. The food was good, and even Clotinus's remaining daughter, only twelve or so, was good company, and sympathetic enough when he told her that his father had tried to arrange a marriage for him with an unknown. She might well have been offering to console him on some subtle level but Gaius remembered - not before time, he thought - what his father had said about entangling himself with native women. If the girl was sending him any wordless signals, he pretended not to notice them.
But except for prayers dimly directed at Venus, he could think of no way to approach Eilan. In sleep he ground himself against his blankets, moaning, and waking, knew that it was of Eilan that he had dreamed.
I love her, he thought in self-pity, when the hopelessness of his situation overwhelmed him. It isn't as if I meant to seduce and abandon the girl. I'd be happy to marry her if I could get the permission of all the people who seem to have made it their business to control our lives. After all, he was twenty-three, and an officer — though a very minor one - in his Legion. If that did not make him old enough to marry at his own will, how old would he have to be?
One day when he was riding out under the excuse of hunting, he found himself traveling past the burned-out walls that once had been the house of Bendeigid, and he realized he must be somewhere in the vicinity of the Forest House. His leg ached a bit as he remembered the boar pit — it seemed to him very long ago - and the first time he had ever laid eyes on Eilan.
I cannot stay here . . . he thought suddenly. Every tree and stone will bring back painful memories. He had thought he could bear it. Certainly seeing old Ardanos from time to time in Deva had not troubled his peace. Perhaps he should ride south to visit his mother's people. It would not please Macellius, but he did not much care to please his father just now.
That night before the fire he spoke of it to Clotinus, who urged him to remain another day or two.
"There will be too many folk on the road till the festival," Clotinus pointed out. "You should stay until that is past at least and then you can travel in comfort."
"People won't bother me, but p
erhaps I should not travel in full uniform," said Gaius. "I will make better time and attract less attention if I wear the common dress of a Briton."
"That's true," Clotinus grinned sourly. "You are, in a sense, one of us. I daresay I can come up with something that will serve."
The next morning his steward produced clothing which fitted Gaius well enough: tan breeches and a tunic dyed green, in new cloth, clean and decent but not particularly luxurious, and with them a voluminous dark brown cloak of heavy wool. "The nights are still chilly, lad," Clotinus said. "You will need this when darkness falls."
When Gaius put it on his Roman identity seemed to fall away.
"You are no longer Gaius Macellius Severus in this garb." The old man eyed him oddly. Gaius grinned. "As I think I told you, my mother called me Gawen while she lived; now I look nothing else and I should use only that name."
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