Daughter of Albion

by Ilka Tampke

  ‘Heka,’ I stammered, ‘do you deny it?’

  She took a bored breath. ‘If ill was done by the pin, then it was not by my hand.’

  She could not weasel from this. It was a lie without shame and I could almost taste the pleasure she took in it. ‘Who else would seek to disturb me so?’

  ‘I do not know. But whoever it was, it was not I. Ask your worksister, Cah. She walked with me yesterday. We drank together, here, at the fringe fires. She will tell you.’

  Cah? What was her business here? My certainty cracked and doubt drifted in. I began to wonder if indeed the pin had been lost and I had accused her falsely. ‘Tell me the truth, woman, or, by the Mothers, you will suffer for your lies. I will ensure it.’

  Heka laughed again. ‘You set me a geas? Ooh! By which journeyman is it sanctioned? Which skin laws enforce it?’ She scratched a lesion at her throat.

  ‘I know it was you,’ I said, despairing. ‘I know it.’ But my voice was thin.

  Heka snorted and turned away.

  I brimmed with fury as I walked back through the fringe huts, but it was an impotent, crippled anger that found no justice. Never before had I been deemed worthy of such ill. Yet I could not cast off the thought that it was somehow deserved. That her lies were payment for mine. Then I thought of the precious buck and I was stiffened with hate all over again. My geas had no sanction, but it was made with the full weight of my heart.

  I stopped before I reached the southern gate. I could not return to my kitchen tasks in such distress. There was only one who could help me make sense of this, and, while I had leave from Cookmother, I would test his promise to me.

  With Neha at my side, I stole back along the first rampart, and slipped through the northern entranceway, down the hill. A farmer was driving cattle in the next field and women were washing blankets at the Nain, but none noticed me as I edged south through the crop fields then out along the Cam.

  It did not take me long to reach our place. The water mirrored the dark sky, its burbling drone more a warning than a comfort. Come, I willed him, wrapping my summer cloak tightly as I waited.

  Neha barked at something in the river.

  I peered over the bank and my eye caught an arrow of light as a fish shot to the deep. After a moment it surfaced again, the weak sun catching on its flank. It was the fish from the bathing pool. I was sure of it. ‘Hush, Neha,’ I chided, as she let forth a torrent of barking.

  I crouched, watching it ribbon through the water, its belly crimson and silver, black at its spine. Never had I seen anything so beautiful. I laid my hand on the river’s surface and the fish glided under my palm. The touch of its skin halted my breath. In a flash, it had darted upstream.

  I cried out in dismay and to my delight it returned, then swam away once more. I stared after it, enchanted. Did it want me to follow?

  It flipped joyously as I began to walk. I quickened my step until I was not ten paces from the edge of the Oldforest and there I stopped. Cookmother had always warned me to keep a fair distance from the forest’s edge, that its spirits had a long reach. But I could not take leave of this animal.

  The fish darted back and forth, cajoling me forward, until I stood right at the forest’s threshold. I stared into the shadowy corridors that were hardly touched by the day’s thin light, my flesh pimpling in the sudden cold.

  Neha barked beside me but the sound was distant.

  The salmon leaped once more then lunged into the forest. Now I had no doubt: it was asking me to go in. What harm could come when I had the invitation, the protection, of such a magical creature?

  I took a step, then several more, until there were dark, moss-covered trunks, not only before and beside me, but also behind me, and I was fully encased within the forest.

  Neha did not follow.

  It was an eerie world in which I found myself. Filtered light through the canopy lent a veiled, moonlit quality to the narrow path. The air in my nostrils was cold and scented with rot. Silence surrounded me, save for the faint barks of Neha and my muffled footfall on the forest bed.

  I did not tear my eyes from the fish, who led me steadily now, without jumps or turns. My mind knew nothing but its rhythmic undulations, like a trickle of blood through the black water.

  When it slowed, I was deep in a grotto: a hidden place as lovely and secret as any I had seen. A small waterfall dropped into a wide pool ringed with mossy boulders and surrounded by hazel trees. Their branches spread over the water like gnarled fingers, laden with fruit as crimson as the fish’s skin. Every few moments a nut dropped into the water, where it bubbled and sank, prompting a thin mist to rise off the surface.

  I stood at the edge, as the fish circled. Before my eyes, its colour strengthened until it was the hue of a fresh wound. It plunged and surfaced several times. Then there was stillness and it was gone.

  In an instant, my dress and sandals were off and I was into the water. My legs blanched with the coldness but I pushed further in. Underfoot were sharp stones, silty mud, wriggling things. But with my next step, I could not find the riverbed. There was no floor. When I inched forward, my toes felt a ledge, and beyond this, only space and water.

  Hesitantly, for I had never swum alone before, I glided out over this deep place. I let myself drop until I was fully submerged but still there was nothing beneath me. It was a well of some kind, a spring, within the river. The water at its opening was ice-cold as I flailed above it, eddies pulling me downward. This was where the fish had gone.

  With a deep breath, I dropped under once more and peered into the darkness, straining to sight a flash of red.

  ‘Ailia!’ Taliesin’s voice echoed through the water.

  I broke the surface, searching frantically. ‘Taliesin!’ I called, splashing back to the bank. ‘I am here!’

  ‘Ailia—’ Again I heard his voice but it was distant, muted, as if through a barrier.

  I called to him as I clambered from the pool, but my shouts were met with silence and a heavy mist that had rolled in from the heart of the forest. Pulling on my dress and sandals, I ran among the trees, calling, but the mist denied me sight and he did not speak again.

  When I was finally still, shaking with cold, the truth of where I had come struck me like a blow. The fish’s hold was broken and suddenly I was terrified. ‘Neha!’ I screamed, running back to the forest entrance, ‘Neha, where are you?’

  I ran without rest, stumbling on roots and stones until the trunks started to thin and I sighted my dog waiting patiently.

  ‘Thank the Mothers,’ I murmured into her neck when I reached her. As she licked my face, I lay back on the grass, laughing to be out of the forest and free of its seduction. How foolish I had been, how lacking in strength. ‘You were cleverer,’ I whispered to Neha. ‘You knew to resist.’

  I promised myself never to be drawn again, but no sooner had I done so than I remembered the voice calling through the mist. Was it some mischief of the forest? No. It was Taliesin, I could have sworn it. He was there.

  When I pushed through the doorskins, only Bebin and Ianna were in the kitchen, hemming cheesecloths at the table.

  ‘Where is Cookmother?’ I asked.

  ‘Gone with Cah to attend a dirt-dweller near death from skinsores,’ said Bebin.

  I stared. ‘Which dirt-dweller?’

  Bebin shrugged. ‘Someone Cah had knowledge of.’

  ‘I will be back soon,’ I said, retying my cloak.

  ‘Be sure that you are, sister,’ called Bebin after me. ‘I will find stories for your absences no longer.’

  Even as I hurried down to the fringes, I knew what I would find when I got there. I pushed my way through the knot of people gathered outside the tent I had visited that morning.

  Inside the cramped space, Cookmother was bent over a figure lying on linen wraps on the ground. An evil smell poured from her. Though her face was swollen and badly blemished, I saw it was Heka.

  Cookmother gasped with relief at my arrival. ‘Quickly
, Ailia, help me! There is infection in the blisters and my compresses will not clear them.’ Bundles of herbs lay strewn around her and she was wringing hot water from bloodied linen strips. ‘Nothing relieves her—’

  ‘She is cursed!’ cried a voice from the crowd around us. ‘Skinsores are the mark of the lie-teller. A blemish for each lie told.’

  ‘Confess your lies, if you’ve told them, dirt-dweller,’ said Cookmother to Heka. ‘It may be all that saves you.’

  But Heka was beyond hearing or speaking. Her eyelids flickered with a roll of fever.

  ‘May I sit with her alone?’ I asked.

  ‘Do what you can.’ Cookmother hauled herself to standing. ‘My cures are spent.’

  Heka’s skin was ashen. Her face, throat and arms were covered in rosy eruptions, their white centres weeping with pus. Heat poured from her and she moaned with pain.

  Had I done this? These were violent sores and had come quicker than any flesh-law would allow. If this was my curse, it had manifested more swiftly than even a journeyman’s geas.

  Heka groaned as a boil broke at her temple.

  If I had in any way crafted this horror, I could not allow it to continue. I leaned close to her. ‘Heka—’

  Her eyes sprang open at my voice and filled with a wild hope. ‘Lift the geas,’ she whispered.

  ‘Who killed the forest’s child?’ I murmured into her blistered ear.

  Her breath laboured through her swollen throat. ‘It was I.’

  I swallowed. ‘For what reason?’

  ‘So you would know what I have known.’ Her words were unfathomable.

  ‘What have you known?’ I stared at her, but she spoke no more. The fever was robbing her breath. I could not allow her to burn a moment longer or she would surely break her ties with this world. ‘It is lifted.’

  Straightaway the redness began to pale. I pressed her brow and felt it cool.

  ‘Thank you,’ she whimpered.

  ‘Ailia?’ called Cookmother from the entrance.

  ‘Come!’ I cried. ‘Your herbs have prevailed. She becomes well.’

  ‘What? By Mothers, you are right.’ Cookmother bustled in and stood beside me, smiling.

  We gathered up the bandages and took them to the well. I was silent as we washed them, struggling to fathom the power of my geas. At my wish, Heka had been sickened and healed. The truth of it shocked me, but I could not deny it. Was it something in the forest—the fish, the pool—that had bestowed me this strength? I burned to ask Cookmother, but how could I confess that I had entered the forest? That I had transgressed her gravest foreboding?

  The afternoon brought heatwork in the making of cheese. It called for our largest iron cookpot, four women to lift it and hours of patience for stirring the milk.

  We worked tirelessly, seasoning the curd with droplets of sweat. Bebin and Ianna chattered without pause and Cah broke in with her usual barbs, but I remained quiet, my thoughts spiralling, until at day’s end, in need of giving them voice, I asked Bebin to walk with me.

  We stood on an upturned bucket to mount the earthen ledge circling the hilltop behind the first wall. Walking north along the ledge, we reached a place where several spiked beams had rotted and tumbled into the ditch below. Here we sat with our legs dangling, staring out to the eastern horizon, watching the nightfall.

  There could surely be no colours like those of a Summer dusk, the bruised pinks, mauves and greys falling like gauze on the vivid green flatlands. A wane moon was ascending and we could hear the distant natter of day’s end drifting from the town.

  Bebin looked up at the emerging stars. ‘The bull’s head is almost mid-sky. Tomorrow will favour unions.’ Although she had only the first degree of training, she was gifted in star-reading and I loved to hear her speak of it.

  ‘Then it is a shame your traveller is not returned,’ I teased.

  ‘Nor yours.’ She glanced at me. ‘Where are your thoughts, Ailia? Have they followed Ruther to Rome?’

  ‘No,’ I laughed. ‘I’ve barely thought of him.’

  ‘So what has quieted you today?’

  I scratched a small welt that had risen on my hand, then looked down in alarm as it bled. Did my skin now begin to betray my lies? It was time to speak before my flesh confessed what I did not. I inhaled and told her that I had stepped into the Oldforest. I told her of the fish, the drop in the water, Heka’s mark on the fawn and the command of life I had shown that day. The only thing I did not speak of was Taliesin.

  She listened, round-eyed. When I was finished, she was grave. ‘You must not go back in. I warn you with all my heart. The Oldforest is dangerous to those without training. I know only little, but I have heard of such drops as the pool you found—’ She paused, her face taut with worry.

  ‘What are they?’ I urged.

  ‘They are holes in our hardworld.’

  ‘But where do they lead?’

  Bebin shook her head. ‘That is journeywomen’s knowledge. But I do know that they are tears in the truth of things and if you fall through them you are unprotected.’

  ‘Why does it draw me? This fish? This place?’

  Again she shrugged. ‘Perhaps they sense easy prey. You are untaught and pure-hearted.’

  As she spoke I was ashamed of my ignorance, my easy surrender to the enchantment of the fish.

  ‘These are powerful places, only for people with knowledge. Stay clear, I beg you, sister. Cookmother will insist on the same.’

  I grabbed her arm. ‘Don’t tell Cookmother,’ I pleaded. ‘Promise you will speak nothing of this to her.’

  Bebin nodded. ‘As you wish,’ she agreed. ‘But it is not well to hold secrets from those who would protect you.’

  ‘Just this one,’ I said. ‘There will be no cause for further secrets to be kept.’

  ‘Only if you promise me something also,’ she said.

  ‘Ay—what is it?’

  ‘That you won’t go in again to the forest—not one time hence.’

  ‘I promise,’ I said.

  We both looked out over the lowlands. A breeze carried the scent of willow blossom up from the river.

  Even as I promised, I knew that I must go in just one last time. Taliesin was caught there, hidden from me. I would find him. I would bring him out of the forest’s darkness and into the light.

  There was news of a rider as we returned, and all through the township, people spilled from their doorways, bearing torches, gathering to share the news.

  The rider had come from the Artrebates, a powerful tribe that shared our northeastern border. King Caradog had overthrown their tribeking and taken control of their tribelands.

  Caradog was building an army.

  Rome would not like it.

  Rome would stop it.

  It was right at our doorstep.

  12

  The Skinsong

  The skinsong is within us.

  It is the cord that leads us back to the Mothers.

  THE NIGHT SKY was paling to a bloody dawn when I reached the hazel-ringed pool the next morning. I had crept from the kitchen in darkness. Neha had led me, untorched, along the river, but I had walked through the forest alone, with only the faintest first light and the water’s soft gurgle to guide me.

  A figure stood by the pool’s edge, dark against the white mist.

  With a surge of relief I ran to him. ‘Where were you yesterday?’ I murmured into his chest. ‘Why did you not come?’

  His face was troubled. ‘I am not a dog to be summoned at will.’

  ‘Of course, but I…I heard your voice—’ I faltered, dismayed at his sharpness. ‘We must leave here, Taliesin, both of us. It is dangerous for me to be in this place, and already I am fraught with changes—’

  ‘What changes?’ He frowned.

  ‘There is no time to tell you now, will you come?’

  ‘Tell me what is altered in you,’ he insisted.

  I groaned, and hurriedly told him of Heka, the fawn, the skinsores.r />
  He looked at me. ‘You set a geas then called it back. What is the strangeness in it?’

  ‘It is not the art of a kitchen girl!’

  He snorted. ‘Your gifts are plain enough. Is that the whole of it?’

  ‘No. There is more. I have been too easily enchanted. Never should I enter this forest, but I was led by a river fish against my will.’

  ‘And yet you come again today,’ he said.

  ‘Only to find you!’ I cried. ‘We have always met outside the forest. Never within. We must return to that place, Taliesin, or find a new one, far from the Oldforest.’

  ‘I cannot leave here,’ he said.

  ‘But that is madness. Why not?’

  He turned away. ‘We made an agreement—no questions.’

  ‘No!’ My frustration erupted. ‘I cannot honour this agreement. I am kept in an unending fog with you. You draw me here, where I am entirely forbidden, and now you say you cannot leave. Look at me!’ I commanded.

  He turned back, his eyes bright with anger.

  ‘Who are you, Taliesin? What do you want of me?’

  ‘Nothing!’ he shouted. ‘I ask nothing of you—I never have. Leave, if what I offer is not enough.’

  ‘How dare you make such a challenge to me. Does it mean so little whether I stay or go?’

  He strode a few paces upriver and stood with his back to me.

  ‘You retreat to a hole like an animal,’ I spat. ‘Why will you not stand where you can be seen? Do you so fear the light?’

  ‘It is not that I fear it,’ he said, his voice low, ‘I know it is not there.’

  ‘Of course it is there,’ I scoffed. ‘There is always light.’ I walked to his side. ‘You wrap yourself in a blanket of mystery while I shiver alone outside. It is selfish. Cruel.’

  He laughed, coldly.

  ‘By the Mothers, what is funny in it?’

  ‘It is not the first time I have worn those words.’

  ‘So now you claim them?’ I cried. ‘I seek you against the gravest of warnings, yet you do not choose to return the effort.’