Lady of the Light

by Donna Gillespie

  Ragnhild followed a path almost invisible to Avenahar, who could only find the root cave by looking above, to the rotting red cloths Ragnhild long ago tied in the trees to mark the way. Finally they were halted by a lichen-covered rockface pitted with small hollows that oozed a sticky substance; Ragnhild regularly smeared butter and honey into the boulder’s pocked surface as offerings to the woodwives and elves, so they wouldn’t be inclined to venture farther and steal her treasures. They moved along the wall of stone until the rock split, then followed this narrowing crevice until they found themselves enveloped in the earthy darkness of the root cave, and pleasantly smothered in its sweet pungence. Ragnhild needed a secure central place to store her medicines while she roved with the migratory war band. Every surface of the interior was draped with herbs, some desiccated, some still fresh; many hung from hemp ropes strung just beneath the cave’s roof, so that the cavern seemed to drip with plants.

  They dumped their flowers and leaves into the willow-withy baskets at the back of the cave. Then Ragnhild began gathering up a sackful of what Avenahar had heard the old woman call “misery bread”—not bread at all, Avenahar discovered, but a thin, hardy, whitish-brown root that tasted somewhat like parsnips. “We’ll need more of this,” Ragnhild said as she hoisted the sack to her shoulder.

  “You told me that’s for starving times.”

  “Trading that fine stallion of yours fetched us quite a bit but you couldn’t expect it to keep us forever.”

  “But what of the food gift Witgern was promised?”

  “The village that promised us this time? The Four got there first.” Ragnhild shrugged. “It happens now and again.” Seeing Avenahar’s look of bafflement, she added, “That’s four cavalrymen of the frontier patrols who ride in a pack—Rome’s scavenging dogs. They make the circuit of the villages and demand what they want, usually portables, buried silver and such. They sell it to supplement their army pay. If the folk are slow to give, they burn the granary.”

  This sort of story was growing familiar: Roman patrols unable to control themselves among a beaten and humbled populace. It puzzled and disturbed Avenahar that most people seemed to accept it, like crop-destroying hail.

  But Avenahar said nothing, and she, too, gathered up a sackful of misery bread. Then she carefully scanned the cave’s floor in the half-light, relieved to see nothing amiss. The first time Ragnhild had brought her here, they’d found something darkly unsettling near the back of the cave—a dagger with a broken point, tied about with a strip of white cloth secured with wolf’s hair. Ragnhild had told her it was a curse worked against the owner of the cloth—the working of a knowledgeable seeress. The old woman had been deeply alarmed; she believed only her apprentice herb women knew of this cave. Then Avenahar had realized it was woolen cloth of a finer weave than one ever saw in this country, with a tablet-woven border. And she knew, with dull terror settling on her stomach, that it was a torn bit of the tunica she’d been wearing when Witgern’s band found her.

  Someone in this country wasn’t pleased she was here.

  But on this day she discerned no sign of an intrusion. And so they set out for the Wolf camp. The way was long; the sun began to sink. They waded through a shifting sea of blue chicory flowers, then plunged into a twilit grove of mountain ash, the wise and beloved tree from which, Ragnhild had told her, the first man was formed. They passed a wolf skull nailed to a tree; Avenahar felt the gaze of its captive ghost tracking their progress.

  Then they found themselves in the midst of Witgern’s encampment, as if it had sprung up from the ground. The Wolf Coats’ tents were set out in no order, like a rockfall among the trees; when Witgern’s men moved, they moved in a swarm. Some had made shelters that were no more than a deer hide lashed to a triangular frame set against a trunk. Others had dug into the earth like dogs and pulled a hide over the hollowed-out place, or made a nest at the base of a tree. The camp was deserted but for an occasional sentry posted among the trees. Avenahar was mystified by this until they heard the stark keening of a priestess issuing from deep in the grove. A sacrifice was taking place. They followed the sound, threading their way through strewn bedding and goathide sacks. The band’s possessions were portable and few; Wolf Coats wore their wealth on their arms, as beautifully-wrought silver rings of varying weights, or about their throats, as necklets of precious amber. There was a bare simplicity about their society that had, at first, made their lives appear chaotic to Avenahar. Among them, men were not so neatly divided into the humble and the powerful as were the folk of the Roman province. A man of prestige, famous for some bold deed, might be asked first for his opinion in council, but when they carried out their rituals, all drank from one horn. Only gradually did she perceive that they were caught in an invisible web of law, whose radial threads connected back to a belief that a war band shared one soul. And as she observed them longer, she saw traits to admire: Theft was almost unknown among them; Avenahar sometimes thought they might kill a man before they would steal from him. They were ferociously protective of friends, and good to the few thralls they kept, a kindliness of disposition that originated with Witgern, whose nature was disseminated throughout the whole band. But most important to Avenahar, they lived by war, and were remorseless enemies of Rome. Among them, vengeance was a holy rite; they believed it could restore a slain man’s spirit to the greater soul of his family. They despised what she despised and acted upon it with a swiftness that cleansed the blood. This fitted her temper so neatly—like two halves of a broken vessel brought together again—that she was willing to overlook some things, such as the filthiness of many of them, or their frequent bickering over trifles, such as whether Witgern or Sigibert had a greater collection of captured Roman cavalry medallions. The Wolf Coats lived like wild pigs, but they were free.

  One bearded sentry, then another, watched the women with great silence. Two nodded respectfully at Ragnhild. Avenahar might have been a stray dog.

  They passed a beardless sentry—a youth. No, one of the band’s eleven women, Avenahar realized after a discreet second look. Her head was wrapped in a length of brown wool; her small face was weathered to a coppery sheen. The scarred pelt of a gray wolf hung from her shoulders. This maiden Wolf Coat was scarce older than Avenahar, but she seemed of no age; her closed expression suggested she’d never allowed a childish thought free play in her mind. She stood still as a temple god, ash spear upright in a calloused hand. In selecting his companions, Witgern was said to consider only whether a candidate was truly possessed of the wolf spirit. The band’s women had performed tests of valor as rigorous as the men’s—the single-handed slaying of a boar; the seizure of some prize from deep within an enemy camp. They, too, had endured the trial in which they were buried in earth to the waist, given a small round shield, and made to defend themselves against a rain of spears. The women were famed for having no thought for safety—often they were first to scale a palisade or last to retreat, and Avenahar suspected this was because, mingled with their wolf frenzy, there was a measure of anger that some expected less of them.

  Avenahar nodded hopefully to the fiercely silent maid, who ignored her.

  Greenish light filtered down from the boughs. In spite of the band’s indifference, Avenahar felt content as a horse on a plain in this country, and was filled with an unaccountable sense that this land wanted her.

  As Avenahar passed between two tents, a stout, leather-laced leg projected across her path—and she was airborne. She landed hard on her chest and hands. Her face ploughed into rotted leaves.

  “No goat meat for you, villa-whelp,” came a thick, lazy voice behind her. “Risk nothing, get nothing.”

  After lying numbed and senseless for a time, she turned about to see the youthful but ruined face of a Wolf Coat. His upper lip was cleft with a puckered scar that cleared a path through a red mustache, then travelled up to one eye, the result of a dagger cut that hadn’t been properly stitched. Matted red hair did not quite cover a bare place on hi
s head where a Roman javelin had partly scalped him. His lips glistened with the wild rosemary mead that all of them had been quaffing since dawn as he watched her with truculent, glassy-eyed satisfaction.

  Ragnhild appeared suddenly from behind a tent. The draught-dazed warrior jerked to attention; he’d thought Avenahar was alone.

  “Listen well, Hrolf, you wriggling malt worm,” Ragnhild said, pushing her face close to his. “This is my herb woman. You will not molest her.”

  Hrolf scuttled backward until he was pressed hard against an ash trunk.

  Ragnhild moved with him.

  “My eyes grow feebler these days as I stir the worts into your brew,” Ragnhild muttered right into his ear. “It grows harder to tell the wild parsley from the water hemlock.”

  The Wolf Coat mumbled something half coherent while fumbling in his clothes for the figwort amulet he wore for protection against sorcery.

  Ragnhild ambled off, calling out, “May you get a wound that festers.” Avenahar found herself warmly pleased that Ragnhild had struck a blow for her. And amazed afresh at the fearful respect the old woman commanded. Avenahar had seen at once that elderwomen in this country wielded a natural authority that matrons in the provincial town of Confluentes did not. They had an ability to change the way things were done, the power to impress their wills on all domains of life, from hearth, to altar, to battlefield. She thought it partly because all in this place believed women stood closer to the gods, and partly because of their near-universal command of the witches’ arts, which they employed at every passage, from the ceremonies that gave strength to the babe in the cradle to the incantations that guided the spirit after death. At Confluentes she’d once seen a pack of boys, sons of the town’s Roman officials, steal pears from an old woman’s fruit stall. It would never happen here. In this land, to offend a crone was to risk ridicule, starvation, and death.

  Nevertheless, the Wolf warrior’s words cleaved her heart; she knew he spoke thoughts harbored by many.

  They came to the place of sacrifice. The warriors of Witgern’s band were seated on wolf pelts, massed in a semicircle about a small clearing with a shallow pit at its center; most were obscured behind the sluggish smoke of the sacrificial fire lazing low over the ground. A bone flute’s golden brown notes wended through the trees with the torpid slowness of a sleepy dancer; the rich lament poured a warm glaze over the scene. A dirty-robed, barefoot priestess moved in a fluid circle about the pit, droning an entreaty to Donar the Thunderer, who had hurled a bolt yesterday that set an oak ablaze in their midst. Her long hair was loose, and hung in her face. The blood of a goat darkened the bottom of the pit; a Wolf Coat was dragging the flayed carcass toward a spit. When it was roasted, the band would partake of the flesh in a communion feast.

  Avenahar and Ragnhild quietly moved past them, toward four provisions wagons that seemed wedged among the trees. There they saw a young maid with arms thin as sticks, pale hair, and even paler freckled skin, clad in a sad cloak patched with big, naive stitches; she wrestled with an unwieldy sack of grain. This was Ermenhild, a daughter of one of the provisions women, an independent tribal society that grew grain for the warbands. She had been kind to Avenahar, who supposed it was because Ermenhild was of humble status among these women, and so felt comradeship with another who stood outside.

  Avenahar broke into a trot. “There are need-fires all over the hills!”

  “You’ve not heard it yet?” The heavy sack bent Ermenhild’s thin body like a bow as she let it slide to the ground. In bitter quiet she looked toward the open forest, as if this were her private grief. “The fires are for Auriane.”

  Avenahar felt a flash of numbness, as if pricked by a poison dart. “Is she . . . living still?” Avenahar managed.

  “Yes, but she’s a prisoner. No one understands it. It’s said she’s confessed to some Roman crime. It’s thought to be the end for her.”

  Avenahar felt her spirit slip from her body, neatly as a hand from a glove. She knew then she’d somehow sensed the shape of what had passed, before Ermenhild spoke—as if so dreadful a thing could not happen without sending out invisible messengers.

  The iron jaws had closed about her mother, and soon would mangle her alive. Ragnhild caught Avenahar as her knees buckled. Aided by Ermenhild, Ragnhild guided Avenahar toward the herb women’s tents.

  Ragnhild’s portable dwelling consisted of three walls and a roof constructed of willow-withy mats lashed together and covered over with hides; the open side faced her cookfire. Bearskins thickly blanketed the ground within. She helped Avenahar to sit before her fire. When Avenahar shuddered like someone taken with palsy, Ragnhild wrapped her in several coverlets and began humming charm songs. Once, she forced on Avenahar a strong broth brewed from goatweed and all-heal, which was the herb woman’s balm for anguish.

  Avenahar was buffeted about on a heaving sea. Her mother was the world, in some way Avenahar could not name, the broad stage on which her own life was played. In one moment she felt intoxicated by a certainty all would be well. Auriane might go off, but she always returned—as when Avenahar was a babe, and Auriane had left her to go to war. But then in the next, Avenahar knew only that her running away was the cause of this evil turn of fate. And she wanted to snuff herself out like a candle. She willed that the light rain, falling now, would dissolve her flesh and mingle her with the earth.

  From the distant songs, the women knew the sacrifice had been consumed. At nightfall, when they heard the wolf-chants begin, Ragnhild took Avenahar by the chin and gently held her gaze.

  Avenahar’s face was flushed from the potent soup Ragnhild had given her; she felt she rolled on an ocean of fog.

  “If we are to be of any use to one another,” Ragnhild said, “we must stop the play-acting. I know you are Avenahar.”

  Avenahar felt one sickening jolt, as if a step had given way beneath her. But then she felt relief—maintaining the false identity had begun to weary her.

  “How did . . . did Witgern tell you?”

  “No. I just knew. You know, if you’d even once said, ‘Peregrina’ while thinking, ‘Avenahar’, it’s ‘Avenahar’ I’d hear.”

  “Gods below . . . who else knows?”

  “The elder provisions women. At new moon the forests a day’s ride south of here were overrun with Roman patrols searching for Auriane’s daughter. Then we find a girl with hair black as jet in extra-fine clothes, riding a horse fit for a chief. Anyway, anyone who’s ever set eyes on your noble mother would see her in your face.”

  “So . . . many were out looking for me?”

  “What did you expect?” Ragnhild shook her head chidingly. “No deed ever plays itself out without intruding on the fates of multitudes of others, knocking them off course, either a little or a lot, for good or for ill. And how much more so, a grievous deed such as your running off. The young! They never pause to think of that.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me you knew?”

  “You seemed to need to hide.”

  “Why didn’t you turn me over to the patrols?”

  “That’s Witgern’s domain. You’re not a plant—that’s mine.”

  “You’ll keep my secret before the others?”

  “I think I can keep remembering to say ‘Peregrina.’ I’ve managed this long.”

  “What’s to be done? We cannot let my mother die!”

  “It’s a Roman place. We have no power there.”

  “Ragnhild, I must go back there . . . and do whatever I can, to—”

  “And storm the walls, and lose your own life? No. You must live. You are god-born, and you bring us strength and luck. You’re with us now, like it or not, secure as if you were our prisoner.”

  A fresh grief seized Avenahar. She realized then she’d been harboring a belief that going back to her mother was always possible. Now, clearly, it was not. Without intending it, she’d blundered into a place with no return path. Six days ago, a messenger from one of the Holy Nine had found her way into the Wol
f camp, bearing a wax tablet on which was inscribed an urgent letter in Auriane’s hand, asking Witgern to conduct Avenahar to the Holy Wood. And Avenahar, at the time still full of loathing and brash confidence, had not even shown the tablet to Witgern; she’d tossed it into the stream.

  How easy that had been to do, when she’d thought the choice her own. This was no Elysian forest-world now; it was a blasted plain, empty of her mother.

  “And will Witgern do nothing?” Avenahar started struggling sluggishly to her feet.

  “Sit down, where do you think you’re going? First, he’ll carry out what he already plans. He’s promised this secret expedition will strike a grievous blow to Rome. It will restore balance in the unseen world.”

  “Vengeance? That is well, but it does nothing to save her!”

  “Avenahar, try to ease your mind a bit. I knew your mother from old.” Ragnhild’s voice was soft, warbling, comforting. “The Fates own her acts. They watch her like the shepherd his sheep. They’ll open a way for her.”

  What an ignorant old woman, the savage thought came to Avenahar. Ragnhild knows every rock and root, but this, she does not understand. “No way will open. She goes to her death,” Avenahar whispered.

  “Don’t take power from the Fates or they’ll avenge themselves on you.” Ragnhild looked slyly about, as though those mighty women might be listening.

  “We should go to war.”

  “You’re full of plans today! Our strongest war chiefs stay in their halls, accusing each other of treachery with Rome. And you’ve forgotten we’ve got the Cheruscans clamped onto our backs like a lynx. There are times, child, when you can do nothing but wait.”

  Avenahar caved forward, dropped her head into her hands and wept. Ragnhild watched kindly, until all Avenahar’s tears were spent.

  “Avenahar. I have wanted to ask you something, ever since the night we found you. You were trying to give yourself to the gods. Why?”