by Alys Clare
She had taken the road with her people once and they had taught her the forest arts of making a snug camp, with a shelter made out of discarded branches and dead bracken and a small, careful fire that usually escaped the notice of the curious. Most important of all, she had been taught the methods by which the temporary camp could be abandoned in the morning with no sign, except a narrow circle of burned ground, to show that she had ever been there. Her people did not abuse the earth for the Earth was their mother; their love and respect were too great to risk doing anything that might cause her harm.
Eventually she had reached the channel that cut off Mona’s Isle from the mainland. Not that she could see the island, for all that it was not much more than a mile away, because a thick white mist hung like a heavy curtain over the water.
She waited – a day, two days; she could not be sure – and, just as her faith was starting to slip, a round boat with a willow and wicker frame covered in heavily tarred leather appeared out of the mist in the shallows before her. It was being propelled along swiftly with a single oar by a dark-haired man with a gold ring in his right ear. He wore a leather tunic that was made of the colours of the earth and his arms were bare. As were his feet, Joanna noticed when he skilfully brought the small craft up on to the shore and leapt out.
‘Aren’t you cold?’ she asked, half laughing; he was smiling broadly, apparently taking delight in the day, although the wind was icy and Joanna was clutching Meggie under her cloak and close to her breasts.
‘No!’ he cried. ‘The Sun is always there and always warms us; we have only to remind ourselves of that to feel his heat!’
Even if I could make myself believe that, Joanna thought cynically, it will not avail poor shivering Meggie.
As if the man had read her mind, his expression grew serious. ‘You have had a long wait and the little girl is cold,’ he said. ‘I am sorry for the delay but I could not come for you until Moon was past her full.’
‘Oh.’ Joanna did not immediately understand; it was the cold, she told herself later, numbing her brain.
The man must have noticed her vacant expression. ‘The tides run dangerous high at full Moon,’ he explained gently.
‘Of course,’ Joanna muttered. Then the man picked up her pack from where it lay beside her feet and stowed it under the little boat’s central thwart. She took his outstretched hand and, clutching Meggie so tightly that the infant let out a protesting squawk, climbed aboard. The man pushed the craft off the beach, leapt in, picked up his oar and within the blink of an eye they were out in the open water and racing towards the distant shore of Mona’s Isle.
Joanna wondered afterwards if her people always made the crossing to and from the island under cover of mist or darkness, both of which conditions ensured that no inquisitive eyes observed the comings and goings. Certainly, on that day the concealing mist did its work well and she was aware of no other living being except the man with the gold earring. He ferried her safely to the island, where he beached his craft, hiding it away in the hollowed-out heart of a thorn brake, then, shouldering her pack as if it contained nothing heavier than feathers, led the way up a short, steep track that gave on to open ground covered in tussock grass and heather. The mist was still swirling thickly around them, silently covering them in drops of moisture, and Joanna could not tell how the man kept to whatever track he was following; perhaps that too, she thought, was intentional.
They walked for what seemed a long time. He stopped for one brief rest, during which Joanna fed Meggie and accepted sips from the man’s flask of some sweet, spicy liquid that brought a comforting heat to her mouth and warmed her throat and stomach. Then, all three renewed, they went on their way.
Eventually they reached their goal. They climbed up a long grassy slope strewn with boulders, as if giants had once had a battle and their missiles still lay there abandoned. Then, scaling a sort of lip that seemed to be a part of the natural landscape, they descended into a wide glade guarded by a circle of huge trees. Just at that moment the mists began to clear and Joanna saw that – of course – the trees were oaks.
So began her time on Mona’s Isle. The sense of timelessness that she had already fleetingly experienced became a permanent state and she could never afterwards say exactly how long, in days and weeks, that first stay was. She knew only that, in terms of acquisition of knowledge, it seemed to go on for ever.
She and Meggie were housed in what was clearly one of her people’s temporary dwellings, but this had been carefully constructed and was warm and snug. They lived with the other young mothers and their infants, whose company – in that time of learning so much that was strange, frightening, intense – was, at the end of each day, a wonderful reminder that she was still human, still a new mother whose prime concern was to put her child to the breast and watch her grow strong. The women welcomed her but asked no questions concerning who she was and where she came from; they did not even ask her name, although they did enquire as to Meggie’s.
Joanna was given a day or two to settle in. Then they sent for her and her instruction began.
She learned so much.
On a night of dark Moon a fortnight after her arrival, her people enacted the ancient tales of Mona’s Isle. She wondered at first if this was for her benefit – part of the teaching – but she soon realised that this was a regular event, the means by which the tribe ensured that the story did not die and that the people remembered their own past, and she chided herself for her presumption.
The ceremony took place on a mild night. Joanna and the other mothers were ordered to take their babies with them and, well wrapped in a fur cloak, Joanna settled on the ground and waited in expectation.
The tale unfolded with men in hide cloaks and animal masks creeping through the encircling oak trees and into the clearing. Their first act in the dark, sacred grove was to give praise, in a sudden screaming shout to the night sky that made Joanna’s heart leap into her mouth and set Meggie wailing. The woman beside her gave her a grin and told her to put the babe to the breast: ‘That’ll give her something else to think about!’ As Meggie suckled, Joanna gave herself up to the performance.
She watched as the men in masks were joined by others – women and children – and a society was formed. She watched the people divide themselves into small groups, some hunters, some berry gatherers, some the guardians of the people’s stock animals. She watched as some of the men and the women stood up tall and put on robes of pure white, miming the action of cutting something obviously precious from the oak trees with small golden sickles. She watched as the lore of the people was passed from the old to the young, always by word of mouth, always muttered softly so that only the designated ear should hear.
Then came the attack.
She thought it was real and would have shot terrified to her feet, ready to flee for the cover of the trees and the undergrowth, but for her neighbour’s firm restraining hand on her arm. ‘Be still,’ the woman hissed, ‘there is no danger now!’
Men came pushing and shoving into the grove; men dressed in leather boiled until it was hard and stained red with the bruised fruit of the mulberry. They carried long wooden poles and short stabbing swords that, at a distance, looked like iron. They went among the people and cut them down and then they began on the trees. The people put up a fierce resistance, with women in black robes and wild hair waving torches and hurling themselves, spitting and screaming, on the invaders, while the men raised their hands to the black sky and called down curses on their enemy. But spittle, screams and curses could make no immediate impact against swords and javelins; soon it was all over.
Joanna thought that they had actually cut the trees down for, as the soldiers departed and left the grove to the dead, she saw great felled oak trunks lying across the grass. She had tears in her eyes, weeping not just for the people but for those glorious trees . . .
A voice was chanting. Softly at first – Joanna could not tell if it issued from a woman or from a man –
it seemed to be recounting the list of the dead. Then the voice grew louder and the cursing began, shouting aloud the name of the enemy and begging the Great One to keep the commander and his army in perpetual torment in retribution for their sacrilege and their pitiless slaughter.
‘They thought they had killed us all, tribe and tree, people and practice,’ cried the voice, soaring now up out of the grove and into the night sky. ‘They were wrong, for the people of the oak do not die and we are still here!’
As the echoes of that great cry died, a vast shout came from the people, a shout that had no words but was a simple opening of throats as, their pent-up energy at last flowing from them, the people screamed their defiance and their pride.
And Joanna, with them, one of them, joined in.
In the course of her subsequent instruction, Joanna was taught the cruel reality that lay behind the tale. Her people were the indigenous race of the islands of Britain, old in their ways long before the invader from the hot south arrived. Driven progressively westwards, they had thought to be left in peace, for they had yielded the prime lands to the relentless newcomers and it seemed for a time that, having gained military dominance, the invader would be satisfied with that and allow the people to live and to worship as they saw fit. But the people had a strong and enduring power that the invader perceived to be a threat; as systematically as they did everything, the leather-clad, sword-wielding armies from the south began the annihilation of their rivals. The Great Ones of the people fled before them, making their way in the end to the holy groves and the sanctuary of Mona’s Isle, but this sanctuary was but illusion.
The leader of the invaders drew up his men on the far shore and commanded them over the water and on to the attack. The men were afraid, for rumour of the people and their strange powers had spread like sickness through the southerners’ ranks, but their commander was not a man to abandon a mission. He ordered the most vociferous of the reluctant ones to be brought forward and he ordered savage punishment. Having thus made an example of the cowards, once again he gave the order to proceed across the water. This time there was no hesitation.
‘They killed everyone that they found,’ sighed the old man who was Joanna’s teacher in this vital part of her instruction. ‘Men, women, children; mercy was shown to none. Then they cut down the trees, for Suetonius was a wily man and he knew that destroying our sacred groves would be a blow from which we would not recover.’
There was an extended silence. Finally, when she could bear it no longer, Joanna said, ‘But you did recover!’
The old man smiled. ‘Oh, yes.’ Then, after a pause, he went on, ‘Have you ever seen a tree in a dry summer? Hm?’
‘Er . . .’ She thought frantically what he meant. Then suddenly she knew, or believed she did. ‘We had a birch tree in the place where I grew up,’ she said softly. ‘One year there was a prolonged drought and the birch put out a myriad small seeds. They went everywhere and we were finding them in the house for months afterwards. Later we noticed that there were dozens of little birch saplings.’
‘Well done.’ The old man was nodding his approval. ‘Your Lady Birch perceived the threat and she put forth her strength and ensured her survival; even had she herself perished, she would live on through her daughters.’ Leaning forward, he said, ‘In this same way did the sacred oaks of Mona make sure that they would endure.’
Joanna frowned, trying to absorb this. ‘But they – that is, the trees’ – she was finding it difficult to speak as naturally as her teacher did of trees as sentient beings – ‘they could not have known in advance that they would be destroyed, so how could they have had the time to produce a particularly generous crop of acorns?’
The old man was watching her. ‘They knew,’ he said simply. ‘That is a fact for, even as the armies went marching away back to the conquered lands, already the acorns were putting down their tap roots. By the time Boudicca died those roots were strong and, the next spring, the first leaves appeared. Four hundred years later the invader went away, as do all invaders in the end, and here in the sacred grove, it was as if he had never been.’
‘And what of the people?’ Joanna whispered, although she felt she already knew what the old man would say.
The old man smiled gently. ‘If a tree can survive, so can men and women,’ he said. ‘Child, from what you already know of us your people, can you believe that, unlike the oaks, we had no forewarning?’
Something about what he said snagged in her mind but she was preoccupied with discovering how they knew and did not pause to look at what it might have been. ‘Do you mean that the people saw the enemy on the far shore?’ she asked. ‘Or that they had sent out spies to see what the soldiers were doing?’
‘Both of those things, naturally, for they are common-sense actions. But think beyond such things. Think how it is that you, even you, young and green as you are like a slim birch sapling, know when your child needs you, even when she is out of range of your eyes and your ears.’
‘Well, I suppose that’s a mother’s instinct,’ Joanna said without pausing to think.
‘Instinct,’ the old man repeated. ‘The use not of eyes, ears or touch, but of something far more fundamental and subtle. Ponder that, child, and come back to me when you have done so.’
It was the old man who bestowed her new name. He must have likened her to a birch sapling knowingly for he named her Beith. The birch, she learned, was the first tree to grow after the retreat of the ice and so was sacred to the Mother Goddess. Among her people Joanna was so called for ever more.
There was no warning of what came next. She was shaken awake very early one morning soon after the spring equinox – and when, indeed, she and the rest of the community were still catching up on their sleep following the extraordinary night of celebration – and told to pack up, feed Meggie and get herself ready. She had learned that it would do no good at all to say, ‘Ready for what?’ and she did not, instead meekly doing as she was ordered and then sitting down patiently to wait.
It was the man with the gold earring who came for her and the fact of its being him straight away gave her a clue. Sure enough, and without allowing the time for goodbyes, he led the way out of the settlement by the grove and back across the grassy moor land to the shore, where once again he helped her into his little boat to ferry her across the narrow channel. On the mainland shore he gave her a nod, wished her good speed and the Great Mother’s protection, then nimbly turned his boat and paddled swiftly away.
She had no idea where she was to go. Back home to the hut in the forest? Surely not, for there had been hints in plenty that something was being planned for her that had nothing to do with quietly returning to where she had come from.
She waited for much of that day. At sunset, a small, neat ship entered the channel from the north-east and, its sails furled, slipped quietly along until, offshore from where she stood, it lowered an anchor. As she watched, a small boat was lowered and rowed across the water towards her. A man with weather-roughened skin called out to her and, picking up her pack, she ran down the beach and jumped into the boat, Meggie in her sling bouncing up and down with the violence of the action. The man gave a nod and in silence rowed her out to the ship, where he helped her climb up a rope ladder hanging down from the wooden deck. A group of sailors stood watching her; a couple of them gave her friendly smiles.
Then a tall man in black stepped forward from the shelter of a companionway. ‘I am called Nuinn,’ he said in a rich, deep voice. ‘I am to take you south across the sea to Armorica, which is the Land Beside the Sea. It is a long way. Come with me’ – he stepped back inside the entrance – ‘and I will show you to your quarters.’
The cabin was tiny but at least she and Meggie had it to themselves. There was room on the floor – which was spotlessly clean – for her pack but for little more, and the rest of the space was taken up by a narrow bed with several thick woollen blankets and a small pillow. Under the bed were a bucket and a jug, both at pres
ent empty.
‘The bucket is for your personal use,’ the captain said tactfully; ‘come up on deck and empty it to leeward before it’s full, else you’ll spill what’s in it and have to mop it up.’ He gave her a swift grin. ‘Jug’s for washing water; you’ll be told when it’s available.’
‘Thank you,’ Joanna managed.
He grinned again. ‘It’ll be rough once we’re out of the shelter of the island,’ he said. ‘You may be sick or you may not; people are different. If you’re sick, remember to eat whenever you can; better by far to be sick when you have something to be sick with.’
As he spoke those disconcerting words, there came the sound of voices from above and she felt the ship give a sort of bounce. Then there was a definite sensation of movement, quickly accelerating. She sat down heavily on the bed and Meggie gave a small cry.
The captain was already half out of the cabin. ‘Come up on deck if you wish,’ he said, ‘but do not get in anybody’s way.’
