That night, farther to the north than she could have seen even after several days’ sailing, a cataclysm had taken placed that was about to change the shape of the world. Around the long curve of what mariner’s tales called the Northland, winter seas raged in wild frenzy, lashed by storms that could not be imagined in Iwerydd. From steel gray skies came fierce winds and torrents of rain, frightful flashes of lightning thrown by a strange northern god named Thor, who wielded a great hammer and led the raging rout of winter through the air. Deafening explosions of thunder shook the sky as the giant waves hurled themselves at one another and ice fell from the heavens. Deep beneath the wild surface of the Northland sea, the cold, dark waters thrashed and churned upon old underwater cliffs. In the dark depths a crack appeared in the earth. In a mere moments a stretch of cliff nearly the size of Iwerydd broke away, and plunged down the long slope into the utter darkness of the sea, throwing before it a great wall of water higher than anyone living had ever seen. With rapidly increasing speed the wave raced across the northern reaches, leveling islands as it went, sweeping the ruins of human habitation before it.
As Lisinde watched from the summit of the temple, the strange silver band grew higher and wider, until it filled the horizon. With the sudden powerless clarity that comes from approaching death she knew what it was! The wind driven ahead of the giant tidal wave blew wildly around her, almost throwing her over the edge. She clung to the wide altar stone upon which she and Eagil had joined at midsummer. Her eyes grew wide with horror to see the giant wave crash through the circling hills as though they were sand. Moments later it rose over the city, seeming to hover for an instant to relish the kill.
“Mother! Mother!”
Lisinde looked up at the giant wave. In her mind she saw Miamir riding the crest, screaming out a warning to the people sleeping below. But there was no time for a warning.
“Miamir!” she cried, “Mia, Daughter! O Huan, help us!”
But Huan sat low in the eastern sky, a helpless goddess, as the great wave came crashing down upon the temple, sweeping Lisinde into oblivion, submerging the city of Arian and grinding it into the seabed with the churning, heaving waters of its ferocious power. In moments the ancient island of Iwerydd was no more, and the waves of the sea heaved to and fro over its grave.
~
In the middle of the Salis plain Miamir, the first High Priestess of the Brythonic Iweryddon, had awoken with a start. She could see nothing in the darkness of her roundhouse, but she felt the earth tremble in agony. Her stomach twisted and lurched forward as if she had been thrown with great speed into a yawning abyss. She closed her eyes and saw stars flying by overhead into the north. As Huan rose in the east, Miamir rode the crest of a great wave, the realm of Iwerydd rushing forward to meet her. She flew over the circling hills on explosions of sea spray, and saw the city of Arian lying small and helpless beneath her. Her mother stood on the summit of the Great Temple, looking up at her in horror, and Miamir cried out. But hers was a seeing of what was already taking place; there was nothing she could do. Then she heard the cries of her people as they were swept away, and she broke free from the trance, trembling and sweating outside in the cold of the Salis Plain. When she could will her shaken body to move again, she awakened the other priestesses. Together they roused the rest of the colony. It was nearly morning as they all gathered, cloaks hastily pulled around them, in the center of the camp.
Light snow fell about them as they sought meaning in Miamir’s vision.
“She saw true,” Danien said. “I feel it. I have felt it coming for a long time. A sailor knows the waves, feels it in his gut when something strange is happening. The sea has not felt right since last midwinter.”
“That’s true,” another man answered. “Fishing’s been bad in the northern waters all year. It’s almost as if the fish ’ave left for other waters.” Others nodded assent.
“I tried to reason with Eagil,” Danien said. “I told him constantly it was time for us all to leave.” He drew his wife close to him, and she wept at the bleakness in his eyes. “I wish to all the gods I had not been proven right.”
The snow stopped, clouds lifting and glowing red as Huan rose above the edge of their new world. Where Iwerydd once lay, she was already high in the sky, looking down upon unbroken waters black with silt, littered with the floating remnants of a lost people who were, in the end, not as wise as they claimed to be. But there on Salis Plain it was the beginning of a new day.
~
In early spring, when snowdrops began to appear, Danien and Miamir held council with those who had emerged as leaders of the colony.
“We now dwell far from the wealth of the sea,” Danien began, “and we will be dependent upon crops and the movement of game for all our food. More than ever before, we will need to know the travels of the sun upon the rim of the horizon. No longer do we have the Great Temple and the peaks of the circling hills to tell us of Huan’s times and seasons.”
“So we must recreate the circling hills with what we have available,” continued Miamir. And she began to explain plans for the building of a great circle. When she finished, men began gathering wood from the copses that stood here and there on the plain. From ash and oak they fashioned sharpened stakes the length of a forearm, and long posts, twice the height of a man and several fingers in diameter. They stripped the bark, dried the smoothed posts over a slow fire, and rubbed them with oil rendered from animal fat. Then they waited.
On the morning of the balance between dark and light, Danien stood with Miamir in the midst of a broad, flat portion of Salis Plain. Beside them was a long stake Danien had driven into the ground. Together, in silence, they watched the sunrise. Miamar greeted the goddess Huan, asking her for guidance in following the times and seasons. To mark the place on the horizon where Huan appeared, Danien strode eastward fifty paces, turned, and faced Miamir where she stood beside the first stake. Waving with one arm and then the other, she directed him to the spot where he stood directly between her and the rising sun. There he drove a second stake into the ground, the line between the two stakes pointing from Miamir, past Danien, to the sunrise on the horizon. The next day they did the same, and the day after. When clouds hid the horizon they would wait for the next visible sunrise, mark its place on the growing circle, and then fill in the days that had been missed. The whole process took a year to complete, with special reverence at midsummer, and the autumnal equinox. As each stake was set and the great circle took shape, each short stake was replaced with a tall, wooden post reaching toward the sky. At midwinter, to honour the anniversary of the dead of Iwerydd, two large poles were set side by side in the north of the circle, with a lintel joining them across the top. The rising sun cast its rays through the memorial arch, where Huan seemed to stand still in reverence as her light fell upon the circle’s central pole. It had been painted blood red with ochre, for the blood of their people, and could be seen from far across the plain.
When spring came again the circle was completed, a broad henge of wooden posts rising into the sky from Salis Plain. What no one but the small band of Iweryddon refugees would ever know was that every so often around the circle a certain post, taller than the others and carved with special markings, represented one of the sacred peaks of the circling hills of Iwerydd: Ing, Elger, Miamar, Tidwell, and Ghent. Like the sacred peaks, now slowly eroding in the deep ocean currents, the posts were used for marking times and seasons. But they served a purpose more sacred to the hearts of the Iweryddon: they were a reminder of the circling hills of their lost home.
Of course the wooden posts were not as durable as the hills of Iwerydd, but stonemasons among the refugees had plans for that. Over three generations, as the new community flourished and grew in numbers, they quarried giant bluestone monoliths from the far hills beyond our western marshes and dragged them across the wide plain to the site of the henge. There they raised them in threes like the original northern archway: two upright stones joined by a lintel acro
ss the top all around the circle, forming a great stone henge. A semicircle of larger trilithons in the center represented the central city of Arian, and an altar stone in their midst was the memory of the Great Temple. There the priests and priestesses of Iwerydd celebrated the rites of Huan in a new land, and remembered the lost island that had been the home of their ancestors in an age that was fading from the world. And so it was for many ages. ~
But the colony would not prosper forever. In time, the tides of many more generations swept over even their memories, and the last people of the lost land passed from the earth. Frosts of countless winters and the rains of as many summers took their toll upon the untended stones, left alone on Salis Plain. One by one most of the trilithons leaned, then tumbled, and were covered over with moss and lichens, bindweed and creepers. Sometimes a passing band of hunters would pause to wonder at the sight. But they always moved on, for the high plain was exposed to the elements. Its weather was harsh, and it was no place for a settlement of any kind. So the stones stood alone, touched only by the weather, and the passing of time. The day came when no one could remember who had raised the stones, or in what pattern, or what purpose they might have served.
So it was in the days when the Drwyds at last came from the southern continent, across the sea channel, to make the Brythonic island their home. They, too, wondered about the ancient stones: who had placed them there, and for what purpose. They told campfire tales of a race of giant men who brought them from a green isle in the west, and set them in place under the instructions of an old wizard named Merlin. “The Giants’ Dance,” they called the stones. But really they did not know. No one knew. There are tales today that say the first Drwyds used the fallen temple for their own rites, or even that they were the ones who raised the stones in the great circle. Indeed, it is often told that the Drwyds themselves came from the realm of Iwerydd, bringing ancient and arcane knowledge with them. In truth they came from lands far to the south, and dwelt in the great forests of Armorica before crossing to our Brythonic lands. They loved trees more than stones and worshipped rather in our ancient groves. It was they who brought the ancient oak knowledge to this land, as old in its own right as the stones of the Iweryddon, but of different origin. The Drwyds grew wise in the workings of the world, but it was the Iweryddon who had raised the standing stones. Few remember that today, for there is little of the ancient wisdom left in the world.
We will never know how much has been forgotten. But the wisdom of the times and the seasons remains yet. And Huan, now called by many names, still heralds the plantings and the harvest, while the ruined and fallen stones remain forever silent on the wide Salis Plain.
Chapter Ten
The Quiet Fires of Bel
Galan Haf came and went, and with it the celebration of the Fires of Bel. The long paddock on the southeast side of Llan y gelli was emptied of its winter residents. Passing between twin bonfires in token of fertility, the livestock moved out into summer pasture. The cattle found their way into the forest behind the fort, where much of the year they lived unsheltered and nearly wild. There young women, living in family roundhouses scattered outside the walls, wandered among the trees each day with milk buckets. The Silure cattle were small, no higher at the shoulder than even the youngest of milkmaids. The sheep had lambed in late winter, and the grassy meadow in front of the fort was filled with scruffy brown sheep of all sizes. Like the cattle, Silure sheep required little care and were mostly left to fend for themselves. The broad enclosure within the walls was still alive with fowl, and some pigs whose ancestors had been coaxed out of the forest several of their generations before.
Though the Iceni uprising in the east had been put down some time ago, Seutonius showed no signs of returning to the Silure region with the XIV Gemina legion. The once great II Augusta was without a commander, Vespasian having returned to Rome. So for a time, at least, there was peace at Llan y gelli. Men who had fought off Roman patrols for years spent their time repairing winter damage to the palisades, or plowing the small barley field before the gates. The older men were grateful for this gentler activity, while the young ones grumbled, and boasted of battles to come.
Fianna’s wound had healed well, but she was still recovering her strength. Often she worked with Cethin in the healer’s hut, where she taught him much, from the esoteric uses of hellbore to the daily salves and ointments of marsh mallow used for the gentler injuries of peacetime.
And she had begun two moon cycles before, in early spring, to teach him the Marsh Tales. It turned out to be a far greater task than he had imagined, for learning the tales meant memorizing them word for word so he could tell them to others.
“There is not enough space inside my head for all this!” he complained one day to Fianna.
“Nonsense,” she said, laughing out loud. Such laughter still caused a pain in her side, but it was therapeutic, so she ignored the pain and laughed as often as possible.
“Nonsense,” she said again. Among the druids there are bards who memorize many more tales than this! If you can keep dozens of herbal recipes in your head, you can learn a few old marsh stories!”
The tribes knew of writing, of course, but the advantage to learning by ear was that it took much longer, and was done with another person who had the time to answer questions that came up along the way. Cethin had never heard of Cysgodion or Ynys Calchfaen. Several times he had seen the great henge on the Salis Plain and walked among its fallen stones. But he had no idea who had built it or why. Indeed, Cethin often had so many questions that Fianna would accuse him of making them up in order to avoid the tedium of memorization.
One day after the last frost they were walking in the forest above the fort, looking for early stitchwort and toadflax, working on the tale of the Dark Lady.
“Now again,” Fianna said, “beginning with the appearance of Gwalch, the marsh harrier.”
“Under the blue sky and white clouds there was a cry,” he began. Then, for a time, he was silent.
“Talons . . .,” Fianna prompted.
“Yes, I know,” said Cethin. “But I was wondering, what does she mean when she says ‘The marshes rejoice at your presence, but they do not need you’?”
Fianna bent to look at some new cranesbill growing beside the path. “The Lady is speaking of the importance of every creature, and the interconnectedness of all. Each of us is a part of the dance of life, but if we were not here, the dance would go on without us. A different dance, to be sure. But the dance would nevertheless go on.” She rose. “We’ll come back here in the fall for the crescent seed pods. The mashed seeds make a good eyewash.”
“It seems a shame to discover you are not needed,” Cethin mused.
“Does it?” asked Fianna. Wanting to be needed means wanting another to be dependant upon you. Is it not better simply to be a reason for another’s rejoicing? When you realize you do not need another, Healer, you understand you are complete within yourself. And when you know that, you are strong enough to love.”
They walked farther into the forest as Cethin recited more of the Dark Lady’s tale. When he came to the appearance of Enaid, he paused again.
“I think this pause is not for more prompting,” Fianna smiled. You have another question?”
“Where did this woman come from?” Cethin asked. “All the other creatures, like the Lady herself, appear out of the marshes. But Enaid comes from somewhere else. Who is she.”
“You will meet Enaid again in another tale,” Fianna said. “For now, let her be a mystery, with no beginning and no ending. Perhaps she is a part of the Lady’s self-awareness, a part of her growing from Morwyn into Vivian.”
“But they are so different. Enaid is bright, and the Lady is shadow.”
“We are each of us darkness and light,” Fianna answered. “Now begin again, after, ‘Is that like a flock of graylag geese?’”
~
Word came now and again of the Romans in the east. Seutonius was loath to return his force
s to the treacherous bogs and ravines of the Silure forest. But the swarthy, battle tested Silure warriors were all that prevented complete Roman occupation. One day they would return, Cadfael knew. And when they did, he would be ready for them. Even when all else was quiet in Llan y gelli, the smithy was alive with the ringing of iron; spearheads being prepared, for the day when peace would end.
~
The tale of Doeth was even more perplexing.
“Why remember a tale in which the gods do not answer?” Cethin asked.
“What tale is that?” Fianna asked in reply. “I do not remember such a tale.”
“Doeth is sitting in the rain,” Cethin said, “and tells the Goddess that she has . . .”
Fianna held up her hand to stop him.
“Recite it,” she said. Cethin paused a moment, remembering.
“’We have been making offerings to you for countless cycles of the moon,’ Doeth said aloud, looking out over the lake. ‘Yet you do not answer, and the waters rise. What are we to do, Goddess? How are we to live?’ No sound answered her but the hiss of falling rain on the surface of the lake. ‘No, I did not suppose you would answer.’”
“And did not the Goddess answer?” asked Fianna.
“Not that I can see,” answered Cethin.
“And what happens in the end?”
“Doeth watches the boat rise on its tether with the tide, and figures out the solution for herself.”
“For herself?” asked Fianna. “Go, Healer, and think about what that means.”
~
Finally, the eve of Galan Haf was upon them. Cethin stood on the south palisade overlooking the sheep meadow, where preparations were being completed for the fire festival that evening. The cattle and sheep were restless in the paddock, sensing their release to pasture was near, nervous about the campfires that had begun to burn before the gates. As with every fire festival before, people came in families and clans from all the nearby villages to celebrate the feast of Bel, the sun god whose time of year was beginning. The livestock in the enclosure at Llan y gelli belonged to all the villagers in common, and now the people were gathering on the green for the ceremony that would ensure fertility for another year. They had been arriving all day, laying fire rings for cooking, gathering wood, spreading hides for sitting on the ground or raising small lean-to’s. But the center of all the activity was the laying of two great ricks of wood, side by side in front of the paddock gate. When the time came, as night’s darkness covered the land, these would become the fires of Bel, ancient symbol of fertility and purification. In the meantime children played games in the grass, men told tales of ancient battles, and women wove stories about their men while preparing evening meals. In this way, the celebration beginning before the gates of Llan y gelli was just like every other ever held throughout the Brythonic lands for as long as people could remember.
Tales of Avalon Page 9
