But that night, Cethin knew, would be different from any Galan Haf that had come before.
“I wondered why my heart was breaking as I watched them arrive.” palisade. “All celebration on the flatlands near the beach. But here we are on a hill.” She looked around at the rolling countryside, and the smoke from cook fires drifting into neighboring glens. “Here we are on a hill,” she said. “It reminds me of Dolgwyl Waun below Fyrtwyddon, with the high Tor of Bryn Ddraig rising above us.” There were tears in her eyes.
“I would not have thought you to be homesick, you who can travel where you will in your mind and see Ynys y Niwl as if you were there.”
“Ah, Healer,” she said. “The Sight is not the same thing as hearing the wind in the old yews above y Ffynnon Goch, or sitting under a tree on Bryn yr Affalau, or touching Vivian’s hand.” Tears came anew as she remembered that Vivian was It was Fianna, who had joined him on the those years on Ynys Mon we held this lost to her now. It would be Sianed, as the Lady, who would welcome her home. “Ah, Cethin, I have been away too long.”
A shout rang out from below in time for them to see a ball flying toward them, escaping from a group of boys playing on the grass. Cethin caught it in midair and tossed it back, laughing. “It is like any celebration of Bel from my boyhood,” he said. But then he looked at the shadow upon Fianna’s face and was silent. Because in truth it was not like any such celebration that could be remembered. For that night, for the first time ever, there were no druids.
After the slaughter on Mona what druids were left had scattered across the waters, or into the forests and mountains around yr Wyddfa. Indeed it might has well have been a tomb they entered, for they disappeared without a trace. Now the feast of Bel had come again, and there was no druid to lead the ritual, to perform the magic.
As the great fires were lit, Fianna’s heart took her back to the last fire festival on Dolgwyl Waun, before the great stone altar. She watched in her mind as Vivian and Caldreg raised their arms and called down the powers upon excited yet frightened young men and women prepared to leave childhood behind. She remembered when it was not Cethin, but Eoasaidh who stood beside her, frowning as Vivian stepped to Caldreg and kissed him.
“It is a ritual, and her duty as the Lady, Eosaidh,” she had told him then, trying to assure him that Vivian was not taken with the young druid. But it was a young Dubh-bunadh herbalist standing beside her now, not an old tinner from Cornualle. And Caldreg had died in the forest, in the rain, trying to get her to safety. And because there were no druids in Llan y gelli to tend the fires of Bel, there would be no revelers in the forest, none to release their virginity to the gods.
“The fires of Bel will be quiet this night,” said Cethin beside her. And suddenly the night was cold upon the palisade, and she drew a woolen shawl more closely around her shoulders. “You are cold, Mother,” he said. “We should go down to the fires where it is warmer.”
“Thank you, Cethin, but no, I would not join in what revels there are. I can watch the running of the cattle from here, and then I would like to go to bed.” When he asked her leave to at least bring her some tea she agreed, and when he returned with it the warmth was welcome.
When the twin fires were fully ablaze, the wooden paddock doors swung open. Suddenly the night was filled with the lowing of cattle and bleating of sheep. Two young men emerged into the firelight, one leading the old bull on a tether, the other holding fast to a horn of the lead ram. As they drew them between the fires, the rest of the livestock came through the gate, following behind. In other years this moment was marked by raucous cheers from the crowd, the singing of songs and the thundering beat of drums. But the people fell silent, as did the animals, until the only sounds were the shuffling of hooves and the crackling of the great fires. And everyone knew they were present at a turning of the ages. When the animals had been let loose to pasture, the people drifted back to their camp fires and unrolled their sleeping furs. Perhaps in years to come the celebration of Beltane would regain some of its old glory, but that night all was quiet around the dying fires of Bel. ~
The next day, when Cethin and Fianna had tended to the last burned finger and scraped knee, and the people had gone home, each to their own village, the healer and the priestess sat together on an old wooden bench outside the doorway.
“I think, Mother,” Cethin said, “it is like the Lost Land of Iwerydd.”
Fianna smiled, for she saw the Tales were becoming a part of him. But she pretended not to notice.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“When Iwerydd was lost and the refugees settled on the Salis Plain, they had to find a new way of relating to Huan, their sun god, a new way of understanding a new world. But the temple they built, the stone henge, was not entirely new. Rather it was a new representation of the ancient encircling hills of their homeland. So as times change, old things are seen in new ways. But the old is never completely lost."
Fianna nodded. If she had ever borne a son of her own, she realized, she would have wanted him to be just like the young Dubh-bunadh healer.
~
And so the days of spring grew warmer as the world turned toward summer. In the meadows and forest glades around Llan y gelli wildflowers grew and bloomed as ever they had since long before such as the Romans had arrived on the Brythonic shores. Dog violet and moon daisy, celandine, cow parsley, and fox gloves. Fianna moved from the healer’s hut to an empty roundhouse beside the sheep meadow, enjoying the freedom of being outside the confining walls. Often she would walk alone in the forest. Sometimes, gazing into the quiet pool of a brook, she would find Sianed, and they would speak in their hearts of the coming of Rome and the safety of Affalon. Always, Sianed would end with the same admonition. Do not tarry, Fianna. Return before the frosts.
Often, too, Fianna and Cethin would sit on the bench beside the healer’s hut as she taught him the Marsh Tales. Tales of seekings and beginnings, tales of hopes and sorrows. And they would walk nearby in the forest, and she would ask him what he understood of what he had learned. Those were the gentlest of days at Llan y gelli, before the return of shadows.
Chapter Eleven
V. The Lights of the Ellylldan
At the edge of the ancient marshes, far from the open waterways, there are things in the darkness that are best left alone. So are the fens that surround the forbidden isle of Ynys y Cysgodion, where the Lady of Darkness is thought to dwell below the shadows of the Mendydd hills. From ancient times hapless travelers in those noisome waters have told of the Ellylldan, but only in daylight, for they dare not speak of such things in the darkness of the night.
~
Once there was a young woman of the Dwrtrygydd who was known as Tresglen. She was darkly beautiful, with a voice that sang like a marsh thrush. She was promised in marriage to Oriog the boatwright, a man of rough appearance and dangerous moods. Tresglen was a lover of the wide marshes, but Oriog hated them, and made it known at every turn. He came from a distant tribe that dwelt by the shores of the wide sea. His father had been a builder of proper boats, with deep hulls and sails that caught the wind. They would race through the blue waters like storm clouds that flew across the sky.
“You can’t call this a boat,” he said with disgust, ignoring the cold venison and birch beer that Tresglen had brought. “It’s your damned marshes! Not enough water to float a tadpole.” He dropped his stone adze, picked up the piece of venison and stared at it a moment, then dropped it as well. He snorted and walked over to a bush to relieve himself while Tresglen stood nearby in silence. When he returned to sit again on the ash log he was working on, she finally spoke.
“I don’t know why you stay here when you are so displeased with us.” He always ranted about the marshes, but clearly it was her people he hated. “Why don’t you return to the sea and your own people?”
He looked with yearning for a moment to the west, then spit in no particular direction. “You know well the answer to that, woman. It seems our
Chief desires an alliance with the Dwyrtrygydd, for what deranged reason I cannot guess. I am his nephew, you are the daughter of Gweledydd the seer.” He spit again on the ground near his foot and picked up the adze. He hated the damned marshes, the damned marsh people and, she knew, he hated her only slightly less.
“No keel,” he muttered, “no frame, no sail. Just a damned log.” In truth there was a certain degree of skill involved in crafting a marsh boat, but not such that Oriog would acknowledge. He set to work attacking the tree’s heartwood with the adze, his noon meal and his inconveniently betrothed woman both driven from his mind.
Tresglen did not cry. There were no tears left. Oriog’s mumbled curses faded behind her as she followed the raised trackway through the marsh back to the island of huts. “I will not have this life,” she said to herself aloud. A startled marsh hen flushed from a thicket of reeds to her left. She shouted to it as it flew off, “I will not have this life!”
~
At supper that night Gweledydd’s eyes were sad but resolute. “It cannot be undone, daughter,” he said. “Oriog is a skilled craftsman, even if he would rather not be making marsh boats. He will be a good provider, and we cannot insult his clan by backing out now.”
Tresglen poked absently at the small hearthfire. Her father was a seer. Could he not see the grief in his own daughter’s face? She imagined herself in Oriog’s bed, saw the disdain in his eyes as he lay over her and took what was his due. I cannot, she thought. I will not! He would not dare do this to me if Mother were still alive.
And so the days went by. The grief in her heart turned to anger, and the anger to resentment. One day, as her wedding to Oriog drew near, her resentment turned to resolution. She began to gather a store of food – dried fruit and stale bread, and skins of water – and stored them in the hollow of an old tree outside the camp. She sharpened the knife Gweledydd had given her for skinning hares, and the short spear with which he had taught her to fish. And she watched Oriog as he worked on the flat bottomed boat. Watched, and waited for him to finish, praying to the marsh goddesses that he would before their wedding night arrived.
On the evening before the ceremony was to take place he looked up from his work and saw her sitting nearby, quietly singing to herself. For a moment he allowed himself to think, she does have a beautiful voice. But then he remembered his displeasure, and spat on the ground. “Well that’s done,” he said, and walked off to get drunk. It was beginning to get dark. Quietly, deep in the ancient marshes, the Ellylldan began to stir.
The young woman ran to her father’s hut for her knife and spear, and a warm woolen cloak. Good, he was not there. He would be with the other men celebrating with Oriog, and would not return until late. By then she would be gone. She gathered her skins of food and water from the hollow tree and returned to the boat. It was harder to drag the flat bottomed dugout to the water than she thought, so she had to stop and rest several times. By the time she had it afloat and loaded with her provisions, darkness had settled upon the marsh.
Tresglen had no plan except to get away as quickly and quietly as possible. To avoid being missed soon enough to be successfully followed. To not get caught. To never be found.
Her marsh lay to the north of Ynys Calchfaen. It was in the days before the lake villages, so there was only open water beyond that. Tresglen shivered at the thought of the wide water with its vast openness in every direction and the unbroken sky stretching above. She was a daughter of the marshes, preferring the close covering of reeds, the gathering of shadows above the dark waters. In the end she chose a path through the marshes because, she told herself, it would be easier to hide and make good an escape. Still, the marshes at night could be as frightening as the wide waters. There were things in the marshes at night, she knew, and she looked cautiously about her as she paddled away from the bank. Somewhere in the huts of her people the men were drinking with Oriog, making crude jokes about the coming adventures of his wedding night. Somewhere, out in the marshes, the Ellylldan were beginning to stir.
There was no moon that night. Black clouds covered the stars. With no light by which to see, Tresglen decided to head east from Calchfaen, staying just inside the edge of the marsh reeds. That would take her counter-sunwise in a sweeping circle to the northeast, past the darkness of Ynys y Niwl and then on into the dark shadows of the north marshes. Folk who went in there often did not come out. It would be a good place to hide. So Tresglen paddled along the narrow channels, softly humming marsh tunes to herself in the dark.
She need not have worried about being missed. Far into the night Oriog, Gweledydd, and most of the other men sat around a blazing fire, drank untold skins of well-aged mead, and sang vulgar songs of conquests of every sort. Indeed her father never returned to their hut that night, nor Oriog to his. Blind drunk, they collapsed together beside a pathway and sang themselves to sleep on the ground. Neither Tresglen’s absence, nor the boat’s, would be noticed until they were both long gone. No, she would not be followed. But there were other things than men stirring in the shadows of the night.
All round her the night sounds of the marsh filled her imagination with visions of what she could not see. The humming and chirping of countless insects was deafening in the darkness. The deep croaking of a frog nearby in the rushes sounded as though it were with her in the boat. In the water there were things that glowed with a pale, eerie light. Things she could not see with her eyes she began to see in her mind. Her skin crawled as she felt things she had not touched; long, curling eels, and sucking leeches. She prayed there would be no tangling webs of spiders spun across the channel, as she felt her way forward between the reeds.
All of this is better than a life with Oriog, she told herself over and over. All of this! And she told herself the morning would come, though the night grew ever deeper. In the darkest part of the marsh, near unseen Ynys y Niwl, the Ellylldan were waiting, dancing among the reed tussocks where noisome marsh gasses hovered over black waters.
At first Tresglen thought the darkness was playing tricks with her eyes. Soft white lights appeared before her, indistinct, uncertain. They flickered and danced, then disappeared, only to appear again some distance away. She heard soft, taunting voices in her mind:
Come! Come, dance with us. Come and follow the lights, Tresglen. She shook her head to clear her vision and her mind. But the lights remained. Follow the lights, Tresglen. Come with us. The voices were like sweet songs. No need to fear the dark. Come! Follow our lights! The Ellylldan danced before her in the dark, and she knew not what it was.
“Come,” she repeated, in a quiet voice. “Come.” And she was entranced. Dipping the narrow blade of her paddle into the shallow water on her right, she began to turn her boat toward the beckoning lights. “Yes, I am coming,” she breathed into the night air, and the lights danced away before her farther into the dark.
Something tugged at her awareness. What was it? A sense of unease that seemed to call for caution. Beware! The word was clear in her mind. But why? The lights were so beautiful, dancing slowly in the utter darkness. Then a tune emerged from deep within her memory, and the voice of her mother singing, the scent of her mother’s body as she cradled the young child Tresglen in her arms. Finally, she remembered the words of the old marsh rhyme:
On darkest nights
within the marshes deep, beware the lights
that soft before you creep! Beware the ghostly dancing lights before you in the dark:
they will not guide your steps aright, nor safest pathways mark!
On darkest nights
when creatures in the marshes creep, beware the glowing lights
that lure the mind to sleep
and trick the feet to wander from the way; for there within the darkness will they keep you, evermore, from living light of day!
Beware the lights, marsh traveler, if you can! Beware the enchantment of the Ellylldan!
Tresglen froze, her paddle held still in the water. A quiet trembling shook her
as childhood fears gripped her mind. Ahead the lights softly retreated and continued their dance, bidding her deeper in a direction she had not chosen. The Ellylldan! She shut her eyes tightly for several moments, hoping the lights would go away. But when she looked again they were still there, slightly farther off among the reeds. They danced in a slow bobbing motion before her.
Come , they softly sang. Come follow us, come dance with us. Follow the lights.
Her thoughts raced even as her body remained frozen, her boat sitting motionless in the still water. Insects sang their night songs around her. What did she know about the Ellylldan? Her mother’s warnings had always fed childhood imaginings of dark, ugly creatures, wet and dripping with marsh water, weeds and slime matted in their stringy hair, their long and boney limbs, and large, bulbous frog-eyes lit from within with an unholy light. And their teeth. Long, needle sharp teeth.
Tales of Avalon Page 10
