The burning sensation was consuming her, now, and Meredydd scratched and rubbed at her bare arms, praying for it to stop. She felt a strong urge to tear off her clothing and roll in the sand, but somehow knew even that would not relieve her. A whimper of panic slipped from her throat when she realized the results of her chafing—the tiny glints had bled together so that her arms glimmered with a pallid yellow phosphorescence. And the skin! Her skin felt blistered, as if she had sustained a terrible sunburn. It sloughed away beneath her fingertips like snake-skin, turning to oily powder and disappearing into the sand.
Frantic, Meredydd pulled down her sleeves and folded her arms tightly across her stomach. She began a prayer duan, struggling for control. Whatever this was, surely it was supposed to happen. Nothing she could do would prevent it or alter its course. She glanced over her shoulder at the dark wooded slope behind. She could run.
Oh, yes, and leave Skeet where he lay. Her lip curled with self-disgust. Running would not help. She glanced over at Skeet, asleep by the waning fire. He looked perfectly normal.
Whatever this was, it was affecting only her. That was good.
She could throw herself into the water, she supposed. Maybe the cold salt-water would assuage this horrible burning. It seemed a sound idea. In fact, she was certain it would work.
The frigid water, the sting of the salt—yes, that would take away the burning.
She jumped to her feet, ready to bolt across the sand when she caught herself. Was it this that had enticed Taminy-a-Cuinn into the Sea?
She wavered for a moment, then dropped back to the sand. If this was what Taminy had succumbed to, then she would resist it.
She turned her face downward into the darkness of her lap and saw tiny rinds of flesh sift down to lie on the cloth of her tunic. She lifted a trembling hand to her cheek, stroking it gently with her fingertips. The flesh crumbled and fell. Horrified, she stared at her fingers. The fleshy remnants clung to them and they, too, glowed.
She did not take her eyes from her hands as she rose from the sand. Once on her feet, she rubbed at her cheeks, at her arms—desperate now, to discover what lay underneath. Robbed of its covering flesh, the substance of her arms gleamed gold-white in the darkness of the night, brighter than the gold-white heart of Skeet’s fire.
Transfixed, Meredydd removed her tunic, her boots and leggings, her shirt. Then, after a moment’s hesitation, she stripped off her undergarments and stood, naked, upon the Meri’s beach. She was not cold, for heat radiated from her pied body, leaking, along with the light, from patches where flesh had come away with cloth.
With hands that no longer trembled, Meredydd continued her task, shedding what was left of her outer self, shaking her hair to free the flame hidden within the drab strands, until finally she was bare of flesh, blazing and lustrous like a tiny sun—like a star.
When the last scrap of slough had dropped, when she had surveyed her new body with wonder and fear, she raised her eyes to the Sea and beheld there a green-white flame that equaled her own. It filled the water with glory and washed, like translucent milk, upon the shore.
Meredydd stepped down to the waterline, letting the Sea lap at her bare toes. She waited calmly now, though her heart beat a quick tattoo within her fiery breast, and her eyes, garnet-dark, sparkled, expectant.
The water seethed and roiled before her and then, a glorious Being rose out of the foam and hovered just offshore. It was like nothing Meredydd had ever seen nor any she could ever describe. Only one feature could she mark with any certainty—the Creature’s eyes. They were like emeralds—deep, bright and verdant, and they laughed.
“Beautiful Sister.” The voice came from nowhere and everywhere, and filled the cloudless sky and covered the milky waters. “I have waited long.”
Meredydd found her own voice, but it didn’t sound like her own. Still, it worked her will, though it said words that seemed strange when she was so full of questions. “I have traveled far.” That was all.
“I have traveled with you, Sister.” The Meri extended her radiance toward the shore. “Come home, Sister. Come home. This is that for which you have been created. Not to be Osraed, but to be the Mother of Osraed. Not to carry the torch of Wisdom, but to light it.”
Meredydd had no words, only a great sense of unworthiness. She was disobedient, inattentive, stubborn—
“You are kindness; you are compassion; you are obedience tempered with love; you are justice tempered with mercy; you are strength of purpose; you are faith and reason. You will be the Mother not of the bodies of Osraed, but of their spirits—the Channel of the Knowledge of the First Being. For this you have proven worthy.”
The radiant “arms” extended all the way to the shore. The beautiful, world-filling laughter sounded again, flute-like.
“Come into the water, Sister, and do you get wet.”
Meredydd laughed, too, then and raised her own arms of Light and stepped from the shore into the milky Sea. It was warm—warm with love and delight and acceptance. She was home, for her mother and father were here and Osraed Bevol and Skeet and all she loved. She could touch them, feel them, know about them what she had never known.
The Meri met her in the surf and embraced her, drawing her down beneath the waves. She could breathe here just as she had above in the air—but, no, she realized—it was only that she no longer needed to breathe. She was wrapped all about by luminescence—her gold, the Meri’s green—she was embraced in it, embraced in the arms of the Meri.
The great emerald eyes locked with her own. Now, Sister, said the Meri, and could be heard without sound. Now, hold the knowledge of all that has been.
The banners of their individual radiance mingled—green and gold—and Meredydd ceased to be Meredydd and began to be Something Else.
When at last the brilliance separated—the gold and the green—two which had been one floated apart, still touching.
Emerald eyes gazed into eyes like garnets. The Lover and the Beloved have been made one in Thee.
The Meri smiled a smile that could be felt and heard, if not seen. And I had wondered what that verse meant.
Now you know.
Now We know.
The green radiance withdrew now, separating completely from the gold.
Farewell, Sister Meredydd.
Farewell, Taminy.
Toward shore, she went, the green brilliance fading as she neared the beach, dying as she stepped out onto the sand—merely a glimmer now, as of moonlight on wet skin. There was a boy there, sitting beside a fire. Waiting, with his eyes on the milky gold water. Beside him sat a little girl with moonlit hair, and beside her was a man—a copper-bearded Osraed—holding out a robe.
She took a deep breath of winy sea air and laughed. “Ah, Osraed Bevol! I have not breathed for a hundred years!”
o0o
She watched them as they left in the first light of dawn. Watched them in a way she had never been able to watch anything before—from outside and inside all at once. She felt Skeet’s anxious gaze prying at the waters she had inherited and understood that now, as never before on Pilgrimage, he was only Skeet, no longer Osraed Bevol’s eyes, ears and hands.
She understood a great many things now. Things about Taminy-a-Cuinn and Mam Lufu and herself—and about Osraed Bevol as well.
He had been at her Name Tell, she knew, and knew why her mother, who had meant to name her Airleas, had spoken instead the name Meredydd, which means “guardian from the Sea.”
It would be said in Caraid-land that yet another young woman had walked into the Sea. But this time, the Weard would not lie. He may not be believed, but he would not lie. And there would be a new legend to add to the old.
She gazed down history lines no mortal being could see and knew that now was a time of deep and difficult change. There was glory if Caraid-land was ready for that change, devastation if it was not.
The Meri listened to the Voice of the Beloved within Her—the Voice of the Spirit which men call Go
d—and learned the Duan that no living mortal had sung but for the Star of the Sea.
Chapter 14
Let the arrow in your hand be an arrow of love.
Let it not hurt any living being.
Let it be an arrow of love.
— The Corah
Book II, Verse 11
Within sight of the Sea, Aelder Prentice Wyth hesitated. What sense did it make to go on? He could only fail. Dear God, he had failed already. He’d tried to obey the instructions of Osraed Calach, but it seemed that every time he tried to focus on his goal, some unavoidable dilemma would arise, forcing him to abandon his Path. That steadman’s flooded field, that little boy’s broken arm....
And it seemed that no matter how inept his aid had been, the people to whom he gave it praised him as if he were some great, sainted Osraed. If he believed the half of what they said about him—
“Prentice Wyth?”
He glanced away from the Sea’s sparkling carpet. His young Weard, Prentice Killian, gazed up at him through tired, red-rimmed eyes.
“Are we going to descend? I think we can make it to the seashore by early evening if we keep moving.”
There was some reproach in that, for Wyth was wont to pause for introspection at odd intervals, during which poor Prentice Killian (and he thought of himself in exactly those terms) was forced to champ the bit until he rose from his stupor and moved on.
He had thought, had poor Killian, that being Weard for an Aelder Prentice would be glorious, or at least interesting. It had proved to be neither. He’d had to pile peat bags right alongside his Pilgrim when a stream flash-flooded some steadman’s corn field, and had been forced to sit up all night at the bedside of some wee imp with a busted limb. He prayed his own Pilgrimage would be more exciting.
Prentice Wyth nodded his head and began shuffling forward again. The Sea drew him like a magnet, notwithstanding he knew it would be the scene of his ultimate humiliation.
The warm, damp wind infiltrated his clothing and made him wriggle uncomfortably. Discomfiting too, was the thought that he might stand upon the very stretch of beach where Meredydd had met whatever fate had really claimed her. He didn’t believe she had killed herself, although that theory had been put forth, but it was difficult to believe Skeet’s tale of her transformation into a radiant Eibhilin Being. The Osraed, save Bevol and one or two others, scoffed at the idea. Could anyone believe, they said, that the Meri would surround Herself with an entourage of water sprites?
Yet again, said his lover’s heart, if anyone could be suspected to hide Eibhilin glory beneath human flesh, it was certainly Meredydd-a-Lagan.
He dwelt for a while on how he missed her—on how he wished he could take back all the nasty, superior, stupid things he had said to her in class. He wished she could know the depth of his contrition and sorrow and love. He wished she could see how he defended her whenever it was suggested that she had drowned herself in shame at the Meri’s rage over being approached by a female Pilgrim or that she had been turned into a sea snake by that wrathful Being.
The Meri had changed her aspect again, too, after the great storm that had greeted Meredydd’s suit for Osraed-hood. The one Pilgrim to be granted his heart’s desire, mouse-meek Lealbhallain, said that the waters were suffused with amber light and the Meri’s eyes were garnets, not emeralds as the living Osraed described.
Wyth knew a pang of disappointment that the one Prentice to pass the Meri wasn’t even one of his more promising students. He would be more than disappointed if he was not selected also; he would be completely humiliated. How could he ever look the boy in the face again?
He chastised himself mentally, then, uncomfortable with the tenor of his thoughts. Leal was a nice boy, if not spectacular of intellect or eloquent of speech. He had a good heart and was very proficient at the Healing Arts. He would be a good Osraed or the Meri would not have chosen him.
The praise was sincere, yet so was Wyth’s covetousness of the younger boy’s worthiness. If Aelder Prentice Wyth was not entirely successful of ridding himself of that fault, he at least tempered it by envying Lealbhallain his qualities and not merely his new station. That, however, did not impress Wyth or ameliorate his sense of shame. Swallowing his envy, he stuck out his long chin and followed it to the Sea.
They reached the shore just at sunset and Prentice Killian dragged himself through setting up a camp and observation station while Wyth wandered the beach in search of his Pilgrim’s Post.
No one had bothered to mention to poor Killian that journeying with a self-absorbed Pilgrim meant doing almost all of the manual labor. The boy grumbled a little as he gathered wood and wondered what they would eat for their evening meal—sand, for all Prentice Wyth cared.
It was true that Wyth Arundel was concerned with nothing at this moment but locating the one parcel in a vast wilderness of rock-strewn sand that would be the scene of his final test.
Still, the Sea itself managed to distract him. It was an endless pool of liquid fire. Set ablaze by the great, eye-scorching orb of gold that dipped into its nether depths, it wore a broad swath of crimson across its breast like a fiery sash. Scattered offshore, shadowed rocks were black coals that had yet to melt or burst into flame.
He wondered how it could look more glorious than this, even when inhabited by the Meri, but knew it must. It would be nothing like this, he told himself. The Meri’s glory would make of this Sun a mere candle.
Unable to take his eyes from the fiery water, he sank to his haunches where he stood, finding an odd double hillock of sand behind him. He rested his back against it, so close to the water that his feet could nearly reach the foam if he but stretched out his legs. Instead, he drew them up and rested his chin on his knees.
Watching the Sea turn from blaze to blood, he recalled a dream. So long ago, it seemed. A dream Meredydd had interpreted to his humiliation. To enter the Sea and not get wet.
He felt a sudden urge to laugh and indulged it, letting the unexpected thing float from his chest into the sea air. The sheer arrogance of him! To think there was greatness in that conceit, when the Sea was symbolic of every bounty God had stored up for man. To enter it without getting wet! He shook his head and lowered his brow to his knees for a moment of prayer.
He felt the Sun set without seeing it, felt its warmth withdraw from flesh and sand and air to be replaced by the cool of evening. It would be a dark night, too, Wyth knew, for there would be only a sliver of moon and it would be long in rising.
He raised his head, sighed and gazed out at the Sea, dark now except for the light of—
His body stiffened, his backbone coming staff straight. The light of what? The Sun was gone; there was no moon, and yet, far out in the water there was light, gliding beneath the waves like a wave-bound moon—no, a Sun.
He thought of calling to Killian, but no sound would come from his constricted throat but an inhuman croak. He scrambled to his knees and stared at the water.
o0o
She had known it was Wyth before he had even set foot upon Her shore. She had watched every step of his Pilgrimage and saw much of Her own uncertainty in him as She carefully set tests in his path. She also saw honor and integrity, compassion and kindness, strength of will. And if there was, about Wyth Arundel, a certain self-centeredness, it was not selfishness, and disappeared to a vapor when anyone held out a hand to him for help. All arrogance was gone now, leaving behind a purer urge toward self-effacement. Wyth could now show humility in the face of his faults rather than an arrogance born of his sense of inferiority.
Something else She also knew—Wyth was the son of both a murderer and a murderess. It was his mother’s greed which had pushed his father toward the destruction of Lagan. She had seen the precipitating scene as clearly as if She had been standing in the room with the players: Rowan Arundel, white-faced and wild-eyed, his wife flushed and furious—her eyes, mere slits shielding glittering jet glass. It was a rich room in a grand house; high-beamed ceilings overhung tap
estried walls paneled in the sleekest wood. A fire burned in a hearth like a giant’s maw, the beautifully wrought andirons and fender muzzling its roar—handiwork of the Smythe at Lagan.
“Damn your cowardice, Rowan! An easement will not do! An easement will not allow us use of that land in perpetuity. It will not ensure it for your son or for his sons. Nor will it allow us to expand our pasturage. We can run no more sheep on this land, Arundel. There’s barely enough for this year’s flock. And with our southern border to the bluffs and our eastern to the muir, we’ve no choice but to get Lagan.”
“He will not sell,” whispered the Eiric, the white ring around his mouth marking his fear.
“Then you must remove him.”
Eiric Rowan Arundel rallied himself for one last, bold exclamation. “Wife! Do you realize what you are saying?”
Imperious, her sleek brows rose. “Do you want the land?”
“Not that much.”
“—or would you just as soon begin selling off stock because our stead will no longer support it? It has come to that, Rowan. We might as well sell them or slaughter them before-time. We’ve no longer got the pasturage to feed them. What sort of poor inheritance is that to leave Wyth? Shall you die and pass of to him a withered, barren stead? Is that what you would bequeath to your boy?”
She had won him with that and conjured up a plan. She had even hired the men who accompanied the Eiric of Arundel to Lagan, who, themselves, never saw the face of the man that met them in the woods by the Gled-Tyne Road and led them to their killing.
The Meri had stayed with the past stream through all, and saw and heard and felt how the parents of Meredydd-a-Lagan had died.
Her mother had thrust herself upon a knife when Arundel’s hired killers expressed a desire to take more than her life; her father had died trying to fight his way to her side. His last mortal thought was of his wife; hers was a prayer of thanks that Meredydd had not done as she was told and come straight home after worship.
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