by Ilka Tampke
The moon darkened and a cold rage lifted me to standing. My heart clenched like a warrior’s fist and breath hissed through my throat.
Without thought, I pulled off my sandals, the bare soles of my feet pressed on the dirt. I closed my eyes. My urge to harm Heka, as she had harmed, was so powerful I was swaying with it.
And then I felt it. A shivering. Something pushing, as though the earth’s spirit was nudging at my feet. With my next breath it was within me, coursing up from deep in the ground. Life laws had been broken by Heka’s act and now it was as if the Mothers’ own anger rose up through me, stirring and fuelling my own. With deep breaths, I pulled it forth until my belly flooded with the strength of it. With a hard spasm, it rose from my core, erupting in a choking howl. And on this sound was carried all my fury: my desire for Heka to suffer for this fawn.
I fell against the wall of the kitchen, panting heavily. I did not know what I had sent forth, only that it was black with intent. And I was spent like a hunter after a kill.
I eased the jewel from the buck’s ear, gathered him into my arms and buried him with my bare hands at the queen’s gateway.
When I finally burrowed in beside Cookmother, I was hollow with grief. I squeezed against her broad back, but it was no use. I could not rest. Something had awoken and was stirring within me.
A sacred prohibition, a curse, a taboo.
Touch the forbidden object, cross the forbidden threshold, and suffer dishonour, even death.
A journeyman or woman will place the geas, but if the need is true, anyone can call it.
A geas called by a woman is the most powerful of all.
‘WHAT ROTTEN SOUL yields this sick act?’ Cookmother grunted as we scrubbed the blood from the doorstep.
Questions of my lateness had been silenced by the death of the fawn.
‘Who would do it, Ailia? Who is so spirit-ill in the township?’
I did not expose Heka’s name. To do so would reveal that I had relinquished Cookmother’s gift. But this was not all. There was an infection festering between this strangemaid and me, and it filled me with shame.
Cookmother freed me from my tasks. ‘Find the wretch who would slay the queen’s totem, and call for retribution. Or I’ll have Llwyd himself set a geas,’ she called.
It was Mael the breadmaker who told me that Heka slept at the fringes. ‘She touts a trade that she learned at the Roman ports—’ his eyes bulged as he heaved a tray onto the bench, ‘—where women are bought and sold like loaves.’
A slate-grey sky bore down on Caer Cad. I walked out the gates and into the labyrinth of rough huts and tents that made up the fringes. The stench of human shit rose from the narrow paths, and eyes glinted from the doorways as I passed. ‘Get gone!’ I yelled as a swarm of screeching children peppered me with pebbles.
Neha’s bark led me to Heka. She sat under a makeshift thatch, gnawing on gristle, next to a man withered with age.
‘Heka?’
She looked up.
‘I would speak with you,’ I said.
She came reluctantly to her feet and stood before me. ‘Speak then.’
Under the daylight, I saw the dirt that browned her skin and the lice teeming in her hair. For a moment her wretchedness overwhelmed me. Most came to the fringes by skinlessness, others by crime or injury. She was sister to the dog. What held her here? Had all refused her as I refused her? Then I pictured the fawn. ‘The animal slain—you have done grave wrong with it. You had business with me, not a babe of the forest.’
‘What say you?’ She screwed up her face, affecting confusion.
‘Don’t play the fool, you injure the Tribequeen’s own kin in the killing of the Beltane fawn.’
She laughed. ‘And how is it my work?’
‘This.’ I pulled the pin from my pocket and held it before her. ‘You left your mark. Were you so dull-witted as to think I would not know you?’
‘Ah, the pin. That has been lost to me since yesterday morn—thank you for its safe return.’ She reached to take it but I snatched it away.
‘Heka,’ I stammered, ‘do you deny it?’
She took a bored breath. ‘If ill was done by the pin, then it was not by my hand.’
She could not weasel from this. It was a lie without shame and I could almost taste the pleasure she took in it. ‘Who else would seek to disturb me so?’
‘I do not know. But whoever it was, it was not I. Ask your worksister, Cah. She walked with me yesterday. We drank together, here, at the fringe fires. She will tell you.’
Cah? What was her business here? My certainty cracked and doubt drifted in. I began to wonder if indeed the pin had been lost and I had accused her falsely. ‘Tell me the truth, woman, or, by the Mothers, you will suffer for your lies. I will ensure it.’
Heka laughed again. ‘You set me a geas? Ooh! By which journeyman is it sanctioned? Which skin laws enforce it?’ She scratched a lesion at her throat.
‘I know it was you,’ I said, despairing. ‘I know it.’ But my voice was thin.
Heka snorted and turned away.
I brimmed with fury as I walked back through the fringe huts, but it was an impotent, crippled anger that found no justice. Never before had I been deemed worthy of such ill. Yet I could not cast off the thought that it was somehow deserved. That her lies were payment for mine. Then I thought of the precious buck and I was stiffened with hate all over again. My geas had no sanction, but it was made with the full weight of my heart.
I stopped before I reached the southern gate. I could not return to my kitchen tasks in such distress. There was only one who could help me make sense of this, and, while I had leave from Cookmother, I would test his promise to me.
With Neha at my side, I stole back along the first rampart, and slipped through the northern entranceway, down the hill. A farmer was driving cattle in the next field and women were washing blankets at the Nain, but none noticed me as I edged south through the crop fields then out along the Cam.
It did not take me long to reach our place. The water mirrored the dark sky, its burbling drone more a warning than a comfort. Come, I willed him, wrapping my summer cloak tightly as I waited.
Neha barked at something in the river.
I peered over the bank and my eye caught an arrow of light as a fish shot to the deep. After a moment it surfaced again, the weak sun catching on its flank. It was the fish from the bathing pool. I was sure of it. ‘Hush, Neha,’ I chided, as she let forth a torrent of barking.
I crouched, watching it ribbon through the water, its belly crimson and silver, black at its spine. Never had I seen anything so beautiful. I laid my hand on the river’s surface and the fish glided under my palm. The touch of its skin halted my breath. In a flash, it had darted upstream.
I cried out in dismay and to my delight it returned, then swam away once more. I stared after it, enchanted. Did it want me to follow?
It flipped joyously as I began to walk. I quickened my step until I was not ten paces from the edge of the Oldforest and there I stopped. Cookmother had always warned me to keep a fair distance from the forest’s edge, that its spirits had a long reach. But I could
not take leave of this animal.
The fish darted back and forth, cajoling me forward, until I stood right at the forest’s threshold. I stared into the shadowy corridors that were hardly touched by the day’s thin light, my flesh pimpling in the sudden cold.
Neha barked beside me but the sound was distant.
The salmon leaped once more then lunged into the forest. Now I had no doubt: it was asking me to go in. What harm could come when I had the invitation, the protection, of such a magical creature?
I took a step, then several more, until there were dark, moss-covered trunks, not only before and beside me, but also behind me, and I was fully encased within the forest.
Neha did not follow.
It was an eerie world in which I found myself. Filtered light through the canopy lent a veiled, moonlit quality to the narrow path. The air in my nostrils was cold and scented with rot. Silence surrounded me, save for the faint barks of Neha and my muffled footfall on the forest bed.
I did not tear my eyes from the fish, who led me steadily now, without jumps or turns. My mind knew nothing but its rhythmic undulations, like a trickle of blood through the black water.
When it slowed, I was deep in a grotto: a hidden place as lovely and secret as any I had seen. A small waterfall dropped into a wide pool ringed with mossy boulders and surrounded by hazel trees. Their branches spread over the water like gnarled fingers, laden with fruit as crimson as the fish’s skin. Every few moments a nut dropped into the water, where it bubbled and sank, prompting a thin mist to rise off the surface.
I stood at the edge, as the fish circled. Before my eyes, its colour strengthened until it was the hue of a fresh wound. It plunged and surfaced several times. Then there was stillness and it was gone.
In an instant, my dress and sandals were off and I was into the water. My legs blanched with the coldness but I pushed further in. Underfoot were sharp stones, silty mud, wriggling things. But with my next step, I could not find the riverbed. There was no floor. When I inched forward, my toes felt a ledge, and beyond this, only space and water.
Hesitantly, for I had never swum alone before, I glided out over this deep place. I let myself drop until I was fully submerged but still there was nothing beneath me. It was a well of some kind, a spring, within the river. The water at its opening was ice-cold as I flailed above it, eddies pulling me downward. This was where the fish had gone.
With a deep breath, I dropped under once more and peered into the darkness, straining to sight a flash of red.
‘Ailia!’ Taliesin’s voice echoed through the water.
I broke the surface, searching frantically. ‘Taliesin!’ I called, splashing back to the bank. ‘I am here!’
‘Ailia—’ Again I heard his voice but it was distant, muted, as if through a barrier.
I called to him as I clambered from the pool, but my shouts were met with silence and a heavy mist that had rolled in from the heart of the forest. Pulling on my dress and sandals, I ran among the trees, calling, but the mist denied me sight and he did not speak again.
When I was finally still, shaking with cold, the truth of where I had come struck me like a blow. The fish’s hold was broken and suddenly I was terrified. ‘Neha!’ I screamed, running back to the forest entrance, ‘Neha, where are you?’
I ran without rest, stumbling on roots and stones until the trunks started to thin and I sighted my dog waiting patiently.
‘Thank the Mothers,’ I murmured into her neck when I reached her. As she licked my face, I lay back on the grass, laughing to be out of the forest and free of its seduction. How foolish I had been, how lacking in strength. ‘You were cleverer,’ I whispered to Neha. ‘You knew to resist.’
I promised myself never to be drawn again, but no sooner had I done so than I remembered the voice calling through the mist. Was it some mischief of the forest? No. It was Taliesin, I could have sworn it. He was there.
When I pushed through the doorskins, only Bebin and Ianna were in the kitchen, hemming cheesecloths at the table.
‘Where is Cookmother?’ I asked.
‘Gone with Cah to attend a dirt-dweller near death from skinsores,’ said Bebin.
I stared. ‘Which dirt-dweller?’
Bebin shrugged. ‘Someone Cah had knowledge of.’
‘I will be back soon,’ I said, retying my cloak.
‘Be sure that you are, sister,’ called Bebin after me. ‘I will find stories for your absences no longer.’
Even as I hurried down to the fringes, I knew what I would find when I got there. I pushed my way through the knot of people gathered outside the tent I had visited that morning.
Inside the cramped space, Cookmother was bent over a figure lying on linen wraps on the ground. An evil smell poured from her. Though her face was swollen and badly blemished, I saw it was Heka.
Cookmother gasped with relief at my arrival. ‘Quickly, Ailia, help me! There is infection in the blisters and my compresses will not clear them.’ Bundles of herbs lay strewn around her and she was wringing hot water from bloodied linen strips. ‘Nothing relieves her—’
‘She is cursed!’ cried a voice from the crowd around us. ‘Skinsores are the mark of the lie-teller. A blemish for each lie told.’
‘Confess your lies, if you’ve told them, dirt-dweller,’ said Cookmother to Heka. ‘It may be all that saves you.’
But Heka was beyond hearing or speaking. Her eyelids flickered with a roll of fever.
‘May I sit with her alone?’ I asked.
‘Do what you can.’ Cookmother hauled herself to standing. ‘My cures are spent.’
Heka’s skin was ashen. Her face, throat and arms were covered in rosy eruptions, their white centres weeping with pus. Heat poured from her and she moaned with pain.
Had I done this? These were violent sores and had come quicker than any flesh-law would allow. If this was my curse, it had manifested more swiftly than even a journeyman’s geas.
Heka groaned as a boil broke at her temple.
If I had in any way crafted this horror, I could not allow it to continue. I leaned close to her. ‘Heka—’
Her eyes sprang open at my voice and filled with a wild hope. ‘Lift the geas,’ she whispered.
‘Who killed the forest’s child?’ I murmured into her blistered ear.
Her breath laboured through her swollen throat. ‘It was I.’
I swallowed. ‘For what reason?’
‘So you would know what I have known.’ Her words were unfathomable.
‘What have you known?’ I stared at her, but she spoke no more. The fever was robbing her breath. I could not allow her to burn a moment longer or she would surely break her ties with this world. ‘It is lifted.’
Straightaway the redness began to pale. I pressed her brow and felt it cool.
‘Thank you,’ she whimpered.
‘Ailia?’ called Cookmother from the entrance.
‘Come!’ I cried. ‘Your herbs have prevailed. She becomes well.’
‘What? By Mothers, you are right.’ Cookmother bustled in and stood beside
me, smiling.
We gathered up the bandages and took them to the well. I was silent as we washed them, struggling to fathom the power of my geas. At my wish, Heka had been sickened and healed. The truth of it shocked me, but I could not deny it. Was it something in the forest—the fish, the pool—that had bestowed me this strength? I burned to ask Cookmother, but how could I confess that I had entered the forest? That I had transgressed her gravest foreboding?
The afternoon brought heatwork in the making of cheese. It called for our largest iron cookpot, four women to lift it and hours of patience for stirring the milk.
We worked tirelessly, seasoning the curd with droplets of sweat. Bebin and Ianna chattered without pause and Cah broke in with her usual barbs, but I remained quiet, my thoughts spiralling, until at day’s end, in need of giving them voice, I asked Bebin to walk with me.
We stood on an upturned bucket to mount the earthen ledge circling the hilltop behind the first wall. Walking north along the ledge, we reached a place where several spiked beams had rotted and tumbled into the ditch below. Here we sat with our legs dangling, staring out to the eastern horizon, watching the nightfall.
There could surely be no colours like those of a Summer dusk, the bruised pinks, mauves and greys falling like gauze on the vivid green flatlands. A wane moon was ascending and we could hear the distant natter of day’s end drifting from the town.
Bebin looked up at the emerging stars. ‘The bull’s head is almost mid-sky. Tomorrow will favour unions.’ Although she had only the first degree of training, she was gifted in star-reading and I loved to hear her speak of it.
‘Then it is a shame your traveller is not returned,’ I teased.
‘Nor yours.’ She glanced at me. ‘Where are your thoughts, Ailia? Have they followed Ruther to Rome?’
‘No,’ I laughed. ‘I’ve barely thought of him.’
