by Ilka Tampke
‘So what has quieted you today?’
I scratched a small welt that had risen on my hand, then looked down in alarm as it bled. Did my skin now begin to betray my lies? It was time to speak before my flesh confessed what I did not. I inhaled and told her that I had stepped into the Oldforest. I told her of the fish, the drop in the water, Heka’s mark on the fawn and the command of life I had shown that day. The only thing I did not speak of was Taliesin.
She listened, round-eyed. When I was finished, she was grave. ‘You must not go back in. I warn you with all my heart. The Oldforest is dangerous to those without training. I know only little, but I have heard of such drops as the pool you found—’ She paused, her face taut with worry.
‘What are they?’ I urged.
‘They are holes in our hardworld.’
‘But where do they lead?’
Bebin shook her head. ‘That is journeywomen’s knowledge. But I do know that they are tears in the truth of things and if you fall through them you are unprotected.’
‘Why does it draw me? This fish? This place?’
Again she shrugged. ‘Perhaps they sense easy prey. You are untaught and pure-hearted.’
As she spoke I was ashamed of my ignorance, my easy surrender to the enchantment of the fish.
‘These are powerful places, only for people with knowledge. Stay clear, I beg you, sister. Cookmother will insist on the same.’
I grabbed her arm. ‘Don’t tell Cookmother,’ I pleaded. ‘Promise you will speak nothing of this to her.’
Bebin nodded. ‘As you wish,’ she agreed. ‘But it is not well to hold secrets from those who would protect you.’
‘Just this one,’ I said. ‘There will be no cause for further secrets to be kept.’
‘Only if you promise me something also,’ she said.
‘Ay—what is it?’
‘That you won’t go in again to the forest—not one time hence.’
‘I promise,’ I said.
We both looked out over the lowlands. A breeze carried the scent of willow blossom up from the river.
Even as I promised, I knew that I must go in just one last time. Taliesin was caught there, hidden from me. I would find him. I would bring him out of the forest’s darkness and into the light.
There was news of a rider as we returned, and all through the township, people spilled from their doorways, bearing torches, gathering to share the news.
The rider had come from the Artrebates, a powerful tribe that shared our northeastern border. King Caradog had overthrown their tribeking and taken control of their tribelands.
Caradog was building an army.
Rome would not like it.
Rome would stop it.
It was right at our doorstep.
The skinsong is within us.
It is the cord that leads us back to the Mothers.
THE NIGHT SKY was paling to a bloody dawn when I reached the hazel-ringed pool the next morning. I had crept from the kitchen in darkness. Neha had led me, untorched, along the river, but I had walked through the forest alone, with only the faintest first light and the water’s soft gurgle to guide me.
A figure stood by the pool’s edge, dark against the white mist.
With a surge of relief I ran to him. ‘Where were you yesterday?’ I murmured into his chest. ‘Why did you not come?’
His face was troubled. ‘I am not a dog to be summoned at will.’
‘Of course, but I…I heard your voice—’ I faltered, dismayed at his sharpness. ‘We must leave here, Taliesin, both of us. It is dangerous for me to be in this place, and already I am fraught with changes—’
‘What changes?’ He frowned.
‘There is no time to tell you now, will you come?’
‘Tell me what is altered in you,’ he insisted.
I groaned, and hurriedly told him of Heka, the fawn, the skinsores.
He looked at me. ‘You set a geas then called it back. What is the strangeness in it?’
‘It is not the art of a kitchen girl!’
He snorted. ‘Your gifts are plain enough. Is that the whole of it?’
‘No. There is more. I have been too easily enchanted. Never should I enter this forest, but I was led by a river fish against my will.’
‘And yet you come again today,’ he said.
‘Only to find you!’ I cried. ‘We have always met outside the forest. Never within. We must return to that place, Taliesin, or find a new one, far from the Oldforest.’
‘I cannot leave here,’ he said.
‘But that is madness. Why not?’
He turned away. ‘We made an agreement—no questions.’
‘No!’ My frustration erupted. ‘I cannot honour this agreement. I am kept in an unending fog with you. You draw me here, where I am entirely forbidden, and now you say you cannot leave. Look at me!’ I commanded.
He turned back, his eyes bright with anger.
‘Who are you, Taliesin? What do you want of me?’
‘Nothing!’ he shouted. ‘I ask nothing of you—I never have. Leave, if what I offer is not enough.’
‘How dare you make such a challenge to me. Does it mean so little whether I stay or go?’
He strode a few paces upriver and stood with his back to me.
‘You retreat to a hole like an animal,’ I spat. ‘Why will you not stand where you can be seen? Do you so fear the light?’
‘It is not that I fear it,’ he said, his voice low, ‘I know it is not there.’
‘Of course it is there,’ I scoffed. ‘There is always light.’ I walked to his side. ‘You wrap yourself in a blanket of mystery while I shiver alone outside. It is selfish. Cruel.’
He laughed, coldly.
‘By the Mothers, what is funny in it?’
‘It is not the first time I have worn those words.’
‘So now you claim them?’ I cried. ‘I seek you against the gravest of warnings, yet you do not choose to return the effort.’
‘There is no choice in it.’
‘There is always a choice.’
He turned to me, his face twisted. ‘Do you not think this is hard for me also, Ailia? It is harder than you could know.’
His words caught in my chest. Suddenly he was softer than a pup and I could not kick him again. ‘I am weary of these questions without answer,’ I said quietly. ‘If you wish to see me you will leave the Oldforest. I cannot come here again.’
His eyes closed then opened slowly. ‘As you wish.’
I stared at him in despair. Then, beneath the indifference that masked him, I saw such anguish in his dark eyes that I could do nothing but pull him toward me, cradling his head as it dropped on my shoulder. ‘What strange and magical creature are you?’ I murmured into his hair. ‘I did not mean it. I will not stop coming, I cannot. But there is one thing that you must tell me at the very least. One question that cannot be left unanswered…’
He lifted his head and met my gaze.
‘Is it love that we have in the chasm between us?’ I whispered. ‘Tell me. This alone I need to know.’
He did not speak.
My hands dropped from his shoulders and fell to my sides. I waited but still he did not answer.
He did not love me. This was the truth he had found so hard to share.
We stood like this, each staring at the ground, as I reeled with the pain of it. At least now it was known.
Finally he took my hand and led me through the mist to a boulder by the river’s edge, where we sat down. The flow was quiet in the dawn, and shafts of salmon-coloured light spun off the water’s surface. A hazel branch dropped one red berry and we watched it drift downward.
In the breaking day, Taliesin began to sing. His voice was piercingly tender. But as soon as I heard it my belly flooded with dread. I braced my palms against the cold rock.
He was singing me his skinsong.
Human kin, hear my skinsong,
The song of my mother,
The song that has made me born.
I heard its first cycle in silence. I was not expected to sing here, only to listen. His song told of a childhood lost to the rivers and forests, a lonely life, a father unknown, and a mother’s betrayal. Its sadness shifted the fluids of my heart.
He began the last verse. The music of the skinsong was always gifted by the mother, but this—the summation—was where Taliesin must shape his own words:
I was born in the waters of wisdom,
Spawned of knowledge more ancient than creation
But I was wrong-born: half here, half there
Swimming forward and yet backward tears the soul,
Lets memories out and chaos in,
But the smell of my birthplace is in my flesh.
My love, I call to you
I’ve swum oceans searching,
Now I catch your scent
I am destined to find you, but it will be a fight,
My flesh will ebb, my bones will crumble,
but I will not sleep until I have reached the pool where you swim.
Your scent is in my flesh
and I will search the world to find it.
When we had finished, we both stared into the water, the silence bleeding between us.
He loved me utterly and I could not return it.
‘Why do you not sing?’ he whispered.
In his eyes I saw his slow understanding that I would not join with him. And I was horrified that he should think this, because I had never yearned for kinship with anyone so deeply in my life.
For this reason, I could not tell him why I did not sing. I loved him too much to speak the truth: that I was unmarriageable, unloved by the Mothers. That I had no song. It was better he thought I withheld it than know I did not possess it. While he believed I had a song, at least, he might continue to hope for me, continue to love me.
I could not bear the disbelief in his face. I had never felt so treacherous, so ignorant. For the first time it was I who stood and left without farewell.
The rising sun was clearing the mists as I pounded over the forest path. But though I ran swiftly, the edge did not come. I stopped to check I had not led myself awry, but no—the river was still close. As I entered by her, I would exit by her, so I held tight to her banks. Taliesin’s song pushed into my thoughts, but I drove it out, running yet faster to be free of this forest and into the open where I could think in the light.
I stopped, motionless, at the smell of woodsmoke. There was a fire nearby, downstream. I crept forward. If there was a camp or worse—a journeymen’s grove—I had to pass unseen.
The smoke thickened and I wondered, with a gust of hope, if somehow Taliesin had lit this fire—if I had discovered his home. Then I froze again. Through the dense trunks I glimpsed a hutgroup on the other side of the river.
I stole through the trees until I reached an old willow at the water’s edge. Hidden behind its trunk, I peered over at the settlement, amazed that I had run this very path yesterday and seen nothing.
It was a small hut group, the huts built in a circle amid pens of dark sheep. But at the centre of the hutgroup burned the largest fire I had ever seen. It was tended by tribespeople I thought at first to be men. But they worked half-clad in the fireheat, and soon I saw they were women’s shoulders that carried fuel to the firepit and women’s arms that cast it in.
Propped against the huts were many swords and knives. This was forge fire. But who were these women who worked fire without men? They were young, barely past maidenhood, but steady and formed as grown oak. Even at a distance, their dark eyes burned.
I stood transfixed by their stature, their purpose. I squinted to see the talismans and cloth patterns that would mark their tribe, but the smoke was settling over the river, veiling my sight.
A wren whistled behind me. The forest grew ever lighter. If I did not return home in time with bread, then I would be forced to confess my disgrace to Cookmother and my broken promise to Bebin.
I took a last look at the women, then turned back to my path. When I emerged from the forest, Neha was still standing guard at the entrance. She whimpered as I greeted her, more anxious than usual to rekindle our bond. Something was not right as I cast my eye around the fields. The sky was too bright. With a horrified glance at the sun, I realised that the day had almost reached highsun. It had been dawn only moments hence! Had I watched the women of the fire for so long? I began to run. There would be no explaining this lateness now.
An icy silence greeted me as I entered the kitchen.
Bebin’s eyes flickered a warning as she hurried out at Cookmother’s command. Ianna and Cah were at lessons.
Cookmother sat at the hearth, facing the door. ‘Sit,’ she said.
I walked to her and sat on the floor at her feet.
‘Bebin went to the bakehouse,’ she began, ‘as you were not here to make the errand.’
‘I am sorry—’
‘Silence,’ she spat. ‘While she was at the bakehouse, Bebin saw Dun’s wife, wasted with worry. Dun has worsened, is near gone.’
My stomach curdled as I realised what I had done.
Cookmother sat unmoving. ‘She asked Bebin why the herbs never came.’ Her mouth was rigid. ‘Why did the herbs never come?’
‘Is it too late?’ I whispered. ‘Let me take them to her this moment.’
‘Bebin brought her here and I gave her the herbs. Tomorrow will tell us whether they came too late. Now I ask you a second time: why were the herbs not taken?’
In all my days with Cookmother, I had never once failed to do her bidding. Not one life had been lost at my hand. I had served her craft tirelessly and the thought that I had breached it now was too much to bear. The wrongness of this neglect, Taliesin’s unanswered song, and all that had befallen me since Beltane surged within me and I could carry it no longer. ‘I have been swept up in a tide of change since the fires,’ I wept. ‘I have been wronged, and oddly powered, and then seduced into the Oldforest—’<
br />
She inhaled sharply. ‘What is this? You have walked the forest?’
In truth, it was a relief to be caught. ‘Yes.’
‘That which I have entirely forbidden?’
There was to be no more hiding. ‘Ay. It was a fish, a crimson-skinned fish that magicked me in. Then this morning, there were women with a great fire—’
Cookmother flinched as if physically struck. Her voice, when it came, was trembling. ‘Tell me what you have seen.’
‘Only a hutgroup,’ I said. ‘And women of such grace working the fire…’
Cookmother’s hands flew to her mouth. When she lowered them they were shaking. ‘Did you walk among them? Touch them or speak with them?’
‘No.’ I was becoming frightened. ‘They were across the river, hidden by smoke. I just saw the shape of them. I did not call.’
Her shoulders dropped with relief. ‘Thanks be,’ she breathed.
‘Cookmother?’ I said, unnerved. ‘Who were the women?’
She would not meet my eye. ‘They were outcasts, dirt-dwellers not permitted even to fringe the towns,’ she said. ‘They’ll slit your throat for your sandals.’ She fingered the carved bone talisman at her belt as she spoke.
I frowned. ‘I would swear they were no outcasts.’
‘Be assured, that’s what they are. And hear this, Ailia—’ Now she held my gaze. ‘If the threat of the forest alone is not enough to repel you, then let me promise you this: if you go to the forest again, I will cast you from this kitchen.’
My mouth dropped open in shock.
‘Unlawful contact with the forest invites darkness and I will not permit it near my kitchen.’
Never had she threatened such a thing and the fear of it conjured a fresh batch of silent tears.
‘Ach, come,’ she grumbled, pulling my head to her lap. ‘This is your path, by me,’ she murmured as she stroked my hair. ‘You are meant for my learning. Hear me please, Lamb. Never go to the forest again.’
