by Ilka Tampke
‘Yes,’ I nodded, although I could not fathom how it would serve me.
‘Keep it well hidden until it is needed.’
I nodded again and strapped the sword, sheathed in leather, beneath my skirts. It was short and light enough that I could bind it to my thigh—a little awkward as I walked, but nothing compared with my pride in possessing it.
Tara handed me a torch and stepped away.
Suddenly I was frightened. ‘How will I find my way back?’
‘By our song.’
I went to query her but she silenced me.
Softly, the Mothers of fire began to sing. It was low at first, in unison, on deep, rolling breaths. Then it built, until song poured like water, filling the dusk. It spoke to me of all their wisdom, the gift of fire, and the birth of my learning. I began to walk. They were singing me out of their place and back into mine.
For several hours I walked, guided by their voices. As they grew fainter, the night air grew hotter. Eventually I stripped off my shawl and cloak, wedging them under my arm. When they became too cumbersome to carry, I left them behind on the path.
Finally I heard the voices no longer. My torchlight spluttered. I was at the forest’s edge.
A dog barked. With a surge of joy, I burst free of the trees and there, to my disbelief, was Neha. I buried my face in the folds of her neck, drawing deep breaths of the crushed-grass scent of her fur. ‘Were you waiting for me?’ I marvelled. Surely she had not kept vigil since I entered the forest? I stroked her flank, but she was no thinner, and bore no sign of having lived wild. It was as though no time has passed.
The creamy moon lit our path back to Cad. By its height, the hour was not long past midnight. As I walked on, I imagined the words that I would tell Llwyd: that the Mothers had called me, that I was worthy of learning despite my skinlessness, and he must teach me at last.
After a short way I was sweating. It was yet warmer here beyond the forest. What strange autumn was this? The air was as hot and noisy with insect hum as it was when I left, a whole season hence. I stared around me. The crops were still thick in the fields and there were berries on the bushes that lined my path. There was something tilted here. I had been gone for several moon turns. At least the turn of the season. But I was returned to the scents and fruits of midsummer.
Had I slept in the forest and dreamed my passage? No, there was a wet bandage around my arm and the dull throb of the cut. And bound, chafing, to my thigh, was the sword I had been gifted. It had been no dream.
The sight of my hilltop town brought a wave of relief. For the first time since I had left, I yearned to see Cookmother and my worksisters. But with each step closer, my excitement gave way to dread. The lulling haze that had wrapped me as I trained with the Mothers was now truly lifted. I had no idea of what furies Cookmother would deliver, what Llwyd would say of my learning without skin. My boldness, my new strength, were ebbing away.
I stole through the gates and into the Tribequeen’s compound. In the odorous heat, Cookmother, Bebin, Ianna and Cah were sleeping soundly. Cookmother was alone. It was odd that she had not called one of the others into her bed when I had been gone so long.
Then I noticed what was strangest of all. Spread across the floor was the same upturned basket and spilled barley that I had kicked as I left.
I stood paralysed, my mind reeling. I had returned to the same night that I left. Had they all been captured in some stillness of time? There had been some deep magic here and for the first time, far away from the light of the Mothers’ fire, I felt sickened with fear for what I had done. It could not be right to have passed time in one place without time being spent in another.
I pulled off my sandals and lay beside Bebin, who stirred and murmured without waking. Despite my exhaustion, sleep would not come. What had happened was wrong. I had journeyed—this much I knew—but it should not have happened in this way. I had the journeywoman’s gift but not the learning to support it.
How could I explain my months with the Mothers when there had been only a passage of one night? I would not be believed. Or I would be punished for walking where I was not permitted.
I could not ask Bebin, who had warned me, nor Cookmother, who had forbidden me. I was alone.
There are years of good harvest and years of bad.
We must not cling to our joy nor despair of our suffering.
I OPENED MY eyes to Bebin’s face watching me as I slept.
‘Tidings,’ she whispered.
The morning was full of birdsong, yet the kitchen was still. ‘Why have none risen?’ I murmured.
‘Do we not always lie late after festival?’
‘Festival?’ I asked, too drowsy to think.
Bebin frowned. ‘Solstice, you goose. Are you still dreaming?’
‘Of course,’ I nodded, masking the jolt as it all returned to me. Though they had long since cooled in my memory, the solstice embers would still be warm on Sister Hill.
I rose to tend the fire. It was bewildering to be reunited with my worksisters when I had not seen them for many months, and yet to know that, by their reckoning, there had been no absence at all.
Cookmother did not protest it when I brought her goat’s milk to sip in her bed, but nor did she thank me, and I knew I was not forgiven.
I joined Bebin at the fire as she prepared the breakfast. ‘Tell me of the feast.’ I urged. ‘I’m sorry I did not help—’
She waved my apology away. ‘It was lively,’ she said, tipping meal into the cookpot. ‘Fibor drank half a barrel and was asleep by highsun. And—’ she glanced at me. ‘There was news from Gaul.’
‘Well or bad?’
‘Mixed.’ She stirred the porridge. ‘The best of it is that there has been mutiny among the Roman forces.’
‘The mighty Romans?’
‘Yes!’ she laughed. ‘Plautius commanded the legions to board the ships but they refused, too frightened.’
‘Of what?’ I scoffed.
Bebin shrugged. ‘Of us. Of Albion.’ She scooped some water from a bucket beside the fire and poured it into the pot. ‘They think this place is the edge of the world.’
I smiled. ‘An army of field mice.’
We giggled together over the bubbling porridge. It felt good to laugh.
‘What was the worst of the news?’ I said, quieting.
‘The numbers.’ Her face grew still. ‘The rider said that forty thousand soldiers, and as many horses, are gathered on the shores of Bononia. Two thousand ships wait in the tides, laden with grain and weapons.’ She looked up from the pot.
Such numbers were beyond my imagining.
‘If they do find their courage,’ she said, ‘then how will we defeat them?’
When I walked to the well after breakfast, Cah stood there, laughing with the strangemaid, Heka. The sight of them stopped me in my path. I had rarely ever seen Cah so at ease, so lost in her laughter. At the sound of my footsteps, they turned, and their smiles dropped away.
By late morning the sword had rubbed my thigh skin to an angry rawness. Desperate to ease it, I released the leather binding whi
le the kitchen was empty for a moment, and buried the sword deep in my bedskins, where Neha proceeded to snuffle for it beneath the blankets.
‘This will not do,’ I murmured, pulling Neha off to fish it back out again. Glancing over my shoulder, I pushed aside Cookmother’s rosewood chest, which covered the opening to the storepit below. Little was held there now and it was rare that Cookmother bade us enter it.
I dropped down on the wobbling stepladder into the chill of the dark chamber. It was barely tall enough for me to stand. In the light that seeped through the opening above, I could just make out a few grain pots, some old metal tools, and a mound of straw that would once have been bed to winter’s smoked carcasses. I wrapped the sword in my leine and stashed it beneath the straw.
Cah entered the kitchen just as I was pushing the chest back over the opening. ‘What are you doing?’ She watched me from the doorway, clutching an armful of wood.
‘Looking for a pot lid Cookmother has lost,’ I murmured.
‘Find it?’ Her mind was sharp as flint. She walked to the woodpile. ‘You are holding secrets—do not think I will protect them. You are favoured enough as it is.’
I crouched beside her as she stacked the logs. ‘Why do you offer your friendship to Heka?’
Cah shrugged. ‘She helps me with my tasks for nothing more than a cup of ale. And I like her. She has no one—no suck-mother to protect her—and yet she survives. She does not look down on me.’
I nodded, ignoring the jibe. ‘Do you know what has brought her here?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘She doesn’t speak of it. She is a spirit that wanders. She follows pleasure and takes it heartily.’ Cah stacked the last log and got to her feet. ‘She did ask of you often when first she came. Though thankfully her interest seems to have waned.’
‘She has cruelty in her nature, Cah,’ I said, as she walked toward the doorway.
She turned briefly. ‘Perhaps that is her strength.’
I sighed. ‘Perhaps.’
I had greater concerns at this moment than Heka.
I was grinding wheat with Bebin after highsun when the doorbell sounded. We jumped to our feet as Llwyd entered.
‘Be at peace,’ he said, waving away our reverence. ‘I come to speak to Ailia.’
Cookmother hurried my worksisters out of the roundhouse then busied herself at the cookpot.
‘Might I be alone with her, Cookwoman?’ Llwyd sat at the fire.
Cookmother eyed him, then ladled a large bowlful of porridge and set it with a clatter on the bench beside him. ‘Of course.’
‘Thank you, Cookwoman. Your graces are, as ever, enchanting,’ he said with a faint smile as she trundled toward the door. He turned to me as I sat beside him. ‘How do you fare, Ailia?’
‘I…am well,’ I faltered. Did he see change in me?
‘I would speak of the warning in yesterday’s fire.’
The memory, softened by the Mothers, was now knife-sharp here. ‘Yes,’ I said.
‘It would seem that the Mothers have marked you,’ he said slowly, ‘to be woven, somehow, into the fate of this tribe. But I cannot understand the omen because you are without skin. You will never journey or even train.’ He shrugged. ‘I can make no sense of their intentions.’
He had opened a crack I could not let close. Before I could stop myself, I had reached for his hand and grasped it firm.
It was cold and bony and returned my hold.
My voice trembled. ‘Journeyman Llwyd, honoured Elder, will you teach me?’
His grip tightened.
‘I think there is knowledge in me.’
He nodded. ‘I see it. And the fire saw it too. But without skin, you cannot be taught. You must learn within the fabric of your skin. This is what the Mothers require.’
They themselves have already taught me, I wanted to wail. But I was afraid to confess the warped shape my journey had made. If I wanted to go back to them I had to find a sanctioned way.
‘And even more so because of the seer’s prediction that blood will run,’ he continued, ‘we must show the most loving observance of the skin laws.’ He frowned. ‘Or they will not protect us.’
‘From what?’ I breathed, daring to ask what I had never been taught. ‘What is the danger?’
He winced, as if struggling to resolve what should be spoken. ‘It is not just our souls that are wrapped in skin,’ he began. ‘The hardworld itself is held in its layers. It is spirit skin that separates the realms and holds us intact. And if it is ruptured or torn, then the wound can infect and spread. Knowledge is the blood that sustains this skin, Ailia. Only knowledge holds the hardworld in place. If knowledge is breached, it will bring chaos and damage upon us all.’
My stomach lurched. I had made such a breach with my untrained journey. I knew I must never repeat it, and yet I could not go back to the darkness of life before I began to learn. I had to convince Llwyd to teach me. ‘I am without skin, that is so, but Llwyd, there are other truths that mark me for learning.’
He frowned. ‘Go on.’
You asked me once if I saw an animal,’ I said, my thoughts racing. ‘I did—a fish. A salmon attended me.’
He raised his chin. ‘What else?’
‘A geas,’ I spilled, ‘that I set and healed. It carried the weight of death.’
His breath caught. ‘Is there anything else?’
The sword lay in the chamber beneath us. With a word I could tell him that I had walked with the Mothers and my learning was greater than he knew. But my unlawful journey had already wrinkled the seasons, and I was terrified to confess it. I shook my head.
‘Upon these truths alone, you cannot be trained,’ he said, ‘but if there was more evidence of your knowledge,’ he urged, ‘then perhaps, Mothers willing, the Isle would take you.’
‘The Glass Isle?’ I whispered. ‘Could it be so?’
‘I have never known a skinless woman to be trained, but if the knowledge gift was strong enough, then teachers of the Isle may want to shape it…’ He gripped my fingers until they ached. ‘Show me more, Ailia, and I will call Sulis.’
I nodded, blood pounding in my head. Llwyd saw knowledge in me. There would be more. I would find a way to show him.
‘But please—’ his voice wavered, ‘—you must not go near the sacred places, especially the Oldforest, when you are untrained. You could bring great injury to the tribes.’
I stared at the bone talismans that hung from his belt and hoped he could not see my chest thumping beneath my dress.
He looked at me, reading me. ‘Have you, Ailia? Have you breached the forest’s edge?’
‘Most certainly not,’ cried Cookmother, bustling back. She must have heard every word. ‘I’ve not let her slip from my view since—’
‘Since what?’ said Llwyd.
She stood at the hearth, her arms folded across her chest. I knew she was thinking of my first sighting of the Mothers.
‘Since…the early harvest,’ she stammered. ‘There’s nothing in it, Llwyd. She’s a kitchen girl, nothing more. She’s of no more conseq
uence to the fate of this tribe than the mice in the kitchen.’ She picked up her ladle and churned the porridge, flicking scalding droplets onto my forearm.
‘Which can be of great consequence, as you know, if they get into the grain pits,’ said Llwyd. ‘It is not my way to command your honesty, but it is your conscience upon which it will rest if you are wrong.’
‘Do you say that I lie, wiseman?’ Cookmother snapped.
‘No. But we both know that you have cause to.’
A burning silence flared between them and for a moment I was forgotten.
Cookmother stirred the pot as though it was a hide needing beating and Llwyd stared, unmoving, at the fire.
My eyes darted from one to the other, unable to fathom this tension between them.
Finally, Llwyd turned back to me. ‘The Oldforest?’ he repeated.
I looked up at Cookmother. Her rigid jaw revealed a fear I had never seen before. My thoughts raced. Cookmother knew that I had walked the forest and yet she was determined it should not be revealed. It was difficult to lie to Llwyd, but it was Cookmother in whom I trusted. I shook my head.
Llwyd sighed and the lines scored in his cheeks seemed to deepen. ‘I hope it is so,’ he said.
I shifted on the bench, my thigh still smarting from where the sword had been bound.
Llwyd stood to leave. ‘Do not breach the forest’s edge, Ailia. Do not weaken what protects us.’
I nodded, vowing in my heart that I would not defy him. I would not risk harm to the souls of the tribespeople. I prayed that it was not too late.
When Llwyd had left, Cookmother stood before me, her cheeks flushed with anger. ‘I repeat what I have told you,’ she said. ‘If you step once more into the forest you will not sleep in this kitchen again. You will not be my work daughter.’
