Skin

by Ilka Tampke

She laughed. ‘Risk? I will comfort you with this: you are born of those who are lucky in risk.’ She turned back toward the fire, still laughing.

  ‘Stop!’

  Slowly she turned.

  ‘Is that all I shall know?’ I gasped, incredulous at her deceit.

  ‘I shall tell you more when I have reason to do so.’

  ‘You are lying. You do not know my skin!’ I wailed. ‘You invent stories for your gain.’

  ‘Perhaps.’

  Please, Mothers, I prayed, let her not be lying. ‘I will withdraw your place in the kitchen—’

  ‘Do so if you will.’ She nodded to the misery around us. ‘I will be no worse off. And you will never know anything more.’

  I brimmed with fury at the weapon she made of her knowledge. ‘You inflict an unspeakable cruelty with this,’ I whispered.

  Her eyes blackened with contempt. ‘It is nothing to what has been inflicted on me.’

  My temper erupted. ‘That was not my doing!’ I shouted. My legs were trembling with the injustice, the indignity of anger.

  Her fire companions turned at the noise. One sprang to his feet, hungry for trouble.

  Then Heka screamed, her teeth bared like an animal, ‘Yes, it was!’

  I heard it ringing in the marrow of my bones.

  I ran, shaking, through the streets of Cad. I could not fight this battle now. Heka knew my skin. She was telling the truth. I could feel it within her. To protect this knowledge, I had to protect her. When I returned I would find a way to make her tell me. But now I had to steady myself. Now I had to leave.

  I had time left only to pack my few belongings: my shawl, a waterskin, a bone comb and the golden fish pin. They fitted easily into a pouch I tied across my back.

  Ianna had made rye porridge but I could not eat. Bebin brushed and re-braided my hair and, too quickly, I was ready.

  Neha was not permitted to accompany me. She had been tethered to a pole at the stable, out of sight, so she would not see me leave. I went to her one last time and crouched to farewell her, rubbing her muscled shoulders and soft belly. She stared up at me, her odd eyes questioning, and I fought back the wave of sorrow that told me not to leave without her.

  I walked to the Tribequeen’s gateway, where Fraid and my house kin waited to bid me leave. Llwyd was already leading the horses through. He would accompany Sulis and me on the day-long ride to the lakes.

  I stood first before Fraid. She straightened my cloak. ‘I am proud of you,’ she whispered as we embraced. ‘Continue to make me so.’

  I kissed the cheeks of each of my worksisters, murmuring blessings for Bebin’s marriage into her ear.

  Then there was only Cookmother. Her hold threatened to crack my ribs. I pressed my face into her hair and drank the thick, smoked smell of her: burnt milk, sour bread, nettle, sage and a thousand other herbs. The smell of my girlhood. I filled my lungs till they took no more.

  ‘Go well, daughter,’ she muttered hoarsely, ‘go bravely.’

  I nodded vigorously, unable to speak.

  The next moment, she had released me and pushed me away.

  I walked through the gateway without looking back. Llwyd waited with my mare just beyond the queen’s wall. Only he saw my face collapse.

  At the final rampart of Cad Hill, a messenger stopped to tell us his news before he took it to Fraid.

  The stammering, limping leader of Rome, the Emperor Claudius, had landed on British soil and led the legions into Camulodunon. On his ships, he had brought more men, jewelled chariots and beasts from foreign lands to make up his procession. The animals that bore him into Camulodunon were as moving stones: hairless, grey and as big as farmhouses, with curved, white swords that grew from their faces. They were said to be the mightiest and greatest beasts that walked the land, all under the Emperor’s command. He appointed General Plautius as Governor of Britain.

  I looked to Llwyd, white-haired and stooped, on his brindle pony. What hope did we have?

  People of Albion do not seek to invade other lands.

  We seek to invade the lands of our souls.

  WE RODE WEST along the Nain, turning north into the vast wetlands that bordered the great lakes. Already I felt the pull of the water as we travelled the wooden causeways that spanned the marshes. Already it seemed as a spirit world, where land and water slipped into each other without boundary.

  Llwyd and Sulis said little as we rode. Where the pools deepened, or the willow trees were grouped in a certain way, they dismounted and stood by the water, chanting and casting in pieces of silver.

  By late afternoon we had reached the lakes. Never had I seen such breadth of water. I squinted into the distance as we approached, trying to find the shape of the Isle.

  ‘It would not be called Glass,’ smiled Llwyd when he saw me craning, ‘if it were easily seen.’

  ‘Do not tease, Journeyman,’ called Sulis, who rode ahead. ‘You will see the Isle clear enough, girl. But it is still a night’s boat journey away.’

  ‘Further than the Mothers’ world,’ I joked to cloak my sudden nerves.

  ‘Indeed,’ said Sulis, unsmiling. ‘The Isle is hard, but the realm of the Mothers is reached easily from its shores. This is why initiates train there. And why you, especially, must be careful.’

  When we had reached the place where the lake became deep, Sulis stopped. A wooden canoe knocked against one of the causeway’s pylons. As we dismounted and Sulis untethered the boat, a thick mist poured in across the lake’s surface.

  ‘Come, girl.’ Sulis was lowering herself into the canoe.

  ‘Do not betray my faith in you,’ whispered Llwyd, as we embraced farewell.

  ‘I will not,’ I murmured into the folds of his collar. I stepped into the wobbling boat and sat opposite Sulis. ‘Journeyman—’ I knew the answer but I could not help asking. ‘Can you not come with us?’

  ‘It is not the Island of Mona,’ he chuckled. ‘You’ll find no men on Glass.’ He unhooked the rope and cast it into the boat. ‘Or none that hope to return.’

  I shuddered as he pushed the boat away with his foot. Taliesin was such a man: caught in the wrinkles of a place where he did not belong. Not the Isle, but somewhere more deeply hidden: the Mothers’ place. I prayed that the Isle would admit me to him.

  As Llwyd faded from view, the mist wrapped around us, and soon I could not see land in any direction. Sulis rowed without speaking. At times we passed a gliding nightfowl or a quiver of reeds, but otherwise the lake was as lifeless as a tomb, and only the splash and drag of the oars broke the silence.

  Though we faced one another, Sulis kept her eyes averted. She was among those who did not trust the Mothers in choosing me. Soon my eyes grew heavy and I dozed, while Sulis rowed through the night.

  A dull dawn met us as we pulled onto the beach. I glimpsed grassy banks, startlingly green. But what stilled me, as I stepped into the shallows and stood on the Glass Isle for the first time, was a mighty, steep-banked hill rising out of the mists, like a cry from deep in the earth, a crag of stone at its peak. ‘What is it?’ I asked.

  ‘The Glass Tor,
our most scared place.’ Sulis glanced at me as she dragged the canoe up the pebbly shore. ‘You are forbidden to climb it. And you are forbidden to walk on the west side of the Isle. It is our burial place.’

  I nodded, following her up a woodland track until we reached a small group of huts dotted amid beautifully tended gardens and fruit trees at the foot of the Tor. A round, stone temple welcomed the sun, surrounded by a labyrinth of narrow streams and springs.

  Sulis waited as I walked, delighted, among them. The rocks lining the streams were stained deep rust. Even the water itself appeared rose-tinted. ‘What is this redness?’ I asked, peering into the deepest pool.

  ‘It is the blood of the Mothers,’ said Sulis. She took a cup that nestled in a low rock wall and handed it to me. ‘Drink.’

  I crouched at the pool and filled the cup. The water was cold and tasted of metal. No one could have missed the magic in it and I was glad I had come.

  We entered the temple house where the journeywomen were preparing to take their morning meal. Sulis had told me that I would not eat, and that none would acknowledge me, until I had been ritually admitted. I sat at the outer edge of the curved room, watching, listening. There were women from all tribes of Albion, many in the green robes of the initiate, others in the blue that marked the ovate’s learning. The teachers wore undyed cloth and sat closest to the fire.

  Sulis stood in the strong place to dedicate the food, her staff in both hands, her head lowered. For the first time, I heard her speak the three laws that would become the shape of all my learning: ‘Remember the Mothers,’ she began. ‘Seek their world. And know your own.’

  That night, an older initiate led me wordlessly to the sleephouse where I was finally permitted to rest. The day of admittance had been long. I had been bathed in the red pools—not once, nor twice, but five times—scrubbed, soaked and skin-roughed in between with salt and herbs, fresh leaves and blossom. I had been naked in the groves, surrounded by women bearing fire sticks held at the outer points of me, and had smoke washed through my skin and hair. The chanting was ceaseless, its breath warming my bare thighs and shoulders in the autumn chill. I had not eaten or drunk all day and, even as the sun had fallen, my growling belly was not given a crumb to relieve it.

  The sleephouse was sparse, its floor swept and without skins. Six tidy beds lined the walls and sage smoke rose from the scent pots beside them. For the first time since I had arrived, I missed Cookmother so sharply that I would have gladly gone another day without food for one embrace against her grubby breast. But I was to have neither. ‘Where are the others?’ I asked my companion, suddenly terrified that I was to sleep alone.

  ‘They will come.’

  In a moment the hut was full of giggling voices, busied hands and discarded robes: the music that is many girls.

  Sulis threw open the doorskins. ‘Silence, initiates! To sleep without delay. The new one needs rest.’

  The room fell quiet but I lay awake, sleepless in this strange place. ‘Friend,’ I finally whispered to the girl beside me, the one who had led me in. ‘Might I sleep in your bed? I am not accustomed to sleeping alone.’

  ‘Come then.’ She held open her bedskins.

  I curled against her bony back. It was not as comforting as Cookmother’s, but still drowsiness descended at the touch of another.

  ‘Enjoy it now,’ she whispered as I began to drift. ‘There will be no such relief when you go to the forest for the long night.’

  ‘What is this?’ I asked, fully awakened.

  ‘We all fear it,’ she said. ‘At the end of the first lustre you must sleep alone in the wild places of the Isle. With only forest food and water.’

  ‘I cannot do that,’ I said, horrified. ‘I cannot sleep alone.’

  ‘We all must endure it,’ she said. ‘But do not worry. It is many moonturns away.’

  The very next day I commenced the first lustre: the degree of learning. It would last one year, or several, depending on my speed and strength.

  Each day was without variation. We awoke two hours before dawn to sit on long benches under the open sky. Even as the autumn rains came, running in icy rivulets down the necks of our cloaks, we had to sit unmoving, bearing witness to the Mothers’ birthing light, training our breath to align with its rhythm.

  After sunrise came our day’s first meal of sheep’s curd and bread, taken in the temple house. We huddled and chattered, thawing our damp robes against a fragrant birch fire, initiating friendships despite the many tongues that were spoken between us. These were young women selected for the deep seams of their thoughts, and it was easy to feel at peace among them.

  The hours of the sun’s ascent were given to lessons. We sat in the gardens learning the poems by tireless repetition. Writing had come to Albion, but the poems were too sacred to be given to letters. Their power lay in the months it took to seed them in memory.

  We walked with the teachers through the forests and grasslands of the Isle, learning survival arts of fire, water-gathering, wild food and shelter—arts that would be tested in the long night.

  I pushed my terror of this night from my thoughts. We were told little of it, only that it would come without warning, and that it would separate the weakest from the strongest of the initiates.

  In the afternoons, we tended the hutgroup: weaving, thatching and herding the sheep that fattened on the lush pastures surrounding the Tor.

  We ate our only other meal at sunfall: an unvarying stew of mutton and roots. There were no rose cakes, no honey glaze on our bread, no fruit wine or other Roman delicacies. Rome had not touched this place.

  Over many weeks, I learned the stories that formed the Isle, the stories of which Llwyd had spoken. The magnificent Tor was the longest poem, a well of sacred lore, and I wept, sitting in the grass beneath it, on the drizzling morning when Sulis nodded that I had spoken its final verse without error.

  We learned the laws of fair treatment of one person by another, the moral truths, the correct attitudes to pain and death. Slowly (for it would take twenty lustres to say I had truly learned) I began to see the patterns that lay over all things: the veins of a leaf, the cast of the stars, the bones of a robin. I saw the shapes mirrored between these and everything beyond, and I also saw the pricked holes of difference that threw the Mothers’ light in its infinite directions. I saw that it was neither Llwyd’s oak nor Ruther’s burning wheel alone that was truest, but the two set in perfect balance, one at the heart of the other, the stillness created by ceaseless spin.

  Every day I was more fully awakened. But the truth remained. I was still without skin. At first it had caused sharp words among the teachers, and some had refused to give me lessons. But gradually, as my strengths were seen and the story of my sword was repeated, I was taken by them all, until there was only one lesson I had not yet commenced.

  I had been two moon turns at temple. Sulis called us to the red springs before dawn, and we gathered drowsily, stamping against the cold. ‘Sit,’ she commanded and began passing out cups of dark liquid that she ladled from a bucket. ‘Not you,’ she warned, as I reached for a cup. ‘You will watch only. You will not journey.’

  ‘No, Sulis—’ I protested before I could stop it. Surely she would not withhold
me from this.

  ‘Silence,’ she said. ‘Without skin, you are unguided. We cannot sing the spells to prepare you. We cannot protect you. It is for your own sake as well as ours.’

  I watched wretchedly as my sister initiates drank the herbs and raised the chants that would prepare the passage. Over many hours I bore witness as they fell into trance, their bodies emptied, quivering, as they made their first spirit flights toward the Mothers.

  Sulis wandered attentively among them, guarding their passage.

  ‘Let me journey, Sulis,’ I cried as she passed. The lure of the Mothers was an ache in my chest.

  She crouched before me, her grey eyes alive to this rite. ‘The danger is too great.’

  ‘But I am not scared.’

  ‘I know it. But there is more at risk than you alone. Skin holds us all. It must not be breached—’

  ‘Why not?’ I whispered. ‘What is the risk?’

  ‘Infection,’ she hissed. ‘Disease of the hardworld. In shape and form we cannot imagine.’

  ‘Then when?’ I lamented.

  She scowled, searching my face with her journeywoman’s sight. ‘I can see that they want you. But you must go on our terms, held fast by your skin.’

  From that day onward, I sat beside my sister initiates through all their journeys. I watched them commence each morning, eager and rosy, then emerge hours later, pale and exhausted, their eyes black and glazed. Sulis asked if I would not rather spin or harvest late-autumn herbs while they practised, but I chose to stay with them, wanting to be close to the rite that my soul craved.

  Sometimes the call was so strong that even without the medicine, without the chants, I began to slip into trance, plunging toward the Mothers in a wash of elation.

  Sulis stayed near me always, watching for the loll of my head, the whimper of my breath, so that she could rouse me and bring me shuddering back to the wet ground of the temple garden.