Avalon - Priestess Of Avalon Part 6

By the time we were brought to the sanctuary above the holy well darkness had fallen. We were dressed alike in plain white garments that hung uncinctured from an shoulders to our bare feet, and cloaks of undyed wool. Our hair lay loose upon our shoulders. Torches had been set along the path; their wavering light gleamed from Heron's dark locks, and touched Aelia's hair with fire. My own fine hair, undisciplined since its recent washing, blew across my face, edged with light.

Seen through that golden veiling the familiar way appeared mysterious and strange. Or perhaps it was only that the day's fast and the expectation of trance was beginning to affect me. It seemed to me that it would be very easy to let go of ordinary awareness, and travel between the worlds. I wondered whether the rule that one must seek visions while fasting was always wise. It was keeping control of the vision that was likely to be a problem now.

A stool had been set upon the stone terrace. Before it, coals glowed in a brazier. A small carven table stood nearby bearing a silver pitcher and a piece of folded cloth. Silently we took our seats on the bench beyond it and waited, hands resting on our knees, breathing deeply of the cool night air.

It was some sense other than hearing that made me turn. Two priestesses were approaching with the silent gliding step it had taken me so long to learn. I recognized the rigid set of Ganeda's shoulders even before she came into the light. Suona followed, bearing something wrapped in white linen in her hands.

"Is it the Grail?" Aelia whispered beside me.

"It cannot be-the only novice who is allowed to see it is the Maiden who is its guardian," I murmured in reply as Suona set her burden on the table. "This must be something else, but clearly it is very old." Old, and holy, I thought then, for it seemed to me that I could already feel its power.

Suona drew the linen cloth away from the thing she held and lifted it so that it caught the torchlight. It was a silver bowl, a little dented, but lovingly polished, chased around the rim with some design.

"It is said that this bowl was used for scrying at Vernemeton, the Forest House whence came the first priestesses to dwell on this holy isle. Perhaps the Lady Caillean herself once gazed into it. Pray to the G.o.ddess that some of her spirit may touch you now..." She set the bowl beside the pitcher on the little table.

I blinked, my sight of the bowl overlaid for a moment with another image, of the same vessel, bright and new. Was this imagination, orrecognition ?

But I did not have much time to wonder, for the High Priestess stood before us, and between one moment and the next she drew the glamour of her calling around her, so that from a little bent woman, always frowning, she became tall and stately and beautiful. I had seen that transformation many times now, but it never ceased to amaze me, or to remind me that I must never discount this woman's powers, no matter how she treated me.

"Do not think," said the High Priestess, "that what you are about to do is any the less real because you are still being trained as priestesses. The face of Fate is always both wonderful and terrible-beware how you lift Her veil. Certain knowledge of what is to come is given to few. For most, even a holy seer, foreknowledge comes in glimpses only, distorted by the understanding of the one who sees and the ones who hear the prophecy." She paused, fixing each one of us in turn with a gaze that pierced to the soul.

When she spoke again her voice had the resonance of trance. "Be still, therefore, and make clean your hearts. Let go the busy mind. You must become an empty vessel waiting to be filled, an open pa.s.sageway through which illumination can flow."

Smoke swirled up from the brazier as Suona sprinkled the holy herbs upon the coals. I closed my eyes, awareness of the outside world already beginning to slip away.

"Heron daughter of Ouzel," said the priestess, "will you look into the sacred waters and seek wisdom there?"

"I will," came the answer. I heard the rustle of clothing as she was a.s.sisted into the chair.

I did not need my eyes to know when she looked into the bowl, nor did I need to hear the murmur of instruction by which the Lady drew her deeper into trance. As Heron spoke, I also glimpsed the images, broken and chaotic-storms and armies, and dancers at the sacred stones.

Presently they ceased. I was vaguely aware that Heron had been brought back and it was now Aelia's turn to look into the bowl. Once more I shared the visions. The Lady's voice had sharpened, commanding her look for a time closer to the present, and events of import to Avalon. For a time there was only swirling shadow, and then, dimly, I saw the marshes that edged the Lake. Figures with torches moved along the sh.o.r.e, calling. Then the image disappeared. There was a splash as the bowl was emptied, and Aelia sat down beside me once more. I could feel her shaking, and wondered what it was that her mind had refused to see.

But now I could feel the High Priestess standing like a flame before me. "Eilan daughter of Rian, are you willing to seek visions?" the voice came out of the darkness.

I murmured agreement, and was a.s.sisted to the chair. Awareness shifted once more and I opened my eyes. Suona poured more water into the bowl and set it before me.

"Lean forwards and look within," said the quiet voice beside me. "Breathe in... and out... wait for the waters to still. Let your vision sink beneath the surface, and say what you see."

Suona had put more herbs on the coals. As I breathed in the heavy sweet smoke my head swam and I blinked, trying to focus on the bowl. Now I could see it-a silver rim surrounding a shifting darkness shot with gleaming flickers of torchlight.

"If you see nothing it is no matter," the priestess continued. "Be at ease-"

It does matter, I thought with a twitch of annoyance.Does she wantme to fail ?

Perhaps it would be easier without the distraction of external vision. I did not quite dare to close my eyes again, but I let them unfocus, so that I saw only a dim blur surrounded by a circle of light. Look for the marshes, I told myself; what had Aelia been trying to see?

And at the thought, the vision began to emerge before me, first in scattered flickers, and then complete and whole. Dusk was fading into evening. The Lake gleamed faintly in the last of the light. But the mixture of marsh and islet that stretched around to the south and east were all in shadow. Torches moved along the higher ground, but my vision was drawn to a dark pool in the shadow of a twisted willow tree.

Something moved there. With a gasp, I recognized Dierna's bright head. With one arm she clutched a fallen log. The other reached down as if she were holding onto something beneath the surface. I strove to see more clearly, and the scene shifted.

The searchers had found her. In the torchlight I could see Dierna sobbing, though I heard no sound. Two of the Druids were in the water beside her. One lifted her into Cigfolla's waiting arms. The other was fixing a rope around something beneath the water. The men pulled, a pale shape surged upwards- "Becca! Drowned!" The words tore from my throat. "Please, don't let me see it-don't let it be true!" I convulsed away from the table, and bowl and pitcher went flying. I fell to the ground, curled in anguish, grinding my palms against my eyes as if to erase what I had seen.

In another moment Suona had my wrists and was holding me close, her voice a soothing murmur beneath my sobs.

"Of course she will be all right," Ganeda's voice came from behind me. "These hysterics are only to gain attention."

I jerked upright, though the movement made my head spin. "But I saw it! I saw it! You must guard Becca or she will drown!"

"You would like that, wouldn't you?" snarled Ganeda. "One less of my blood to compete with for my place when I am gone!"

The manifest unfairness of this deprived me of speech, but I could feel Suona stiffen with shock at her words.

To move into the trance state had been easy. Recovering, especially when I had been so suddenly recalled from it, was harder. For several weeks thereafter I was disoriented and subject to fits of weeping. In the days immediately after the scrying session even my sense of balance was upset so that I could hardly walk, and at every step a headache stabbed my skull. When it became clear that a single night's sleep would not restore me I was sent to the House of Healing. The reason given was that the other maidens would tire me, but I think now that it was really because Ganeda did not wish me to speak to the others, and especially to Dierna, about what I had seen.

And so it was that I was still there, being cosseted by Cigfolla whenever I emerged from my uneasy dreams, when I heard shouting from outside the house, and sitting up, saw the flicker of torches in the darkness through the open door.

"What is it?" I cried. "What is going on?" But a familiar fear had begun to uncoil in my belly. I tried to get out of bed, but the pain in my head struck me back down, moaning.

I was still sitting there, trying to control the agony by careful breathing, when the door flew open and Heron darted in.

"Eilan-we cannot find Dierna or Becca!" she whispered, looking over her shoulder to make sure she had not been seen, and from that I knew that no one had come to see me because Ganeda had forbidden them to come. "In your vision, where did you see her? Tell me quickly!"

I clutched at her arm, describing as well as I could where the willow pool that I had seen lay in relation to the path. Then she was gone and I lay back, tears leaking from my closed eyes.

An eternity of misery later I heard the searchers returning, voices deadened by sorrow or hoa.r.s.e with weeping. I turned my face to the wall. It did not help that without my vision Dierna might have died with her sister. I had wanted so desperately to prove to Ganeda that my Seeing was true, but now I would have given anything to have her accusations proven right, and little Becca safely home again.

Gradually my own health improved and I was allowed to return to the House of Maidens. Heron told me that Dierna had gone hunting herbs in the marshes, leaving her sister behind. But Becca, who since their mother's death had been her sister's shadow, had followed, and fallen in, and by the time Dierna reached her, had already been sucked under by the bog. Even if no one else blamed her, Dierna must be tormenting herself with guilt by now.

I was not surprised to hear that the chill she had taken from the water had turned to lung fever. Now it was her turn to be nursed in the House of Healing. I asked to visit her, but Ganeda forbade it. I remembered a story that my tutor Corinthius had once told me about an oriental king who responded to bad news by executing the messenger. It made no sense for her to blame me for what had happened, particularly since she had not believed me, but I had learned long since that where I was concerned the actions of the High Priestess rarely made sense at all.

Our training went on, but we were given no more lessons in scrying, and I for one was content to have it so. I had learned the first paradox of prophecy, which is that glimpsing the future does not necessarily mean one can understand it, much less alter what one sees.

In time, Dierna also recovered, to creep about with eyes like holes in a blanket and a face pale as whey against the fire of her hair, as if she had died with Becca, and it was only her ghost who remained with us on Avalon.

And so that dreadful summer drew to a close at last. The cat-tails in the marshes grew full and brown, nodding in the wind that fluttered the turning willow leaves, and the mists that surrounded Avalon seemed suffused with gold. One evening as the new moon was rising I was returning from the privies when I glimpsed a pale shape moving down the path towards the Lake and recognized Dierna. My pulse leaped in instant alarm, but I stifled the cry that rose in my throat and whistled instead to Eldri to go after her.

When I caught up with them, Dierna was sitting beneath an elder bush with her arms around Eldri, weeping into the little dog's silky fur. At the sound of my footstep she looked up, frowning.

"I was all right. You didn't need to send Eldri after me!" she said sullenly, but I noticed that she did not let the dog go. "But maybe you think I ought to walk into the Lake and just keep going, in punishment for letting my sister drown!"

I swallowed. This was worse than I had thought. I sat down, knowing better than to try to touch the girl now.

"They all say it wasn't my fault, but I know what they're thinking..." she sniffed, and wiped her nose on her sleeve.

"Isaw what happened, you know, in the scrying bowl," I said finally. "But n.o.body believed me. I keep thinking that if I had only tried harder to convince them..."

"That's stupid! You couldn't know when-" Dierna exclaimed, then paused, eyeing me suspiciously.

"We both feel guilty," I said then. "Perhaps we always will. But I will try to live with it if you will. Perhaps we can forgive each other, even if we cannot forgive ourselves..."

For a moment longer she stared at me, her blue eyes filling with tears. Then, with a sob, she threw herself into my arms.

We stayed that way, weeping, while the white sickle of the moon swung across the sky. It was only when Eldri growled and pushed her way out from between us that I realized how much time had pa.s.sed, and that we were not alone. For a little while I had felt peace, holding the child, but now my belly tensed once more. The cloaked shape confronting us was that of the Lady of Avalon.

"Dierna-" I said softly. "It is late, and you should be in your bed." She stiffened as she saw her grandmother, but I was already pushing her to her feet. "Run along now, and may the G.o.ddess bless your dreams."

For a moment I thought she would insist on staying to defend me. But perhaps Dierna realized that to do so would only increase Ganeda's wrath, for although she glanced backwards several times, she left us without arguing. I confess that as I sensed the menace in the Lady's silence I almost called her back again, but this confrontation had been a long time coming, and I knew I must face it alone.

I got to my feet. "If you have something to say to me, let us walk out along the sh.o.r.e, where our voices will disturb no one." I was surprised to hear my own voice sounding so steady, for beneath the shawl I was trembling. I led the way down to the path that edged the Lake, Eldri trotting at my heels.

"Why are you angry?" I asked when the silence had grown unbearable, like the stillness before a storm.

"Do you begrudge your grand-daughter a little comfort just because it comes from me?"

"You killed my sister when you were born..." hissed Ganeda, "you ill-wished Becca, and now you are trying to steal the last child of my blood away."

I stared at her, anger replacing my fear. "Old woman, you are mad! I loved that little girl, and surely my mother's death was a greater loss to me than to you. But have our choices no part to play in all this, or has all the teaching of Avalon been a lie? My mother chose to act as priestess in the Great Rite, and when she knew she had conceived, to keep the child, understanding the risk she ran. And Becca had been told not to follow her sister and chose to do otherwise."

"She was too young to know-"

"And youchose to keep me away from both girls!" I raged on. "Don't you know I would have watched them like a mother bear with two cubs to stop what I had seen from coming to pa.s.s? From the moment I first set foot on Avalon you have hated me! What have I ever done to deserve that? Can you tell me why?"

Ganeda gripped my arm, and as she jerked me around to face her, I sensed her energy expanding, and before the wrath of the Lady of Avalon, my anger seemed suddenly the petulance of a child.

"You dare to speak so, to me? With a single Word, I could obliterate you where you stand!" Her arm swung up in a sweep of dark draperies like the wing of the Lady of Ravens, and I cowered. For a moment the lapping of wavelets against the sh.o.r.eline was the only sound.

And then, from the rich scent of wet earth and the whisper of water another kind of power began to flow into me, a steady, enduring strength that could absorb whatever lightnings Ganeda's majestic fury might call down. For a moment then I touched something fundamental within, although whether it was the G.o.ddess or my own eternal soul I could not tell. Slowly I straightened, and as she met my gaze, the power ebbed from Ganeda's body until she was no more than an old, bent woman, shorter than me.

"You are Lady of Avalon," I said with a sigh, "but we are both daughters of the Lady who rules over all.

In everything that concerns the good of Avalon I will obey you, but it is because I choose to do so."

She looked up at me, her seamed features carved in lines of light and shadow by the moon.

"You are young," she said in a low voice, "young and proud. Refuse to fear me if you will-life itself will teach you to be afraid, aye, and the meaning of compromise!" She began to make her way back along the sh.o.r.e.

"Dierna is my kinswoman too," I called after her, "and I will not let you keep me from being with her!"

At that Ganeda turned once more. "Have it your own way," she said tiredly, "but when I was younger, I too had visions. I have looked into the Sacred Well, and seen that it is Dierna who will be my heir. You do well to make a friend of her, for I tell you now that it isshe , not you, who will be the next Lady of Avalon!"

Slowly, the terrible summer of Becca's death faded into memory. I knew what that tragedy had done to her sister, but as time pa.s.sed it became clear that Ganeda had also been affected, more deeply than we, or perhaps she herself, knew. In body she was still vigorous-indeed, I do not believe that anyone without superior stamina could do the work required of the Lady of Avalon. But the edge that could cut friend and foe alike, was gone.

I found it hard to be sorry, and being young, I did not understand how life's buffets can wear down the spirit. Nor did I care enough to try. Strong in body and delighting in my own rapidly maturing powers, I went eagerly to my testing, and, certain of my decision, bestowed the bag of gold aureii with which I had been provided upon the family of the boy who had given me Eldri ten years before.

And so I entered the mists, and drew up from the depths of my being the Word of Power that would open the way, laughing because in the end it was so easy, as if I were simply remembering something I had learned long before. Heron and Aelia did likewise when their turn came, and like me were received back with rejoicing. But Roud never returned to us.

In the year of silence that followed, I was forced to look inward in a way that the myriad demands of my training had never before allowed. It was this, I think now, that was the true initiation, for it is not the adversaries outside oneself, that can be confronted and defied, that are most dangerous, but the more subtle antagonists that dwell within.

Regarding the oath with which that year ended, I must also keep silence, save that it was, as Ganeda had promised, an act of making sacred, ofsacrifice . But though I offered myself to the Lady to be used as She willed, I did not then understand the warning that we cannot predict or control what the G.o.ddess will do with us once that commitment has been made. Nonetheless, when my oath had been given, I pa.s.sed through the Mystery of the Cauldron, and the blue crescent of a priestess was placed upon my brow.

With my attention fixed upon my own struggles, I did not at first realize that things were not going so well in Avalon. During our year of silence, Aelia and I grew ever closer. I was surprised to find that wordless, I understood more of what was in her heart than ever I had when we concealed our thoughts in conversation, and knew she felt the same for me. Using our voices only to sing the offices of the G.o.ddess, words themselves took on a new and sacred meaning.

Thus, the deliberations at the first full meeting of the consecrated priests and priestesses to which I was admitted after my year of silence seemed charged with unusual significance. In truth, matters were serious enough. It had been several years since any new youths or maidens had come to be trained at Avalon, and Roud was not the only one who had gone out for her testing and never returned. In addition, the princes whose contributions helped to maintain the community on the isle had become increasingly unwilling to pay what was due.

"It is not that we have no money," said Arganax, who had become chief among the Druids the previous year. "Britannia has never been more prosperous. But the Emperor Claudius in Rome seems to have forgotten us, and with the death of Victorinus, the Imperium Galliarum has concerns more pressing than collecting taxes here."

Cigfolla laughed. "It is his mother, Victorina, who rules there now, despite those young cousins she has set up to warm the throne, and she is twice the man he was, from all I hear. Perhapsshe would welcome the a.s.sistance of Avalon!"

"The princes supported us gladly when the foot of Rome was on their necks," said Suona. "It is almost as if they feel they no longer need us-as if they can abandon the old ways of Britannia now that they are free of direct control by Rome."

For a moment we stared at her in bemused silence. Then Ganeda cleared her throat.

"Are you proposing that we work magic to bring the emperors back again?"

Suona flushed and fell silent, but the others were babbling with speculation.

"We can decide nothing without knowing what we face," Ganeda said finally, "and we have exausted the knowledge available by any ordinary means..."

"What are you proposing?" asked Arganax.

Ganeda looked around the circle with the exasperated frown I remembered so well from my days as her student.

"Are we Greeks, to waste our lives debating the limits of our philosophy? If our skills are worth preserving, let us use them! The Turning of Spring is almost upon us-let us make use of this balance point between the two halves of the year to invoke the Oracle!"

CHAPTER FIVE.

AD 270.

"Seekers on the ancient ways, Seekers on the Path of Light, Now the Night gives way to Day, Now the Day has equalled Night..."

Singing, the line of dark-robed priestesses moved with gliding steps around the circle, matched by the Druids in their white garments marching in the opposite direction. Dark and light in perfect balance completed the circle and came to rest. Arganax stepped forwards, lifting his hands in blessing. Behind him another priest stood waiting with the gong.

The Arch-Druid was a vigorous man in his middle years, but Ganeda, who had moved out to face him, seemed ageless, empowered by the ritual. Her robe, of so dark a blue it was almost black in the lamplight, fell in straight folds to the polished stone of the floor and the moonstones in the silver ornaments of the High Priestess glowed unwinking from her breast and brow.

"Behold, the Sun rules in the House of the Ram, and the Moon rests in the arms of the Twins," the Druid proclaimed. "The winter is past, and herbs are pushing their way towards the sunlight, birds return, proclaiming their readiness to mate, beasts emerge from their long sleep. Everywhere life arises, and ourselves with it, moved by the same tides, kindled to action by the same great energies... Keep silence, and behold the rebirth of the world, and as we are all One, behold the same great transformation within..."

I closed my eyes with the others, trembling to the vibrations of the gong that echoed from the pillars of the Great Hall of the Druids. It seemed to resonate in every atom of my being. Lost in the beauty of the moment, I forgot to feel envy that it would be Heron and not I who would be sitting on the three-legged stool and descending to the Well of Prophecy.

"Awake! Awake! Awake!" came another voice, high and clear.

"Companions of the Cosmic Light, The hidden splendour will appear!