The Oath

by A. M. Linden

  Aleswina bit down harder on her lip and nodded.

  Caelym nodded back, although his arms remained crossed as he intoned. “Now as to the penance—for this middle sin, there will be two. First, though you have confessed and are sorry, you have too much knowledge to stay here in some convent among your own people, as I would have wished. Instead, you must travel on with us until we can find some convent in Celtic lands where our Saxon enemies will never find you.”

  The poorly hidden happiness in both women’s faces left Caelym feeling discouraged that this penance would have any benefit in preventing future sins. Taking this as one more proof that Christianity was doomed to failure, he completed the formula anyway.

  “And for your second penance, while we travel together, it is you who will be speaking in Celt instead of me who must speak English.”

  “Mi wnaf,” Aleswina whispered, barely loud enough to hear.

  Shifting to Celt as well, Caelym remained stern. “You are then forgiven but are to do no more sins in my presence!”

  With that, he uncrossed his arms, took hold of her hands, and pulled her to her feet.

  Aleswina wanted nothing more than to retreat into the boat but, as quickly as she stood up, Caelym dropped to his knees, so close to her that she stepped back, caught her legs against the edge of the boat and fell backwards—fortunately coming down on the center seat instead of landing upside-down in the bottom of the boat.

  Caelym rose, pulled her back to standing, and knelt again at her feet. Then, looking solemnly up at her, he announced that he must now be confessing as well, “For I also have done sins, and it is you who must be hearing my confession and judging and giving the penance that I must do to be forgiven.”

  Aleswina made no audible response, but Caelym continued on as if with her approval.

  “When I did not think you could understand what I was saying, I have called you unkind names. I have called you stupid, and I have called you a coward as never I should have done, and I am sorry for it. Now, will you be judging this sin, and giving me some just penance that I may do, and then I will be forgiven?”

  “It doesn’t matter . . . I don’t mind,” Aleswina stammered, barely aware that she was speaking Celt as if it were her first language. She would have edged away if Caelym had not put his arms out on either side of her and rested his hands on the side of the boat so that she was trapped there and could not move without coming into some contact with him.

  Caelym remained on his knees. “Then you will not give me any penance, and I will not be forgiven but must be sorry for this ever after?” He gazed up at Aleswina with such a desolate expression that the gleam in his eyes might well have been unshed tears.

  “Aleswina,” Annwr snapped, “give him his penance and forgive him, or we will be here until I die of old age!”

  Casting about for something to say, Aleswina recalled her years of confessions at Saint Edeth. “Father Wulfric makes me say the fifty-first psalm once for each time I have been late for services or have thought unkind thoughts.”

  “Then you will teach me this fifty-first psalm, and when I have said it once for each time I have called you stupid and each time I have called you a fool and each time I have thought these unkind thoughts, you will forgive me?”

  Annwr answered for Aleswina that she would, only later, after they were in the boat and on their way, unless Caelym wanted his sons to be old men with beards before he saw them again.

  With Annwr shooing them both, Aleswina clambered into the front of the boat, and Caelym heaved his pack after her. He shoved the craft into the water, held it in place long enough for Annwr to get on board, then gave it a final thrust and leaped in. As the current took hold, he scrambled into his seat, caught hold of the flailing oars, and maneuvered the boat into the center of the channel. Keeping a firm grip on the oars to steady the boat on its course, he braced his feet, straightened his back, and looked over Annwr’s head to where Aleswina was crouching in the prow of the boat. Assuming his most staunch and resolute voice, he declared, “I am ready! Recite for me this psalm fifty-one, and I will say it as decreed by your Christian priest, once for each time I have called you stupid, once for each time I have called you a coward, and once for each time I have thought these unkind thoughts.”

  Chapter 31

  The Fifty-First Psalm

  Father Wulfric, the Abby of Saint Edeth’s visiting priest, was mostly a patient and uncomplaining man whose theology was deeply imbued with the kinder and more compassionate side of Christianity. He had, however, been taking confessions from the convent’s nuns and novices for going on three decades, and he did not look forward to the time he spent in the chapel’s cramped, stuffy confessional.

  Listening to novice after nun after novice recite their litany of petty sins—coveting the biggest slice of bread at supper, inadvertently looking at a shirtless man walking past the convent’s orchard, forgetting the Lord’s pain on the cross for almost an hour on the Thursday before last—had, as he’d once admitted to his bishop in a confessional moment of his own, come to feel to him as if he were being slowly martyred by the pricks of a thousand embroidery needles. The bishop had chortled, given him quick absolution, and told a story of falling asleep during an abbess’s confession.

  Since then, Wulfric’s two chief goals on his visits to Saint Edeth had been to keep from falling asleep during Hildegarth’s confessions (which, like her sermons, were always erudite, usually lengthy, and often obscure), and to get through the rest as quickly as possible. Excepting the abbess, for whom he carried and consulted an annotated list of penitential prayers, he kept a count of each penitent’s transgressions on his fingers, dispensed a recitation of the fifty-first psalm for each offence, forgave her, and told her to sin no more. Then he’d close his eyes and shake his head to clear his mind of the self-excoriating fluff while he waited for the next nun or novice to send him back into a somnambulant stupor.

  Having seen little of the kinder and more compassionate side of Christianity, Caelym was not expecting to have Aleswina stammer out a pitiful piffle of an invocation hardly sufficient to placate an affronted wood sprite, much less any deity as harsh and vengeful as the Christians’ chief god. Determined to make up in verve and variety what the chant lacked in substance, he summoned the spirits of his bardic ancestors and began his recitations, shifting from exhortations as wild and despairing as a man’s final words before he threw himself off a cliff to entreaties as soft and wistful as an errant lover wheedling his way back into his consort’s bed.

  Aleswina was awed.

  Annwr wasn’t and snapped, “That’s enough! She forgives you!”

  Caelym, however, had begun to relish the resonance of the psalm’s long, lingering vowels so, after he finished with his estimate of the number of times he’d thought that Aleswina was a stupid coward, he went on to repent the times he’d thought she was a whiny weakling or a sniveling nuisance.

  Chapter 32

  Making Camp

  While Caelym was reciting, the river carried them though the saw-toothed ridges that marked the edge of Derthwald and rushed on into the rugged uplands of Atheldom as if in a race against the setting sun.

  Watching the banks slip by, Annwr tried to match the passing scenery with what she’d learned from listening to every scrap of conversation in the palace kitchen or the village market that had to anything do with traveling anywhere. Although nothing she’d heard provided any hint of how to find her way back to Llwddawanden, she had accumulated an extensive knowledge of the roadways and habitations of Derthwald and the lay of lands around it. Now, seeing the dark outline of a forest looming on either side of the next ravine, she was fairly sure they were coming into the last of the wild woods before they reached the thickly populated central plains.

  Atheldom, by all accounts, was ruled by a king whose notion of Christianity had nothing to do with kindness or compassion and everything to do with absolute, indisputable authority. Whether this was a good thing or a ba
d thing varied from one speaker to the next, but there was complete agreement that the kingdom’s roads were heavily patrolled by soldiers on the lookout for bandits, rebels, and runaway slaves.

  Certain that word of Aleswina’s flight would have spread throughout the Saxon realms and that rewards for her capture were, even now, being proclaimed in every village and hamlet along the river, Annwr guessed that the rapidly approaching forest would be their last chance to stop and disguise themselves before they left the uplands. Besides that, she wanted to cook Aleswina another hot meal and to make sure that Caelym wasn’t going to go rushing headlong into a hornet’s nest when he’d not be the only one stung. It would be just like him to go on rowing and singing straight through the woods and into the laps of Gilberth’s men.

  “Any time you’re done showing off, maybe you’ll pay attention to where we’re going and find us a safe place to land and make camp for the night.”

  Caelym had never stopped paying attention to the river and was more than a little offended by the insinuation that he could not recite poetry and row a boat at the same time. Knowing better than to argue back with a priestess in a snit, he contented himself with humming, Miserere mei Deus secundum magnam misericordiam tuam et secundum multitudinem miserationum tuarum dele iniquitatem meam, as he scanned the banks for a place to pull into shore.

  Just as Annwr was about to repeat her command, Caelym brought the boat around, tucking it in between a sandbar and the shore where the undercut bank was just higher than the side of the boat, making a sheltered nook out of sight from any other boats that might pass by.

  Despite what Annwr thought of his judgment—or lack of it— Caelym had survived on his own for nearly three months, traveling through hostile and hazardous lands, before his unfortunate encounter with that unusually alert band of Saxon guards. And even with an arrow in his back (one lucky shot out of the dozens he’d dodged), he’d escaped and made his way practically to her doorstep. He knew as well as she did that they’d need to stop, take stock, and make plans for what to do next, especially now that they had the hopelessly simple-minded Saxon princess to worry about. As he’d tried unsuccessfully to make Annwr understand, even if Aleswina didn’t intentionally turn them over to their enemies, her presence was as good as waving a banner and proclaiming, “Look! Here we are! Come and kill us!”

  Besides that, Caelym had seen the quick flashes of silver darting away when his oars struck the water. Tired of having nothing to eat except sausage, stew, and stale bread, he was ready for roasted fish, and the channel between the bank and bar ran deep enough to set a weir.

  As the boat slipped into its niche, Annwr caught hold of an exposed root and tied the line to it. With the craft secured, she stood up cautiously and stepped out. Aleswina—to Caelym’s surprise—handed Annwr the smaller pack without being told to do so and climbed out by herself. Caelym heaved the bigger bag onto the shore and joined Annwr and Aleswina as they looked around.

  The bank itself wasn’t wide. Backed by a second, steeper bank, it offered little by way of shelter, but slanting beams of sunlight pointed the way to a gap in the ridge above them where a series of flat, mossy rocks formed a stairway up and into the forest. Without so much as a word between them, Caelym and Annwr shouldered the packs. With Caelym leading the way, they made the short, easy climb and came out on at the top of a flat ridge where a towering stand of pines formed a backdrop to a semicircle of boulders that in turn enclosed a raised ring of smaller rocks.

  “Here is your campsite,” Caelym announced as proudly as if he’d personally planted the trees and laid the boulders to create a place that was to other campsites what a king’s palace was to a peasant’s hut.

  Certainly they were not the first to stop there, but seeing the fire ring overgrown with moss and filled with pine needles, they were reassured that they were the first in many years. Working together, they cleared out the moss and debris—hurrying to get a fire started and banked while there was still enough light left for Caelym to go back to the river to build his weir and for Annwr and Aleswina go into the woods to gather roots and greens.

  “So Caelym didn’t choose such a bad place to stop after all.”

  It took a moment for Aleswina to place the unfamiliar note in Annwr’s voice and realize that it sounded cheerful.

  They’d taken a deer path that led up and over a rise and then down again into a lush glade, picking fern fronds, wild celery, and sorrel along the way. Now, coming to the edge of a wide, shallow pond grown thick with clumps of bulrushes and with birds singing all around, it seemed to Aleswina that they might be standing in the Garden of Eden.

  Knowing how annoyed Annwr got at the idea of God casting Adam and Eve out of the Garden (“For doing nothing more than eating an apple when he told them not to, which was exactly why they would and any goddess would have known it!”), Aleswina didn’t say anything about Eden. Instead, she copied what Annwr was doing. She set her basket down, slipped off her sandals, hitched up her skirt, and waded into the pond to help pull up the greenest and freshest of the stalks, which ended in the fattest and most succulent roots. She was tugging at a particularly stubborn plant when she heard Annwr snort.

  Looking where Annwr was staring, Aleswina saw Caelym on the far side of the pond, cutting dry brown reeds. “Shouldn’t we tell him that those are too old and tough to be any good?”

  Annwr didn’t answer her, just stood shaking her head and muttering something about apples and trees.

  Confused because it was far too early for apples and there were none of the right trees around anyway, Aleswina started to ask again, “But shouldn’t we tell Cael—”

  “Never mind him!” Pulling another fresh green rush by its roots, Annwr added, “Let’s get these trimmed and washed while there’s still light to find our way back.”

  Aleswina had already lost sight of Caelym in the fading twilight, and she did as Annwr told her. After cleaning their harvest and washing her hands, she retied her sandals, hoisted her bulging basket and hurried after Annwr along the darkening trail.

  As they came into camp, they were met with the smells of roasting fish and the hiss of boiling water. Caelym, who had somehow passed them unseen, stood up from the hearth and welcomed them back with a sweeping bow that ended in a wave of his hand towards a neatly spread blanket set with bowls and spoons and an open flask of Annwr’s elderberry wine.

  They ate Caelym’s roast fish and passed a cup around in the dark as they waited for the greens and roots to cook.

  Afterwards, nestled against Annwr’s side, Aleswina watched golden sparks from the campfire float upward as a blanket of silverwhite stars spread out across the sky. Caelym was sitting opposite her, his face glowing in the firelight. She could see he was cutting holes in his dry reed and wondered if he was going to do some Druid magic with it, even though Annwr had said over and over that if Druids could work the sorcery they were accused of, Christian priests would have turned into toads and hopped off into a bog long since—“and a lot more sense you’d hear from them croaking in a swamp then anything they say from their indoor altars!”

  Still, Aleswina couldn’t imagine what else besides magic he might be doing when he put one end of the reed to his lips and blew into it, making a sound so much like a meadow thrush that it was answered by a real bird. For a time their notes went back and forth—Caelym’s flute singing out and the sweet, trilling call answering back so it seemed to Aleswina, who was getting very tired, that they were somehow back in the long-ago time Annwr had told her about, before the feud between people and animals began, and they could all still talk to each other and understand each other’s language and their children still played together.

  As if he was reading her thoughts, Caelym left off playing the bird’s song and began a melody that skipped up and down like the sound of the children playing, and she felt herself drifting off into a story that Annwr had told her when she was a little girl afraid of falling asleep and having bad dreams.

 
She was just awake enough to realize that Caelym had lowered his flute and begun singing a song that was about the same thing as Annwr’s story—a little girl named Gwendolwn who went into a meadow to gather flowers for her mother and met a bear cub who was looking for a honey tree.

  . . . Forgetting all about her mother’s flowers, Gwendolwn went along with the bear cub, looking for the honey tree. Up and down the mountains they went, and over rivers and through forests, until they came to the edge of a muddy gray marsh where they found the tree—so full of honey that they could see the honeycombs in holes in the trunk just above their heads. There were great swarms of bees circling all around the tree, buzzing and buzzing, and that should have warned them to leave the honey alone and go get their mothers, but instead the baby bear put the basket over his head like a helmet, and Gwendolwn lifted him up, and he grabbed a honeycomb with his front paws, pulled it out, and jumped down. Together, they put the honeycomb in the basket and held it between them as they ran away. They ran fast but the bees were faster and came buzzing after them, and to escape they jumped into a muddy marsh and hid there, eating the honey and getting stickier and muddier until no one could have told by looking at them which one was the sticky, muddy little girl and which one was the sticky, muddy baby bear.

  After they had eaten all the honey and the bees had buzzed away to their tree, Gwendolwn and the bear cub went back to the meadow so covered with honey and dirt that their mothers, who were searching for them, mixed them up, and it wasn’t until the mother bear had taken Gwendolwn home to their cave and licked the honey off and found out she was a human child and Gwendolwn’s mother had taken the bear cub back to their cottage and put him into a tub of water and washed him off with soap and water and realized he was a baby bear that the two mothers realized their mistake and rushed back to the meadow to trade children and get their own babies back. Then they all went home—the mothers scolding their children and telling them not to do that again, and Gwendolwn and the baby bear promising they wouldn’t—and they both went to sleep, the little girl in her cozy bed and the little bear in his warm cave.