So I ate everything that was put before me, and asked as politely as I could for extra helpings, and stuffed those too as quickly as they came to my plate, aware of Gorlas's indulgent eye on me, and Ygrawn's smile—as warm as before, though now with a touch of sadness too, as if she were seeing someone else in my face, and perhaps she was—and ever conscious of Ailithir at Gorlas's left hand.
But Arthur and I smiled into each other's eyes as if already we shared a secret, though I doubt we had so far managed to exchange more than a score of words, and most of those had been part of the fostern-rite. We had stood side by side before Gorlas and Ygrawn and Ailithir and Gorlas's Druid Dylan—and this I do remember—had flinched only a little as Ailithir and Dylan gently made the tiny cuts, the second of the Three Cuts of ritual, in the side of our wrists, and caught the drop or two of blood in the great silver graal. I remember that we drank the drink of fosterage, he and I, and spoke the words of pledging, and gave each other the kiss of brothers. The rite need not have been so speedily performed, I suppose, now I look back on it; but perhaps it was in Gorlas's mind to get me safe under his lawful protection as soon as might be done. For Arthur and me it made no slightest differ, I think we had done our own rite up there on the hill, in that moment when we first laid eyes on each other; our brotherhood was made in that moment, and not oath nor blood nor bond could seal it firmer.
At last the meal was over, and we were free to retire. All at once I was desperately tired, and I looked round for Ailithir, my only familiar anchor in these strange new seas. But he had gone out with Ygrawn, the two of them deep in talk; so I was borne up to my bed by Gorlas himself, with Arthur, full of good-natured chatter, running along after like an eager hound puppy, anxious not to be left out. After I was bathed and brushed and dried, Ailithir came in alone to see me safe settled, with a kiss and a blessing and a few words of comfort for the morrow. Of our journey, and the still unspoken reason for it, we said no word, and presently, bidding me sleep, he quitted the chamber.
But I could not sleep, not straightway, and lying there in the big fourposted bed so like my own at Tair Rhamant I cast my memory back over the days that had taken me from there to here, and jabbed futilely as ever at that wall in my mind that seemed to be sealing off some terrible secret.
The rigors of the journey, and the relief of its ending, and perhaps most of all the richness and sheer volume of my dinner, all took their inevitable toll, and in spite of my best efforts I soon drifted off. Having succumbed I must have slept heavily for some hours, for when I awoke with a terrible wrenching shudder, my heart pounding and a cry on my lips that I caught back before it could be uttered, it was still dark.
When I was calmer, I could tell a little by the texture of the air and the quality of the silence that it was nowhere near dawn but deep night still, perhaps not more than an hour either side of middlenight.
Looking round the room, I told myself fiercely that all was well: I was safe at Daars, I had a fostern now, and foster-parents, and above all I had Ailithir still; I was here in this spacious, pleasant chamber, in this supremely comfortable bed, beneath thick feather quilts and upon soft pillows. Even the furnishings were like to those I had left behind: carved cupboards and presses against the walls; fair hangings, intricately woven tapestries; a very workmanlike desk with inlaid computer pads; and, standing in splendor in a wall-niche to itself, my own beloved harp, free now of its wraps and glowing in the firelight.
Almost I managed to quiet myself and turn again to the pillows; but the feeling of terrible wrongness that had thrown me from sleep now invaded me again, stronger and darker and colder than before. In my unthinking terror I jumped down from the bed, caught up a chamber-robe and threw it about me, and ran out of the room in my bare feet, down to where I might find the comforting reassurance of voices and lights and people.
No one was about in the castle's silent upper halls; it must have been later than I had thought, in my state I was no fit judge of time. Or even place: In my confusion and desperation I kept turning as if the halls I wandered were those of Tair Rhamant, not Daars, and only grew the more panicked when rooms and towers were not where I thought to find them.
At last, more by chance than intent, I came across a part of the castle that seemed to show signs of life: I heard voices—servitors clearing away for the morning, most like—and passed lighted chambers, but found no sign of anyone I sought. In the end it was Berain, a warrior in Ygrawn's service, who found me wandering weeping in the maze of corridors, and who bore me in her arms to where Gorlas and Ailithir and Ygrawn sat late awake in Ygrawn's own grianan, the three of them deep in talk.
They all three leaped to their feet when they saw me tear-stained and wretched in Berain's arms, and each reached out eagerly to relieve Berain of her burden. But Ygrawn was quickest, and herself carried me to the deep comfortable chair beside the fire where she had been sitting, and settled me in her lap.
By this time I was almost past the reach of reason, or even words; I was shivering uncontrollably, as with high fever, though my skin was ice to the touch, and Ygrawn wrapped me in the fur throw that had been wanning her own knees. I did not understand what they had been saying to each other—I had caught a few exchanges before they were aware that Berain and I had come into the darkened room—and I did not understand now what Gorlas demanded of Ailithir, nor the urgency of his tone.
"How could he know? You put the forgetting-rann on him, did you not, and I take oath no one here told him—" He fell silent at a look from Ailithir, and Ygrawn glanced up and shook her head in a warning of her own.
Lulled in the warmth of fire and fur and breast, I ceased to tremble, but only the edge of my terror was dulled. As soon as I felt more myself again, I struggled to sit up in Ygrawn's encircling arms—strange that I should struggle, it was the first time I could remember that I had been held so, in a mother's embrace—and gazed imploringly at Ailithir.
"Athro—"
He came and knelt before Ygrawn's knees, and I was struck afresh with terror at the new grimness that hardened his face. I could feel in my mind the crumbling of that wall which had been protecting me somehow from a dreadful memory. But he was speaking now, and with all my might I willed myself to listen.
"Taliesin, hear me. Your father is dead; he has been slain on Tara by the Marbh-draoi Edeyrn."
It seems strange to say so now, but through the sudden lancing sorrow I heard his words with a kind of relief. I had feared and expected to hear gods knew what unimaginable tidings; to hear Ailithir tell me, with unspeakable gentleness, of my father's death seemed almost a disburdening. My father had been dead in my child's mind since the night he left Tair Rhamant; to be told of it now, though the grief I felt was no less the real for it, was only to be told of a thing already accepted.
"I woke up—there was something I felt—it was then that the news came, athro?"
Ailithir and Ygrawn exchanged a swift look. But he said only, "Aye, child, it was."
And as if those words had been a trigger, suddenly the wall in my mind, that had been slowly fracturing, breaking up like ice in the spring, was breached entirely, and memory poured flooding back, inexorable as those waters I now remembered, the waters that had rolled over Gwaelod, and I cried out then in the mingling of the two griefs.
"Tasyk—the wave—" And I wept in Ygrawn's arms as Gorlas and Ailithir took it in turns to tell me: how my father had challenged the Marbh-draoi, there in the Archdruid's very stronghold of Ratherne; had challenged him to his face, cursing him and his usurping ways, and Edeyrn had destroyed him. They spoke too of how it had been Ailithir's Sight that had saved the two of us: Edeyrn's plan had been to strike when my brothers were home on their secret visit—not so secret after all, it seemed; perhaps someone had indiscreetly gossiped, or there may have been a traitor—and my father was to have been forced to witness the destruction of his cantred and his family, and then to have been slain himself. But he had thwarted that, to save at least his family: Gw
yddno had called his own death to him at Ratherne, and Edeyrn in his fury had drowned the cantred all the same.
We were to learn later that a few hundred folk had managed by various miraculous means to escape the whelming of Gwaelod: hundreds, out of tens of thousands… One even, a Trevelyan, a worthy son of that bold wild clann, had actually ridden his white mare to safety ahead of the wave. Had the water been only a little higher or stronger at the time he could not have done it; but it had broken, and though it was still running swift the mare proved swifter, and showed her heels to the flood. That wild gallop was by decree of her grateful master the last time she would bear any greater burden upon her back than her own shining coat, and both master and mare found their way to Daars not long after we did.
But that was later: Now I wept for Gwaelod, and for my father, and for myself; and all the while I wept Ygrawn rocked me on her breast, and her own tears fell upon my head.
But my new foster-mother was not the last comforter I was to have that terrible night…
After I had been borne once again to my bed, and the door had shut behind Ygrawn and Gorlas and Ailithir, a shadow stirred in the dark corner beyond the big carved press. Even before the fire glinted on his hair I knew who must be hiding there, and it came to me that Ailithir too, and perhaps Ygrawn, must surely have sensed his presence; but if they had, they must also have thought it good for him to be there, for no word was spoken to command his return to his own chamber.
He came forward to stand beside the bed, and I sat up to meet him. His face was grave, as I was to learn it seldom was, and the brown eyes seemed to look beyond me to some other time and place, as I was to learn they so often did.
"My father is dead," I heard myself explaining. "And my mother—now I have no one."
I had not said it to be pitied, but as simple statement of fact; that is the bard's great curse and greater gift—that whatever befalls one, it seems to be happening to someone else and not to oneself at all—and already it had begun its long work.
But Arthur shook his head. "Nay," he said. "Not so; now you have me."
* * *
Chapter Four
Gorlas himself came to me that next morning, before I had been awake long enough to do much more than bathe and dress and say the short prayers I had been taught by Ailithir with which to begin the day.
My new foster-father was a man in his early prime, no more than eighty at the time, not tall but strongly built, with black hair and the same deepset dark eyes to be seen in Arthur. Like my own father, he was not one of the great lords of Keltia; both were chiefs of minor houses, ruling over minor provinces of little political importance and less wealth. And again like my father, Gorlas was well pleased to have it so; he was perfectly content in his Caer-in-Arvon, and had not wish nor will to rule anything more.
Nor was he a man of subtlety, and he came at once to his topic.
"Taliesin, Ailithir tells me I may speak to you as I would to one of my own lords or chiefs, and so I shall. You are my son now, as lawfully as Arthur; but you are still Gwyddno's son, and it is as your father's son that Edeyrn will be seeking you. We have heard that he has learned of your escape with Ailithir, and though I do not wish to frighten you overmuch, you must know that he will hunt you down if he can the way he hunts your sisters and brothers.—Nay, do not fear, they are all safe, by the best intelligence we have—and our intelligence is usually the best." He settled himself in the chair by the window. "What I wish to suggest to you is this: that we give out to folk that you are my nephew, the son of my dead sister Teleri, who was killed last year in a fall. We shall say that she had made a brehon marriage with a lord of whom her family did not approve, and that you were the result; so that when she died, we could do naught else but take you in and raise you as our own. Thus, if any Ravens or other of Edeyrn's creatures come seeking you, they cannot name you as Gwyddno's."
He paused expectantly, perhaps a little disconcerted by my calm acceptance. But what was I to say? I was six years old, and it sounded a fine plan to me. So I spoke the first thing that came into my head.
"And Ailithir? How shall we hide him!"
Gorlas laughed, clearly relieved. "Oh, never fear, that one is able to hide in an open field! It would take the Marbh-draoi himself to winkle him out, and I doubt not but that Edeyrn will keep well off from Gwynedd for some time to come."
"And my—and methryn?" It came hard to my lips at first, the word for 'foster-mother,' but then it seemed the finest thing in the world to say, and I said it again. "What does methryn say?"
"All this is her thought," said Gorlas. "She spoke of it to me this morning, and there is one thing more that she did think of: that while you are here you should be called by some other name. I fear that even a Raven might have no doubts as to the true identity of a surprising new fostern at Daars, Taliesin by name."
"What shall I be called, then?" Unexpectedly, I was delighted by the idea of a new name, and the romance of being in hiding.
"Let him be known as Gwion."
Both Gorlas and I looked up in surprise, for the voice was Ailithir's, and neither of us had marked his entrance. He came forward now to join us, his hair and beard whiter than ever against the blue robe he wore.
"Is that not perhaps too near his father's name to be a safe choice?" asked Gorlas a little doubtfully.
"A common enough name in this part of Gwynedd." Ailithir stretched out comfortably in the window-seat, one elbow on the deep sill, looking down over Daars and the river. "Any road, it is one of the names his mother gave him at his saining. It will serve well enough."
'Gwion,' I thought. How strange to have a new name… Still, it had been mine all along: Taliesin Gwion Idris Glyndour, son of Gwyddno. My forenames had always felt far too grand for the likes of me—names of kings and gods and wizards—and I wondered now what my mother had Seen, to give such names of power to her youngest child.
But the kindred-name of Glyndour had ever been a source of shy pride: Though it was one of the very last names to come to Keltia from Earth, five hundred years since, he who bore it first had been himself a true Terran, born on Earth, one of the last to make the great immram. He had been a mighty lord of the Kymry in that time, a period of war and civil strife; then he had lost his war, and simply and suddenly he had vanished away—taken by us to Keltia to live out his days in honor and in peace. I often wondered what folk of Earth had made of his going, both then and in later years; it must have been a marvel and a mystery. Owein, he had been called, a prince of our folk…
But they were both looking at me expectantly now, my foster-father and my teacher, and I hastened to answer the question I guessed one or both must have asked.
"It will serve very well."
We settled in at Daars, Ailithir and myself, more swiftly than I would have thought possible. Within a fortnight, already I had near forgot that I had ever known another home than the comfortable old castle on the river-cliff. I had made a private fortress of the room I had been given that first night, and I supposed Ailithir found as congenial to his own particular tastes and needs the isolated tower-chambers he had chosen for his use.
Nor had our coming stirred so much as a ripple of curiosity amongst the castle folk. As I had suspected from the moment of our meeting with Arthur, Ailithir had been often in Daars; indeed, he had spent some years here before coming to us at Tair Rhamant, and whenever he could spare the time he had made return visits since—which was why Arthur did not find him a stranger. And since I had always thought Ailithir had been at Tair Rhamant from the beginning of time, if not before, this new knowledge came as somewhat of a surprise.
But if Ailithir's return to Daars were no surprise to its folk, by any reckoning my own advent upon the scene should have been rather more of one. Yet my presence was scarce remarked upon: Gorlas and Ygrawn were casually commended, when the matter was mentioned at all, for taking in the poor orphaned sister-son whose own father's clann would not have him. This tale gave me a strange fee
ling whenever I heard it, and I confess many times I longed to declare the truth; but even a six-year-old understood the need for concealment, and I gradually grew to accept it without a second thought, even to the point where I must set myself to conscious recall of the truth. It never occurred to me until much later that perhaps Ailithir might have had a hand—or more than a hand—in the folk's easy acceptance of the story.
Or perhaps even in my acceptance of it: I learned to answer to 'Gwion' as readily as I had to 'Taliesin,' and only Ailithir and Arthur, and sometimes Ygrawn, still called me by my old name; and then never but in private, lest ears should hear that ought not to.
Nor did it take long for my old routine to be reestablished: Lessons at Daars were as necessary as lessons had been at Tair Rhamant, and I was at my studies again before I had been more than a sevennight in my new home.
I was not the only student in the castle schoolroom: Arthur shared my lessons with me. Though I pined at first for Benesek, I was soon too busy even to mourn him, as my new instructors began the courses of study that were to have so great a weight in all our lives after.
Those teachers were chosen by Ygrawn herself, she not wishing to leave so important a choosing to her husband's more casual and less careful nature. In the old days, the days before Edeyrn, after our fostering was at an end Arthur and I would have been sent to study at one of the great centers that had flourished in Keltia since the beginning. Kelts are passionately fond of learning, prizing knowledge and those who can impart it above all other things, and we have schools for every trade and craft and art: for bardery and battle, for magic and music and all manner of making.
But Edeyrn had dissolved all such places long years since, in his panicked fear of what might not be taught there; and of course the bards and Druids and Ban-draoi and Fianna were his chiefest foes. Even I knew how among the leaders of the Counterinsurgency were some of the cleverest minds in Keltia; and so they would have had to be, to keep the resistance alight so long, flaming so strong in the face of all Edeyrn could send against them. Edeyrn was right to fear learning: Knowledge has ever been a sword to cut down tyranny, be that tyranny the work of an evil overlord or an unjust monarch or an overbearing religion.
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