She looked away for a moment, and I knew the first explanations she could never make before were about to begin.
“How does this work?” I asked. “What happened so you would know who you were before?”
“In every life,” she began, “I reached a point where suddenly nothing made sense and it took time to remember what I am.”
“Your powers?” I asked.
“No, not that,” she replied. “Awareness always emerged earlier, always when I was moving from adolescence into adulthood, but the moments and what you call ‘memories’ surface at a slower pace, and it takes a while to recognize and remember them.”
“That has to be a shitty, confusing time,” I added.
“Some were worse than others until I learned to find and see those moments in each new life. A few times, the thoughts made me worry that Satan was controlling me, or that maybe I had gone mad. After a while, it became clear, and each time—each life—I remembered.”
“Why now?” I asked. “You said I was never supposed to see or learn about any of this.”
Aline moved close and slid her feet under my legs because, she says, the pressure feels good. Her face wore a thoughtful, almost sad expression.
“Have you kept a secret all your life, something you never revealed to anyone, not even once?”
“I’d have to think about it,” I replied, but the question flustered me and my answer seemed inadequate.
“Think about it now,” she said. “I’ve kept this secret for a thousand and a half years because Cadwal was right: the time for our ways has passed and it will never return.”
Aline’s voice became distant and strange, the way an actress might adjust to direction for an ethnic or foreign accent. It was disturbing, and I hoped she wouldn’t hear the concern filter out from my thoughts, so I shifted topics just a little to distract her.
“After you…well, after you die…you’re reborn into a new family line?”
“Each life was unique and not connected to another physically or genetically, but I was always a part of them. My firstborn spirit, soul, or essence—whichever you prefer—remained through them all.”
I listened closely because Aline’s nature was being revealed and laid bare for me to see; with one word—firstborn—the last veil in a mystery fell away, and the moment seemed removed and eerie when I looked and saw two in the face of one. It happens that way sometimes; we clomp along in happy ignorance until, like a white-hot bolt of lightning, understanding waits in front of us with an upheld hand we can no longer avoid. In those seconds, it felt like that, and I smiled with a slow shake of my head as the final pieces fell into place.
“Seven lives. Every time, it was always you; always Tegwen. The lives you lived since were never just one person.”
“Yes. I am Aline in this life, but I have always been Tegwen.”
Her answer was immediate, direct, and the destroyer of my perceptions of existence built on the faith of accepted truth. Of course, that belief had been torn away, and I felt like a lone man in the middle of a featureless plane with no horizon. Aline—and every life that went before—was a shared identity.
“Rhian wasn’t reborn as Aline Lloyd,” I said at last, “Tegwen was.”
She nodded, but we were moving to another place where her manner seemed to shift a little, and the uneasiness crept back in despite my best efforts to ignore it. As usual, she heard.
“Evan, this is not a split personality disorder; there is no ‘Sybil’ in here.”
I shook my head in wonder and said, “I can’t imagine how this must feel for you.”
“It’s funny you put it that way because this is perfectly normal for me, and it always has been,” she answered. “I can’t imagine what it would be like any other way.”
“How can you be two people at the same time?”
“That’s not how to think of it,” she said. “I wouldn’t be who I am as Aline Lloyd without Tegwen; it’s rather like echoes or instinct guiding me. I know where it comes from, and why, but it has never been a superior-to-subordinate experience.”
“Aline is not under Tegwen’s control?” I asked.
“Not in the way you mean. It’s more accurate to say Aline’s consciousness is assisted by Tegwen, not directed by it.”
It hadn’t occurred to me earlier, but one question became suddenly obvious, and I moved closer to Aline.
“These lives,” I began, “always lived here…in Wales.”
She nodded the way people do when they think you need support, even if you do not.
“Does anything from your past explain?” I wondered. “Maybe from Tegwen’s life or part of your time as a Druid to tell you it would always begin here?”
Aline smiled for a moment, and it seemed my question surprised her. Of course, it hadn’t and she knelt on the floor, leaning to draw her hand across the ancient planks very slowly.
“Our gods made it that way, I suppose,” she replied in a hushed voice. “I’ve been many places and other countries, but it’s never right until I return to this land.”
It was the first time our talks went to her pagan origins and she pulled it into the light deliberately and without regard for how I might react.
“Did Cadwal tell you about this when you were young?” I asked. “Did he explain the lives yet to be lived…being born again and again?”
“Only in broad terms,” she answered. “I knew it would happen, but he described rebirths as something much like skipping a smooth stone across a quiet pond; it bounces from spot to spot until it finally slows and sinks. It was a simple way to tell me about the importance of my original life—the stone—meeting and joining with other lives until I finally die.”
“Until Tegwen dies.”
“Yes.”
I listened and learned as she went, privy to a window into the past no one else has been given, but other questions seeped through and I posed them carefully. I imagined her in that life, making her way through the fifth century, learning, growing and how it was in an age (and culture) mostly erased from history.
“Were Druids allowed to marry?”
Aline grinned at me and what she knew was another query made with caution against a reply I wouldn’t want to hear.
“Of course,” she answered.
“Did you?”
Her expression changed again, and I remember watching with a blended sense of curiosity and dread.
“There was another; a member of our class I met when we journeyed across from the island and down the coast to a gathering where Harlech stands today. He was called Fáelán and we formed a friendship during that time. There was an idea of marriage, but it never happened.”
“Why not?”
“He died,” she answered simply. I said nothing because the memories could only have been painful, but she finished the thought.
“Cadwal took me to an important conclave and from it, we were given several requests for hearings at two villages near present-day Llanidloes. It took many weeks before we returned, but during that time Fáelán became gravely ill.”
“I suppose that happened with some regularity back then?”
“By comparison, I suppose it did,” she answered. “A ruptured appendix or punctured lung from broken ribs was always fatal.”
“What happened to Fáelán?”
“They said it was a plague, but smallpox is more likely. The village where he lived built a pyre, and so I could never visit a gravesite to ask our gods for favors in his name.”
“Favors?”
“When one of our own died, especially before his or her time, words were offered to the gods of wind, sun, and rain to honor the dead by extending kindness to those left behind—abundant crops, for example, or an end of raids by foreigners.”
“You meant to marry this man?”
“No formal announcement or arrangements were made but it was understood, yes.”
With her solemn answer, the implications became clear: Tegwen followed a course on her own, and on
e life was changed by the death of another. It was difficult for me to contemplate the reality and a man long dead who won her heart many centuries before, but that truth was unavoidable, and I made up my mind to take it for what it was and avoid peevish jealousies that could never affect me. It made me wonder if she understood my emotional dilemma, but Aline didn’t mention it and I was at least wise enough to leave it buried with the ashes of the past.
“TELL me about the others; I’m ready to learn now, and anyway, it can’t get any stranger than this, right?”
She reached for my hand and said, “When I was first born, what I am was no longer common and that was the reason Cadwal made me promise to never reveal what I could do. Today, it’s much worse.”
“Why was it becoming less common?” I asked. “A product of the Roman experience?”
“As the old ways died out, there were fewer and fewer of us. I don’t understand why, and maybe it was accelerated evolution, but the Romans killed so many, it’s reasonable to connect them to it.”
“But something else changed?”
“For my duties and responsibility to Cadwal, hearing the thoughts of others was useful because we were trusted to render fair judgment. But he knew those abilities were bound at some point to be noticed in a changing world, and it would expose us to dangerous risks.”
I listened and heard the conclusion before she reached it.
“Claude Dumont’s reaction is a good example.”
“Yes, and that is why I have never spoken of it since. My other lives are similar; can you imagine what anyone else would say if I told them I was born fifteen hundred years ago?”
I passed through a final gate separating the life I’d lived from the days and years still ahead: a one-way threshold it was pointless to resist. The moment was not as dramatic as I would expect, and I remember smiling sadly as I considered my own reaction. In those first moments of a revelation like no other, I told her digging up a giant glass bottle didn’t prove anything; I needed to show her my intellect prevented me from giving myself over to a fantastical illusion that defied the laws of physics without a fight, but the effort would certainly have been wasted. Somehow, in ways I can’t justify or even describe, the last of my doubts faded. There is no way for me to quantify such things—to apply scientific analysis and find a truth no one else can see. Instead, in a beautiful parallel to those times in Aline’s former lives, I simply knew.
“You showed me a glimpse of Tegwen’s life,” I began, “but what about Rhian and the lives you lived in between; can you show me?”
“First, I want to tell you about them and who I was so the images will make sense when you see and experience those moments.”
“Where the hell do you start with something like this?” I asked. “It’s not exactly a slide show from summer camp.”
Aline held up a reassuring hand and it was clear she anticipated the question.
“After Renard came here,” she replied, “this was inevitable, so I thought about it and how best to take you through.”
It didn’t matter to me which life she chose, but I understood the importance of her first existence as Tegwen and the common bridge connecting it to all her lives. Lives, plural. It still sounds strange to me but it really is the only way to describe her accurately. It was time to move things forward, but those first minutes were colored by the unnerving reality Aline was no longer a singular entity—a unique personality. Tegwen was with her, and always had been, but my perceptions were forced into a new framework and reality we’re not trained by life’s experiences to accept easily. When she began, I looked and listened as a man forever altered.
ALINE BROUGHT GLASSES of wine and settled on her couch to start my lessons about a girl I would never see but who also sat right beside me in her newest life. Without a written language, she said, history that was passed down by word of mouth over centuries provided few meaningful clues as to when Tegwen was born. Elder Druids she’d met on her journeys with Cadwal spoke of a time before and measured, in their words, by the passage of “three generations since the invaders disappeared from the land.”
I asked her what it meant and she jotted notes on a pad from her kitchen, laying out timelines I could recognize. Presuming three generations spans nearly a century, she explained, it’s an easy enough task to work the math forward.
“I didn’t know any of this before my life as Rhian,” she began, “but I sat with history professors while I was at university in Cardiff, and they showed me what I didn’t know about the times corresponding to my earlier lives. For them, it was just my curiosity about western civilization, but it helped me understand my own, hidden history and fill in the blanks.”
“When you lived the first time, your people didn’t keep written records,” I complained. Aline just smiled patiently and said, “No, but the Romans did and some of theirs have been useful to this purpose.”
“In what way?”
“We knew Roman legions were recalled from Britain late in the fourth century, which means I was born sometime late in the fifth century, anywhere between 460 and 480. And just to be clear, my ‘people’ were your people, too, Evan; we are both descended from the same distinct culture.”
“So noted,” I replied with my best apologetic smile.
She pulled out an old milk crate filled with texts and history books describing Britain and Wales during the Middle Ages but also an internet “favorites” folder on her laptop with at least fifty saved websites dedicated to the various eras in which she had lived. It didn’t make any difference to her story, but she reacted badly when I referred to Tegwen’s time as the “Dark Ages,” regarding it innocently as a common historic reference.
“Because it came along before the Renaissance,” she said with a scowl, “doesn’t mean those times were dark!”
I listened she reminded me Tegwen “didn’t have to endure the Saxons and Normans, Vikings, or goddamned Henry the Eighth.” I nodded in silence, deciding to never open that wound again, but the mysterious world of the Druids became more interesting to me than it had been.
Little of them is known today because of the maddening absence of a written Celtic language. There is slight evidence by way of artifacts and remnants of their settlements, leaving mostly the transcribed accounts of others to describe (in miniscule detail) who and what they were. Worse still, those commentaries were made primarily by Romans (or Greek scholars on their behalf) and could hardly be regarded as objective or fair, considering such open hostility the Empire held for Druids over 500 years.
Julius Caesar’s commentaries on Druidic influence, made from his experience fighting the Gauls in modern-day France, Belgium, and northern Italy, seemed to me little more than offhand, surface-level notes and certainly not a thorough academic white paper telling us things about the Druids other historical analyses cannot. The texts in Aline’s collection included observations from the odd Roman soldier or attending commentator keeping track of the Roman Empire’s western-most domain, but it was clear they had no use for Druids and all of them said so. Pliny spoke of “monstrous rites,” and the revulsion he reported from human sacrifice (including cannibalism as a part of the ritual sacrifice process) suggests an obvious, deliberate bias against the Druids, and I wondered if any of it made a difference to Aline. The Roman experience with Druids in Gaul, she reminded me, was not hers and happened long before she was born.
A class of people within the Celtic tribes, mystery-shrouded Druids were priestly keepers of knowledge and a connection to the physical world around them; teachers, judges and powerful seers were the link between natural and supernatural. The questions piled up and I could barely contain myself.
“You know how much people today don’t know about the Druids, right?” I asked.
“Oh yes,” she replied simply.
“Doesn’t it bother you?”
“No,” she answered. “Should it?”
“It would be impossible for me to know what you know and not be tempted to
straighten out their misperceptions!”
“It wouldn’t if you were me.”
Her answer stopped me cold. She showed none of the frustration I expected, and I wondered if she was just that patient or if there was another force operating to make the question irrelevant. Of course, presenting herself as the only living person who can tell the world precisely what it was to be a Druid priestess in post-Roman Wales meant exposing herself to a nightmare of intense scrutiny and plenty of vehement disbelief the rest of her life, and I was silently proud of myself for not taking it further.
“And Druids today?” I asked, hoping to steer the conversation away from an uncomfortable reality she could never allow into the light.
“There aren’t any,” she answered blandly. “At least none that I know of.”
“There must be some,” I countered. “They gather at Stonehenge every year and commune with the oaks during one solstice or another, right?”
“They’re not Druids, Evan,” she replied, and her expression changed to one of caution. “Stonehenge had nothing to do with us; it was built at least a thousand years before Celtic people came out from continental Europe, probably by Neolithic Britons who lived there three or four millennia ago. I didn’t even know there was a Stonehenge until my fifth life when I learned of it from my tutor.”
“If they’re not Druids, who are they?”
“People who feel a deep connection to nature, I suppose,” she said with a new distant tone. “They practice what they believe to be the traditions we kept, or what they would like to believe, and most of them have Celtic ancestries.”
An image from a documentary came quickly into my thoughts, showing white-robed people carrying stylized gold sickles across a field, clearly somewhere on Salisbury Plain, making their way to the ancient and mysterious monument.
“I always thought of them as flakes and dirt-worshipers who think it’s cool to call themselves ‘Druids.’”
“They’re not all flakes, Evan; they simply hold onto a modern interpretation of Druidic traditions no differently than Christians or Muslims hold onto theirs. I suppose some are charmed by the trappings of what they perceive as Druid life, but for many, it represents wonder and respect for the earth.”
The Seventh Life of Aline Lloyd Page 27