The Forest House

by Marion Zimmer Bradley

  "My King!" she whispered as the flame he had kindled seared along every nerve. "Come to me!"

  He sighed then, sinking into her embrace as the sun into the sea, yielding to her even as she gave herself to him. In the distance she could hear shouting, as if it came from another world, and knew that the priests had lit the Beltane fires.

  But a greater fire was blazing within her, and by that time, even if Caillean and all the women in the Forest House had been standing in a row watching them, Eilan would neither have known nor cared.

  The day was far advanced and the sun was setting when Gaius finally stirred. Eilan drew reluctantly away from him; he reached for her once more and kissed her hard.

  "I must return to the Forest House," she said very gently. "They will be looking for me." Indeed, Miellyn would be beside herself with worry. But if Eilan could manage somehow to get back into the enclosure unseen, they might believe that the crowds had kept them apart and she had somehow found her way back alone.

  Even now, when passion had ebbed and she could think clearly once more, Eilan did not regret breaking her vows; the Goddess had known and had not intervened, proof enough that she had served a higher law. Part of the secret doctrine that Caillean had revealed in the months since Eilan's initiation was that before the coming of the Romans, the priestesses had taken lovers as they chose, or even married. It was only since the coming of the Romans that men had had the arrogance to control the private lives of their women. Caillean had never met the man who would tempt her to break her vows, but perhaps she would understand. On the other hand, Caillean would not agree with Eilan's choice of a lover, so perhaps she had better not tell the older priestess after all.

  "Eilan, don't go back." Gaius raised himself on one elbow to look down at her. "I am afraid for you."

  "I am the Arch-Druid's granddaughter; what do you suppose they would do to me?" she replied.

  Her father had once said he would kill her with his own hands if she allowed what Gaius had just done, but this was not the moment to mention that. She was a woman now, and a priestess sworn, accountable only to her sisters and the gods.

  "If I were there to protect you, it wouldn't matter what they tried," he said darkly.

  "And would I be so safe if we ran away? Where could we go? The wild tribes of the North might accept me, but you would be in danger, and where else could we run beyond the reach of Rome? You are a soldier, Gaius, as bound by oaths as I. I broke one vow to fulfill a greater one, but that does not release me. I still belong to the Goddess, and must trust her to take care of me . . ."

  "That's more than I can do —" he said then, rubbing his eyes.

  "Nonsense. If you go back on active service you will certainly be in greater danger than I." Eilan clung to him once more at the thought of cold iron piercing the heart that now beat against her own, and as he kissed her again, all thoughts of the future were forgotten. For a little while.

  Fifteen

  Lying with a man had not, despite the whispered speculations Eilan remembered from the House of Maidens, destroyed her magic. At least the shielding spell she murmured as she eased through the kitchen gate and along the path to the Hall of the Priestesses appeared to prevent the few people who were about from noticing her as she passed.

  In her own room she slid out of her gown and washed herself, hiding her stained shift until she should have time to soak the smear of maiden blood away. That done, she put on her night-garment and built up the fire, realizing that she was half frozen with cold, and famished. It was past the hour of the sunset meal. She ought to go to the kitchens and find herself something to eat; but she needed time to think about what had happened to her and Gaius. Or perhaps, she thought with unaccustomed self-mockery, she simply wished to close her eyes and relive their lovemaking again.

  She might have expected that Gaius would be eager, but not that he would be so tender, holding back until he quivered like a drawn bow lest he go too fast and hurt her. But virgin though her body might be, the pleasure that pulsed through her had more than matched his. And in the final moments, when the ecstasy became almost too great for mortal endurance, it had seemed to her that once more it was the Goddess who encompassed her and received the gift of the God.

  She sighed, noting the unaccustomed soreness and the sweet lassitude that weighted her limbs. Will the Goddess strike me dead for breaking my oath, she wondered, or will my punishment be to weep in the night, remembering what I will never have again? Isn't that better than never having known it at all? She pitied Caillean, scarred since childhood from her only experience of what men call love.

  As day followed day, a certain equilibrium began to assert itself. Eilan attended Lhiannon at the rite of the full moon, and no lightning struck. The advanced training that followed initiation continued, both in skills and in lore, and as the days grew longer, they met with the older priestesses when weather permitted in one of the gardens or in the holy grove.

  There were thirteen sacred oak trees, twelve in a circle, and the oldest, in the center, shading the stone altar. To Eilan, looking up at them, it seemed that even in the drowsy warmth of afternoon the trees still held something of the magic with which the moon had vested them a few nights before. Caillean's voice receded to a background murmur as Eilan gazed upward. Surely the light that glowed in their leaves was more than sunshine. All her senses seemed heightened since Beltane.

  The voice of the priestess came into focus again. "In the old days there was a sisterhood of nine high priestesses, one for each region of this land. They stood behind the queen of each tribe, advising and supporting her."

  Eilan sat back against the sturdy trunk of the oak tree, linking into its steady strength, and tried to keep her eyes open.

  "They were not queens themselves?" Dieda asked.

  "Their role was a less public one, though they were often of the royal line. But they were the initiators of kings, for when a king came to his hallowing, it was the priestess who became the channel by which the Goddess accepted his service, conferring a power that he in turn passed on to his queen."

  "They were not virgins," Miellyn said sourly, and Eilan found herself suddenly wide awake, remembering the Merlin's words. Had she been the Goddess for Gaius? What then was his destiny?

  "The priestesses lay with men when the service of the Lady required it," responded Caillean in a neutral tone. "But they did not marry, and they bore children only when it was the only way to preserve a royal line. They remained free."

  "In the Forest House we do not marry, but I would not call us free," Dieda observed, frowning. "Even though the Priestess of the Oracle chooses her successor, the Council of Druids must approve her choice."

  "Why did things change?" Eilan asked, need adding intensity to her tone. "Was it because of Mona?"

  "The Druids say that our present seclusion is for our own, protection," Caillean answered with the same careful neutrality.

  "They say that only if we remain pure as Vestals will we be respected by Rome."

  Eilan stared at her. Then what I did with Gains was not flouting the Law of the Lady, but only the Druids' rules!

  "But will we always have to live like this?" Miellyn asked wistfully. "Is there no place where we can speak the truth and serve the Goddess without interference from men?"

  Caillean's eyes closed. For a moment it seemed to Eilan that the very trees stilled, waiting to hear what the priestess would say.

  "Only in a place outside time . . ." Caillean whispered. "Protected by a mist of magic from the world." And for a moment then Eilan seemed to see what the older woman was seeing - mist drifting like a veil across the silver waters, and white swans singing as they took the air.

  Then Caillean started and opened her eyes, staring in confusion around her, and through the trees they heard the gong summoning them to the evening meal.

  For a time Eilan's anxieties were eased, but as the days lengthened towards Midsummer, she began to guess why the Goddess had not stricken her at
once. At first, when the usual time came to seclude herself for purification according to the customs of the Forest House and there was no bloodsign, she was unconcerned; she had never been regular. But when the second month had come and gone, she became certain that the fertile magic of Beltane had worked on her only too well.

  Her first, instinctive joy soon yielded to terror. What would Bendeigid say? Or do? She wept then, wishing that she could go back in time and seek the comfort of her mother's arms. Then, as the days went by, she wondered if instead of pregnancy some serious illness had seized upon her as punishment for her sacrilege.

  All her life she had been healthy and strong, but now she grew sick whenever she tried to eat or drink; shudders racked her every day and she had no appetite for her food. She longed for harvest and thought wistfully of its fruits, as if they would not make her so sick. About all she could swallow without retching was the thinnest and sourest of buttermilk. Surely her sister Mairi's pregnancies had not tormented her this way, so this could hardly be an early symptom. Even the waters of the Sacred Well, when the priestesses gathered on the longest day to drink of them and see the future, racked her with icy shudders.

  From time to time she sensed Caillean watching her, but the older woman was sick too; Eilan, who was perhaps closer to her than any other, did not know what ailed her. When asked, Caillean said that her moon cycle was troubled, but the older woman's ill-health only filled Eilan with greater fear. Surely Caillean could not be pregnant! Eilan wondered sometimes if her sin had cursed the whole Forest House, if her illness would spread first to Caillean, and presently kill them all. She dared not ask.

  Caillean plucked a few thyme leaves from the bed Lads had growing in the inner court and rubbed them between her fingers, breathing deeply as the sweet scent hung in the moist morning air. Thyme was good for headaches, and perhaps it would clear hers. Today, at least, her womb had ceased the painful intermittent bleeding that had plagued her all summer, and perhaps this contact with the earth could ease the nagging sense of dread that had haunted her as well.

  From the privies on the other side of the wall she could hear someone retching. She waited, wondering who had been awakened at such an early hour. Presently she glimpsed a figure in a white shift slipping through the archway as if she feared to be seen. For the first time in weeks Caillean's inner senses awakened and she knew who it must be, and with a sudden certainty, what was wrong with her.

  "Eilan, come here!" It was the priestess-voice of command, and the girl was too well trained not to obey. With lagging footsteps, Eilan returned, and Caillean noted the pinched cheeks and the new fullness in the girl's breasts. Her own troubles must have been more distracting than she realized, she thought bitterly.

  "How long have you been this way? Since Beltane?" she asked. Eilan stared at her, her face contorting. "My poor child!" Caillean held out her arms and suddenly Eilan was clinging to her and sobbing.

  "Oh, Caillean, Caillean! I thought I was ill . . . I thought I was going to die!"

  Caillean stroked her hair. "Have you had your courses during this time?" Eilan shook her head. "Then it is life, not death, you are carrying," she said, and felt the betraying release of tension in the thin body beneath her hands.

  Her own eyes filled with tears. This was a dreadful thing, certainly, and yet she could not help feeling a desperate envy, remembering how her own body was betraying her now and not knowing if what had come to her was only the end of the fertility she had never used or the end of her life indeed.

  "Who has done this to you, my darling?" she murmured into the girl's soft hair. "No wonder you have been so quiet. Why didn't you tell me? You cannot have thought I would not understand!"

  Eilan looked up with red-rimmed eyes, and Caillean remembered that this girl did not lie. "It was not rape -"

  Caillean sighed. "Then I suppose it was that Roman boy." It was not a question and Eilan nodded mutely. Caillean sighed again and looked off into space. "Poor child," she said at last. "If I had known at once, something might have been contrived, but you are three months along. We will have to tell Lhiannon, you know."

  "What will she do to me?" Eilan quavered.

  "I don't know," Caillean said. "Nothing very much, I imagine." There was an ancient law that demanded death for a priestess who broke her vows, but surely they would never apply that to Eilan. "Probably you will only be sent away - you were prepared for that, I suppose. But I am sure that is the worst," she added.

  And if they try to punish her more harshly, thought Caillean with a spurt of her old energy, they will have to reckon with me!

  "You wretch, you dirty little animal!" cried Lhiannon. A sudden purple suffused the High Priestess's cheeks and Eilan recoiled. "Who did this to you?"

  Eilan shook her head, her eyes burning.

  "You did this on purpose - you did not scream? Traitor! Did you mean to shame us all, or did you simply not think? Rutting like an animal in heat, after all our care for you —" Lhiannon sucked in breath, gasping horribly.

  Caillean had suspected there would be a scene when the High Priestess was told, but it was worse than she expected. Lhiannon's health and temper had become increasingly precarious, and Caillean could see this was one of her bad days. But by then it was too late. Suddenly she slapped the girl, shouting, "Do you think this was a holy passion? You are no better than a whore!

  "Lhiannon —" Caillean got an arm around the old woman's shoulders and felt some of the tension ease. "This is not good for you. Calm yourself, Mother; let me get you some tea." She passed her hand across the older woman's brow and Lhiannon sagged in her arms. One-handed, Caillean poured tea from the flask into a beaker and held it to Lhiannon's lips. A minty fragrance spread through the room. The High Priestess drank, then let out her breath in a long, shuddering sigh.

  Eilan still stood numb and tearless before her. It had taken all her strength to come here. What happened next was in the lap of the gods, and at this moment, still appalled by Lhiannon's fury, she obviously found it hard to care. When Lhiannon roused, she seemed to have forgotten her fury.

  "Sit down!" she said querulously. "It hurts my neck to look up at you."

  Caillean pointed to a three-legged stool, and Eilan, still hot-eyed and resentful, complied.

  "Very well," Lhiannon said in something closer to her normal tone. "Now what's to be done? I'm sorry I slapped you, but this upsets plans . . ." She stopped, frowning. "Well, we must manage something. I suppose we had better tell Ardanos."

  "For the life of me I cannot see what he has to do with it," said Caillean. Unless, she thought, it is his plans that have been upset by Eilan's disgrace! "It's not as if she were the first to kindle from the Beltane fires, nor will she be the last, I am sure. It would be easier if Eilan were any other man's daughter. But Ardanos and Bendeigid will just have to live with it! Surely the fate of a priestess of Vernemeton is our own affair. Do you mean to say we cannot find the right thing to do?"

  "I did not say that," Lhiannon answered fretfully, "but Ardanos should be told."

  "Why? What law requires it except the Roman law which makes women no more than chattels of their menfolk?" Caillean grew angry. "Do you really have such respect for his wisdom?"

  Lhiannon passed her hand over her eyes. "Why must your voice be so sharp, Caillean? You will give me a headache. You must know by now that it is not a question of wisdom but of power. By the treaty that protects this place, everything to do with the Forest House is in his charge."

  "Yes, more's the pity," said Caillean bitterly. "Tell me, who appointed him to be the god?"

  Lhiannon rubbed her left arm as if it pained her. "In any case he is one of Eilan's few surviving kinsmen, and it is only right to tell him," she said tiredly.

  Caillean felt an unwilling pang of pity. Obviously Lhiannon was only too eager to unload the problem on to someone else's shoulders. In view of her poor health, perhaps this was not altogether surprising.

  Eilan was still silent, as if this confes
sion had taken all her strength. Her gaze was turned inward, as if what they said had nothing at all to do with her, or she no longer cared.

  Say something, child! Caillean glared at her. This is your fate we are deciding! Caillean knew that Ardanos could not do anything to her; he had tried, but Lhiannon was fond of her fosterling, and they had come to a certain accommodation by carefully pretending that Caillean did not exist. She, for her part, tried to avoid attracting his attention, or opposing him; but for Eilan's sake she felt she would even try to face the old Druid down.

  "Very well then, send for Ardanos," she said aloud. "But think twice before you put her into his power."

  "Well?" Ardanos frowned at the three women who awaited him in the High Priestess's dwelling. "What has happened that is so important that you had to send for me?" Lhiannon looked fragile and tired, and Caillean loomed like a shadow behind her. Was it her health? he wondered with a sudden stab of alarm as he noticed Eilan sitting beside the window. Had they sent for him because the High Priestess was dying? She did not look that ill, and surely they would not have already told Eilan . . .