by Ilka Tampke
I shook my head, inwardly cursing as I sat alone. How foolish I had been to imagine the Mothers would grant me Caradog. They had granted me pardon for my betrayal. I could hope for no more.
Cerrig’s streets were ablaze with torches as we walked to the temple for the dawn ceremony. The lake fires still burned, the people were all awake. The longest night required a diligent vigil. There were no more drums, nor voices. We had made our prayers. Now we would see if Lleu had heard them.
We entered the temple. Caradog sat in the strong place, his oak stool not a hair’s width to the east or to the west of the stakes that marked the angle of the sun’s solstice rise.
I stood behind him, holding a bronze crown that Sulien had handed me.
The journeypeople ringed us in a tight circle, leaving only a gap for the light to enter. Behind them the townspeople and guests crammed into the temple, gathering outside when the space had been filled.
Then Sulien bade us be silent.
Through the temple doorway we could see a paleness on the horizon, a thin glow that told us Lleu had not been defeated, that he rose again from the year’s strongest darkness, that summer would return.
The back of Caradog’s head brushed against my chest as he straightened.
Now that Lleu had been glimpsed, a single voiced chant unspooled into the faint light. It was Sulien’s sweet, certain voice that began to regather the torn threads that flailed within me. Here, in ceremony, I could find strength. Caradog did not love me, but his goal for our tribelands was also my own. In this way—if no other—we were of one mind, one heart.
The sky had brightened from red to salmon. Soon Lleu would appear. Sulien bade me to ready the crown. I raised my hands and held the bronze circlet above Caradog’s head.
Now the other journeymen joined Sulien in chant. The horizon was aflame.
I lowered the crown to the war king’s head just as the sun crested over the fields, slowly, irrefutably, painting him golden.
6
The Unseen
The Mothers hate what is obvious and love what is hidden.
I WALKED TO the lake and splashed my face with cold water. The revellers had returned to the settlement, or dispersed to their tents for some sleep. Other than a bittern stirring the surface, I was alone.
As I crouched at the water’s edge, I heard a choked cry emerge from a bank of sedge behind me. It was a muffled hybrid of whimpering and singing, an ailing sound. I pushed through the bushes to find a shallow trench. There, lying in the mud, ale horn in hand, and wailing senselessly in praise of the marriage rites, was Rhain.
‘You’re drunk,’ I chastised, as I pulled him upright, brushing grit from his robe. He was limp, heavy and utterly useless. ‘You daft creature! Don’t you know we ride in a few hours hence?’
‘Mount me now!’ he shouted, his speech slurred. His sour breath turned my head. ‘Let me know you, at least, if I can know no other.’
‘Hush!’ I hissed. ‘You are beyond senseless.’ Somehow I managed to drag him into the marriage tent, where I gave him water and tried to settle him. Between bouts of song-wailing, his gaze focused on my face. ‘Ailia?’ he breathed, as if I were a marvel to him. ‘Is it you?’
‘Hush—’ I urged, fearful that he would be discovered in this improper place. ‘Yes, it is I.’
‘Tell me what occurred in here!’ he demanded. ‘How flies the wren in the arts of the bed?’
‘What?’ I said, shaking my head. ‘Why do you speak so leeringly of Caradog?’
‘Why?’ he repeated, giggling stupidly. ‘Why should I not? Do you think you alone deserve to taste the sweetbreads of marriage?’ He laughed again as his head lolled to his chest.
I paused as his blurred words slowly found their meaning. He was so misshapen that I had never imagined he might know the hungers and desires of any man. But of course he must. We were flesh until we ceased to breathe.
‘Oh Rhain.’
He lifted his eyes to mine and I recognised in them the immense sadness that mirrored my own. I felt a wave of compassion. The tribes placed such value on our bodies’ perfection. We were fined for every expansion of our belts, our chiefs replaced if they became maimed or blemished. Rhain stood little hope of finding a wife. And yet any woman would be blessed to be loved by so deep a mind, so full a soul.
‘Is it me you wish for?’ I asked.
‘Nay, not you.’
We sat in silence. I would not ask him to declare himself. As I hoped I would not have to declare myself.
‘Come, dear teacher,’ I said, smoothing the bed. ‘Sleep off your ale in my tent and then prepare a new song to teach me as we make our ride. We both need the sweet milk of a poem to fill us this day.’
My head swirled with the tides of our human yearnings as I packed my saddle bags in the guest hut. Despite my sadness at Rhain’s suffering, it gave me comfort to have seen it. If a Songman as powerful as he still knew unmet affection, then perhaps my own longing would not be a barrier to my strength.
At highsun, we gathered in the hall of Cerrig to discuss the safest route to Tir Brigantes. The journeymen were bleary-eyed from the rivers of ale drunk at the marriage feast, but Caradog was adamant that we not delay our departure by even one day. Even dressed in a simple shirt and woollen cloak, his new kingship was palpable.
‘Certainly, you cannot go in your own guise,’ said Sulien. He had been one of the few to show restraint at the ale tap, and it repaid him now in clear wits. ‘If Roman scouts find anyone with the likeness of the war king on the roads, you’ll be in leg-rings before you can slice their shaven throats.’
‘Then bring a farmer’s shirt and a sack of barley to give me purpose,’ said Caradog. He smiled at Rhain. When his temper was bright, the whole war was sport to him.
Sulien was seated beside me. ‘You must alter yourself also, Kendra,’ he said. ‘Scapula is brutal against the journeypeople. His soldiers are instructed to dispatch anyone found on pilgrimage in treaty lands. I have lost three brothers at the border of Tir Brigantes.’
‘That is murder,’ I said.
‘That is fear,’ said Sulien. ‘They know that it is we who are their strongest enemy.’
‘What of the Brigantes?’ I asked. ‘Do you still hold ties to their journeypeople?’
‘Some,’ he said. ‘The Roman soldiers are noisy and ignorant of the forests. It is easy to evade them. My bonds to the Brigantes have weakened, but not yet died.’ He stared at my forehead. ‘You are unmarked?’
‘Yes.’ I held back my hair to reveal my bare forehead. ‘I have completed no branch of learning.’
‘Thanks be for that,’ he said, ‘so you might travel as a peasant’s wife.’
Our greatest disguise would be the smallness of our party. None would expect the leader of free Albion to travel unattended.
That Rhain would come with us was never questioned, despite that he would give us away to any who knew that the war king’s poet was strange-formed. For what hope did Caradog have of turning the heart of the great queen, Cartimandua, without the magical voice of his Songman?
‘What shall be my disguise?’ asked Prydd, whose hairless scalp revealed the mark of the initiated all too clearly.
Sulien smiled. ‘Your disguise shall be your return to Tir Silures. For even if we could hide your marks, your journeymen’s graces are impossible to obscure.’
It was true. While Caradog’s sword-built shoulders could easily be attributed to a farmer’s labour, Prydd’s stooped and delicate bones could belong to none but a journeyman, and even then only one who practised the branch of law or judgement, not surgery, measurement, or astrology, which required arm strength and fortitude for long walking.
Prydd must have been angry beneath his wordless nod. Yet he had no choice but to defer to his knowledge-elder, who glanced at me after making his pronouncement.
Sulien met the world with light humour, but I saw how sharply he perceived the textures of statecraft. He must have sensed it would aid
me to be free of Prydd’s fettering gaze, and he was right. Perhaps, with Prydd gone, alone with Caradog and with Rhain my teacher, I could at last find a Kendra’s voice that would not be silenced.
An hour later, Sulien, Prydd and several other journeymen stood at the edge of Cerrig to bid us farewell. Our horses pawed at the path, ready to move. They had arrived carrying riders of nobility and learning. Now we were as peasants, in rough-woven wool, our throats and wrists unadorned by metal. Only my sword and sling, bound firm, as always, to my leather belt, betrayed any falsehood in my likeness to a farm-woman. These were as vital to me as the body that bore them.
Sulien spoke to Caradog. ‘I have sent messengers to the Deceangli chiefs that Môn acknowledges you as high king,’ he said. ‘I expect they will acknowledge you in accordance with our advice. But whether the same will be said of the Brigantes chiefs—and of Cartimandua—that is in your hands alone.’
Caradog glanced at me. ‘And my wife’s.’
Prydd stepped forward. ‘The journeymen have made you king,’ he said to Caradog. ‘But make no mistake—your power is increased, not absolute. You must consolidate the tribes and you must secure our sovereignty. Otherwise your kingship will fail.’
Caradog frowned. ‘I shall not fail.’
‘No, you shall not,’ said Sulien, kissing his cheek. ‘And please do not wait too long to end this war.’ He nodded toward the fields that held the homeless. ‘We will not have enough grain to feed this number for another winter.’
‘It will be soon,’ said Caradog. ‘Is there any further news from the Iceni?’
‘None yet,’ said Sulien. ‘Though I’m sure there will be battle before you reach Cartimandua. And if the Iceni are successful against Scapula, then she will be forced to consider your approach even more carefully.’
And if they are not? I thought. I called Neha to my side as I mounted my mare, but she had crept behind Sulien’s robe skirt and would not come.
‘What is this?’ I murmured as she continued to refuse me. I dismounted and crouched beside her, fondling her soft white ear. ‘Do you wish to stay, dogess?’ Never, without purpose, had she failed to attend me.
‘Perhaps she would remain to ensure you return,’ said Sulien.
I stared into her eyes of blue and brown. Day and night. ‘Perhaps you are right,’ I marvelled, laughing. She licked my face, but would not follow.
‘Leave the hound, Kendra!’ called Caradog. ‘Or we will miss the last ferries.’
‘She is accustomed to sleeping fireside,’ I whispered to Sulien, ‘and she is no easy friend of other dogs.’
‘I’ll watch her,’ said Sulien.
We passed our first night in a farmhouse on the mainland, leaving before light the next morning. It would take at least twenty dawns to ride to Stenwic, from where Cartimandua ruled her tribe.
Our first week was spent in the territory of the Ordovices, where we were met with welcome. Rhain sang Caradog’s praise songs as we rode into the stony, mountain-bound settlements, and forged stories of his rise to kingship around the fires by night.
These misty tribelands were untouched by Rome. The lurching black mountains and the deep lakes between them had known only the tribe’s law and the eerie grey cast of the Mothers’ light. The presence of Rome felt unimaginable here, and the chiefs were not fearful to commit their fighters to Caradog’s war.
When we passed the border stone into Tir Deceangli, Caradog had to toil harder to solicit war-bonds from the chiefs. Many held strong friendships and marriage ties with the petty chiefs of southwest Tir Brigantes and were reluctant to betray them, despite their hatred of Rome.
Caradog was skilled with persuasion. He convinced many of them that the Brigantes and its fighters would soon be within his command, proclaiming how the Kendra, herself, had deemed him worthy. Above all he spoke of how we were bound to this land by law and by love. How our wounds were the land’s wounds, how our capture was the land’s slavery, how he could protect them from both.
One by one, even the chiefs who had refused to join him in the attack on the Sun Road laid their swords at his feet.
I was always at his side as he walked through the settlements, offering my Kendra’s blessings to the winter calves and new-born children, watching the tribespeople’s eyes well as they kissed the hand of the woman who had heard the Mothers’ song.
By day, it was a perfect union.
But nights revealed a different truth. In the quietness of the guesthuts the war king and I barely spoke. This time it was not he who drew away, but I. For I had no strength to permit myself small sips of what I longed to drink in great, spilling drafts.
Each wakeful night I prayed for my heart to release him.
Each morning reminded me I still adored this tireless, headstrong creature, who did not shy from the world’s trouble but plunged into it with all the reckless courage of a stallion descending a sheer cliff to evade capture.
Caradog joked with Rhain in easy laughter, while I rested in silence, hollowed by a man who had lain with me just once, but enough to set a torch to a bonfire of hunger that now burned from inside.
In the larger townships I wandered the fringes, drawn to the unskinned people who dwelled there. It was in these untended places, where dark eyes stared up at me from bodies too poorly-fed to be useful to farmers, that I felt my Kendra’s blessings might carry some power. I brought them bread, which I shared at their fires, and spoke to them of the war, of which they knew almost nothing.
Caradog called me back whenever he found me at such places. He felt it tarnished his nobility for his wife to drag her skirts through the mud and shit of the fringes, even if it were only a farm-woman’s dress and not the Kendra’s cloak that she wore.
But I felt at peace among those without skin. I had been one of them and did not see them as something other. Although I had skin now, and a title, I still recognised myself in their struggle for place and purpose. I felt needed among them. Far more than when I sat around the council fires with the chiefs and listened, unspeaking, to the negotiations of weapons and warriors that Caradog was so fond of, and about which he rarely asked for my view.
He desired my esteem, seeking it often as we rode out from one township to another, demanding that I reflect on how persuasively he had spoken, how impressed the chiefs were with his generosity and bearing. But I knew that I had no real influence upon him. He did not yet seek my guidance. He did not yet heed my authority. He did not love me.
Perhaps Prydd had been right. It seemed that my Kendra’s title was valued for its glamour and little more.
But there was more. My only hope could be to show it by song.
I learned Rhain’s poems. One, then another, then another, in every hour that we rode through mizzling winter rain. There was no time to stop and re-walk the mountain paths and rivers we were passing in our travels, so I picked up pebbles, feathers, acorns and fallen coins from the roadway whenever we stopped to replenish our water skins, fastened them to the cord that I carried in my pouch, and used their shapes and textures to index my knowledge.
I gorged on Rhain’s teaching until I felt heavy with memory. He was always pleased to begin a new cycle of history, a myth of Annwyn, or a song that mapped the route we rode and ensured I could ride it again alone. Although I could not alter the words of the poems, I poured into them my love for Caradog, my devotion to the Mothers, and Rhain praised my voice for its depth and richness.
As we neared the border of Tir Brigantes, where we would have to cease our singing, I asked him, for a second time, whether I might be permitted to forge a song.
‘Not yet,’ he said with a maddening smile.
‘Why not?’ cried Caradog, who often rode close as I sang. ‘I would like to hear it!’
‘You must wait, War King,’ Rhain said.
‘For what?’
‘For sovereignty.’
Caradog smiled, thinking, of course, that Rhain spoke of our land.
Only I knew he s
poke of my sovereignty of voice.
As we rode into the last Deceangli settlement, the chieftain warned us that Roman scouts had learnt of our journey. ‘There were soldiers here two dawns ago,’ he said, as we dismounted. ‘They were looking for three travellers, one with a disfigured face.’
Caradog stared at him. ‘How have they discovered this?’
‘We are thick with scouts,’ said the chieftain. ‘Rome does not leave such a precious border unwatched.’
‘I cannot go on with you,’ said Rhain.
‘Caradog needs you to sing,’ I said. ‘I will return, then at least you will be two and not three. If you hood Rhain’s face, I am sure you will be safe.’
Caradog looked at us both. ‘You will remain with me, Kendra. Rhain will return to Llanmelin.’ He would hear no argument.
I wept as I farewelled Rhain an hour later.
‘Shed a skin,’ he said as he kissed my cheek.
Caradog and I passed into territory bound by treaty to the Emperor Claudius. The Brigantes, by size and numbers, were Albion’s largest tribe, prosperous with lead, coal and hides, and revered for the fierceness of their warriors.
The country was harsh, defended by mountains and fast-flowing rivers. As we rode northward into its core, forests gave way to vast, desolate moorlands, where mists clung like shrouds, and sheep fossicked for scant growth amidst stones and snow. We passed few grain fields—wheat grew poorly here—and yet there was a dark strength in this land, an unyielding wildness. How strange, I thought, as our horses stooped to drink from a part-frozen stream, that it was one of the first of the tribelands that Rome had tamed.
Sulien had given us the names of chiefs who would be certain to welcome us. We found food, ale and shelter readily enough, but no chief would make war vows to Caradog until he could evidence the friendship of their mighty queen. Even those professing great sympathy with Caradog’s war and hatred of Rome would not betray vows made to Cartimandua. ‘Bring us sign of her alliance to you,’ said one, pushing silver coins into Caradog’s saddle pouch as we prepared to depart, ‘and our swords are yours.’